The Board of the Samuel Beckett Society have selected four papers for a panel that examines the educational, personal, and cultural influences that shaped Samuel Beckett’s imagination and intellectual development. Our rationale is that the centenary of his graduation from Trinity College Dublin in 2027 provides a timely occasion to reassess the formative influences that shaped his intellectual and imaginative development. 1927 was a pivotal moment in Beckett’s life that invites renewed attention to the formative contexts from which his literary career emerged. From that point onward, he embarked on a career that would span sixty years and radically transform the parameters of Western literature. This panel aims to explore the years of his education in order to understand the cultural and personal forces that shaped his imagination, the foundations of his intellectual formation, and the influences that guided his trajectory. Each speaker will have 15 minutes to present, followed by a 15-minute closing discussion.

In “The Formative Years of the Young Samuel Beckett” Virginie Podvin argues that the author’s artistic awakening began with his family circle under the influence of the Sinclairs (William Sinclair, Beckett’s uncle by marriage). These family members had a significant impact on the development of the young Beckett’s artistic sensibility. Furthermore, the study of the German Diaries and Beckett’s first volume of correspondence, reveals the importance of pictorial art in his work. The circle of friends surrounding the young Irishman furthered his artistic awakening. Indeed, they formed an eclectic artistic constellation: Some wrote, others painted, and still others were musicians. This paper proposes to examine what thecorrespondence between the not-yet-writer, his family, and his friends reveals about his future literary work.

Lidan Lin, in “The Molding of a Genius: Beckett’s Artistic Ears, Eyes, and Mind” also examines what early influences – familial, educational, cultural, and inter-personal – contributed to the shaping of his creative imagination. Her paper will look at Beckett’s early education in music, foreign languages, literature, and his subsequent self-education in visual art. She argues that this early all-round liberal education and self-education proved instrumental in shaping Beckett’s artistic ears, eyes, and mind, as he later embarked on his literary career. Lin shows that Beckett’s formal music and foreign language (French) education at Earlsfort House School and Portora Royal School, the influence of his musician family members, his frequent visits to the National Gallery of Ireland and close friendship with Jack B. Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy during his Trinity College years, and his exposure to European literature at an early age prepared him to welcome Chinese music into his early fiction and poetry and to deeply engage with visual art, including Chinese art.

For his part Hugh Deasy, in “An Unheroic Man of Letters: Thomas Carlyle’s influence on Belacqua’s Study in ‘Dante and the Lobster’”, pays attention to one lecture of Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History that senior sophisters in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin studied for their examinations in 1927. The ‘Dream Notebook’ shows that Beckett read Carlyle alongside Dante’s Purgatorio. Specifically, Beckett was researching commentaries on Dante’s Belacqua, who would become his first hero—a man of letters. In “Dante and the Lobster,” More Pricks than Kicks’ first story, Belacqua engages in fruitless study of Paradiso’s second canto. His limits as a scholar are not just, as Sam Slote argues, illustrative of a tension between ethics and creativity. Rather, Belacqua’s studiousness lacks intellectual sensitivity. Influenced by Carlyle’s heroic scholar, who speaks “the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books,” Beckett fashions a hero who is trapped by his learning, as incapable of understanding Dante as of renouncing academia.

Finally, in “Beckett, Bergson, ‘Ping’”, Thomas Gurke pays attention to the figure of Henri Bergson, an author Beckett knew of through his studies at Trinity College, mainly thanks to Arthur Aston Luce and his book Bergson’s Doctrine of Intuition, published in 1922. Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) introduces the concept of the “image” as a perceptual quality which is used in order to re-attach perception to the real. This notion can be traced in Samuel Beckett’s “Ping” (1966/67). The stream of images, which Bergson sees as central to our perception, is interrupted in the moment of affect. Itis within this interval – this ‘in-between’ – that the subject experiences the energetic matter of real objects as sensual dataflows of its own body. In Gurke’s opinion, Beckett’s usage of body and image follows similar strategies in “Ping”.