After Beckett - D'apres Beckett

After Beckett D’après Beckett

Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14

An Annual Bilingual Review Revue Annuelle Bilingue EDITORS: Chief Editors: Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans (The Netherlands) Editorial Board: E. Brater (USA), Mary Bryden (England), Lance Butler (England), Keir Elam (Italy), Matthijs Engelberts (The Netherlands), Dirk Van Hulle (Belgium), Serge Meitinger (France), Jean-Michel Rabaté (USA), Danièle de Ruyter (The Netherlands), Dominique Viart (France) EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE: All editorial correspondence should be addressed to: Dr M. Buning Faculteit der Letteren (Engels) De Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands Toute correspondance destinée à la rédaction doit être adressée à: Dr S. Houppermans Faculteit der Letteren Vakgroep Frans, Boîte postale 9515 2300 RA Leiden Pays Bas

Subscriptions, Advertisements and Business Correspondence: Editions Rodopi B.V., Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Telephone (020) - 611.48.21, Fax (020) - 447.29.79 USA/Canada: Editions Rodopi, One Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 1420 New York, NY 10020 USA Telephone: 800-265-6360 Fax: 212-265-6402

After Beckett D’après Beckett

Edited by Édité par

Anthony Uhlmann Sjef Houppermans Bruno Clément

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Photo cover : © Paul Joyce / National Portrait Gallery, London. Photographs by Sjef Houppermans: “Wholeness and Disruption” (Manly-Oestgeest 2003)

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1972-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS / TABLE DES MATIÈRES Introduction / Avant-Propos I.

11

INTERTEXTUALITY AND CONFLUENCE

1. Angela Moorjani PEAU DE CHAGRIN: Beckett and Bion on Looking Not to See

25

2. Chris Ackerley THE UNCERTAINTY OF SELF: Samuel Beckett and the Location of the Voice

39

3. Sjef Houppermans THE EYE, THE VOICE, THE SKIN: la Peau, la Voix, l’Œil

53

4. Seán Kennedy “THE ARTIST WHO STAKES HIS BEING IS FROM NOWHERE”: Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy on the Art of Jack B. Yeats

61

5. Masaki Kondo ILL SEEN ILL SAID AND IGITUR

75

6. Minako Okamuro ALCHEMICAL DANCES IN BECKETT AND YEATS

87

7. Michael Angelo Rodriguez “EVERYWHERE STONE IS GAINING”: The Struggle for the Sacred in Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said

105

8. Anthony Macris SAMUEL BECKETT, CLAUDE SIMON AND THE MISE EN ABYME OF PARADOXICAL DUPLICATION

117

9. Anthony Cordingley KEEPING THEIR DISTANCE: Beckett and Borges Writing after Joyce

131

10. Hannes Schweiger SAMUEL BECKETT AND FRIEDERIKE MAYRÖCKER: Attempts at Writing the Self

147

11. Michael Guest AUTONOMY AND THE BODY IN SAMUEL BECKETT AND KOBO ABE

161

12. Mary Bryden BECKETT AND THE DYNAMIC STILL

179

13. Sjef Houppermans LE ROI DES ÉCHECS

193

14. Yann Mével APRÈS OU D’APRÈS BECKETT: Joël Jouanneau metteur en scène de Beckett

203

II.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY

15. Bruno Clément CE QUE LES PHILOSOPHES FONT AVEC SAMUEL BECKETT

219

16. Paul Stewart “ALL MEN TALK, WHEN TALK THEY MUST, THE SAME TRIPE”: Beckett, Derrida and Needle Wylie

237

17. James Phillips BECKETT’S BOREDOM AND THE SPIRIT OF ADORNO

251

6

18. Matthew Holt CATASTROPHE, AUTONOMY AND THE FUTURE OF MODERNISM: Trying to Understand Adorno’s Reading of Endgame

261

19. Chris Conti CRITIQUE AND FORM: Adorno on Godot and Endgame

277

20. Suzie Gibson THE WORK, THE NEUTRAL AND THE UNNAMABLE

293

21. Ranjan Ghosh RECONFIGURING THE WAITING FOR GODOT: Explorations within some Paradigms of Hindu Philosophy

307

22. Garin Dowd “VASTS APART”: Phenomenology and Worstward Ho

323

23. Anthony Uhlmann “A FRAGMENT OF A VITAGRAPH”: Hiding and Revealing in Beckett, Geulincx, and Descartes

341

24. Naoya Mori BECKETT’S WINDOWS AND THE WINDOWLESS SELF

357

25. David Musgrave THE ABSTRACT GROTESQUE IN BECKETT’S TRILOGY

371

26. Amir Ali Nojoumian SAMUEL BECKETT’S THE UNNAMABLE: The Story of that Impossible Place Named Silence

387

7

27. Russell Smith BECKETT’S ENDLESSNESS: Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime

405

28. Sabbar Saadoon Sultan THE CRITICAL ASPECTS OF BECKETT’S TRILOGY

421

29. Andrea L. Yates ABANDONING THE EMPIRICAL: Repetition and Homosociality in Waiting for Godot

437

III.

TEXTUAL GENESIS, CONTEXTUAL GENESIS AND LANGUAGE

30. David A. Hatch THE ‘UNTIDY ANALYST’: Dialogue Form, Elenchus, and Subversion in “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”

453

31. Takeshi Kawashima CONJUNCTION OF THE ESSENTIAL AND THE INCIDENTAL: Fragmentation and Juxtaposition; or Samuel Beckett’s Critical Writings in the 1930s

469

32. Dirk Van Hulle ‘(HIATUS IN MS.)’: Watt and the Textual Genesis of Stirrings Still

483

33. Mark Byron THE ECSTASY OF WATT

495

34. Diane Luscher-Morata MISE EN MOTS DE LA SOUFFRANCE DANS WATT: “A Soliloquy under Dictation”

507

8

35. Gerry Dukes ENGLISHING GODOT

521

36. William Martin ESSE AND PERCIPI IN FILM: A ‘Note’ upon the Beckett-Schneider ‘Correspondence’

533

37. Karine Germoni PONCTUATION ET RYTHME DANS EN ATTENDANT GODOT ET FIN DE PARTIE DE SAMUEL BECKETT

547

38. Nadia Louar LE BILINGUISME DANS L’ŒUVRE DE SAMUEL BECKETT: pas d’après

563

39. Curt G Willits HOW IT IS: The Epical Call to Voice at the Limits of Experience

579

40. Livio Dobrez THE WORD IN CRISIS: Variations on a Theme by Samuel Beckett

595

41. Peter Williams UNSAYING AND THE CATEGORIES OF DISCOURSE IN BECKETT’S GESTURAL TEXTS

607

CONTRIBUTORS

621

9

INTRODUCTION The 5th of January 2003 was the fiftieth anniversary of the first performance of En Attendant Godot. Like all anniversaries, it called upon those affected by it to look both back and forward. Organising a major celebration of the anniversary in Sydney, Australia, rather than Paris, say, or Dublin, meant that all those involved would also be asked to consider questions of space and place as well as time. Beckett’s works have spread out over the years since they first emerged both in time and space, and this collection, in part, seeks to reflect this. The essays collected here are drawn from the Beckett Symposium, organised by the University of Western Sydney and held as part of the Sydney Festival in January 2003. The group of events ‘Celebrating Samuel Beckett’, which was awarded a major theatre industry prize in Australia (the Helpmann Award) for ‘best special event’, not only included the Beckett Symposium but performances of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and the screening of Beckett on Film. The Symposium itself drew participants from every continent including work from places not often associated with Beckett scholarship, such as Iran, Jordan, Argentina, South Africa, Singapore and India, as well as from all over Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan. In total over 110 people gave papers, with 30 of these coming from Australasia and 80 or so from elsewhere (with ‘elsewhere’ being more or less synonymous with ‘far away’). The variety and quality of speakers was a tribute both to the strength of the field and to the continuing reach and wide appeal of Beckett’s works. Special mention must be made of Andrea Curr, one of the conference organisers, who spent hours searching the internet for Beckett scholars from all over the world and made certain as many as possible received the call for papers. The theme for the Symposium was ‘after Beckett, d’après Beckett’. The difference in inflection between the French and English terms was intended, as it was hoped that participants would explore questions related not just to how we understand what it means to write since Beckett produced his major works, but what we understand it means to work ‘in the manner of’ Beckett (both for Beckett himself and for others who have followed him). These questions remain in this collection, which offers a selection of papers which were presented at

the conference and have been refereed and revised for publication. A collection like this obviously both does and does not represent the symposium from which it was drawn. It inevitably and necessarily takes on a life of its own outside that event as points of resonance not foreseen by the conference organisers become apparent when the essays are laid side by side and grouped together around points of commonality. Having selected the group of essays published here the editors recognised that three general groups could be identified. We have labelled these as follows: ‘Intertextuality and Confluence’; ‘Philosophy and Theory’; and ‘Textual Genesis, Contextual Genesis and Language’. Each of these groupings attend, though in differing ways, to problems which (either clearly or obliquely) pass through the dual theme ‘after Beckett d’après Beckett’. They do so in the sense that the dual theme has at its core an image of flowing or flux, an image meant to be understood in the complex sense of Michel Serres who has pointed out that rivers do not flow in a particularly uniform way, that, rather, they carry different currents, eddies, and so on. The first section consists of contributions that, in one way or another, are linked to the notion of intertextuality. Beckett’s works constitute the node of an immense network of connections that has already been explored in many ways but that continues to expand. The range of source material, for example, is constantly expanding, and genetic studies offer us a wonderful aid with regard to this: the manifold ways in which – directly or indirectly – Beckett’s immense reading has been integrated into his works continues to surprise scholars. In particular, those authors who provided the earliest impetus for Beckett, such as Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce and Proust, re-emerge, often in astonishing ways, in his texts. So too, those writers whose texts Beckett translated have clearly remained important to him. Of the great Irish authors, it is Yeats who is discussed here, in an article that examines the use of alchemical symbolism found in “Rosa Alchemica” and seen to reappear in Quad. In a similar vein, another paper focuses on the stone as an eternal symbol, drawing from the works of Mircea Eliade. The influence of French literature on Beckett’s work is multiple and varied: here different readings concentrate on analogies with works by Flaubert, Mallarmé and Claude Simon. Yet the field of attraction of Beckett’s works spreads much wider than this, and essays 12

here serve to further indicate his place in a universal web of relations where, for instance, Borgès, Abe Kobo and Friederike Mayröcker connect (or just as instructively fail to connect) with his works around specific points of interest or through the general principles of their writing. Such connections, of course, cannot be limited to the strictly literary domain: we know, for example, how important painting and music were to Beckett. Jack Yeats, as is touched upon here, is an important figure in this regard, and Mary Bryden offers us a rich panorama of some of the major lines of convergence between the expression of movement in Beckett’s work and the characteristic dynamism of 20th century painting. A group of essays resulting from a ‘round table’ concerning Beckett and Psychoanalysis is also included in this section. Again, in effect, it is through the intermediary of aesthetic considerations that the force of this encounter can be most fully drawn, be it on the surface of the skin, through the inflexions of the voice or following the directions of the gaze. Balzac, Bion and Anzieu are the interlocutors of preference with regard to these bodily marks where the unconscious rests insistent. Finally, of course, one should not neglect the theatre, where transformations, disguises and metamorphoses, are an integral part of the relation between the various creative agents involved. The case of the contemporary French director Joël Jouanneau is particularly revealing in this regard: “after Beckett, d’après Beckett” as the Symposium’s title has it. The second section of this collection considers the relations Beckett’s œuvre maintains with philosophy and literary theory. There are two kinds of approach adopted here: firstly, there is a group of essays which take the points of view presented by (or justified with reference to) contemporary philosophers in relation to Beckett’s works as their object. Secondly, there is a group of essays which attempt to elucidate, render more precise, or even at times reconstitute, Beckett’s own philosophical orientations. These two tendencies, are, without doubt, as old as Beckett’s works themselves, but it is apparent, in reading the studies which comprise this section, that things have changed perceptibly over the last ten to fifteen years. Indeed, one of the merits of the Sydney Symposium was to have brought this change more fully into the light. The first French interpreters of Beckett were Bataille and Blanchot, two writers who without doubt were professional philosophers 13

who knew, loved, practiced and cited philosophy with pleasure. This initial patronage would be a determining one. Fifty years after these first, prestigious readers, philosophers and literary critics contest this body of work, each asserting their own understandings as the clearest. Following their lines of descendance, readers of Beckett continue to rethink this division. It is striking to recognise that, within the last ten or twelve years, philosophers as different from one another as Badiou and Deleuze, or a psychoanalyst like Anzieu, have encountered the work of Beckett along their own theoretical paths, and that each have proposed their own exclusive, seductive, readings of these works. It is also striking that Blanchot continues to inspire fertile readings of texts which he himself had commented upon earlier (as for example, his study of L’Innommable). The first couple of essays in this section attempt to characterise and situate the relation of these different approaches to one another. The next group return to the interpretations of Beckett made by Adorno, who was the first true philosopher to read these works which are steeped in philosophy. The subsequent essays proceed, in altogether logical ways (though each following their own threads), from a range of philosophical perspectives (phenomenology, Hindu philosophy, Deconstruction, postmodernism) in seeking to understand or see in texts as removed from one another as Godot or Worstward ho, things which have not yet been clearly seen. Despite all that has been written to date, one still cannot take it as read that all the internal references to philosophy in the works (which we know to be extremely numerous, as Beckett was a great reader of classical philosophy) have already been elucidated. Essays, like that on Geulincx and Descartes, or that on Leibniz, make apparent that the need to locate, elucidate and interpretate these more or less hidden allusions and citations is as urgent as it has ever been. The distinction between external and internal references is observable elsewhere in essays which adopt a theoretical point of view which is more resolutely literary. Bakhtin, Derrida, and Kermode are mentioned in turn in this group as a means of describing the manner in which the works function; of exploring the purpose of the works or elements of the works. But it would be naïve to think that Beckett’s oeuvre does not, itself, offer some tools capable of taking these things into account. The remarkable contribution to theories of art and literature in general constituted by texts like Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit or Proust, or, again ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ 14

are the object of another essay which examines the Trilogy in their light. Recently, much attention has been paid to genetic studies of the works of Samuel Beckett. The “Notebooks” in particular have become a matter of central interest, as is further evident in the forthcoming issue of SBTA (edited by Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost) which discusses the “Irish Notebooks”. In the third section here, there are articles that concentrate on the genesis of Watt and Waiting for Godot. The processes of composition which remain apparent are carefully scrutinised, with, for example, the variants of different manuscripts, the rearrangements caused by the shifts between two languages, and certain doodles of suffering figures being considered. Space is made in this section for discussion of the different kinds of dialogue Beckett had with some of his collaborators, such as Alan Schneider with regard to Film, or Georges Duthuit and others with regard to matters of significance to aesthetic theory. In this way, we are able to observe what seems, with Beckett, an interminable search for what is essential. The traces of this sustained reflection emerges in all his works, but are especially marked in writings such as How it is where the exploration of the limits of the subject and of (his) voice attains an epic dimension. Such investigation also constitutes an endless dialogue, with Maurice Blanchot for instance, or with Emmanuel Levinas, a dialogue that helps free up the overcrowded terrain of making sense, opening up a ‘post-hermeneutical’ reading. In this way, one understands how the Beckettian text originates through successive touches, both upon the concrete material of the writing, and in the vasts of contextualization where it encounters philosophy and literature. And if, at the beginning of the twenty first century, language has entered into a crisis without precedent, Beckett, because he did not content himself with simply registering the reasons and the consequences of this crisis but gave a sharp diagnostic of this strange disease, can perhaps serve as a touchstone. This is because both before and after everything else Beckett always returns to Mother Language, which he reveres and maltreats, adores and suspects, embraces and tears apart. Therefore, articles that examine certain particularities of Beckett’s style conclude this section. For example, one shows us how punctuation can create a peculiar rhythm in the text which invites the reader-spectator to join in, and another focuses on bilingualism seen as a ‘stylistic passage15

way’. The theme of flux, of flows, again re-emerges here, through ideas of dialogue within textual variations and with contexts. In conclusion, we would like to thank the many people who helped make the Sydney Symposium such a memorable occasion. An enduring memory of the event will be the manner in which it affirmed the ongoing vibrancy of Beckett’s works, and the ongoing interest in those works, not just in the minds of academics and theatre people, but also in the wider imagination. That the Beckett events could make the front page of both the major newspapers in Sydney (albeit for reasons of controversy) was something which, even if only in hindsight, should be taken as affirming the continuing importance of work of the kind Beckett was able to produce to a wider, and very much international, community. Anthony Uhlmann / Sjef Houppermans / Bruno Clément

16

AVANT-PROPOS Le 5 janvier 2003, on fêtait le cinquantième anniversaire de la première représentation de En attendant Godot. Comme tous les anniversaires, celui-ci réclamait des gens concernés un double regard : à la fois rétrospectif et prospectif. Commémorer solennellement l’événement en Australie, à Sydney, plutôt que, disons, à Paris, ou à Dublin, cela signifiait qu’on attendait des participants qu’ils envisagent les questions d’espace, de lieu autant que celle du temps. Depuis l’époque de leur apparition les œuvres de Beckett n’ont pas franchi seulement les années, elles ont franchi les frontières, et c’est l’une des ambitions du présent recueil que de le manifester. Les textes rassemblés ici ont fait l’objet de communications au Colloque Beckett organisé par l’Université de Western Sydney et qui constituait l’un des pôles du Festival de Sydney de janvier 2003. La série de manifestations « Celebrating Samuel Beckett » [« Pour saluer Beckett »], qui s’est vu décerner l’une des plus prestigieuses récompenses que l’Australie accorde en matière d’arts de la scène (le prix Helpmann) ne comprenait pas seulement le Colloque Beckett à proprement parler, mais les représentations de En attendant Godot et de Fin de partie, ainsi que la projection de Beckett on Film. Le Colloque lui-même rassemblait des participants de tous les continents, il accueillait des travaux venant d’endroits du globe assez peu souvent associés aux études beckettiennes, comme l’Iran, la Jordanie, l’Argentine, l’Afrique du Sud, Singapour, l’Inde ; des travaux venant de toute l’Europe, de l’Amérique du Nord, de l’Australasie, et du Japon. En tout, plus de 110 personnes sont intervenues, 30 venant d’Australie, et 80 du reste du monde (ce « reste du monde » étant d’ailleurs presque toujours lointain). La diversité et la qualité des intervenants témoignaient à la fois de la vigueur des études beckettiennes, du rayonnement croissant de cette œuvre, et de l’attrait de plus en plus large qu’elle exerce. Un hommage particulier doit être rendu à Andrea Curr, l’une des organisatrices du Colloque, qui a passé des heures à rechercher sur Internet les spécialistes de l’œuvre de Beckett dans le monde entier et à s’assurer que le plus grand nombre d’entre eux avaient reçu l’appel qui leur était lancé. 17

Le titre du colloque était « After Beckett, d’après Beckett ». Il s’agissait de jouer sur la différence de sens qui sépare le mot français du mot anglais : l’on attendait des participants qu’ils n’envisagent pas seulement les questions « post-beckettiennes », mais qu’ils cherchent à penser ce que l’on entend par travailler « selon » Beckett (aussi bien pour Beckett lui-même que pour ceux qui ont écrit après lui). On a donc gardé pour constituer ce volume des textes traitant de telles questions et qui, ayant fait l’objet d’une communication, ont ensuite été sélectionnés et amendés en vue de la publication. Un recueil comme celui-ci, c’est évident, à la fois reflète et ne reflète pas le colloque dont il est issu. Il acquiert nécessairement une vie propre lorsque l’événement qui lui a donné naissance est passé et que les rapprochements, les regroupements thématiques font apparaître des points de résonance que les organisateurs n’avaient pas prévus. Après avoir opéré la sélection qu’ils présentent ici, les éditeurs se sont aperçus que ces textes pouvaient être regroupés sous trois chefs principaux. Nous les avons intitulés : « Intertextualité et Confluences » ; « Philosophie et Théorie » ; « Génétique du texte, génétique du contexte, langue ». Chacune de ces sections s’affronte, même si c’est selon son mode propre, à des problèmes qui, de façon plus ou moins claire, plus ou moins détournée, recoupe le double thème « After Beckett, d’après Beckett ». Elles le font en ce sens que ce double thème a en son cœur l’image d’un flot, d’un flux – image qu’il faut entendre dans le sens complexe que vise Michel Serres quand il dit que les rivières ne s’écoulent pas selon un flux réellement uniforme ; qu’elles sont plutôt traversées de différents courants, de différents tourbillons, etc. La première section regroupe des textes qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, sont liés à la notion d’intertextualité. Les œuvres de Beckett sont au centre d’un réseau immense de liens qui ont fait dans le passé l’objet de bien des études, mais qui ne cesse de s’étendre. Le domaine de ce qu’on appelle les « sources », par exemple, est en perpétuelle expansion, et les études génétiques nous offrent une aide précieuse à cet égard : les manières variées dont, directement ou indirectement, Beckett a intégré la somme de ses lectures dans ses œuvres constitue pour les spécialistes un sujet de surprise toujours neuf. C’est particulièrement vrai des écrivains qui ont donné à Samuel Beckett la première impulsion (Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, Proust) et qui réapparaissent dans ses textes de manière souvent inattendue. Les écri18

vains dont il a traduit les textes sont eux aussi, à l’évidence, restés importants pour lui. Parmi les grands auteurs irlandais, c’est l’influence de Yeats qui est étudiée ici, dans un article consacré à l’usage de la symbolique alchimiste découverte dans la « Rosa Alchemica » et qu’on voit réapparaître dans Quad. D’une manière comparable, l’une des communications s’attache, en s’appuyant sur les travaux de Mircea Eliade, à la pierre comme symbole éternel. L’influence de la littérature française sur l’œuvre de Beckett est multiple et diverse : différentes lectures sont consacrées à des rapprochements avec Flaubert, Mallarmé, Claude Simon. Mais le corpus des œuvres auxquelles touche celle de Samuel Beckett étant sensiblement plus étendu, certains des textes qu’on va lire s’emploient à indiquer plus largement sa place dans un réseau de liens beaucoup plus vastes où Borgès, par exemple, où Abe Kobo, où Friederike Mayröcker peuvent (ou – et c’est aussi intéressant – ne peuvent pas) être rapprochés de cette œuvre, que ce soit sur des points de détails ou sur le principe même de leur écriture. De tels rapprochements ne sauraient évidemment se limiter au domaine strictement littéraire : nous savons par exemple quelle importance avaient pour Beckett la peinture et la musique. La figure de Jack Yeats telle du moins qu’elle est évoquée ici, est à cet égard particulièrement importante et Mary Bryden fait apparaître pour nous, en un très riche panorama, quelques-unes des lignes de convergence majeures entre l’expression du mouvement dans l’œuvre de Beckett et le dynamisme qui caractérise la peinture du 20e siècle. On trouvera aussi dans cette section un regroupement de textes issus d’une table ronde qui s’est tenue sur le thème des rapports entre Beckett et la psychanalyse. Ici aussi c’est de considérations esthétiques que le rapprochement tire sa force et sa pertinence, qu’il s’agisse de la surface de la peau, des inflexions de la voix, ou de l’orientation des regards. Balzac, Bion, Anzieu sont les interlocuteurs de prédilection lorsqu’il s’agit d’évoquer ces marques corporelles où l’inconscient reste prégnant. Enfin, il ne saurait être question, bien sûr, de négliger le théâtre, où les transformations, les déguisements, les métamorphoses sont partie intégrante de la relation entre les différents agents impliqués dans le processus de création. Le cas du metteur en scène français contemporain Joël Jouanneau est particulièrement éclairant à cet égard : « Après Beckett, d’après Beckett », dit le titre du Colloque. 19

La seconde section du recueil envisage les rapports que l’œuvre de Beckett entretient avec la philosophie ou la théorie littéraire. On trouvera ici deux sortes d’études : celles qui prennent pour objet le point de vue que des philosophes contemporains portent (ou permettent de porter) sur cette œuvre ; celles qui cherchent à élucider ou à préciser, parfois à reconstituer, les orientations philosophiques de Beckett. Ces deux tendances, sans doute, sont aussi vieilles que l’œuvre beckettienne ; mais il semble, à lire les études qui forment cette section, que les choses aient sensiblement changé au cours des dix ou quinze dernières années. Et ce sera sans doute un des mérites du colloque de Sydney que de l’avoir fait apparaître. Les premiers lecteurs français de Beckett furent Bataille et Blanchot, deux écrivains qui sans être des philosophes professionnels connaissaient, aimaient, pratiquaient et citaient volontiers la philosophie. Ce parrainage aura été déterminant. Cinquante ans après ces premiers et prestigieux lecteurs, philosophes et littéraires se disputent cette œuvre, chacun revendiquant son intelligence ; et les lecteurs de Beckett continuent, dans leur descendance, de repenser ce partage. Il est frappant de constater que dans les dix ou douze dernières années, des philosophes aussi différents que Badiou, que Deleuze, ou un psychanalyste comme Anzieu aient rencontré sur leur chemin théorique l’œuvre de Beckett dont chacun propose une lecture exclusive et séduisante ; que Blanchot continue d’inspirer des lectures fécondes de textes qu’il avait autrefois commentés lui-même (voir par exemple l’étude sur L’Innommable). Les premières études de la section cherchent à caractériser et à situer l’une par rapport à l’autre ces différentes démarches ; à revenir aussi sur la lecture d’Adorno, qui fut, de cette œuvre imprégnée de philosophie, le premier lecteur vraiment philosophe. Les suivantes, logiquement en somme, dans leur droit fil en tout cas, cherchent en partant de corpus philosophiques divers (la phénoménologie, la philosophie hindoue, la déconstruction, le postmodernisme) à faire entendre ou voir dans des textes aussi éloignés l’un de l’autre que Godot ou Worstward ho, quelque chose de réellement inédit à cette date. On ne peut malgré tout tenir pour acquis que les références philosophiques internes à l’œuvre (et l’on sait qu’elles sont nombreuses, Beckett ayant été un grand lecteur de la philosophie classique) aient été toutes élucidées. Des études comme celle sur Geulincx et Descartes, ou comme celle sur Leibniz, montrent à l’évidence qu’un 20

repérage, une élucidation et une interprétation de ces allusions et citations plus ou moins cachées sont plus que jamais urgents. Ce partage entre références externes et références internes est par ailleurs observable dans les études qui adoptent un point de vue de théorie plus résolument littéraire : Bakhtine, Derrida, Kermode sont tour à tour évoqués, dans les études de cette section, pour décrire le fonctionnement, expliciter le propos de cette œuvre, ou de telle de ses parties. Mais il serait naïf de croire que l’œuvre beckettienne ne s’est pas dotée elle-même d’outils susceptibles d’en rendre compte. L’apport absolument remarquable à la théorie de l’art et de la littérature en général que constituent des textes comme les Trois dialogues avec Georges Duthuit ou l’étude sur Proust, ou encore « Dante… Bruno. Vico .. Joyce » fait l’objet d’une étude séparée où est proposée, à cette lumière, une lecture originale de la Trilogie. Ces dernières années, les études génétiques des textes de Beckett ont su retenir l’attention des chercheurs. Les « Notebooks », en particulier, sont maintenant l’objet d’un intérêt général ; il n’est pour s’en assurer que de se reporter au prochain numéro (coordonné par Matthijs Engelberts et Everett Frost) que la revue SBTA consacre aux « Irish Notebooks ». Dans la troisième section de notre volume, on trouvera des textes qui s’attachent à retracer la genèse de Watt et de En attendant Godot. Y sont examinées en détail les étapes de la composition, pris en compte les variantes entre les différents manuscrits, les réaménagements entraînés par le changement de langue, ainsi que certaines ébauches de figures souffrantes. Une partie de cette troisième section est consacrée à l’examen des différents types de dialogues que Samuel Beckett entretenait avec quelques-uns de ses collaborateurs, comme Alan Schneider à propos de Film, ou Georges Duthuit, ou d’autres, à propos de points importants de théorie esthétique. On se retrouve ainsi en position d’évaluer ce qui semble, chez Samuel Beckett, une inlassable quête de l’essentiel. Des indices de cette interrogation tenace sont repérables dans toutes ses œuvres, mais ils sont plus manifestes dans des textes comme Comment c’est, où l’exploration des limites du sujet et de la (sa) voix s’élève à une dimension épique. Une telle recherche prend aussi la forme d’un dialogue incessant, avec Maurice Blanchot par exemple, ou avec Emmanuel Levinas, dialogue qui contribue à déblayer le terrain plus qu’encombré de l’interprétation, et conduit tout naturellement à une lecture « postherméneutique ». On comprend ainsi par quelles touches successives 21

s’élabore le texte beckettien qui, partant de la matière concrète de l’écriture, traverse les espaces de la contextualisation, où il rencontre la philosophie et la littérature. Et s’il est vrai qu’en ce début de 21 e siècle le langage est entré dans une crise sans précédent, Beckett, parce qu’il ne se contente pas de repérer les causes et les conséquences de cette crise mais délivre un diagnostic de ce mal étrange, Beckett serait peut-être une bonne pierre de touche. Et cela, parce que le retour à la langue maternelle est de son œuvre à la fois le socle et l’horizon. Langue maternelle qu’il révère et malmène, qu’il adore et soupçonne, qu’il embrasse et met en pièces. Cette dernière section se termine donc tout naturellement par des articles consacrés à quelques particularités stylistiques de Beckett. L’un de ces textes nous montre par exemple comment la ponctuation peut créer un rythme spécifique susceptible de créer chez le lecteur-spectateur un véritable mouvement d’empathie ; un autre est consacré à la question du bilinguisme, considéré comme « passage stylistique ». Le thème du flux, du flot, fait ici sa réapparition, à travers les idées d’un dialogue faisant alterner variations textuelles et situations contextuelles. Nous voudrions pour finir remercier les très nombreuses personnes qui ont contribué à faire de ce colloque de Sydney un événement mémorable. Ce qui restera durablement sera son affirmation d’un écho grandissant rencontré par les œuvres de Beckett, de l’intérêt croissant qu’elle suscite, non seulement aux yeux des universitaires, ou des gens de théâtre, mais dans l’imaginaire du public. Que l’actualité beckettienne ait pu faire la « une » des deux plus grands quotidiens de Sydney (pour cause, c’est vrai, de controverse) voilà qui, même aprèscoup, pourrait être regardé comme la preuve de l’importance que continue de revêtir une œuvre du genre de celle que Beckett savait produire, pour une communauté élargie – et même élargie au monde entier. Bruno Clément / Sjef Houppermans / Anthony Uhlmann

22

INTERTEXTUALITY AND CONFLUENCE

This page intentionally left blank

PEAU DE CHAGRIN: Beckett and Bion on Looking Not to See Angela Moorjani

In this article I explore the intriguing likemindedness of Beckett and Bion on the subject of vision and blindness. Reading the two figures in tandem leads me to suggest connections between Bion’s thought on the imaginary twin and Beckett’s twin writing; to link vision and the guilty pursuit of knowledge with Bion’s and Beckett’s reconfigurations of the Oedipus saga; and to probe their views on the unknowable, “binocular vision”, and artful and playful techniques for obscuring pain by the pleasure of looking without seeing.

The Shrivelled-Up Wish In suggesting that we append the title “Peau de chagrin” to our session on Beckett and psychoanalysis at Sydney’s “after Beckett / d’après Beckett” Symposium, Chris Ackerly led me to rediscover that Beckett in Molloy alludes to Balzac’s novel by that title. Translated into English as Fatal Skin, Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, of course, revolves around a piece of magical leather that keeps shrinking with each wish granted the novel’s protagonist. One wish, one pleasure too many, and the fatal skin to which the story’s Raphael tied his destiny shrivels to nothing, thereby ending his life in midst of a final act of ecstasy. Fittingly, although it refers to a technical term for grained leather, Balzac’s title also puns on chagrin (‘grief’). In alluding to Balzac’s story in Molloy, Beckett suggests one of the possible lessons to glean from Balzac’s philosophical fable: wisdom consists in making wishes vanish, not in indulging them. This is what happens in Beckett’s novel: Molloy, unable to find his bicycle, is overtaken by the wish to look for it. The text continues: But instead of trying to satisfy this wish I stayed where I was looking at it, if I may say so, looking at it as it shriv-

elled up and finally disappeared, like the famous fatal skin, only much quicker. (1955, 52) Molloy, then, is an anti-Raphael, capable of making his wish, not his skin, shrink to nothing, as if replying to Balzac’s novel some hundred years later. Among the sources for Molloy’s stance of making his wish shrivel up under his gaze, Buddha, the Ancient Cynics and Stoics, and Schopenhauer come to mind. In this article, however, I privilege a different intertext, reading the Beckettian motif of looking without seeing in its interplay with the postKleinian thought of Wilfred R. Bion. Bion, Beckett, and the Imaginary Twin Influential psychoanalysts Didier Anzieu and Bennett Simon as well as a number of Beckett critics hold that Bion’s 1950 paper on “The Imaginary Twin” (1967, 3-22) is in part a fictionalized account of his treatment of Beckett some fifteen years earlier. They further surmise that an unconscious connection linked Beckett and his former therapist over the years, even if they were never to be in personal contact again.1 The suspicion that the young Beckett is patient A of the “The Imaginary Twin” is supported by Bion’s description of his inventive analysand as a man who was adept at blurring the boundary between real and imaginary events, who made ambiguous statements that were open to multiple interpretations, who felt that he was inhabited by an unborn twin and imagined himself in a womb afraid to be born, and who spoke in a monotone, while leaving rhythmically placed pauses that seemed to suggest to the therapist that it was his turn to return the ball (Bion 1967, 3-11). Because Bion mentions three patients (A, B, and C) in his paper, it is also likely that for his article he produced a fictionalized composite that cannot be uniquely identified with Beckett.2 Bion would here be doing something “after Beckett”, who shares the art of the composite, or ‘condensed’, figure with many writers, melding together bits and pieces of self, family, friends and enemies, literary, philosophical, mythological, and religious figures and including at times his psychotherapist in the mix. There are three layers of interpretation involving the imaginary twin. First, in recounting the analysis itself, Bion’s description of the interpretations he discussed with his patient A show familiarity with the early work of Melanie Klein on splitting, projection, and play26

therapy (Klein 1992, 199-209). Second, while composing his paper, Bion, no doubt extended his interpretations with knowledge of the later theories of Klein, with whom he was in analysis from 1945 to 1953. Foremost among these is projective identification which Klein introduced in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” of 1946 (1993, 1-24). This mechanism involves splitting off and expelling good or bad parts of the ego by projecting them into others (Bion was to refer to these as “containers”), who are then identified with either lovingly or aggressively. Subsequently, such fragments of self may be reintrojected from the containing personality in a transformed state. For Klein, the ego’s splitting itself into fragments is a way of dispersing the phantasized destructive forces within that threaten to annihilate it. On the other hand, excessive projective identification weakens the sense of having a self and gives rise to feelings of unraveling, alienation, imprisonment, and the phantasy of “world catastrophe” (Klein 1993, 1-24).3 Thirdly, when seventeen years after writing his paper on the imaginary twin, Bion comments on it for its republication in Second Thoughts, he repeatedly draws attention to the difficulties involved in communicating an analyst’s “ineffable experience” of an analysand’s state of mind and criticizes the importance he attached to the concept of the imaginary twin. At the time of writing this gloss in 1967, he subsumes the imaginary twin under the general theory of splitting, attributing his mistaken belief in an “original discovery” to his inexperience at the beginning of his career (1967, 121, 127-28). Whether the imaginary twin is to be taken as Bion’s discovery or as a particular case of splitting, it remains startling to observe the parallels between patient A’s phantasy and Beckett’s own obsessive ‘twin’ or ‘split’ writing. Intriguingly, in conversations with Lawrence Harvey (247) and Charles Juliet (14), Beckett identified the unborn twin phantasy as his own. In the case of analysand A, Bion takes his imaginary twin to be a bad split-off part of his personality that he projected into his therapist to rid himself of the suffering it was causing him. Capable of personifying his inner fractures in artful ways, analysand A imagined, moreover, that he was inhabited not only by a twin but by a complaining parent, an entire poisonous family, a number of impotent substitutes for himself, and a girl with injured eyes. Tying projective identification to self-knowledge, Bion further concludes that in splitting off the parts of his psyche that he experienced as wounded or defective, his patient is subjecting them to the scrutiny 27

of his eyes and intellect (1967, 7-15). How is one not to think, for instance of “my brother inside me, my old twin” of which Fox tells in Rough for Radio II, a burlesque spoof of Kleinian analysis (Beckett 1984, 119)? And what of the parental imperatives in Molloy; the poisoned family and the long list of “vice-existers” or “avatars” in the Unnamable (Beckett 1958a, 318-24, 315), and the speaker of Not I, who may well be a composite of Jung’s waning little girl and the injured girl of whom Bion writes, albeit grown into an old phantasy? 4 Because lack of space limits discussion of the many instances of ‘twin’ writing in Beckett, I will concentrate on Watt of the SamWatt couple and Molloy of the Moran-Molloy pair. These writing twins stand out as figurations of a writer’s splintered selves, even if, in contrast to Rough for Radio II and the third and fourth Fizzles they are not explicitly referred to as such. In “Fizzle 4”, for instance, beginning with “I gave up before birth”, a voice of unrecognizable gender, speaking from within the Beckettian tomblike womb of the imagination, affirms that it remained “inside” during its twin’s birth: “it was he, I was inside, that’s how I see it, it was he who wailed, he who saw the light, I didn’t wail, I didn’t see the light” (Beckett 1995, 234). In the way Molloy makes his wish for his bicycle shrivel up under his gaze, the narrators of Watt and Molloy scrutinize their inner twins into evanescence, in a sense giving up the wish to make them “see the light”. When given a male identity, moreover, the suffering twin inside is more often than not associated with the iconography of the Man of Sorrows. Thus Sam compares Watt, but not himself, to “the Christ believed by Bosch [Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns)], then hanging in Trafalgar Square” until, he says, “I saw him no more” (Beckett 1959, 159, 213). A similar fading from sight is effected in the “residual” Ping, in which signs, traces, and a bare white body suggesting the dying Christ waver between visibility and invisibility, “almost white on white” (Beckett 1995, 193). What could be the impetus for the wounded twin’s eclipse? Vision and Oedipus In seeking a reason for patient A’s great difficulties in using his eyes to scrutinize his inner rifts, Bion hypothesizes a close connection between vision and Oedipal conflicts. Taking account of Melanie Klein’s hypothesis of an early Oedipus stage, Bion suggests that vision develops at the time infants begin to harbor clashing emotions 28

toward their parents. Patient A’s looking at his splintered figments thus involves him in rehearsing painful Oedipal dramas to which he would rather turn a blind eye. In another instance of rapprochement between Bion and his famous former patient, both men ponder in their writings the connection that the Oedipus, Garden of Eden, and Tower of Babel narratives make between feelings of loss, guilt, and exile and increasing self-knowledge (Bion 1967, 20-22; 1963, 63-68). In Molloy, the exile from paradisiacal gardens; the lack of a common language between parental figures and offspring; Moran’s Oedipal spying and desire to know versus Molloy’s feelings of guilt and pretensions to unknowingness, all point to Beckett’s concern with Eden, Babel, and Oedipus’s guilty knowing. The ‘modesty topos’, a rhetorical device for hiding one’s knowledge, that Beckett favored for himself after turning forty and that he lent to Molloy, is clearly apropos. “The truth is I don’t know much”, Molloy declares at the beginning of his narrative (1955, 7). For both Bion and Beckett (at least in many of their works until the early sixties) the primary focus is on Oedipus, with Bion blunting the Freudian emphasis on sexuality with his notion of an apparatus for learning. For Bion, Oedipus is a “pre-conception”, a psychic script of sorts, activated by the child’s relation to the parents, and resulting in a concept of the parental relationship. At the same time, concern for his analysands’ Oedipal wounds leads Bion to hypothesize that a violent attack on the learning apparatus can give rise to a (mis)conception of the introjected parents in the form of a ferocious superego (1963, 4549, 62-68, 82-83, 91-94). Among Beckett’s many, often ironic, scenarios of superego tyranny, such (mis) conceptions occur repeatedly in the shape of cruel and paradoxical imperatives of psychic, mythic, and political import that spy on and torture their victims into bringing the unthought into light, the ineffable into utterance. Ordered by Youdi to search for Molloy, for instance, Moran speaks of bringing a likeness of Molloy “to light”, while denying that this figure is “the true denizen” of his “dark places” (Beckett 1955, 114). 5 Molloy, in turn, is harassed by contradictory imperatives that counter the command to bring “some light to bear” on the questions of “relations” with his mother with intimations that it may be folly to do so (1955, 86-87). Such double binds concerning knowing and not knowing lead to endlessly inventive manipulations of light and dark and intermediate gloom, seeing, ill seeing, and blindness, visibility and invisibility 29

in Beckett’s fiction and drama.6 For the theatre, Eleutheria, Play, Not I, Catastrophe, and What Where particularly come to mind as dramatizations of tyrannical extortions dramatized through the play of light and darkness involving simultaneously stage and audience and inner (psychic) and outer (social and political) theatres of action. 7 The Unknowable and Binocular Vision Epistemological skeptics who are aware of the terrors of enforced knowing, Bion and Beckett share the conviction that the obscure parts of the mind are ultimately unknowable. Beckett’s limit is ill seeing and ill saying; Bion concurs that the unknowable can at best be only partially grasped through the mind’s evolving transformations (verbal, musical, artistic, for instance). One could either flood the darkness with “brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light”, Bion suggests, or count on maximum darkness to reveal flickers of the unforeseen. Accordingly, Bion postulates that one seeing eye and one blind eye would be the best approach to problems, using one for observation and the other for intuiting the unforeseen in the dark. In an astonishing figure recalling the imaginary twin, Bion goes on to refer to the still unknown as “unborn babies” (1970, 18; 1990, 20-21, 104-05, 12021). “Mental binocular vision”, as Bion terms it, (1990, 105), is, of course, familiar to readers of Beckett. Many generational pairs are split into one blind and one seeing party, as in Gall Senior and Junior, Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov, Dan and Jerry, with the blind half pictured as an ironic image of the artist (looking inward) while acting out an imperious form of neediness and dependence on the seeing half (looking outwards). “For if the father had not been blind, then he would not have needed his son to hold his arm […] but he would have set his son free, to go about his own business”, is the narrator’s verdict in Watt about the Galls (1959, 70). In another instance, split between an urge to see and the wish neither to see nor be seen, the protagonist of Film is pictured with one seeing and one unseeing eye (covered with a patch). Because Beckett’s notes on Film, if only for “structural and dramatic convenience”, identify perception with being and flight from perception with a search for nonbeing, the protagonist’s seeing/unseeing eyes also suggest the Beckettian being/nonbeing, life/death inbetweenness (Beckett 1984, 163). Such doubleness, of course, is evident in the many Beckett figures that are split between a 30

desire to be seen (being) and a longing for the dark (nonbeing). Further, suggesting filmic, pictorial, and theatric parallels, and it too torn between the wish to know and not to know, the eye in Ill Seen Ill Said probes alternatively the blinding power of whiteness and, “having no need of light to see”, the dim illuminations of blackness (Beckett 1981, 23). Similarly, in Play and Not I, audiences are kept looking without seeing in the dark before and after the onset of the inquisitorial light, whereas the paradoxical power of light to make an image appear and disappear is explored in Ping, reminiscent of white on white painting.8 The Pleasure of Looking without Seeing In investigating vision in relation to Oedipal conundrums, the guilty quest for knowledge, and mental forms of blindness, Bion further ties the development of vision to the pleasure and reality principles. According to this view, even partial ways of knowing that are tied to the reality principle, such as illuminating darkness or using the “blind eye” of intuition, are in conflict with the outright denial of painful perceptions. Such denials, he finds, are an escapist form of blindness under the control of the pleasure principle. Bion’s reference here is the 1911 “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”, in which Freud emphasizes that at the beginning of psychic development unconscious activity is intent on avoiding pain or “unpleasure” and fulfilling needs and wishes through hallucinatory satisfactions. Only when these maneuvers fail to prevent frustration does the reality principle set in to adapt to the new demands of the outer world by means of the development of consciousness tied to the senses. Emending Freud’s description slightly, Bion adds that the two principles operate “co-existentially”, not consecutively (Freud 12: 219-21; Bion, 1962, 31). The aim of “the fatal pleasure principle”, to quote once again from Molloy (Beckett 1955, 99), which is to reduce outer and inner stimulations to zero (not seeing) is bound to enter into conflict with the reality principle’s aim to grasp the inner and outer environment and turn it into knowledge (seeing). The parallels between Molloy and the early conceptualizations of Beckett’s former therapist on vision’s entanglements with the imaginary twin, the Eden, Babel, and Oedipus stories, and the pleasure-reality principles are astounding until one considers that there is nothing terribly surprising in the two writers shaping intertextual ma31

terial that harks back to remembered or imaginary conversations with each other. Then, too, some of Beckett and Bion’s likemindedness may be explained by their sharing the same Freudian, Kleinian, Jungian, mythic and philosophical (Kantian) intertexts. In any case, in taking the imaginary twin intertext, which may be considered the product of his and his therapist’s grappling with the phenomenon of splitting, to shape it into obsessively repeated figurations of his textual activity, Beckett has carefully positioned his writing between the ‘reality’ of pain and the ‘pleasure’ of play. Accordingly, the MoranMolloy pair is divided between Freud’s two principles: Moran, who finds “inscribed, on the threshold of the Molloy affair, the fatal pleasure principle”, is at a loss to explain how a man like himself “so patiently turned towards the outer world as towards the lesser evil” should let himself be “haunted and possessed by chimeras” (Beckett 1955, 99, 114). Maintaining in his 1911 essay that the phantasy of child’s play is under the control of the pleasure principle, Freud adds that a further sign of the continuing power of “pleasure” within the reality principle is the promise of future reward for present effort and pain (12: 22223). D. W. Winnicott’s contention that the “potential space” of play mediates between the dreamlike unconscious and the social world is clearly a theoretical elaboration of Freud’s intertwined principles. In another linkage made as early as 1929, Klein associates unconscious splitting and projection with “the tendency to personification in play” (1992, 205). Consequently, drawing on Klein’s view, Bion remarks that analysand A “personified his splits with such success that […] one might almost imagine one’s self watching a session of play therapy with a child”; and Beckett in Murphy, which he was composing at the time of his therapy with Bion, pictures the first zone of Murphy’s mind, the one associated with “light”, as containing “the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy” (Bion 1967, 16; Beckett 1957, 112). Similarly, situated like all play between pleasure and reality, the fort-da game that Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which his little grandson makes his toy or himself disappear and reappear, uses the pleasure of play repeatedly to counter the painful reality of separation. As Freud observes, moreover, the child often skips the second part, using his toys only to play “gone” (18: 14-17). As I noted some years ago, Beckett’s intertextual allusions to the child’s game 32

with the reel are particularly obvious in the repeated fade-outs from visibility to invisibility in his fiction and drama. In Watt, for instance, the game is played both by covering and uncovering the light of a lamp to make embers in the fireplace glow and darken (Beckett 1959, 37-39) and by Watt, Sam’s twin and mirror image, emerging and fading into the shadows. In work after work, it is the pleasure principle’s ‘gone’ (darkness) that is privileged but only until the next round of play (Moorjani 1982, 33-35, 51-53). The Artful Pleasure of Reversed Perspective In advocating that his analysands modify their intense psychic distress by strengthening their links to reality, Bion thought to counter their preference for the phantasy of play and other unconscious devices that would keep them from seeing what is too painful for them to bear. Patient A, for instance, not only projected his wounded twin into his analyst to reduce his own suffering, but he also resisted reintrojecting his personified splits and repairing the broken contact between them. With Freud and Klein, Bion emphasizes that such refusals to recognize and link parts of the self are among the pleasure principle’s strategies for avoiding pain (Bion 1963, 62; 1967, 8-16, 20). In this manner, Sam and Watt, Moran and Molloy, among others, substitute the pleasurable repetition of the fort-da game of now I see you, now I don’t for the repair of the broken links that used to bind them. Additionally, they wield projective strategies in order not to see what is too painful to endure. The protagonists of Molloy thus are made to play paradoxical versions of the fort-da game to keep the suffering of reality in check. They use projective identification to expel the cruel perceptions of self that come with the Oedipus conflict, while introjecting the parental power they envy. By means of such mirror inversions, or double blinds, Moran can make his displeasure at his treatment at the hands of Youdi disappear while introjecting Youdi’s envied authority. And he can deny the inner reality of his suffering twin by projecting Molloy into his son. In the spiraling structure of the novel, Molloy in turn projects into the blind Mag his own abject state reminiscent of a greedy infant, while introjecting the maternal privilege of chastisement (the complaining parent). In Endgame, the blind Hamm proceeds no differently in relation to Nagg and Nell and Clov. 9 The 1965 dramaticule Come and Go (close in meaning to da and fort) combines similarly the motifs of blindness and projection in the service of the 33

pleasure principle. Each of the three women, whose eyes are hidden by broad-rimed hats, projects her own mortality into one of the other women while disavowing her own (Beckett 1984). Bion, as we have seen, relates many of his analysands’ expedients for avoiding psychic anguish to vision and Oedipus on whose blindness, along with Tiresias’s, Sophocles’s drama dwells. Among the most startling of such maneuvers that Bion uncovered was the tendency of one of his patients to reverse perspective whenever allusions to the Oedipal situation were raised. Instead of using denial, this patient would switch the elements from figure to ground in the manner some people see a vase where others see two faces while looking at the same drawing (Bion 1963, 54-59). Such reversed perspective is one of the most artful ways of looking without seeing. Whoever the patient may be whom Bion found reversing perspective, Beckett did adopt this oscillating visualization in his works and specifically in relation to Oedipus. For instance, in Molloy’s two parts, one repeating the other, the maternal and paternal imagos and the writer’s splintered selves slip alternatively from foreground to background and from background to foreground, thus more or less effectively screening one or the other from view (see Moorjani 1982, 110). Could this blinding mechanism help to explain why readers who early on recognized many of the mythic strands in the novel failed to see the ironic use Beckett made of psychoanalysis’s founding myth? Is this too a matter of the pleasure principle’s looking without seeing? Reading Bion and Beckett in tandem helps to uncover some of the latter’s spectacular techniques for obscuring pain with pleasure and pleasure with pain by making his injured figments, both exiled fragments of self and phantoms of the unknowable, appear and disappear, back and forth between figure and ground, fort and da, blindness and sight, light and shadow, via the projective identifications of twinning textual play. Beckett’s aesthetics wavers between wishing and wishlessness, sight and sightlessness, painful reality and pleasure (to mention only these). But what is the role of the audience in all this? Adept at conflating his own textual play with the play of his viceexisters, Beckett invites his readers and viewers to join in the round, to become his playmates of sorts. His audiences too are made to waver between seeing and not seeing the chimeras that he repeatedly projects into the text to become the objects of his textual play over the abyss of the unknown. It is the author’s way of shaping for his audience the 34

pleasure of looking at wishes, objects of knowledge, and figures of chagrin as they disappear like the famous fatal skin, only to reappear, like the child’s game with the spool, to be played through again and again. Addendum This as addendum on the radical aesthetic import of keeping the unknowable unknowable, of looking without seeing: Recognition obliterates the other, whereas a process of not knowing, being unable to see, having no secure recognition, no consumption, no givens for a reality/realism of scale, size, colour, tone, etc., puts the viewer into a position of viewing, of having to view, a process that makes somehow from the bits and pieces of the seen, the rememorated, the seen again, the differently apprehended, a process that never solidifies the viewer and never reifies the other. . . . (Gidal 2003) Notes 1.

On the controversial correspondences between Beckett and Bion, see also Rabaté, Oppenheim, Moorjani 2004.

2.

In his 1967 gloss on “The Imaginary Twin”, Bion mentions the necessity of distorting the past of the patient he is discussing in order “to prevent him or anyone who knew him from thinking it referred to him” (1967, 120).

3.

Bion does not use the term “projective identification” in his 1950 paper no doubt because, although describing this mechanism in detail in her 1946 paper, Klein did not add the term itself to her paper until 1952 (Hinshelwood, 179-80). As for the phantasy of world catastrophe, in having Hamm tell the tale of the mad painter who thought he was the only survivor of a world reduced to ashes, Beckett is both suggesting what is at work in Endgame and using irony to put it into doubt (1958b, 44).

4.

On Beckett’s identification with both Jung’s little girl, whom the latter described as “never born entirely”, and an unborn twin, see

35

Harvey (247-48), and Juliet (14). I discuss these identification in Moorjani 2004. 5.

The French version is less explicit: “Et le Molloy que je renflouais […] n’était certainement pas tout à fait celui de mes bas-fonds” (Beckett 1951, 177).

6.

For a thought-inspiring discussion of blindness and silence in Beckett and other artists, including Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, see Gidal’s essay of 1974 (Gidal 2001, 310-12).

7.

For a political reading of What Where, persuasively tying the striving to make sense with the Ancient Stoics’ “being of violence”, see Uhlmann.

8.

British painter Thérèse Oulton describes “painting the experience of light being both the only possibility of seeing but also as a burning out of vision, as causing its own disintegration of vision” (Oulton and Gidal, 5).

9.

On projection and introjection in Molloy, see Moorjani 1982, 96118.

36

Works Cited Anzieu, Didier, Beckett et le psychanalyste (Paris: Éditions Mentha, 1992). Balzac, Honoré de, La Peau de chagrin (Paris: Librairie Générale FrançaiseClassiques de poche, 1995). First published in 1831. Beckett, Samuel, Molloy (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1951). –, Molloy, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1955). –, Murphy (New York: Grove P, 1957). –, The Unnamable, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1958). (1958a) –, Endgame (New York: Grove P, 1958). (1958b) –, Watt (New York: Grove P, 1959). –, Ill Seen Ill Said (New York: Grove P, 1981). –, Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove P, 1984). –, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Bion, Wilfred R., Learning from Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1962). –, Elements of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1963). –, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Jason Aronson, 1967). –, Attention and Interpretation (London: Maresfield Library, 1970). –, Brazilian Lectures: 1973 São Paulo, 1974 Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo (London: Karnac Books, 1990). Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth P, 1953-74). Gidal, Peter, “Beckett & Others & Art: A System,” in SBT/A 11, “Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000/Fin sans fin en l’an 2000,” ed. Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 303-14. Previously published in Studio International 188 (Nov. 1974), 183-87. –, Unpublished Notes for Volcano (11 June 2003). Harvey, Lawrence E., Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). Hinshelwood, R. D., A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1991). Juliet, Charles, Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett (Montpellier: Éditions Fata Morgana, 1986). Klein, Melanie, “Personification in the Play of Children (1929),” in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945 (London: Karnac Books, 1992), 199-209.

37

–, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946),” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963 (London: Karnac Books, 1993), 124. Moorjani, Angela, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982). –, “Beckett and Psychoanalysis,” in Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (London and New York: Palgrave, 2004). Oppenheim, Lois, “A Preoccupation with Object-Representation: The Beckett-Bion Case Revisited,” in International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82 (2001), 767-84. Oulton, Thérèse, and Peter Gidal, “Speaking of These Paintings,” in Thérèse Oulton: Clair Obscur, Recent Paintings and Watercolours (London: Marlborough, 2003), 4-5. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, “Beckett’s Ghosts and Fluxions,” in SBT/A 5, “Beckett & la psychanalyse & Psychoanalysis,” ed. Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), 23-40. Simon, Bennett, “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion,” in International Review of Psycho-Analysis 15 (1988), 331-52. Uhlmann, Anthony, “The Ancient Stoics, Émile Bréhier, and Beckett’s Beings of Violence,” in SBT/A 11, “Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000/Fin sans fin en l’an 2000,” ed. Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 35160. Winnicott, Donald W., Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971).

38

THE UNCERTAINTY OF SELF: Samuel Beckett and the Location of the Voice Chris Ackerley

The location and provenance of the Voice in Beckett’s fiction remains an enduring mystery. This essay identifies some aspects of the voice in relation to his early writing and notes the impact of a lecture by Jung at the Tavistock Clinic in 1935. Jung articulated a sense of the schizoid voice that would receive its most complex expression in L’Innommable. The Unnamable’s inability simultaneously to both locate and identify the Voice (the “I” or the “Not-I”) reflects a fundamental principle of Uncertainty; Beckett’s failure to go beyond the final impasse of that novel is arguably the consequence of an antinomy that (as he may or may not have recognised) cannot finally be resolved.1

Molloy refers (51) to “the famous fatal skin,” Balzac’s “peau de chagrin” (as in the French text, 69), the piece of shagreen or wild-ass skin which grants its owner’s every wish but shrinks accordingly, until it is nothing and its owner is dead. Like Raphaël, Molloy desperately attempts to wish for nothing, but cannot still the voices within his head. His predicament anticipates that of Malone, who seeks a realm of calm, a “great indifference” beyond the tumult (198), but is frustrated by a voice which will not leave him alone. In a previous article for Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, “Samuel Beckett and Thomas à Kempis: The Roots of Quietism” (2001), I concluded that Beckett’s mode of secular quietism arose partly in response to Thomas’s teachings, and, in particular, from The Imitation of Christ, I.xx, “Of the Love of Silence and Solitude”, where his retreat into the solitary cell and withdrawal from “seculer noyce” would permit God to “nye unto him”. I concluded that out of the very impulse towards the realm of calm, Molloy’s nothing and Malone’s “great indifference”, there arises the infinite mystery of the Voice that comes and goes, for which

that paper was but a perplexed prelude, as Molloy and Malone meurt are, respectively, voices in the wilderness before L’Innommable. In this article I continue my exploration of this mystery, but from a different perspective. The mystery of the voice is the paradox that drives Samuel Beckett’s supreme fiction, the three novels that culminate in L’Innommable, and then manifests itself in the fiction (and ultimately the drama) that follows. It may be, finally, Beckett’s most profound literary creation. Reduced to its fundamental sound, that mystery consists of where the voice is located, without or within (“La voix ... Ma voix”), and its authenticity, whether transcendent or delusional, a marker of discrete, essential identity, or a cultural echo. The origin of voice would remain unresolved, part of the enigma and paradox of being, of the mystery of creativity, yet its very insolubility provided the impetus for articulating the epistemological quandary from Murphy to How It Is. Beckett’s exploration took many paths: an early fascination with echo; then with the schizophrenic voice; his desire expressed in the “German Letter of 1937” for a kind of Nominalist irony en route to the unword; his attempt in fiction to determine the nature and location of that impossible imperative, the need to express; and finally his representations of a dramatic monologue beyond the unity of interior monologue, beyond the coherence of ego and character. “Assumption” exemplifies part of the paradox: “He could have shouted and could not.” The story concerns the poet’s need to “whisper” down the turmoil, to dam the stream of whispers before “it” happens, and an inchoate storm of sound overwhelms all. The story ends with the failure of the poet to find his personal voice. In Echo’s Bones (1935), that search embraces the myth of Narcissus and Echo, the poems as calcified and petrified remnants of what once was, of a voice that is no more. Dream of Fair to Middling Women mocks the voice of “the little poet” (26), but acknowledges Augustine’s sense (Confessions 11:6) of that voice which “passed by and passed away, began and ended; the syllables sounded and passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last after the rest, and silence after the last” (compare Dream, 105 & 137). Beckett recorded this in the Dream Notebook (27), and deployed it in his unpublished story “Echo’s Bones”, and in First Love (37); it is his first but lasting statement of the disjunction between the eternal and non-eternal voice. 40

Murphy depicts some aspects of this disjunction, but the mode is essentially ironic. Ticklepenny refers to “the vocal stream issuing from the soul through the lips” (85); Plato is mocked, but the source of the voice cannot be as easily dismissed. Rosie Dew uses the ouija board to access voices from the au-delà (98); the fakery is obvious, yet the phenomena persist. The patients in the MMM (167-68) offer written and verbatim reports of their inner voices; they are paranoid, but their problem remains. Dr. Killikrankie has experience of the schizoid voice: “It was not like a real voice, one minute it said one thing and the next minute something quite different” (185). In the French text his background at this point is more complex: conceived in the Shetlands, born in the Orkneys and weaned in the Hebrides, he is a great admirer of Ossian, and “croyait s’y connaître en voix schizoides. Elles ne ressemblaient guère aux voix hébriennes, ni aux voix orcadiennes, ni aux voix shetlandiennes. Tantôt elles vous disent ceci et tantôt cela.” Jung might on occasion use the phrase “Ossianic emotions” for wild flights of fancy. Murphy marks an important stage in Beckett’s quest for the voice. Its structure and argument were shaped by Beckett’s visit (2 October 1935) with his therapist, Wilfred Bion, to the Tavistock Clinic, to hear the third of Jung’s five lectures (which Beckett later read). Jung argued that unity of consciousness was an illusion, because complexes could free themselves from conscious control; they have “a certain will-power, a sort of ego, we find that in a schizophrenic condition they emancipate themselves from conscious control to such an extent that they become audible and visible. They appear in visions, they speak in voices” (Tavistock Lecture 3, 72). For Beckett this was a psychoanalytic insight crucial to his determination of the authentic voice. At that lecture Jung showed a diagram he had used previously, a series of concentric spheres representing gradations of the mind from the outer light of ego-consciousness to the dark center of the collective unconscious. Beckett recorded Jung’s interpretation of that diagram: “The closer you approach that centre, the more you experience what Janet calls an abaissement du niveau mental: your conscious autonomy begins to disappear, and you get more and more under the fascination of unconscious contents” (Knowlson, 218). The diagram entered the picture of Murphy’s mind with its “three zones, light, half light, dark” (Murphy, 111), and is arguably a blueprint for the trilogy, with its tripartite movement from Moran’s outer light to 41

the Unnamable’s dark centre. Beckett identified in the dark zone what he called “commotion and the pure forms of commotion” (Murphy, 112). Murphy is a dubious case-study: although he pursues a willed retreat into his dark zone, the loss of his “conscious autonomy” is overcome by his regrettable but fundamental sanity; that is, he cannot both retreat to the third part of his mind to succumb to the fascination of its unconscious contents, and be conscious of so doing. This antinomy anticipates the problem experienced by the Unnamable when he tries to locate the voice. Unlike Murphy, Watt is a classic case of the schizoid voice. As Mr Spiro answers his own questions (29) Watt hears nothing because of “other voices, singing, crying, stating, murmuring, things intelligible, in his ear”. Further on (33) he hears a mixed choir, “from without, yes really it seemed from without”. At Mr Knott’s house he experiences many “incidents of note”; these dislocate his sense of reality and confuse the relationship of his inner and outer worlds. Abandoned by its inner rats (84), his world becomes increasingly “unspeakable” (85). He begins to hear “a little voice” (91) saying that Mr Knott is shy of dogs, but he does not know what to make of “this particular little voice”. Leaving the establishment (225) he has the curious experience of seeing a figure which is yet is-not his self. At the station (234) he relives the experience of a woman named Price whose voice comes and goes; and, knocked to the ground (239), he distinguishes fragments of Hölderlin, the schizoid poet. The consequences of his illness are seen in Pt. 3, in his disintegrating discourse with Sam, the Cartesian méthode having succumbed under the weight of the trust placed in it. Derrida in “La voix et le phénomène” calls the voice listening to itself the major instance of illusory self-transcendence; the voice in Watt constitutes a warning of the fate awaiting one who tries too hard to eff the ineffable. Yet the attempt to deconstruct, to decompose, to hear and to identify the voice is the incessant concern of the Three Novels. That concern is anticipated in the “German Letter of 1937”, where Beckett expressed his post-Mauthner distrust of language, and sought a means of boring holes in the silence, seeking not the Joycean “apotheosis of the word” but something on the way to “the literature of the unword” (Disjecta, 171-73). What he thought desirable, a necessary stage, was “some form of Nominalist irony”, as the basis for an irrational art. The word “irony” is important. Windelband, whose History of Philosophy 42

Beckett had read closely, argues (296) the consequences of assuming that universals cannot be substances (the Realist position), and asks what they then might be. A word (“vox”) Boethius had defined as a “motion of air produced by the tongue”. With this the elements of an extreme Nominalism were given (contrast the “extreme Realism” of William of Champeaux, Murphy 294): universals as collective names and sounds which serve as signs for a multiplicity of substances or their accidents. Nominalism thus formulated (that is, lacking irony) accounts for much in Beckett’s writing, but not for the ironic “something” seeping through. As Windelband notes (296), the metaphysics of individualism which accompany such a theory of knowledge assert that only particulars can be regarded as truly real (he invokes Roscellinus), and this is a position which Beckett accepted. The form of Nominalist irony required is thus one that acknowledges the immediacy of “demented particulars” (Murphy, 13). Scholasticism, rather than more recent post-structuralism, constitutes the immediate background from which the voice emerges in the great writings of the middle period. The poem “bon bon il est un pays” (1947) dramatizes the mind as a place, a location, to which the poet retreats to seek “le calme, le calme”; that realm sought by Malone (198), beyond the tumult. The advent of the voice disturbs that peaceful prospect, because it constitutes a different imperative. Molloy’s quest for the self is equally a quest for the voice (I here move to the English texts, where this theme is perhaps articulated more clearly). Anticipating the structure of the Three Novels, he cries out (25), “this time, then another time perhaps, then perhaps a last time” (the French text, conceived as a diptych, reads: “Cette fois-ci, puis encore une je pense”). This is the outer voice, not the inner, but it serves to focus the theme. Molloy first intuits the inner voice when he hears the voice of a world collapsing endlessly (40). He chooses not to listen to that whisper, but it is not a sound like other sounds; “it” stops when “it” chooses, and he will hear it always, though it does not suit him to speak of it at this moment. The Unnamable will speak of nothing else. Molloy later hears “the small voice” (59) telling him to take his crutches and get out; and he obeys. He hears it again (65), telling him his region is vast; and he acknowledges (86) that he is subject to his imperatives, hypothetical or categorical. The voice telling him to leave the forest manifests itself as a murmur, “something gone wrong with the silence” (88); but at the 43

critical moment (91) he hears a reassuring voice: “Don’t fret, Molloy, we’re coming.” This suggests Matthew 14:27 or Acts 23:11, the voice of the Lord saying “Be of good cheer”; and it anticipates the Pauline voice heard by the Unnamable. Moran undergoes an identical experience. He recognizes the silence “beyond the fatuous clamour” (121), and early in his narrative (132) tells of the voice that needs no Gaber to make it heard, one within, ambiguous and not always easy to follow, one he is just beginning to know, but one he will follow “from this day forth, no matter what it commands.” When it ceases he will do nothing but wait (like the Unnamable) for it to come back. Tomorrow, he adds, he may be of a different mind; and, sure enough, he later recounts (169-70) how he first heard that voice (a voice giving orders, a voice without) on the way home, but paid no attention to it. In the final paragraph he returns to that voice, he is getting to know it better now, beginning to understand what “it” wants. It tells him to write “this report” (ambiguous and not always easy to follow), which is simultaneously that which has just concluded and the next two volumes that relentlessly go on. Malone presents a different aspect of the voice, that of the author who tells stories to pass the time and to create puppets through which he may be heard. This compulsion towards identity will be stripped away in the endeavor to isolate the voice itself, the unaccommodated voice (just as Molloy has become the unaccommodated self). Malone will “play” (180), but he recognizes from the outset that (like St Paul?) he will put away playthings and find himself alone in the dark. His narrative is the account of the movement towards that position, to a death that is also a monstrous birth, to an end that is equally the beginning of the third novel. Stories, inventories, objects: he must divest himself of these, little by little, in order to fail, to reach the great calm (198). He hears “noises” (206), but has lost the faculty of “decomposing” them (the pun is intentional). The voice in Malone Dies manifests itself less directly than in the other two texts, but Malone’s sense (233) that “it’s coming” (death, the voice), like the images of St. John that dominate the story, cry the way of one to come. The search for the voice is the great theme of The Unnamable. The French and English texts vary in their beginnings, but the first paragraph of each concludes the same way: “Je ne me tairai jamais. Jamais” [“I shall never be silent. Never”]. The tone adopted is a com44

posite biblical one. Like John (14:10) he must speak of things of which he cannot speak; like Paul (1 Corinthians 15:10) he invokes an authority that is not his own, “yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me”; like Job (7:11) he is obliged to speak in the anguish of his spirit, in the bitterness of his soul; and like Jeremiah (later said by Beckett to be the voice behind Company) he will utter his lamentations. A distinction must be drawn between the self that “utters” and the “Not-I”, which cannot so easily be identified. This is implicit in “These things I say” (301), which echoes John 5:34: “these things I say, that ye might be saved”; in imagining “a without” (305; the Calder text omits the crucial indefinite article); but above all in the paradox of “this voice that is not mine, but can only be mine,” and must continue to utter, to invent, voices “woven into mine” (309), in order “not to peter out” (307), or go silent (310). If the voice is not renewed, it will disappear (309). Mahood tells his tale, then is silent, “that is to say his voice continues, but is no longer renewed” (325). The narrator is surrounded with murmurs, vociferations, the “burden” (refrain, pensum) of which is “roughly” that he is alive (335). But all this “business about voices” requires to be “revised” (336); he speaks of voices (“let them come”), but the problem remains that of “Assumption”: “if I could only find a voice of my own, in all this babble” (438). Mahood and Murphy sometimes spoke, “but it was clumsily done, you could see the ventriloquist” (348). Yet there is another sound which never stops (349), which forces the recognition that he is in a head, a skull, assailed with noises “signifying nothing” (351; the echo is of Macbeth), a voice which has “denatured” him. He considers going deaf (354), invokes the conceit of a head growing out of the ear (356), a kind of transformer, the aural equivalent of the eye, of percipi, the paradox of no voice without a listener. If only the voice would stop (364), what could be worse (a soprano perhaps), he’s in a dungeon (369), an oubliette, with a voice that never stops, he wishes it would stop, this blind voice, “this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing” (372), he is the tympanum, vibrating (383). These agonies culminate in a remarkable passage, accentuating the contrast between “my voice” and “the voice” (393-94), the euphony in the French text (177) between “Ma” and “La” rendering the difference more poignant. The Unnamable hears the voice failing, fears he is going silent, listens hard, intimates the real silence, then as 45

he pauses for air, listens for his voice in the silence. It returns (“elle revient”), and with renewed breath he moves towards the end. This passage is not present in the second manuscript notebook at this point, but two additional leaves containing it are pasted into the flyleaf of the first notebook and were later reworked into the novel. Internal evidence reveals that this important interlude, dealing with the loss and recovery of the voice, must antedate the rest of the novel (for more details, see my 1993 article, “The Unnamable’s First Voice?”). This is quite literally the Unnamable’s first voice, and the most emphatic statement of the novel’s major theme, the search to locate the mysterious voice, a search doomed to frustration. This passage may well be the “text” for the entire novel, the nucleus of the whole, a point of departure which in turn leads to the conclusion. Yet the conclusion that follows is inconclusive, the nature and location of the voice as much a mystery at the end as it was in the beginning. Nevertheless, one key to the mystery may be sought in the sub-atomic imagery that governs the novel. Just as the all-important third zone of Murphy’s mind is conceived as something not subject to the Kantian (or Schopenhauerean) categories of time, space and causality, as “a tumult of non-Newtonian motion” (Murphy, 113), so The Unnamable opens by depicting the old stable ego of self. But that “I” may be split, to reveal a quantum world of non-Newtonian motion, a micro-universe in which the very attempt to “id-entify” it is of necessity doomed to frustration. Specifically, the “commotion” within the dark part of the mind (that which, in Jung’s 1935 model, structures this, the third of the Three Novels) is analogous to that existing in the universe of quantum mechanics where classical physical laws, as defined by Newton and regulating the machinery of the Big World, do not apply. Entities such as electrons exist as two things simultaneously, matter or energy; electromagnetic radiation behaves as both waves and particles (“quanta”); all depends on how they are measured. Beckett found in such contemporary theories curious dynamics applicable to his Occasionalist definition of the little world of the mind, where one might be free. Murphy experiences the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target (Murphy, 112); and Molloy feels, as identity fades, the “namelessness” of “waves and particles” (Molloy, 31), nameless things, thingless names. Earlier, A and C acted like particles in an undulating landscape, “which caused the road to be in waves” 46

(9); their meeting is the kind of apparently random coincidence which binds other pairs of characters in the novel, the encounter often emitting the output of destructive energy. In the Whoroscope Notebook Beckett recorded details from Henri Poincaré’s La Valeur de la science about the paradoxical similarities of atoms and stars, and he later used this to structure the beginning of L’Innommable, where forces move around the fixed central figure in a way that suggests both the planetary system and atomic structure, with emphasis on the immense emptiness of space and the mirroring of the micro- and macrocosms. This is an image that first Rutherford then Bohr had invoked to describe the brave new sub-atomic world. The activity of The Unnamable might be likened to splitting the atom of self, the Cartesian “I” isolated by this point in the trilogy: no longer an integrated entity, strange new particles discovered within, yet no ultimate understanding reached and the location of the voice still a mystery. One partial resolution to that mystery, the voice within yet equally without (the NotI), might be in terms of Bohr’s notion of complementarity and/or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which suggest that it can be heard but not located, or vice versa, but not heard and located simultaneously. Thus the antimony of the “I” and the “Not-I” must remain absolute, in the same way that Murphy cannot apperceive himself in the dark part of his mind: one cannot be conscious of being unconscious. In the fiction following Three Novels Beckett tried still to move (the paradox is implicit in this phrasing) beyond the impasse, to resolve the dilemma of the voice within that is equally the voice without. Texts for Nothing pursue this goal, but without success (Beckett considered them failures), for they rehearse the “old aporetics”. The final “Text” begins by affirming, “Weaker still the weak old voice that tried in vain to make me.” The paradox remains: “No voice ever but in my life”; the impersonal phrasing, “it murmurs”; and the partial resolution, “nothing but a voice murmuring a trace” (Texts for Nothing, 152). The image of the “trace” is poignant and ephemeral, a tiny flurry of dust disturbed by the movement in the air, evidence of the voice that was but cannot endure, leaving no trace against the “black nothing” (154), the voice that cannot speak yet cannot cease. The “impasse” has not been overcome, but these Texts testify to the voice that goes on. If the issue is unresolved yet again in How It Is, it remains a powerful heuristic. The novel begins with three of Beckett’s certain47

ties, birth, existence and death: “before Pim with Pim after Pim” (7); then introduces the fourth, the voice that was “once without” and then “in me”, “an ancient voice in me not mine”. This restates the central thesis of The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, the need to express as an obligation or pensum. The question abides as to whether How It Is will go beyond this. Before Pim the voice is “afar” (13); “changeable” (15); “once quaqua then in me” (20); “barely audible” (23); yet “not mine” (40). With Pim the attention moves to the voice of the other. Pim’s voice is “extorted” (21); “there within an inch or two” (56); but his is not that ancient voice the narrator seeks, and there is no telling whether Pim has heard that voice (74), any more than what the narrator will utter when tormented by Bom (76). Again, the distinction is that between the voice that utters and the “first voice”. Whatever the status of the latter, “above” or “without” (79), there is “only one voice my voice never any other” (87) that he hears and murmurs, though it be folly. It leaves, but it comes back (95), like that of the Unnamable. Part 2 ends with the restatement of the voice “in me that was without quaqua”, but introduces the notion of “the voice of us all” (99), to be examined in Part 3. The notion is important, for it consititutes the difference between the narrator as sole elect, or the sense of universal experience; but by a rigorous process of logic when the voice comes “back at last” (106), the universal (a choir, megaphones, “the voice of us all”) manifests itself as that of the self alone, just as the possibility of the many is ruthlessly reduced to knowledge of the one (108, 114, 126 & 128). The given is the solitude (129), and the voice that recounts it is the sole means of living it; “a past a present and a future” have been joined by the fourth inevitability, the voice (the need to express). His life comprises “bits and scraps strung together” (133) by “an ancient voice ill-spoken ill-heard”, the modality of both witness and scribe in doubt. The only conclusion (134) is that “my life” is constituted by “a voice without” (ill-spoken, ill-heard) which is now “in me in the vault bone-white” (ill-heard, ill-murmured). This is not an advance on The Unnamable, nor even on the opening of this novel, because no advance is possible beyond the deductive logic (139) that reduces “this anonymous voice self-styled quaqua the voice of us all” to that of the “single voice” within: “this voice quaqua yes all balls yes only one voice here yes mine yes” (144-45). The echo of the end of Ulysses mocks any assertion of univocality, but (when the panting 48

stops) there is finally “only me yes alone yes with my voice” (146), for that is how it is. Note 1.

This essay has benefited immeasurably from innumerable conversations with Stan Gontarski on the subject of the Voice in Beckett, and, in particular, from our joint work on this theme for The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. Although I have accentuated Beckett’s earlier works and aspects of psychoanalysis and physics, my understanding of Voice is inextricably blended with Stan’s sense of Beckett’s assault upon literary understandings of character, representations of dramatic monologue beyond the unity of interior monologue (fiction leading to theatre), and, finally, for his insistence that Voice, the enigmatic disembodied sound that swells out of the darkness, for all its paradoxes and ambiguities, for all its irresolutions, is Beckett’s most profound, original and complex literary creation. This essay also owes much to my former student, Damian Love, whose entries in the Grove Companion on psychoanalysis, schizophrenia, Jung and Freud are among that volume’s finest. Some of the materials of this article have also been used for The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett that, due to editorial policy, has been published before this collection of essays could appear.

49

Works Cited Ackerley, C.J., “The Unnamable’s First Voice?,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 2.2 (Spring 1993), 53-58. –, “Samuel Beckett and Thomas à Kempis: The Roots of Quietism,” in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 9 (2000), 81-92. Augustine, St, Confessions, trans. William Watts [Loeb Classical Library] (2 vols; London: Heinemann, 1922 [repr.]). Beckett, Samuel, Collected Poems in English and French (London: John Calder, 1977). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (Dublin: Black Cat P, 1992). –, “First Love” [1946], in Complete Short Prose, ed. S.E. Gontarski, 25-45. –, “German Letter of 1937,” in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn, 51-54, 170-73. –, How It Is [1961] (New York: Grove P, 1964 [repr.]). –, L’Innommable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1952). –, Malone meurt (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1951). –. Molloy (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1950). –, Murphy [1938] (New York: Grove P, 1957 [repr.]). –, Murphy (Paris: Bordas, 1947). –, Texts for Nothing [1950-52], in Complete Short Prose, ed. S.E. Gontarski, 100-54. –, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable [1955, 1956, 1958] (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991 [repr.]). –, Watt [1953] (New York: Grove P, 1959 [repr.]). –, Whoroscope Notebook (BIF, University of Reading [RUL MS 4000/1]). Cohn, Ruby, ed, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1983). Derrida, Jacques, La voix et le phénomène: introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. [1967] (4th ed, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. Épithémée, 1983 [repr.]). Gontarski, S.E., ed, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (New York: Grove P, 1995). Jung, Carl [1935], “The Tavistock Lectures,” in The Collected Works XVIII, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 5-182. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Pilling, John, ed, Beckett’s Dream Notebook (Reading: BIF, 1999). Thomas à Kempis, The Earliest English Translation of De Imitatione Christi, Now First Printed from a Ms. in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, with various Readings from a Ms. in the University Li-

50

brary, Cambridge, ed. John K. Ingram, Early English Text Society #63 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1893). Windelband, Dr Wilhelm. A History of Philosophy, with special reference to the formation and development of its problems and conceptions, trans. James H. Tufts. 1892 (2nd ed., rev. & enlarged, London: Macmillan, 1914 [repr.]).

51

THE EYE, THE VOICE, THE SKIN: LA PEAU, LA VOIX, L’ŒIL Sjef Houppermans

As Didier Anzieu shows in his Beckett et le psychanaliste, if we want to look at Beckett and his work in a psychoanalytical way, we should dare to follow the lines that trace a continual to and fro at the surface of life and word, marks on the skin rather than views on an abyss. Prolonging this way of reading we shall point to the rhetoric of the unconscious as the texts display it, permitting a critical approach to what psychoanalysis says.

But instead of trying to satisfy this wish I stayed where I was looking at it, if I may say so, looking at it as it shrivelled up and finally disappeared, like the famous fatal skin, only much quicker. (Beckett 1955, 52) This allusion to Balzac’s “Peau de chagrin” when Molloy contemplates his beloved bicycle, might involve more than a simple wink. Balzac’s tale is the story of a young man who acquires the skin of an onager that, on the one hand, permits him to realize all his desires but, on the other, goes on becoming smaller and smaller until it vanishes ending the life of its owner in the process. This is the perfect image of a psychic mechanism that is primordial in Beckett’s work too – the shrinking of desire that Lacan indicates with the word ‘aphanisis’ – and it is literally embedded through a foundational technique that Beckett shares with Balzac and many other authors: in the beginning was the pun. Peau de chagrin refers to a skin made of a particular kind of leather that has been grained, but of course Balzac chooses his title because ‘chagrin’ also expresses the sorrow and the pity caused by the vanishing of desire which is concomitant with the dimensions of the skin in question. A third point where Balzac and Beckett meet

is the reunion of the spiritual and of the very concrete: passing through the words to touch their very materiality. Indeed, we could read the whole scene of the presentation of the skin to Raphael de Valentin in this ‘conte philosophique’ as a journey descending from metaphysics to materiality, but I shall limit myself to one sentence: Le jeune homme, se retournant, témoigna quelque surprise en apercevant au-dessus du siège où il était assis un morceau de chagrin accroché sur le mur […] les grains noirs du chagrin étaient si soigneusement polis et si bien brunis, les rayures capricieuses en étaient si propres et si nettes, que pareilles à des facettes de grenat, les aspérités de ce noir oriental formaient autant de petits foyers qui réfléchissaient vivement la lumière. These small points of focus fascinate and dazzle the spectator: the vanishing of the object of desire has its origin in a blindness that, as with Oedipus, is linked intimately to self-mutilation. The eye and the skin are catapulted into one another. Raphael is working on a “Théorie de la volonté”, a demonstration that is completely inverted by the very reality of the skin and his only remedy will be the proximity of another skin: that of the woman who loves him: P(e)auline. Between Balzac and Beckett we can distinguish, for instance, the figures of Hoffmann and Schopenhauer. This kind of intertextuality might be helpful in establishing the place of Beckett in European intellectual history. His writing is so original because it explores, at least, a three-fold tradition of AngloSaxon, Germanic and Romance thinking and feeling. With regard to the French literary heritage, we should not limit ourselves to Proust but also consider the many points of contact with Chamfort, Rimbaud, Flaubert and indeed Balzac. This little excursion into Balzac and intertextuality makes it possible, I think, to emphasize the first of a number of points concerning Beckett and psychoanalysis that I would like to put forward as in my eyes fundamental for any further exploration. That is, the above-mentioned endless effort to account for the paradoxical presence in man of, at once, the most ethereal and the utterly concrete. Beckett’s unconscious is not a place, a hidden place or dimension where some secret mobiles of his writing might reside – be they oedi54

pal or pre-oedipal or uterine or conceptual or pre-conceptual in the manner of Tristram Shandy1. The unconscious in Beckett is a question of constant movement, of working-through (‘durcharbeiten’), of keeping distance and the impossibility of doing so, of the intangible limits of the I, of his extensions and his shrinking, of its doublings and its ghostly appearance. The unconscious is the gap between the thinking I and the feeling I, the abyss where the present of thought vanishes, the instant where in and out, container and contained, shift and im-ex-plode; this is where the skin in its fragmentation and coagulation is a symptom and a metaphor, like Freud’s Wunderblock, a kaleidoscopic surface where the I lives its / his ever changing encounter with otherness that cannot be grasped or fixed. While the I suffers intensely from the impossibility of deciding upon its frontiers, the skin will be seen, in a phantasm, as ONLY being the all covering blanket of intimacy and protection, that, however, at the same moment appears to be a shroud2 or what can and should be opened, lacerated, scraped off. The last wish of the old ones: to be scratched (Endgame). Anzieu says Beckett’s work turns psychoanalysis inside out “comme une peau de lapin” (like a rabbit-skin, Anzieu, 98). Beckett establishes the most extreme bridge between the very abstract and the very concrete, between the philosophical concept in its purest form and the intensity of a body that suffers or that is simply functioning in its most elementary way. This is the gap which characterises our human condition. Or as Anzieu points out – making the link again with the shifting dimension of the sign as both signifier and signified – ‘peau’ also brings to mind ‘pot’ which sounds similar, provoking a short circuit between the surface, the envelope, the protecting veil and at once the eruptive openings of the body and the place of abjection, dejection. « Casser le pot » is the all-decisive formula where the universe of Proust’s Recherche falls into an irremediable catastrophe.3 Anzieu discovers this pot on the spot where Watt wanders, doubling (in Anzieu’s eyes) Beckett’s expedition with Bion. ***** Casser le pot (sodomy seen as a destructive action) and casser la peau (lancing an abscess) is a sadomasochistic handling of a injured narcissistic construction; it is also a flagrant exhibition of what lies at our 55

roots and can not be understood. This reality of our bodily heaviness oversees (überseht: surveys in blindness and insight) the unbearable lightness of our mind. The unconscious is this unthinkable link, this irretraceable to-and-fro. This process may originate in the gap between son and mother, in their cruel separation and all the suffering and fetishism of skin it brings with it. But at the same time these phenomena are consequences of an intense (un)consciousness of the impossible unity / duality / multiplicity of our own body. In order to indicate in a precise way the connection between these reflections on the skin as an all-enveloping cover that cannot but be torn open, and language in its most concrete form, I propose to look at a quotation that has been often used, but that seems me to fit perfectly in this scenario: that is, the famous letter to Axel Kaun of 1937: And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. (Beckett, 1983, 171) Beckett’s goal (or endpoint, or breaking point) all along this way of desire and distress is to go beyond this confrontation, towards a nirvana, a blank space, a place of silence, a plane without marks covered by a shroud of ashes, the hole on the inside of a skull that has been emptied, tracing the way the unconscious murmurs its destiny, sliding into death as the recovery of what came before life: the ‘an-conscious’ as the limit of all unconscious wandering. The most pregnant mise-en-scène of this search of and in the unconscious might well be Company. The situation of someone lying on his back in the dark listening to a voice saying ‘you’, revisiting a series of events in a certain past, in fear of being attacked by a rat or touched by a fly. Here the transference as well as the countertransference is acted out in a way that is also contagious for the reader. Here are three moments which bring to mind the stages of our preceding reflection: the hand of the mother that is abruptly taken off and, in reaction, the body of the child falling from the huge pine tree (cutting and fusing skin and body); the nightmare of the total decomposition of what you care for too intensely, what you die for (the scene of the hedgehog); and finally a kind of nirvana, Thalassa in all its seductiveness, when among the waves the father calls from below 4. 56

***** Returning to the basic link between unconscious and language I would suggest that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s semanalytic research account for these mechanisms in the best possible way. Because the standard distances to the Other (with a capital letter) and the other (in lower case) (‘a / A’ in lacanian terminology) have been distorted, the introjection (living with the other) has been made into an incorporation, the creation of a tomb, of a crypt, where the lost one is absent / present. This void should be emptied in an endless stream: hence the foirade (which, while rendered ‘fizzle’ in the English version, in French clearly means ‘diarrhoea’). But on this crypt there is an inscription, unseen, unknown, a piece of language that makes the (mis)connection between body and consciousness: ‘tieret’ is this word for the Wolfman (as Abraham and Torok demonstrate: the Russian word for rubbing ); so too, ‘secret’ words link together the mental constructions of Louis Wolfson, Jean-Pierre Brisset and Raymond Roussel. Often these examples of cryptonomy pass by another language. For Beckett French had different functions of course but it was also more and more entangled with English therefore permitting this cryptography. Proper names may function like this in an exemplary way: ‘Beckett’ absorbing the French verb ‘becqueter’, to eat but also to kiss; Barclay decomposing in barre and clé (or ‘clay’); and ‘Sam’ of course. Here are some other words that seem to call for attention: in Premier Amour the name Anne and also the ‘faitout’ as well as the ‘hyacinthe’; in Molloy la bière (‘bière’ means also ‘coffin’ in French); in En attendant Godot Vaucluse = merdecluse (in Vaucluse one perceives Petrarca’s ‘vallis clausa’: so here we might have a perfect ‘mise en abyme’ of the cryptic enterprise); in Company the genets; in Mal vu Mal dit the ‘tire-bouton’ and the ‘huche’ as well as the ‘manicôme’; in Catastrophe the word ‘malheur’; in Film the only sound of this mute production: Hush ! ***** As a last point I would like to emphasize the necessity of once again turning to considerations such as these about the role language plays. If Beckett is the servant of language in a Lacanian way, pointing in his 57

texts to man’s cruel destiny of slavery, he nevertheless does not cease to challenge language and literary constructions with the intention of breaking their hegemony or at least going beyond them, to point to their beginning, to make us guess why language necessarily eschews its confrontation with reality and why these very failures are our only way of defying the real. This saying-unsaying is realized in a long series of rhetorical techniques where it appears that psychoanalysis is no longer (among other manifestations) primarily a theoretical construction for shedding light on texts, but that literary inscriptions particularize and concretize these mechanisms, commenting on them and offering a bias that opens onto their very origins. For example there is the playing with the duplicity of words, paratactic constructions, the use of ‘epanorthosis’, techniques of multiplication and serialisation, the various ways of accomplishing exhaustion, the apparition of silence as in music. Artists are our masters, said Freud; Beckett signifies psychoanalysis’ turning inside out. It could be said in another way as follows: the relation between theory and fiction should not be based on violation and penetration, but it should proceed as a sweet and soft touching of the skin. I would like to finish with a quotation from Didier Anzieu who has had, in France, the most inspiring dialogue with Beckett which has begun from psychoanalytical premises: [ Beckett continue à écrire] Pour intégrer cet échec [ la cure avec Bion] et la cohorte des échecs vitaux associés à lui, aspirés par lui, dans un système fictif, dans une théorie explicative apparemment adulte mais analogue aux théories sexuelles infantiles, une théorie de la négativité, d’abord restreinte, puis généralisée. (Anzieu, 84) Here fiction and theory are no more independent entities but the two sides of a same skin. Notes 1. 58

Balzac’s motto for “La Peau de Chagrin” is the famous ‘serpentine’ movement of Uncle Toby’s stick.

2.

Didier Anzieu proposes this as a starting point for a discussion of the unconscious in Beckett.

3.

This occurs when Albertine using these words reveals to the narrator a hidden dimension of her past and her implication in lesbian relationships.

4.

We should, by the way, pay more attention to the writings of Sándor Ferenczi and Georg Groddeck in talking about Beckett and psychoanalysis.

Works cited Anzieu, Didier, Beckett et le psychanaliste (Paris: Mentha: Archimbaud, 1992). Balzac, Honoré de, La Peau de chagrin in La Comédie humaine, t. 10 (Paris: Gallimard, coll. la Pléiade, 1979). Beckett, Samuel, Molloy (Paris: Olympia Press, 1955). –, First Love (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973) –, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). –, Compagnie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980). –, Mal Vu Mal Dit (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Edited by Ruby Cohn, (London: Calder, 1983).

59

“THE ARTIST WHO STAKES HIS BEING IS FROM NOWHERE”: Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy on the Art of Jack B. Yeats Seán Kennedy

Thomas MacGreevy felt that Jack B. Yeats’s art was a repository of Irish national consciousness, and that it could act as a basis for the articulation of a uniquely Irish post-colonial identity. Samuel Beckett was strongly opposed to such a view, describing Yeats as an “artist from nowhere”. I explain this divergence of views in terms of Beckett and MacGreevy’s different cultural positioning in the Irish Free State, and suggest that Beckett’s views are indicative of the way in which he himself wished to be read vis-à-vis the cultural narratives of identity being espoused in ‘Irish Ireland’.

Beckett’s writings might appear particularly resistant to historical readings. Certainly Beckett himself resisted them, and that resistance has been taken up in turn by many of his critics. Such resistance might also seem remarkable, given the currency attained in Beckett studies by the idea of “the Beckett country”, an area of the Dublin mountains in and around Foxrock to which references appear with astonishing regularity throughout Beckett’s entire oeuvre. However, the gradual realisation that Beckett’s works are not as rootless as they might first appear, or have been carefully made to appear, has not led to any sustained initiative to restore Ireland as a context for the discussion of Beckett’s work. This ongoing resistance to historicised readings, sponsored in the first instance by aspects of the work itself, and sustained by the writer’s unwillingness to discuss the issue of his background at any length, has involved critics from time to time in a species of self-deception: in order to sanction this relative neglect of all things Irish, the Beckett country seems capable of being both there and not there in Beckett’s texts.1 The impetus to produce historically inflected readings of Beckett’s work is regarded as unseemly, somehow inevitably reductive. It is as if to relate Beckett back to his ori-

gins would be to undo what Beckett himself had achieved, escaping from an oppressive and debilitating cultural backwater into the heart of European modernism. In this article I want to suggest the usefulness of an examination of Beckett’s cultural positioning – as a southern Irish Protestant – to readings of his work. The early governors of the Irish Free State were faced with an urgent quest for legitimacy after 1922. Increasingly, and especially with the rise of Fianna Fáil in the 1930s, this quest took the form of a concerted drive for political, economic, cultural and moral selfsufficiency from England. However, the partial nature of the Treaty settlement – the embarrassment of partition – and the fact that the Free State had inherited the language and administrative structures of its erstwhile enemy, meant that early attempts to define an authentically Irish cultural identity were shot through with insecurity. Margaret O’Callaghan, for example, has shown how Irish Free State intellectuals were repeatedly embarrassed by their inability to point out with any certainty instances of the “hidden Ireland” they wished to foster and develop (226-245). Aware of this contradiction, and impelled by anxieties regarding the possibility of recovering a uniquely Irish sense of national identity, the “Irish Ireland” movement often sponsored a narrow cultural conformism that alienated many in the Free State, especially the ex-unionist Protestant minorities. In the cultural sphere Irish Irelanders urged the rejection of English literary precedents. Published in 1931, Daniel Corkery’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature decried the debilitating effects of British influence on Irish writers, and proposed an aesthetic for the “Ireland that counts”, based on “religion, nationalism and the land” (1966, 19, 23). The rich heritage of the Literary Revival was rejected as accomplished but unnative, “written for England by spiritual exiles” (9). By contrast, the truly Irish artist should be racy of the soil, “possessed of a culture based on [his] emotional subconscious” (16); he should “feel it in his bones” (12). “The writers in a normal country are one with what they write of”, says Corkery, “the life of their own people [which] they cannot get outside of. That is why they belong” (13). These writers must work “by Irish suffrage”, “without obligation to alien markets”, using “a mental equipment fitted to shape the emotional content that is theirs, as well as the nation’s, into chaste and enduring form” (23, 25, 16). A contemporary review of Corkery’s 62

book stated its thesis succinctly: “It is, in a nutshell, that only an Irish Catholic Nationalist can write Irish literature” (O’Hegarty 1932, 53). Samuel Beckett’s friend Thomas MacGreevy is indicted in Corkery’s essay as one of a body of expatriate Irish writers whose choice and treatment of Irish conditions is thereby distorted “by alien considerations” (1966, 5). However, MacGreevy himself never felt that expatriation precluded him from an authentic treatment of Irish material. Indeed, his Jack B. Yeats: an appreciation and an interpretation (1945), can be read as an attempt to apply Corkery’s criteria for a nationalist art to the work of the Irish painter Jack Yeats. Recalling Corkery’s stirring phrase, MacGreevy focuses on “the Ireland that matters”, i.e. Irish Ireland, and he reiterates Corkery’s rejection of the art of the ascendancy, describing it as “no more than a province of English art” (1945, 9). For Corkery, the truly Irish artist is one that ‘belongs’, and this almost mystical sense of affinity with the land is also important to MacGreevy’s Yeats. Indeed, it appears to allow MacGreevy to intuit the form that Yeats’s art will take even before he encounters it: It was several years before I saw any of Jack Yeats’s painted work, but the spirit of it was familiar, and when I did come to it, it was to find something that was already part of myself brought into consciousness and expressed fully and radiantly […] I had, as it were, inherited him from my childhood in the remote south-west of Ireland. (22) In another echo of Corkery, MacGreevy argues that Yeats’s nationalism is central to his development as an artist, and MacGreevy attributes Yeats’s great change in artistic technique – from realism to expressionism – to the traumatic events of the war of independence and the Irish civil war. After 1924, for MacGreevy, “[Yeats] turns from recorded observation to paint scenes from memory or history, and treats them more arbitrarily, more purely imaginatively” (28). However, this does not prevent Yeats from painting a nationalist art. Rather, it was inevitable that “as [Yeats’s] experience and understanding deepened and matured, his interpretations of Irish life should, nationally speaking, signify to an even greater degree” (1942, 239). Like Corkery, MacGreevy is describing a process of decolonisation: 63

the struggle to establish the Irish Free State has created the conditions of emergence for a uniquely Irish art, and Yeats’s paintings are “the consummate expression of the spirit of the nation at one of the supreme points of its evolution” (1945, 10). Samuel Beckett was strongly opposed to this reading of Yeats, claiming in a 1945 review of MacGreevy’s monograph that “the national aspects of Mr Yeats’s genius have been overstated” (1983a, 96). Beckett’s brief review is a sophisticated attempt to undermine MacGreevy’s politicised readings of Yeats’s art, asserting that Yeats refers in his work not to Ireland, but to a world where “Tir-na-nOgue makes no more sense than Bachelor’s Walk, nor Helen than the applewoman, nor asses than men, nor Abel’s blood than Useful’s” (1983a, 97). There is a lot going on in this brief statement. In 1915 Yeats painted Bachelor’s Walk, showing a young street-vendor placing a rose at the site of a massacre of Irish citizens by the British Army that had occurred on the 26th July 1914 (Rosenthal, 26). In this painting MacGreevy argued Yeats was “immortalising the spirit of Irishmen and Irishwomen … who fulfilled themselves in sacrifice” (1942, 251). Beckett’s contention that Bachelor’s Walk makes no more sense in Yeats’s world than the mythical land of Tir-na-nOgue plays down its significance as the site of a civilian massacre, undoing MacGreevy’s politicised reading of the work. Similarly, MacGreevy read Yeats’s Tinker’s Encampment: Blood of Abel (1940) as an allegorical indictment of all participants in Ireland’s civil war, comprising a dark prophesy: “all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the just, even unto the blood of Zachanas […] shall come upon this generation” (1945, 36). However, Beckett asserts that Abel’s blood makes no more sense than Useful’s in interpreting Yeats’s work, undermining the relevance of Yeats’s reference to Abel, in order to rebut MacGreevy’s civil war reading of the painting. And the same strategy is used against MacGreevy’s reading of Helen (1937). MacGreevy had argued that this painting affirmed Yeats’s dedication to Irish Ireland, and offered an allegorical reading of the painting as an indictment of partitioned Ireland (1945, 33-5). Beckett, by contrast, had told MacGreevy that he found the painting “absolutely natural and unrhetorical”, 2 and he deliberately plays down Helen of Troy’s symbolic significance in the review, citing her as 64

merely another among others in Yeats’s world, on a par with the ordinary apple-vendor on Dublin’s Henry St. In essence, Beckett’s review is a closely argued rejection of MacGreevy’s nationalist agenda, which it replaces with a call for a deracinated reading of Yeats’s art. In Beckett’s reading, Yeats’s Irishness is an irrelevance: “Mr Yeats’s importance is to be sought elsewhere”, he maintains, “than in a sympathetic treatment (how sympathetic?) of the local accident, or the local substance” (1983a, 97). This is an aspect of Beckett’s broader conviction that art should not be related to its historical or cultural background, which he dismissed as nothing more than “an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery” (Qtd in Knowlson, 244). Beckett read the completed manuscript of Yeats as early as 1937, and, on the subject of Yeats’s transition to expressionism after 1924, flatly refused to grant Yeats’s republicanism an aesthetic significance. He told MacGreevy: I understand your anxiety to clarify his pre and post 1916 painting politically and socially [… but] I am inclined personally to think that the turning away from the local […] results […] from a very characteristic and very general psychological mechanism, operative in young artists as a naiveté (or an instinct) and in old artists as a wisdom (or an instinct) […]. You will always, as an historian, give more credit to circumstance than I, with my less than supine interest and belief in the fable convenue, ever shall be able to. (SB to TM, 31st March 1938) In this reading Yeats’s artistic development is the gradual realisation of an innate process of maturation wholly unrelated to political events surrounding the birth of the Irish Free State, and Beckett concedes what MacGreevy had already told him many times, that he has “no sense of history” (SB to TM, 4 th September 1937). Against MacGreevy’s historical and political reading, Beckett’s review argues that Yeats’s art “brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the isolation at the heart of the human condition.” This implies that the correct context for an assessment of Yeats’s achievement is not national, but ontological: an approach that articulates broadly philosophical concerns. MacGreevy had argued in his monograph that Yeats was the first to juxtapose “landscape and figure with65

out subduing the character of either to that of the other” (1945, 13). However, Beckett wanted to go much further, seeing Yeats’s depiction of the relationship between man and nature as one of fundamental disparity: “What I feel he gets so well […] is the heterogeneity of nature and the human denizens. The unalterable alienness of the phenomena”. Beckett sees Yeats’s work as “a painting of pure inorganic juxtapositions where nothing can be taken as given and there is no possibility of change and exchange” (SB to TM, 14 th August 1937). This view of man’s exteriority to landscape had been clarified for Beckett in his consideration of the works of Cézanne, whom he held to be the first to “see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurate with all human expressions whatsoever” (SB to TM, 8th September 1934). For Beckett, man’s predicament consists in the impassable immensity that separates him from nature irrevocably. In “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), Beckett had described a “courageous artist”, willing to face up to this predicament and “state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects”. There, Beckett had argued that Jack Yeats is such an artist, who confronts the bankrupt relationship between man and nature, and articulates the impossibility of communication between them (1983, 70-1). Beckett’s Yeats is a philosopher of being, for whom the local accident acts as little more than a backdrop to an exploration of the “issueless predicament of existence” (1983a, 97). “I find something terrifying”, Beckett tells MacGreevy, “in the way Yeats puts down a man’s head and a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, the awful acceptance of 2 entities that will never mingle” (SB to TM, 14th August 1937). In Beckett’s eyes, these people are entities before they are Irish, and the impossibility of any effective communication between them is far more important than local accidents of politics or national identity. Of course MacGreevy failed, or what is more likely, refused, to grasp the point. He considers Beckett’s contention that Yeats’s transition to expressionism is an inevitable phase of his evolution as an artist, before rejecting the idea, concluding that “art is never wholly divorced from the conditions of life in which it is produced” (1945, 28). “If art is concerned with religion and patriotism”, he argues, “I do not see why art criticism should ignore them” (1945, 4). MacGreevy’s Yeats is a truly Irish artist of the people, and so, when MacGreevy quotes Beckett’s remark that he felt Yeats grew “Watteauer and Wat66

teauer” as time went by (SB to TM, 23rd July 1937), he elucidates it with the following gloss: [T]he sensitive Frenchman cherishes Watteau as an artist who elucidated and depicted something that was a peculiarly French statement of an attitude to life. And similarly an Irishman of the people may feel that Jack Yeats has elucidated and depicted certain qualities in his race which it has, instinctively and against enormous, even desperate, odds, cherished and feels justified in cherishing. (1945, 14) Again, MacGreevy views Yeats’s work as a repository of national consciousness for an oppressed people engaged in an ongoing anticolonial struggle, and as such, he believes that it acts as a basis for the articulation of a uniquely Irish post-colonial identity. This, of course, was precisely what Beckett did not mean, and he wrote to MacGreevy again to tell him so. He suggested that MacGreevy had read his comment in the light of his own preoccupation with historical and cultural contexts, whereas Beckett had meant to suggest Yeats and Watteau’s shared concern with “inorganic juxtaposition”, or “nonanthropomorphised humanity” (SB to TM, 31 st August 1938). The 1954 frontispiece “Homage to Jack B. Yeats” stands as Beckett’s most succinct statement of his own views on Yeats’s work, and “Homage” is an attempt at a radical re-situation of Yeats’s work in the context of Beckett’s own preoccupation with a deracinated ontology of man and mess (SB to TM, 18th October 1932). Beckett claims that “the artist who stakes his being is from nowhere. Has no kith”. Yeats is such an artist, demonstrating a “strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilations to holy patrimony, national and other”. Rather, Yeats’s art is referable only to itself – is, a “high solitary art uniquely self-pervaded, one with its wellhead in a hiddenmost of spirit, not to be clarified in any other light” (1983c, 149). This reading of Yeats is a conscious, point for point rebuttal of the prognostications of Irish Ireland’s cultural agenda as evinced by MacGreevy’s monologue. Art that cannot be assimilated to “holy patrimony, national and other” can have no significant relationship to Corkery’s holy trinity of “religion, nationalism and the land” (Corkery 1966, 19). Similarly, the “artist from nowhere” can never hope for a relationship with any national landscape based on his emotional sub67

conscious; he can never hope to feel Ireland in his bones, as Corkery and MacGreevy suggest he must. In any case, such attempts to read Yeats in the light of cultural and historical contexts are misguided, says Beckett, since the work is not to be clarified in any other light: it is “uniquely self-pervaded”. Indeed, Beckett argues against the provision of any gloss on Yeats’s art whatsoever: “In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occasion, no time given, no room left, for the lenitive of comment” (1983c, 149). Elsewhere, in 1945, Beckett had likened even the best art criticism to hysterectomies with a trowel (1983b, 118). Yet the instruction to “Merely bow in wonder” cannot conceal the fact that Beckett’s own mode is polemical (1983c, 149). Certainly, as James Knowlson has argued, Beckett was “looking at Jack Yeats’s painting in a way that the painter himself would probably not have recognised as his own” (Knowlson, 267). “Homage” tries to claim Yeats for Beckett’s own artistic vision of the “inorganic juxtaposition” of man and nature – an aesthetic of estrangement. Yet what we know of Yeats’s own views appears to align him more closely with Corkery’s model of belonging. Hilary Pyle has quoted Yeats as saying that “the true painter must be a part of the land and the life he paints”, underlining the importance of precisely the sort of innate ties to the land that Corkery felt resided in the emotional subconscious of the true Irish artist (Pyle, 104). Yeats held that affection was the greatest tribute of an artist to his subject, and insisted: “From the beginning of my painting life every painting which I have made had somewhere in it a thought of Sligo” (Qtd in Booth, 13). There is little sense of estrangement here. Yeats’s critics agree: Marilyn Gaddis Rose describes Sligo as the ‘sine qua non” of Yeats’s work (97), and John Booth has suggested that Yeats’s nationality was the “dominant theme of his life” (13).3 Yet Beckett simply did not want these connections between Yeats and Ireland to be made: “What less celt”, “Homage” implores us, “than this incomparable hand shaken by the aim it sets itself or by its own urgency?” (1983c, 149). For Beckett, Yeats’s work describes a “great inner real where phantoms quick and dead, nature and void […] join in a single evidence for a single testimony”: a better description, surely, of the amorphous world of Beckett’s The Unnamable. It is as if Beckett has engaged in a creative misreading of Yeats’s work, not in order to escape from the anxiety of influence, but in order to posit a 68

tenuous basis for artistic kinship by seeing Yeats as a fellow traveller along the lonely path of interiority. “Il est difficile”, as the author of Murphy realised, “à celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens” (1993a, 90). For this reason, whilst they are extraordinary in themselves, I do not think Beckett’s views constitute a particularly astute assessment of Yeats’s art. They are somewhat overdetermined by Beckett’s refusal to countenance the significance of cultural and historical contexts in art criticism. As early as 1932 Beckett had been dismissive of such an approach,4 but in “Homage” questions of socio-cultural background are simply removed altogether. What I want to suggest here is that “Homage” can be more usefully approached as a statement of the way in which Beckett himself wished to be read. Beckett’s art criticism is nearly always at least as interesting as a gloss on Beckett himself, a point that Beckett regularly conceded, and it is revealing that Beckett wrote to George Duthuit in the month before “Homage” was published: “So, you can’t talk art with me; all I risk expressing when I speak about it are my own obsessions” (Qtd in Knowlson 268). Reading “Homage” in this way fits with Beckett’s resistance to historicised readings of his work, since the “artist from nowhere” cannot be usefully read against any historical or cultural background whatever. In a letter of 1938 Beckett explained to MacGreevy the reasons why he was so unhappy to have Yeats’s work related to Ireland: Perhaps it is […] the fault of my mood and of my chronic inability to understand as member of any proposition a phrase like “the Irish people”, or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after, or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests and the demagogues in the service of the priests, or that it will ever care, if it ever knows, any more than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. This is not a criticism of a criticism that allows as a sentient subject what I can only think of as a nameless and hideous mass, whether in Ireland or in Finland, but only to say that I, as a clot of prejudices, prefer the 69

first half of your work with its real and radiant individuals, to the second, with our national scene. Et voilà. God love thee Tom, and don’t be minding me. I can’t think of Ireland the way you do. (SB to TM, 31st January 1938) Here, Beckett candidly admits his different cultural positioning to MacGreevy vis-à-vis the Irish Free State, and suggests that it is his estrangement from “Irish Ireland” that causes him to resist MacGreevy’s attempts to align Jack Yeats’s art with such a project. Beckett’s alienation from the “modern Irish Ireland” of MacGreevy’s monograph is profound, and there is a degree, either of anxiety or contempt, behind his hyperbolic description of the Irish people as a “nameless and hideous mass”. His inclusion of Finland in this context is, perhaps, desperately random: a vain attempt to suggest that Beckett’s prejudices are not specific to Ireland. However, the phrase “our national scene” restores Ireland as the relevant focus of Beckett’s comments, and concedes Beckett’s implication in that scene at the same time as it expresses a profound sense of alienation from it. MacGreevy’s nationalist reading was consciously aligned to Irish Ireland’s drive for self-sufficiency from Britain, and the cultural vision espoused by Corkery left little room for members of the former ascendancy. “After all”, as Corkery wrote in 1934, “it was the AngloIrish that squelched Irish Ireland almost to the death” (1934, 616). Under the circumstances most Irish Protestants preferred to remain aloof from Irish affairs, adopting a pose of “indignant marginality” (Bowen, 56). Beckett’s remarkable letter to MacGreevy suggests that he shared the minority’s sense of exclusion from the official narratives of cultural identity in the Irish Free State, and his exclusion is not presented as something to be regretted. Beckett is a self-confessed “clot of prejudices” on the subject of Irishness, and those prejudices have a distinctively Protestant tone. The contention that the people of Ireland are neglectful of the arts aligns Beckett with other Protestant critics of the Catholic middleclasses. It recalls, for example, W. B. Yeats’s indignant poetry regarding the Hugh Lane bequest. The uncivilised condition of independent Ireland was almost axiomatic among Irish Protestants after 1922, and Beckett’s own opinion of the Free State can also be inferred from Murphy (1938), where an astrologer is described as being “fa70

mous throughout the Civilised World and Irish Free State” (1993a, 22). MacGreevy’s essay, corroborating Corkery, had blamed the lack of a native Irish art on the existence of Protestant Ascendancy (1945, 19). Here, Beckett challenges that contention directly, denying that the Ascendancy, or the Act of Union that consolidated its position, had any debilitating affect whatsoever on the Irish people’s attitude to art. It was based, he contends, on ignorance before and after the Union: another example of that sense of superiority that was characteristic of Ireland’s Protestant minority in the early years of the Free State. Beckett’s belief that the Irish were a nation overrun by the Catholic clergy is also typical of the Protestant sensibility. The relationship was felt to be one of “unhealthy subservience”, and the majority of Irish Protestants would have concurred silently with the hostile observer who held the Irish were “of all people the most completely drilled and absorbed in the Christian religion as it is distorted by the Churches” (Fleming 1965, 164-66; Filson Young, Qtd in Whyte 4). Irish religiosity was an aspect of life in Ireland that Beckett recalled with distaste in his interview with Tom Driver: “When you pass a church on an Irish bus, all the hands flurry in the sign of the cross. One day the dogs of Ireland will do that too and perhaps also the pigs” (220-1). And in “L’ Expulsé”, the narrator comments sardonically that it will soon be made a crime in his native land not to salute funerals in this manner, adverting to the increasing alignment of Church and State in independent Ireland (Beckett 1947, 696). All of which suggests that Beckett’s desire to extricate Jack Yeats from national and historical contexts may be read as the desire of an estranged Irish Protestant to prevent Yeats’s work being interpreted as part of an exclusivist Free State cultural agenda that was defining itself increasingly in Catholic and nationalist terms. For Beckett it was better to belong nowhere than to be implicated in such provincial debates, and he was keen that Jack Yeats, as artist and friend, should be exempted from Ireland’s obsessive attempts at selfdefinition. It would be easy to overstate the importance of Beckett’s affiliation to Protestantism; nevertheless Beckett’s Protestantism was available as a site for resisting assimilation to what he considered an even more unseemly alternative – the narrow cultural conformism of Irish Ireland. Which is not to say that the world of Irish Protestantism proved particularly congenial to Beckett either. Ultimately he was confronted 71

by two contrasting social identities – Irish Irelander and Irish Protestant – and was unwilling to articulate to either. He was “between contraries”, as Belacqua had noted, and “no alternation was possible” (Beckett 1993, 175). The idea of belonging nowhere, which simply ignored the vexed issue of national identity, was a daring way of escaping the terms of the problem. At some point in the 1930s Beckett began to cultivate a sense of rootlessness. He moved to France and began writing in French, decisions that rendered his cultural background increasingly obscure. He began to excise social and cultural determinants from his work, which suggested that the meaning in Beckett’s texts was to be sought not in the local accident or the local substance, but rather in the same “inner real” of “nature and void” described in the homage to Jack Yeats (1983c, 149). By the time Beckett completed the frenzy of writing that produced the Trilogy and Waiting for Godot, he was “the artist from nowhere”, and if he belonged anywhere it was to the world. “Beckett”, as one critic wrote in 1969, “is the Aüslander, the alien who has dissociated himself from his own heritage without adopting any other” (Porter, 62). To the extent that we accept this reading, we will always have an impoverished sense of his significance.

72

Notes 1.

Hugh Culik, for example, contends that Mercier and Camier is a novel carefully arranged not to give the reader a setting, but goes on to comment on Beckett’s “residual Irish landscape” (97).

2.

Samuel Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy in a letter dated 5th February 1938 (Trinity College, Dublin Manuscript 10402). Further references shall be given in parenthesis as (SB to TM, date).

3.

This is not to suggest that Yeats endorsed Corkery’s project, but only to point out a shared concern with ‘belonging’.

4.

“Milieu, race, family, temperament, past and present […] The background pushed up as guarantee… that tires us” (Beckett 1992, 13).

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, “L’Expulsé,” in Fontaine 10 (Dec 1946 – Jan 1947), 685708. –, “Recent Irish Poetry,” in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 70-76. –, “MacGreevy on Yeats,” in Disjecta, 95-97. (1983a) –, “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon,” in Disjecta, 118132. (1983b) –, “Homage to Jack B. Yeats,” in Disjecta, 149. (1983c) –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat, 1992). –, More Pricks than Kicks (London: John Calder, 1993). –, Murphy (London: John Calder, 1993). (1993a) Booth, John, Jack B. Yeats: A Vision of Ireland (Scotland: Thomas and Lochar, 1994). Bowen, Kurt, Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Montreal: Queen’s UP, 1983). Corkery, Daniel, “The Nation that was not a Nation,” in Studies (December 1934), 611-22. –, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork, Mercier P, 1966). Culik, Hugh, “Entropic Order: Beckett’s Mercier and Camier,” in ÉireIreland 17.1 (1982), 91-106.

73

Driver, Tom, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 217-223. Fleming, Lionel, Head or Harp (London: Barrie and Rocklift, 1965). Gaddis Rose, Marilyn, “Jack B. Yeats: Irish Rebel in Modern Art,” in ÉireIreland 7.11 (1972), 95-105. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). MacGreevy, Thomas, “Three Historical Paintings by Jack B. Yeats,” in Capuchin Annual (1942): 238-251. –, Jack B Yeats: an appreciation and an interpretation (Dublin, Waddington, 1945). O’Callaghan, Margaret, “Language, nationality and cultural identity in the Irish Free State, 1922-7,” in Irish Historical Studies xxiv, 94 (November 1984), 226-245. O’Hegarty, P.S., “Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature,” in Dublin Magazine 2.1 (Jan-Mar 1932), 51-6. Porter, Thomas, “Samuel Beckett: Dramatic Tradition and the Aüslander,” in Éire-Ireland 4.1 (1969), 62-75. Pyle, Hilary, Jack B Yeats: A Biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989). Rosenthal, T.G., The Art of Jack B. Yeats (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993). Whyte, Jack, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1979 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984).

74

ILL SEEN ILL SAID AND IGITUR Masaki Kondo

Igitur gives critical clues to the understanding of Ill Seen Ill Said. Beckett transformed Mallarmé’s poetic work into the fragments of cinematographic images in the Irish countryside. In Mallarmé’s concept of existence “Le Personnage” believes that Absoluteness reduces the accident to infinity, while he becomes impersonal and the purity of his family remains after Absoluteness disappears. Beckett gazes or fails to gaze at the eternal transition of time in the heaven and landscape with the impersonal eyes, which are to become the ruin of the organ threaded with the impotent line of affirmative and negative drops of words.

Beckett transcribed two lines from Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine” (SeaWind) in his reading notebook. [...] la clarté déserte de ma lampe Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend ([...] my waking lamp, whose lonely light Shadows the vacant paper, whiteness profits best,) (Beckett, MS 2901. Trans. by Arthur Symons) It is easy to imagine how forcibly Beckett was struck by the image of a page of blank paper on which a solitary lamp shed light. Beckett confided to me in Paris in 1983 that Mallarmé, his poetry, not his prose, was important to him. They both pursued being in the negation of being, and the degree zero of language in le néant. Ill Seen Ill Said is a play of time, and of eyes and words, or seeing and saying. Time is implied by Venus, the sun, the moon, the shifting light and changing scenes of pastures and the zone of stones, and the slow movement of an old woman’s gestures which also resembles a natural phenomenon. There are three categories of eyes: the

old woman’s eyes, those of some intimate but absent person watching her, and the impersonal eyes viewing all the scenes without a body. Words in this novella exhibit images of time moving in the impersonal memory, which assumes an absent narrator’s eyes and yet cannot be reduced to his or her sight. Those images are the murmur of the spirit of language which is freed from subjectivity to become a collection of figments finally settled on the pages as fragmentary haunting images. In Compagnie, the French version of Company, there is inserted a phrase, “Se créant des chimères pour tempérer son néant (Devising figments to temper his nothingness) (43).” In Mallarmé’s Igitur, Chimère is a word charged with a symbolic suggestion. Igitur sees himself reflected in the depths of a mirror as “the phantom of horror (99)” amid “the supreme shivers of chimeras (99) (des suprêmes frissons des chimères) (441).” After that, he drinks a drop of nothingness from a phial, and lies down upon ashes of his ancestors. Ill Seen Ill Said represents infinite cosmic time and finite earthly time by the physical movement of heavens, the infinitesimal shift of dim light, the movement on a certain circular plane and the lasting tremble of something or other. It is an endeavour to concentrate the writer’s ears and eyes on the movement, arrangement and rhythm of words in the final phase of writing (devising), and thus to reveal the uncertainty of the verbal transcription of perception and imagination. The close observation of ghostly images of the old woman who intermittently appears in a cabin or the pastures tracks the repetitive uncertain consciousness. The anonymous composer constructs imaginary fields in Ireland, calling to his mind’s eye stars, white stones, gravestones and snow and urging on or halting the procession of words, as if a tricky dialectic between seeing and saying worked itself out. ***** Ill Seen Ill Said opens with the sentence, “From where she lies she sees Venus rise.” Venus also appears in Mallarmé’s Hérodiade (II) angry at the darkness and burns in leaves in the evening; [...] sais-tu pas un pays / Où le sinistre ciel ait les regards haïs 76

De Vénus [...] (where the sinister sky has the hated look of Venus) (Mallarmé, 48, translation by Greer Cohn, 79) Venus and the moon preside over three different gazes on the earth: the old woman’s, her possible ex-husband’s and the impersonal composer’s. They become subject to a celestial body representing the physical time outside the cabin. The mysterious dim scenes representing the narrative are viewed both by the heavenly bodies and the impersonal eyes of the composer, reciprocating between his memory and imagination. They also visualize the passing of time by the intermittent images of the old woman. This concept of time is different from the time of constellations and sea which is to become the absolute present at midnight in Mallarmé. Time is not absolute but relative in Beckett. It is Beckett’s habitual method to oppose the eyes that see to the eyes that are seen as in his Film, or the reader of a text to its listener as in Ohio Impromptu. It reminds us of the opposition of the speaker and the copyist in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, which is the division of a protagonist into a subject and otherness. This is an impossible attempt to represent the invisible passage of time at once in continuity and discontinuity. The old woman may be regarded as the personification of Mallarmé’s “Night”. She is positioned at the centre of a dial surrounded by twelve figures which seem to indicate directions, the hours, and the houses of the heavens. The woman extends her gaze to one of them and turns it in another direction the next moment. The two windows of the cabin represent future and past rather than the two eyes of the old woman who stands between them like a pendulum at rest. The man who represents otherness in this novella finally disappears. The past ceases to survive even as images of memory. The photographs the woman gazes at in an album on her knees may be mere “withered flowers” (8), and the eyes which watch the woman from outside the window are ghostly as well as the woman’s movement in a shady pallet and on a bare chair. The past is soon denied and its images are lost. Footnotes on the snow are also effaced and there remain only the twelve guardians in the distance. The impersonal eyes watch the fragmentary past scenes of the woman making for a grave carrying a cross or a wreath around her 77

arm (11), or making haste toward the sound of the sea plucking her long skirt (11). The flagstone before the door of the woman’s cottage hallowed by her steps for many years is another image of passed time (11). These scenes are not only reflected in the eyes with tears but also animated by wings of imagination. However, when an image of a stirring buttonhook is presented to a reader’s impassive eyes, together with an image of an old key hanging from the woman’s finger (20), we cannot but recollect Mallarmé’s trembling of time. The buttonhook in the form of a tarnished silver fish which hangs from a nail on the wall incessantly imperceptibly trembles. When the composer says, “Close-up then. In which in defiance of reason the nail prevails. Long this image till suddenly it blurs [.] (13)”, it sounds like a direction for one shot of a film, the impersonal eyes being a camera-eye mechanically operated by a cameraman. The image of the nail enlarged full in the reader’s eyeshot recalls the nail from which hangs a pallet, painted at the top of Georges Braque’s “Violin and Palette” (1909-10). The nail, critics then commented, suggested that the canvas itself hung from the nail. This cubist painting does not tremble, but the planes of things painted in it look like they are intersecting with one another, folded up and trembling. The effect is like that of combined lenses or the reciprocal reflection of two mirrors facing each other. Another association, more akin to the original image may be made with Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, “View of the Artist Studio: Right Window” and “ Left Window” (1805-6), in each of which, respectively, a pair of scissors or a key hangs from a nail on the wall. While Beckett sometimes presents these sorts of fragmentary cinematic images, the tense observation of the minute change of movement and delicate gradation of light is more akin to painting a subject than to shooting a cinematic shot, for it is in a viewer’s mind’s eye, not in a camera-eye, that an immobile object starts to tremble. Beckett once gave an elaborate realistic representation of pastoral scenes of farmers and sheep in slow motion in Malone Dies. A reader imagines that it is as if narrated scenes were proceeding on the page as on screen, but they actually remain composed in words. A motionless figure painted on a canvas seems to be minutely moving as if a viewer’s eyes perceived molecules of time rather than of light in motion. 78

***** The trembling of Beckett’s silver buttonhook corresponds to the sound of the hour struck by Mallarmé’s golden clock. The same trembling is presented as the shimmering shade of leaves and Mother’s long black hair stirring on her baby’s face in the still air under an aspen (48) in Beckett’s previous novella, Company. While Mallarmé’s phrase, “the white shiver of my nudity” (47) (le frisson blanc de ma nudité) (99) in Hérodiade is the sensual trembling of words that is felt like the embryonic stirring in the womb of language, he writes in Igitur that after the golden sound of the clock is lost, “a null jewel of reverie (92)” (un joyau nul de rêverie) (435) pretends to be rich and that void remains. He reads the meaning of the infinite accident in the complex conjunction of the constellation and sea. The soundless movement of the celestial time and the rhythm of waves are the orchestration of the cosmos, of which the transposition to a book on a table is Igitur. Contrast the complex of the constellation and sea of decorative patterns on Igitur’s clock with the place where the image of the old woman haunts in Ill Seen Ill Said. Here the approach of Venus, the sun and moon on a line implies conjunction, and the accident of conjunction suggests the cosmic course of time. Just as Beckett’s silver buttonhook never stops trembling, so the polished key hanging from the old woman’s finger faintly keeps trembling, gleaming in the moonlight when she comes back home accompanied by the long evening shadow. Grass begins to tremble under the composer’s impersonal eyes when the woman sits on a stone and gazes at a gravestone in front of her. A stone of the same height as the woman in the pasture also begins slightly to tremble as she watches it. A great coat hung upside down from a curtain rod also minutely trembles. These phenomena of trembling are felt to be the frisson of matter being animated by the composer’s penetrating eyes rather than its reaction to the old woman’s gaze. It is the trembling of spirit more than the sign of life or the expression of feelings. The evening sun or the snow light is a natural phenomenon, but the tremble of things in Beckett’s world is a kind of communication between the human mind and things. Things are neither the surface of the world nor the remains of the past, but the present which reflects the being of one seeing them. They exist while they are seen, as images of films or paintings are alive while they are viewed. It is a process opposite to Mallarmé’s 79

pure presence of Midnight that arrests the quivering of thought and immobilizes the pure self. ***** The pure self no longer dwells in Beckett. Even “I” is lost in his later works. When impersonal eyes abruptly enter a scene and watch an object, it starts to tremble at last. As a faint tremble occurs at the innermost of a thing as in the case of grass in the pastures, so the old woman’s body trembles when watched by the composer’s eyes (26). The woman appears to be placed in the cabin as an actress on the stage of a theatre rather than its inhabitant, which distantly recalls Friedrich’s painting, “Woman at the Window” (1822). She seems to have no continuity of being, intermittently appearing like a puppet and deteriorating each time. These descriptions are given to answer questions, but the composer wants to be over and done with questions, saying his composition is a “dream” (33). Mallarmé’s pure dream of Midnight disappears in itself, leaving the sterility of the white page of a book opened on a table. Igitur’s book is transformed in Beckett into a scrap of paper covered in dust in a coffer in the old woman’s cabin. There can be deciphered on it only “Tu 17” or “Th 17”, which looks like a date torn from a diary. The ancient words which Midnight in Igitur’s book utters are “I was the hour which is to make me pure (93)” (J’étais l’heure qui doit me rendre pur) (435). If the ciphers on the leaf of paper indicate the date, Tuesday 17th, this will be the fourth day after Friday 13th, which may suggest Good Friday. Below this passage are inserted the following lines in the typescript. To pray a presuming prayer To pray it she shill [sic] pray Beseeching if beseeching La prière-Si prière il y a

(Beckett, MS 2200)

The old woman reemerges in the next paragraph (36) and there occurs a phrase, “Dead still on her back,” followed by “Quick the eyes. The moment they open.” The image of death and resurrection seems to be 80

alluded to in these phrases. No one but the old woman can search in this coffer, but there is no hint of her. As the word, “abort” in the previous paragraph (34) suggests, it seems as if she were dismissed, leaving her trace in the fragmentary date on the scrap of paper found in the coffer. Igitur’s darkness is ‘aborted’ by an ephemeral lamp of life, that is, by Igitur’s consciousness. It turns out to be chaos as words become chaos when the book is closed. The ancient idea in Mallarmé makes for the chaos of the aborted darkness (Chaos de l’ombre avorté) (436). Beckett’s “book”, however, is nothing but a yellowed page covered in dust. “The brightness of the chimera (93)” (la clarté de la chimère) (436) which is both the fulfillment of prediction and the symbol of its extinction, becomes the haunting eye in Ill Seen Ill Said. It is not, however, the mirror of light which reflects Midnight=Igitur, but the imaginary eye which has an illusion of the old woman. The eye creates the woman but does not see through her eyes while being unified with her as in a fiction. She is somehow felt like a blind woman who is “unseeing” (36), imagining and recollecting, even while her eyes are open. For they do not function as an apparatus to see. The woman rather looks like images, which enter and exit from each scene, speaking nothing and leaving no traces. So readers feel as if they were watching a ghostly mime. She resembles a human clock silently pacing forward and backward. Viewers need to open their eyes wide to see the action, which is one reason why the old woman appears to be a blind shadow. Beckett’s impersonal eyes concentrate on seeing more than the spiritual light of Mallarmé’s consciousness does. A reader feels the will to see in them when they are fixed on an object, and senses the presence of Beckett’s eyes behind them penetrating the object to reach its essential image to confirm his own being. In the course of the verbal penetration, Beckett visualizes the minute shift of time in its subtle gradation. This is the difference between the human eye which contemplates and the camera-eye which records. There is a trap door on the floor of the woman’s cabin, well camouflaged with ebony boards in line with the flooring. When the woman’s black skirt brushes the black floor and a stark skeleton chair is seen paler than death, the trap should suggest a coffin or a grave. Igitur goes out of his room, descends the stairs and gets to the absolute at the bottom of things, which is a grave of neutralized ashes, 81

without sentiment or spirit. We hear “the sound of the sepulchral door closing (95)” (du bruit de la fermeture de la porte sépulcrale) (437). Even if the trapdoor in the woman’s room might be associated with a coffin or a grave (39), she neither opens the trap nor falls into the grave, but already seems to be transformed into an illusion of a skeleton of her chair. The shock (choc) of the closing tomb in Igitur may coincide with that of the old woman being already dead (40), but the composer says it is more convenient that she is alive (40). The woman walks with a wreath around her arm over the pastures to a grave. It is not clear whether it is hers or the grave of time. There stands a white granite stone of her own height on the way. She stops beside it going and coming back from the grave, and gazes at the graffiti inscribed on the upturned surface of the stone by rain and wind over many years, though unable to decipher them. In the book on the table in Igitur’s room there are written his ancestors’ ancient words, “I was the hour which is to make me pure (93)” (J’étais l’heure qui doit me rendre pur) (435). Midnight evoked the finite and null shadow=Igitur. The old woman does not make a spiral movement as Igitur, but walks keeping as straight as possible between her dwelling and the grave. It is a movement of systole and diastole as that of a pendulum of a clock, even though Igitur’s clock is the gemlike remains of the eternal night (436). The white stone and old woman’s black figure standing side by side cast long twin shadows, and cannot be distinguished from each other except for black and white. The white stone may be regarded as the woman’s stopped pendulum or gravestone or “the gem” of eternal time. Beckett produces a tautological gem: “Black as jade the jasper that flecks its whiteness (42).” The image of the stone and old woman casting two long shadows suggests two hands of a clock. Then follows an image of an enlarged dial with a single hand moving on it (44). ***** Curtains or draperies are important furnishings, acting as a mirror, in Igitur’s room. Time of Midnight is absorbed into the hangings on which the weakened trembling of thought stops in oblivion. This corresponds to the old woman’s languid hair around her face with null eyes which resembles a mirror deprived of all contents except the present (435). Igitur recovers from the ennui of being thrown out into 82

time by the null mirror, registers the thinness of the atmosphere around him, and watches “the furniture twisting its chimeras in the void, and the curtains invisibly trembling (98)” (les meubles, tordre leurs chimères dans le vide, et les rideaux frissonner invisiblement) (440). When Igitur gazes at the clock with his soul, the hour disappears through the mirror or hides itself in the hangings, and does not allow him to abandon himself to the ennui he longs for. The old woman reappears at her window in the evening. A great black coat hooked by its tails from a rod, hangs sprawling inside out like a carcass in a butcher’s stall, and shows an infinitesimal quaver as the buttonhook did. Suddenly in a single gesture she snatches aside the coat, and again the sky is as black as the coat (45). The woman is neither “I” nor a protagonist. She does not wait for the achievement of the future or the formation of pure time as Igitur does. Still there is a “pure wait (45)” in her head, and the great coat hangs down on the window instead of the hangings to absorb time in Igitur’s room. Venus is no longer to be seen. There is only the black sky which is neither the eternally transforming night nor pure time, but a black night like a carcass of the great black coat. The last form of the pure Shadow in Igitur extends behind the night and in a well before it, as “the stretch of layers of shadow, returned to pure night (95)” (l’étendue de couches d’ombre, rendue à la nuit pure) (437). The shadows of the old woman and stone in Ill Seen Ill Said extend long to the east-north-east in parallel (43). Igitur says, “I have always lived with my soul fixed upon the clock. Indeed, I have tried for the time it sounded to remain present in the room, its becoming for me both nourishment and life (97)” (J’ai toujours vécu mon âme fixée sur l’horloge. Certes, j’ai tout fait pour que le temps qu’elle sonna restât présent dans la chambre, et devînt pour moi la pâture et la vie –) (439). The old woman’s cabin, bed, pastures and walk certainly signify time in Ill Seen Ill Said, but her time slips away from the cabin and pastures now and then, for her sequences do not continue but abruptly fade and vanish, which signifies that time in Ill Seen Ill Said is more visual than biological. ***** Igitur hears the beating of his heart in the void of the present in which time has stopped and fallen asleep (438). In the same way Beckett 83

sees the analogy of a black heart or mock brain=skull to the woman’s cabin, when he writes a marginal note: “Hell atwain? (Beckett, MS2200)” (52, 53). Here the image of the chair fades away in a reader’s mind into the zero of inexistence. The skeleton-like chair may be viewed as the symbolic remains of the old woman. When the composer says, “Quick find her again. In that black heart. That mock brain (53)”, he means, “Find her body or face, particularly her eyes among her bones, heart or head which are hung amid the furniture of the cabin”. The woman’s time and space are set in the impersonal memory and fantasy of eyes, so they can have no beating heart and are the remains of the past as well as of the “mock brain” and skeleton=chair. Time seems to have stopped and be ruminating itself in the woman. She no longer has a body, so a heart cannot beat and be renewed in her. Igitur opens his eyes and sees the vision of horror in the depth of the mirror and accepts it all at the cost of the remaining human sentiment. Then his faded image seems to grow animated again. The curtains and furniture become thinner and thinner reaching absolute purity, and their images come to be detached from the pure mirror as if frozen. The furniture halts the twisting of the dying chimera, the hangings cease their uneasy trembling and fall down as if dead. Although the old woman’s great coat also falls in Ill Seen Ill Said, she only heaves a final sigh of relief and no purification of her image occurs. The fall of the curtains neither clears away darkness nor retains the grace of the fallen. Even the curtain-rod is not damaged except for being slightly curved. The nails are still good enough to serve for the glorious ancestors who may include Jesus Christ. Even if the rod and nails may be regarded as the figure of the Cross and its nails, the device is nothing but a parody after the trembling time ends. It is merely an ironic allusion to the sacred, “all the fond trash (56)” without a trace of the fallen idol. The old woman’s image becomes a figure of horror in Beckett’s mirror of a book, but is far from being a thin trace of a purified image. It is a piece of rubbish like a skeleton, or better, a vision of a sunk eyeball turned inside out, rather than the absence of vision. It is “two black blanks (59)”, “Fit ventholes of the soul (59)” like the two fallen black coats, or the exposed black skylights reflecting “Blackness in its might at last. Where no more to be seen (59)”. 84

Igitur finally closes the book, blows out the candle, lies on the ancestors’ ashes and drinks the drop of le néant from a flask. The flask being now empty, le néant passes leaving a castle of purity behind. Beckett’s blackness is “Absence supreme (60)”. There is no trace left of the old woman on earth and the impersonal eye searches around the same place in vain and bids it farewell. It is slowly dispelled “like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes (61)”, as if “drawn by a phantom hand (61)”. A death knell sounds. Sky and earth are devoured moment by moment, but what consciousness is that subsists and has “Grace to breathe that void (61)” and “Know[s] happiness (61)”, we cannot tell. It is neither Mallarmé’s Absolute (l’Absolu) nor Infinite (l’Infini) nor purity nor even le néant, but the void. When Dante ascends to Paradiso and sees the figure of Beatrice reflecting eternal light, his eyes are clean and he feels dolce (sweetness) dripping in his heart. What remains at the end of Ill Seen Ill Said on the contrary is the mere void, which is somehow a source of “Grace” and “happiness.” It is neither light nor darkness but the void that is devoured by time after everything is. The void is the extinction of things and words as the result of the union of seer and seen, narrator and narrated, in the nullification of the words to narrate with. This union in void at the end of the novella would be Beckett’s ideal of purity and eternity, which, however, is as near to zero as possible.

85

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Nowhow on: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1989), (A numeral after quotation indicates the consecutive number of the paragraphs of each work). –, (MS 2901, MS 2901: Sottisier / Mirlitonnades / Company Notebook, Beckett Archive, U of Reading, 1976-1982). –, (MS 2200, Notebook for Ill seen Ill said, Beckett’s translation of Mal vu Mal dit, Beckett Archive, U of Reading, 1980-81). –, Compagnie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980). –, Mal Vu Mal Dit (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor et G. Jean Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), (A numeral after quotation indicates its page). –, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: A New Direction Book, 1982), (A numeral after quotation from Caw’s English translation of Igitur indicates its page). Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: William Heinemann, 1899, Reprinted by AMS P, New York). Cohn, Robert Greer, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Houston: Scriven Press, 2000), (A numeral after quotation from Cohn’s English translation of Hérodiade indicates its page). Mallarmé, Stephane, Igitur (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1981). Richard, Jean-Pierre, L’Univers Imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961).

86

ALCHEMICAL DANCES IN BECKETT AND YEATS Minako Okamuro

Among other aspects of his thought and work, William Butler Yeats’s concern with alchemy exerted a significant influence on the work of Samuel Beckett; this article explores the insight afforded by Yeats’s “Rosa Alchemica” and his “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons” into Beckett’s Quad. These works in particular of Yeats illuminate Beckett’s Quad in terms of alchemy and dance, for the dance-like performance in Quad reflects the alchemical dances that Yeats’s works comprise in significant respects. The alchemical writings of Carl Gustav Jung also shed light on the relation of Yeats and Beckett in this regard.

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair (W. B. Yeats, Blood and the Moon) 1. Introduction In Samuel Beckett’s Quad (1981), the four players revolving in a square may be understood to represent the four elements of the alchemical conception of nature. As I have pointed out elsewhere, James Joyce and Carl Gustav Jung may have exerted an influence on Beckett’s thematics of alchemy in Quad,1 but these influences do not fully account for the use of the dance-like performance in this simple yet enigmatic work for television. A specific insight into the function of the dance-like movements in Quad to represent a central idea of alchemical thought is rather afforded by two prose pieces of William Butler Yeats: “Rosa Alchemica” which appeared in The Secret Rose (1897), and “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons” which appeared in the first, private edition of A Vision (1925). These pieces contain

alchemical dances that in significant respects resemble the performance in Quad. More generally, although Yeats’s influence on Beckett has long been a subject of scholarly inquiry, this influence has not been fully examined in regard to Beckett’s use of alchemy. Considering that Yeats is well known to have gained a profound knowledge of alchemy as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and considering that Beckett took a deep interest in Yeats in his own old age, a strong argument emerges for Yeats as a crucial source of Beckett’s alchemical thought. In this article, I examine the specific influence of Yeats on Beckett’s use of alchemy in Quad. 2. Quad and “Rosa Alchemica” (1897) The relationship between Quad and Yeats’s “Rosa Alchemica” emerges from the similarity between the movements of the players in Quad and a form of ancient Greek ritual dance. In Quad, the four players pace counterclockwise along the sides and diagonals of a square in repetitive, rhythmic, geometric, dance-like movements. Although these leftward movements can be seen as Dantesque (see Gontarski, 137; and Knowlson, 673), they are also similar to the ritual Crane Dance, one of the so-called ‘labyrinthine dances’ of ancient Greece (see Okamuro 1997), in which a line of dancers spirals counterclockwise. Karl Kerényi reports that the convolutions of the Crane Dance are an “imitation of the labyrinth” (Jung and Kerényi, 134), and that the spiral is usually stylized in angular form. In ancient Greece, labyrinthine dances were performed in the mystery rites of Eleusis to celebrate the Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. According to Erich Neumann, the labyrinthine dance was “a way through a gate of death and rebirth”, and the labyrinth itself was regarded as the deathly womb of the Terrible Mother. 2 The labyrinthine way thus led to the centre of danger. This structure seems to be reflected in Quad, the centre of which Beckett described as “a danger zone. Hence deviation” (453). The resemblance of Quad to the labyrinthine dances does not necessarily demonstrate that Beckett had knowledge of the mystery rites of Eleusis, but Yeats was evidently familiar with them. In his short prose piece “Rosa Alchemica”, the first-person protagonist at first resists the efforts of his friend Michael Robartes to draw him into a secret society called the Order of the Alchemical Rose by asking, 88

“Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form of worship, why should I go to Eleusis and not to Calvary?” (1897, 232, my italics). By the phrase “go[ing] to Eleusis,” the protagonist here refers to initiation into the society, for such initiations were closely connected with such mystery rites. Furthermore, after agreeing to join the society, the protagonist describes the magical dance that he is required to learn as follows: A couple of hours after sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance [...]. I found that the steps, which were simple enough, resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had them in my memory. (1897, 254; my italics) The specific movements of the dance resembling “certain antique Greek dance” that the narrator is required to learn are not described, but the initiation dance may be understood to evoke the labyrinthine dances discussed above: “The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor the shapes of petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead” (1897, 257-258; my italics). The dance takes the form of a rose primarily because it is an initiation for the Order of the Alchemical Rose; notably, the rose is one of the principal symbols of alchemy. In a preface to one edition of The Kabbalah Unveiled, Moina MacGregor Mathers – a sister of Henri Bergson and the wife of S. L. MacGregor Mathers, a major figure in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – writes, “the rose with its mysterious centre, its nucleus, the central Sun, is a symbol of the infinite and harmonious separations of nature” (x).3 In Yeats’s “Rosa Alchemica”, the Order of the Alchemical Rose is likely modeled on the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member.4 Significantly, in tracing “the shape of petals in the rose”, the initiation dance also articulates a repetitive, stylized, and in some senses spiral pattern akin to that of the labyrinthine. Insofar as “the dance wound in and out”, it can be understood to describe a line that spirals to contract inwards and expand outwards like the outline of the petals in a rose. In view of the centrality of the theme of life in death and death in life in Yeats, the “certain antique Greek dance” that the 89

initiation dance in “Rosa Alchemica” resembles – like the dance-like movements in Quad – resonates deeply with the labyrinthine dances of ancient Greece. It is also noteworthy that according to A Dictionary of Symbols, “when the rose is round in shape it corresponds in significance to the mandala” (Cirlot, 275). Etymologically, the root ‘manda’ in ‘mandala’ – which denotes the Oriental ritual or magic circle used as an aid to contemplation – originally meant ‘essence’, while ‘la’ meant ‘to obtain’. In this sense, the mandala is thus related to alchemy.5 Moreover, Jung argues that mandalas are not specifically Eastern symbols but rather occurred all over the world, and that they are among the oldest religious symbols of humanity. It bears further consideration in this regard that the dance-like movements in Quad closely resemble what Jung called the ‘mandala dreams’ of a certain patient whom he introduced in Psychology and Alchemy, dreams which he interprets in terms of alchemy (see Okamuro 1997). 3. Alchemical aspects in Quad In one mandala dream, the patient saw people walking “to the left around a square”. (1980, 124) Jung views the square in this dream as having arisen from a circle that the patient had seen in a former dream, interpreting the square in terms of the quadrature, or squaring, of the circle, and thus as denoting an alchemical mandala. That is, the quadrature of the circle symbolizes alchemy for Jung; it affords a way from chaos to unity, a method by which the four elements – earth, air, fire and water – represented by the square, can be brought into unity, represented by the circle. Eliphas Lévi, who greatly influenced the occult thought of Yeats and Joyce, defines the quadrature of the circle in similar terms: So unity, complete in the fruitfulness of the triad, forms therewith the square and produces a circle equal to itself, and this is the quadrature of the circle, the circular movement of four equal angles around the same point. (37) In light of this understanding, the movements in Quad of the four players circulating along the sides of the square and dividing it into four triangles along its diagonals – symbolizing the circulation of the 90

four elements – can also be understood to represent the quadrature of the circle. For insight into the alchemical significance of this symbolism, consider that in A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, the quadrature of the circle is related to the image of a great wheel: During the opus the matter for the Stone must be dissolved and returned to its primal state before it can be recreated or coagulated into the new pure form of the philosopher’s stone. This cycle of separation and union has to be reiterated many times throughout the opus. During this circulation, the elements earth, air, fire and water are separated by distillation and converted into each other to form the perfect unity, the fifth element. [...] In another alchemical metaphor, this process is described as the transformation of the square (four elements) into the circle (the united fifth element). This process of transformation, of successively converting the elements into each other, is often compared to the turning of a great wheel. (Abraham, 137-138; my italics)

This image of “the turning of a great wheel” once again brings Yeats to mind, for the rhythm of the magical dance in Rosa Alchemica is described as “the wheel of Eternity”. Furthermore, the “Great Wheel” is the central idea of his work of occult philosophy, A Vision, in which appears a figure captioned “The Great Wheel” that consists of triangles, squares, and circles; that is, the Great Wheel is interestingly por91

trayed as a mandala. A Vision merits further inquiry in this regard, but before turning to this work, let us consider another circulation of four, viz., the cycle of four seasons as represented in Yeats’s “The Wheel” and Beckett’s What Where.

Figure 2. The Lunar Phases 4. Yeats’s “The Wheel” and Beckett’s What Where Yeats’s poem “The Wheel”, which Beckett evidently read, appeared in his collection “The Tower” (1928). The poem concerns the cycle of the four seasons: Through winter-time we call on spring, And through the spring on summer call, And when abounding hedges ring Declare that winter’s best of all; 92

And after that there’s nothing good Because the spring-time has not come – Nor know that what disturbs our blood Is but its longing for the tomb. (237) This poem expresses a succession of the feeling of dissatisfaction with each season. Beckett makes similar use of the seasons in relation to a vicious circle of dissatisfaction in What Where (1982), a play for television written a year after Quad. In What Where, four tormentors – Bam, Bim, Bem, and Bom – consecutively become the tormented in a chain of violence related to the cycle of the four seasons. Another person, presumably called “Bum”, is absent. In other words, the four figures circulate, or perhaps spiral, around a final act of “switch[ing] off” with a fifth who is absent. This pattern brings to mind the spiral rather than circular structure of Waiting for Godot,6 in which four characters – Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and Lucky – in a sense spiral towards nothingness around the core of an absent fifth, Godot, who never appears. In Quad, similarly, four players circulate around a square but avoid the centre, as if orbiting an absent completion. That is, as argued above, the four players in Quad may be regarded from the viewpoint of alchemy as the four elements, and a principle aim of alchemy is to seek the fifth element that is absent from the natural world. Yeats’s poem “The Wheel”, informed by a similar structure, is clearly related to the central idea of his occult treatise A Vision, the Great Wheel. Based upon his wife George’s automatic writings and speech, A Vision presents Yeats’s identification of the twenty-eight phases of the moon with distinct human character types, and his ordering of Western history according to the lunar cycle in his figure of the Great Wheel. Yeats divides the Great Wheel into four parts which are equivalent to the four elements: The phases 1 to 8 are associated with elemental earth, being phases of germination and sprouting; those between Phase 8 and Phase 15 with elemental water, because there the imagemaking power is at its height; those between Phase 15 and 22 with elemental air, because through air, or space, things are divided from one another, and here intellect is at its height; those between Phase 22 and Phase 1 with elemental 93

fire, because here all things are made simple. The will is strongest in the first quarter, Mask in second, Creative Mind in third, and Body of Fate in fourth. (1962, 93) It may be worth mentioning that Yeats presents the idea of the Great Wheel in the form of dance in the first edition of A Vision, which was issued in a private circulation of 600 copies under the pseudonym Owen Aherne. Let us now consider this prose work in relation to Quad.7 5. “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons” and Quad Appearing in Book One of the first edition of A Vision, which is entitled “What the Caliph Partly Learned”, “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons” begins as follows: Michael Roberts gives the following account of the diagram called “The Great Wheel” in Giraldus. (1925, 9) That is, the story related in “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons” is to be understood as an explanation of Yeats’s Great Wheel. In the story, a Caliph decides to offer a large sum of money to any person who can fully explain human nature. Two parties attempt an explanation for the Caliph, as related in the following passage: Kusta ben Luka, now a very old man, went to the palace with his book of geometrical figures, but the Caliph, after he had explained them for an hour, banished him from the palace, and declared that all unintelligible visitors were to be put to death. A few days later four black but splendidly dressed persons stood at the city gate and announced that they had come from a most distant country to explain human nature, but that the Caliph must meet them on the edge of the desert. He came attended by his Vizir, and asked their country. “We are,” said the eldest of the four, “the King, the Queen, the Prince and the Princess of the Country of Wisdom. It has reached our ears that a certain man has pretended that wisdom is difficult, but it is our intention to reveal all in 94

dance.” After they had danced for several minutes the Caliph said: “Their dance is dull, and they dance without accompaniment, and I consider that nobody has ever been more unintelligible.” The Vizir gave the order for their execution, and while waiting the tightening of the bow-strings, each dancer said to the executioner: “In the Name of Allah, smooth out the mark of my footfall on the sand.” And the executioner replied, “if the Caliph permit.” When the Caliph heard what the dancers had said, he thought, “There is certainly some great secret in the marks of their feet.” (1925, 9-10; my italics) There is no direct reference to alchemy here, but the idea that the eponymous “royal persons” reveal by dance may be understood as alchemical, for the wheel, as mentioned above, is an important symbol in alchemy. Moreover, Yeats also regarded the King and Queen as alchemical symbols, as Gorski observes in her study Yeats and Alchemy: “another medieval motif that Yeats employed was the alchemical idea of the mystical marriage [...] symbolized as the conjunction of sun and moon, the embrace of king and queen” (11). Although this brief story does not describe the dance of the royal persons in detail, it notes that “some great secret of human nature” is hidden in the “mark of their footfalls”.8 This brings to mind Beckett’s deep attachment to footsteps: the stage directions of Quad specify that “each player has his particular sound”, and Beckett is the author of a play called Footfalls.9 In “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons”, the “great secret of human nature” in the marks of the footfalls of the dancers is not explained, but the introductory nature of the story suggests that such secret wisdom is the subject of the remainder of the first edition of A Vision. In Book Two, entitled “What the Caliph Refused to Learn” – in the second chapter, which is entitled “The Geometrical Foundation of the Wheel” – Yeats presents a diagram explaining the Great Wheel that consists of two whirling, interlocking cones called “the gyres”. He describes these gyres as originating in a single gyre as follows: Sometimes this cone represents the individual soul, and that soul’s history – these things are inseparable – sometimes general life. When general life, we give to its narrow end, to 95

its unexpanded gyre, the name of Anima Hominis, and to its broad end, or its expanded gyre, Anima Mundi; but understanding that neither the soul of man nor the soul of nature can be expressed without conflict or vicissitude we substitute for this cone two cones, […]. It is as though the first act of being, after creating limit, was to divide itself into male and female, each dying the other’s life living the other’s death. (1925, 129-130) Notably, the double cones here oppose each other, one expanding as the other contracts.10 Yeats calls these opposing cones “tinctures”, a term Hazard Adams identifies as an occult usage employed by Jacob Boehme to signify quintessence: the fifth element. The conjunction of opposites in quintessence is an essential idea in alchemical thought. In the fourth section of this chapter of Book Two, entitled “The Pairs of Opposites and the Dance of the Four Royal Persons”, Yeats describes how ‘the Four Faculties’ – Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate – move within the cones. The four royal persons may be understood to represent these four faculties, which in turn must also be understood to reflect the four elements. Yeats concludes of the Four Faculties, “[…] if we study their movements we have those of the Great Wheel or the Dance of the Four Royal Persons” (1925, 138). Thus, the diagram of the double gyres illustrates the marks drawn by the footfalls of the four royal persons, revealing their dance to be the movement of the four elements in opposing gyres, or spirals, that engender the fifth element. The editors of A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925) point out, quoting from Giorgio Melchiori’s The Whole Mystery of Art, that in the Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats learned that the unification created in “the dance of the four elements” represents the ultimate aim of life, and call our attention to the Four Quarters of the Great Wheel and other Yeatsian quaternaries (Harper and Hood, 9). Yeats suggests that the dance is Islamic rather than Greek in origin, noting that he had “the Saracens” in mind when he conceived of the four royal figures,11 but the dance nonetheless reflects the likeness of that “certain antique Greek dance” in “Rosa Alchemica”, insofar as it too is a spiral dance. 96

These points also support an understanding of the dance of the four royal persons, like that of the four players in Quad, as representing the alchemical conception of the spiral movement of the four elements. In contrast to the dance of the royal persons, however, the dance-like movements of the four players in Beckett’s Quad, never reaching the center, do not give rise to the fifth element. 6. Alchemy and arts/ artists Jung describes the circular motion of mind as “circumambulation of the self”, or ritual pacing of the self, and argues: What we call development or progress is going round and round a central point in order to get gradually closer to it. In reality we always remain on the same spot, just a little nearer to or further from the centre […].12 (1973, 274-5) In the production of Quad that he directed for the SDR in Stuttgart, Beckett conveyed a similar understanding by adding a black-andwhite version of the dance-like performance after the colour one. In the additional version, the four figures continue to pace around the same square, but the speed of their pacing is much slower and the beating of percussion that accompanied the colour version ceases, rendering the wearily shuffling footfalls of the players audible. According to Martin Esslin, Beckett said that relative to the colour version, this black-and-white version takes place “a hundred thousand years later” (44; see Knowlson 674). Yeats locates the aesthetic domain of the artist in whirling around a centre rather than in the centre itself: If it be true that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did, his style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty faint and sickly, […]. 13 (1919, 9697)

97

Yeats himself never aspired to be “the saint”, but chose rather to be “the poet”, dreaming that “when all sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal possession of itself in one single moment” (1988, 357). For Beckett, such a dream is impossible to attain, for the movement of his “rhythmic” bodies never come to “an end”. Yet in regard to Beckett, it is illuminating that alchemy remained essential to Yeats’s aesthetics throughout his life. As William Gorski argues, Though clearly eschewing the physical practice [of alchemy] and retaining the metaphysical plot-line, Yeats’s alchemy also encompassed certain aesthetic claims. Yeats conceived the creative process (for all kinds of art) as a form of alchemy and, moreover, thought that the artist himself became transformed through the art of creation. (17) Yeats himself reveals such a conception of the arts in casting their future in alchemical terms: The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things. We are about to substitute once more the distillation of alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and for some other sciences; and certain of us are looking everywhere for the perfect alembic that no silver or golden drop may escape. (1961, 193) Especially in his later years, Beckett was a devoted reader of Yeats, and Beckett’s works clearly reflect Yeats’s influence. For example, the title of another of Beckett’s works for television, “…but the clouds…”, is taken from the closing lines of Yeats’s poem “The Tower”, a poem closely related to A Vision insofar as ‘the tower’ is a 98

metaphor for athanor, an instrument of alchemy. Beckett would certainly have understood the alchemical underpinnings of the poem. As I have discussed, Quad itself reveals many alchemical aspects. Considering the elderly Beckett’s devotion to Yeats, however, the close resemblance of Quad to Yeats’s alchemical dances must be viewed as intentional. Understood as such, the repetitive dance-like movements in Quad emerge as no less than an undying homage to Yeats, as well as an expression of Beckett’s endless search for a fifth element that might be nothingness. Notes 1.

I pointed out the similarity of Quad to one of the dreams introduced in Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy at the Beckett Symposium held in Strasbourg in 1997. At the Beckett Symposium held in Berlin in 2000, I related Quad to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in terms of alchemy (see SBTA 6 and 11).

2.

Neumann describes the rite of the mother Goddess as follows: “The rite as a way begins always as a ‘walked’ or danced archetype, as labyrinth or spiral, as image of a spiral, as image of a spirit, or as a way through a gate of death and rebirth” (177).

3.

In one of his unpublished notebooks, Yeats drew a twenty-two petalled Cabbalistic rose. Donald Pearce describes this drawing as follows: “ [...] each petal [is] marked with a Hebrew letter, and a Rosicross at the centre. Beside it is a corresponding geometrical diagram in which zodiacal and occult symbols have been substituted for the Hebrew letters” (177).

4.

As noted by Harper and Hood, an entry dated 4 June 1909 in the Maud Gonne Notebook shows that Yeats had knowledge of symbolic dance as a modality of the teachings and rituals of the Order of the Golden Dawn. The entry reads, “Felkin told me that he had seen a Dervish dance a horoscope. He went round & round on the sand bar & then circled to center. He whirled round at the planets making round holes in the sand by doing so. He then danced the connecting lines between planets & fell in trance. This is what I saw in a dream or vision years ago” (9).

5.

According to Mary Flannery, Yeats read in the 1930s a Chinese Taoist book entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower, edited by

99

Richard Wilhelm and with a commentary by C. G. Jung. This work involves a meditator who summons a mandala that deeply impresses him from his own unconscious (6). 6.

Roland Barthes defines a spiral as “a kind of circle distended to infinity”. Barthes observes that “on the spiral, things recur, but at another level: there is a return in difference, not repetition in identity” (218-219). This notion seems applicable to the two-act structure of Waiting for Godot.

7.

Eyal Amiran, referring to the Yeats’s Great Wheel, argues that Yeats served for Beckett as “a ready and potent vehicle to Neoplatonism” (127).

8.

The footprints made by holy figures are believed to have been preserved and worshipped in ancient Ireland.

9.

Mary Doll identifies the grief of the female protagonist of Footfalls with that of Demeter in the mystery rites of Eleusis (58).

10.

Yeats explains these opposing forces further in later editions of A Vision: “If we think of the vortex attributed to Discord as formed by circles diminishing until they are nothing, and of the opposing sphere attributed to Concord as forming from itself an opposing vortex, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other’s base, we have the fundamental symbol of my instructors” (1962, 68).

11.

According to A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), a rejected manuscript reads, “This story was told to Michael Robartes by a Judwali Doctor at Damascus, & he added a suggestion the four suits of the Tarot, the King and the Queen, Prince & Princess were derived through the Saracens from the dance, and that these cards have in turn given birth to our common court cards” (Harper and Hood, 9).

12.

Referring to this passage, James Olney points out the similarity of Yeats’s magic and Jung’s alchemy. Olney asserts that both are grounded in Plato’s Timaeus, which teaches that the Demiurgos created the physical universe of becoming and motion out of the four elements. Olney writes, “Plato’s four elements are like Empedocles’ in that they combine and recombine in different proportions to form different compounds, different living forms; they dif-

100

fer from his, however, in that they are not themselves ultimate or immutable” (32). This notion would also seem to apply to Quad. 13.

This brings to mind Beckett’s short essay “Les Deux Besoins”, in which he asserts, “Ce foyer, autour duquel l’artiste peut prendre conscience de tourner, comme le monde – sauf erreur – autour de lui-même, on ne peut évidemment en parler, pas plus que d’autres entités substantielles, sans en falsifier l’idée.” (55). This is a part of the study under the Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research (B) provided by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Works Cited Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge UP, 1998). Adams, Hazard, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1995). Amiran, Eyal, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993). Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, Representation. Trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1985). Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984). –, Footfalls, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). –, “...but the clouds...,” in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). –, Quad, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). –, What Where, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). Cirlot, J.E., A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (London: Routledge, 1971). Doll, Mary A., Beckett and Myth (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988). Esslin, Martin, “Towards the Zero of Language,” in Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, ed. James Acheson and Kateryana Arthur (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1987). Flannery, Mary Catherine, Yeats and the Magic: The Earlier Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1977). Gontarski, S.E., The Intent of Undoing in Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985).

101

Gorski, William T., Yeats and Alchemy (New York: State U of New York P, 1996). Harper, George Mills, and Walter Kelly Hood, ed. A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925) (London: Macmillan, 1978). Jung, C.G., Letters I, ed. Gerhard Adler, in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton UP/ Bollingen, 1973). –, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980). Jung C.G., and C [K]. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R.F.C.Hull (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Lévi, Eliphas, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, trans. A.E. Waite, (York Beach: Samuel Weiser, 1999). Mathers, MacGregor, S. L., The Kabballah Unveiled (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). Melchioli, Giorgio, The Whole Mystery of Art (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1960). Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983). Okamuro, Minako, “Quad and the Jungian Mandala”, in SBT/A 6, “Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines/ L’Œuvre Carrefour/ L’Œuvre limite”, ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. 1997), 125-134. Onley, James, “The Esoteric Flower: Yeats and Jung”, in Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan, 1975). Pearce, Donald, “Philosophy and Phantasy: Notes on the Growth of Yeats’s ‘System’”, University of Kansas City Review, 18 (Spring 1952), 177. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000). Yeats, William Butler, The Secret Rose (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897). –. The Cutting of an Agate (London: Macmillan, 1919). –, A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, 1st ed (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925). –, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961). –, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962). –, The Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1982). –, Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988).

102

List of Illustrations Figure 1: William Butler Yeats, A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, 1st ed (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925), xiv. Figure 2: Ibid., 13.

103

“EVERYWHERE STONE IS GAINING”: The Struggle for the Sacred in Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said Michael Angelo Rodriguez

Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre is replete with references to stone, which mythologically supports his characters’ struggle for the sacred. Mircea Eliade maintains, indeed, that a stone’s ability to resist time displays for primitive man “an absolute mode of being”, a mode that the old woman in Ill Seen seeks by striving for permanence in the midst of an identity – i.e., a narrative – in flux. Beckett establishes this struggle in his earliest fiction and soberly reinforces it in Ill Seen where the archetypal image of stone engenders an aporetic text that displays the presence of language and, ultimately, of being.

Perfection is not of this world. It is something different, it comes from somewhere else. (Mircea Eliade) That Samuel Beckett’s texts are laden with references to stone should come as no surprise given his self-confessed ‘love’ for certain stones as a child in Foxrock where the distant tinkle of stone-cutters in the adjacent hills would have been all too familiar. Stony sites as ancient as the cromlech at Glen Druid must have made a deep impact on so sensitive and impressionable a youth as Beckett, who once recounted how he would take particular stones home from the beach in order to protect them from the inclemency of the weather and lay them down in the protective bosom of tree branches to keep them safe from harm (Knowlson, 29). Later in his life, of course, he would link his enduring fascination with stones to Freud’s theory, outlined for the first time in his revisionist Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920, of the death instinct, that is, Freud’s notion that human beings have an “instinct to return to the inanimate state” (46) in order to restore an ear-

lier state of things. As early as 1937, in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy dated 14 August, Beckett praised the painting of Watteau for its depiction of people who are ‘mineral’. In the psychoanalytic tradition, Beckett also connected stone with the unconscious mind, rather reminiscent of Gottfried Benn’s “The Structure of the Personality”, an essay that appeared in the momentous 21st issue of transition and outlined a geology of the self while taking into account recent advances in neuro-psychology, and, in fact, a table of geological periods appears in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook. In the early drafts of Watt, the stated intent is ‘autospeliology’, the desire to plummet “deep down in those palaeozoic profounds, midst mammoth Old Red Sandstone phalli and Carboniferous pudenda . . .” (qtd. in Ackerley, 179). James Knowlson even acknowledges that in Beckett’s later work, “there is an obsession with decay and with petrification, with stone and with bone” (29). There are simply too many references to stone in Beckett’s oeuvre to list and explore within the parameters of this essay, but the more representative examples range from seemingly frivolous episodes to sustained narratives of profound mythological import. One of the more outwardly humorous episodes, though still mythologically poignant, occurs when Lady McCann hurls a stone at Watt’s head for no discernable reason, thereby causing his hat to fall on the ground: Here, faithful to the spirit of her cavalier ascendants, she picked up a stone and threw it, with all her might, which, when she was roused, was not negligible, at Watt [. . .] for the stone fell on Watt’s hat and struck it from his head, to the ground. This was indeed a providential escape, for had the stone fallen on an ear, or on the back of the neck, as it might so easily have done, as it so nearly did, why then a wound had perhaps been opened, never again to close, never, never again to close, for Watt had a poor healing skin [. . .] (32) This scene foreshadows an event in “The End” where the narrator suffers a similar unfortunate experience: “The little boys jeered and threw stones, but their aim was poor, for they only hit me once, on the hat” (88). As Mircea Eliade, an historian of religion and myth, ex106

plains, the power of stone to strike is one of its principle characteristics: “Above all, stone is. It always remains itself; and, more important still, it strikes. Before he even takes it up to strike, man finds in it an obstacle – if not to his body, at least to his gaze – and ascertains its hardness, its roughness, its power” (1996, 216). In addition to these seemingly cursory references, though, stones are often made use of in many of Beckett’s texts, sometimes as instruments, thus rendering the issue rather more complicated than we may have initially assumed and, consequently, deconstructing the orthodox notion that Beckett’s use of stones (and other sacred symbols) serves as an ironic subversion of the traditional sacredness that primitive man assigned to them. Melvin J. Friedman’s essay entitled “Molloy’s ‘Sacred’ Stones” is a case in point. Friedman, in examining the famous sucking-stones section of Molloy, contends that, given Beckett’s “talents as a pasticheur”, Molloy’s pseudo-ritualistic movement of the sucking stones “is intended as a vast gesture of mockery” (11). Friedman’s analysis, however, is far too cursory and, as a result, reductive to sustain such a conclusive statement, for it does not allow for the deeper mythological implications of a symbol that has its source not only in the earliest of Beckett’s texts, but, more importantly, in the most primitive of human rituals. Molloy does confess, after all, that “to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need” (81). As Eliade maintains, a stone represents for primitive man something that transcends the precariousness of his humanity: an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionlessness, its size and its strange outlines are none of them human; they indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts and threatens, all at once. In its grandeur, its hardness, its shape and its colour, man is faced with a reality and a force that belong to some world other than the profane world of which he is himself a part. [. . .] Invested with certain sacred powers as a result of their shape, they were not adored, but made use of. (1996, 216-217) Within this mythological context, Molloy’s ‘bodily need’ takes on new significance; even when he apparently dismisses with mockery 107

the loss of the stones, he does so tentatively and qualitatively: “But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without [the stones], when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any” (81). The qualification ‘or hardly any’ reinforces his ‘bodily need’ for stones at least as much as it purports to dismiss the inclination. The entire section, after all, ultimately takes up some seven pages. Malone also makes use of a stone in his meta-narrative when he relates that one of the many stories that he is weaving to avoid petering out will be “about the thing, a stone probably” (206) since he, like Molloy, has a particular fondness for them. Stones represent something other than people, contends Eliade, and, consequently, they act as “instruments of spiritual action, as centres of energy designed to defend them or their dead” (1996, 216). Malone’s juxtaposition of narrative with stone, like his character Mr. Saposcat who once “hid his books under a stone and ranged the countryside” (220), becomes for Malone a way to stave off death, a theme that will become central to the narrative technique of Ill Seen Ill Said when the “obscure graffiti” (75) is scrawled on a stone “for the eye to solicit in vain” (75). Malone’s impending death is even quelled, albeit momentarily, by his penchant for falling asleep with a stone in his hand: “And I loved to fall asleep holding in my hand a stone [. . .] and I would still be holding it when I woke, my fingers closed over it, in spite of sleep which makes a rag of the body, so that it may rest” (282). The protagonist in “The Expelled”, furthermore, gains the cabman’s attention by knocking with a stone, presumably identical to the one that the narrator of “The Calmative” carries as a matter of habit, for “having gone out as it were without premeditation” (67), he leaves the house with his stone. The unnamable, perhaps most significantly, declares that he will establish the position of his body based on the relation of the perceiving subject to the object perceived lest “[a] man [. . .] wonder where his kingdom ended” (413), an ontological breakdown that would force him to use something as an extension of the body, like a stick or a stone, to negotiate his extension of space: “his eye strive to penetrate the gloom, and he crave for a stick, an arm, fingers apt to grasp and then release, at the right moment, a stone, stones [. . .]” (413). This very notion, that of using a stone to problematize the space between the perceiving subject and the object perceived, is a significant one since it represents a complex thematic interplay with even 108

further mytho-linguistic implications, the most exemplary of which resides in his late prose-poem masterpiece Ill Seen Ill Said, a work that is the culmination of Beckett’s life-long use of stone imagery and one that is primarily concerned with “the relationship of a personal subject with a spatial object” (Locatelli, 188). In Ill Seen personal subjectivity, coextensive with narrative exposition, is in flux, somewhere one second and gone the next, the old woman’s subjectivity made up of a narration that exists in (and is corruptible by) time cancer; the objective “zone of stones” that increasingly abound, however, mythologically function as “a modality of existing independently of temporal becoming” (Eliade 1978, 115) given their strength and indestructibility, their ability to resist time. The juxtaposition of metamorphosis, particularly in relation to narrative, with the image of incorruptible stone is operating in many of Beckett’s texts, situating the woman in Ill Seen in a definitive Beckettian tradition, but in Ill Seen the space between perceiver and perceived – between decaying subjectivity and stony permanence – ultimately collapses to form an aporetic text that is not so much concerned with a traditional mimesis but, as Carla Locatelli argues, with presenting “Différance [as] the antidote to a crystallized, atemporal ‘ill said’ that engenders or perpetuates the ‘ill seen’” (199). This new space, which has its genesis in the most primitive of human experiences, is a sacred one since it displays the presence of language – and, by extension, of unmediated being – in a state of becoming that includes multiple levels of reality. Ill Seen occupies a special place in Beckett’s oeuvre, and, consequently, one is tempted to approach it with the kind of reverence that all his late work demands. Gone from this text are any hints of mockery or frivolousness: “No trace of humour. None any more” (72). The chilling sobriety of the content, coupled with the narrative’s magnificently protean nature, produces a text unlike any other, one that teeters on the edge of the uncanny or the numinous. And despite its dogged resistance to critical reductionism, the temptation to read the text mythologically is quite simply overwhelming. Critics have been quick to compare the woman, for instance, with the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, or Demeter, all of which may be plausible, but the text is too uncompromising in its vague pronominal designation, for the only first person pronoun in the text is not singular but plural: “Behold our hollows [italics mine]” (67). Though the woman in the 109

text seems entirely unique, furthermore, the imbrication of her dwindling subjectivity and the funerary stones that consume more and more of the mental and physical landscape situates her within a mythological dialectic that is operating even in a text as brief as “The Cliff”, a piece, much like Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, that conveys a static representation of flux. Like the dark figure of Woburn in Cascando who struggles on with a face “in the stones . . . no more sand . . . all stones” (300) or the interrogated Fox in Rough for Radio II who goes back to the depths where there exists “all stones all sides” (278), the woman’s death in Eh Joe enacts a Freudian return to the mineral state as her face, lips, breasts, and hands clutch the stones: Scoops a little cup for her face in the stones [. . .] Now imagine . . . . Before she goes . . . . Face in the cup . . . . Lips on a stone . . . . Taking Joe with her . . . . Light gone . . . . ‘Joe Joe’ . . . . No sound . . . . To the stones . . . . Say it you now, no one’ll hear you . . . . Say ‘Joe’ it parts the lips . . . Imagine the hands . . . . The solitaire . . . . Against a stone . . . . Imagine the eyes . . . . Spiritlight . . . . Month of June . . . . What year of your Lord? . . . Breasts in the stones . . . . And the hands . . . . Before they go . . . . Imagine the hands . . . . What are they at? . . . In the stones . . . . (366-367) Similarly, the unnamable may be trapped in his head like a fossil in a rock: “Yes, a head, but solid, solid bone, and you embedded in it, like a fossil in the rock. Perhaps there go I after all” (450-451). Even in the unpublished story “Echo’s Bones”, intended as the ‘recessional’ story of More Pricks Than Kicks, the symbiosis of subjective metamorphosis and stony permanence reveals itself. At the end of the story, the groundsman, Doyle, excavates Belacqua’s grave and makes a bet with the postmortem Belacqua about what may be found within the tomb; at the critical moment, in fulfillment of the Ovidian myth, a metamorphosis is effected when Belacqua, like Echo, turns into the handful of stones he finds there. The woman in Ill Seen, with her “stone face” (50), is part of Belacqua’s lineage and is involved in a similar kind of metamorphosis although the linguistic implications are rather more profound in the 110

later text. The centrality of the stones, their capacity to orient the subject, gathers momentum, as they “increasingly abound” (50), throughout the progression of the narrative. The old woman, in fact, is drawn to a particular stone that serves not only to diminish or humble her already crumbling subjectivity, but also as a means by which to orient herself in sacred space: She is drawn to a certain spot. At times. There stands a stone. It it is draws her. Rounded rectangular block three times as high as wide. Four. Her stature now. Her lowly stature. When it draws she must to it. She cannot see it from her door [profane space?]. Blindfolded she could find her way. With herself she has no more converse. Never had much. Now none. As had she the misfortune to be still [as in motionless?] of this world [which one?]. But when the stone draws then to her feet the prayer, Take her. Especially at night when the skies are clear. With moon or without. They take her and halt her before it. There she too as if of stone. (52-53) The stone’s ability to draw her “to a certain spot” radically opposes the profane space that surrounds her cabin, which is “At the inexistent centre of a formless place. [. . .] Flat to be sure” (50). The stone functions as a hierophany, that is, a fixed point that opposes the ‘formless’, homogenous, amorphous expanse that characterizes profane space. In a sense, the founding of this space is tantamount to a founding of the omphalos, the world navel, and expresses man’s desire to “wedge himself into Being” (Eliade 1996, 32) so that he is not “paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences” (Eliade 1987, 28). Pausanias, for instance, contends that “What the inhabitants of Delphi call omphalos is of white stone, and thought to be at the centre of the earth; and Pindar, in one of his odes, confirms this notion” (qtd. in Eliade 1996, 231). On his way to Mesopotamia, when he had come to rest, Jacob is said to have put some stones under his head and slept in the same place that consequently became the ‘House of God’, the point in space and time where communication took place between heaven and earth, between the living and the dead. Of the ubiquity of this point in space and time in different traditions, Eliade writes that in every tradition the omphalos “is a stone consecrated by a 111

superhuman presence, or by symbolism of some kind” (Eliade 1996, 233). The stone, then, acts as a ‘ladder’, the Axis Mundi, what is referred to in India as ‘the gate of deliverance’, where “the transcendent might enter the immanent” (Eliade 1996, 231). The old woman in Ill Seen, like Jacob, performs a similar gesture “with her head on the stones. A pallet then flat on the floor. No pillow” (71). “A tomb”, therefore, is “seen as a point of contact between the world of the dead, of the living, and of the gods, [and] can also be a ‘centre’, an ‘omphalos of the earth’. [. . .] The place where communication could be made between the world of the dead and that of the gods of the underworld was consecrated as a connecting link between the different levels of the universe, and such a place could only be situated in a ‘centre’” (Eliade 1996, 232). In primitive thought, however, not all stones are considered sacred: We shall always find that some stones are venerated because they are a certain shape, or because they are very large, or because they are bound up with some ritual. Note, too, that it is not a question of actually worshipping the stones; the stones are venerated precisely because they are not simply stones but hierophanies, something outside their normal state of things. [. . .] A thing becomes sacred in so far as it embodies (that is, reveals) something other than itself. (Eliade 1996, 13) Some stones, for instance, assure women of fertility, vitality, and health – either because some stones have the power to make sterile women fruitful, because the spirits of ancestors dwell in them, because of their shape (e.g., of a pregnant woman), or because of where they came from (e.g., a meteor). In some parts of Europe and elsewhere, in fact, young couples walk on a stone to make their union fruitful. The tribes of central Australia, furthermore, have similar notions about the efficacy of stones, for when women do not want children, they go near a rock and pretend to be old while leaning on a stick, crying, “Don’t come to me, I am an old woman!” Many customs, indeed, preserve the notion that merely touching a sacred stone or rock is all that is needed to make a sterile woman fertile, as in Carnac where women used to sit on the cromlech of Cruez-Moquem to reverse the effects of barrenness 112

(Eliade 1996, 220-225). Interestingly, the old woman, who is at least creatively sterile (“Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings” [56]), sits on stone twice: “Seated on the stones she is seen from behind” (64) and “Hither and thither toward the stones. There she turns and sits” (70). The particular shape and texture of the stone that draws the old woman, which is “Granite of no common variety assuredly” (75), is reminiscent of what to the ancient Greeks represented presence, power, and fertility. The mythological dimension is clear, to be sure, when the old woman is frozen with “the rigid Memnon pose” (69), a reference to the Colossus of Memnon, one of two giant sandstone statues, twenty meters high, guardians of ancient Thebes. As Eliade explains, far before Hermes came to be known as a god in post-Homeric religion and literature, he existed simply as a theophany of stone in its unwrought form: The stones set along the sides of roads, originally called hermai, functioned as ‘protecting’ agents against “the loneliness of the roads, the fearsomeness of the night, and [they] stood for the protection of the traveller, house and field” (Eliade 1996, 235). Only much later did the sign develop into a person; that is, his theophany became myth when a column with a man’s head, a hermes, came to be taken as an image of the god. In Ill Seen, too, the old woman’s “rigid Memnon pose” mirrors the undressed stone that draws her to it: “Is it to nature alone it owes its rough-hewn air? Or to some too human hand forced to desist? As Michelangelo’s from the regicide’s bust” (75). The reference to Michelangelo’s failure to complete the tomb of Pope Julius II, whose heirs scaled down the composition, resonates with striking mythological undertones. As the old woman in Ill Seen progresses in her ‘vigil’ (57), that is, as her narrative unfolds, the differentiation between her inner and outer landscape becomes blurred so that what she sees and what she imagines, what she experiences and what she remembers, what she narrates and what is narrated for her, are increasingly impossible to determine. Her “vanishing” (78) subjectivity is initially at odds with what the narrative refers to as “true stone” (80), but as her subjectivity merges with the stones, until there will ultimately be nothing but “Universal stone” (80), she (and, by extension, the narrative) mythologically becomes the omphalos, the aporetic link between the world of the living and the dead: “This old so dying woman. So dead” (58). And, later, we learn that “No shock were she already dead. As of 113

course she is” (73). The mingling of the dead and the dying resonates when the woman’s presence effects an ontological change in the white sepulchre, thus implying “a singling-out” (Eliade 1996, 13) of the stone so that it becomes saturated with being: “Changed the stone that draws her when revisited alone. Or she who changes it when side by side” (75). The extent to which she changes the stone is indeterminate, but a change has occurred, and her proximity to the stone’s presence ultimately renders her and the stone identical: “Empty-handed she shall go to the tomb. Until she go no more. Or no more return. So much for that. Undistinguishable the twin shadows” (76). Even when the narrator refers to the swelling of the old woman’s third finger, there is a reminder that “Still [‘motionless’] as stones they defy as stones do the eye [‘I’]” (67), the ‘eye’ doubling as both literal ‘eye’ and the figurative pronoun ‘I’, that is, subjectivity. As Eliade writes, “this paradoxical coming-together of sacred and profane, being and non-being, absolute and relative, the eternal and the becoming, is what every hierophany, even the most elementary, reveals” (1996, 29). The megalithic cult of the dead erected menhirs (i.e., a large vertical stone, sometimes very high, set into the ground) independently of burials in order to constitute a sort of ‘substitute body’ in which the souls of the dead were incorporated, thereby rendering them both impermanent and eternal since, as in Indonesian mythology, “they had succeeded in taking possession of both the stone and the banana” (Eliade 1978, 117-118). The old woman, of course, “exult[s] at the white heap of stone” (63) until she is projected into its very structure: “Frozen true to her wont she seems turned to stone. [. . .] Where to melt into paradise” (64). This is the point at which the immanent and the transcendent begin to merge, as a consequence of “the paradox of hierophanies” (Eliade 1996, 29), so that “at the end of the novel space will be found coextensive with reality and intimately related to time” (Locatelli, 189). Locatelli argues that the text’s unwillingness to give into binary oppositions creates a linguistic suspension: “In fact, thanks to this suspension, we come to see that the ‘unreal’ is not the opposite of the real; it is only a ‘partial object,’ a ready-made, complementary product of conceptualisation that actually closes movement within the real, and betrays it, with a closed, frozen image. The serious attempt to ‘say its contrary’ reveals that the ‘real’ is an all encompassing, pervasive procession of différance, a limitless movement ‘from eye to mind,’ including every kind of reality” (196). 114

The limitless movement that the text effects, on a mythological level, is coextensive with the structure and morphology of the sacred: “Whatever its context, a symbol always reveals the basic oneness of several zones of the real [. . . .] [B]y becoming symbols, signs of a transcendent reality, those things [symbols] abolish their material limits, and instead of being isolated fragments become part of a whole system; or, better, despite their precarious and fragmentary nature, they embody in themselves the whole of the system in question” (Eliade 1996, 452). At the very end of the text, of course, the narrative and the old woman are riddled with uncertainty, reinforcing, perhaps, what Eliade calls “the ambivalence of the sacred” (1996, 384). Indeed, man is both attracted and repelled by the transcendence and danger that are the very cornerstones of the sacred: What can be noted now is the self-contradictory attitude displayed by man in regard to all that is sacred (using the word in its widest sense). On the one hand he hopes to secure and strengthen his own reality by the most fruitful contact he can attain with hierophanies and kratophanies; on the other, he fears he may lose it completely if he is totally lifted to a plane of being higher than his natural profane state; he longs to go beyond it and yet cannot wholly leave it. (Eliade 1996, 17-18) The old woman in Ill Seen knows that she cannot know happiness because of what Locatelli aptly describes as “the paradox of cognition” (192), for to know is in the same instant to cease knowing: “Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness” (86). The sacred, then, may be unknowable (there may, in other words, be ‘no knowable’ happiness), but the text is less concerned with what can be known and more interested in nature as experience (Locatelli, 197). The old woman, for all her pain and tears, is ultimately lead toward herself at least as much as she is alienated from it.

115

Works Cited Ackerley, Chris, “Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt,” in SBT/A, “Beckett in the 1990s” (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi), II: 179. Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). –, The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989, ed. and intro. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). –, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, intro. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1996). –, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, intro. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997). –, Watt (New York: Grove P, 1953). Eliade, Mircea, A History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, vol. 1 of 3, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978). –, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1987). –, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1996). Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989). Friedman, Melvin J, “Molloy’s ‘Sacred’ Stones,” in Romance Notes 9 (1967), 8-11. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Locatelli, Carla, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Work After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990).

116

SAMUEL BECKETT, CLAUDE SIMON AND THE MISE EN ABYME OF PARADOXICAL DUPLICATION Anthony Macris

In his seminal study of novelistic mise en abyme structures, The Mirror in the Text, Lucien Dällenbach identifies a type he calls the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication. Characterised by an extreme self-reflexivity, Dällenbach explores the operations of this literary trope in the later novels of the nouveau roman, particularly those of Claude Simon and Samuel Beckett. This article explores how Simon and Beckett employ this device with radically different results, Simon’s forming part of a textual poetics that engages with the material and social, while Beckett’s tends to a privileging of the selfreflexivity of language.

While many thematic commonalities exist between the works of Claude Simon and Samuel Beckett, in particular their preoccupation with existential themes such as the suffering of humanity and the struggle to maintain an ethics in a chaotic, fragmented world, there are also significant formal points of comparison, not least the of which is their innovative use of the mise en abyme. In this essay, I will use as my methodological framework the most comprehensive study of the mise en abyme to date, Lucien Dällenbach’s The Mirror in the Text (1989), in order to examine some of ways Beckett and Simon use this literary device in their novels. In particular I wish to argue that there are significant differences in how they employ the mise en abyme as a compositional device, differences that have a profound impact upon the thematic implications of their respective oeuvres, with the Simonian mise en abyme forming part of a textual poetics that has a tendency to engage more with the material and social, while Beckett’s leans towards a privileging of the selfreflexivity of consciousness and language. Despite these differences, however, I also wish to suggest that the strategies used by Beckett and

Simon lead the mise en abme to its very limits as an ordering principle, and bring it to the threshold of its own dissolution. Their work also points to certain limitations of Dällenbach’s paradigm, particularly its reliance on a structuralist methodology that tends to omit important aspects of the mise en abyme’s expressive capabilities. For Dällenbach it is the new nouveau roman1 that is particularly rich in what he terms the type III mise en abyme, or the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication, in which “the degree of the analogy between the mise en abyme and the object it reflects” (1989, 110) grows ever closer. For such a mise en abyme structure to function, there must be a kind of isomorphism between the reflected and reflecting elements of the text. Thus the Type III mise en abyme is characterised by texts that are mimetic of themselves not in part, but as a whole. Their mode of reflection is no longer that of resemblance (Type I), or enunciative self-reference (Type II), but complete identification with themselves. De Nooy pithily sums up Type III as seeming “to contain the work that actually contains it” (1991, 19). But how can a literary text be truly imitative of itself? If it were an exact copy of itself, wouldn’t the entire function of duplication, of copying and mirroring, become redundant, because, replicated in its entirety, the work would have dispensed with the very moment of reflection? It is for this reason that Type III has been given the name of paradoxical duplication, because it is precisely this total identification with itself that it tries to achieve. It is typical of Samuel Beckett2 that he would successfully capture such a paradoxical structure with the simplest of materials: a pencil. In Malone Dies, the unnamed narrator, confined to bed in a small room, writes himself into existence in a small exercise-book. It is not immediately obvious to the reader, however, that this is what is happening. I fear I must have fallen asleep again. In vain I grope, I cannot find my exercise-book. But I still have the pencil in my hand. I shall have to wait for day to break. God knows what I am going to do till then. I have just written, I fear I must have fallen, etc. I hope this is not too great a distortion of the truth. I now add these few lines, before departing from myself again. (Beckett 1976, 209) 118

As in Cervantes and Gide, it is once again on the level of enunciation that the reflection takes place. But unlike them, Beckett has extended the duplication to the very act of writing itself. Throughout Malone Dies Beckett makes great use of this pencil, turning it into a gruesomely comic prop whose various aspects throw light onto the mode of reflection itself. My pencil. It is a little Venus, still green no doubt, with five or six facets, pointed at both ends and so short there is just room, between them, for my thumb and the two adjacent fingers, gathered together in a little vice. I use the two points turn and turn about, sucking them frequently, I love to suck. And when they go quite blunt I strip them with my nails which are long, yellow, sharp and brittle for want of chalk or is it phosphate. So little by little my little pencil dwindles, inevitably, and the day is fast approaching when nothing will remain but a fragment too tiny to hold. So I write as lightly as I can. (223) The writing act takes place under the most tenuous of conditions, with a pencil so short that not much can be written, by a man who is dying. What suspense there is in the narrative comes from seeing which will give out first: the lead or the narrator. The alternation of the two pencil points, punctuated by the sucking of the narrator, combine to make a mocking portrait of the artist hero; there is no polo-necked Sartre here leading radical students into riots, only a dying consciousness that writes itself into, and finally, out of existence. Beckett’s pencil also evokes the Ouroboros motif, this image of the serpent biting its own tail one of Dällenbach’s favourite symbols of Type III. Although the end result may be the same, with the text devouring itself, Beckett’s motif is at the same time both more elegant and frightening: the very pressure of the writer’s hand, the very words he writes, ensuring the text’s conclusion, and the writer’s very own fingernails agonisingly tear at the wood in order to sharpen the pencil that records his own end. Compositionally, however, the overall structure of Malone Dies is less sophisticated than the enunciative procedures contained in it. The narration of the act of writing takes the textual form of episodes 119

interspersed between the stories invented by the narrator to amuse himself, the darkly funny tales of the Saposcats, the Lamberts, and Macmann. Thus, in Malone Dies, the writing does indeed produce itself, the characteristic most important to Dällenbach’s Type III. The text has reached a level of self-identity not seen in its earlier forms, and it is this kind of extreme linguistic self-referentiality that Dällenbach’s terms the transcendental mise en abyme, a subcategory of Type III (1989, 101). But even if the mise en abyme is here self-generating, it also, in Beckett’s example, guarantees its own abolition, an aspect crucial to the theme of Malone Dies. As in Melville and Simon, the device is not used gratuitously, or merely for the love of its trompe l’oeil effects (as it is in much of the nouveau roman, for example Robbe-Grillet). Rather it embodies a theme that could not have been achieved in any other way: the manner in which self-creation and selfabolition form the twin face of the Janus mask. By the time Beckett comes to write Company,3 the gap between the sophistication of the enunciation procedures and the stories and characters represented by it is significantly narrowed, and a text of great complexity is produced. Company presents the reader with an inversion of the relation between form and content as manifest in Malone Dies. The consciousness of the narrator shatters as it is put through a process of multivocalisation, but one where the enunciative flows are subject to paradoxical duplication. Previous efforts in the history of literary theory to explicate the relations between who speaks and sees – “point of view” in the Anglo-American parlance, and “focalisation”, in the French – can barely accommodate the selfreflexive processes that traverse the consciousness of Beckett’s character lying in the dark. These flows of voices, memories and persons (second, third, and later mentioned, but only mentioned, first), configure and reconfigure, their discreteness an illusion as the narrative progresses and we find that each is dependent on the other in a such way that no single hierarchy can be established: A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example 120

when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of one to win credence for the other. That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. Quick leave him. Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. (1989, 5-6) The voice that designates the “you”, the person lying in the dark, and that speaks his memories, will start to tell stories in a way reminiscent of Malone Dies. There are, however, significant differences. No longer are the “stories” explicitly stated as being self-conscious reflections, the product of a unitary consciousness. Via the use of person, predominantly second and third, Beckett subdivides consciousness into linguistic flows that are suspended in a voice that cannot be directly identified. But little by little attempts at identification are made, rationalisations that endeavor to establish the relations between the branches of this manifold subject diffused among the faint glimmerings that emerge between darkness and memory. Soon the voice claims to be its own “deviser”, its own self-creating instance. Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of 121

himself as another. Himself he too devised for company. Leave it at that. (20) Here we can clearly identify a kind of radical reflexivity of enunciation, a nearly pure Cartesian moment that empties consciousness of all its contents in order to build up the external world from nothing, from the void. Only, in this case, the foundational moments short-circuits. The primary flow of enunciation refuses to act as a substratum for communication, instead collapsing life and memory into itself, into a whirlpool of flows and persons that can’t be stabilised. Again and again Beckett tries to find, if not a central point of reference, then at least some clear patterns of relationships. But he fails. The narrative voice hovers at the limits of naming itself, defining itself, categorising itself, but refutes these attempts in a moment of aporia, returning to one of Beckett’s central themes, the unnamable. For why not? Why in another dark or in the same? And whose voice is asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. In the same dark as his creature or in another. For company. Who asks in the end, Who asks? And in the end answers as above? And adds long after to himself, Unless another still. Nowhere to be found. Nowhere to be sought. The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I. Quick leave him. (19) Emerging out of this field of instabilities is a dialectic that runs throughout Beckett’s work, the unnamable/I dialectic, a nodal point on which the maze of relations of consciousness converges, but only temporarily, only conditionally. For at the heart of this maze is an “I” suspended in a void, a void suspended in an I. Here we also see, in this second Beckett trilogy, a definitive inversion of the use of the I. In Beckett’s early trilogy the I is foregrounded, it acts as a Cartesian consciousness in which all else is suspended, even if Beckett’s end goal is to decompose this hierarchy. In the second trilogy the I is nearly completely effaced: in Company in particular it is utterly subordinated to the second and third persons. Such a progression has important implications for the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplica122

tion: it points to a series of inversions and mirrorings that are not only internal to specific works, but to Beckett’s work as an oeuvre. The I that stands at the forefront, and in which all other voices are suspended in the earlier trilogy (the stories made up to keep the narrator amused), now takes an inverted position, is relegated to an indeterminable coordinate, has narratively become the unnamable, and, in a perfect mirroring, gazes through the layers of memories, stories and persons back at the Cartesian I of the earlier trilogy. By the end of Company, the unnamable will have spoken itself to its final state, that of absolute solitude: “alone” is the last word in Beckett’s text. Thus the conclusion, provisional as always, and typical of Beckett, is to leave the narrative agency utterly separate from other consciousness. Yet it is inside this “alone” that the manifold voices swarm, multiply, factor themselves out of themselves. Inside this “alone” a kind of pure self-reflexive movement of consciousness is enacted, a paradoxical mise en abyme of voices that create themselves, abolish themselves, and recreate themselves all over again in a Sisyphean movement that embodies, in a near pre-linguistic domain, Beckett’s attempt to render the process of the production of meaning. 4 Simon’s Triptyque is also an example of a type III mise en abyme, but one that employs different techniques to create its effects of implosion of frame and miniature. In Triptyque Simon once again refuses to employ simple enunciation procedures in order to further develop his use of the mise en abyme. Instead, he embarks upon an experiment that, even as it builds on his love of metaphor and analogy, involves taking two steps back in order to take one forward. In his works of the 1970s, Simon tends to abandon the long lyrical sentences that typified his earlier style, heavily influenced by Proust and Faulkner, and which attempted, through often overly complex sentences structures full of subordinate clauses and parentheses inside parentheses, to exploit the metaphorical power of language and image at every possible moment. With Les Corps Conducteurs his style becomes increasingly disciplined, with the metaphorical level displaced to one where images breed out of one another in striking ways. In Triptyque his style becomes simpler again, with an accompanying increase of complexity in the novel’s compositional schema. Replacing Les Corps Conducteurs’ single story line and single level of action is a series of three tableaux that are arranged sequentially. Triptyque’s first part is set in a village, the second in the coun123

tryside, the third in an urban zone. Each of these chapters constitutes a separate mirror, each reflecting the other in such a way that there is now no longer any hierarchy between framing narrative and subordinated miniature, between the subject and object of reflection. By multiplying the actual number of mises en abyme, and making each of the same importance, Simon has begun to solve the problem of an originary text that is mirrored at all: the first term has been abolished, and there is now only an infinite series of reflections amongst multiple mirrors, all of which “produce” one another. In Triptyque frame and miniature have finally imploded, the macro level now truly only the pretext for the general organisation of the novel. These larger chapters have been eaten away from the inside by the micro-movements of mirrorings, embeddings, duplications and metaphorical breedings that are no longer anchored to a ground of originary meaning, but have been allowed to break free. Thus, somewhat differently to Beckett’s Malone Dies (whose self-generating aspect reflects the writing act itself), Simon demonstrates how a text can be self-producing on the image level: it is thus given the name of the productive mise en abyme (Dällenbach 1989, 162). Simon achieves this productive mise en abyme by choosing elements that lend themselves to extreme mirroring effects. Of course his work has always featured such elements, such metaphors of origin (Dällenbach 1989, 181-3): paintings, statues, ornate façades and motifs of all kinds dominate even his earliest novels. But in his middle and later periods he abandons some of the more traditional metaphors of origin associated with mise en abyme novels, and explores the layer of reality we can term second nature, the dense field of images and communication events thrown up by media culture in the postwar period. Both Les Corps Conducteurs and Triptyque were written in a period (the late 1960s and early 1970s) when media culture was rapidly expanding, and are full of advertising imagery such as billboards, posters, newspapers and magazine spreads, as well as cinema images and urban landscapes full of designed, blueprinted, networked objects and image systems. It is as much his exploitation of this kind of imagery – the layer of what Jean Baudrillard termed simulacra (1983, 10-11) – as the compositional dimension of the text, that makes Triptyque the unique novelistic mise en abyme it is. Simon, however, is careful not to let these images float free in Baudrillard’s space of the hyperreal (1983, 23). In Triptyque, as in L’Herbe and Les Corps Con124

ducteurs, he goes to great lengths to show how human perception is inextricably linked to what it perceives, and how there is a recursion between the world of consciousness and the world of things. It is the exploration of this margin, this threshold between perception and things, in which Simon’s work is largely situated. But if Dällenbach has recouped the mise en abyme for textual self-reflexivity and shown us, exhaustively, that Simon has passed the poststructuralist test of knowing that his representation of reality is refracted through the medium he uses, then perhaps it is time to focus on the insights about the material world that are presented in his work. One such sequence from Les Corps Conducteurs provides a good example. The extract below is taken from a section where the main character is looking down from an airplane as it flies low over a busy city, preparing to land. Peering down into the darkness from the airplane, the eye can discern puzzling patches of light scattered here and there over the surface of the dark earth below. As these patches come closer, one can make out branching points of stars, tentacles, incandescent crosses, like cracks in the dark crust of earth through which trickles of lava appear to be pouring, expelled by some cataclysm far below the surface. Flaring up like little forest fires, looking ridiculously tiny in the immense dark expanses of the night beneath the cold, slowly wheeling constellations, the artificial flames, in which the names of movie stars, petroleum products, perfumes, whiskeys, and tires blaze up, go out, and flame up once again, drift slowly past, fighting an insane battle against the shadows attempting to engulf them. Rent for the space of an instant, driven back for a moment by the blindingly bright force of millions of volts, these shadows then close in again, inexorably advancing and receding with each of the pulsations produced by huge invisible machines whose motive force has been provided by gold mines, by virgin forests swallowed up in darkness, by blacks lashed with whips, and by millions of tons of water roaring down over the edge of wild cataracts. (Simon 1975, 68-9) 125

Just as Beckett metonymically reduces writing to the simple tracing of a pencil across the page of an exercise book (invoking the complexities of signification), Simon suggests an entire system of material processes in the space of a pulse of light. In a single image Simon unites the near and the distant, the banal and the cosmic, the sensuousness of things and the abstractions that allow us to perceive them. In this single blink of light, we see a series of inversions of the Symbolist abyme: the shadows that threaten to engulf the cityscape are the void, the gouffre, but one formed by interstices created by material processes, in this instance the enormous organic and human forces harnessed by the creation of electricity. The stars in the sky, studded in constellations against the blackness of the night, become the names of film stars that blink on and off in the neon tubing of street signs. The analogical level here is also exploited, not only linguistically or compositionally, but also in the series of natural forces: the flowing lava of the volcano, the invisible machines that drive the powerstation turbine, the forests burnt up to fuel them, the exploited workers who provide the labour in the first place. Such a series also describes a kind of backchaining, one that demystifies capitalist operations, and that takes us beneath the reified surfaces of the industrialised world and into the labyrinth of forces that creates it. 5 It is precisely Simon’s interest in material processes and the implications it has for the development of the mise en abyme that Dällenbach seems so reluctant to engage with. For Dällenbach, what is important about pioneering novels like Triptyque is the way they “break away from the realm of ontology and truth [...] and promote the age of reflexion and language that Mallarmé and Roussel had heralded” (1989, 163). Such conclusions are inevitable given Dällenbach’s structuralist (and to a small degree poststructuralist) methodology. Two critical observations are important here. Firstly, any conception of a literary work whereby it becomes totally reflexive of itself will also entail an extreme self-reflexivity of language. The outcomes of such an analysis lead naturally to the Symbolist, Mallarméan tradition of selfreflexivity, which reaches its culmination in the famous “Sonnet en X”, a poem that tries to be reflexive of language itself (Mallarmé 1994, 217-8). The second tendency of Dällenbach’s analysis is that the sign will dominate over the referent, and literary works that are rooted in the reference function of language, that try to exploit the 126

mise en abyme in order to render, by analogy, patterns in the material world, will be near impossible to theorise. Analysis of Simon’s work becomes extremely partial if it is interpreted only from the point of view of this more transcendental, Symbolist conception of the mise en abyme. It is not for nothing that Simon has used the chosisme of the nouveau roman to depict these phenomena: through the narration of things,6 the exploitation of both the metaphorical power of language and material processes, he develops the device in a way that any notion of language as productive of itself cannot. This development of the generative mise en abyme, this proliferation of mirrors and the concrete potentialities embodied in them, and which, in a double movement, also transform the mirrors themselves, is in many ways the exact opposite of a Beckettian paradoxical mise en abyme, whose concerns, at least as evidenced in novels of the first trilogy (Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), How it Is, and Company, are more linguistic, textual and existential than directly occasioned in the social, historical and material. Yet even if Simon shows us that the relationship between words and things, between signs and referents, is a complex one, it is Beckett who explores similar complexities in the relationship between language and consciousness. Simon’s emphasis on material processes can make it difficult for the mise en abyme to explore the complex nature of subjectivity, the nuances of consciousness, and how consciousness relates to its own perceptual machinery as well as the world of other consciousnesses. In Simon’s work, matters of focalisation and the positioning of the subject (both intra- and extratextual) often rely on either the kind of stream-of-consciousness techniques of high modernism, or the demetaphorised chosisme pioneered by Robbe-Grillet. In comparison to much of Beckett’s prose from How It Is onwards, such schemas represent relatively fixed perceptual modes, which, even if they form a kind of surface across which the mind and the nervous system can trace their chaotic paths, do not achieve the polyvocal intensity of a work like Company, or, to take an example from Beckett’s later work for the theatre, That Time. Thus we can also see how Dällenbach’s model of the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication also runs up against certain limits in respect to Beckett. By emphasising the non-referential aspect of language in the Symbolist tradition, that is by emphasising the relation127

ship between words and other words, it becomes difficult to explore the rich permutations of Beckett’s use in Company of self-reflexive structures in terms of polyvocal enunciation strategies and the workings of human consciousness. It is this attempt to grasp the operations of consciousness and its relations to sense and memory that wreaks such havoc on the unitary meaning of words, not simply the attempt to problematise any direct relations between words and things. The attempt to categorise a form as manifold and complex as the hyper self-reflexive mise en abyme could perhaps only have created a situation where its textual embodiments – works such as Company and Triptyque – lead to its undoing. If this is the case, it puts the theorisation of the Type III mise en abyme in a thankless position: the very portal of discovery it created is closed behind it once we have been given an entry to the works only that structure could provide. Yet, in my view, there is a sense in which the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication lays the groundwork for it’s own abolition, because once the hierarchical relationship between frame and miniature, either between mirror text and whole, between the I and its subordinated voices and events, completely implode, we are left with an open-ended textual entity that resembles a fragment of a pattern in which no motif can dominate. It is to this very threshold that Beckett and Simon take the development of the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication. Notes 1.

A new phase of the nouveau roman that Dällenbach claims begins in the 1970s. See Dällenbach, 1989, Chapter 10.

2.

Dällenbach illustrates this point with the circle image from Beckett’s Watt (Dällenbach: 102-3).

3.

The version of Company referred to was published with two other prose works from the 1980s, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, under the title Nohow On (1989), and is often called the second trilogy.

4.

This, of course, in no way concludes a discussion of Beckett’s use of the mise an abyme. Krapp’s Last Tape, with its ingenious use of

128

recording technology and its implications for identity and memory, is a particularly rich use of the device, but would require an analysis of the semiotics of performance that a study of the novel cannot comprehensively include. 5.

In his notes for a film of Marx’s Capital, Sergei Eisenstein (1987) intended to use a cinematic form, employed by Vertov in his Man with a Movie Camera, know as the “hysteron proteron,” which “depicts the process of production in reverse” (129).

6.

See Goldmann (1975), particularly the chapter “The Nouveau Roman and Reality”, for an account of how the narration of things lends itself to depicting new layers of reality out of the reach of traditional realist discourse.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Beckett, Samuel, Molloy Malone Dies The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1976). –, Nohow On (London: John Calder, 1989). Dällenbach, Lucien, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely with Emma Hughes (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). Eisenstein, Sergei, “Notes for a Film of Capital”, trans. Marcie Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson, in October: The First Decade, 1976-1986, ed. Annette Michelson, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P. 1987), 129. Goldmann, Lucien, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock P, 1975). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). Nooy, Juliana de, “The Double Scission: Dällenbach, Dolezel, and Derrida on Doubles”, in Style, 25:1 (DeKalb: NIL, 1991), 19. Simon, Claude, L’Herbe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1958). –, The Grass, trans. Richard Howe (New York: George Braziller, 1960). –, Les Corps Conducteurs (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971). –, Triptyque (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973). –, Conducting Bodies, trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Calder Boyars, 1975). –, Triptych. Trans. Helen R. Lane (London: John Calder P, 1977).

129

KEEPING THEIR DISTANCE: Beckett and Borges Writing after Joyce Anthony Cordingley

This article examines the dynamic underlying Beckett’s experience of language, an attitude which focussed his prose style towards what Hugh Kenner termed Beckett’s ‘atom-age prose’ with Comment c’est/ How It Is. Beckett’s desire to write in French and his compulsion to self-translate are read as evolving, integral components of this dynamic. Crucial to this trajectory is Beckett’s radical, but never divorced, critique of modernist literary form in Joyce and Proust. In Spanish and Latin American literature, Jorge Luis Borges crafted a different alternative to the aesthetic of the modernist novel. Borges’s ficciones are a generic riposte to Joycean modernism, and in some of these stories the scene of aesthetic contestation is beguilingly satirised.

Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges have often been coupled as exemplars and pioneers of postmodern fiction since John Barth’s seminal essay of 1967, “The Literature of Exhaustion”. They were the joint winners of the first Formentor Prize in 1961 1, which apart from increasing the international attention to both Beckett and Borges, effected at least a mutual recognition between the two writers. However, it seems that during their careers, neither writer had anything to say of the other. While Beckett’s reticence is not out of character, given Borges’ enormous critical output, his reviews of contemporary literature, and his books on and translations of English and American literature, his silence towards Beckett is remarkable. The ellipsis is more important because of Borges’ unofficial position as an interpreter of Anglophone literary culture to the Argentine and Latin American literary community. This article proposes that this silence is the result of the antithetical nature of each author’s response to the modernist novel, specifically Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The diverging aes-

thetic strategies of each author will be traced through their literary affiliation and disaffiliation to the aesthetic of Joycean modernism. ***** Beckett treats Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s “Work in Progress”, in terms of the fabric of their language. In 1931 he writes of Proust, “the quality of the language is more important than any system of ethics or aesthetics” (1965, 66). Symbolic associations are the result of the linguistic play of the text, a density whose organising principle is poetic; a function of what Beckett terms “autosymbolism” (1965, 80). A similar agency is attributed to Joyce’s language in the 1929 essay “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”. Beckett contends, “Here [in Work in Progress] form is content and content is form. You claim that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read” (1984, 27). Similar to Proust’s ‘autosymbolism’, Joyce’s language exists within its own textual dynamic, regardless of the practices of a reader. Beckett characterises the dynamic in Joyce’s text as a purgatorial one where competing and opposing tendencies give life to an unresolved linguistic tension that avoids the stasis of a heaven or a hell, paradise or inferno. Beckett writes, “Purgatory is a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of these two elements” (1984, 33). However, instead of becoming an ideal centre, in Beckett’s reading, the field of the text partakes of a circular motion where these extreme elements move from one to the other. In Beckett’s Fiction (Hill, 1990), Leslie Hill provides a fecund reading of the purgatorial dimension to Beckett’s prose, however I would like to draw out the extent to which it was a dynamic which underwrote his aesthetic, encompassing stylistic inclinations and the compulsion to self-translate. The style of Beckett’s early prose works, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1936) are most obviously indebted to Joyce. However in the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett connects what he calls his project of a “literature of the unword” to the imperative to move beyond the English language. He says, “more and more my own language appears before me as a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things” (1984, 171). To write in what Beckett calls “official English” is “becoming more and more difficult, even senseless” (1984, 171). The compulsion in Watt (1944) to push its language 132

towards disintegration – Watt’s obsessive articulations, cancellings and reinscriptions, his backwards writing – signals Beckett’s experimentation with a character whose indifference to language proliferates difference against an engulfing logos. Leslie Hill observes: Watt’s inverted words, then, dramatise a deep-seated division in identity, one which was already visible in his ambivalent attitude to his dead father, asserting the difference of his father’s nether parts while unable to substantiate that difference. The use of cryptic language to enact this division of the self supposes that within one language various different treatments of language, different idioms, or different voices are able to coexist simultaneously. (1990, 34) Watt’s language becomes encrypted with what cannot be incorporated into it. The scene dramatises Beckett’s drive to free himself from ‘official English’. It is clear that after his intense period of writing in French after WWII and before 1950 Beckett experienced a liberating energy. This has been much commented upon by critics, yet the period need not be seen as a rupture in Beckett’s aesthetic progression. That letter to Kaun shows that as early as 1937 Beckett was dissatisfied with the course of the avant-garde, namely what he saw as Joyce’s “apotheosis” of the word. Beckett’s shift to writing in French he expressed to Ludovic Janvier as “le désir de m’appauvrir davantage. C’était ça le vrai mobile” (Janvier, 18). Creation in a foreign tongue had an incantational, ecstatic effect on Beckett: “French [...] afforded him [...] triumph of feeling and thought, an inspired simplicity, a glimpse of imagining the unimaginable, through the rotation of simple sounds and words, not a trope so much as a tropism towards the dark sun of death” (Ricks, 47) [my italics]. Here Ricks is referring to the death drive in Beckett’s writing, the triumph of witnessing one’s own fall. If writing in English had become infernal for Beckett and in French a paradisiacal release, he knew only too well that neither language would express what needed to be expressed, or perhaps, never only what needed to be expressed. Beckett’s essentially bilingual production in the ‘50s implicated him in his own purgatorial divisions, of a self essentially divided be133

tween a mother tongue from which he escaped, but to which he was compelled to return. The masochistic compulsion to self-translate into English, to inflict upon himself a labour which was from all reports so painful to him, tempered the ecstasy of his post-war literary liberation (Molloy, 1951, Waiting for Godot, 1954; Malone Dies, 1956; Endgame, 1958; The Unnamable, 1958). Furthermore, the litany of doubled characters which populate Beckett’s texts may in one sense be read not so much as derived from, but essential to the unity of this aesthetic principle. The situation is born out with an example, taken more or less at random from Comment c’est (1961)/ How It Is(1964), a work chosen because of its position, coming after the initial effusions of writing in French, and the translations of the ‘50’s. Chosen also because its prose composition denies dialectical closure. The syntax is slippery and indeterminate, there are no defined beginnings or endings, the verbal phrase, not the sentence, is the basic unit, and the entire text lacks punctuation or capitalisation (except, tellingly, at the scenes of inscription on Pim’s back). Seven paragraphs into the novel the reader encounters this: ici donc première partie comment c’était avant Pim ça suit je cite l’ordre à peu près ma vie dernier état ce qu’il en reste des bribes je l’entends ma vie dans l’ordre plus ou moins je l’apprends je cite un moment donné loin derrière un temps énorme puis à partir de là ce moment-là et suivants quleques-uns l’ordre naturel des temps énormes (1961, 1999, 10) here then part one how it was before Pim we follow I quote the natural order more or less my life last state last version what remains bits and scraps I hear it my life natural order more or less I learn it I quote a given moment long past vast stretch of time on from there that moment and following not all a selection natural order vast tracts of time (1964, 1996, 8) The voice in this passage seems to be saying that its articulation will move at once from moments long past and forwards, while also from the just articulated, ‘my life[,] last state[,] last version’ and forwards. 134

Beckett stresses that the voice is that of the “narrator-narrated” (Cohn, 1973, 233), the voice claims to be reading, or quoting, from a text of its own life. Yet, here the syntax mocks the ‘je cite’, internally moving against the order of quotation when the voice hears ‘my life’ followed by ‘natural order’ inverting the order of its original inscription, implying that it has reversed the trajectory the ‘natural order’ – it is after all buried in primordial mud. Conversely, if the stress falls on ‘my life last state last version’, ‘state’ is not the ‘état’ of the narrator-narrated, but a present imperative to state, to articulate. Again that circulating, purgatorial motion dominates because any poetics of translation is also mocked as it will only ever state the last version (absent from the French), and so mimic the ironised order of quotation, advancing in reverse. The final phrase of the English text ‘vast tracts of time’ varies its preceding ‘vast stretch of time’, which also implies an order of difference which, as symptomatic of the telling of a tale, could well affirm a forwards motion of inscription – like the act of producing ‘tracts’, as in literary artifacts (or translations). Furthermore, an anxiety to reveal a voice ontologically woven to the aesthetic of textual production is comically held in check by the subversive potentiality of language: as Beckett probably well knew, a tract was also an anthem of verses formerly sung on certain penitential days or at requiems, in place of the alleluia. In Comment c’est, the order of quotation offers a parody of scientific discourse and its premise of linear progression. An advancing control over both memory and writing is invoked in the final lines. Yet embedded in the assertion to follow, ‘not all a selection natural order’ is of course, the logic of regression, a reversed order of natural selection. H. Porter Abbot has explored Beckett’s critique of the trope of the quest dominant in nineteenth century literature which exploded “the idea of onwardness, he completed the job that modernists had begun in ridding plot of linear causality” (1996, 42). That narrator/narrated’s flaunting of his learning – his occasional bursting forth with inkhorn diction and learned allusions to Heraclitus, Apostle’s Creed, Malebranche, Klopstock, Erebus, Belacqua etcetera – informs the central scene of the novel, the meeting of Pim and the torture of Pim. The torture is Pim’s education in oral and written language, yet power and control will soon shift, as torturer becomes victim with the meeting of Bom. These characters seem to exist as a line of selves in the same series of one being, and the ultimate circularity of the narra135

tive suggests that the narrator-narrated acquired his erudition as a subject in such inhuman scenes of instruction. His existence is Wattlike, polyvalent: like the blind echo of Watt in ‘what remains’, Beckett suggests the radical indeterminacy of the narrator-narrated’s textual crawling from west to east – of production underwritten with pain and volatility, without escape from this inky morass. Be he alive (remaining), or dead (in remains), Watt still haunts the narrator-narrated’s language, threatening with a linguistic blackout. Stylistically, the novel’s fabric of repetition on some twenty or so stock phrases, moderated in tonal nuances, weds with its form an order of repetitive difference. Bound within these coordinates the reader articulates the sound of being in this universe. What is absurd is the seeming indifference with which the language coordinates are selected, the “I quote”, “vast stretch of time”, “something wrong there”, “I say it as I hear it”, etcetera. Hugh Kenner has said of Comment c’est “[I]t gets useful work from the microforces of language” (Kenner, 198). Indeed, the absurdity is unimportant because as with Proust’s ‘autosymbolism’, semantic import comes from the words’ function in the text, Beckett’s own ‘natural order’ of repetition and difference. “[T]he trend is towards monosyllables each with maximized semantic content. This atom-age prose emits its meanings in quanta”(Kenner, 203). The most obvious differences between the two versions – the insertion of ‘last version’ which echoes ‘last state’, the occurrence of ‘natural’ three times not just once, ‘vast tract’ or ‘vast stretch of time’ refracting the French ‘temps énorme’ – result from Beckett’s consolidation of English accentual rhythm, as apposed to the tonic rhythm of French. Contrary to the purely postmodern interpretation of Beckett’s prose, which holds that beyond Beckett’s language there is nothingness, in a text like Comment c’est the intersecting rhymes and echoes, the repetitions and variations on a stock of phrases contributes to a feeling that there is a not just a voice but a self which is remembering. Scholars have observed that at least up until the late prose – when Beckett again felt English to be a foreign language – the narrative voice of the English translations is embedded with dialogical quanta in excess of the French. It is not surprising then to see in the quoted verset the impersonal ‘ça suit’ become ‘we follow’. While this invites a tone of greater informality into the English translation, it also posi136

tions the reader alongside the narrator-narrated, with all his Pims and Boms, and whatever else. When in that same letter of 1937 Beckett wrote to Kaun imploring “us therefore to act like that mad (?) mathematician who used a different principle of measurement at each step of his calculation” (1984, 173) this not only anticipates the internal dynamic of the prose Beckett would write, but it aptly describes a mode of composition which seeks to match two inherently different language systems. Commenting on Beckett’s self translations Brian T. Fitch, Steven Connor, A. R. Jones, Leslie Hill and others have persuasively argued that the usual primacy accorded the original over the translation does not exist with Beckett’s self-translations. Because he is the author of both the original and translated text, because the translated text might be used to clarify the original and because the translated text may even be an improvement on the original, the original is subsequently rendered a version of its translation as much as vice versa (in the case of Molloy, both texts bear the same title, as well as identical character names). Each version of the text gains its identity from its difference to the other version; each owes a debt to the other. Beckett sought to distinguish his ‘atom-age prose’ from the excess of apotheosis in Joyce and Proust: “Il suffit, remarque-t-il, d’examiner leurs manuscripts ou les épreuves qu’ils ont corrigées. Ils n’en finissaient pas d’ajouter et de surajouter. Lui il va dans l’autre sens, vers le rien, en comprimant son texte toujours davantage” (Juliet, 1986, 39). Nevertheless the result of Beckett’s constriction of his text is to channel the potential power of language into its most basic elements. If the purgatorial circling in Joyce is a centrifugal one driving language to its apotheosis, Beckett sublimated that dynamism in his texts by drilling into quotidian existence with a centripetal energy. Stephen Connor makes a crucial observation, “[T]here is a sense in which the proliferation of minima in Beckett’s work begins to resemble the superabundance of Joyce and Proust” (1988, 11). Beckett seems to have acknowledged this when he is then quoted by Connor, “quelque part, les deux manières doivent se rejoindre” (1988, 11). ***** Jorge Luis Borges’ response to the Anglo-European novel was a generic counterpoint, his ficcion: the literary short fiction shaped by the 137

logic of the detective story. A revealing critical approach is to focus the investigation not on Borges’ language, but on the way in which the tropes and allusions with which he laced his ficciones clarify exactly where his literary affiliations lie. Between 1919 and 1921, those same years in which Joyce was completing Ulysses, Borges the young Argentine intellectual, lived in Seville and became deeply involved in the avant-garde ultraísta movement. This movement rejected the popular aesthetic of Hispanic modernismo, which does not correspond with Anglo-European modernism, but was rather an aesthetic characterised by “rich rhymes, sumptuous images, highly wrought exoticism and decadent eroticism” (Sarlo, 36)2. It was chiefly a poetic aesthetic which flourished in Hispanic poetry from 1880 through the first World War, and its chief exemplars were the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío and in Argentina, Leopoldo Lugones. The ultraístas rejection of modernismo is similar to the reaction of Anglo-European and American high modernists against fin de siècle aesthetes and decadents (Rice, 48-9). Ultraísmo shared formal imperatives with avant-garde movements in Europe such as futurism and cubism. Upon his return to Buenos Aires in 1921, Borges instigated the ultraísta broadsheet poster, Prisma. The first issue of Prisma heralded the death of the psychological novel and castigated poets who relied upon autobiography and tired approaches to symbolism. The manifesto for a new poetry demanded the reduction of lyric poetry to its basic element, metaphor; the elimination of superfluous adjectives and connecting phrases; and importantly it called for the synthesis of two or more images in one, enlarging the suggestive potential of language (Borges, 1921, 52). The ultraístas also sought to reinvigorate the neglected baroque authors of the Spanish Golden Age. They came to recognise experiments with Latinate syntax and elaborate imagery in Góngora, in Quevedo the play with conceit, and in Cervantes the labyrinthine fiction within fiction, each of which echoed their own concerns (Rodriguez Monegal, 166). In this sense the young Borges writes from an aesthetic base not dissimilar to that of the young Beckett. Both authors were driven to their respective avant-gardes by the perceived limitations in their national literatures and the air of literary experimentation in continental Europe. By 1924 Borges had distanced himself from ultraísmo and what he saw as its “baroque” indulgence. While Borges was obviously im138

pressed by Joyce’s language in his 1925 review of Ulysses, declaring Joyce “a millionaire of words and styles”, he closes the review with an address to Joyce using Lope de Vega’s “respectful words” to Góngora, symbolising that for Borges the two authors, Joyce and Góngora, share a similarly decadent place in literature (2001, 12-15). Yet, the year before his review of Ulysses, Borges had written for Ortega y Gasset’s Spanish review, the Revista de Occidente, an article severely criticising the language of Góngora which he reads as “urged by grammarians” at the attempt to imitate Latinisms. Borges contrasts this with the virtues of Quevedo’s poetry which he compliments as being “psychological; it aims at restoring to all ideas the risky and abrupt character which made them astonishing the first time they came to mind” (1924, 10). By affiliating Joyce with Góngora, Borges is passing judgement upon him as a grammarian, albeit a superlative one, as opposed to a writer of inspired artistry. Furthermore, Borges is distancing himself from the Seville ultraístas and their experimental attitude to poetic language by identifying himself with Lope, a critic of the Latinised diction of gongorismo, popular amongst southern sevillanos and cordobeses in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Spain3. In 1927 the Góngora revival was at its peak in the Hispanic literary world. New scholarly editions of Góngora’s Soledades were being published by the poet Dámaso Alonso, who incidentally translated Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Spanish. Borges deplored the Góngora revival and in an essay which appeared in his 1928 collection El Idioma de los argentinos, he affirms his break from the ultraístas and gives a clue to his real opinion of Joyce, “Góngora has become a symbol for meticulous but superfluous games of technique, for the simulation of mystery, for mere adventures in syntax – in other words, for that melodic and perfect non-literature that I have always repudiated” (1928, 123). It is therefore difficult to agree with the common perception amongst Borges critics who hold that Borges’ reaction to Joyce was both enthusiastic and hopeful. In both reviews of Finnegans Wake, “A Fragment on Joyce” (1941, 2001, 220-221) and “Joyce's Latest Novel” (1939, 2001, 195), Borges refers to Stuart Gilbert as the “official interpreter” of Joyce. While Borges hopes for an exegetical treatise from Gilbert on this “verbal labyrinth”, Borges passes sentence upon the language of the text: “Finnegans Wake is a concatenation of puns committed in a 139

dreamlike English that is difficult not to categorise as frustrated and incompetent” (1939; 2001, 195). In “A Fragment on Joyce” Borges obliquely indicates that his character Funes from the 1944 story “Funes, his Memory” (1998, 131137), is in some way a portrait of the sleepless reader which Joyce famously invoked as the ideal reader of Ulysses. Despite being a rural Argentine, Funes is rumoured to have an English father though his name is the decidedly Celtic, O’Connor. Even before the accident which mysteriously endows Funes with the power of absolute memory, Funes always knew what time it is and so is tagged “chronometric Funes”, progressing through time with the precision of Bloom’s hourly movements. Though after his accident, Funes moves beyond time, he spends all his days in his dark room, and defies the present in his ability to perceive past and future consequences of phenomena and memory. He becomes less Bloom than Bloom’s narrator. Reminiscent of Joyce’s mapping of the clouds in what Hugh Kenner calls the “parallax” effect in the Telemachus and Calypso chapters of Ulysses, Funes “knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882” (1998, 135). In contrast, when the narrator of Borges’ story first leaves Funes before his fall it is to depart on the Saturn, thus, the narrator is at the service of Cronos, time4. Equally, the telegram which the narrator receives prompts him into considering a conjunction of reality against rhetoric, of the “absoluteness of the adverbial phrase” which distracted him from “any possibility of real pain”(1998, 133). This distancing from real, human emotion by a grammarian’s obsessiveness in the narrator of this story – the note is after all telling him that his father is ill – differs to the kind of physical correspondence in Ulysses, and in Funes. For Funes, memories were “not simple – every visual image was linked to muscular sensations” which imitates the logic of Ulysses’ every chapter and hour of the day corresponding to a body part. Each time Funes reconstructs an entire day, it had “itself taken an entire day” (1998, 135). In “A Fragment on Joyce”, Borges dismisses Ulysses’ “imperceptible and laborious correspondences” as “wilful tics” [‘tics voluntarios’] (2001, 221). Borges articulates his utter disdain for Joyce’s use of Homer’s narrative, “Among these wilful tics, the most praised has been the most meaningless: James Joyce’s contacts with Homer, or (simply) with the Senator from the depártment du Jura, M. Victor Bérard” (2001, 221). 140

Reminiscent both of the taxonomania of Ulysses and the neologisms of Finnegans Wake, Funes entertains a bizarre, illogical theory which wants to attribute a phrase to every single number, yet he cannot understand a plain logic to the contrary. The narrator states, “He was the lucid spectator of a multiform, momentous and almost unbearably precise world” (1998, 136). Funes had already been compared to the emperor of Lilliput in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and his mad numerical system is the kind of ridiculous scientific hypothesis one encounters in the grand and venerated academy in the third part of Gulliver’s Travels. Yet, Funes (a.k.a. James Joyce) is essentially the idiot savant; he is “virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas” and despite being like Joyce, a polyglot, “He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin”, Funes “was not very good at thinking” (1998, 136-7). Borges connects Joyce and Swift with Flaubert and the idiot savant, in his 1954 essay, “A Defence of Bouvard and Pécuchet”. The essay couples Flaubert and Swift together for their hatred of human stupidity. Bouvard and Pécuchet are the two characters of Flaubert’s unfinished final novel. Each is essentially an idiot savant, though they move to the country and embark upon an encyclopaedic course of learning, which Flaubert’s novel charts in minute detail. Borges clearly delineates his allegiances when he writes: The negligences or disdains or liberties of the final Flaubert have disconcerted the critics; I believe I see in them a symbol. The man who, with Madame Bovary, forged the realist novel was also the first to shatter it. Chesterton, only yesterday, wrote: “The novel may well die with us.” Flaubert instinctively sensed this death, which is indeed taking place (is not Ulysses, with its maps and timetables and exactitudes the magnificent death throes of a genre?). (2001, 389) The idea that the novel was on its deathbed had been circulating with the Spanish ultraístas largely through the influence of Ortega’s 1925 essay, “Ideas on the Novel” (Ortega 1983, 51-95). However, Borges’ conducts a thorough attack on Ortega’s essay in the preface to the novel The Invention of Morel by his compatriot, literary coconspirator and friend 1940 Adolfo Bioy Casares (2001, 243). Borges 141

uses the occasion to denounce both the kind of psychological novel devoid of a compelling plot, and Ortega’s theory that readers now had a ‘superior sensibility’ for plots of adventure. Borges insists on the existence of superior plots of certain twentieth century novels such as The Trial, Le Voyageur sur la terre and Bioy Casares’ novel itself. Proust is found somnolent and tedious, thus “unacceptable”. Borges then characteristically invokes G.K. Chesterton and the detective story; for the quality of his plots, Chesterton, author of the Father Brown detective stories, is deemed superior to Stevenson. Borges repeatedly claimed to have borrowed his narrative strategies from English writers, not modernists, but the likes of De Quincey, Wells, Stevenson and Chesterton. The logic which allowed Chesterton to pass final judgement upon the genre of the modernist novel in “A Defence of Bouvard and Pécuchet” is mirrored in Borges’ story from 1941, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1998, 131-37). This ficcion is a sharp satire veiled in a sinologist’s garb at the meaningless of Ulysses to a non-academic reader. To my knowledge César Augosto Salgado is the only critic to have identified “The Garden of Forking Paths” as a critique of Joyce’s aesthetic. Salgado also makes the fascinating discovery that Joyce’s ‘official interpreter’, the man to whom he gave the diagram schema of Ulysses, Stuart Gilbert, is actually disguised under the anagrammatic repetition, in St-ephen Alb-ert, the character who in “The Garden of Forking Paths” provides the answer to the riddle of the labyrinthine novel. The story is encoded with much of the mystery and legend surrounding Ulysses. However, to read it with a detective’s eye is to witness the triumph of the logic of the detective story over the modernist novel of invisibly ordered symbols (and the industry which justifies its existence): Albert the scholar is finally murdered by the spy who delivers his one word answer, not through any dubious scholarly exposition, but via the logic of the detective narrative. After Yu Tsun murders Albert, he is himself captured by the Irishman, Richard Madden. However, Yu Tsun’s reader (the Boss in Germany) knows to read the newspaper headline as the rhetorical gambit of its real author, Yu Tsun, and so – as in Lacan’s reading of Poe’s, “The Purloined Letter” – the letter reaches its destination. Yu Tsun’s message is understood and Albert, the English city, is bombed. The joke is on scholars with a bent for deciphering, but Borges invites the attention as much as any original text “demands translation” (de Man, 1986, 82) for its regen142

eration – and Borges seemed particularly willing to be reborn as an Anglo-American author. ***** What Beckett identified in Joyce as the word’s ‘apotheosis’, Borges diagnosed as ‘verbal monstrosities’. Borges’ self-styled labyrinthine, metaphysical ficcion is an aesthetic and generic riposte against this decadent weight of the modernist novel. He riles against a narrative mode where a struggle over what Beckett terms ‘the materiality of the word surface’ is either superior to the plot, or provides the direction for the plot itself. This is the mode in which Beckett’s Comment c’est/ How It Is operates. Beckett chose not to reject Joyce’s aesthetic project of extending the potentiality of prose through that ‘purgatorial’ means of composition. Rather, from this impetus Beckett strove to arrange the basic elements of language, even the friction of two languages, to rupture the surfaces of narrative fiction. Borges found recourse from the issue of language by submitting existent forms of narrative, namely the detective story and fantastic fiction, to the kind of dialectical interrogation of the status of the text and subjectivity which is often associated with the modernist novel. The response of Beckett and Borges to the Joycean aesthetic is deeply antithetical. The constitutive differences of their engagement with Joyce undermine an invocation of Beckett and Borges as theoretically sympathetic avatars of postmodern experimentalism. Notes 1.

The Formentor Prize was established by five European avantgarde publishers and one from the United States: Libraire Gallimard, in France; Giulio Einaudi in Italy; Ernst Rowohlt Verlag in West Germany; Weidenfeld & Nicholson in England; Editorial Seix-Barral from Spain; and Grove Press in the United States.

2.

Sarlo’s description is directly referring to Leopoldo Lugones, the Argentine modernista.

3.

On this aspect of Lope’s critique of the Latinising of Castillian see, M. Romera-Navarro. “Lope y su defensa de la pureza de la

143

lengua y estilo poético”. Revue Hispanique. LXVII: 171 (1929), 287-320; 172, 321-81; and Leo Cabranes–Grant, “Lope de Vega y los debates sobre el origen de la lengua castellana”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. 77:3 (2000); 147-169. 4.

I owe this observation to my supervisor, Dr Bruce Gardiner.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996). Barth, John, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Atlantic Monthly (August: 1967). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (New York: Grove, 1957). –, Watt (New York: Grove, 1959). –, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965). –, More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove, 1972). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (New York: Grove, 1984). –, How It Is (London: John Calder, 1996). –, Comment c’est (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1999). Borges, Jorge Luis, “Ultraísmo,” in Nosotros (Buenos Aires) 39:151 (December, 1921). –, “Menoscabo y grandeza de Quevedo,” in Revista de Occidente, 6:10 (December, 1924). –, El idioma de los argentinos (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1928). –, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). –, The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). Cohn, Ruby, Back to Beckett (New Jersey: Princeton U P, 1973). Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). de Man, Paul, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1986). Hill, Leslie, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). Janvier, Ludovic. Samuel Beckett par lui-même (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1969). Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1964) –, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1986).

144

Juliet, Charles, Rencontre Avec Samuel Beckett (Paris: Editions Fata Morgana, 1986). Kenner, Hugh, “Beckett Translating Beckett: Comment C’est”, in Delos: A Journal of Translation, 5 (1970) 194-211. Ortega y Gasset, Jorge, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (New York: Double Day, Anchor, 1983). Rice, Thomas, “Subtle Reflections of/upon Joyce in/by Borges,” in Journal of Modern Literature, 24.1 (2000), 48-49. Ricks, Christopher, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993). Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1978). Sarlo, Beatriz, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, (London and New York: Verso, 1993).

145

SAMUEL BECKETT AND FRIEDERIKE MAYRÖCKER: Attempts at Writing the Self Hannes Schweiger

Taking the concept of autographical writing as a starting point, I will discuss the importance of Samuel Beckett's late prose for Friederike Mayröcker's writing. My focus is on their continuous attempts at establishing a self and thereby challenging traditional concepts of identity. The question of how to constitute a self through remembering as well as through creating a relationship to other selves and to a possibly non-existent, but imaginary outside reality is touched upon by both writers and I will discuss their different answers – if there are any but the old ones.

Many texts by Samuel Beckett, both drama and prose, can be read as examples of autography, of ‘writing the self’, as texts which are concerned with the problem of identity and which elaborate on the impossibility of establishing a stable self and of representing an individual’s life through language. As H. Porter Abbott has convincingly and extensively argued (1996), the notion of autography, instead of narrowing down and limiting Beckett’s texts to an autobiographical reading, enhances a discussion of some of the primary concerns that Beckett has pursued throughout his life as a writer. His attempts at writing the self are closely linked to his project of a ‘literature of the unword’, to his search for a language beyond representation as well as to his explorations of the relationship between the self and the other (Uhlmann, 156-186), the body and the mind and between inner and outer reality. An autographical reading of Beckett’s texts also sheds more light on the challenge they present to concepts of autobiography and biography which still dominate a large proportion of the discourses on this subject. Taking the notion of autography as a starting point and as a point of comparison, one of the foremost aims of this article is to draw attention to an Austrian writer who has not only become one of the

most interesting and most renowned contemporary authors in the German-speaking world, but whose writing is related to the works of Samuel Beckett in many respects. Friederike Mayröcker is one of the most prolific and also most challenging contemporary Austrian writers. She was awarded the prestigious Georg Büchner Preis in 2001 and has been writing mainly prose, but also poetry, radio plays, drama and children’s books. She draws to a large extent on the works of other writers and artists. When she was awarded the Hölderlin Preis in 1993 she listed the main ingredients for her writing: A pinch of Benn, a pinch of Brecht, a pinch of St. John Perse, Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic reports of his life, Jean Paul, Freud, Francis Ponge, a lot by Breton, Michaux, Duras, some by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Botho Strauß, and again and again Samuel Beckett, the incomparable master of modernism.1 (1995, 90) Beckett is frequently referred to as being her favourite writer, one whom she keeps returning to in her attempts at coming to terms with the problems of identity, language and reality. Reading a text by Beckett has such a powerful and overwhelming effect on her that it almost silences her and gives her the impression of no longer being able to write anything at all, because of her admiration for Beckett’s writing and because of her sense of failure in her own work (1987, 180). But silence, as she remarked in an interview (Kastberger, 32), presses forth new language and generates a new text. In this respect, reading Beckett’s texts exerts a stimulating effect on her writing, makes her fight the silence and keep it at bay. In Stilleben / Still Life, there is an interlocutor called Samuel, who repeatedly comments on the text in the process of its coming into existence. As Mayröcker declared, Samuel could be understood as an hommage to Beckett, in a text written around the time of his death (Kastberger, 31). One should be careful, however, to completely associate this interlocutor with Samuel Beckett, since all the interlocutors in Mayröcker’s texts are just figments of the narrator’s mind and their selves are as unstable and interchangeable as is the narrator’s own self. 148

It would be misleading to assign paramount importance to the influence of Beckett on Mayröcker’s writing. There are many others who figure in her reading and writing and whom she herself regards as highly influential. Mayröcker never tries to speak through the texts and quotes of others, nor are her texts a postmodern vanity fair with a clever writer devising riddles for literary scholars. Her practise of “a trembling fury a quoting fury”, a “ZITTERWUT ZITIERWUT” (1995, 40) is one of appropriating the voice of the other, altering it and turning it into emanations of the narrator’s own shifting self. The material taken from other texts enters the writer’s perforated mind and body and by passing through her body and mind it is changed, altered, muddled up, thrown into disorder. Undergoing the hallucinatory process of a “fluttering of the mind”, a “DENKFLATTERN” (1991, 183), the texts are stripped of their original meaning, the voice of the other no longer speaks in its own right, but rather on behalf of the narrator. The narrator occupies the signifier of the other for the purpose of rereading it and reading its own self in this mirror text. The narrator is only able to create the temporary illusion of a self by virtue of the otherness of these texts, which have been appropriated as its own texts. Furthermore, her reading of other works of art is a productive misreading, which transforms the original texts or passages, puts them into a completely different context and assigns new meanings to them. Even her own writings, the drafts of her texts are prone to be misread by her in the course of working on them and reworking them (1991, 176). Scenes from the past, figments of the mind, traces of dreams and many images come in between her and the texts of others as well as her own texts. In this sense, her reading is as much a failure as is her writing, but at the same time misreading and misrepresenting, ill seeing and ill saying is the condition under which her writing thrives and which is the very driving force of her texts. The main driving force for her writing is to perfect the means of expression in order to be able to capture in language her inner reality, her perceptions, thoughts and emotions. However, the effort to refine her means of expression is always threatened by silence and haunted by the notion of the insufficiency of her language as well as of her flawed perception. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Beckett 1983, 7). This is also one of the driving forces in Mayröcker’s writing and she actually mis-quotes this sentence by Beckett in her last major 149

prose work brütt: “‘scheitern nochmals scheitern besser scheitern’, Samuel Beckett” (1998, 201). ***** The impossibility to grasp one’s own self, to establish a stable self and to assert one’s identity is a recurrent issue in Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s writing. Both writers have produced texts which resist the notion of narrating one’s life from its beginning to the present. An autobiographical reading would thus mean a closure to texts that are fascinating precisely because of their resistance to closure and solidification and because they constantly reflect on modes of autographical writing. The notion of autography liberates a discussion of Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s texts from any tendency to link these texts with the ‘real lives’ of both writers, it shifts the focus onto questions of writing the self and of treating the problem of identity. In Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s texts alike, the self and its others exist only within language. In this respect one can read their texts as examples of prosopopeia, which Paul de Man discussed in his seminal essay “Autobiography as De-facement”. Prosopopeia is the rhetorical figure which gives a face to the absent or the dead and thus makes them visible and readable. But at the same time it acts as defacement, since the face made visible in language is not the face itself. The face itself always remains something invisible, something outside language and thus something absent and silent. The personae, which serve to substitute a dead and non-present center in Mayröcker’s and Beckett’s texts, have only imaginary status. In Company it is a “deviser devising it all for company” (Beckett 1996, 64), a “deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself” (34). In Worstward ho, the voice speaking is struggling at establishing the presence of the man, the child and of the woman as well as of himself. “Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none.” (7) The speaking voice commands itself: “On. Say on.” (7), driven by the urge to express where there is nothing to express. Finally, the figures emerge out of the void: “Say that a body. Somehow standing. In the dim void” (11). After having brought the four figures into existence and having rendered them visible through language, in a continuous movement of back and forth, making them appear and disappear again, the narrator struggles to gradually reduce and dissolve them 150

again. The narrator is the “scene and seer of all” (23). By trying to find words for his figments of the mind he becomes at the same time the observer of his own creation and reads it in order to rewrite it. He cannot help creating and tries to undo his creations, but by doing so he creates. Worstward ho is generated as a text through the attempt to move beyond representation and capture nothingness. Since this is done through language, a text emerges, and similarly the figures in the text are generated precisely because of this effort to represent the nonrepresentable. What the text can then only do is to reduce the figures, ‘worsen’ them till the ‘unlessenable least’, the ‘unworsenable worst’, but nothingness or non-presence can never be brought about within the text. In Mayröcker’s texts, the different personae are emanations from the narrator’s self, which splits into a multitude of selves and others. In Still Life, she refers to her writings as “a dialogically overflowing prose-of-consciousness”, “eine dialogisch ausufernde Bewußtseinsprosa” (1991, 100). Her dialogues, her “SHAM TALKS” (1991, 150) with imaginary partners indicate a sense of self-alienation: I am removed from my self, unfathomable, I have moved away from my self, [...] I live at a distance from my self, I regard my self as a person who is close to me, with whom I am, however, not identical. (2001, 373) The various others merge into each other and their voices cannot be clearly distinguished from one another. For Mayröcker, imagining others is a means of temporarily establishing one’s self, which is only possible through a detour through the other. As Jacques Derrida argues, “it is the ear of the other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography” (1985, 51). For the duration of the writing process, the fiction of a self is created. But this self can never be solidified, because the others only exist as emanations from the narrator’s self. And the narrator self-consciously generates and undoes these others. Similarly, in Company the others that are devised for company never fulfill their purpose of giving presence to the one in the dark, because they are unmasked as being only figments of the mind. Accordingly, the self can never enter a more definite and stable status. But its crav151

ing for company is precisely grounded in its need for the other for asserting its identity and self. It has frequently been remarked in the literature on Beckett that his late texts are mainly concerned with a process of reduction towards the final silence, towards the unnamable, towards nothingness. As Andrew Renton puts it, “Beckett’s was an art of impending silence, coupled with the obligation to overcome that silence” (168). Although Mayröcker’s prose works are at first sight totally different in this respect, abounding with images and metaphors, a similar process of reduction can be found in some of her writings. Throughout mein Herz mein Zimmer mein Name / my heart my room my name there are several figures with whom the narrator communicates or from whom she receives letters. The central figure is the ‘ear confessor’ (“Ohrenbeichtvater”), who is both her companion and the critical commentator of her work. In the end, all the figures have vanished: they have virtually sneaked away, they have virtually slipped away from the course of the story, haven’t they, or we have forgotten them, I mean, by no longer mentioning them, hardly mentioning them, by hardly thinking of them, we have denied their existence, we have really forgotten them, ... they have vanished. (1998, 335) The ending of the text is made feasible and is brought about by forgetfulness, by dissolving the personae of the text into nothingness and rendering their status as pure figments of the mind explicit. Only the narrator remains, sitting alone at the window, looking out from the window into a glowing morning, into the void and at the same time into the dawning of a new text, which the void and the silence generate. ***** Beckett’s late prose can be read as attempts at reducing the body, the self and the other to their very essence. In Worstward ho, the man and the child are at first brought into existence and then reduced again and ‘worsened’ by having their legs and arms cut off: “Nothing from pel152

ves down. From napes up. Topless baseless hindtrunks. Legless plodding on” (1983, 43). The text makes the bodies of the four figures gradually appear and disappear, generates them and deconstructs them, a process which is repeated with minor variations again and again. The deconstruction of the body is part of the text’s objective to move beyond representational language and represent the unrepresentable essence of the self as non-essence. The attempt at undoing the self fails in the sense that there is always something that remains: the final void and silence cannot be achieved, there are stirrings still. The literature of the unword, as suggested in his letter to Axel Kaun (Beckett 1984, 171f), is an unachievable aim, no matter how much effort is put into a text in eradicating everything that might constitute it: the body, space, time, motion. At the end of Worstward ho, there remain “All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim” (1983, 46). “Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on” (47). This state is the closest the deviser devising it all, to take a phrase from Company, can get to the state of nothingness and emptiness. In the struggle to undo the self and reduce it to its very essence, there is only a pinhole that remains, the essence as void and non-presence. The deconstructed body in Worstward ho is indicative of the fragmentation and distortion of the self. Similarly, one frequently encounters a distorted body in Mayröcker’s texts, making the fragmentation of the self visible. In Reise durch die Nacht / Night Journey she is looking into the mirror and is confronted with “my grey twisted face in the clouded bathroom mirror, a worn grey in the mirror” (1983, 12). She speaks of “unbuckling her arms, her legs” (96), of the “eroding of a face” (133), of the tearing apart of the “intestines and the heart” (27). Her body is fractured and torn into pieces as is her text, which is equally fragmentary and does not form a single and coherent whole. Her body is her writing body (“Schreib-Leib”) and therefore the site on which her writing takes place. Because of the lack of a coherent body and self as vital and essential prerequisites, there is no possibility of forming a coherent narrative. On the other hand, the fragmentation of the body, the sense of a fragmented and distorted life is a precondition for writing: “My totally destroyed and perforated life is one of the prerequisites for my work as a writer.” (1991, 39) There is a striking similarity between Worstward ho and Still Life: in both texts, the body is reduced to a non-presence. In Worstward ho it is a pinhole, in Still Life an apostrophe: “how should 153

how could I ever know, what where I am myself – a figure, whose head has been apostrophised.” (Mayröcker 1991, 175) She conceives of herself as a headless figure. However, the head has not totally disappeared, it has left its mark: the apostrophe, the marker of the absent. This is the ultimate state of reduction in Still Life and indicates a moment of crisis, when writing and therefore imagining a self is most difficult or seems to be completely impossible. The feeling of inability to carry on makes her despair and fear the void, the silence and the falling apart of the self that can only be maintained as long as the writing process continues. Towards the end of Mayröcker’s text, the image of the “topless hindtrunk” is repeated: “Then this head is hanging around on its own, trunkless, I will have abandoned my head, a.s.o., walking around just as a trunk.” (1991, 214) The image of the headless body indicates the loss of the sense of identification and congruence with her self which is temporarily constructed as long as the creative process continues. Contrary to Mayröcker, Beckett is striving to reach the ultimate state of reduction at which body and self have almost disappeared and can only be represented as the void of a pinhole. Both in Still Life and in Worstward ho, however, the body and self are reduced to their utmost minimum at the end of the text, when the movement of language that generated the text comes to a standstill. When looking at the images of the body in Mayröcker’s and Beckett’s texts, it is important to bear in mind the notion of the writer’s life as taking place within writing. Mayröcker frequently refers to her “writing existence”: “it is about writing as living, it is about the writing existence” (1988, 21). Her texts undermine any autobiographical reading, because living and writing are inextricably linked and the boundary between life and text is blurred. Her self becomes text, a texture made up of a multiplicity of voices. She creates her self through creating fictitious selves and others and makes her self become a text which in turn she can read and rewrite: “I copy myself”, “ich schreibe mich selber ab” (1988, 42). As her texts are constantly rewritten, so are the selves in her texts. Consequently, any representation of a single self becomes impossible through its constant deferral and the constant rewritings of the selves and others. Both Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s texts are less recuperative than generative, they are self-generating. The narrator’s mind and body are the site of writing, 154

on which all the movements of the text take place and leave their traces. In Mayröcker’s texts, the dissolving of the others, the defacing of their masks, also affects the self and shows its constructedness and almost-nothingness: “the figures dissolve, they have become silhouettes, including you and me, a justifiable ending” (1988, 336). If any ending is possible or conceivable, then it has to be one of dissolving the self and others to what they are, namely mere silhouettes, figures of speech without any materiality and without any existence beyond the final stop, outside language and outside the text. Mayröcker can be regarded as a writer of différance, drawing on Beckett as well as Derrida, both writers whom she admires and whose texts she frequently and recurringly reads. The repetitive structure of Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s texts is characteristic of their failing attempts at writing the self. Repetition is a crucial device in Mayröcker’s texts, a structural principle that is indicative of her practice of différance. One of the numerous recurring images is the writer kneeling in front of her own texts, an image which goes back to her reading of Beckett, as her notes and manuscripts show. There is also the image of the disorderly room in which she lives, her “fool’s closet”, her “Närrinenkasten” (1988, 8), and above all there is the device of a fictitious partner which she uses in many of her prose texts. In each of her texts, numerous phrases and images are repeated and with each repetition they are slightly modified. Rebeginnings are a prevention from closure and totalization and therefore the ‘story’ is resumed again and again. Repetitiousness is also one of the traits of the voice in Company: “Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone.” (1996, 20) Phrases and images are frequently repeated and through repetition they are altered. What is never achieved, however, is a satisfying result. The text as well as the voices in the text are in flux, in a state of becoming, and therefore they lack any essence. The self as essence is constantly deferred: at first, there is only the one in the dark and a voice coming to him, but there might be others in the dark as well: “For were the voice speaking not to him but to another then it must be of that other it is speaking and not of him or of another still.” (14) Additionally, there is a deviser, but the deviser is not the final authority either, only a “devised deviser” (64). In the end, however, all the emanations of the self are reduced again to nothingness and the 155

text ends with the single word “Alone.” (89) But who it is, being alone, has not become clear. The effort to imagine voices and thereby create a self has failed. No self has emerged. ***** The voice coming to one in the dark presents images of the past, and therefore Company can also be read as a struggle for establishing a self by means of a detour through the past. There are moments in the text when memory seems to be possible: But a voice saying “I remember” is not heard, it is only longed for: To murmur, Yes I remember. What an addition to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular. Murmuring now and then, Yes I remember. (20f) The memories which the voice coming to one in the dark narrates retain a status of uncertainty. The one lying on his back in the dark cannot link his own presence to the recollections of a past that is lost. The scenes from the past are ‘recollections by invention’, to use a phrase by Porter Abbott (1996, 28f). Remembering by misremembering triggers off a process of continous deferral, in which the essence or truth of the past remains always at one remove and thus inaccessible. The spots of memory are not part of the larger narrative of one’s life. The impossibility of narration in general makes the autographical project a futile and impossible one. Similar to Beckettian spots of time in Company, Mayröcker encapsulates memories of an imaginary past in her texts, isolating them from each other and rendering a narrative of her life impossible. The memories are, however, not separated from each other by void and darkness, not by gaps in the text, but rather by an everincreasing text. In the case of Night Journey, the more text is produced in order to reach the dead father beyond the grave, the more the past disappears into oblivion and darkness. Finally, at the end of the project of autographical writing, and at the end of this particular text, memory is lost, the past is eradicated.

156

Time is blown over – help that the sun sets so red behind the mountains, and eyes, and ears .. until we will finally have reached our destination, namely having become masters of oblivion and altogether masters of forgetfulness and having reached the ultimate of all ultimate stages that is the utmost degree of our utmost decline. ... (clouds made from sugardust, make sense who may). (1983, 136) Remembering her own past is not possible, the only way to enter her past life is through the voices and minds of the other, through the other who has access to the self’s past: my past: my enigma. Can’t remember anything anymore. Others have to tell me about myself and my past life, Laura for instance. (1991, 143) The voices provide a way of entering the past, but since these voices are emanations from the narrating self, the spots of memory retain, as in the case of Company, a status of epistemological uncertainty. Referring to Beckett’s essay Proust, one could argue that the self can never integrate the past into its presence, can never make sense of the past, because the self is in constant flux. The self of today is different from the self of yesterday, and since the past has altered the self, the self is never the same, is never at one with itself but lacks a center and an essence (Beckett 1965, 12-15). In Company, the origin of the voices is constantly in question and so is their significance for the self, struggling to establish itself. Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. In the same dark as his creature or in another. For company. Who asks in the end, Who asks? And in the end answers as above? And adds long after to himself, Unless another still. Nowhere to be found. Nowhere to be sought. The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I. Quick leave him. (32) 157

The source of all the voices is unthinkable, unnamable. It is the I that cannot be named and that is beyond reach. Reading Company and Worstward Ho at the backdrop of Derrida’s notions of différance and supplementarity, these texts lack an origin and a center. One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center’s place in its absence – this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. (Derrida 1978, 289) The self remains unknown and unknowable. It is a non-presence, a pinhole, a void which cannot be represented in language. This is equally true for Mayröcker’s texts in which the self can never be glimpsed as a single and stable unit, but only in the shape of different voices, which bear no identifiable and representable center. In my opinion, it would be misleading and unjustified to read Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s writing as pessimistic or even nihilistic, conceding defeat and admitting the futility of their efforts. To the contrary, their texts are manifestations of the power of language and imagination. And the lack of an origin, an essence, a self at the center of their texts has a liberating and creative effect, because it engenders a never-ending flow of language, encircling the void and giving shape to it. The language of their texts keeps moving and even when it comes to a standstill at the end of each text, it resumes its endeavour in yet another text. In their search for a language and a literature not yet accomplished, they take different directions: Beckett’s late texts become more and more self-enclosed and minimalistic, he reduces language to its very basics and moves towards silence. His fictitious worlds become increasingly barren and empty. Mayröcker’s narrators, on the other hand, are confronted with an increasing richness of inner and outer reality, her texts are dense and abound with images. Her efforts to find new ways of ‘accomodating the mess’, of transforming ideas, perceptions and emotions into language generate more and more language, enriching her textual worlds and keeping the dreaded silence at bay. ***** 158

Beckett’s and Mayröcker’s attempts at writing the self are doomed to fail, but since failing better is one of the maxims of both writers, these recurring failures are the very driving force of their writing. Beckett’s as well as Mayröcker’s texts challenge the notion of autographical writing, of narrating one’s life through reference to a past, to a consistent bodily self, grounded in a sense of one’s own identity as being stable, solidified and secure. They show the impossibility of the autographical project, but are nevertheless concerned with the struggle at representing the essence of one’s self and one’s life. And since the essence turns out to be a non-present center, a void, their project at representing this non-essence is one that carries them, and us as readers, beyond the boundaries of language and knowing, where words can no longer reach and where silence prevails. Note 1.

Throughout the essay, the English translations from Mayröcker’s texts in German are my own.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter, “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories,” in New Literary History 19.3 (1988), 597-615. –, Beckett writing Beckett. The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1996). Beckett, Samuel, Proust (London: John Calder, 1965). –, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984). –, Company (London: John Calder, 1996). Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). –, The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie MacDonald (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P, 1985). Hulle, Dirk van, “‘Usw.’: Beckett – Mayröcker, still – eben,” in “Rupfen in fremden Gärten”. Intertextualität im Schreiben Friederike May-

159

röckers, eds. Inge Arteel, Heidy Margrit Müller (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002), 153-164. Kastberger, Klaus, “Fliege mit Rädern,” in Falter 20 (1991), 31f. de Man, Paul, “Autobiography as De-facement,” in Modern Language Notes 94 (1979), 919-930. Mayröcker, Friederike, Reise durch die Nacht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). –, Magische Blätter II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987). –, mein Herz mein Zimmer mein Name (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). –, Stilleben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991). –, Magische Blätter IV (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). –, brütt oder Die seufzenden Gärten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998). –, “Lection,” in Gesammelte Prosa IV 1991-1995, ed. Klaus Reichert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 209-424. Renton, Andrew, “Disabled figures: from the Residua to Stirrings still,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 167-183. Uhlmann, Anthony, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 156-186.

160

AUTONOMY AND THE BODY IN SAMUEL BECKETT AND KOBO ABE Michael Guest

Abe was certainly influenced by Beckett, but as well, he sometimes anticipates features of Beckett’s work or independently generates similar implications. This essay compares the two writers in a context of the phenomenology of reading and in respect to the possibility of an autonomous image, such as found in Kafka and Breton. Beckett and Abe co-opt the autonomous image in techniques of bodily iconoclasm. Rather than being rooted in dark allegories of alienation, both writers explore potentials of human signification yet uncharted. Comparison with Abe serves to highlight Beckett’s post-surrealistic aspect.

Kobo Abe (1924-1993) read Samuel Beckett, along with Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger and André Breton.1 Beckett is sometimes alluded to in characterizing Abe, despite obvious dissimilarities, such as Abe’s politics and his explorations of transformation and renewal, as against Beckett’s movement into minimalism and entropy. Taking an entirely different direction from Beckett’s austere Worstward Ho, in which the opening phrase, “On. Say on”, all but exhausts the narrative progression, Abe’s last published novel, Kangaroo Notebook, is the story of a man who, finding broccoli growing from his legs, undergoes an examination and is taken on a wild Dantesque journey: riding on top of his hospital bed, steering it by psychic control through traffic and down a mine shaft, to end up at the Buddhist equivalent of the River Styx, a place haunted by the souls of aborted fetuses, who are consigned forever to stack up piles of rocks. Beckett and Abe, however, both adhere to anti-naturalistic aesthetics and subversive approaches to genre, as different in specifics as these may be. Neither writer was confined by genre, but both worked in prose and theatre and wrote pieces for radio and screen. Beckett manipulates effects of genre at a fundamental perceptual level, where genre begins to manifest itself at all, where telling a play from a prose

work is an issue, and one is aware of action occurring in a ‘theatre of the mind’. Abe, on the other hand, parodies genre at a higher order, such as in his appropriation of the private eye and science fiction novels in The Ruined Map and Inter Ice Age 4; although Abe is like Beckett a parodist of the novel as such. A similar comparison holds where the two writers explore forms of drama that depart from a conventional literary play-text, with Beckett’s controlled minimalist works considered in opposition to the expansive, abstract, actorcentered works of the Abe Studio. This essay concentrates on a concept of ‘autonomy’: a phenomenon to be found in both writers that connotes individual freedom within and beyond the act of reading. Autonomy is first demonstrated with respect to works by Kafka and Breton, in order both to examine the phenomenon and try to sketch out a context for its aesthetic possibilities. My aim is to subordinate Abe’s quasi-citation and prefiguring of Beckett to considerations rooted in reception. By comparing Beckett with such a brilliantly original yet in certain respects like-minded writer, and by considering some of the ‘Beckettian’ features of Abe, I hope to explore some of Beckett’s creative rationales – especially those that bear upon the broader phenomenological ‘meaning of reading’. Abe’s partiality to surrealist thought is recognized (see, for example, Takano, Iles), so let me first consider Beckett’s affinity with general surrealist notions. André Breton describes an experience that helped him define Surrealism. One evening in 1919, on the point of sleep, a phrase came to Breton spontaneously or “automatically”. The image that the phrase stimulated in Breton may be thought of as a prototypic autonomous image. Breton mentally heard a phrase, “A man is cut in half by the window”, which was associated with [. . .] a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man leaning out of a window. But, with the window following the man’s locomotion, I understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. (1978a, 162)

162

Notice the gesture of bodily iconoclasm that informs Breton’s image, albeit unconscious in intention. The body is cut in two in a narrative gesture that precludes any possibility of volition from a naturalistic source. Vertical-horizontal orientation is confounded and the body isolated against nothingness, such that its motion ensues from no rationale other than to constitute itself as an imaginable entity: walking naturalistically yet bisected by a stationary physical object. Similar dynamics to these of Breton’s bisected man are common in Beckett’s work; an early definitive figure is the invisible dwarf-like figure in Texts for Nothing 8 (1995, 134; see Guest, 232). Beckett’s image of the non-dwarf – it is only the level of the hat that indicates “a dying dwarf or at least hunchback” – is close to Breton’s image in its isolation from a naturalistic context by an indeterminate spatial-temporal ‘fog’. Like Breton’s man, the non-dwarf appears to “advance” yet stay put within the gaze of the imagination. Beckett’s image is bodily-iconoclastic too, in its rejection of the body altogether, which can only be visualized as a function of the moving objects – hat, ear trumpet and boots. Moreover, Beckett’s image lacks any contextual motivation, but is narrated simply by virtue of having come to the narrator. Similarly, in one of Beckett’s last works, Worstward Ho, human figures appear within an internal, mental void. They move autonomously but get nowhere: Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands – no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. (1996, 93) Head in hat gone. More back gone. Greatcoat cut off higher. Nothing from pelvis down. Nothing but bowed back. Topless baseless hindtrunk. Dim black. On unseen knees. In the dim void. (99) The framing “dim void” itself flickers in and out of consciousness (94), and within that appears the image, also in its spontaneous action of repetitive motion within repetitive flickering. Parts of the body are 163

unseen, or vanishing at once or in parts. With respect to this particular reading-effect, the images are a variation on the theme of the autonomous contained or cloaked body, which may be traced from Beckett’s figure in the jar in The Unnamable, through Endgame and Happy Days, and throughout his later prose and plays. In Beckett’s theatre, the covering of parts or most of the body involves a calculated gesture of bodily iconoclasm, an act of fragmenting the body and removing it from the objective focus of representation, thus motivating the internalization and subjective perception of the onstage bodily image. Beckett’s creative process is known to have been painstaking, and in this respect it hardly exemplifies the type of “automatic writing” espoused by Breton, the aim of which was “simply to grasp involuntary verbal representation and fix it on the page without imposing on it any kind of qualitative judgment” (1978b, 144). The processes of conception and reception of the image are, however, related intrinsically. Breton emphasizes the experience from the point of view of the artist, but his evaluation presumes he has played the role of reader as well. Spontaneous aesthetic expressions and images may perhaps undergo any number of variations on and interrogations of their autonomy freely, yet remain spontaneous – if spontaneity is the germ of the image. And it is indeed within a surrealist sphere of possibility that Beckett’s narrative voices are portrayed as autonomously ‘coming to’ rather than originating in an authorial identity – ideally they may come to the reader in the same experience of spontaneity that they come to the writer. Instances of spontaneous reception abound in Beckett; two obvious occurrences are in the opening lines of How It Is: “I say it as I hear it” (7) and Company: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (1996, 3). Breton writes that an image such as the poet Pierre Reverdy’s (1889-1960) “the world goes back into a sack” – quite a Beckettian line, in mind of How It Is and Act Without Words II – reveals not “the slightest degree of premeditation” but juxtaposes realities in a spontaneous manner that is beyond human power (Breton 1972, 36). The point is that in its conception the image is involuntary. Beckett’s phrase in Texts 8 – “I can also just discern, with a final effort of will, a bowler hat [. . .]” (1995, 134) – carries an irony on the spontaneity of the image, questioning the phenomenological dynamics of intention in an act of visualization: does the effort of will motivate the image or focus on an indistinct preexisting or involuntary image? 164

(By the way, if Beckett happens to have borrowed Reverdy’s sack, then it is only fair he pass it on in the same condition he received it; and indeed, in Beckett, such a sporting attitude to the game of reading is invariably found alongside the most astute and arcane literary allusions.) Hypothetically, being set in play by autonomous acts of creativity, aesthetic autonomy may manifest itself in untold ways. In Abe’s and Beckett’s writing, it is often implicit in the construction and deconstruction of bodily figures, since the human body, and its interaction with other bodies, is crucially positioned at the objective centre of representation. The objective body is a powerful traditional symbol, the accrued significances of which extend physically and functionally into a received ‘human reality’ predicated on the body. A great strategy in the repertoire of an artist wishing to subvert the traditional human reality is, therefore, to assault bodily representation: a hypothesis that is borne out by innumerable instances in the contemporary history of art. Literary autonomy is not, however, confined to living bodies. Franz Kafka draws a study on the autonomous image sans body in his short story about the elderly bachelor Blumfeld, who returns home one day from his clerical job at a linen factory, contemplates buying a dog, and discovers an astounding phenomenon: “two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes jumping up and down side by side on the parquet” (185). The balls have a mind of their own, evading or following him about at will in perpetual motion, snaring him in their mania, until he manages to imprison them in the wardrobe. They are in one respect an image of an irrational, autonomous phenomenon; or they may be read as a metaphor for a repressed part of Blumfeld’s psyche, the projection of some germ of freedom. But more than this, their autonomy from the physics of Blumfeld’s reality is at once the autonomy of the image from the naturalistic determinants of the specific narrative genre, which is in turn contiguous with the deterministic world. Compare their delirious action with the first line of the story and its connotation of dreary teleology: “One evening Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor, was climbing up to his apartment – a laborious undertaking, for he lived on the sixth floor.” Hence a critical technique of figurative containment: by capturing the balls inside the wardrobe, Blumfeld sets them loose in his imagination, where they continue secretly to exert their power to dis165

turb and distract him and the reader. Their autonomous motion continues in a dimension that has been opened up in parallel behind the diegesis. Then, no sooner does he manage to offload them onto some neighborhood children than the workaday demands of his world reassert themselves. The balls have destroyed and thereby rescued the narrative genre in which they had manifested themselves as an autonomous event. Thus Kafka’s story fizzles – to borrow Beckett’s term – in ruminations on the petty politics of Blumfeld’s office. After the balls have gone, it is as though they never existed, so whatever point there was in telling the story evaporates as well. Here the destabilizing effect of autonomy upon genre is to truncate the conventional narrative ironically, for the sake of an extensive, unspoken narrative of existential subversion. Ostensibly inanimate events similar to the manifestation of Blumfeld’s balls are familiar in Beckett’s writing, one marked effect being the powerful impression that his defined autonomous actions inscribe on the memory. One such instance is the startling “Close-up of a dial” in Ill Seen Ill Said, derived from Giordano Bruno’s proof that infinite speed is a state of rest: with its single hand that “Leaps from dot to dot with so lightning a leap that but for its new position it had not stirred” (1996, 76). The anti-Aristotelian pulsation; the cyclical action of the hand; the isolation of the image from other entities (“Close-up of a dial. Nothing else”): various factors contribute to the perpetual motion-stasis and imaginative detachment of this image from its context, and perhaps from its text. The image is detached from any received, instrumental reality: amalgam of clock and compass, perfectly useless relative measurer of absolute relativity. A further fascinating instance is Beckett’s depiction of a natural phenomenon in For to End Yet Again, where the motion of the falling fragment either flouts Galileo’s law of falling bodies or turns on a subjective, epistemic shift in the narrative. One’s retrospective, rational recognition serves to re-evoke the motion: “With slow fall for so dense a body it lights like cork on water and scarce breaks the surface” (1995, 244; my italics). Beckett projects the reader as the site of an involuntary mimetic action, the repeatedly, perpetually falling fragment. The mimetic action of the image comes to the reader “spontaneously, despotically”, to use Breton’s description of the surrealistic image (1972, 36). The reader indulges an Aristotelian apprehension of an object falling slowly although it is dense and is power166

less the next instant against a post-Galilean act of reason that reiterates and negates the image. On the one hand, the scene seems to encapsulate an objective historical moment of alteration in the human episteme, between two opposed modes of seeing the world; but since this moment inevitably incorporates an act of perception, it remains surrealistically bound up in subjectivity. Abe’s early, minimalistic story “The Red Cocoon” (1950) is in tune with the possibility of autonomy. The nameless, homeless narrator at first contemplates suicide by hanging and reflects on his loss of identity and home. Then knocking on a random door, he harangues a woman there, insisting that her house might as well be his own, in the absence of any other proof than her say-so. (His psychology recalls Molloy’s in finding his bike in the same place he must have left it, though he “didn’t know [he] had one” [Beckett 1979, 16-7], and other existentially loaded instances of memory loss in Beckett.) Soon after, Abe’s character finds his body unraveling into a silk thread that simultaneously enwraps and incorporates his existence into the form of a hollow cocoon. Abe’s narrative perspective turns inside out to become radically internalized. Abe prefigures the narration of Beckett’s unnamable contained in a jar, in which the body, removed of its limbs and in the absence of external referents apart from the jar, may be perceived from a proprioceptive perspective as a sphere of cosmic proportions (1980, 280; see Guest, 231). In Abe’s story, the cocoon is first brightened red by the evening sun, as seen from the narrator’s internal position, but because time has ceased in the cocoon, it continues to glow after nightfall. Noticing the red glow, a passerby takes the cocoon and places it in his child’s play box. Through the self-enclosing action of the transformation, Abe undermines the dimensions of time and space, decentering and blurring the narrative and generic points of view. Interpretations of the story as an allegory of a process of alienation that reduces a man to an empty, alienated shell ignore connotations of regeneration in the final images and events and thus miss the point. Reading from the very point of view the narrative attempts to undermine, they tend to ‘reterritorialize’ an autonomic state in terms of traditional symbolism: who on earth would want to be a cocoon?2 Abe’s representatives of the possibility of autonomy, like Beckett’s, subvert conventional discourses and symbolism concerning the concepts of freedom and alienation. 167

Written in 1949, Abe’s earlier story Dendrocacalia, about a man’s spontaneous transformation into a plant, anticipates features of much later Beckett works. At the instant the hero Common turns into a plant, suddenly: [. . .] everything went dark. Within the darkness he saw his own face staring back at him, as if reflected in the window of a night train. A hallucination, of course. His face was on inside out. Frantically, he tore it off and put it back correctly. The moment he did so, everything reverted to normal. (1991b, 44) First, note the depiction of shock that accompanies the fall from an everyday state into a ‘fixed’ subjective condition, which is close to the protagonist’s reaction to her fall in Beckett’s Not I (Beckett 1984). Second, Abe’s representation of the subjective state anticipates images of interior states in Beckett’s late dramas, which depict an inverted condition of existence, by representing bodily fragments in a strategy of bodily iconoclasm. In Abe’s best known novel, Woman in the Dunes (1991a), the alternative state is arrived at via a surrealistic narrative blind-spot or blur. The protagonist, entomologist Niki Jumpei’s straying from social reality to become captive in a sandpit implies a mimetic action of sliding across the limit of public rationality at an indeterminate point in time and space. The shift may occur during a moment of intense focus on his subject, since, walking with head bent, “An entomologist must concentrate his whole attention within a radius of about three yards around his feet” (15); which is not intrinsically the attitude of an alienated human being, as it has been read, but perhaps quite the opposite. Jumpei’s mentions of Möbius evoke a potential diegetic form: the act of narration twists and brings the subjective and objective surfaces of the received, public reality into convergence, forming a universe of one single surface – a surreality in which subject and object continually infuse each other. 3 Jumpei the entomologist becomes the trapped insect under inspection, an inversion that is virtually identical to that of Beckett’s representation of Murphy as a reflection in the eye of his catatonic chess opponent, “a speck in Mr. Endon’s unseen” (1973, 140). Abe puts an amusing spin on the idea at the end of his play Green Stockings (1974), when the protagonist, who undergoes surgery in order to become herbivorous, turns into a bug 168

and finally a stain on the wall, after being unwittingly swatted by his surgeon. Abe’s phenomenological motif in Woman in the Dunes of bodies trying vainly to oppose a continual process of burial by sand recalls Beckett’s Happy Days. Moreover, like Winnie, Jumpei is halfinterred bodily at one point, when he sinks in quicksand while trying to escape. He resigns himself to a new, if enforced, mode of existence (recalling, furthermore, the action in Act Without Words I [Beckett 1984], also with its desert setting). In Abe’s novel the suggestion is that Jumpei decides to defer his escape (239) because he has discovered a purpose for his existence: developing a scientific method for extracting water from beneath the sand. What had appeared from his previous naturalistic, public perspective to be an intolerable condition was a utopia in disguise, a vital, sexual, autonomous life. Jumpei’s abnegation of the old life is marked by an official document recording his disappearance: the final trace of an identity as it slips perpetually, instantaneously about the Möbius curve into its subjective phase. One will read pessimism into Abe’s narrative progression to the extent that one contributes traditional ideas of reference and mimesis. To that extent, one will tend to read the final action of the man in Beckett’s pantomime as one of ‘learned helplessness’ rather than a noble, passive gesture of renunciation, such as Protagonist’s in the play Catastrophe (Beckett 1984). One might tend to read Winnie toward the pessimistic pole, as a pathetic doomed figure, which she is not intrinsically, as her optimism affirms. Abe’s works, like Beckett’s, disintegrate into elemental forms and ideas; autonomous actions and stylistic features on the ‘micro’ level have ‘macro’ articulations. In Beckett’s Molloy, the inverted cosmic perspective inherent in Molloy’s gazing on his “sucking stones” is further reflected in his bicycling gait – stiff leg propped on the axle, the other pedaling “free-wheel” (17), the anamorphic effect of a draftsman’s compass that connotes a circular narrative trajectory that implicitly negates teleology. Anamorphosis (Greek for “form [morphe] seen backwards or understood retrospectively [ana]”) (Conley, 101), or the aesthetic phenomenon in which a single image reveals compounded contradictory images, is a staple of Beckett, Abe, and the Surrealists, and a close relative of Salvador Dali’s “paranoiaccritical activity”, meant to “discredit completely the world of reality” by subverting it with obsessive ideas (Breton 1978a, 182). The 169

eponymous Box Man in Abe’s novel (1974), distinguishing himself from the common vagrant (18), but equally eschewing society, chooses to live and walk about in a cardboard box designed to hide his form and provide him with a uni-directional view of the Other. The perambulating box-body is at once “an entrance to another world” (18) and a temporal-spatial tunnel through human society, inuring him against it (64). The box is a metaphor for photography and writing: a chrysalis out of which the Box Man may emerge who knows what kind of evolved, autonomous being (41). Aesthetic acts that dislocate the body from its naturalistic representation may impart shock, as though an act of violence assaults the body itself. Abe harnesses this effect in The Box Man, in an erotic narrative portrait of a nude woman viewed voyeuristically through a window at night and through the eye-slit in the Box Man’s box: The shoulders were bent far back, and the neck rising perpendicularly from there supported a head bent forward as if a hinge had come loose. It was an altogether relaxed pose, but I had the impression that a slender steel core passed down the middle of her. (52) The image evokes Breton’s bisected man and some of Beckett’s later pieces, such as All Strange Away, where human figures are defined geometrically. Note too the striking anamorphic image of a sprung mechanism to which the human figure gives way, and the irony that this mechanism is endowed with potential energy, while the woman remains still, like an inanimate art object or puppet. In Woman in the Dunes, the body is continually dehumanized in its visualization: As he had feared, the alcohol in his stomach bounced to his head like a ping-pong ball, ringing like the buzz of a bee in his ears. His skin began to stiffen like pig’s hide. (127) He was an empty water pipe in a deserted house, covered with spider webs and smeared with dust, gasping like a fish. (143)

170

Maybe even a human being could sing such a song . . . if tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears . . . if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra . . . if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids. It might resemble cruelty, and then again it might be a little different. (160) The bodily iconoclastic trope is an independent dimension of the novel. It is separate from but complements the plot with a searing quality, a continuous poetic effect that simulates the heat of the dunes. In contrast, in The Ruined Map, in which a private eye searches for a man who vanished in public, the tendency of the body is to withdraw from the field of representation, to be swallowed up in the murky urban mise en scène, which is derived from clichés of the detective genre: “The white-coated silhouette of the girl turned directly under the street light, swelling out before my eyes, and then vanishing into the darkness” (Abe 1970, 32). The sexual act warrants grotesque treatment when it falls into the public arena. Jumpei’s sexual encounters with the woman resemble Beckett’s romantic scene by the racetrack in How It Is (31-33), where nearby the dog “lowers its snout to its black and pink penis too tired to lick it we on the contrary again about turn introrse fleeting face to face transfer of things swinging of arms [. . .] heads back front as though on an axle” (33). In a prelude to their first act of intercourse, the bodies of Jumpei and the woman freeze mechanistically in a reflexive gesture toward representation, “as in a movie when the projector breaks down” (Abe 1991a, 132). Later, her soaped, sweaty, sandy body felt to him like “machine oil mixed with iron filings” (166); he “mounted her from behind like a rabbit and finished up within seconds” (166), and again recalling How It Is: “Sexual desire, with a history of some hundred million years from the amoeba on up, is fortunately not easily worn out” (141). In the climactic scene, Jumpei’s captors, the villagers, goad him into attempting sex with the woman out in the open in the pit beneath them, offering him his freedom back in return for the show (228-30). The erotic intersubjective locus, what Abe’s narrator calls “the limitless consciousness of the sexual act” (141), is a critical subject for the expressive function of language, since it is vulnerable to external repression. Both Abe’s 171

erotic scenes in Woman in the Dunes and Beckett’s erotic passages fall into a reflexive gesture of situating the object within a lens of public discourse. Why sear, bury, vanish, dismember, fragment, conceal, unravel, and deface the body? Rather than informing allegories of human alienation, the more progressive effect may be to undermine the simulacrum of man by attacking its generative icon, the body. In The Face of Another, Abe’s first person narrator, who has lost his own face and intends to replace it with a realistic mask, is assured by his doctor that “man’s soul is housed in his skin” (26): hence the observed ability of the Noh mask to project the human range of expressions through illusory effects of motion and light (68-9). The Box Man approximates this Noh technique: tilting the box projects a formidable glare, by virtue of resultant adjustments to the vinyl flaps that cover his eye slit (Abe 2001, 6). The idea is Beckett-like in its surreal, inside-turned-out confusion of the sense of reality, in its evaporation of the self-subject, an arguably historical Western construct. Abe’s hero-narrator observes how the Noh mask is reducible to a membrane over the basic form of the skull, theorizing that, in evolving out of efforts to exceed the limits of expression, the mask is aimed in a negative, internal direction, and constitutes “an empty container, a reflection in a mirror, transfigurable according to the person peering in” (1967, 70). The figure embodies the features that Abe’s post-surrealistic literature shares with Beckett’s, in particular, the subjective, autonomous mimetic effect, and the iconoclastic function of the body. Notes 1.

See, for example, Takano (1994) and Iles (2000).

2.

See, for example, Iles (64); Currie (14-5, 183), and Murakami (51). A comment of Abe’s in a limited edition published in 1969 lends support to my present interpretation: “At the time, I was extremely poor, but I was hardly conscious of it. Poverty had taken on my natural contours, as though it were my own skin. Maybe it was like spinning that poverty into yarn that I wrote the work. The Red Cocoon seems especially like my own double. It seems to me the author should invariably commit suicide in the work” (1999c, my translation).

172

3.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s well-known film of Woman in the Dunes (1964), in which Abe collaborated, strongly evokes the Möbius strip in the play of camera movement over the dunes during the first scenes, where Jumpei is shown walking over them, already insect-like. M.C.Escher renders the idea independently in his woodcut “Moebius Strip II” (1963).

Works Cited Abe, Kobo, The Face of Another, trans. E. Dale Saunders (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1967). –, The Ruined Map, trans. E. Dale Saunders (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1970). –, Inter Ice Age 4, trans. E. Dale Saunders (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971). –, Woman in the Dunes, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage International, 1991) (1991a). –, “Dendrocacalia,” in Beyond the Curve, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991) 43-64. (1991b). –, Green Stockings, in Three Plays by Kōbō Abe, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 71-130. –, Kangaroo Notebook, trans. Maryellen Toman Mori (New York: Vintage, 1997). –, Complete Works (Abe Kōbō Zenshū), (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1999) 29 vols (1999a). –, “Akai Mayu” (The Red Cocoon) in Complete Works 2, 492-494. (1999a) –, “Oboegaki: Akai Mayu” (Memoir on The Red Cocoon) in Complete Works 22, 307. (1999b) –, The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979). –, The Box Man, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage International, 2001) Beckett, Samuel, How It Is (London: John Calder, 1964). –, Murphy (London: Picador, 1973). –, Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber, 1984). –, Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995). –, Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1996). Breton, André, Manifestoes of Surrealism, ed. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan P, 1972). –, “What is Surrealism?” in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978) Book 2, 151187. (1978a).

173

–, “The Automatic Message,” in What is Surrealism? Book 2, 132-148. (1978b). Conley, Katharine, “Anamorphic Love: The Surrealist Poetry of Desire,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001) 101-125. Currie, William Joseph, Metaphors of Alienation: The Fiction of Abe, Beckett and Kafka (PhD dissertation, Univ. Michigan, 1973). Guest, Michael, “Beckett versus the Reader,” in SBT/A 11, “Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000/Fin sans fin en l’an 2000,” ed. Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), 228-236. Iles, Timothy, Abe Kōbō: an Exploration of his Prose, Drama and Theatre (Fucecchio: European Press Academic Publishing, 2000). Kafka, Franz, “Blumfeld: an Elderly Bachelor” (1915), trans. Tania and James Stern, in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971) 183-205. Murakami, Furinobu, Ideology and Narrative in Modern Japanese Literature (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1996). Takano, Toshimi, “Hyōten Abe Kōbō” (Kobo Abe: critical biography), in Abe Kōbō, Shinchō nihon bungaku arubamu 51 (Album of Japanese literature) (Tokyo: Shincho, 1994).

174

ILLUSTRATIONS 1.M.C.Escher’s “Moebius Strip II” © 2004 The M.C.Escher Company – Baarn – Holland. All rights reserved.

2. Bob Meyer: Anamorphic reception: Molloy as draftsman’s compass Drawing by Bob Meyer

3. Toshizane: “Deigan” (1996) by Noh Mask Maker Toshizane, Osaka

This page intentionally left blank

BECKETT AND THE DYNAMIC STILL Mary Bryden

In Beckett’s writing, movement patterns are often jerky, irresolute, subject to delays and dilemmas. In the later work, no Beckett character is exempted from a difficult relationship with his or her body in space. If able to move, the Beckettian character paces restlessly in predetermined patterns. If mobility does not come easily, s/he is condemned to ceaseless aspiration towards stasis or towards alternative movement configurations. These impulses invite linkages with some aspects of painting and the visual arts. This article explores the nomadic and the statuesque, the still and the dynamic in Beckett’s work, with reference to chosen examples from twentieth-century visual art.

Pascal wrote in his Pensées: ‘Notre nature est dans le mouvement; le repos entier est la mort’ [Our nature can be found in movement; complete rest is death].1 It is very tempting when considering movement to insert it into a structure of duality and opposition. In such a schema, movement is a departure from rest, a change of position, whereas rest is a cessation of movement, a recourse to inactivity. Movement and rest become ping pong partners, sharing out between themselves all available initiatives. Of course, Pascal appends the adjective ‘entier’ to his description. Just as a ‘rest’ in music is merely an interval between sound and stillness, it is not rest itself which is death. However, ‘repos entier’ is complete rest, definitive repose. How might such an opposition work in conjunction with the writing of Beckett? The answer, I think, is that it would not take us very far, because it is based upon a premise which is deeply uncongenial to Beckett. This is not to say that the premise is absent, but rather that, within Beckett’s writing, it is constantly fumbled and dropped. The premise is Pascal’s assertion that ‘Our nature can be found in movement’. In Beckett’s work, the implications of such an assumption are horrifying and unsustainable for long. We can see this repeatedly in his Texts for Nothing. Here, in Text VII, Beckett, at his most dev-

astatingly funny, undermines the notion that ‘to live is to move’. The narrator declares: ‘No point in apologizing again, for talking of me, when there’s X, that paradigm of human kind, moving at will, complete with joys and sorrows, perhaps even a wife and brats, forebears most certainly, a carcass in God’s image and a contemporary skull, but above all endowed with movement’ (93-94). If the human paradigm is to move unproblematically through space, the narrator must for his part assert a different experience, one of stalled movement. He ponders: ‘What if all this time I had not stirred hand or foot from the third class waiting-room of the South-Eastern Railway Terminus, […] and were still there waiting to leave […]. The last train went at twenty-three thirty, then they closed the station for the night. […] Is it there I came to a stop, is that me still waiting there’ (Beckett, 1986, 94). Beckett’s people are professional waiters, caught in the machinery of interrupted dynamics. Stirrings to stir, stirrings to stay: each inhabits the other in cycles of regret and indecision. The Texts for Nothing are particularly rich in examples of this alternation and shortcircuiting. In the very first paragraph of the first Text, the narrator reports: ‘Someone said, You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on’ (Beckett, 1986, 71). For me, perhaps the most satisfying summary of this positional dilemma is to be found, set out with humorous precision, in Molloy: ‘For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on’.(Beckett, 1979, 46) The Beckettian organism recurrently feels an impulse to move, if not to progress. Yet there are invariably inhibitory factors which retard that impulse, which cast into doubt its advisability. Hence, whether becalmed or, as with Krapp, ‘burning to be gone’, (Beckett, 1984b, 62) Beckett’s people can neither rest easy nor move easy. For Gilles Deleuze, the erratic journeys and unpredictable deviations undertaken by Beckett’s characters constitute one of the most remarkable features of his writing. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze associates Beckett with other literary itinerants who, unhinged from the linear, voyage in apparently random mode: ‘Les personnages de Beckett sont en perpétuelle involution, toujours au milieu d’un chemin, déjà en route’ [Beckett’s characters are in constant involution, always in the middle of a path, already on their way] 180

(Deleuze and Parnet, 38). The choice of the word ‘involution’ is significant. In contrast with the notion of evolution, which denotes a development or unfolding outwards or onwards, the involutional process is concerned with an infolding or reduction, consonant with the recessionary promptings which so often disrupt Beckettian journeys. At the same time, the mobility associated with the Beckettian organism is for Deleuze and Guattari a limitless one, shuttling back and forth between positions and never becoming reducible to them. They see Beckett’s work as being peopled by what they call a ‘transpositional subject’, which is always on the move, neither in motion nor at rest, always deterritorialising. Beckett’s characters both shuffle and shuttle. Sometimes they move irregularly in space, in circles, zigzags, or would-be beelines, and sometimes they move back and forth, in a kind of obsessive, inevitable repetition. When talking of Beckett’s transpositional subject, Deleuze and Guattari have primarily in mind the fiction, and notably the Trilogy. Yet of course in the theatre we encounter stark visual realisations of these tendencies. From Waiting for Godot onwards, Beckett’s drama is shot through with difficult transitions between movement and stasis. Hence, the static turbulence of the close of both Acts in Godot – ‘Yes, let’s go. They do not move’ (1965b, 54, 94) – may also be seen in Winnie’s grounded utterance in Happy Days: ‘Something must move, in the world, I can’t any more’ (1978, 78). In Not I, Mouth describes the experience of being a receptor for impulsions, while also being aware of faulty transmission, of noise in the system, as reflected in a stop-start bodily movement: ‘a few steps then stop…stare into space…then on…a few more…stop and stare again…so on…drifting around’ (1984c, 216). In Rockaby, cessation and death are contemplated, but their onset is perpetually deferred within the ongoing movement, both stop and start being contained in the mantra-like phrase: ‘time she stopped/going to and fro’ (1984d, 271-282). On the stage, phrase and image are mutually reinforcive. The woman’s body is sedentary, but made by the motion of the chair to oscillate through space. Moreover, though the woman is dressed in black (the colour associated with death and mourning), the light forms living, dancing patterns upon her as it catches the jet sequins of her dress and sets them glittering. In Footfalls, May’s tormented accommodation to movement creates unforgettable stage images as she alternates between the nomadic and 181

the statuesque: ‘Some nights she would halt, as one frozen by some shudder of the mind, and stand stark still till she could move again’ (1984a, 242). Ruby Cohn reports Billie Whitelaw as having said of Beckett that ‘he writes paintings’ (31) and Cohn herself states that ‘Beckett comes close to painting still lives in movement’ (Cohn, 31). Of course, the expression ‘still life’ is wondrously complex. Contemporary painters have largely abandoned the genre, but, as traditionally defined, the genre of still life is seen to focus upon an arrangement of inanimate objects. These objects are commonly fruit, flowers, feathered poultry, and so on. Are these really ‘inanimate’? Certainly they are not breathing and growing, though once they did. The French translation of ‘still life’ – ‘nature morte’ [dead nature] – is no more helpful. The idea of animation – ‘nature’ – is introduced, only to be cancelled again by ‘morte’ [dead]. Ruby Cohn’s expression, ‘still lives in movement’ retrieves that co-occurrence of movement and stasis which I am also working towards in my own title, ‘the dynamic still’. I find the ambiguity of this phrase useful. It draws into collocation two tendencies which, though potentially mutually exclusive, are in fact part of an uncomfortable continuum in Beckett’s scenic world. As well as being an adjective, ‘still’ can be a noun. A ‘still’ denotes an image which, while not being cinematographic, may be applied to a frame, or series of frames, from an ongoing reel of pictures. In his conversations with Charles Juliet, it is significant, I think, that Beckett himself moves from describing the trudging, to-and-fro movement of Footfalls to an example taken from painting. Fingering the table, he observes that Bram van Velde was familiar with this phenomenon: ‘Toujours ce va-et-vient… (Et de la main, il décrit ce mouvement du prisonnier dans sa geôle, du fauve dans sa cage). C’est quelque chose que Bram connaît bien’ [Always this to-and-fro… (And, with his hand, he traces out this movement of the prisoner in his gaol, of the wild creature in its cage). This is something which Bram knows well] (Juliet, 48). Beckett does not develop this observation further, but my understanding of it is that constriction within a given space – whether it be a concrete wall or a picture frame – is not necessarily concomitant with immobility or stagnancy. On the contrary, in the kind of art to which Beckett responded most readily, a reduction in spatial, temporal or colour resources could lead not to a dampening but to an intensification of the image. This should not be achieved, in 182

Beckett’s view, by the imposition of additional elements. Such an approach, described by him as ‘peinture raisonnée’ would consist of, for example, a ‘nature morte avec papillon’ [a still life with butterfly] (Beckett, 1983b, 127). In such a juxtaposition, the flimsy butterfly wings would have to bear the full, clumsy weight of symbolism, to introduce something aerial to something earthy, something moving to something still. For Beckett, if art is to be innovative, it should be stripped of what he called ‘occasion’ (Beckett, 1965a, 121), to present the viewer with pure ‘affect’, unmediated by the straitjackets of symbol or narrative. Such painting would be, as he memorably said of Bram van Velde, ‘peinture de vie et de mort. Amateurs de natron, abstenez’ [painting of life and death. Lovers of mummification should abstain] (Beckett, 1983a, 151). There are, of course, many modern artists, apart from Bram van Velde, who can be drawn into close affiliation with Beckett. One such would be Francis Bacon. Bacon, in a formulation strikingly similar to that of Beckett in the first of the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, repeatedly said that his paintings said nothing, meant nothing, and that he himself had nothing to express. For Bacon, as Michael Peppiatt remarks, ‘the test of an image which “worked” […] was in part its resistance to any logical or coherent verbal explanation; everything that failed this stringent test fell into the despised category of “illustration”’ (Peppiatt, 97). Both Beckett and Bacon set forth compelling but fugitive images which appear to capture not a pose or an attitude, but a medial moment, a still, a frame from a movement in progress. In his essay on Beckett, L’Epuisé, published with the French translation of Beckett’s television plays, Deleuze brings the two artists together in terms of the intensity but transience of their images (1992, 97). Beckett and Bacon produce images which thud and throb, but which are always on the point of evaporation. Bacon’s screaming popes are enthroned within their cubic frames but seem about to burst out of them. In his study of Bacon, Logique de la sensation (1981) Deleuze notes the way in which Bacon captures violent movements of great intensity (1981, 30). He gives as an example Bacon’s 1967 portrait of George Dyer conversing with Lucian Freud, in which Dyer’s animation is conveyed by the distribution of his head between two lateral faces, one turned towards Freud and the other away from him. A similar impression may be gained from the 1972 ‘Portrait of a Man 183

Walking Down Steps’, where the subject is seen approaching the foot of the flight of steps. One leg precedes the other, the shining shoe about to land, but ghosts and shadows of feet, before and behind, suggest the complexity of movement which is achieving his descent. The man’s mobility encourages the viewer’s eye to fidget around him, as with Footfalls, where the mother’s voice enjoins the spectator to watch May as she carries out her self-imposed programme of pacing and wheeling. It is, indeed, with respect to walking that Deleuze finds the linkage between Bacon and Beckett most productive. Referring to the handling of figures in movement, he remarks that Bacon and Beckett are never closer than in their exploration of repetitive movements within confined spaces. Through and beyond the stasis of page or canvas, the figures of Bacon and Beckett draw the eye to the flickering though abiding impulse towards locomotion. Nevertheless, if movement must be sought, stillness must inevitably lie in wait. Implicit in the mobility is the immobility, and vice versa. Bacon always felt a distinct uneasiness when people tried to compare his work to that of Beckett, even though Beckett interested him. In the remainder of this article, I shall discuss another British artist who is still in the full flow of creativity, and who does, if pressed, acknowledge a feeling of kinship with Beckett. The artist is Maggi Hambling. Hambling shares with Beckett, in my view, a ravenous commitment to detail and precision, an extreme reluctance to comment on her own work, and a relentless pursuit of the co-existence of contraries. Hambling first became interested in Beckett in 1975, when she saw Max Wall in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Greenwich Theatre, in London. After the performance, Max Wall returned to the stage to talk to the audience. As he talked, Hambling became mesmerised by his face. To her, it was the quintessential face of a clown, full of expressive lines, and flashing in an instant between comedy and tragedy. Wall’s own private life had indeed contained ample measure of both. He had established his early reputation, in the 1930s and 1940s, as a variety performer on stage and on the radio. After a period of comparative neglect during the 1950s, he had reinvented himself as a serious actor, appearing in plays by Jarry, Wesker, Osborne, Pinter, etc. This enabled him to develop his one-man show, which was ecstatically reviewed, thus re-establishing him as Britain’s 184

greatest living clown. Wall had developed his own distinctive persona, and had over the years adapted to the changing mediums of film and television, but he still drew inspiration from earlier silent movie comedians such as Buster Keaton, and he brought a good deal of this visual, bodily humour to his stage roles, including that of Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape, and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. It is also appropriate that Max Wall should have followed Buster Keaton in appearing in Beckett’s Film. Keaton was directed by Alan Schneider, in the presence of Beckett, in New York in 1964, while Wall was directed fifteen years later by David Clark, in the version filmed in London. A year or two after this, when Maggi Hambling was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, she went across the road to the Garrick Theatre to see Max Wall’s one-man show, and this prompted her to approach him, with a view to painting him. This was the starting point of a remarkable friendship which coincided with Max Wall’s appearances as Vladimir in Braham Murray’s production of Waiting for Godot at the Round House in 1981. I saw this production myself, the previous autumn, at its originating venue of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. I remember it as probably the most powerful of the many productions I have seen since. In the hands of Max Wall and Trevor Peacock as Vladimir and Estragon, the changes of mood were not just shifts or colourings. They were visceral and embodied. In the echoing, cavernous interior of the former corn exchange, there was a sense of real threat in the off-stage space. Both the comedy and the tragedy were gut-wrenching. The experience of watching it was exhausting but exhilarating. Maggi Hambling had seen Waiting for Godot before, with a different company, but had not particularly responded to the play. This production electrified her, and she went five times to see it at the Round House. Hambling had by this time worked hard on training her visual memory. After experimenting with different mediums at the Slade School, she returned to painting in the early 1970s. At this time, she would go and sit in pubs and clubs. Noticing a face which interested her, she would observe it lengthily, looking away, visualising, looking back, checking her memory. She did this with the intense attentiveness to detail which characterises what Lois Oppenheim refers to as the ‘creation through re-creation (repeating, remembering, 185

re-enacting) [which] was both Beckett’s method and his focus’ (Oppenheim, 148). This was the skill which Hambling now brought to rendering the movements of Max Wall who, at this stage, was a sprightly seventy-three years old. Unable to draw while the play was in progress, she would rush back to her studio and feverishly commit to paper the visual memory she had retained. The result is a series of moments from the play. Seen individually, they encapsulate a segment of action, a posture, or an attitude. Seen together, they provide a series of stills from that ongoing reel of waiting, playing, dancing, thinking, expostulating, which Godot constitutes.2 Drawing Max Wall as Vladimir in the midst of a hat trick, for instance, Hambling used the medium of oil on paper to lend fluidity to the event. The baggy trousers of the clown billow out on the right, drawing the eye up his body to the hat, being casually thrown from Wall’s left hand to land neatly on his head. This trick, perfectly executed, was of course part of Wall’s stock-in-trade, a legacy from vaudeville. The painting is called ‘Voilà, c’est tout’, the phrase which traditionally concludes the clown’s act in France. With the balletic, outstretched position of the right side of his body, Wall elicits applause for the trick being performed on his left side. Though his left hand bears all the responsibility for the trick, his eyes turn ingeniously to his right, in the direction of the hat’s trajectory. In this way, the eye of the viewer is drawn in flowing circles from bottom right, over Max’s head, and down to bottom left, with further swirls of movement provided by the drape of the voluminous trousers. In another charcoal drawing entitled ‘Vladimir Becomes the Tree’, from the second act of Godot, Wall is caught in the split second during which he maintains his balance in imitating the tree. The concentration in this drawing is upon the two curved vertical lines which echo one another. On the left is the tree, its trunk tilting to the right, and its branches projecting in an upward direction. To the right is Vladimir, his trunk also tilting to the right, but with his head, like the upper part of the tree, leaning slightly to the left in an effort to maintain his equilibrium. His outsized clown boots point upwards, like the branches of the tree, and his arms are merely suggested by a whirl of knotted outlines. Below his left foot is a further projection of curled branches, suggesting both a shadow and a root. Again, the drawing is both dynamic and still. Vladimir is trying to emulate the stillness and 186

rootedness of the tree. Yet the drawing is also dynamic in that the swirls of branches and limbs lead the eye into a web of configurations. Vladimir aspires to the aerial domain of the tree, reaching for the sky, and he succeeds for a split second. But in fact the upper part of the drawing is faint and unresolved, and Vladimir remains primarily connected to the earth. In a pencil drawing, entitled ‘Vladimir Performs Lucky’s Dance, Watched by Gogo’, Vladimir again raises one foot in the air, delicately distributing his weight so that his left arm and left leg create an airborne diagonal, while his right arm points downwards along the earthbound line created by his right leg. His left hand is accorded two positions, suggesting the experimentation needed for him to remain upright on one leg. Estragon, seated and seemingly attentive for once, provides a viewing position which directs the gaze from left to right, and from lower regions to upper, passing through the straining features of Wall’s face. The link between the two men is maintained by their feet, which almost touch. In a charcoal drawing, ‘Vladimir Flaps His Wings’, Wall is again tilting his chin skywards. Interestingly, the wing-flapping becomes just a ghosted activity to his rear. The focus is again on the vertical through line beginning with the boots, following the curvature of the belly and up the braces to the hat. The blur of the ‘wings’ and the upended right foot make clear to us that this is a farmyard scuttle and not a stationary pose. These vivacious drawings show us Wall as Vladimir not frozen in time and space, but caught in action or in the space between actions. As the critic Mel Gooding writes: ‘The likeness to life that [Maggi Hambling] achieves is wonderfully dynamic. Out of a flurry of drawn marks emerges the attitude of a head, the expression of a face; out of a furore of vigorous strokes the solid form of a body is brought to life, caught […] in violent action, or static, […] but with the stillness of a moment, the stillness in which is held the potential of the next movement of the living being’ (Gooding, 6). One of Hambling’s paintings renders the very particular stillness which ensues at the end of a performance. This oil painting is called ‘After Godot’. After the end of the first night of Godot at the Round House, Hambling went backstage to visit Wall. She found him sitting absolutely motionless in his dressing room, naked apart from a pair of briefs, and just staring ahead. Viewed from behind, the actor’s 187

naked torso, gaunt shoulder blades and balding head make him seem vulnerable, emptied of resources, reduced to essentials. However, Hambling avoids manipulating the viewer. She also avoids the cliché of the tragic clown. Wall is in some kind of trance, quiet and isolated, but that is all the spectator can know. The subject’s back is turned to the viewer, not to repel, but simply to allow for all the possibilities which such a posture might suggest. The ‘Good Luck’ card on his table may or may not have been efficacious. But something in him remains nevertheless, some extra capacity. The figure is not slumping, but still leaning forward, still intent, still waiting. The painting is not drained of movement, since it bears the memories of movement and the anticipation of future movement. Another painting, also in oils, offers an illustration of that movement, within a larger context which is itself moving. Called ‘The Search is Always Alone’, this painting presents us with a bare, eggshaped stage, devoid of resources and shelter, and seemingly revolving, like the world, under its own impetus. At the centre of it, like an evolving embryo, is the tiny figure of Max as Vladimir. Temporarily deprived of Estragon’s company, and dwarfed by his surroundings, the central figure could be seen as stark and potentially under threat in his isolation. In such a situation, he could have crouched and cowered. Instead, he swaggers along, full of bravado, trying to fill the space available, making the best of a bad job. The painting seems to encapsulate what Bryan Robertson, referring to Hambling’s work, has referred to as ‘the eternal balancing act of existing with some sort of grace or humour confronted by disintegration and the blank unknown’ (Robertson, 4). Max Wall died in 1990. In the early years of that decade, Hambling turned to bronze to produce a series of sculptures related to death and death’s container, the coffin. The subject sounds grim, but Hambling’s handling of it is robustly humorous, as can be guessed from some of the titles: ‘Coffin in a hurry’, ‘Coffin struck by lightning’, and ‘Rocking coffin with erection’. These coffins seem to have a mind and impetus of their own. In 1994, Hambling produced a bronze sculpture called ‘Coffin for Max Wall, after “Godot”’. Like the earlier works, it contains both stillness and dynamism, solidity and porosity. In this sculpture, the irrepressible Wall refuses to lie down in his coffin. Instead, his head, with the wide crown and expressive eyebrows which Hambling visually emphasised so often during his life, 188

juts up from the horizontal coffin to confront and engage with the featureless mass facing him which is Godot. It is featureless because Godot both attests presence and imposes absence. While the Godot shape is a solid, immovable block, the Wall shape is malleable, light and airy. Hambling once told me: ‘I saw it as Max still dancing, in eternal conversation with Godot’. The Max coffin is reminiscent of another sculpture of Hambling, entitled ‘A Conversation With Oscar Wilde’. This sculpture, commissioned after the death of the film-maker Derek Jarman and completed in 1998, is situated in a prominent pedestrian thoroughfare, just off Trafalgar Square in London. It consists of the bronze head of Wilde emerging rakishly from a polished granite sarcophagus. The sculpture is completed when passers-by sit on the coffin and join in the conversation as Wilde puffs companionably on his cigarette. The sculpture is placed in such a way that it parts the walkway in two: a choice has to be made about which side of it to walk past. Some people keep walking, secure on their own route-path. Those who pause and linger by it are usually those who appear to have time on their hands – too much time – or who carry their possessions in carrier bags. Perhaps their internal conversations with Oscar Wilde were rather similar to those undertaken by Vladimir and Estragon, who also have too much time on their hands. What, then, do these observations add up to? I have used Maggi Hambling’s work in the second part of this article, as a case study to illustrate the observations in the first part. There are many other correspondences which could be made between Hambling and Beckett. Here I have concentrated on the central theme of movement, its necessity and its impossibility. It seems to me that Hambling’s work comes closer than any other living artist, with the possible exception of Avigdor Arikha, to the tense co-occurrence, also found within Beckett’s work, of imperatives towards dynamism on the one hand and, on the other, rootedness to the spot. Hambling is an immensely productive artist, proficient in several mediums, and will no doubt continue to evolve in new directions. She looks back with great affection to her collaboration with Max Wall, and to spending hours reading the part of Estragon to his Vladimir, as he practised his lines. Hambling now regards Godot as the most important play of the twentieth century. When I asked her why, she replied that Max Wall had brought it to life for her, making her 189

see it as a play which struggles to balance on what she calls ‘a knifeedge between laughter and tears’. She would nevertheless be the last to want to freeze that role into one particular interpretation of it. That Godot has endured till now demonstrates the portability and hence variability of the play over time. Moreover, part of the tension between movement and immobility derives from the irresolute space between, the desire to leave and the fear of leaving, the recourse to pauses rather than halts. Godot is all about potentiality rather than opportunity, and Hambling points out that, insofar as Beckett has influenced her at all, it is in prompting her to leave blank spaces within her work, where movement may or may not occur. In many of the paintings Hambling has done since her close association with Max Wall, she has left a significant space of bare canvas, untouched by paint. Her self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery (1977-78) is an example of this. Surrounding Hambling herself, scowling at the viewer, are random objects or events which for her have all the chaotic coherence of Lucky’s speech. Between these objects are expanses of bare canvas; these parts, she told me, are her Godot spaces, the spaces of chance, of absurdity, of the intervention of absence into presence. Finally, Hambling shares with Beckett a sense of the interpenetration, almost the contemporaneousness, of the two defining movements of birth and death. One of her sculptures is entitled ‘Astride of the Grave’, in a deliberate reference to Godot, where the phrase is uttered first by Pozzo and then by Vladimir. The sculpture contains three protuberances, facing in the same direction, and all emanating from the same trunk. One is held aloft, upright and well-defined in the vertical position, the second, at the mid-point, slumps with open jaws at an angle of 45 degrees, and the third is recumbent, as if melted, on the horizontal plane. Waiting for Godot contains examples from all three tendencies. In the first Act of Godot, Pozzo recalls a time when Lucky ‘used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango, and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy’ (Beckett, 1965b, 40). Now, he can only summon up the creaky movement of an automaton on a failing battery. With Beckett, there is always the possibility that the pratfalls and the stumbling may shade into the final collapse. And yet, for Beckett, movement is never definitively halted. As Hélène Cixous observes, Beckett’s writing can be seen always to be escaping at the last moment from ‘la paralysie, l’impuissance et la 190

mort, par quelque effort supplémentaire’ [paralysis, impotence and death, by some extra effort] (Cixous, 398). More often than not, that extra effort is accompanied by an undercurrent of anarchic laughter. Both Beckett and Hambling treat death not with reverence and euphemism, but with humour and inventiveness. What the critic Bryan Robertson says of Hambling may just as readily be applied to Beckett’s writing: ‘With Hambling it is not exactly gallows humour so much as capering about on the edge of the abyss’ (Robertson, 5). Notes 1.

Pascal, Fragment 129, 108.

2.

Many of Hambling’s portraits of Max Wall appear in the exhibition catalogue, Max Wall: Pictures by Maggi Hambling (Gibson).

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Three Dialogues, in Proust, and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965). (1965a) –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1965). (1965b) –, Happy Days/Oh les beaux jours, bilingual edition edited by James Knowlson (London: Faber, 1978). –, Molloy, in The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979). –, “Bram van Velde,” in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983). (1983a) –, “La Peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon,” in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983). (1983b) –, Footfalls, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1984). (1984a) –, Krapp’s Last Tape, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1984). (1984b) –, Not I, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1984). (1984c) –, Rockaby, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1984). (1984d) –, Text VII, Texts for Nothing, in Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 (London: John Calder, 1986).

191

Cixous, Hélène, “Une Passion: l’un peu moin que rien,” in Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett (Paris: L’Herne, 1976). Cohn, Ruby, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). Deleuze, Gilles Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, Vol. I (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981). –, L’Epuisé, printed with Samuel Beckett, Quad, et autres pièces pour la télévision (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992). Gibson, Robin, Max Wall: Pictures by Maggi Hambling (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1983). Gooding, Mel, “An Eye Through a Decade,” in MaggiHambling: An Eye Through a Decade 1981-1991, Exhibition Catalogue, Yale Center for British Art, 1991, Juliet, Charles, Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1986), Oppenheim, Lois, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Pascal, Blaise, Pensées (ed. Brunschvicg) (Paris: Garnier, 1960). Peppiatt, Michael, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998). Robertson, Bryan, Introduction, Maggi Hambling: Sculpture in Bronze 199395, Exhibition Catalogue, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd., 1996.

192

LE ROI DES ÉCHECS Sjef Houppermans

Au cimetière de Montparnasse l’ombre de Beckett rendra sans doute parfois visite à l’un de ses proches voisins, le roi des échecs, Alexandre Alekhine, le seul homme qui soit mort – en 1946 – tout en étant champion du monde. Si Beckett était bien un roi et qu’il aimait profondément le plus noble des jeux, d’autre part il déclinait les échecs suivant leur tragique destinée et traitait le roi de la manière suivante: “La chose qui m’intéressait moi, roi sans sujets, celle dont la disposition de ma carcasse n’était que le plus lointain et futile des reflets, c’etait la supination cérébrale, l’assoupissement de l’idée de moi et de l’idée de ce petit résidu de vétilles empoisonnantes qu’on appelle le non-moi, et même le monde, par paresse.” (Beckett, Premier Amour, 21) On verra comment notamment à l’époque de ce premier amour les bonshommes Mercier et Camier s’acquittent de cet exercice.

Récemment, en 2002, Pierre Michon a publié chez Verdier un texte qui s’intitule Corps du roi. L’auteur des Vies minuscules, probablement l’un des plus exigeants stylistes de la littérature contemporaine et en plus un des plus authentiques visionnaires, y dépeint dans une série de portraits la grandeur et la misère de quelques grands écrivains. Il insiste notamment sur le fait qu’à travers la misère de leur existence, par son inscription même à l’endroit de la tragique déchéance de leur figures, une illumination royale les profile selon leur statut d’artiste créateur. On pourrait parler de ‘grâce’, ou du ‘sublime’; Michon scrute leurs portraits et y discerne un punctum lumineux qui témoigne de leur étrange fascination. Le premier auteur qui, même avant Flaubert et Faulkner par exemple, impose à Michon cette évidence est Samuel Beckett. La section initiale du livre, “Les deux corps du roi”, nous montre la photo que Lutfi Özkök a faite de lui en 1961. Sur cette photo, nous dit Michon, on voit les deux corps du roi, c’est à dire “l’apparition simultanée du corps de l’Auteur et de son incarnation ponctuelle, le verbe

vivant et le saccus merdae.” (14) Sans doute se dit Michon, Beckett accepte cette simultanéité, et ce passage du livre se termine alors par les phrases suivantes: Il [Beckett] dit: Je suis le texte, pourquoi ne serais-je pas l’icône? Je suis Beckett, pourquoi n’en aurais-je pas l’apparence? J’ai tué ma langue et ma mère, je suis né le jour de la Crucifixion, j’ai les traits mélangés de Saint François et de Gary Cooper, le monde est un théâtre, les choses rient, Dieu ou le rien exulte, jouons tout cela dans les formes. Continuons. Il tend la main, il prend et allume un boyard blanc; gros module, il se le met au coin des lèvres, comme Bogart, comme Guevara, comme un métallo. Son œil de glace prend le photographe, le rejette. Noli me tangere. Les signes débordent. Le photographe déclenche. Les deux corps du roi apparaissent. Je voudrais indiquer quelques autres endroits où dans les textes de Beckett se devine cette double apparition. La chute vertigineuse et l’échec cuisant sont le revers d’une image qui sans eux ne pourrait probablement pas apparaître. Les deux corps du roi sont inséparables sans aucun doute. Le roi dans le jeu d’échecs pareillement déchoit lamentablement dans sa fin de partie mais son visage se transfigure sous la blanche vision du Lac de Côme. Dans Molloy le vieil infirme traîne ses pauvres os tout au long des chemins de la mouise pour aboutir au bord de mer rayonnant. Ainsi Samuel Beckett avait vécu un moment comparable en 1946, expérience dont on retrouve le reflet dans La Dernière Bande. La scène de l’illumination sur la jetée de Dun Loaghaire n’a jamais été vécue de cette façon par l’auteur, comme l’a montré James Knowlson; pourtant si c’est une expérience vécue dans la maison maternelle, comme le suggère son biographe, c’est d’autant plus significatif. Le résultat essentiel en est que Beckett découvre qu’il est un auteur de la nuit, des ombres et de la rétraction, des cendres et de la nudité des os. C’est à travers les ténèbres, sur la piste des ombres et des fantômes que la lumière se fait. Beckett est par excellence un auteur qui vaque parmi ces ombres errantes dont parle Patrick Quignard dans son livre du même titre. Ainsi Quignard écrit: “La scène où toute scène prend origine dans l’invisible sans langage est une actualité sans cesse active” (12). Cet innommable se faufile 194

entre les phrases de Beckett dans le halètement de la voix paratactique. “Hétérogénéité naturelle, originaire, tel est le destin de l’art” (62) insiste l’auteur du Dernier Royaume (titre d’ensemble de la grande fresque fragmentée que se propose d’écrire Quignard et où le roi revient en scène). “Unwording” – défaire les mots, ce sera la tâche que s’impose Beckett: donner son espace au silence en face du psittacisme intarissable du monde. Ecrire l’immonde, les déchets, la souffrance et creuser ainsi les rides et les sillons du visage portraituré où Michon dans une très belle image voit “le tesson de Job”. Regarder les portraits de Samuel Beckett de décennie en décennie révèle, à travers et à côté des ravages du temps, le triomphe de celui qui décide de s’asseoir dans les cendres1. Cette luminosité gagne en intensité pour ouvrir la voie à la barque qui glisse sur les flots de Compagnie, aux paysages lunaires de Mal vu mal dit inondés de clarté, à la longue route où tombe la lumière oblique dans laquelle s’éloignent le vieillard et le garçon de Worstward Ho. Dans les Dialogues avec Duthuit ce court-circuit entre l’échec et la révélation se formulera de la façon la plus concise (et pour cela suspecte aussi, provisoire, suspendue). La peinture des van Velde est échec et nul, n’exprimant rien; elle est en même temps un art de roi, une luminosité chromatique qui révèle rien et néant dans leur absence originelle. Qu’on me permette seulement de dire en catimini que les moments de Tal Coat également manifestent / cachent bel et bien, tant mal que bien, une telle origine. 2 C’est peut-être bien en 1946 que se met définitivement en place ce dispositif, après les années de réclusion, après la déchirure avec la mère, après l’épiphanie nocturne. C’est pourquoi j’aimerais m’arrêter un moment dans ces parages à partir de l’été 1946 quand Beckett prend la décision de se dépouiller de son plus grand trésor, sa langue maternelle, pour s’enrichir du tesson français, cette petite tête aiguë, qui pourra gratter sa peau. Il écrira cette année-là Premier Amour, L’Expulsé, La Fin, Le Calmant, mais son premier texte en français sera le très curieux Mercier et Camier. Michon fait suivre immédiatement Beckett de Flaubert dans sa galerie de portraits et surtout le Flaubert de Madame Bovary et de Bouvard et Pécuchet. Le célibataire de Croisset avec sa moustache tombante et sa gueule de phoque triomphe royalement à travers le 195

dépit grotesque de la Bovary et tout au long des déboires de ses copistes positivistes. C’est ce dernier que rejoint Beckett dans Mercier et Camier: c’est au bord du même canal que l’encre est jeté. Qu’on compare les deux phrases suivantes: “Plus bas, le canal Saint-Martin, fermé par les deux écluses, étalait en ligne droite son eau couleur d’encre” (c’est la deuxième phrase de Flaubert) et vers la fin du vagabondage des héros beckettiens “la pluie tombait sans bruit dans le canal. Mercier en était chagrin. Mais bien au-dessus de l’horizon les nuages s’effrangeaient en longues effilochures ténues et noires, des cheveux de pleureuse.” (208) Il y a peut-être l’Ile heureuse à l’horizon suggère Mercier (ce qui parmi d’autres éléments justifie aussi le rapprochement qu’a fait Julie Campbell avec Bunyan); Camier aura plutôt comme but l’hôpital pour les maladies de peau. Mercier s’installe au bord de l'eau et quand il fait noir enfin il entend des « bruits que le long jour lui avait cachés, des murmures humains, par exemple, et la pluie sur l’eau ». Mercier se fait roi. Si le périple des deux amis s’inscrit plutôt à l’enseigne de l’échec suivons un moment les courbures de leur voyage pour y détecter aussi les moments de décalage. Comme Didier Anzieu dans son livre “Beckett et le psychanalyste” l’a exposé, il est probable que Mercier et Camier est aussi le compte rendu de la cure psychanalytique que Beckett avait suivie auprès de Wilfred Bion avant la guerre.3 En effet Camier nous est présenté comme fin limier, détective privé spécialisé dans le domaine des enquêtes familiales et il n’arrêtera de s’informer de la santé de son compagnon. Anzieu explique que Beckett avait le sentiment de ne pas pouvoir avancer avec Bion qui avant tout insistait sur la nécessité de la séparation avec la mère. Après la rupture Samuel Beckett a poursuivi son analyse dans ses livres, écrit encore Anzieu, et Mercier et Camier serait justement le récit de leur cheminement commun tel qu’il échoue et tel qu’il aboutit à l’interruption de leur relation. Concrètement c’est la fourche où vers la fin leurs itinéraires bifurquent. Il s’agit d’ailleurs plutôt d’une sorte d’interdépendance où transfert et contre-transfert se confondent (ainsi c’est Camier qui souffre d’un kyste), le couple se tenant la main comme deux enfants dans le noir, s’injuriant tout en se caressant, un peu / beaucoup déjà Vladimir et Estragon, mais aussi de façon plutôt grotesque les Laurel et Hardy (l’un est rondelet et l’autre du type escogriffe) d’une mascarade élémentaire. 196

Le but de leur voyage pour lequel ils veulent quitter la ville un matin particulièrement moche n’est jamais précisé; en réalité ils stagnent plutôt en ville et quand finalement ils ont pris le train, ils reviendront après peu de kilomètres. Le cheminement circulaire ne mène nulle part et leur principal souci est de récupérer leurs affaires qui ne cessent de s’égarer: l’imperméable, la bicyclette qui se morcelle, le parapluie qui ne saurait les protéger des pluies interminables et le mystérieux sac dont le contenu précieux restera invisible sinon inexistant. Une belle image du parapluie déchu emblématise leur voyage: “Il avait l’air d’un grand oiseau blessé, un grand oiseau de malheur que des chasseurs venaient d’abattre et qui haletant attendait le coup de grâce”. Ce coup de grâce doit être important car Beckett conserve le même terme dans sa traduction en anglais: la grâce qui touche l’être de misère le métaphorise, le métamorphose. Les rencontres qu’ils font témoignent du même arbitraire qui caractérise la direction de leur vagabondage, que ce soient les séjours dans la maison de passe d’Hélène, les stations dans les bistros ou les conversations dans le train. Même absence de visée dans la phrase qui ouvre le texte et où le narrateur s’adresse aux lecteurs: “Le voyage de Mercier et Camier, je peux le raconter si je veux, car j’étais avec eux tout le temps”. Si quelque chose arrive ce sera la manifestation justement de l’échec, d’un désir constant d’en finir. Tout chute et dégringole depuis le début. Aussi ne nous étonnons pas si Camier s’exclame: “Le soleil sort enfin, afin qu’on admire sa chute à l’horizon” (28). Il est vrai qu’il ajoute: “Une sorte d’encre surgit à l’orient et inonde le ciel”. La nuit s’écrit en encre comme l’eau flaubertienne et le personnage de Beckett s’y noie. Le désir initial de se jeter dans le canal fait suite aux paroles de Camier: “plus vite on crèvera, mieux ça vaudra” (26). Le récit tourne court et se résume en style télégraphique au bout de tous les deux chapitres. La catastrophe menace partout: ainsi p.62 où Mercier au bord du tacot ayant écouté Madden, le compagnon des cadavres, s’écrie: “C’est une véritable catastrophe, j’en suis – Il réfléchit. J’en suis effondré, dit-il”. Et p.129 le narrateur s’exprime directement dans les mêmes termes: “Les gens dans la rue vont cernés de catastrophes en marche”. Mercier et Camier avancent irrémédiablement à la rencontre de leur chute. Vers la fin de leur périple on lit: “Bientôt ils n’avancèrent plus qu’en titubant […] Les chutes commençaient, tantôt c’était Mercier qui entraînait Camier (dans sa chute) tantôt c’était le contraire et tantôt ils s’effondraient tous les deux en 197

même temps…” (179) et bientôt on entend “Nous sentons la décomposition à plein nez” (197). On peut lire le récit des deux vagabonds comme une régression psychique complète qui aboutit tantôt à l’ataraxie, tantôt à la catatonie, mais c’est surtout aussi un jeu rhétorique autour des propositions de la psychanalyse. On peut supposer que l’emploi du français permet cette mise en scène. Quand Beckett traduit en 1973 / 1974 Mercier et Camier en anglais – tâche qui lui pèse car, peut-on supposer, la régression ne saurait se retracer sur les mêmes pistes – il va essayer de concentrer le récit, mais il ne sera jamais très content du résultat. Le français s’ouvre sur un vaste flot de termes vulgaires se rapportant surtout à la scène anale (à plusieurs reprises Beckett traducteur remplace les ‘merde’ par des ‘fuck’ d’ailleurs); la sexualité se condense elle aussi dans les attouchements, les enculements et la fellation; la ‘mère’ Hélène à la belle moquette (un Kidderminster précise le texte anglais) sera chevauchée bon gré mal gré, tandis que son ara – de flaubertienne allure lui aussi – conchie le silence, et vers la fin du texte on tapera sec et dru sur la tête de l’agent autoritaire qui tente de leur interdire la visite du quartier chaud (il imite ainsi le gardien du square Saint Ruth qui dès le chapitre 1 suscite leur grogne quand il envoie valser deux pauvres clebs vissés l’un à l’autre. L’ami Watt qui fait son apparition peu après se met au pas en cassant son bâton sur la table du café et en s’écriant “la vie aux chiottes”. Il devient clair que s’il y a initialement telle visée, elle se dirige constamment ailleurs, qu’elle désire en finir, qu’elle tend inlassablement vers son échéance. Comment en terminer avec le temps ? Dès le début le calcul du temps paraît jouer un rôle essentiel: tout un schéma est dressé pour nous expliquer qu’arriver à la même heure au rendezvous n’est pas évident. Et vers la fin il s’avère être pareillement compliqué de se rattraper. En finir serait le vœu le plus cher et le plus irréalisable. Mais “il y a des jours, dit Mercier, où l’on naît à chaque instant. Alors partout il y a plein de petits Mercier merdeux. C’est effarant. On ne crèvera jamais.”(50) L’épouvantable vie élémentaire qui grouille. De là la fascination de la prime échéance telle que Monsieur Conaire, un des hôtes du café, l’évoque: “Les chairs meurtries que cela représente. Le joli entre-jambes en charpie ! Les cris ! Le sang ! La glaire ! L’arrière-faix ! Il mit la main devant les yeux. L’arrièrefaix ! gémit-il.” (83) Un mot français archaïque pour décrire la scène primitive. 198

Et c’est partout dans cet univers de chutes, de rencontres d’êtres malfaisants, d’échecs, de pertes et d’échéances fatales la même promiscuité primitive qui exhibe l’absurde, la “panspermoconnerie” (185), le dérisoire vagissement de l’âme ( “Âme a trois lettres et une ou une et demie et même jusqu’à deux syllabes” – 118; en anglais Beckett ajoute une jolie variante d’ailleurs en précisant pour la carte de visite de Camier là où en français est marqué “Discrétion assurée”: “soul of discretion” – 54). Voie primitive de la distance impossible que mettront en scène diversement Premier Amour, Molloy, Malone meurt, l’Innommable, En attendant Godot, Fin de Partie. La dérive par le grotesque, le corps du clown ou celui du clochard. La démarche du fou du roi (“Pour aller où ? dit Camier. Obliquement devant nous, dit Mercier” – 142). Mais toute cette parade est nécessaire pour pouvoir dire le néant à travers l’échec (91 – “annihilation” en anglais), pour pouvoir sortir par ce charivari de la représentation en chaînes (ces mêmes chaînes dont parle Mercier, celles des coins de rue qui visualisent la corde des tout débuts) et de toucher à l’innommable. Ainsi la scène primitive ouvre-t-elle sur la scène originelle, impossible à saisir, où les formes se muent en fantômes, où rôdent les ombres (celles de Charpentier, de Couperin, de Pascal). Comme on peut le deviner dès la page 28 où entre chien et loup: “Une sorte d’encre surgit à l’orient et inonde le ciel. Je garde l’impression, dit Camier, de formes vagues et cotonneuses. Elles vont et viennent, en criant sourdement ”. C’est la tête du roi qui se détache en filigrane: “Le front [de Mercier], large et bas, barré de rides profondes en forme d’ailes, rides dues, plus qu’à la réflexion, à cet étonnement chronique qui lève les sourcils d’abord et ouvre les yeux ensuite, le front était quand même ce que cette tête avait de moins grotesque” (99). Et quelques pages plus loin se précise l’orientation du périple de Mercier: “La main de Mercier lâcha le barreau de la grille auquel l’avaient cloué ces renvois, supportés avec courage, d’époques révolues, comme on dit. Oui, il les avait supportés avec courage, car il savait qu’ils cesseraient à la fin dans cette lente chute vers le murmure et puis le silence, ce silence qui est aussi un murmure, mais inarticulé” (130). Quand Mercier et Camier arrivent dans le pays des ruines où la nuit les laisse ensevelis parmi les décombres, le texte se glisse parallèlement parmi les ombres: “Ce serait le moment de finir. Après tout c’est fini. Mais il y a encore le jour, tous les jours, et toute la vie la 199

vie, on les connaît trop bien les longs glissements posthumes, le gris trouble qui s’apaise, les clartés d’un instant, la poussière de l’achevé, se soulevant, tourbillonnant, se posant, parachevant.” (181) “The end went like magic” dit le texte anglais (p.120) [“Ça a été vite, à la fin” – 208] comme pour indiquer l’autre dimension qui s’ouvre. Celle du ciel du dernier paragraphe; “Dark deepen to its full” “Il regarda son ciel s’éteindre, l’ombre se parfaire” et c’est aussi la dernière formule du dernier résumé: L’ombre se parfait. Apogée des ombres errantes. ***** C’est ce perfectionnement de l’ombre qui s’origine ici que l’œuvre beckettienne va poursuivre inlassablement. Pour ébaucher à l’aide du fusain de l’ombre les contours du corps du roi. Ces ombres frivoles et tragiques Beckett a su les reconnaître dans la musique qu’il aimait, dans les derniers quatuors de Beethoven, dans les Lieder de Schubert. La plainte du « Kehret wieder holde Traüme » / Revenez doux rêves, revenez. Et on peut s’arrêter avec lui tout au bout de son voyage d’hiver (James Knowlson a très bien intitulé pareillement le dernier chapitre de sa biographie) où l’image du joueur de vielle résume toute la misère du siècle et puis la transforme en luminosité. Drüben hinterm Dorfe steht ein Leiermann Und mit starren Fingern dreht er, was er kann. Barfuss auf dem Eise wankt er hin und her Und sein kleiner Teller bleibt ihm immer leer. Keiner mag ihn hören, keiner sieht ihn an, Und die Hunde knurren um den alten Mann. Und er lässt es gehen alles, wie es will, Dreht und seine Leier steht ihm nimmer still. Wunderlicher Alter, soll ich mit dir geh’n ? Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier dreh’n ?

200

Notes 1.

Pareille émotion en écoutant sa voix (je pense aux documents sonores que Martin Esslin proposa à Strasbourg en 1997).

2.

L’exposition de l’été 2002 dans la Galerie du Port à Royan donnait aux ‘champs’ de ses tableaux un envol mélodique et elstirien

3.

“Pour intégrer cet échec et la cohorte des échecs vitaux associés à lui, aspirés par lui, dans un système fictif, dans une théorie explicative apparemment adulte mais analogue aux théories sexuelles infantiles, [Beckett invente] une théorie de la négativité, d’abord restreinte, puis généralisée”. (Anzieu, 84)

Ouvrages cités Anzieu, Didier, Beckett et le psychanaliste (Paris: Mentha: Archimbaud, 1992). Beckett, Samuel, Mercier et Camier (Paris: Minuit, 1970). –, Mercier and Camier (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974). –, Premier amour (Paris: Minuit, 1970). Michon, Pierre, Corps du roi (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2002). Knowlson, James, Damned to fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Campbell, Julie, “Pilgrim’s Progress/Regress/Stasis: Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Quest in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Beckett's Mercier and Camier,” in Comparative literature studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 , 1993, 137-152.

201

APRÈS OU D’APRÈS BECKETT? Joël Jouanneau metteur en scène de Beckett Yann Mével

Ce texte se propose de présenter le travail du metteur en scène français Joël Jouanneau et de réfléchir aux réactions très vives et très diverses que suscitent régulièrement ses mises en scène.

Lors du congrès de la Beckett Society, à Berlin (septembre 2000), Tom Bishop évoquait, avec quelque sévérité, une “version ‘contemporaine’” d’En attendant Godot, celle de Joël Jouanneau, donnée au théâtre des Amandiers (Nanterre), en 1991.(Bishop, 43) Ses griefs étaient de divers ordres, relatifs notamment au “changement générationnel”: la mise en scène de Jouanneau optait pour un Vladimir (David Warrilow) beaucoup plus âgé qu’Estragon (Philippe Demarle). Le parti pris de la modernisation sociale se ressentait sur bien des plans, dont Tom Bishop retenait tant le décor – un hangar laissé à l’abandon – que la figure de Lucky, représenté – selon les termes de Joël Jouanneau – comme une “sorte de travailleur immigré” (Jouanneau, 1994). Nous souhaitons ici tenter de comprendre, comme de l’intérieur, la démarche du metteur en scène. Quand bien même ce spectacle apparaîtrait comme une belle infidèle, il mérite, nous semble-t-il, d’être perçu à la lumière d’une autre forme de fidélité: à David Warrilow, avec lequel Joël Jouanneau avait commencé un compagnonnage – long de 9 ans – bien avant son Godot, mais aussi à Beckett lui-même, dont il a mis en scène cinq textes, entre 1991 et 2001. Ainsi s’est peu à peu dessiné, selon les termes d’Olivier Schmitt, “l’un des parcours les plus singuliers du théâtre français contemporain” (Schmitt). Singulier, d’abord, en ce que Joël Jouanneau articule écriture et mise en scène (y compris de ses propres œuvres). Mais, précisément, la singularité du rapport qu’entretient Joël Jouanneau avec l’œuvre de Beckett peut nous permettre de penser dans les

termes de la filiation notre rapport à l’héritage beckettien, ainsi qu’une période-charnière dans la réception de cette œuvre. Le débat que nous décidons de réouvrir prolongera celui amorcé par la critique dramatique, en France, lors des premières représentations du spectacle. L’un des plus significatifs de la question ici posée était, sans doute, l’article de Martine Vogel dans L’Express du 30 janvier 1991, ainsi intitulé: “L’Enfant terrible. Joël Jouanneau est-il le fils indigne de Beckett? Réponse avec son Godot à Nanterre”. L’article, à vrai dire, cédait largement la parole au metteur en scène et donnait argument à la défense, rappelant que Joël Jouanneau avait obtenu de Beckett les droits de mise en scène. Le mot n’était pas encore prononcé, mais il le serait dans Le Monde du 7 mars: Joël Jouanneau proposait une “nouvelle lecture” – ce à quoi le bref billet – non signé – ajoutait une pointe d’enthousiasme. Une nouvelle lecture, et quelle lecture dans la drôle de vie de ces deux fous qui ont tout perdu, sauf la raison. C’est vrai que les mots de Beckett s’amusent comme des gosses dans l’univers de gamin de Joël Jouanneau. Quelques semaines auparavant, dans le même journal, Colette Godard faisait du spectacle un pareil éloge: “[…] le spectacle, écrivait-elle, est d’une beauté à couper le souffle, comme tout ce que fait Joël Jouanneau” (7 février). Les deux tiers de la critique allaient prendre la même voie. Les réserves alors émises n’en méritent que plus d’attention. Elles portèrent d’abord – sans surprise – sur le parti-pris de modernisation sociale de la mise en scène. Le chroniqueur du Courrier des Hauts de Seine refusait de trancher – après avoir, pourtant, laissé percer quelque scepticisme: Les clochards d’aujourd’hui ne sont plus ce qu’ils étaient. Sans le chapeau melon prescrit par Beckett, ils perdent leur dignité, ils ne sont plus que des exclus victimes de la société. Scepticisme dû à quelque goût pour l’orthodoxie? On aura, du moins, remarqué le lexique, médical, de la prescription. Pourtant, reprocher la modernisation, l’“adaptation” de la pièce à la société des années 90, était encore mesuré, en comparaison de la condamnation qui allait 204

faire jour sous la plume de Pierre Marcabru, dans Le Figaro du 26 février. À l’abstraction répond le réalisme, à la métaphysique le social. Beckett songe à la condition de l’homme; Jouanneau à la condition des hommes. L’humanité entre dans le jeu. Quelque chose s’est défait: la sidérale distance. Jugement excessif, sans doute, et injuste. Mais le dédommagement avait, pour ainsi dire, précédé le mal, sous la plume de Fabienne Arvers, critique dramatique au journal La Croix. Ni naturaliste ni métaphysique, la mise en scène de Jouanneau place ce “classique contemporain” dans le droit fil de notre époque. Impressionnant. (13 février 1991). Joël Jouanneau n’évitait la condamnation pour naturalisme que pour rencontrer une autre, apparemment contraire, mais non moins virulente. Où la cruauté et la dérision noire de Beckett? Où sa dimension métaphysique? Quoi de la réflexion sur le théâtre? […] Joël Jouanneau fait naître de belles images: des lumières pour les feuilles qui ont poussé sur l’arbre. C’est très beau, mais la beauté prend le pas sur le sens […]. Joël Jouanneau devait cette critique en règle à l’un de ses pairs: Sylviane Gresh, du journal Révolution (8 février 1991), organe dans lequel il avait travaillé, lui l’homme aux expériences multiples; instituteur, journaliste, reporter au Moyen-Orient, avant d’embrasser, à 36 ans, la carrière de metteur en scène et de devenir lui-même dramaturge. Pour qui n’a pas assisté au spectacle, créé aux Amandiers de Nanterre, le plus précieux compte rendu est assurément celui de Colette Godard, qui décrivait avec précision ses premières minutes. Il fait nuit et les deux hommes sont arrivés dans une sorte de hangar, immense, dont les parois ondulées pendouillent […]. Par delà les verrières, on devine des feuillages. Le 205

fond est formé d’une palissade, couverte de graffitis, on le verra plus tard. Pour le moment, le brouillard du dehors et l’éclairage pauvre fabriquent un noir translucide, dans lequel flottent des traînées de poussière, immobiles comme l’éternité. Le plus âgé des hommes reste assis pratiquement sans bouger dans une guérite déglinguée où traînent des fils électriques. Un arbre y a poussé – l’arbre. Une branche maigrelette a percé le toit. L’autre d’abord on ne le voit pas, on l’entend taper du pied dans une boîte en fer, qui roule. Il apparaît, il est jeune avec un joli sourire et le crâne rasé, comme un soldat de fortune, un soldat perdu. Il est Estragon, donc l’autre est Vladimir […]. (7 février 1991). L’analyse des effets de sens de cette mise en scène se trouve tout à la fois aidée et contrainte par les commentaires auxquels elle a donné lieu chez ses maîtres d’œuvre. S’il est vrai que Joël Jouanneau reconnaît volontiers la liberté du spectateur – son droit à s’approprier ce qu’il voit –, la marge de manœuvre du spectateur informé est limitée par l’explicitation récurrente et souvent précise du projet sous-jacent à cette mise en scène. Ainsi dans Théâtre / Aujourd’hui n°3 (1994): Le choix d’un vieux Vladimir et d’un jeune Estragon, considéré comme sacrilège, a constitué le point de départ de mon travail. Habituellement, les personnages sont supposés être de la même génération: le texte de Beckett ne fournit cependant aucun repère à ce sujet. Je voulais que l’un fût le “grand-frère” de l’autre: l’idée que le premier est censé apprendre quelque chose au second est à mes yeux, inscrite dans le texte. En attendant Godot, c’est l’histoire d’une initiation à l’attente, sous-tendue par l’évolution des rapports entre les deux protagonistes: dans ce domaine, l’élève peu à peu dépasse le maître jusqu’à la fin où ils deviennent égaux. Cette répartition des rôles a disparu, et ils peuvent continuer à parler jusqu’à la nuit des temps, pareils à deux petites étoiles dans le cosmos. (Jouanneau, 1994, 38) 206

Il est remarquable que cette lecture, pour ainsi dire symbolique, de la pièce trouve, dans les commentaires de Jouanneau sur son travail, autrement plus de prolongements que la lecture “naturaliste”, suggérée dans le même entretien – mais également dans la presse. Je songeais à la phrase d’Hegel “Non pas l’homme, mais cet homme…” et je voulais raconter ce Vladimir et cet Estragon-là, restituer l’image de la dérive d’êtres exclus dans la France des années 90. (38) Les clochards actuels ne sont pas ceux d’il y a trente ans. On est loin du brave clodo satisfait de sa marginalisation, qui représentait une sorte de choix existentiel. Les exclus d’aujourd’hui sont à bout de souffle, à bout de droits. (Vogel) Comme son metteur en scène et ami, David Warrilow mettait en relief l’influence du contexte non seulement social, mais international (la guerre du Golfe) sur la violence sourde du spectacle. Pour autant, le processus d’identification entre comédien et metteur en scène ne devient réellement perceptible qu’au moment, pour David Warrilow, d’expliciter la portée, tout à la fois affective et poétique, de cette mise en scène. […] [Joël Jouanneau] voyait en Vladimir et Estragon une relation de maître à élève: le premier transmet sa connaissance du passé, sa sagesse, tout en sachant qu’un jour l’élève prendra le dessus, qu’il le tuera – symboliquement –, que d’une manière ou d’une autre il prendra sa place. En un sens, je vois Vladimir comme le “moi supérieur” mis dans la lumière, éduquant le “moi basique” qui ressemble à un enfant de trois ou quatre ans, cet enfant à l’intérieur de nous. Un enfant turbulent. Sans cesse il poserait des questions, aurait toujours faim, serait toujours prêt à dormir, voudrait toujours quelque chose et demanderait toujours “pourquoi”. (Jouanneau, 1996, 58) 207

Lors d’un entretien qu’il nous a accordé (22 décembre 2002), Joël Jouanneau nous indiquait que, dans le dispositif scénique adopté pour sa mise en scène de Godot, deux espaces, antagonistes, lui avaient immédiatement paru essentiels: le muret, hérissé d’arêtes métalliques, qui longeait la scène, et le transformateur électrique (issu d’une expérience personnelle, une promenade dans la campagne). Ce dernier, significativement, apparaissait tout à la fois comme le lieu de la communion entre Vladimir et Estragon, et celui d’une lumière par ailleurs longtemps diffuse: “[C’]est une idée très “mystique”, la source de lumière aujourd’hui, c’est l’électricité!” (Jouanneau, 1994, 41) La dimension symbolique du muret – espace d’acrobaties pour Estragon / Philippe Demarle, tout comme le transformateur – aurait pu demeurer énigmatique sans l’aide apportée par David Warrilow. Le vaste espace derrière le mur, c’est l’Enfer. Estragon, parce qu’il se bat, résiste et se bloque, se trouve la plupart du temps en enfer. À l’occasion, il accepte de sortir, et c’est là où il va que se passe la pièce, ainsi que leur jeu lorsqu’ils jouent ensemble. Puis Estragon repart en Enfer et c’est comme s’il ne savait que faire. Il est à la fois en ébullition et en extase: c’est ça l’Enfer. […] À un moment, il veut se mettre à la place de Vladimir, et c’est tellement choquant, tellement dangereux pour tous les deux. Puis à nouveau, ils se réconcilient, et à ces instants le public… On le sent se dresser sur son fauteuil, et alors… C’est à cause de ce que dit Vladimir. Ce dont il parle, il est si tendre… (Jouanneau, 1996, 60) Porter notre attention sur ces espaces, le muret, le transformateur, aussi importants soient-ils pour le jeu dramatique, ne nous fournit qu’une vision fragmentaire du projet sous-jacent à la mise en scène. Signe que le travail de Joël Jouanneau relève foncièrement de ce qui fonde la spécificité du théâtre, la cage scénique métaphorise ici les plus intimes secrets – cage, “hangar” qui, dans cette mise en scène de Godot, redoublent “ces boîtes noires que sont les théâtres”. (Ibid., 33) […] mon grand-père m’enfermait régulièrement dans un cachot noir, ce n’était pas qu’il pensait à mal, non, du tout; c’était, à l’image des rites des Indiens Wayana de la forêt 208

amazonienne, pour m’initier au silence et à la mort, faire du silence et de la mort, mes ennemis jusqu’alors, de singuliers bien que délicats complices depuis […]. (32) C’est ici le lieu où devient nécessaire une mise en perspective de la mise en scène de Godot, au sein du long travail mené par Joël Jouanneau sur l’œuvre beckettienne. Celui-ci ne peut se comprendre qu’à la condition que soit perçu le projet autobiographique, moteur et soubassement de la trilogie rêvée par Joël Jouanneau (qui estime, cependant, qu’elle est inhérente à l’œuvre même de Beckett). […] plus encore qu’avec aucun autre auteur, il faut ici mettre sa peau sur le plateau; non pour l’étaler, ce qui ne présente aucun intérêt, et pas même pour les intéressés, mais pour la mettre en jeu et alors ce peut être l’affaire de tous. Ainsi il est certain que, pour moi, le projet d’une trilogie qui, initialement, s’ordonnait ainsi: En attendant Godot, Fin de partie, La dernière bande, mettait en jeu une des clés de mon enfance, soit une relation furieuse et complexe avec un vieil homme, un grand-père. Disons qu’il était le sacré, et alors j’étais le profane; disons qu’il était Monsieur Seguin, et alors j’étais la chèvre; disons que mon enfance se déroule comme un conte, et alors ce serait un petit conte tendre et cruel. Et ainsi, lisant Godot à vingt ans, mais encore aujourd’hui, j’étais Estragon, celui qui veut partir, celui qui aime à dire: “Tu pisses mieux quand je ne suis pas là”, et lui était Vladimir, celui qui veut rester, celui qui me disait. “Relève ton pantalon!”; et lisant Fin de Partie, je l’entendais, lui, tel Hamm, me dire: “Tu ne peux pas me quitter”, et tel Clov, je répondais: “Et toi, tu ne peux pas me suivre!” Et si j’ai fini par partir, c’était pour ne pas l’entendre enregistrer sa dernière bande.1 Ainsi perçue, la communion entre Vladimir et Estragon, à la fin de la mise en scène de Jouanneau, serait donc relativisée par les mises en scène à venir. Pour autant que les personnages de Beckett sont, à l’infini, des alter ego, le seul avenir possible serait celui de la sépara209

tion: à en croire Jouanneau, Clov finit par quitter Hamm, et, pour lui comme pour Krapp, la solitude est inéluctable. C’est dire que le travail de mise en scène, tel que le conçoit Joël Jouanneau, est indissociable d’un travail de mémoire et d’un jeu d’identification – au sens où, chez Beckett, il y a de “l’être à jouer”. (Jouanneau, 1997, 404) La question est de savoir si on peut investir les textes des autres avec son vécu, mais est-il possible de faire différemment? Et le spectateur ne reçoit-il pas un spectacle à partir de son histoire? Mais dans Godot, c’était d’autant plus possible que le texte permettait cette lecture. Car enfin Didi, c’est bien celui qui “dit”, et Gogo, en anglais, c’est bien celui qui “part”, et Estragon précise bien que “lui joue de la bouche et moi des pieds”. J’aurais vraiment pu dire cela de mon grand-père. Donc un rapport maître-élève était possible, et je voulais un Didi qui marche avec sa tête et parle à la perfection la langue de Beckett. Le gardien du temple ne pouvait être que David. Et je voulais un Estragon qui boude cette langue, qui pense avec les pieds, comme moi, qui ait pour but de déstabiliser le maître, ne serait-ce que pour gagner sa liberté. Mais à la fin, ils sont tous deux dans l’arbre, ils continuent. On peut légitimement me reprocher la différence d’âge entre les deux, encore faut-il souligner que c’est bien dans Godot que Beckett dit que nous naissons et mourrons “le même jour, le même instant”. Dès lors, vingt ans de plus ou de moins, telle n’est pas la question! (Jouanneau, 1991, 102) La procédure d’identification sous-jacente à la mise en scène de Godot, à travers le personnage d’Estragon, allait de pair avec une fusion des figures – remarquablement proches au physique, selon Jouanneau – du grand-père et de David Warrilow. Occasion privilégiée, proprement rêvée, d’un dialogue à distance et moyen de “poursuivre avec lui le duel […]”. Ma collaboration avec David Warrilow me renvoyait à mon grand-père. Il est le socle que je voulais profaner, l’image d’un certain ordre que je voulais bouleverser. J’avais avec 210

mon grand-père une relation passionnée qui a fondé ma personnalité. (Schmitt) Le comédien serait donc, tout à la fois, le lieu et l’instrument de la profanation du sacré – bien au-delà du biographique, puisqu’à travers David Warrilow, semblait-il, depuis des années, passait la voix de l’auteur, cette autre figure du (grand) père. Le comédien lui-même allait justifier l’entreprise. [Beckett] avait un but: voir réalisée l’image qu’il avait dans la tête. Il disait: “Les Allemands font toujours ce qu’on leur demande”. Je savais que nos avis différaient, mais j’étais tellement sûr de mes voix intérieures, que j’en étais convaincu, je ne devais pas faire comme lui. Réaliser l’image d’un autre est impossible. (Jouanneau, 1996, 55) Quel serait, au juste, le sacrilège ici en jeu? S’agissait-il de cette modernisation sociale évoquée au seuil de notre propos? Autant de signes, il est vrai, d’un rapport très personnel aux didascalies. Joël Jouanneau aime à dire que son premier geste, avant de mettre en scène une pièce de Beckett, consiste à user du feutre noir – ce qu’il fait, également, affirme-t-il, lorsqu’il travaille sur ses propres textes. Mais ne profane que celui qui, un tant soit peu, est initié. Jouanneau et Warrilow figurent au nombre de ceux qui […] [sont] venus au théâtre comme d’autres entrent dans les ordres: ils ne peuvent plus rien faire d’autre, et c’est finalement leur seul moyen de continuer d’être là, présents au monde, mais c’est aussi le choix d’aller au plus profond de l’aventure intime et de la quête de soi (Jouanneau, 1996, 35) C’est dire que l’offense faite à Beckett serait ici profondément, radicalement, d’avoir franchi l’interdit de l’affect.2 Le plaidoyer pro domo de Jouanneau prend l’allure d’une confession.

211

[Je] ne peux être autrement que je ne suis. Je viens d’un milieu paysan, où la tendresse on devait la garder en soi et ne pas l’extérioriser. On devient ainsi un bloc de tendresse, un bloc muré. Evidemment, dès que j’ai ouvert les vannes!… Dans un second temps, je me suis heurté au même interdit, mais dans les milieux intellectuels, où le sentiment est souvent considéré comme obscène. Barthes a très bien parlé de cela. Moi, j’aime les mélodrames de Douglas Sirk, comme Le temps d’aimer et le temps de mourir, j’étais ému par Cosette et je suis plutôt Jean-qui-rit-Jean-qui-pleure. Je dois être cyclothymique. (Jouanneau, 1991, 105) Des gardiens du temple David Warrilow s’était exempté au moment de proposer à Jouanneau de mettre en scène En attendant Godot. Mais c’est une conception aussi “borgesienne” que “beckettienne” de l’auteur qui ressort des propos de Joël Jouanneau: “[…] je maintiens qu’au commencement est le verbe et non pas l’auteur. Dans le temps même où il écrit, il se fait que l’auteur est écrit”. (Jouanneau, 1997, 403) Ou encore: C’est aussi une question d’écriture que l’on se pose forcément lorsqu’on est auteur si l’on veut être totalement sincère avec soi-même. C’est se dire que tout a déjà été écrit et que l’on est toujours en train d’écrire à l’intérieur d’une langue qui n’est pas la sienne. (Jouanneau, 1995, 86) Dès lors, l’écriture, mais aussi la mise en scène, pour Joël Jouanneau, permet d’“enlever [les] masques” (ceux des rôles sociaux et des idéologies): pour l’une comme pour l’autre, […] c’est une question de possession et de dépossession de soi. Comme l’adaptation de textes qui m’est chère: être à l’intérieur de l’écriture et de la problématique d’un autre tout en sachant que c’est la mienne. Parfois jusqu’à me l’approprier totalement. (86) 212

Dans le mouvement de l’appropriation il demeure du sacré: celui du verbe, celui du texte – l’espace même où se retrouvent les didascalies barrées au feutre noir (lorsque, précisément, elles viennent du texte). L’espace même qu’allaient faire vivre, de leurs voix d’instrumentalistes, David Warrilow puis Mireille Mossé, l’interprète de Winnie dans la mise en scène d’Oh les beaux jours proposée par Joël Jouanneau au théâtre de l’Athénée (Paris, 2001). Faire cercle autour du texte. Faire du texte un totem. Lui tendre l’oreille. En prendre la mesure. Entendre ses murmures. Ses cris aussi. Se souvenir qu’il nous précédait. Qu’il fut son, rythme et pulsation, avant d’être sens. Passer de l’oreille à la bouche. Ne plus être que du verbe. Se demander alors où est passé le corps. Le chercher. Puis danser dans les charmes. Avec une gravité semblable à celle que l’on mettait enfant à nos jeux. (CNA3) Nul étonnement, dans ce contexte, à ce que, selon Joël Jouanneau, le texte beckettien pose fondamentalement au comédien la question de l’incarnation: en autres termes, comment être – demeurer vivant – lorsque seul le texte vous soutient? À ses débuts, Joël Jouanneau, comme “[…] les gens de sa génération, […] totalement fascinés par Beckett”, pouvait se poser “la question de savoir comment “reconstruire” le théâtre”. (Jouanneau, 1995) Sans doute y sera-t-il depuis parvenu, à son échelle, en insufflant de l’affect dans l’œuvre de Beckett, sa “machine à vivre” (Schmitt) – en rejouant aussi une longue scène de séparation, au travers de la maladie de la mort, celle de David Warrilow. L’affect, en effet, se sera introduit de lui-même dans le travail de Jouanneau. Au travers même de l’affect, le théâtre de Beckett sera resté un théâtrelimite. […] la maladie, celle de David, nous a rattrapés, et, de Godot, c’est dans l’urgence que nous sommes passés directement à La dernière bande, dans l’urgence et la douleur, et les mots de Beckett nous ont traversés comme jamais, et la ligne de fracture entre le théâtre et la vie, ligne sans laquelle le théâtre n’est plus possible, cette ligne ne fut plus qu’une 213

feuille de cigarette, rien qu’une feuille, heureusement une feuille. Le théâtre, la vie ne renaîtraient vraiment qu’avec la mise en scène d’Oh les beaux jours, joué “au premier degré” – “ainsi que le souhaitait Beckett, selon Lindon”, précise, scrupuleux, Joël Jouanneau. (Mével, 2002) David Warrilow resurgirait par la voix du metteur en scène lui-même, cette “voix du ventre” par laquelle s’exprimerait Willie, invisible mais audible, par le trou du souffleur. De la polémique, il y en aurait donc encore, mais ce serait de peu d’importance en comparaison du rayonnement de Winnie / Mireille Mossé, femme-enfant, dont la mise en scène révélait les pouvoirs conjugués, face au vide. Pouvoirs de changer de registres à volonté – de jouer, notamment, de l’accent anglais –, aussi longtemps du moins que perdure l’espoir d’une compagnie, sur cette “terre maternelle”, d’un “rose téton”. (Mével, 2002) ***** Dans l’intervalle, en 1995, avec Fin de Partie, Joël Jouanneau avait, une nouvelle fois, rejoué sa scène primitive, avec Heinz et David Bennent – père et fils dans la vie. Et cette fois-là, bien que salué par la critique, le metteur en scène – à cause du décor surtout, qui remplaçait le fauteuil de Hamm par un pneu – avait été puni – sévèrement. La tournée française ne serait pas autorisée. Jouanneau, l’enfant terrible, l’artiste trop artiste, devrait rester en place. Beckett, statu quo?

214

Notes 1.

Y être, tiré à part fourni par l’auteur, que nous remercions. Souligné dans le texte.

2.

Certes, Joël Jouanneau n’est ni le premier ni le dernier à prendre le parti de l’affect, mais il nous faut considérer le fait que celui-ci a en ligne de mire les mises en scène de Beckett lui-même. Selon Jouanneau, Beckett, dans son rapport avec les comédiens, aurait trop souvent occulté la place légitime de l’affect (cf. Mével, 2002).

3.

Ce texte est mis en exergue du portrait de Joël Jouanneau sur le site Internet du Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique (Paris), où il enseigne actuellement.

Ouvrages cités Bishop, Tom, “Staging Beckett in France at the End of the Twentieth Century.”, in S. B. T./A., 11, Samuel Beckett: fin sans fin en l’an 2000, édité par A. Moorjani et C. Veit, Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York, 2001. Jouanneau, Joel, “Un cirque sur un bateau”, entretien de S. Gresh avec J. Jouanneau, in Théâtre / Public, n°100, juillet-août 1991 –, “Non pas l’homme, mais cet homme…” entretien accordé à M. Fournier, J.-J. Arnault et J. Cl. Lallias, in Théâtre Aujourd’hui, n°3, L’univers scénique de Samuel Beckett, (CNDP, 1994). –, “L’écriture creuse intérieurement”, entretien avec A. Colao, in Alternatives théâtrales, n°49, octobre 1995. –, Warrilow Solos, J. Jouanneau et Cl. David dir., Actes Sud / Eldorado. Théâtre de Sartrouville, 1996. –, Y être, tiré à part fourni par Joël Jouanneau à l’auteur. –, “Quatuor: entretien de quatre metteurs en scène”, in S.B., T./A., 6, Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines, L’œuvre carrefour / l’œuvre limite, édité par M. Buning, M. Engelberts, S.Houppermans et E. Jacquart, Rodopi, 1997, 404. Mével, Yann, entretien avec Joël Jouanneau, 22 décembre 2002 Schmitt, Olivier, “Joël Jouanneau achève sa visite dans le château de Samuel Beckett”, in Le Monde, 6 juillet 1995. Vogel, Martine, L’Express, 30 janvier 1991. Site internet Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique: http://www.cnsad.fr (CNA)

215

This page intentionally left blank

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY

This page intentionally left blank

CE QUE LES PHILOSOPHES FONT AVEC SAMUEL BECKETT Bruno Clément

Ce texte cherche à évaluer l’évolution de la critique beckettienne française dans les dix dernières années. Après une mise en contexte de tonalité historique, il s’intéresse plus précisément aux textes que les philosophes (Badiou, Deleuze) ou les psychanalystes (Anzieu) ont consacrés à Beckett; et il pose à l’occasion de cette lecture la question plus générale du rapport entre le dispositif textuel d’une œuvre et la pensée produite à partir de lui. Il semble que l’œuvre de Beckett ait de ce point de vue un fonctionnement spécifique; qu’elle amène à poser de façon inédite le problème de la subjectivité critique.

Fidèle à ma manière, je parlerai moins ici de l’œuvre de Beckett que de quelques discours – spécialement philosophiques – auxquels elle a donné lieu. Mes références seront essentiellement françaises. D’abord bien sûr parce que je connais mieux la critique française que l’anglosaxonne (sans rien dire de mon ignorance des autres…); mais surtout parce que le discours sur le discours est l’objet presque officiel de ma curiosité et de mon étude. J’ai depuis longtemps déjà fait l’hypothèse que le discours critique relevait, plus ou moins selon son degré d’autonomie par rapport au texte qu’il se propose comme objet, de la rhétorique. La rhétorique en effet n’est pas seulement l’art de bien parler; c’est aussi – et peutêtre avant tout – l’art de convaincre. Le bon discours conduit celui qui le reçoit à parler, à penser et finalement à agir selon les intentions, et donc les intérêts de l’orateur. On ne peut exclure sans examen l’hypothèse que l’existence même de l’activité de commentaire doive quelque chose à la rhétorique, ne serait-ce que le désir, propre à l’œuvre littéraire, de faire effet sur le lecteur. Or, le critique littéraire, après tout, est aussi un lecteur. Et il serait difficile de soutenir que son commentaire ne devra rien à sa lecture. Il me semble qu’ainsi posée la question de la nature du dis-

cours secondaire (dont la critique est une forme incontestable) n’est pas séparable de celle de la facture de l’œuvre littéraire qui lui a donné naissance, autrement dit que l’on ne peut esquiver le problème des rapports qu’ils entretiennent l’un avec l’autre. Or, depuis une quinzaine d’années se sont déroulés suffisamment d’événements dans le paysage critique beckettien pour qu’on ne puisse éluder la question. Cette métamorphose s’explique bien sûr en partie par les changements d’époque (historiques, sociaux, politiques, culturels, etc.), par le progrès accomplis dans diverses approches techniques, mais il serait naïf de sous-estimer la part du texte beckettien lui-même dans cette évolution. C’est dans ce va-et-vient entre le texte et son époque que je chercherai à inscrire ma réflexion. Il me semble qu’on pourrait distinguer quatre points à partir desquels envisager les choses. Le premier serait plus ou moins chronologique, et on pourrait l’appeler “le temps de l’œuvre”; le second prendrait en compte les discours spéculatifs susceptibles d’être produits à partir de l’œuvre, on pourrait l’appeler “la pensée de l’œuvre”; le troisième constituerait une sorte de brève digression théorique sur la question de l’annexion, je l’appellerais volontiers “le territoire de l’œuvre”; le dernier chercherait à dire quelque chose de la difficile question de la subjectivité du discours critique, je parlerai donc pour finir du “sujet de l’œuvre”. Le temps de l’œuvre Chacun sait que la critique française de Beckett n’existe guère en France avant Molloy (1951) et que sa notoriété coïncide, en gros, avec la première de En attendant Godot (1953). De cette époque datent des textes fameux, signés des plus grands noms (Bataille, Blanchot, Janvier, Robbe-Grillet, etc.) et qui malgré leur diversité ont pourtant en commun d’être écrits “sous influence”. Je veux dire que leur teneur est redevable, à des titres divers, au discours tenu par l’œuvre sur ellemême. L’exemple le plus frappant reste à mes yeux le “Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?” que Maurice Blanchot publie à la parution de L’Innommable. Dans ce texte célèbre, qui devait donner pour longtemps la tonalité des études beckettiennes, on s’aperçoit avec le recul que le critique est pour ainsi dire ventriloqué par le texte dont il prétend dire quelque chose. Il dit par exemple que les histoires sont devenues presque inexistantes dans ce roman, mais que le récit “ne nous importe pas car nous attendons quelque chose de bien plus im220

portant”. Le texte de Beckett dit quant à lui “Pas cessé de me raconter des histoires, les écoutant à peine, écoutant autre chose, guettant autre chose”. Entre les propos de l’un et ceux de l’autre, la cloison n’est jamais plus épaisse. “L’Innommable a bien plus d’importance pour la littérature que la plupart des œuvres ‘réussies’ qu’elle nous offre”, dit encore Maurice Blanchot; et le narrateur de Beckett: “Je suis en train d’échouer, encore une fois. Ça ne me fait rien d’échouer, j’aime bien ça.” Ce que disait nûment Brian T. Fitch, chacun à cette époque y aurait sans doute souscrit: “Nous espérons donc paradoxalement clore cette étude sans avoir rien dit de l’essentiel” (Molloy disait, quant à lui: “Et pour ce qui est de laisser de côté l’essentiel, je m’y connais, je crois”). Fitch ajoutait: “…sans avoir été amené à formuler l’informe” (Fitch, 94) (et Malone: “J’ai fait pour toujours miens l’informe et l’inarticulé”). Bref, il y eut une époque où l’idéal critique était de “créer une sorte d’équivalent critique de l’œuvre elle-même” (toujours selon la formule de Fitch). L’œuvre de Beckett n’est pas la seule à donner lieu à ce genre de critique; mais ses traits sont spécifiques: la critique mimétique, étonnamment consensuelle, à laquelle elle donne lieu a selon moi son origine dans sa facture propre, et en particulier dans la dualité de ses instances narratives. Le lecteur peu attentif ne prend que tardivement conscience qu’est à l’œuvre, dans le texte qu’il lit, une voix ressemblant à s’y méprendre à la voix critique. Cette voix est précisément celle de l’échec, et elle manque rarement de déprécier ce qui se donne à lire comme un travail en cours. “Quel gâchis!”, “Quelle misère!”, “Quelque chose là qui ne va pas”, “Brusquement, non, à force, à force, je n’en pus plus”: tout lecteur familier de Beckett connaît, aime ces moments innombrables où le texte qu’il lit se déprécie, se corrige luimême, et ainsi se constitue, subrepticement, en discours critique. La rhétorique des titres (Esquisses, Foirades, Têtes-mortes, L’Innommable, Mal vu mal dit, D’un ouvrage abandonné, Textes pour rien, etc.) œuvre évidemment dans le même sens. Peu de lecteurs réussissent à dénier à cette voix métatextuelle toute prétention à dire sur l’œuvre en cours la vérité. Les textes qu’on lit en France depuis quelques années sont manifestement d’une autre facture. En simplifiant beaucoup, on pourrait dire qu’on est passé peu à peu d’une critique mimétique, du type de celle que pratique Blanchot (qui ne dit jamais que ce que dit 221

l’œuvre) à une critique philosophique (qui donne parfois l’impression de faire dire à l’œuvre de Beckett autre chose que ce qu’elle dit). Ces “Beckett” qu’on lit aujourd’hui sont très différents les uns des autres, et il est certain que la lecture de l’œuvre en est profondément renouvelée: le Beckett d’Alain Badiou n’a pas grand chose à voir avec celui de Gilles Deleuze, qui lui-même n’est pas forcément compatible avec celui de Didier Anzieu. Il y a à cela, me semble-t-il, deux sortes de causes. Externes tout d’abord. Vient nécessairement un moment, en histoire littéraire, où les textes sont pour ainsi dire dépossédés d’eux-mêmes; où la “postérité” les détache de leur contexte (historique, amical, idéologique, etc.) et s’emploie à leur donner sens dans un environnement que l’œuvre ne connaissait pas. C’est là le propre des grandes œuvres: celles qui ne connaissent pas ce destin sont celles dont la signification était liée trop étroitement à une époque, à une culture, à un courant; elles sont bien vite oubliées. Nul doute qu’une interprétation marxiste du Prométhée enchaîné d’Eschyle, ou psychanalytique de l’Œdipe roi de Sophocle n’ait d’une certaine manière fait violence au texte commenté; nul doute pourtant que ce texte n’ait été enrichi, et grandement, et durablement, par ces lectures “déviantes”. Tant il est vrai que le principe de l’histoire des textes et des idées est la relecture périodique. À ranger dans les causes externes aussi (mais j’y reviendrai plus précisément sur des exemples précis), la tendance actuelle de la philosophie à prendre la littérature pour objet, à estimer sa faculté, sa propension, sa vocation à penser. Mais causes internes aussi, bien sûr. Si l’œuvre de Beckett a été, si tôt finalement, l’objet de lectures philosophiques, c’est qu’elle contient en son sein de quoi attirer, sinon séduire, les philosophes. Jouant un rôle peut-être comparable à l’instance critique, cachée sous les traits du discours métatextuel, il y a dans les textes de Beckett un discours “philosophique” (des répliques désabusées, des aphorismes catastrophistes, etc.) prêtant si fort à confusion qu’on a pu parler d’une “philosophie” de Beckett, qu’on a même prononcé, à son propos, non seulement les noms de philosophes qu’il cite (Vico, Geulincx, Malebranche, Berkeley, Schopenhauer…), mais aussi ceux auxquels il est vraisemblable qu’il ne pensait pas (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, pour ne donner que deux noms fréquemment invoqués). 222

Il me semble que ce à quoi l’on assiste aujourd’hui est d’un ordre radicalement différent. J’évoquerai principalement trois textes récents, dont aucun ne prétend reconstituer le sens philosophique de l’œuvre en le découvrant de l’intérieur, ou en se prévalant de références plus ou moins explicites en son sein, mais qui de manière plus ou moins déclarée, entreprennent d’intégrer Beckett à leur propre démarche. Il s’agit de L’Épuisé, de Gilles Deleuze, de Beckett et le psychanalyste, de Didier Anzieu, et de Beckett, l’increvable désir, d’Alain Badiou. La pensée de l’œuvre Les trois textes diffèrent essentiellement, il n’est pas question de le cacher. Au contraire: cette différence est l’un des points qui fait rupture, et il convient de l’envisager dans toutes ses implications. Mais il me semble que leur proximité (malgré tout) dans le paysage critique français n’est pas sans signification. L’axiome incontestablement commun aux trois livres, c’est que la littérature et la pensée ne relèvent pas de deux ordres distincts, que la littérature pense par ellemême, je veux dire sans qu’il lui soit nécessaire de faire référence à un système de pensée déterminé et situé hors d’elle-même. L’hypothèse que j’aimerais vérifier est la suivante: travailler sur la langue, c’est penser. Simplement, l’objet produit ne sera pas un concept, ou une idée, mais un objet textuel constituant dans l’ordre de la raison spéculative une proposition non moins sérieuse ni considérable que le philosophique (qui, d’ailleurs, soit dit en passant, est aussi textuel). Le langage, donc, est pris en compte par chacun de ces lecteurs. Et la chose est remarquable: à un Maurice Blanchot qui prétendait que le roman beckettien (il parlait de L’Innommable) ne mettait en œuvre ni “figures” ni “tricherie”, ni “subterfuges”, qu’il était “privé délibérément de toutes ressources”, succèdent des lecteurs, d’ordinaire non répertoriés comme littéraires, que préoccupent les transformations infligées à la langue (et donc à la pensée) par le travail des écrivains. Badiou, par exemple, part du principe que si Beckett avant lui a été mal lu, c’est précisément parce que n’a jamais été pris en un compte réel la transformation incomparable qu’il a imposée à la prose. Son point de départ est l’aveu d’une bêtise, celle qui a consisté à ne pas savoir lire autre chose dans l’œuvre découverte au milieu des années cinquante qu’une alliance “au vrai inconsistante” entre un nihilisme convenu, un “existentialisme vital” (façon Sartre) et un “impé223

ratif langagier”, une “métaphysique du verbe” (façon Blanchot), alors que, dit-il, son souci philosophique devait être d’une “investigation soigneuse des opacités du signifiant” (Badiou, 1995, 7). Son deuxième chapitre fait sur cette question un point minutieux et décidé. La thèse tient presque tout entière (s’agissant des rapports entre langage et pensée) dans une formule dont tous les termes ont été soigneusement pesés: “Disons qu’il s’agit d’une entreprise de pensée méditative et à demi gagnée par le poème, qui cherche à ravir en beauté les fragments imprescriptibles de l’existence” (12). Non seulement Badiou prétend que le texte beckettien est gouverné par ce qu’il appelle un “poème latent”, mais il va jusqu’à dire qu’il faut, pour le lire comme il faut, “partir de la beauté de la prose” (16). Pour Deleuze aussi, la question du langage est essentielle. Sans doute ne souscrirait-il pas au mot de “beauté”, mais il mettrait en avant celui de “santé”, qu’il emprunte à Nietzsche et sous le chef duquel il recueille les textes de Critique et clinique. But ultime de la littérature, dégager dans le délire cette création d’une santé, ou cette invention d’un peuple, c’est-à-dire une possibilité de vie. Écrire pour ce peuple qui manque… […] Ce que fait la littérature apparaît mieux: comme dit Proust, elle y trace précisément une sorte de langue étrangère, qui n’est pas une autre langue, ni un patois retrouvé, mais un devenir-autre de la langue, une minoration de cette langue majeure, un délire qui l’emporte, une ligne de sorcière qui s’échappe du système dominant […] Création syntaxique, style, tel est ce devenir de la langue: il n’y a pas création de mots, il n’y a pas de néologismes qui vaillent en dehors des effets de syntaxe dans lesquels ils se développent. (1993, 15-16) Et de fait l’étude sur Beckett, à qui s’appliqueraient sans doute mieux qu’à tout autre ces considérations sur le travail de la littérature, consiste en une systématique description du dispositif syntaxique des œuvres pour la télévision, et du même coup, à grands traits, de toute l’œuvre. Pour Anzieu, la fonction du langage (qu’il soit celui de l’écrivain ou de l’analyste), est d’“énoncer à l’infini les formes indéfiniment variées d’un manque fondamentalement pervers et polymor224

phe” (Anzieu, 1992, 29) On ne peut guère s’en étonner: les formes de l’œuvre, et donc l’inépuisable invention de Beckett en la matière, n’intéressent Anzieu qu’en tant qu’elles renvoient à l’enfance (c’est l’enfant qui est, selon Freud, “pervers polymorphe”). Si l’on pouvait dire que le travail textuel transpose, ou traduit, ou mime, ou feint un autre travail, une autre tâche; si l’on pouvait imaginer que l’entreprise d’écriture est une solution parmi d’autres possibles (la peinture, l’analyse, la philosophie, la musique, par exemple), aucun des trois livres dont je parle n’aurait de sens. Pour Badiou, pour Deleuze, pour Anzieu, seule la littérature peut ce qu’elle fait. C’est vrai pour Beckett, selon eux, bien sûr. C’est vrai aussi pour chacun d’entre eux, qui sur l’écriture, fût-elle celle des autres, a misé quelque chose. Il s’agit donc de replacer chacune de ces entreprises dans son contexte de pensée et de chercher à évaluer le rôle qu’elle entend faire jouer à la littérature. Là encore, Beckett n’est pas choisi par hasard. Je dirai, pour aller vite, que pour Badiou, Beckett est l’homme qui pense par prose et par fiction (et rappellerai qu’il est luimême l’auteur de plusieurs pièces de théâtre); que pour Deleuze (qui écrivit deux volumes consacrées à la théorie du cinéma), Beckett est l’auteur de Film, et que l’Épuisé est avant tout une étude consacrée aux œuvres filmiques de Beckett; que pour Anzieu enfin, Beckett fut l’un des premiers patients du psychanalyste Bion, et que son livre est consacré aussi à cette rencontre – à la fortune qu’elle eut peut-être. “Non, l’œuvre de Beckett n’est pas ce qu’on a toujours dit qu’elle était: désespoir, absurdité du monde, angoisse, solitude, déchéance” (Badiou, 1995, 4ème de couverture). Badiou propose de Beckett une lecture qu’il souhaite décapante, débarrassée des stéréotypes qui lui en ont, dit-il, empêché un accès intelligent. Et il retrouve dans cette œuvre, comment s’en étonner, les lignes de force de sa propre pensée. D’abord, il faut, selon lui, prendre en réelle considération les seuils et les paliers de l’œuvre. Il y a des périodes différentes en effet, relevant de partis pris esthétiques variés, il y a des infléchissements, des virages, une inlassable invention dans le domaine formel; il attache quant à lui une importance décisive à la date de 1960 (Comment c’est). Et puis, l’œuvre de Beckett n’est pas d’un bout à l’autre celle du monologue et du solipsisme. D’accord en cela avec Beckett lui-même, il parle d’impasse à propos de L’Innommable, et voit dans l’apparition de l’autre (Pim), une obsession de la figure du couple, soit 225

– dans son vocabulaire – du “deux”, figure fondamentale, et d’ailleurs présente jusqu’à la fin. Dans la pensée de Badiou, le sujet se définit par “l’événement”. À chaque procédure du sujet correspond un type d’événement différent. Ces procédures sont au nombre de quatre: le politique (auquel correspond l’événement de la révolution), le scientifique (événement: la découverte), l’esthétique (l’innovation, la rupture), l’amoureux (la rencontre). La lecture que Badiou fait de Beckett cherche à retrouver dans ses textes (principalement ceux écrits à partir de 1960) la trace de cette quadripartition générique. Dans un texte légèrement antérieur à L’increvable désir, Badiou rappelle brièvement cette “topographie” et avance l’idée que la fidélité, qui caractérise l’amour, dont il met en évidence la figure particulière chez Beckett, organiserait aussi bien chacune des autres procédures du sujet: Cette fidélité organise pour Beckett quatre fonctions, qui sont aussi quatre figures du sujet dans l’amour, et dont je soutiens – je ne peux ici en administrer la preuve – qu’elles ont valeur générale, qu’elles sont les fonctions organisatrices de toute procédure générique, de la durée d’amour, certes, mais aussi de la cumulation scientifique, de l’innovation artistique, et de la ténacité politique. (Badiou, 1989, 30) L’œuvre dans son ensemble reçoit ainsi sa lecture, qui rend compte d’un parcours. Partie d’une obsession solipsiste et ressassante culminant dans L’Innommable mais n’excluant pas une préoccupation de l’événement (traqué dans Watt, espéré dans En attendant Godot), l’œuvre s’ouvre, avec le thème essentiel de la rencontre, à la brillance de l’événement, qui emportera sur son passage tout l’attirail de la littérature ancienne (le bien vu et le bien dit). Badiou accorde une importance capitale au mot “bonheur”, sur lequel s’achève Mal vu mal dit: le bonheur est à ses yeux le propre de l’amour, et l’amour l’affaire de Beckett. “Il n’y a de bonheur que dans l’amour, c’est la récompense propre de ce type de vérité. Dans l’art il y a du plaisir, dans la science de la joie, et dans la politique de l’enthousiasme, mais dans l’amour, il y a du bonheur.” Ce qui permet à Badiou d’investir ainsi cette œuvre au nom de la pensée ce sont quelques aphorismes, quelques phrases qui rappel226

lent selon lui, les grandes questions de la philosophie: il cite volontiers, dans les Mirlitonnades, un poème qui évoque Héraclite1; ou, dans les Textes pour rien, la triple question “Où irais-je si je pouvais aller? Que serais-je si je pouvais être? Que dirais-je si j’avais une voix?”, évocation ironique, selon lui, de la question critique kantienne (Que puis-je savoir? Que dois-je faire? Que puis-je espérer?). Le fameux dénuement systématique des personnages de l’œuvre est quant à lui mis en rapport avec l’impératif cartésien, ou aussi bien husserlien, de “suspendre tout ce qui est inessentiel ou douteux, de ramener l’humanité à ses fonctions indestructibles”; c’est ce qu’il appelle “l’ascèse méthodique”. Les textes de Badiou sur Beckett représentent ainsi comme l’intersection entre son univers philosophique propre et celui de l’auteur qu’il lit. Il en va sans doute toujours ainsi, même lorsque cela ne se voit pas. J’y reviendrai pour finir. Le Beckett de Deleuze ne ressemble guère à celui-ci, et cela bien sûr fait problème. Deleuze recompose intégralement le paysage de la création beckettienne, cherchant à dire sa cohérence depuis les années trente (il attache une importance très grande à la lettre à Axel Kaun) jusqu’à ces ultimes pièces pour la TV qu’il envisage. Pour ne pas entrer dans un détail trop minutieux, je rappellerai seulement que Deleuze, en nietzschéen fidèle et convaincu, a toujours lié les deux questions de la littérature – de l’art en général – et de la santé (le recueil Critique et clinique est entièrement construit sur cette problématique); et que si l’on oublie ce principe le titre qu’il a choisi pour son étude, L’Épuisé, risque de rester à jamais incompréhensible. Le mot exhausted, en anglais, est riche de la même ambiguïté que le mot épuisé: il indique une surcharge de fatigue insupportable, en même temps qu’il sert à désigner la totalité des combinaisons possibles (on dit en français épuiser le champ du possible). Le coup de génie de Deleuze consiste à faire jouer cette ambiguïté à plein. Il distingue la fatigue et l’épuisement (“L’épuisé, c’est beaucoup plus que le fatigué”, première phrase), et lie donc la question de l’épuisement à celle du corps; mais il axe l’ensemble de son propos sur la question (philosophique par excellence) du possible (“Il n’y a plus de possible: un spinozisme acharné”, première page). De même que la lecture de Badiou privilégie le “deux” de la rencontre et reconstitue un trajet qui y conduit, la nomme et la médite, de même celle de Deleuze donne la préséance à l’image (que la chronologie biographique place effectivement à la fin de la production 227

beckettienne), et l’investit de la tâche infinissable d’épuiser l’espace. Si l’image intervient finalement, c’est que d’autres tentatives l’ont précédée, qui ont fait la preuve de leur insuffisance. Il y eut d’abord ce que Deleuze appelle la “langue I” (combinatoire cherchant à épuiser les mots, comme dans les expériences langagières de Watt, ou les martingales de Molloy faisant circuler ses cailloux de la poche à la bouche), langue soumise à la raison plus ou moins, langue des romans, principalement; puis la “langue II” (qui cherche, elle, à épuiser les voix, soit les flux de langage), langue “entachée de mémoire”, d’intrications personnelles, née dans le roman, mais prédominant au théâtre, et surtout à la radio. L’image est donc la “langue III”. Il peut s’agir d’une image au sens où on l’entend habituellement, mais pour Deleuze est également “image” une intervention sonore et récurrente (refrain, ritournelle) venant interrompre le tissu des voix ou des mots. Lorsque cette fissure est suffisante, quelque chose s’y insinue: c’est l’image. Par l’image sont conjurées raison et mémoire; par l’image surtout – et enfin – est épuisé l’espace lui-même. C’est ainsi qu’est finalement réalisé le programme de la lettre fameuse à Axel Kaun, qui se proposait de fissurer le langage et d’explorer cette déchirure. Je parlerai d’Anzieu plus longuement dans ma dernière partie; je veux seulement noter ici, s’agissant de la pensée, qu’il lit l’œuvre de Beckett comme ce qui a finalement pris le relais de l’analyse, commencée avec Bion. Dans son vocabulaire, l’objet sous-jacent, c’est l’auto-analyse. Il n’est pas question pour moi d’évaluer, de juger le moins du monde ces démarches pour lesquelles je ne me défends pas d’éprouver une vive admiration. Je ne les présente pas ici pour les mettre en regard d’une œuvre qui les invaliderait plus ou moins, mais pour essayer de penser leur statut. La seule chose que je veux faire remarquer, avant de poser la décisive et si difficile question du sujet de l’œuvre, c’est le tour incontestablement narratif que prend chacune de ces hypothèses de lecture: l’œuvre est toujours présentée comme un parcours, soit comme une histoire. Je n’hésite pas à dire que j’entends aussi le mot dans son sens de fiction. Ce qui revient à hausser le texte critique au niveau de l’œuvre, à en faire une œuvre. À part entière. Le territoire de l’œuvre Avant d’aborder la question qui me paraît aujourd’hui la plus importante, celle du sujet de l’œuvre, je fais ici une brève digression sur la 228

question (qui lui est connexe) de l’annexion. Le Beckett que nous proposent les philosophes, les psychanalystes, nous paraît sans doute d’abord plutôt invraisemblable – peu convaincant, en tout cas. Le lecteur ordinaire que nous avons été (même s’il nous arrive de l’oublier) ne reconnaît pas facilement le Beckett de ses premières lectures. Ceux d’entre nous qui ont connu Samuel Beckett ne manqueront pas de rappeler ici que ce genre de discours lui faisait hausser les épaules, lorsqu’ils ne le faisaient pas fuir… C’est une vieille question, et chaque metteur en scène y est régulièrement confronté aussi bien que chacun qui entreprend de tenir sur une œuvre un discours “critique”: jusqu’où peut-on aller dans l’interprétation? Le cas de Beckett est intéressant, parce qu’il a luimême tenté de baliser le terrain, c’est-à-dire de dissuader, autant qu’il lui était possible (et même parfois, juridiquement possible), de s’aventurer trop loin (toute la question étant évidemment de savoir à partir de quel moment on est “trop” loin). Ses indications de mise en scène sont d’une précision redoutable, il supportait très mal qu’on s’en éloigne. Quant au discours critique… On ne peut évidemment l’interdire aussi facilement qu’une mise en scène, mais il faut bien avouer que certains s’éloignent du Beckett “reçu” bien plus encore qu’un metteur en scène un peu audacieux. Alors? La question est immense, et elle ne concerne pas seulement les critiques professionnels, elle concerne aussi les écrivains eux-mêmes. C’est finalement la seule remarque que je ferai. Et je prétends qu’elle est une manière de sortir de l’impasse. Prenons le cas de Sartre: il a commenté Baudelaire, il a commenté Genet, il a commenté Flaubert. Il a donc été critique littéraire. Que pensent de ces hypothèses les Flaubertiens? La réponse est sans nuances: “délire”, “fictions”, “projections”. Qu’en pensent les Sartriens? Que ces textes font partie intégrante de l’œuvre de Sartre, certains allant jusqu’à dire que L’Idiot de la famille est peut-être son plus beau livre. Et l’on pourrait parler du Gogol de Nabokov, du Stendhal ou du Tolstoï de Zweig, du Balzac ou du Dostoïevski de Proust. Ou du Proust de Beckett (que ne citent guère, à ma connaissance, les proustiens autorisés…). C’est, dira-t-on peut-être, que tous ces “critiques” sont aussi des créateurs et que, lisant, ils ont tendance non pas peut-être à romancer, mais à créer. À recréer. Précisément. Et tel est bien, généralement parlant, l’acte de lecture: une création. 229

Une lecture, une mise en scène, un texte critique – une communication dans un colloque – ne diffèrent pas au fond. Ces événements constituent autant de rencontres et toute rencontre a pour principe la “fusion des horizons” (Ricœur). Le mot d’annexion certes ne convient pas, sauf à ôter au mot son caractère illégitime. Toute lecture est un rapt, un dévoiement. Badiou lisant Beckett fait du Badiou, Deleuze du Deleuze et Anzieu fait du Anzieu. Qui pourrait le nier? Qui (et au nom de quoi?) pourrait le déplorer? Comment d’ailleurs pourrait-il en être autrement? Je ne veux pas dire seulement que l’écriture d’une “œuvre”, fût-elle théorique, autorise le détournement; je veux dire aussi, et résolument, que toute lecture un tant soit peu raisonnée, est une création. Une œuvre elle-même. Le détournement est le destin de toute œuvre. Nous le savons, au fond: nos cours sur Montaigne, Eschyle, Shakespeare n’auraient sans doute pas eu leur assentiment. C’est que les œuvres changent de signification avec les époques; et l’on sait bien que celles qui ne sont pas “trahies” de cette façon sont des œuvres mortes; c’est surtout que nul ne peut s’engager dans une lecture dans l’abstraction totale de son histoire, de sa personne, de ses intérêts, de ses fantasmes. Les plus belles lectures sont le fait de lecteurs qui ont su apercevoir dans les œuvres qu’ils ont approchées ce qui leur convenait. C’est la matière de mon dernier point. Le sujet de l’œuvre Voici le début du livre d’Anzieu: Un soir, pendant les premières années de 1953, par un temps frais mais non hivernal, me voici pour l’unique fois de mon existence au théâtre de Babylone, minuscule dans mon souvenir et disparu par la suite. J’ai trente ans. Nous sommes quatre: ma femme, qui attend notre deuxième enfant, une collègue psychologue qui fréquente comme moi le séminaire de Daniel Lagache pour les psychanalystes en formation, et qui, comme moi, est en analyse chez Lacan; enfin, son mari, ingénieur. On joue la première pièce d’un inconnu… Ce qui frappe ici, et qui ne se démentira pas, c’est le ton extrêmement personnel, parfois même intime de l’entreprise. Le titre, Beckett et le 230

psychanalyste, indique deux directions: la première, objective, entend faire le point sur les rapports entre Beckett et Bion, avec qui il fut, deux ans durant, en analyse; le second, subjectif, cherche à explorer la question des rapports que l’auteur (psychanalyste, comme chacun sait) entretient avec (l’œuvre de) Beckett. Ce qui est ordinairement tenu pour illégitime (l’implication d’un critique avec son sujet) est ici revendiqué avec une grande détermination. C’est en quoi le livre d’Anzieu est original, c’est en quoi aussi il importe. Non seulement parce qu’il ouvre effectivement des perspectives critiques sur l’œuvre de Beckett, montrant, de façon me semble-t-il peu contestable, les traces dans l’œuvre de cette tentative (ratée plus ou moins) de l’analyse avec Bion; mais aussi, et surtout, parce que cette expérience singulière est l’occasion pour l’auteur de faire un point théorique rigoureux sur l’activité de lecture. Son livre se présente comme un journal. Il inclut un certain nombre d’éléments qu’on ne s’attendrait pas à trouver dans une étude critique: le récit de séances de l’auteur avec tel ou telle de ses patients (et ce récit, bien sûr, est mis en rapport avec le livre en cours); des notes qu’il a prises en relisant son travail (ces passages sont intercalés en italique); des textes ou poèmes qu’il écrivit lui-même, en glose plus ou moins empathiques avec ceux de Beckett; des récits de ses propres rêves; il propose enfin des notes et des dialogues fictifs, et revendiqués comme fictifs: notes supposées de Bion sur Beckett, notes supposées de Beckett sur Bion. C’est que le livre court plusieurs lièvres à la fois. Comme tous les livres, sans doute. Mais alors qu’on fait silence, d’habitude, sur ces implications multiples, Anzieu fait de cet amalgame le sujet de son livre. Beckett et le psychanalyste raconte d’abord comment Beckett est devenu écrivain, c’est-à-dire comment l’écriture a pris chez lui le relais de l’analyse brutalement interrompue avec Bion. Il raconte aussi (car Anzieu est analyste) comment Bion est devenu un grand analyste, comment surtout il est devenu l’auteur d’une œuvre théorique. Il raconte enfin, plus discrètement mais non moins décidément, comment lui-même aborde, grâce à l’écriture de ce livre, la dernière partie de sa vie. Je trouve par ailleurs, disséminées dans ce livre, des réflexions sur la pratique de la lecture et plus particulièrement de la lecture critique. Réflexions sous-tendues par la conviction, qu’il faudrait ne 231

jamais perdre de vue, que l’objet d’une étude est toujours aussi occasion d’une autre chose. Sur la nécessaire implication du critique avec son objet: “La lecture me fait me réfléchir dans l’œuvre avant de me faire réfléchir sur l’œuvre: je ne peux parler d’une œuvre qu’en la laissant parler de moi” (23). Ou encore ceci, qui essaie de balayer l’objection selon laquelle Beckett serait mis au service d’Anzieu et non Anzieu au service de Beckett: “L’interaction entre l’auteur qu’il fut et l’auteur que j’espère grâce à lui devenir est plus complexe. Il est injuste d’admirer Beckett pour s’être exposé dans son œuvre de façon si personnelle et de me critiquer d’agir pareillement alors que je cherche à renvoyer de lui une image ressemblante” (37). Sur le caractère nécessairement fictif d’une reconstitution critique: “J’insiste auprès du lecteur pour qu’il considère ces notes comme fictives – d’autant plus fictives qu’elles véhiculent des éléments de réalité ” (40). Sur l’empathie que la lecture suppose et travaille: “Au plus profond de moi-même, je suis comme Beckett fasciné par l’inertie […] par étapes, mon imagination, le lisant et le relisant, m’en approche” (211-212). Sur l’interaction de la lecture et de l’écriture: “De moi j’attends de dire par quoi je suis touché quand j’élabore ce par quoi Beckett est touché, et de l’écrire en mimant à ma façon personnelle ce qu’a de spécifique l’écriture de Beckett” (222). Au début de son dernier chapitre, Anzieu évoque les enjeux véritables de son livre. Je dirai que cet aveu a pour moi force de loi, que le grand mérite d’Anzieu est de l’avoir formulé, mais qu’il en va toujours ainsi, et que même si la chose n’est jamais dite, elle doit toujours être soupçonnée: Ce projet qui nous aura été commun, aux deux auteurs et au lecteur nous questionnant […] ce fut, c’est, ce restera, jusqu’à la fin, le projet de ne pas mourir. Bien sûr, ce chapitre ultime ne le dira pas d’une façon si directe. Il s’en approchera, le contournera, l’effleurera, l’effeuillera, le fera pressentir en le gardant secret. C’est pourquoi je profite de l’occasion offerte par ce résumé pour dire la chose en toute simplicité, clarté, brutalité, naïveté, cette chose qui n’est ni 232

du sexe ni de la pensée, mais qui se rapporte aussi à celle-là et à celle-ci. (195) Dans les livres de Deleuze et de Badiou, on décèlerait sans mal des indices d’une implication comparable. Je ne peux pas croire que Deleuze, malade et condamné, excédé par les douleurs, par le découragement, et qui a fini par se suicider trois ans après son Beckett, je ne peux pas croire que Deleuze n’ait entendu dans cet épuisement qu’il invente pour parler de Beckett – un épuisement qui dépasse la simple et lourde fatigue – autre chose qu’une notion abstraite; je ne peux croire que lorsqu’il parle de la santé comme horizon de la création, il ne cherche pas à dire aussi quelque chose de sa propre préoccupation. Quant à Badiou, il n’est que de relire son premier chapitre pour entrevoir qu’il nierait difficilement une implication qui se trouve d’ailleurs être en homologie profonde avec son objet. “Un ‘jeune crétin’” (c’est le titre du chapitre en question), c’est une façon de se désigner lui-même, bien sûr, et de désigner (selon lui) toute jeunesse, mais nous savons bien que c’est aussi une citation de La dernière bande. Quant aux premiers mot du livre, qui ont l’air d’être banalement autobiographiques, ils annoncent déjà, et comme sans y toucher, le thème essentiel de l’étude: “J’ai rencontré l’œuvre de Beckett au milieu des années cinquante. Une vraie rencontre, une sorte de frappe subjective, dont l’empreinte est ineffaçable, en sorte que, quarante ans plus tard, on peut dire, j’y suis, j’y suis toujours”. (C’est précisément sur la rencontre, je le rappelle, que repose toute l’étude.) Georges Duby disait que l’histoire est un “rêve contraint”. Il voulait dire, je pense, que tout historien digne de ce nom, et de sa discipline, est un créateur qui sans doute s’ignore mais qui, comme le rêveur, écrit l’histoire avec ses désirs, ses angoisses, ses inhibitions; il voulait dire aussi, et bien sûr c’est le plus important, que les faits sont là, malgré tout, les mêmes pour tous, et que l’espace du rêve s’insinue pour l’écrivain de l’histoire dans les interstices, dans l’ellipse nécessaire qui les rend présents à notre imaginaire. Il n’en va pas autrement dans le cas du discours critique – et même sans doute de tout discours qui vise la vérité par construction ou reconstruction. Ni Badiou, ni Anzieu, ni Deleuze ne prennent Beckett à contre-pied; jamais il ne leur arrive de dire quelque chose que l’œuvre infirme explicitement; il est possible, bien sûr, que l’un dise des choses que l’autre contesterait (Deleuze est sensible, par exemple, à l’impossibilité de la rencontre 233

chez Beckett, alors que cette même rencontre est pour Badiou la clé de voûte de l’œuvre beckettienne); mais chacun choisit (et ainsi faisonsnous tous, à notre insu) ce qui convient à sa thèse: Anzieu la première partie de l’œuvre – il ne s’aventure guère au-delà de Comment c’est; Badiou, la dernière – pour lui, les choses sérieuses commencent avec Comment c’est; Deleuze, l’œuvre en images; etc., et entre ces faits textuels irréductibles, ils instillent patiemment, savamment, suavement leur propre matière. ***** L’œuvre de Beckett, mieux qu’aucune autre je crois, permet d’appréhender les conditions du discours critique. Parce qu’elle fait son apparition dans la période où l’absurde est de rigueur, parce que surtout elle propose en son sein une dualité d’instances d’énonciation, elle exerce sur ses lecteurs un pouvoir auquel il n’est pas facile d’échapper. Pouvoir considérable – et redoutable – puisqu’il coïncide avec une sorte de retrait de l’Histoire, qui a si fort irrité les analystes marxistes. L’œuvre donne sa propre temporalité (qu’elle appelle “absence de temporalité”); de ce point de vue les lectures philosophiques et “dévoyantes” qu’il nous est donné de lire à présent témoignent que l’œuvre exerce désormais une emprise d’un autre ordre. Je dirai de même que sa revendication d’une pensée propre (fûtelle une pensée dérisoire, ou une revendication d’insignifiance) ne décourage plus de penser en dehors d’elle, mais aussi grâce à elle. Je dirai enfin que la revendication de la subjectivité, l’implication du lecteur dans son entreprise critique, est vraisemblablement un dernier tour du narrateur beckettien. Sans doute cette pratique est-elle, comme on dit, dans l’air du temps; sans doute plus personne n’oserait longtemps prétendre qu’il s’exprime sans exprimer aussi quelque chose de lui-même; mais on ne peut s’empêcher de rêver sur la coïncidence qui veut que la chose devienne patente – et revendiquée – quand l’œuvre en question est l’une de celles qui passent pour avoir hanté avec le plus d’obstination, de douleur aussi, les espaces de la première personne. Par là, je le crois, l’œuvre de Beckett tient encore en laisse ses lecteurs pour longtemps.

234

Note 1.

“ Flux cause / Que tout chose / Tout en étant, / Toute chose,/ Donc celle-là, / Même celle-là, / Tout en étant / N’est pas. / Parlons-en.”

Ouvrages cités Anzieu, Didier, L’auto-analyse de Freud (Presses Universitaires de France, 1975). –, Beckett et le psychanalyste (Mentha Archimbaud, 1992). Badiou, Alain, L’Écriture du générique et l’amour (Les Conférences du Perroquet, numéro 21, juin 1989). –, Beckett, l’increvable désir (Paris, Hachette, “Coup double”, 1995). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinéma 1, L’image-mouvement (Paris, Minuit, 1983). –, Cinéma 2, L’image-temps (Paris, Minuit, 1985). –, “Le plus grand film irlandais,” in Beckett, Revue d’esthétique (Paris, Privat, 1986; repris dans Critique et clinique, op. cit.). –, L’Épuisé, in Samuel Beckett, Quad, et autres pièces pour la télévision (Paris, Minuit, 1992). –, Critique et clinique (Paris, Minuit, 1993). Fitch, Brian T., Dimensions, Structures et Textualité dans la Trilogie de Samuel Beckett (Paris, Lettres Modernes, 1977).

235

“ALL MEN TALK, WHEN TALK THEY MUST, THE SAME TRIPE”: Beckett, Derrida and Needle Wylie Paul Stewart

The intertextual relations between Beckett and Derrida are considered through the prism of Murphy and Wylie’s assertion that all men talk the same tripe “once a certain degree of insight has been reached”. This does not question the validity of possible paradigms of intertextual relation, yet it does question the value of those relations, making them inevitable as if the “quantum” of the intellectual “wantum” cannot vary. This valueless (and hence non-judgemental) relation acts as an escape into a non-agonistic form of influence, and turns progress into repetition which can only be short-circuited by choosing not to talk at all.

This article might be re-entitled “Beckett and…?” for the question that shadows all else in this article is how one reads that and. This has become a great concern for post-foundationalist critical encounters with Beckett in which the and has served to yoke together Beckett with Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche, to mention only those philosophers broached in the recent Beckett and Philosophy (2002). The quality of this and has come in for some long deserved scrutiny, for the and carries with it the concepts of relation and influence. One comment of Richard Begam’s from his article “Splitting the Différance: Beckett, Derrida and the Unnamable” might serve to focus this question: “[…] virtually every major metaphor in Derrida is also to be found in Beckett” (1992, 887). There is a balanced temporality within the phrase; the act of finding metaphors within Beckett and Derrida is one that can be carried out simultaneously, it seems, as if Beckettian and Derridean pages were open before us on the desk and we take in both at once in the same gaze. The chronology of any possible influence is quietly pushed to one side, yet not quite the side

which Begam has reserved for Beckett within Derrida’s work. And how is one to take the “virtually” of that sentence? Almost all? Less than? Or should we perhaps have simulation in mind, a further level of representation constructed through the medium of the critic? The question of the chronology of that and is one that has been tackled in a number of ways. Is the and a recognition of simultaneity or of history, with Beckett as the prior term in a phrase such as “Beckett and Derrida”? The latter formulation has been carefully avoided by Begam in the phrase above, and yet it briefly appears in the introduction to his book Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity: “I am […] interested in reading the discourse of poststructuralism through Beckett. Such an approach reveals that as early as the 1930s and 1940s Beckett had already anticipated, often in strikingly prescient ways, many of the defining themes of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida” (1996, 4). Early as, anticipated, prescient. This regard for chronology is immediately, one might say literally, sidelined: “Indeed we might begin to understand Beckett as a kind of subtext or marginalium in French poststructuralism, the writer who spoke most resonantly to those thinkers in France who came after Sartre and reacted against him” (1996, 4). Once the marginalium has been reinstated, then the simultaneity of Beckett and Derrida (or Derrida and Beckett one might now say) is restored. The problem with a chronological and is again stated by Begam in the same book: I am concerned with the tendency among critics to treat the postmodern as the antithesis or negation of the Enlightenment tradition, a form of “overcoming” in which the modern is ultimately replaced by the anti-modern. The problem with such an account of the postmodern […] is that it perpetuates precisely the kind of thinking it wants to free itself from. (1996, 9) If the and is read historically then this overcoming becomes more of a pressing concern and Derrida either becomes the overcoming of Beckett, or Beckett (as a sub-text with all its implied essentiality) becomes a foundation for Derrida; an uncomfortable position for postfoundationalist thought. Begam scrupulously avoids this Aufhebung pitfall when he relates Beckett’s reactions to Proust and Joyce, and the 238

same desire is present when talking of Beckett and Derrida, or Barthes, or Foucault. In the case of Proust and Joyce, Beckett works both within the tradition of modernism which they represent and from without in order to dissolve modernism, not to overcome it. Begam sees the same pattern in the works of Derrida with deconstruction at once working within so-called Enlightenment thought and from without. With perfect logic, therefore, Begam places Beckett on the margin of the Derridean page, albeit in occult form; there simultaneously if we only know how to look for it. In “Splitting the Différance” Begam states the relationship with reference to Derrida’s article “Tympan” and to his concept of the tympanum. Beckett’s text may […] be palimpsestically read as a buried or occult marginalium which, standing beyond Leiris and before Derrida, mediates between the two. It consequently functions as a tympan in the full French sense of the term, at once a figure related to speech (the tympanum or ear drum) and thence to Derrida for presence, and a figure related to writing (the tympan or printer’s mechanism) and thence for Derrida to absence. (1992, 886-87) One might wish to question the possessive in “his concept of the tympanum” for the metaphor is of course available to be read with the occult opening of the page from The Unnamable. […] without an ear I’ll have heard, and I’ll have said it, without a mouth I’ll have said it, I’ll have said it inside me, and then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either […] (1994, 386)

239

The chronology of the and is negotiated by Anthony Uhlmann in Beckett and Postructuralism in a rather different way. For Uhlmann, history provides the justification of the and but it is a history not of direct influence but of social and intellectual milieu: If the works of Beckett and philosophers such as Deleuze, Foucault, Serres, Derrida and Levinas have numerous and striking points of intersection, then it is partly because they have encountered or existed within the same non-discursive field milieu, that time and place which produced the same series of problems, the same problem-field… (Uhlmann, 34) With the same problem-field acting as the link for an and, Uhlmann then encounters the problem of relating the supposedly separate disciplines of philosophy and literature. Using Deleuze and Beckett’s critical comments in Proust and “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”, he argues that whilst the problem-field remains the same, the trajectories of the philosopher and author in reacting to that field differ; for whilst the philosopher moves towards a statement of a concept which expresses a particular event (as the general contains the specific), the author, through sensations within a fictional world, embodies the concept. As Uhlmann puts it: The writer and the philosopher might at times be said to approach similar ideas or set of ideas from different starting points. The philosophers often set out from the concept so as to describe a sensation, whereas […] Beckett often sets out from sensations which indicate or congeal about concepts (Uhlmann, 28). This, of course, entails a certain sort of critical activity within which the concepts of sensations of the philosopher are compared with the sensations of concepts as they appear in literature. Uhlmann further secures the status of the and by adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of counterpoint. The work of art enters into new relationships through time. It is re-contextualised as its passage through history activates new relations. In a similar way, 240

philosophy can enter into counterpoint with the work of art: “new concepts, should the resonance be strong, might shed light on the sensations of existing works of art and enter into counterpoint with them, helping us to recognize aspects of the work we might previously have passed over” (Uhlmann, 37). Both Begam and Uhlmann, then, frame their thinking on Beckett with a thinking of the and, of the linkage between the writer and philosopher which is so often felt, but which is so difficult to theorise precisely because such theorising must avoid serious pitfalls, particularly that of chronological influence on post-foundationalist thought. The same problem is expressed in an interview with Derek Attridge with Derrida’s now famous claim that he felt “too close” to Beckett’s work to be able to countersign it (Derrida 1992b, 61). Beneath the theories of linkage, however, lie the metaphors of linkage. A brief survey of Begam’s introduction to Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity gives the following: Beckett as a “subtext” or “marginalium”, (4) “affiliations”, (8) postructuralism might be “traced back” to Beckett (which might be read as another instance of chronological influence creeping back in). Just within Uhlmann’s introduction to Beckett and Postructuralism, are uses of: “striking resonance”, “proximity or neighbourhood” (4), “analogous to” (5) “in accord with” (8) an encounter based on “circular transmutation” (11), “identification”, “resonances between,” (17) “striking points of intersection,” (34), “resonate” (38). It is to this resonance that I wish to turn, perhaps in accord now with the Unnamable: “But it’s a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate” (Beckett 1994, 327). The matter of resonance, of sounding like, can be raised in connection to Beckett and Derrida via the resonance of that philosopher with the work of a German mystic, Angelus Silesius, specifically The Cherubinic Wanderer. Derrida (who splits himself into dual voices, creating a text which I find reminiscent of, or resonant with, The Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,) initially raises the issue of belonging; does Angelus Silesius belong to negative theology? The question is complicated by the status of negative theology itself, insomuch as can one speak of an “itself” in this regard. “Are there sure criteria” asks the text of Sauf le Nom, “available to decide the belonging, virtual or actual, of a discourse to negative theology?” (Derrida 1995, 41). 241

If one cannot assign The Cherubinic Wanderer an uncomplicated and assured place within the discourse of negative theology, one can situate it within a pattern of resonances which includes deconstruction. Derrida quotes the following of Silesius’ epigrams: To become Nothing is to become God Nothing becomes what is before: if you do not become nothing, Never will you be born of eternal light. (6:130) The text is then glossed: This coming to being starting from nothing and as nothing, as God and as Nothing, as the Nothing itself, this birth that carries itself without premise, becoming-self as becomingGod – or Nothing – that is what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible, more impossible than the impossible if the impossible is the simple negative of the modality of the possible. (Derrida 1995, 43) “This thought”, the text claims, “seems strangely similar to the experience of what is called deconstruction.” This strange similarity, this resonance, occasions how such a familiarity might be thought. Once the identification of the possibility of the impossible has been made, a further resonance leads the text on to Heidegger: The possibility of the impossible, of the ‘most impossible,’ of the more impossible than the most impossible, that recalls, unless it announces, what Heidegger says of death: ‘die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit’ (‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’). (Derrida 1995, 44) This begs the question, which is duly put: “I wonder if that is a matter of purely formal analogy. What if negative theology were speaking at bottom of the mortality of Dasein?” And the resonances go still fur242

ther: “All the apophatic mystics can also be read as powerful discourses on death, on the (impossible) possibility of the proper death of being there that speaks, and that speaks of what carries away […]” (44). The text of Sauf le Nom has very rapidly made some extraordinary moves based on strange familiarity. A text which was dubiously part of negative theology has resonated with not only deconstruction but also with Heidegger and led to the claim that all apophatic mystics are “at bottom” speaking of the same thing: Heidegger, Derrida, Silesius, and Meister Eckhart, would seem to be the suggestion. It can be noticed that what started out as the problem – does The Cherubinic Wanderer belong to negative theology – has been superseded as a means of linkage: “What if negative theology were speaking at bottom of the mortality of Dasein?” (44). The problem of belonging has been replaced as a means of belonging. One of the problems that always has to be considered when writing of Beckett and Derrida, is the latter’s stance which saves his name from such an overt conjunction, as so evocatively expressed in his interview with Derek Attridge: “This is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel very close; but also too close” (Derrida 1992b, 61). In Sauf le Nom, Derrida talking about Silesius sounds like the Derrida we don’t have; the Derrida who talks of Beckett. The terms with which Derrida approaches Silesius could be transferred onto Beckett. A few quotations should make this clear. Derrida writes of negative theology that it consists “through its claim to depart from all consistency, in a language that does not cease testing the very limits of language” (1995, 54). The description would hold true for the Unnamable, who banishes all hope of consistency: “how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking?” (Beckett 1994, 294), and who certainly tests the limits of language (“it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it’s a kind of pronoun too, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, let us leave all that, forget about all that”(408)). On a more general level that possibility of the impossible adequately describes the Unnamable’s condition and apparent task: “Where I am there is no one but me, who am not” (358) or: “I have to speak in a certain way, with warmth perhaps, all is possible, first of the creature I am not, as if he were he, and then, as if I 243

were he, of the creature I am” (338), or “It’s a lot to expect of one creature, it’s a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions” (337). If one takes the final quotation, the resonances between Beckett and Silesius begin to be heard. The goal would seem to be a state of peace beyond language. This goal is expressed by Silesius by the word God (which hence stands for a name for the unnamable, no less than the Unnamable in Beckett’s novel) in such epigrams as: God Is beyond Creatures Go where you cannot go; see where you cannot see; Hear where there is no sound, you are where god does speak. (1:199) But Silesius also seems to be aware that part of the problem is that as soon as God is named as God he is circumscribed by language, and hence cannot be God. One must, therefore, go past the name to the unnamabality: One Must Go Beyond God Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand. Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend? It is beyond all place. What should my quest then be? I must, transcending God, into a desert flee. (1:7) No less than Beckett’s Unnamable, Silesius’ is conditioned by impossibility, as Derrida quite correctly points out. Of course, because outside of language the unnamabality cannot be approached through language, and yet that is all we have. So whilst we go beyond God, we end up in a desert, a metaphor in language for that which lies beyond the death of language, just as Mahood is supplanted by Worm, and Worm, the Unnamable speculates, by Jones, ad infinitum. If Beckett and Silesius resonate with each other, then should Beckett be added to the list of apophatic mystics of which Sauf le Nom speaks? “All the apophatic mystics can also be read as powerful dis244

courses on death" (Derrida 1995, 44). We might want to read that “all” as being inclusive of Beckett. Again the question is begged: why Derrida’s reticence? In order to approach this, I wish to return to the uncomfortable concept of chronological influence which exercised Begam and Uhlmann in their approaches to the matter of Beckett and. Both authors are aware of this difficulty and seemingly for the same reason: a Bloomian account of influence raises problems of foundation and overcoming. Yet, this personal, agonistic influence looms within Begam’s account in Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, in which Beckett shadows the work of Derrida in particular, as if he were some sort of éminence grise. On the one hand, Begam writes that “there is a case to be made for the proposition that Beckett has decisively influenced the work of postructuralism’s two leading practitioners, Foucault and Derrida” (1996, 185). On the other, Begam is not the man to make such a case: “the literary negotiations that exist between Beckett and poststructuralism are more a matter of intertextuality than influence, more a matter of allusive engagement than direct imitation (186). However, Beckett remains and his works offer prior terms to which postructuralism’s aims and methods can be traced. Yet the embarrassment of resonances might offer a means of approaching the Beckett/Derrida nexus without resorting to agonistic conceptions of influence. The title of the paper alludes to Needle Wylie of Murphy. He has recently saved Neary from dashing his head against the buttocks, such as they were, of the statue of Cuchlain and is administering advice and three star coffee in equal measures to Neary whose “apmonia” has been confounded by the knock-back of the cunning Miss Counihan. Neary wants Miss Counihan, but Wylie states that this will not change Neary’s difficulties. For once Miss Counihan (just as Miss Dwyer before her) capitulates to his advances, she will no longer be the striking and desirable figure set against the plain ground of the “big blooming buzzing confusion” (Beckett 1973, 6), but will recede into that background leaving only the desire intact behind. Or, as Neary, under Wylie’s tutelage, puts it: “From all of which I am to infer […], correct me if I am wrong, that the possession – Deus det! – of angel Counihan will create an aching void to the same amount” (36-37). All that can be done, according to Wylie, is the relief of the particular symptom, Miss Counihan. This perhaps 245

cynical but not necessarily pessimistic account occasions the following: “There is only one symptom,” said Neary. “Miss Counihan.” “Well,” said Wylie, “I do not think we should have much difficulty in finding a substitute.” “I declare to my God,” said Neary, “sometimes you talk as great tripe as Murphy.” “Once a certain degree of insight has been reached,” said Wylie, “all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe.” (37) How seriously is one to take Neary’s comment? If indeed all is tripe once a certain degree of insight has been reached, then we have no need to read Murphy, nor any other book for that matter. If we take Neary to heart, the and that has exercised this article will become an irrelevance, because everything can be yoked together in like manner. Given the list of “Beckett ands…” over the years we might feel this to be the case. More seriously, perhaps, there would be no need to read Derrida on Silesius once we have read The Unnamable and we need not wonder about Derrida’s reticence concerning Beckett because Beckett has already said the same tripe as Derrida. A more precise concern both for the terms of Wylie's statement and the context in which it functions is needed. Wylie is puncturing Neary’s Gestalt optimism. Wylie sounds like Murphy due to the conversation in chapter one of the novel, in which Neary states what might pass as his principles of desire: “Murphy, all life is figure and ground.” “But a wandering to find home,” said Murphy. “The face,” said Neary, “or system of faces, against the big blooming buzzing confusion. I think of Miss Dwyer.” (6) With the “big blooming buzzing confusion”, according to C.J. Ackerley’s annotations to the novel (1998, 8), Beckett is alluding to the dictum of William James from The Principles of Psychology which forms one of the cores of Gestalt perception, and the “figure and ground” is probably taken from Robert Woodsworth’s 1931 edition of 246

Contemporary Schools of Psychology from which Beckett took detailed notes (Knowlson, 737). Put plainly; Neary knows his psychology. His desire is one based on theories of Gestalt perception wherein the individual entity can flash forth from the grinding background. All this is so much Greek to Murphy; a view with which Wylie would concur. Neary requires a figure against the background, a “single, brilliant, organized, compact blotch in the tumult of the heterogeneous stimulation” (7). Murphy baulks, and with good reason, for the big blooming buzzing confusion, which so exasperates Neary, bears a striking resemblance to the third zone of Murphy’s mind as stated in chapter 6. Rather than distinct forms rearranged for Murphy’s convenient revenge, as in zone one of his mind, or for his indifferent contemplation of distinct forms without parallel in zone two, the third zone negates the fixity of such forms: The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms […] nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. (66) The third zone partakes of the buzzing confusion which Neary struggles vainly against. With no intelligible principle for change, forms, such as they are, are in a constant and confused state of flux rather than cohering about a single principle in a moment of a beloved blotch of which Neary speaks. And, of course, it is in the third zone that Murphy as Murphy also disappears to become nothing but a “mote in its absolute freedom.” Murphy’s desire, and desire may not be the word, is for the confusion against which Neary’s desire must figure. Ironically, once Murphy’s desire has been relinquished, its aim is delivered via the medium of gas: you cannot will yourself into willlessness. This wider context helps to approach the more difficult terms of Wylie’s assertion: once a certain insight has been reached. The insight, it would seem, is that of Murphy’s third zone: a zone beyond, or rather behind, the figure; the ground of the big, buzzing confusion in 247

which forms are in constant flux. For Needle Wylie, it is pointless to pursue the figure, because the ground will always prevail: Miss Dwyer, once bright blotch, is now a part of the big buzzing confusion; the form which is Miss Counihan will soon also be consumed in the “perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms”. The zone of buzzing confusion is the necessary insight which occasions, I would argue, the same tripe from Murphy, Wylie, Derrida and Silesius (and one could add: Watt, Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, the Unnamable, the nameless ones which follow). To characterise it further, it is a zone without identity in which one’s identity is consumed; in short, death or nothing. This leads us conveniently enough back to Derrida and Silesius. For the latter, to become nothing is to become god, and of course the impossibility is raised (as with the Unnamable) of an identity which coincides with becoming nothing, or, for that matter, of anything being nothing at all. And as Murphy’s third zone clearly indicates, to enter the flux of forms means a relinquishing not only of one’s own form but of the desire to relinquish one’s own form. It is this impossibility upon which Derrida focuses in his discussion of Silesius: “this becoming-self as becoming-God – or Nothing – that is what appears impossible, more than impossible, the most impossible possible”. Derrida seems in Sauf le Nom to be aware that something like the same tripe will always be disseminated. The answer to the self-set question of whether there are sure criteria by which to judge that a discourse belongs to negative theology appears to be no: “If the consequent unfolding of so many discourses (logical, onto-logical, theological or not) inevitably leads to conclusions whose form or content is similar to negative theology, where are the “classic” frontiers of negative theology?” (Derrida 1995, 41). This “inevitability” leads to the second of Wylie’s terms: “all men talk, when talk they must”. Once the insight which partakes of recognising nothing has been made, there is an imperative to talk. Of course, the resonance with the Unnamable’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is apparent and need not be further elucidated: it is a critical common-place that in the face of nothing the Unnamable goes on talking, presumably endlessly. At the end of The Cherubinic Wanderer, we have a variation: “I can’t go on, yet you’ll go on”:

248

Friend, let this be enough; if you wish to read beyond, Go and become yourself the writ and yourself the essence. (6:263) One of Derrida’s voices glosses: “The friend […] is asked, recommended, enjoined, prescribed to render himself, by reading, beyond reading: beyond at least the legibility of what is currently unreadable, beyond the final signature – and for that reason to write” (41). The discourse, occasioned by nothing, demands continuance beyond the limits of Silesius’ work in similar fashion to the manner in which the trilogy keeps on going, through a series of scripted substitutions moving about the inexpressible, which may itself be viewed as the dynamic of Beckett’s mime Quad in which progression to the blank centre creates further motion. A series, beginning in nothing, continues about nothing, and in that series we might count Silesius, Derrida, and Beckett. This is to place influence not within the figure of the individual writer but within the dynamics of inevitability demanded of nothing, and the individuals as necessary writers are faithful, not to each other, but to the dynamic of the nothing. Derrida, Silesius and Beckett must resonate because they must write about or around the nothing. This could account for Derrida’s reticence on Beckett, which now becomes only a pseudo-reticence, for in writing of Silesius, in his writing itself, Derrida must also be writing of Beckett, and a writing on Beckett must also be a writing on Silesius. To use Wylie’s phraseology: the quantum of this particular discursive wantum cannot vary. By shifting the influence away from the individual writer and on to the dynamic of the discourse, the agonistic form of “progress” as envisioned by Harold Bloom and the problems of “overcoming” and chronological influence on post-foundationalist thought become of little concern. Indeed, rather than a linear progress, the intertextual shape of this Wyliean theory is the shape of Quad: one figure squares about the central space and is repulsed by it to continue walking; the figure is joined by a second, third and forth and all are repulsed by the central untrodden space and each traces each other’s paths. Rather than progress, the intertextual paradigm is one of repetition. This repetition is conditioned by what remains; in Quad, the central space, in Silesius God and in Beckett, the unnamable; and those three appar249

ently different remainders are themselves differing repetitions of each other. But Wylie is kind. In a book that begins with no alternative, Wylie grants one: “all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe.” There is a choice between taking up the discourse and quietly sitting with sealed lips. Yet the writers, in and of Beckett, having no alternative, write on the nothing new. Works Cited Ackerley, C.J, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 1998). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (London: Picador, 1973). –, Watt (London: Picador, 1988). –, The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994). Begam, Richard. “Splitting the Différance: Beckett, Derrida and the Unnamable,” in Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992), 873-92. –, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Derrida, Jacques, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden. Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward. (Albany: State U of New York P, 1992), 74-142, (1992a). –, “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in .Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, (London: Routledge, 1992), 56-72, (1992b). –, Sauf le Nom, trans. by John P. Leavy. On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 34-85. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Lane, Richard ed, Beckett and Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2002). Silesius, Angelus, The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist P, 1986). Uhlmann, Anthony, Beckett and Postructuralism (London: Cambridge UP, 1999).

250

BECKETT’S BOREDOM AND THE SPIRIT OF ADORNO James Phillips

Beckett is sometimes conspicuously tedious. The conspicuousness warns against interpreting boredom as a response to a lapse on the part of the author. A change in the understanding of art is at stake, whereby the irreducibility that metaphysics since Plato attributes to art might allow reformulation and refinement as the irreducibility of the insignificance of the boring to the signification of spirit. Adorno, who speaks of the spiritualization of Beckett’s art, is not insensitive to the insignificance of the boring because for him spirit is selfquestioning and not the contradictory reification of a spirit distinct from the boring.

Now and again in his writings Beckett proceeds by way of permutations or reflections on permutations. In Molloy there are the pages devoted to the problem of the optimal rotation of sixteen sucking stones among the pockets of the narrator’s greatcoat. Film includes a scene in which a cat and a dog are by turns ushered from the room and unwittingly readmitted. And the dramaticule Quad consists of instructions for the repetitious, interweaving movements of four similarly dressed figures. But this permutational aspect of Beckett’s work is at its most naked and relentless in the novel Watt. Without the meditative perplexity of Molloy, without the slapstick of Film, and without the formulaic conciseness of at least the script of Quad, nothing curtails or relieves the monotony of its mechanical variations. One of the many series is set up in the following way: With regard to the so important matter of Mr Knott’s physical appearance, Watt had unfortunately little or nothing to say. For one day Mr Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, and the next thin, small, flushed and fair, and the next sturdy, middlesized, yellow and ginger …(209)

Having given the twelve descriptive terms of which the series is composed, Beckett continues the sentence for the further 78 groupings that make up the total number of permutations. Let us say that the effect of such a passage is boredom. As nothing needs to be decided on this point, the statement does not suffer from being left in the condition of an hypothesis. What is at stake here is not an attempt to determine the psychological norm in the reception of a given text, but rather the question of the place of boredom in art. Beckett courts the boring. This is the most conspicuous perversity of his art. The passage in Watt on Mr Knott’s physical appearance drives towards a ‘Too much’ that is anything but the declaration of the Kantian sublime. In its disavowal of the sublime, the passage could not be less Romantic. The driving aspiration of Romantic art is alien to it. Instead of overtaxing the faculty of understanding, it undertaxes it. In the Critique of Judgement Kant speaks of the sublime as the moment in which the concepts of the understanding find themselves confronted with something that exceeds their capacity for comprehension. Before various manifestations of Nature the spectator’s understanding is confounded and the faculty of Reason steps in to make sense of the magnitude and force of what is beheld. Before the boring there is also a breaking point, but this breaking point is not the consequence of the revelation of a higher power. The ‘Too much’ of the boring is a ‘Too little’. In its guileless sycophancy towards the understanding, in its ready acquiescence to its own exhaustive formularisation the boring feeds the conceit of the understanding and overfeeds it. While the unmysteriousness of the boring at first corroborates the procedures of the understanding, this unmysteriousness soon becomes an affront. The pain of the boring is proof of the understanding’s guilty conscience, of what Adorno calls the “disenchantment of the concept”. The understanding seeks the extinction of mystery and is nonetheless troubled by unmysteriousness. An art of the boring, which is a Romantic art insofar as it adopts a critical stance towards conceptuality, works upon this contradiction of the faculty of understanding. Beckett is open to boredom. In his work, as is clear from the sighs of “What tedium” with which Malone, for example, breaks off his stories, boredom is not the preserve of the reader. His writing reaches out to claim as its own the boredom by which a reader’s estrangement from a work expresses itself. The reader is left without a means of escape since the rejection of the work, by means of which 252

the reader asserts a distance and independence from it, has been preempted. The etiquette between creator and consumer is flouted. At the moment when judgement is to be passed on the work of art, the author intervenes and supplants the judge, a deus ex machina that confounds the terms of the sentence. But to interpret Beckett’s treatment of boredom as a stratagem for encircling the reader is arguably to miss a chance to interrogate the understanding of art propagated by the metaphysics of subjectity. If this opportunity is not taken up, the phenomenon of boredom risks dissolving merely into the will of the author whereby boredom’s genuine provocation – the horror of its vacuity – is disregarded in favour of everyday intelligibility. The meaninglessness of boredom quickly becomes meaningful: it becomes evidence of the artist’s mastery over intractable material. Boredom at last allows itself to be spiritualized, which is to say domesticated. Is it the philistine who is bored by Beckett? Or does philistinism display itself in the very refusal to be bored? The always tenuous distinction between ‘philistinism’ and ‘bourgeois art-worship’ here collapses. The transubstantiation of Beckett’s work into symbols, cultural criticism and observations on the ‘human condition’ is arguably a reaction against the brute ‘fact’ of boredom. Beckett as the author who steals a march on the disaffected reader is paired up with the reader who sees through everything to its ‘real’ meaning. Having a dread of the sheer phenomenality of boredom, this pair views the work of art as but a cipher of spirit. The philistinism of this dread lies in its disregard for whatever in the work of art is not spirit and which in its difference from spirit has always been constitutive of the problematic metaphysical identity of art. To heed the provocation of boredom is to rethink the irreducibility that metaphysics has always attributed to art and against which metaphysics has defined itself. The provocation of boredom is the very poverty of its provocation. It does not openly raise a challenge to metaphysics and incite its appropriation. That which is boring has nothing to say. It is meaningless while nonetheless concealing meaninglessness as an issue for metaphysics. It is boring by virtue of its transparency and the ease with which its meaning is grasped. That which is boring bores because it comes too late: it reiterates with excruciating clarity what has long been familiar. The provocation of boredom is not the primeval meaninglessness that confronts spirit and 253

in defiance of which, in dialectical contamination with which spirit first consolidates its own meaningfulness. The provocation of boredom is the meaninglessness immanent to spirit as its own historical exhaustion. The meanings on which spirit has turned its back cease to be meaningful without acquiring any of the agonistic lustre of absolute meaninglessness. They are the detritus of spirit in its passage through history. Their meaninglessness is not the dialectical truth of the meaning of spirit. It is not the a-signifying at the heart of the definition of the signifying, but rather the merely insignificant. The meagreness of boredom is its uncanniness. Boredom is both within and without spirit. Its meaninglessness cannot be pinned down. It is irreducible to spirit but not in the sense that its difference from spirit can be supposedly isolated and recognised as such (the distinctness of any such difference belies the claim to have departed from spirit’s sphere of the establishment of distinctions). The boredom of a particular work of art cannot be a property of the work in question. The thoroughly metaphysical understanding of art according to which art is a distinct set of entities with recognisable properties only plays with the notion of art’s irreducibility to metaphysics. Likewise, to situate this irreducibility in meaninglessness as such is to arrange for immediate dialectical recovery of this irreducibility by means of its blank opposition to meaning. Arguably the irreducibility of art to metaphysics is best interpreted as the irreducibility of boredom to spirit. If the metaphysical importance of the problem of art is art’s irreducibility to metaphysics, irreducibility needs to be reformulated so that reflection on the problem of art might enable metaphysics to address the true foundations of its own identity. In Beckett the question of boredom becomes entangled with the question of art. Certainly boredom characterised the reception of earlier works as a possibility, but with Beckett boredom notably ceases to be simply a reaction to deficiencies in the work to which the author alone is blind. Boredom no longer distinguishes the work that has failed. This is not to say that Beckett’s writing is a success: the boredom of Beckett’s art suspends the distinction between artistic success and failure. The criteria by which a work is judged a success or failure have themselves become boring. Differentiating between that which is boring and that which is not, taste includes itself in the former category. 254

The boredom of a work of art marks it in the ambiguity of its irreducibility to metaphysics. Of course boredom is not the privilege of those entities conventionally designated as works of art: metaphysical texts have likewise aroused feelings of boredom. That which has distinguished art in the judgement of metaphysics has never been alien to metaphysics itself. Where sensuousness was proposed as the mark of the work of art, it was similarly never with the implication that metaphysical texts are without a footing in the phenomenal world, since their legibility and transmission depend on it. The tedious and the sensuous are comparable in having been left behind by spirit. The tedious, however, haunts spirit even more intimately than the sensuous haunts it. The repetition in which boredom has its element is the repetition in which spirit sets up the universality of the concept in contradistinction to the sensuous particular. The question of boredom involves the question of spirit. Boredom, as the double and hence unrecognisable other of spirit, is the difference that spirit contains within itself. It is the ‘esssence’ of art’s constitutive difference from metaphysics. Boredom is not to be torn away from the work of art and attributed to the individual who passes judgement on its faults or explained away, as in the case of Beckett, with reference to an authorial sleight of hand and the deceptiveness of appearances. Metaphysics, as it seeks to grasp the essence of all things, must seek to grasp the essence of art. It must seek to grasp that against which it has defined itself as the irreducibility of its unrecognisable other. The problem of the understanding of art is not extrinsic to metaphysics but rather its innermost problem. Metaphysics cannot rest content with metaphysical definitions of art even as it cannot cease misapprehending the essence of art. In the judgement of metaphysics all art is bad because it falls away from that which metaphysics apprehends as the necessarily non-artistic essence of art. The incorrigible badness of art, by means of which it obstinately rebuffs the pretensions of metaphysics to illuminate all that is, is its irreducibility to metaphysics. The paradox of metaphysics is that it constitutes itself in the distance at which it keeps itself from what it is not and yet makes light of this distance in its claim to grasp the essence of all that is. Metaphysics is not served, but merely indulged by literary criticism that simply closes the distance between it and the work of art. The badness of the work of art, since it holds in itself the key to an understanding of the defining 255

limits of metaphysics, stands in need of an elaboration rather than an apology. Does Adorno defend, which is to say dispel through respiritualization, the boredom of Beckett’s art? Yes and no. To be sure Adorno speaks of the pre-eminent spiritualization of Beckett’s work, but spirit for Adorno is not the spirit of a vulgar Platonism. In the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Beckett, Adorno writes: Spiritualization provided art anew with what had been excluded from it by artistic practice since Greek antiquity: the sensuously unpleasing, the repulsive; Baudelaire virtually made this development art’s program. (92) For Adorno, Beckett inherits Baudelaire’s program and consummates it through his inscription of the unpleasing not only in the content of the work but also in its very form. The spiritualization of art is revealed less in the formal mastery by which unpleasing material is aestheticized than in the capacity of art to dispense with aestheticization. Here spirit is not simply domination of nature. It does not seek to bring the boring back under its heel by reinvesting it with meaning, since whatever vigour it would thereby impart to the boring would be at the price of an opportunity to restore its own vigour through an interrogation of its definition in the face of the irreducibility of the boring. Spirit, in order to be the self-questioning which it claims to be, must refrain from an aestheticization of that which for a vulgar Platonism is non-spiritual. Adorno ascribes to spiritualization the inclusion of the unseemly in nineteenth-century art. Through spiritualization art seemingly catches up with metaphysics and matches its inclusiveness: already in the Parmenides the young Socrates is chided for believing that thought must hold itself aloof from the brute nature of dirt and hair. But Adorno at once makes it clear that he is not equating the spiritualization of art with its transformation into metaphysics: Since then, everything sensuously pleasing in art, every charm of material, has been degraded to the level of the preartistic. Spiritualization, as the continuous expansion of the mimetic taboo on art, the indigenous domain of mimesis, 256

works towards art’s dissolution. But being also a mimetic force, spiritualization at the same time works towards the identity of the artwork with itself. (92) Spiritualization is the expansion of the mimetic taboo in the sense that it is an abhorrence of the thingly and the extrinsically determined. Spiritualization shares mimesis with art because it too is a reproduction – the concept, for the nominalist Adorno, is a shadow of the concrete life of the particular (e.g. the sensuous material of the work of art), of that from which the concept is essentially abstracted and which it nonetheless endeavours to assimilate. Adorno notes the spiritualization in Beckett’s work but this spiritualization does not convert the distraction of boredom into the collectedness in which spirit is said to come to itself. Spirit, for Adorno, cannot come to itself because as mimesis it is always beside itself: What appears in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical with it – the nonfactual in their facticity – is their spirit. (86) Spirit is the difference immanent to the work itself: Spirit cannot be fixated in immediate identity with its appearance. But neither does spirit constitute a level above or below appearance; such a supposition would be no less of a reification. (87) Spirit, for Adorno, given that it is that which differs from the thingly, cannot contract into a determinate position: it must be distracted. Spirit, like boredom, must be both within and without spirit in its conventional definition as the collectedness of conceptual thinking. If reification is contrary to the nature of spirit and if spirit is reified as soon as it is localizable, how is Adorno able to single Beckett’s work out for praise of its spiritualization? Is Adorno’s praise not implicitly a criticism, an objection to its reification? Adorno explicitly and immediately dilutes the encomium: “Only radically spiritualized 257

art is still possible, all other art is childish; inexorably, however, the childish seems to contaminate the whole existence of art.” (92) Drawing a distinction between spiritualized art and childish art and thus sounding uncomfortably like a newspaper art critic, Adorno catches himself and submits the distinction to dialectical contamination. The childishness of Beckett’s work is not merely its surface for Adorno. It permeates it and by putting spirit into question, it rediscovers spirit in the indefiniteness of that which must first define what is. It is not an isolated stretch of crookedness that can be set straight in a theodicean reading of the whole. That which as spirit Adorno praises in Beckett is spirit as the fundamental self-questioning of metaphysics. It is not the spirit that holds itself aloof as much as possible from the sensuousness of art and courts conceptuality. Hence it is arguable that Adorno does not shirk the challenge of the boredom of Beckett’s work. He does not overlook the phenomenon of boredom for the sake of its supposed truth, the non-boring essence of boredom that is the work’s adequacy to the age. He does not put up with the tedium of Beckett’s art, as though in obedience to Freud’s reality principle, with an eye to the subsequent pleasure of theory. What Adorno perhaps means by the timeliness of Beckett’s work is the provocation of boredom to which metaphysics in its constitutive self-critique has now brought itself to heed. Both Adorno and Plato delight in the badness of art, but where for Plato the badness of art plays its role in an apology of metaphysics, for Adorno the badness of art is a charge levelled at the complacency of the reified, self-identical spirit of metaphysics. Adorno’s fascination with Beckett is with an artist who does not ape metaphysics, who unlike Schiller and Sartre does not merely sweep the path in advance of the concept. In his essay on Endgame Adorno writes: “What philosophy Beckett provides, he himself reduces to cultural trash, like the innumerable allusions and cultural tidbits he employs.” (241) Beckett’s work does not yield an idea. It has no message. In the face of spirit’s procedures of abstraction and interpretation it simply bores. The task of metaphysics is to think this boredom, to succumb to it without ceasing to be thought. Admittedly, the odds for this are not very good.

258

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, “Trying to Understand Endgame” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), vol. 1, 241-75. –, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997). Beckett, Samuel, Watt (New York: Grove P, 1970).

259

CATASTROPHE, AUTONOMY AND THE FUTURE OF MODERNISM: Trying to Understand Adorno’s Reading of Endgame Matthew Holt

Theodor Adorno’s essay “Trying to Understand Endgame” never refuses the challenge to interpret Endgame but it does not for one moment pretend that theory can unlock the meanings of an aesthetic object without putting its own processes, concepts and style into question – a challenge that is posed by the aesthetic object itself. The autonomy of Beckett’s art must be acknowledged yet at the same time be seen to engage in the most demanding questions of our time. How Adorno manages to keep the critical force of these axioms together is the subject of this essay. Far from being rendered irrelevant by postmodernism, I argue in the conclusion that such a critical project provokes the question of the future of modernism, not its demise.

Adorno’s reading of Endgame (Adorno, 1992) is a crystallisation of his approach to modernist art in general: it attempts to retain the autonomous and radical aspects of Beckett’s aesthetic while also imputing to it a highly charged constellation of social and political meanings. But according to Adorno, Beckett’s play neither reflects nor expresses any of these meanings. The relation between modernist art and the political and social world in which it is embedded is for Adorno an oblique one; it is difficult, enigmatic (rätselhaft) and, moreover, non-programmatic. The theorisation of this oblique relation too is difficult. This is because Adorno attends to the problematic and complicated nature of his object of study in a way that does not reduce that difficulty. In order to understand modernist art, theory cannot take on those categories of reflection and understanding actually left behind by modernist art. It can no longer rely on the direct presentation of meaning. As such, theory has its own autonomy arising from its responsibility not to falsely promise reconciliation and atonement

(Versöhnung) where there is none. Thus what Adorno says of the awkwardness of interpreting Beckett goes for his work as well: Beckett shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today, at the very possibility of theory. The irrationality of bourgeois society in its late phase rebels at letting itself be understood; those where the good old days, when a critique of political economy of this society could be written that judged it in terms of its own ratio. For since then the society has thrown its ratio on the scrap heap and replaced it with virtually unmediated control. Hence interpretation inevitably lags behind Beckett... One could almost say that the criterion of a philosophy whose hour has struck is that it prove equal to this challenge. (Adorno 1992, 244) Adorno conceives his own work as an attempt to prove equal to this challenge. But this is not limited to a dialogue between a thinker and an artist. This is a challenge for the interpretation of all difficult works of art. It is also a challenge, more specifically, for Beckett studies which, akin to nearly all of literary, cultural and aesthetic studies today has the tendency to fall into the trap of merely seeing the object of study as a depository of non-aesthetic meaning: there is little proper reference to, or negotiation of, the aesthetic form of the object. Rather, form not only mediates the social meanings to be found in it but, in fact, is the first (and last) point of access to them. In other words, the primacy of form is paramount and must be taken seriously in any examination of ‘content’. This ‘axiom’ (of the constitutive difficulty of the object of interpretation) and this ‘challenge’ (to respond to that difficulty) also extends to the analysis of the social and the historical. In other words, there is also a sociological reason for this emphasis on the essential opacity of modernist works of art. Society too, for Adorno, can no longer be rendered by ‘clear and distinct’ concepts; it does not admit of rationality because it is no longer (if it ever was, but this is another matter, another debate) itself rational. Or, to be more exact, if society can still be said to be rational then it is a rationality which Adorno exhorts us to critique and to a large extent abandon: for this same rationality has degenerated into the total administration of culture and 262

the total reification of nature. In this situation, one can not simply rationalise the irrational, or apply administrative and reified concepts to an administered and reified society – this would be to deepen the tendencies of that society, not resist it and challenge it. In order to formulate ideas about contemporary society, then, one has to introduce concepts which are themselves cognisant of this cynical indifference to conceptualisation on the part of society and also, in this case, the mocking indifference to interpretation on the part of Endgame. Such concepts would be themselves opaque and indirect. Adorno is thus hard to read and Beckett arduous to interpret. 1 If Adorno’s assessment of Endgame typifies his general argument about the difficulty of taking a social, political or philosophical position in regard to a modernist work of art, then how does he write about the play? How can Adorno find in Endgame a critique of existentialism, a testimony to the destruction of the bourgeois subject (and any philosophy that attempts to resuscitate it), and, finally and perhaps most importantly, an examination and indictment of post-Holocaust culture? To begin to answer these questions, I would like to turn first to the notion of catastrophe that Adorno imputes to the play (like all other commentators) and which organises his reading of it. But before I do, a final word for this introduction: Adorno grows in importance. If, as Richard Wolin argues, he has become a necessary ballast to the current tendency for art to be the “uncritical mirror image of the happy consciousness of late capitalism”, (Wolin 1990, 48) then this is also true in the realm of the social. When Adorno writes in regard to the characters of Nell and Nagg that “Endgame prepares us for a state of affairs in which everyone who lifts the lid of the nearest trashcan can expect to find his own parents in it”, (Adorno 1992, 266) he would not be at all surprised to find that today the elderly would be lucky to even get a trashcan. And perhaps for similar reasons Beckett too is assuming a new importance. The world is certainly absurd enough at the moment, potentially facing new catastrophes, and in the need of “liberated form” (Adorno 1997, 255 2). 1. Catastrophe For Adorno, Endgame is traced through and through by catastrophe. In fact, there are a number of catastrophes he ascribes to the play, both social and aesthetic (and he would have been well aware of its central place in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, where it means a ‘change in 263

fortune’). But importantly, he does not attempt to fix a sole meaning or event to the catastrophe that the characters constantly refer to but never define. First there is a literal but unspecified catastrophe that forms not only the background to the play but is the constant shadow of all the dialogue and of all the action. Some event of utter destruction has taken place of which the characters in the play are, it is implied, the sole survivors. Adorno believes it is foremost the total destruction of nature. He writes: The situation in the play ... is none other than that in which “there’s no more nature”. [Beckett, 16] The phase of complete reification (Verdinglichung) of the world, where there is nothing left that has not been made by human beings, is indistinguishable from an additional catastrophic event caused by human beings, in which nature has been wiped out and after which nothing grows anymore. 3 (245) The method of and reason for this destruction, however, is not revealed by the play. Thus Adorno can expand upon this theme to also make the play an authentic response, as it were, to post-Holocaust culture. But in keeping within the obscure parameters of Endgame, Adorno does not refer to the Shoah in a consistent manner, assuming that it is part of the play’s meaning but not its direct content. As is often argued, the play could also take place in a post-Nuclear world, though, again, there is no direct evidence for this. But what is clear is that there has been devastation; of what kind and for what reasons we are not told. Furthermore, the play does not take place in a completely wasted space (unlike Waiting for Godot). The action takes place in an interior which echoes the interiors of bourgeois drama. There are windows and an eyepiece to see out of them. There are doors, a ladder, a toy. Clov can come and go between rooms. The larder is accessible. Nagg and Nell still have lodgings, however ghastly. In other words, the more universal disaster which the play obliquely presents remains refracted through what is in many respects a quite traditional domestic farce. What is more, the outside disaster is so entwined with the ‘game’ that exists between Clov and Hamm that it becomes difficult, 264

if not impossible, to separate the implied, overarching sense of devastation from the obviously well-versed and repetitive moves of those two characters. Clov, one feels, goes to the window everyday to tell Hamm – after the requisite banter – that, outside, everything is “corpsed”. (Beckett, 25). This is confirmed when, after a pause, Clov continues: “Well? Content?” The pause is part of the dynamic of their relationship, not a moment taken by Clov to consider the immensity of the disaster. In this sense, Clov never really looks outside: his attention is ever-bound to Hamm and his demands, whether he resists them or not. Thus it is no wonder that perhaps the most startling evidence of outside catastrophe occurs inside. Not long after the episode quoted, Clov discovers a flea. Real distress seems to set in. CLOV: (anguished, scratching himself). I have a flea! HAMM: A flea! Are there still fleas? CLOV: On me there’s one. (Scratching.) Unless it’s a crablouse. HAMM: (very perturbed). But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God! CLOV: I’ll go and get the powder. Exit Clov. HAMM: A flea! This is awful! What a day! Enter Clov with a sprinkling-tin. HAMM: Let him have it! (27) This one of the few, if only, references in the play to the Holocaust (as Adorno too notes [270]), if indeed that is what is it is, for the reference is quickly set in the strange jelly of Beckett’s humour: Clov’s flea is in his pants. The insecticide that he pours into them will kill the flea and also, metaphorically at least, his ability to propagate – to lay eggs. Any hope that life could be reborn is considered by both Clov and Hamm – this is where they seem to depart momentarily from the game – with absolute horror. Once the prospect has passed, they return to their rituals. Second, there is a sense of philosophical, metaphysical catastrophe. As Lambert Zuidervaart points out, Adorno interprets Endgame (Endspiel in German) as the Endgeschichte (the final history) of the category of the subject. (Zuidervaart, 156f) The play for Adorno is 265

a much more thoroughgoing exploration of the destruction of the Cartesian subject which forms the basis of modern philosophy than that of contemporary existentialist philosophy. It is also a much more important testament to the destruction of the heroic bourgeois subject in and after the Second World War (the “atomic age”, as he calls it [245]), than that of, for example, Sartre’s absurdist drama with its emphasis on the subjective freedom to act even without the objective conditions to allow such action. Beckett takes the philosophical (and dramatic) subject all the way to its most pitiful state – and refuses any reconstruction of it. We will return to these issues in more detail later. Third, there is aesthetic catastrophe. The play, in a profound but nonetheless ambivalent manner, is a kind of catastrophe of theatrical convention, indeed a more genuine, truthful experience of the crisis of theatrical form, expression and tradition than that of expressionist, dadaist, surrealist and, above all, absurdist drama. This is because, according to Adorno, all the parts of the play relate to each other – there is a definite coherency, especially in technique – but nonetheless its overall meaning remains obscure. An overall meaning and ‘content’ is suggested – and thus a ‘whole’ to relate the parts – but it is never revealed. It is shut up like a “mollusk”. (246) Here Adorno leaves behind the convention that Beckett can be lumped together with other absurdist (and existentialist) dramatists, as if Beckett was merely reproducing a theme of the day, a fashion of his time (what better way to deny the true absurdity of the absurd? What better way to domesticate the anxieties of Endgame?). Instead, Beckett cuts through such comforting categorisation. Endgame not only denies us our tools for understanding but blunts the ones we have already tried on it. But this resistance to interpretation is not willful obscurantism according to Adorno, but absolutely integral to the dramatic form of Beckett’s play and to Beckett’s modernism in general. To explain this further, I will now turn to Adorno’s reading of the play in more detail and explore the autonomy of meaning (or non-meaning) and form that Adorno ascribes to it.

266

2. The Autonomy of Form Adorno first argues that while Beckett’s works share much with Satrean existentialism, predominately the notion of the absurd (and its attendant notions of isolation, alienation and nothingness, etc.), it is not an illustration of any category or thesis. The “literary method” of Beckett, as Adorno calls it, is not one in which an ulterior or exterior motive or concept is expressed. “Whereas in Sartre”, he writes, “the form – that of the pièce à thèse – is somewhat traditional, by no means daring, and aimed at effect, in Beckett the form overtakes what is expressed and changes it”. (241) There are a number of consequences Adorno draws from this notion that form exceeds content – that it is not reducible to content and that it does not express it – but I will concentrate on the implications of the autonomy of artistic meaning which he pits against any existential reading of Beckett. In the face of catastrophe and according to the demands of the modernist work of art to operate on its own terms and not merely reflect either the concept or the social, form withdraws into itself. But Adorno does not consider this a continuation of some principle of l’art pour l’art, even less the autonomy traditionally conferred on the aesthetic category of beauty nor to actual objects of beauty. This particular idea of art’s self-immanence can only occur over and against an onto-social background of meaningfulness – of being able to give sense to things, whether in art or in life, or both. He writes: “The less events can be presumed to be inherently meaningful, the more the idea of aesthetic substance (ästhetischen Gestalt) as the unity of what appears and what was intended becomes an illusion”. (242) This absence of meaning, or at least privation of meaning, is expressed, then, on two levels: that of form itself (no unity in life; no unity in art) and in intention (the desire to give unity or meaning is contrived and ultimately illusionary because the intentional subject is itself no longer unified). The social conditions for cogent, coherent and enfranchised art are no longer evident and viable, and categories invented to illustrate this – like the absurd – actually reintroduce sense-making (a new ratio) rather than doing justice, as it were, to the true brokenness of our times. For example, the absurd explains this irrationality. It becomes a category or a concept for it. Beckett, instead, makes the absurd an absurd concept and the purity of his form (in the sense of its simplicity, its lucidity, but also, as we have said, its coherency between parts) is in fact impure – it is damaged, incomplete and frag267

mentary. It arcs out as if to draw a unity and a completeness of meaning to itself but it never achieves this. It necessarily falls short of this completion. With Beckett, Adorno insists, there is then no transfiguration of deprivation into meaning. Beckett stops short of this false reconciliation, this safety-valve for our own disturbed conscience. In Endgame, this is confirmed (amongst other things) by the staggered, amputated dialogue. The maimed characters and their maimed language reach for meaning but are consistently frustrated; indeed they even show self-awareness of this arbitrary and game-like search for meaning and react as if it has been forced upon them (and of course, this is the joke on interpreter and audience alike): “We’re not beginning to ... to ... mean something?” (27) Hamm asks Clov in a slightly worried tone. But for Adorno, Beckett’s work is not the embodiment of anti-sense nor anti-meaning; rather, it speaks from a place where, in fact, there is no sensible or meaningful place from which to speak (or to interpret). Aphasia and ataxia arise from atopia. There is nothing anthropologically universal about this lack of a place from which to make sense. It is not a general description of an inevitable ‘condition humaine’. Nor is it a dramatic reenactment of the roots of French existentialism – primarily Heidegger’s Being and Time (see 249, 252). Instead Adorno argues: “Modern ontology lives off the unfulfilled promise of the concreteness of its abstractions, whereas in Beckett the concreteness of an existence that is shut up in itself like a mollusk [...] is revealed to be identical to the abstractness that is no longer capable of experience”. (246) What Beckett expresses without expressing, if I may put it like that, is that experience can no longer be transmitted meaningfully, including the very loss or privation of meaning. In the demise of ontological surety there is no restoration of the ontological nor any of its substitutes (like groundlessness, or anxiety or nothingness): this would be a form of negative theology. We cannot, then, ascribe to Beckett the “notion that he depicts the negativity of the age in negative form”, (248) for this would amount to two spurious positions: first, that art merely reflects society (or an ontological precondition of society, like the existential notion of ‘anxiety’, or even ‘freedom’) and, second, that society is itself representable (and thus inherently cogent and meaningful). Thus according to Adorno there is no philosophical subjectivity that the play – and Beckett’s work in general – displays or performs as theme to be expressed, nor, as we have intimated, is there any theatri268

cal expression of the notion of the individual as the absolute residue of the process of Cartesian reduction (but this time around in Sartre’s anthropology, reduced not to thought nor the thinking thing, the res cogitans, but to freedom): The catastrophes that inspire Endgame have shattered the individual whose substantiality and absoluteness was the common thread in Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Sartre’s version of existentialism. Sartre even affirmed the freedom of victims of the concentration camps to inwardly accept or reject the tortures inflicted upon them. Endgame destroys such illusions. The individual himself is revealed to be a historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it, something transient himself. (249) Actually I could envisage Sartre agreeing with this double arrangement – or derangement – of the modern, uncertain subject; one that is both deprived of subjectivity (I presume Adorno also means agency here) and defiant against deprivation (and so always ‘transient’ between these two options or states). Sartre would also ask: from where does one remain defiant if not from our irreducible freedom and our condemnation to it? But Adorno detaches this arrangement, this destroyed architecture of subjectivity, from its remaining support: if bourgeois society produces a torn subject, then at least we can avoid this truth and ascribe it to, as he argues both early Heidegger and Sartre do, an ontological condition; to a “figure of Being (Chiffre des Seins)”. “But”, Adorno argues, “this is precisely what is false”. Instead, “Endgame assumes that the individual’s claim to autonomy and being has lost its credibility”. (249) In other words, the subject in crisis is not a general, ahistorical condition of either Dasein or ‘man’ (some condition humaine) but has a historically locatable significance and fate: the (self)destruction of the ratio of bourgeois society. This is not, then, an ahistorical argument about the possibility or impossibility of representation, rather there is a sociological reason for this luck of representability of the social and the consequent critique Adorno makes of any philosophy of art and any art that attempts 269

to either ignore this crisis – this “catastrophe” of experience as he calls it – or that blithely attempts to represent it. We now can understand Adorno’s problem with Sartre and any existentialist reading of Beckett more clearly. For Adorno, Sartre takes a theme, in this case the absurd, and writes a play about it. There is nothing absurd about that. The sense-making subject retains its position; it is not affected by the object and, further, neither is the form affected by, in this case, the absurd – the style of the text or play remains classical in essence. As we have begun to see, to present a theme or a social condition in art not only denies art’s autonomy but also assumes that the idea or social condition to be presented is, in itself, homogeneous and self-identical enough to be presented, displayed, etc., without contradiction. Hence Adorno’s debate with Lukács and the denunciation of socialist realism (if not realism per se). Realism can only occur when there is a justified belief in the real – only then can it be ‘reflected’ in art without mystification. But when the real itself is distorted and irrational, then realism, in particular social realism, truly becomes ideology: it falsely promises or evokes the reconciliation of social and artistic ends. “An unreconciled reality”, Adorno says, “tolerates no reconciliation with the object in art”, while “Realism ... only mimics reconciliation”. (250) “Today”, he writes, “the dignity of art is measured not according to whether or not it evades this antinomy through lack or skill, but in terms of how it bears it. In this, Endgame is exemplary”. (250) Here we approach what is essential about Adorno’s reading of the play and of modernist art in general: art bears equivocation, complexity, antinomies and so on; it does not express them, reflect them and, most importantly, reconcile them. The autonomy of art for Adorno is a contradictory phenomenon. On the one hand, it is immutable and, on the other, impossible. In other words, autonomy is not to be understood as a formalist attitude or device which, like Clement Greenberg’s thesis concerning the visual arts, is to hone and perfect the defining features of one’s particular art-form (two-dimensionality, for instance, in the case of painting). Nor is it to assert the purity of art over and against its social relations. This is no Flaubertian ‘religion of beauty’. Rather, autonomy for Adorno means a certain oblique relation that art has to its social meaning or content, and that obliqueness not only has a historical raison d’être (the loss of a coherent rationale to society and thus the 270

lack of an fluent connection existing between the social and aesthetic domains), an aesthetic one (modernist art is defined by this autonomy, this ‘self-rule’) but also an ethical one (the keeping to this ‘self-rule’ requires consistent formal invention and the highest degree of effort and exactitude, harder than following any convention, any “custom and costume”, as Malevich would say). This is because the rule of one’s art, or one’s particular work, has to be invented at the same time as the work itself. If anything, this defines the modernist artwork and distinguishes it from both premodern works (or realist works in Adorno’s understanding of the term) and, perhaps, postmodern ones. This, at least, is the issue to which we will now turn. 3. The Future of Modernism I would like to retain a number of aspects of Adorno’s arguments epitomised by his reading of Beckett in order to broach the subject of the contemporary relation between art and politics and art and society and thus, inevitably, the subject of postmodernism. First, that the indirect relation between art and the social is itself an historical phenomenon and occurs when the autonomy of art becomes part of the selfunderstanding of modern art. Second and intimately related to, but not entirely reducible to the first point, this indirect relation occurs when society itself no longer has coherency – a ratio – which allows it be understood, or at least immediately understood. (This is Adorno’s primary contribution to thinking the difficulty of the modernist work of art.) In these two senses, modern art is necessarily post-realist and necessarily post-positivist (in the Saint-Simonian, Comtean understanding of positivism, which aligns social and artistic progress with scientific progress). The term avant-garde in Adorno’s reframing of modern art retains little of its martial character, rather, it becomes a witness to disaster (to catastrophe), albeit a witness whose testimony is almost impossible to read. This is the political ‘content’ of such works of art – that there is no direct political programme to be derived from them, as one would derive meaning and instructions from a road sign. Such a situation, however, should be conceived as a spur to further thought and action, rather than resignation or a retreat from responsibility. It is a recognition of the essential difficulty of things not an elitist subjugation of the vita activa. It seems to me that this notion of the incoherency of the social which Adorno ascribes to modernity is also central to postmodernism 271

and in fact is the most common definition of it (by detractor and defender alike). “Postmodern theory”, Fredric Jameson writes, “is one of those attempts to ... take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an ‘age’, or zeitgeist or ‘system’ or ‘current situation’ any longer”. (Jameson 1991, xi) If this is attempt to grasp what is difficult to grasp is more or less Adorno’s definition of the responsibility of thought and, in a different key, that of art, one wonders why it is then specific to postmodern theory. If the contemporary social world is without coherency, then how can we claim that certain cultural artifacts coherently express the postmodern condition (Jameson’s examples range from architecture through contemporary art to the fractured group politics of today)? Is it any wonder then, when we find lists of ideas and works of art which are modern and those which are postmodern, the postmodern list seems no different to what we would expect from a modernist one (or rather it appears as one tendency of modernism, rather than any kind of break from or, in fact, amplification of it). For Adorno, Beckett does not ‘represent’ his age nor does his work reflect it or embody the ‘incoherency’ which we have mentioned. Rather, his form — which is difficult, oblique but also rigorously attentive and just to its own laws – makes a transversal cut through the tissue of meaningful, accessible content, thereby obscuring that content but nonetheless initiating the very challenge of interpretation itself and therefore the very challenge of interpreting the society we live in. In this distancing of content that the form of modernist art produces we are in fact drawn to content, to interpretation: as Baudelaire exclaims in Les fleur du mal (CXXVI – Le voyage, VII): au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau! (This ‘cut’ produces the chiasmus between the autonomy of form – of art – and that of theory which I have suggested is Adorno’s ‘project’.) Most versions of postmodernism, including Jameson’s, boil down to defining it as modernism without the dialectical struggle from out of which the new emerges (either ‘naturally’, as in progression, or in a quantum leap or change of state). Insofar as dialectics is also a theory of history, in postmodernism we have instead the undialectical appearance of phenomena all at once – everything occupies the same zone of appearance without change or transformation over time.4 This leads, in Jameson’s ‘celebrated’ formulation, to a kind of historical and aesthetic and social “schizophrenia” (not to be confused with the 272

clinical meaning of the term he keeps telling us; but how could it not?). Postmodernism is a timeless time, or a time where everything happens and appears at once (as it supposedly does for the schizophrenic): “Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalisation (at least from the perspective of the ‘West’)”. (Jameson, 310) The past has been absorbed into the present and no longer appears as ‘past’, and the future is always already here, as it were. Future shock no longer rushes over the present from afar. It is already in the present, always part of it, forming a invariable force of anxiety and doubt. Time comes to resemble space, and space becomes neutral, global, rendering everything equivalent and instantaneously self-present. This is the condition of ‘late capitalism’, and, despite protestations to the contrary, art in postmodernity is bound to reflect this. Its defining motif, then, is pastiche, which is interpreted to mean the simultaneous presence of any and all art forms (whether in the one work or across the globe at any given moment). Beckett’s anatomy of theatrical form, however, and to keep to what concerns us in this essay, is by no means understandable on the horizon of postmodern exhaustion of invention, nor on the pastiche model which follows it, as a donkey supposedly follows a carrot. A critical relation to past forms and the desire to expand them and indeed invent new ones is very different from the sigh of the fatigued in the face of a totally reified world (a notion that Jameson retains while calling for an art beyond realism and modernism). If we were to put in Adorno’s terms, in Beckett we indeed have an oblique and sustained response to reification and the loss of nature, a partial recognition of it and a partial negation of it in form. Indeed Beckett’s work may take us all the way to the edge of this world, discarding all the weighing stations for our concepts, interpretations and our hopes along the way, but it is not an ultimately bereft and meaningless gesture of hopelessness in face of it. For example, and moving beyond Endgame, we could say that the increasingly minimalist nature of his works are testament to that spirit of invention which goes against such an interpretation; this is the same aspect which Adorno recognises as Beckett’s unwavering commitment and autonomy. Such minimalism is actually an amplification of form and technique (into film, the use of sound, tape, other means of presentation, etc.), not the running down of a creative clock – of either Beckett himself or of modernism. The works become shorter, stranger, because there is still so much to do, so much 273

to invent, so many possibilities to explore. It is not resignation. Endgame is not the endgame, it is just the beginning. I would like to suggest that the term postmodern has gained such currency not because it describes a new period which had been lacking a name, nor even a significant shift in history or culture, but a weariness in the face of the kind of tasks Adorno offers us as true art and true thought: to think the complexity of our times without reducing that complexity; to realise that the relation between art and politics (and hence politics and desire, art and social meaning, and so on) is oblique and refractory. Far from abandoning modernism, we should endeavour to continue this task which Adorno finds so compelling displayed by Endgame: that of a disturbed, fractured but nonetheless potent autonomy of form. Notes 1.

Cf. Adorno (1997, 27) where he writes: “Beckett’s refusal to interpret his works, combined with the most extreme consciousness of techniques and of the implications of the theatrical and linguistic material, is not merely a subjective aversion: As reflection increases in scope and power, content itself becomes ever more opaque. Certainly this does not mean that interpretation can be dispensed with as if there were nothing to interpret; to remain content with that is the confused claim that all the talk about the absurd gave rise to”.

2.

The full context of the phrase “liberated form” is as follows: “The liberation of form, which genuinely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form – the social nexus of everything particular – represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated form is anathema to the status quo”. This sentence can be considered to encapsulate much, if not all, of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

3.

The English translation of this sentence leaves out “die permanente Katastrophe” which follows and qualifies the phrase “ ... where there is nothing left that has not been made by human beings, ...”. It is important to retain this qualification for it is essential for Adorno’s argument that the more obvious catastrophe that shadows the entire play – some “catastrophic event” which is

274

never named – also accompanied by a more general catastrophe which does not take the form of an event but is a general attribute or condition of society itself (“complete reification”). 4.

Here, unfortunately, I have to leave aside Jameson’s sustained engagement with Adorno, including his remarks in Late Marxism (Jameson 1990) that Adorno not only has become increasingly relevant to the ‘postmodern period’ but also challenges some of its central features – precisely on the issue of dialectics (242ff). Suffice to say, in his well-known work on postmodernism, before and after this book, Jameson does not tend to elaborate on these productive assertions.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone P, 1997). –, “Trying to Understand Endgame”, in Notes To Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 241-275. –, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen”, in Noten zur Literatur, Gasammelte Schriften, Bd. II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 281-321. Beckett, Samuel, Endgame (London: Faber, 1958). Jameson, Fredric, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). –, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) Wolin, Richard, “Utopia, Mimesis, and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Representations 32 (Autumn, 1990), 33-49. Zuidervaart, Lambert, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991).

275

CRITIQUE AND FORM: Adorno on Godot and Endgame Chris Conti

The most common criticism of Beckett’s theatre is its supposed obscurity. Early defenders of Godot and Endgame were themselves criticised as formalists for their inability to say what these plays were ‘about’ or ‘meant’. Adorno’s theory of the modernist artwork explained the historical development of art’s opaque content and Beckett’s own reluctance to explain his plays, solving an impasse in Beckett criticism with his account of the new historical role of aesthetic form as critique.

1. A play about nothing The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. (Adorno, 1997, 6) The scandal of Waiting for Godot, as everyone knows, is that it is a play about nothing. Its clownish characters seem in search of a plot and the plot in search of an ending. Accounts of the play usually begin with a precis, as if the bare particulars of plot were all one could cling to with any certainty. The most famous remark about Godot, as a play “where nothing happens twice” (Mercier, 144), summarised the frustration of reviewers attempting to grapple with its absence of content. Can a play without content (and plot, character, action) still be a play? To take the play seriously seemed a threat to meaning itself, as if it were an assault on the very categories required to make sense of it. Initial receptions of the play as plotless and chaotic were revised when its rigorous use of dramatic forms like dialogue was recognised. Still, the intentionality implied by this use of form did not sit

well with the loss of meaning implied by the play’s absence of content. No other play – with the possible exception of its successor, Endgame – has been so puzzled over as to what it means. Doubt concerning the play’s content (or lack of it) led many to believe the play a hoax, and like all hoaxes, the more one searched for a meaningful structure the more one was taken in by the hoax: “Waiting for Godot is not a real carrot; it is a patiently painted, painstakingly formed plastic job for the intellectual fruit bowl […] asking for a thousand readings [it] has none of its own to give” (Kerr, 20). But the devastated landscape suggested by Godot’s emptied stage reawakened traumatic wartime memories, and many audiences felt they had glimpsed in the play the catastrophic outcome of western civilisation. Articulating this relation to historical reality proved difficult, because while the play seemed to be about occupied France, the holocaust, postwar devastation, the catastrophic fate of civilisation, it did not refer directly to any of these. The growing conviction in the universal importance of the play resisted articulation, as if Godot had divested itself of any connection to history beyond testifying to its catastrophic barbarism. But how could a play drained of content relate to the actual social dramas of the day? The absence of this direct relation encouraged the idea of the play as an allegory of the lamentable human condition, “a modern morality play, on permanent Christian themes” (Fraser, 84). Allegory established Godot’s universality but at the risk of imposing redemptive religious meanings. So as well as a play about nothing, Godot became known as a play about anything and everything, meaning whatever you wanted it to mean because its symbols were pliable enough to meet the needs of theoretical or religious consolation. Godot’s sheer variety of interpretations suddenly seemed suspicious. Indeed the more critics enthused about the profundity of the play the more hollow it sounded. Uncertainty about the meaning of the play gathered around the absent character of Godot, as if the titular character might justify the dearth of stage action and confer at least symbolic unity on the disorder of the play. Alain Robbe-Grillet chafed at such attempts to dignify the poverty of Beckett’s tramps and blocked the path to such affirmative criticism by asserting the play was not ‘about’ anything at all. It was about itself; the physical presence of the tramps on stage: 278

Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more pointless than the last. Godot is God […] Godot […] is the earthly ideal of a better social order […] Or else Godot is death […] Godot is silence […] Godot is the inaccessible self […] But these suggestions are merely attempts to limit the damage, and even the most ridiculous of them cannot efface in anyone’s mind the reality of the play itself, that part of it which is at once most profound and quite superficial, and of which one can only say: Godot is the person two tramps are waiting for at the side of the road, and who does not come. (110) This anti-criticism reduced the play to the barest of plot descriptions and aped Beckett’s own refusal to say what the play meant or who Godot represented: “Those who are perplexed by the play’s ‘meaning’ may draw at least some comfort from the author’s assurance that it means what it says, neither more nor less” (Fletcher, 68). The sense of the play was to be found by feeling it in a performance, not by hunting down symbols in the text: “So the play is not ‘about’: it is itself; it is a play” (Kenner, 31). If the play was devoid of content, it was because the form was the content. What this meant was unclear, because it restated the problem: while everyone agreed there was an excessive use of form in the play, few agreed as to what this meant. If symbolic criticism made too much of the play this anticriticism made too little, confirming sceptics in their view of the play as a pretentious hoax. But as Robbe-Grillet suggests, Godot seemed to include the various perspectives of criticism and deflect each as inadequate to it. That an artwork is not exhausted by its interpretations is one of its definitions, but Godot offered shelter to grand interpretations precisely to scuttle them, defeating its symbolic accounts because it already contained a critique of the symbol. Theodor Adorno understood this negative moment as essential to the modernist artwork and its new critical function.

279

2. Difficulty and disintegration Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning. (Adorno, 1997, 154) The difficulty of understanding Godot and Endgame is integral to each of them and not the perverse invention of academics. The confusion regarding the content or meaning of these plays goes to the heart of both of them: the loss of meaning following the destruction of experience in modernity. The divided reception of Godot as either profoundly significant or a pretentious hoax, as too meaningful or not meaningful enough, pointed to the antinomies or paradoxes borne by the modernist artwork. The modernist artwork burdened aesthetic form with the task of absorbing the self-destructive rationality, or ‘logic of disintegration’, which was unravelling the social fabric of modern life. For Adorno, Beckett’s theatre, particularly Godot and Endgame, is exemplary in this regard. His defence of the pre-eminence of Beckett’s theatre played a significant role in its critical reception – Lukács had argued that Beckett’s work was the product of a distorted mind, relevant only as a symptom of the distortions produced by capitalism – and is tied to an account of the catastrophic fate of civilisation after the war. Lukács and Adorno agreed on a diagnosis of the disastrous social effects of the capitalist economic system but arrived at diametrically opposed views as to the consequences for art and critique. Adorno’s defence of Beckett’s theatre was a defence of artistic modernism and its critical relation to social reality. The burden of this defence lay in establishing the greater social relevance of the formal concerns of Beckett’s theatre, which appeared to many a retreat from the social, over the more obviously social theatre of Brecht or Sartre. Adorno puts Lukács in reverse: the socialrealist portrait of reconciliation was the forgery; the modernist portrait of alienation closer to the real state of affairs. The conditions for the realism Lukács demanded – a more stable reality susceptible to conventional forms and categories – no longer held. In this sense, the modernists had in fact inherited the mantle of realism, for it was not Kafka, for example, that distorted what reality had become; reality had become Kafkaesque. Blaming the nihilism of the twentieth century on 280

Kafka’s and Beckett’s unheroic narratives was bad faith. The crisis of subjectivity was an objective situation; the categories conferring specious order on social development the real solipsism. The logic of disintegration thus describes the objective conditions of modernity and how they affect subjective life. The authority of narrative recollection to order human experience into integral unities and meaningful wholes has been undermined by the success of science as a cognitive paradigm and the success of capital as an socioeconomic one. This undermining of the structure of experience has profound consequences for critique and aesthetic form. “The explosion of metaphysical meaning” (1992, 242), as Adorno refers to Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis, renders the older aesthetic unity which relied on it unavailable. To persist with conventional forms that implied the coherence of subjective life meant artistic ignorance (existentialist theatre), complicity in barbarism (culture industry) or both (socialist realism). The integral unity that once characterised art persisted now as a forgery. Only a discordant aesthetic unity was equal to the extremities of the age: “Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for then they would simply be irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history” (1997, 153). This history was the central concern of Adorno’s aesthetic theory and, if we are to believe Adorno, of Beckett’s theatre. The difficulty of understanding Godot and Endgame, Adorno contends, finds a counterpart in the difficulty of understanding the irrationality of contemporary society. The temptation to dispel the darkness of either play with the clarity of meaning must therefore be resisted (1997, 27). Once again, the onus is reversed: criticism must measure up to the plays, not the plays to criticism; it is not the plays that must yield intelligibility in conceptual terms, but conceptual terms that must yield before the irrationality of contemporary life. Reconstructing this unintelligibility brings the plays’ content into view: the critique of the instrumentalisation of modern life. The difficulty facing an artist who accepted that the logic of disintegration did not stop at the door of the arts was to incorporate the fragmentation of meaning in forms that enacted the integral unity of meaning. It was not enough to write a play about absurdity (like Sartre’s Huis Clos), as if art could take the measure of social rationalisation simply by making it a topic. Treating absurdity as a theme or making it a category imparted to it a coherency it did not possess, 281

thereby escaping the very experience it purported to treat. The meaning lost from social life is in this way won back in art, reducing art to consolation. The integral unity of the pre-modernist artwork articulated meanings positively and implied the unity of the social. The modernist artwork, alternatively, no longer represents the unity of the social because the social no longer constituted a unity (1992, 244). As the experience of the disintegration of experience evaded direct presentation, it had to find expression at the level of form, in the logic of the material itself and not simply in the content. A new aesthetic unity would bear the wounds inflicted by the historical crisis of subjectivity, gathering up critique into the details of form by giving expression to the powerlessness of the subject. The materials combined to produce the eviscerated reality of Godot and Endgame therefore carried an implicit critique. Becket’s method was able to admit a negativity of meaning into the details of form, implicating the means of presentation in the negativity it sought to express, and in the process revealed the shortcomings of the existentialism with which it is still often confused. Conventional dramatic categories are not rejected in this process, they are subjected to the experience of disintegration. The result is not chaos of form, but the search for a new unity capable of bearing this antinomy. A disrupted unity, bearing the wounds of the destruction of experience, defined a task demanding the same rigour that defined the integral unity of traditional artworks. For Adorno, the crisis of subjectivity was not a situation art could avoid; it had rather to bear it, and would be judged on its ability to do so. In Beckett’s plainer terms, the task was “to find a form that accommodates the mess” (Driver, 23). The mess, however, encompassed art as well, recoiling on the forms that sought to present it. Beckett understood the artist’s implication in this task, this time in more paradoxical terms that Adorno would have recognised, when ‘B.’ in “Three Dialogues” speaks of “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (17). The goal of a new aesthetic unity implied immersion in the material, for only here could the expression of the subject deprived of expression occur. Adorno and Beckett reinsert the question of commitment into the immanent dialectic of form. Critique in Godot and Endgame proceeds via determinate negation of meaning – testing traditional categories against contemporary experience – not 282

its abstract negation. In this process, old and forgotten forms emerge as new possibilities. Music-hall gags and panto, stichomythia, the Greek messenger and medieval angel, the Japanese Noh play make up the materials of this new unity, just as the conversational games and rituals of the tramps, which seemed so strange to Godot’s first audiences, are some of its fruits. This formal experimentation is the means by which both plays put ‘meaning on trial’, and is the reason why Adorno saw in them the retrospective vision of the catastrophe of history that Walter Benjamin saw in Klee’s Angelus Novus. 3. Damaged life Even the jokes of those who have been damaged are damaged. (Adorno, 1992, 257) Simon Critchley (157) criticises Adorno’s lack of humour as the chief failing of his 1961 essay on Endgame. Adorno’s treatment of Beckett’s humour, however, is consistent with his entire approach: he refuses to turn humour into exit from Beckett’s negativity. Critchley mutes the play’s critique when he restores agency to the characters that joke about having lost it. The jokes in both plays, invariably concerning the absence or destruction of meaning, are ultimately on us: One daren’t laugh anymore. Dreadful privation. This is really becoming insignificant. Not enough. We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Yes yes, we’re magicians. (1956, 11, 68, 69) When was that? Oh way back, way back, when you weren’t in the land of the living. 283

God be with the days! Do you believe in the life to come? Mine was always that. What? Neither gone nor dead? In spirit only. Which? Both. (1958, 33, 35, 45) In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Adorno’s own black jokes carry the same sting, just as the subtitle glosses both plays. The destruction or “withering” of experience refers to: the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened plaster cast of events takes the place of events themselves. Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on screen. (1978, 55) When reality becomes unreal or “incommensurable with experience”, art is forced to conspire with critique in an attack on art itself (1997, 30). Adorno saw a critical method in the conventional failure of Beckett’s drama, especially in the inability of his characters to move the plot. If the fate of Beckett’s characters cannot be mapped out in advance according to psychology, as in naturalism, this is because the subject has been stripped of its interiority and is powerless to alter its fate. The depiction of this mutilated subject was art’s loudest protest against it, a criterion for a new naturalism yet to be outmoded by current developments in global capitalism. There is no false consciousness in this, for the characters are as aware of their condition as they are baffled by efforts to alter it. The constant play-acting and theatricality in both plays is not just theatrical, in other words, but symptomatic of the crisis in subjectivity. With every joke we are reminded of the characters’ struggle to cope with a suspended fate. “It is as if the two tramps were on stage without a part 284

to play”, said Robbe-Grillet (113). Like the mime Act without Words that followed the first London production of Endgame, the tramps are trapped in a hellish repetition. As well as the source of comedy and the reinvention of old forms, then, the word-play and rituals represent attempts to cope with the ‘withering of experience’. Even the play’s darker remarks are framed as conversational diversions. Pozzo’s peroration, “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth”, is delivered with an eye on his audience: “How did you find me? Good? Fair? Middling?” (38). Lucky’s fragmented speech, also delivered as an entertainment for the other players, is the play’s celebrated instance of the withering of experience. Though trapped in a present cut off from the past and future, the tramps constantly take their bearings, arguing over whether or not they are in the same spot as the day before, whether the tree has grown a leaf or two, whether Estragon remembers anything of the day before. Pozzo and Lucky provide a new set of diversions, and later on (in their absence) the subject of a game (72-73). The prospect of suicide or parting from each other also become games. Indeed anything can and does becomes the subject of a game, because the withering of experience encompasses everything. The games are designed to pass the time, and perhaps an entire life, but threaten to fail when needed most: VLADIMIR: (in anguish) Say anything at all! ESTRAGON: What do we do now? VLADIMIR: Wait for Godot. ESTRAGON: Ah! Silence. VLADIMIR: This is awful! ESTRAGON: Sing something. VLADIMIR: No no! (He reflects.) We could start all over again perhaps. ESTRAGON: That should be easy. VLADIMIR: It’s the start that’s difficult. ESTRAGON: You can start from anything. VLADIMIR: Yes, but you have to decide. ESTRAGON: True. Silence. VLADIMIR: Help me! 285

ESTRAGON: I’m trying. Silence. (63-64) The effort to divert themselves is palpable, as is the absurdity of the predicament that defeats their efforts to do so, but a new word-game suggests itself: “That’s the idea, let’s contradict each other”; and “that’s the idea, let’s ask each other questions”. As another pointless silence gapes, a game of hat-swapping ensues. When that game exhausts itself, Vladimir asks “will you not play?” to which Estragon retorts “play at what?” (72). This is both entertaining and unsettling, as if it can only end in senility. We never forget for long the pathetic motivation for these games: to play at living, to pretend meaningful life is still possible. The play’s concentration on the present moment is so telescoped as to defeat symbolism, for symbols place “a current perception in the context of collected experience” (Winer, 76), conferring a coherence on events the tramps struggle to achieve with their ritualised banter. That loss of memory is an index of decline in the play is clearer in the ‘senile dialectic’ of Pozzo and Lucky (Adorno 1997, 250). When asked where they are going, Pozzo replies simply “On”. The trope of ‘onwardness’ recurs throughout the play (and Beckett’s later prose) in a consistent parody of Victorian notions of material and moral progress (see Abbot, 32-42). We are left to guess what happened to Pozzo and Lucky between Acts I and II, though the ‘progress’ of the story is measured by their deterioration, in Lucky’s muteness and Pozzo’s blindness and memory loss. Whether a day or more has passed is irrelevant to Pozzo, who reacts angrily to Vladimir’s efforts to mark the passage of time: “It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not good enough for you?” (89). Similar exchanges in Endgame likewise suggest the disintegration of subjective experience into ‘one damn thing after another,’ or into moments that do not add up to a life, just as grains of millet do not make a heap – the paradox referred to in the play: “Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!” “That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day” (32). Hamm’s chronicle, though we may wonder who will ever set eyes on it, represents another failed attempt to uncover narrative meaning in recollection. 286

It is not just the jokes and one-liners that testify to damaged life; joke-telling itself becomes another coping technique, though hardly a successful one: ESTRAGON: You know the story of the Englishman in the brothel? VLADIMIR: Yes. ESTRAGON: Tell it to me. VLADIMIR: Ah stop it! ESTRAGON: An Englishman having drunk a little more than usual goes to a brothel. The bawd asks him if he wants a fair one, a dark one, or a red-haired one. Go on. VLADIMIR: STOP IT! (16) Jokes and joke-telling in Endgame, like the rest of the dialogue, intensify Godot’s sense of being rehearsed to kill the time. Nagg complains at one point, “I tell this story worse and worse” (21), as if the effort disclosed only his senility. The ostensible failure of these efforts to confer narrative coherence is the successful implication of critique in the constituents of dramatic form. Few would deny, however, that in Godot a certain dignity, even heroism, attaches to this failure. The possibility of such Stoic heroism accounts for the affirmative readings of the play and the greater popularity of Godot over Endgame, for in Endgame Beckett circumvents the possibility of heroism entirely. 4. The memory of wholeness An unprotesting depiction of ubiquitous regression is a protest against a state of the world that so accommodates the law of regression that it no longer has anything to hold up against it (Adorno, 1992, 248). In the effort to harness the play’s negativity to the purposes of social critique, Adorno risked reducing Endgame to “forlorn particulars that mock the conceptual” (1992, 252), as Robbe-Grillet had reduced Godot (and theatre) to physical presence. The direction of this effort explains his suggestion that Nagg and Nell’s trashcans are “emblems of 287

the culture built after Auschwitz” (1992, 267). The peculiar concreteness of Beckett’s objects – armchair, gaff, stepladder, bloody handkerchief – possess something of the disenchanted character of modern life generally that calls for conceptual articulation, even as it evades it. The task facing criticism is to explore this tension between disenchanted particulars and the concept without releasing it altogether. This means resisting the temptation to construct a philosophy of the remainder out of Beckett’s remains – a reduction Adorno risks when he reads Endgame as the deconstruction of the subject1 – for the more difficult task of articulating Beckett’s method in connection with the eviscerated reality of postwar life, which unfolds with the logic of catastrophe. Godot proved Beckett’s method adequate to the destruction of experience, the ne plus ultra of which is the inescapable prospect of nuclear annihilation. Reference to contemporary reality is once again withheld, giving the play the appearance of “an allegory whose intention has fizzled out” (1992, 269). Endgame is no more ‘about’ nuclear Armageddon than Godot is ‘about’ occupied France. A drama about nuclear catastrophe would only reveal the inadequacy of its constituents, “solely because its plot would comfortingly falsify the historical horror of anonymity by displacing it onto human characters and actions” (1992, 245). The bomb is never referred to – this would render it more amenable to the concept and to understanding itself – but the nihilism of technical reason represented by the bomb suffuses the linguistic and dramaturgical infrastructure of the play. The absurd dialogue and rehearsed patter, for example, is a response to a collapsed world and not in itself absurd. Vladimir’s cajolery, “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?” (12), becomes Hamm’s shrill command, “Keep going, can’t you, keep going!” (40). The word games this time possess a logic that cannot be mistaken for stoic endurance: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM: 288

Open the window. What for? I want to hear the sea. You wouldn’t hear it. Even if you opened the window? No. Then it’s not worthwhile opening it?

CLOV: HAMM:

No. [Violently.] Then open it! (43)

This inverted logic seeps into the object-world of the play: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM:

The alarm, is it working? Why wouldn’t it be working? Because it’s worked too much. But it’s hardly worked at all! [Angrily.] Then because it’s worked too little! (34)

What does the reason for anything matter at this stage? The idea that this form of life could “mean something” provokes Clov’s strangled laughter; a “rational being” returning to earth might make sense of this mockery (27), though not enough to enjoy “a good guffaw” (41). While everything has to be explained to the creatures (32), no explanation could possibly suffice (47). This logic is turned against life itself, as if Hamm and Clov were the last men and given the task of overseeing the extinction of the species. Both take an ironic pleasure executing this duty: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM:

A flea! Are there still fleas? On me there’s one. [Scratching.] Unless it’s a crablouse. [Very perturbed.] But humanity might start from there again! Catch him, for the love of God! (27)

Not even the kitchen rat can escape (37). Clov powders his groin with insecticide aimed at the flea, though the earth went sterile long before he did. The play’s drive to sterility, or ironic solidarity with the technical reason that culminates in lead waves (25) and stinking corpses 289

(33), justifies Hamm’s denial of help to the interlocutor of his chronicle, who wants food for his son (“as if the sex mattered”): HAMM:

[…] Bread? But I have no bread […] Then perhaps a little corn? [Pause. Normal tone.] That should do it. [Narrative tone.] Corn, yes I have corn […] But use your head. I give you some corn […] and you bring it back to your child and you make him – if he’s still alive – a nice pot of porridge […] full of nourishment. Good. The colours come back to his cheeks – perhaps. And then? [Pause.] I lost patience. [Violently.] Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that! (36-37)

The last sentence might be the refrain of the play. When Clov spies a boy through the window he prepares to exterminate him as he had the flea: CLOV: HAMM: CLOV: HAMM: CLOV:

I’ll go and see. I’ll take the gaff. No! [CLOV halts.] No? A potential procreator? If he exists he’ll die there or he’ll come here. And if he doesn’t… [Pause.] You don’t believe me? You think I’m inventing? (49-50)

The boy, like the flea, the rat, and Hamm’s interlocutor, may be invented for the purpose of distraction, especially when Hamm’s apparent direction of the action is considered: “It’s the end Clov, we’ve come to the end” (50). The interruptions and rehearsed narrative tone of Hamm’s story suggest not its unreality, however, but the narrative scenery required to relate the moral vacuum at the centre of it. In Godot this could still be done in the slapstick antics of Vladimir and Estragon’s long-winded responses to Pozzo’s cries for help, but Endgame’s theatricality is a darker reminder of the façade required to 290

conceal the broken social bond. Hamm and Clov live on, or play out their lives, with no wish for self-preservation but only to ensure the end is not miscarried, lest the agony start all over again. That a design, any design, may be at work in this is a hope that can only be whispered: “Something is taking its course” (17, 26). The missing ends in Endgame are moral as well as narrative, for characters in search of an ending find their counterpart in lives without ethical and meaningful ends. Just as the bomb exceeds all conceivable ends, so Beckett’s endlessness is our own. Note 1.

Adorno sought confirmation from Beckett in person over whether ‘Hamlet’, and thus the dramatic subject as such, is deliberately echoed in ‘Hamm’; Beckett rejected the idea (see Knowlson, 428). Adorno dedicated his Endgame essay and his magnum opus Aesthetic Theory to Beckett.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996). Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997). –, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. J.F.N. Jephcott (London:Verso, 1978). –, “Trying to Understand Endgame”, Notes on Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 241275. Beckett, Samuel, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1956). –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). –, and Georges Duthuit, “Three Dialogues”, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of CriticalEssays, ed. Martin Esslin (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1965), 16-22. Critchley, Simon, Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Driver, Tom F., “Beckett by the Madeleine”, Columbia University Forum 4.3 (1961), 23.

291

Fletcher, John, and John Spurling, Beckett: A Study of His Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). Fraser, G.S., The Times Literary Supplement (10 Feb. 1956), 84. Kenner, Hugh, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Kerr, Walter, in Eric Bentley, New Republic (14 May 1956), 20-21. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996). Mercier, Vivian, “The Mathematical Limit”, The Nation 188 (14 Feb. 1959), 144-45. Robbe-Grillet, Alain, “Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ in the Theatre”, in Martin Esslin, 108-116. Winer, Robert, “The Whole Story”, in The World of Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph J. Smith (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,

1991), 73-85.

292

THE WORK, THE NEUTRAL AND THE UNNAMABLE Suzie Gibson

The Unnamable is more than difficult, it gives voice to the new. Maurice Blanchot’s theory of the work and the neutral provides a significant contribution to Beckett criticism because through these ideas, he responds to Beckett’s capacity for invention. Blanchot believes that the work, as an autonomous object, is borne out of difficulty. Beckett’s writing is not only exemplary of this, it plays out the suffering and frustration of transforming words into ideas, ideas into stories and stories into memories. Beckett goes further than illustrate philosophical concepts, he dramatises them. The Unnamable gives them voice, breath, sound and silence.

The words which form the title of this article – the work, the neutral and The Unnamable – are connected by a spirit of invention, by a daring sensibility that could be described as dangerous. In “Where Now? Who Now?” Maurice Blanchot refers to The Unnamable as a dangerous thought experiment “for the man who bears it” and “for the work itself” in that each are exposed to the anarchy of a writing unfettered by history, convention and tradition (1986, 148). The Unnamable’s relentless series of avowals and disavowals, of assertions and retractions enacts an uneasy “approach to origin [...] which alone makes of art an essential research” (148). This article will address Blanchot’s theory of the work and the neutral and then will relate these concepts to Samuel Beckett’s notoriously difficult fiction The Unnamable. Blanchot writes that “The Unnamable has more importance for literature than most ‘successful’ works in its canon” because it descends into a neutral region where the “self surrenders in order to speak” (148). He argues that the neutral, as a force exterior or alien to the self, to narrative and to history is given voice in this work. The Unnamable’s voice recoils and unravels in defiance and in pursuit of memory. Its circular narration works

against our inclination to respond, to order or to pattern its stories, words and images1. The Unnamable, however is not nonsensical. Rather, it is a kind of writing which makes reading difficult – reading becomes hard work. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot places Beckett within the same company as Sade whose writings put “into question the honest act of reading” (1993, 328). It’s interesting that reading is described as “honest” assuming that every reader has the best intentions. Does this mean that Beckett corrupts by turning “the honest act of reading” into a process of questioning? Blanchot goes on to write that “nevertheless” such works are “read, read outside of reading” (1993, 328-329). In Blanchot, the neutral is articulated as a force, or trace which lies outside of reading and writing. It exists outside of familiar patterns and narrative scenarios. In Blanchot’s thinking, the neutral has two identities, one possible, one impossible. The neutral as impossible is wedded to paradox and contradiction. The neutral as possible (or as a less opaque idea) is located through a narrative voice – it takes the form of either an “I” or an “it” (1993, 379-387). The voice in The Unnamable is, without doubt, not a ‘she’. As the unnamable exclaims: “I don’t know what could be worse than this, a woman’s voice perhaps” (1979, 335). The neutral is therefore not neutered. Voice is gendered. It is either a ‘he’ or an ‘it’ – choices that obviously exclude a feminine voice. But before going into any more detail concerning the relationship between The Unnamable and the neutral, I will first deal with Blanchot’s theory of the work since it informs and inflects his understanding of Beckett. 1. The work In Blanchot, the work is general and particular. It is general in that it could be anything from a poem, a song, a hymn, a novel, a play, a paper or even an essay. It is specific because these things are works only if they are independent of the support or authority of a name, a signature, community, institution or law. The work must be its own authority and its own law. It must be free standing, or it must be able to stand free from everything other than what it is. The work is irreducible. Blanchot writes that “the work of art exists quite by itself; an unreal thing in the world outside the world, it must be left free, the props removed, the moorings cut, in order to maintain its status as an 294

imaginary object” (1993, 382). The work as an ‘imaginary object’ is therefore also impossible. But regardless of the work’s possibility or impossibility, it is thought to be borne out of chaos, difficulty and resistance. Blanchot’s reinterpretation of the myth of Orpheus dramatises the inception and destiny of the work. In this story, the work is given a double identity, it is a song and an “extreme moment of liberty” where song is disrupted and transformed (1989, 175). Orpheus’ song is not a work by virtue of its possible harmony or disharmony, tonality or atonality: it is not a question of form or content. Blanchot’s theory of the work is mystical, even theological in tone. Orpheus’ song becomes a work once it is exposed to death. This exposure occurs in the instant of seeing his beloved, Eurydice, evaporate from the world of vision. It is in and through such a terrible moment that Orpheus sees into the centre of the night, which is also to glimpse into the centre of the work. This centre is described as unreachable, yet it is also a space where all paradox and mystery radiate. Blanchot believes that every true work has this centre. The allure and power of this real or unreal centre is integral to the development and resilience of the imagination – it is the space of literature. According to Blanchot, Orpheus sees this fantastic space once he witnesses the impossible – the disappearance of his lover. In this moment, he sees a centre that is centreless and a horizon that is borderless: he sees the impossible, he sees disappearance. Orpheus’ failure to resist the temptation to look back is hailed by Blanchot as a triumphant mistake because what such an audacious act inaugurates is a ceaseless movement in desire that transfigures or transpires into writing. Blanchot asserts that “writing begins with Orpheus’ gaze”. Yet his claim is soon modified, for such a beginning can never be fresh or true for in order “to write, one has to write already” (1989, 176). Blanchot’s reinterpretation of this myth is both dramatic and theological. The Orpheus story provides us with an account of the work whose entrance into the world of vision, language, thought and experience is both painful and miraculous. The destructive and inspirational gaze of Orpheus sets the scene for a work consecrated through error, desire, risk and impossibility. Orpheus’ disastrous decision not only erases his beloved and shatters the destiny of his song, it also breaks the law of the gods. Such an act of insult against the gods, however, begins another law, the law of man. The work enters the 295

world as an expression of man’s hubris. It is also a sign of his freedom. The divine and the godly are reborn in the work. Orpheus’ mistake, however, is just that, a terrible blunder which destroys the spell protecting the life of his beloved Eurydice. Blanchot describes his error as both caring and careless, inspirational and unlawful. It is inspirational because it disrupts the circle or cycle of enchantment that once bound him to the law of the gods and to his beloved. His decision to turn is significant of a break from the spellbinding realm of enchantment to the difficult space of error and disenchantment. It is this rupture which is the fall or leap into the symbolic. Yet such windfall, which is also a worm hole, is discovered at the cost of Eurydice. Her exit from life is not mourned but transformed, absorbed and overtaken by a demand and an idea that is greater, higher and grander than her existence. She is sacrificed. Blanchot never acknowledges her sacrifice but instead elevates the bard of Thrace, a poet-man courageous enough to risk everything in giving us the gift of writing. Blanchot suggests that there would be no art, writing or poetry without such moments of inspiration, rupture, carelessness and lawlessness. The work is born out of his sacrifice, which as I’ve pointed out, is really her sacrifice. Blanchot’s myth provides us with a theological narrative where sin and grief are transformed. His recourse to the sacred and edification of Orpheus at the expense of a woman, is structurally integral to the myth of the hero. In a similar fashion to Derrida’s and Kierkegaard’s tribute to Abraham as a knight of faith, so too is Orpheus praised as an errant knight of faith who risks everything in the pursuit of something higher and grander than the known world.2 But why is hubris praised over restraint? And does the work have to be born out of ‘her’ sacrifice? The autonomy of the work is compromised by Blanchot’s narrative scenario of error, loss and forgiveness. Eurydice is, as I’ve said, the unrecognised victim of this pattern. The work’s singularity is undercut by a religious metaphoric and system of valuation where man transcends his condition of error or imperfection through art. The fall from enchantment to disenchantment, and then from disenchantment to re-enchantment, through art, is perhaps all too familiar.

296

2. The neutral and The Unnamable According to Blanchot, the work cannot be a work without the neutral. The neutral is the work’s unofficial signature – it is a spectral, ghostly sign or trace of its irreducibility. The neutral is the centre or the limit of the work. But as I’ve already suggested, it is a centre that is all circumference and a point of limit that is limitless. The neutral is therefore conceived in and through paradox because ‘it is’ paradoxical. But this is only one aspect of the neutral. Blanchot provides us with two versions, one possible, one impossible. First the neutral as the impossible. Blanchot writes: The neutral cannot be represented, cannot be symbolized, or even signified; moreover it is everywhere, inasmuch as it is borne by the infinite indifference of an entire narrative [...] It is as though it were the infinite vanishing point from which the speech of the narrative, and within it all narratives and all speech about every narrative, would receive and lose their perspective: [it is] the infinite distance of their relations, their perpetual overturning and annulment. (1993, 396, my parentheses) From the passage it seems that the expanse and depth of the neutral’s power is so absolute that it could be made synonymous with the divine or the godly. Blanchot describes the neutral as a resilient yet variable horizon point that allows all forms of expression and endeavour to begin and end. The neutral’s efficacy is again invoked when he claims that it “cannot be neutralised” (1993, 386). As a potent and “infinite vanishing point from which [...] all narratives and all speech [...] receive and lose their perspective” the neutral operates as an endless spindle that unfurls and overturns creation. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the neutral, as a device of perpetual “overturning and annulment”, is figured in the image of Krapp’s beloved spool: “Box . . . thrree . . . spool . . . five. (He raises his head and stares in front. With relish.) Spool! (Pause.) Spooool! (Happy smile. [...] )” (1965, 10). The voice of a younger Krapp recorded and transposed upon the iron oxide ribbons ties language to a “neutral movement” that appears to have “neither beginning nor end” (1993, 343). Through the mediation of tape, we hear repeated fragments of fond memory that retell of a moment of snatched intimacy with a 297

woman. Like the care and reverie with which he preserves the memory of her being, Krapp’s delight in the word “Spooool!” restores language to a past moment of abstract sound and unchartered sensation. In the guise of a mechanical device, the neutral literally unwinds and rewinds the story of Krapp’s longings and desires. At the conclusion of this play, when there is nothing more to repeat and nothing left to record, we are left with the lonely image of Krapp listening to the recorded silence of his wordless present: “Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence” (20). In The Unnamable, language and the self are as detached from each-other as the alien spool that unfurls and withholds the voice of Krapp. Voice does not engender or illustrate identity but imposes a breach upon its continuity: “this voice which has denatured me, which never stops [...] grows confused and falters, as if it were going to abandon me” (322). The extreme point of curvature between voice and sound is expressed through the edges of a narration that curls back, dissolves and replenishes itself: [...] it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again [...] no, it’s something else, it’s an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me, you must accuse someone, a culprit is indispensable [...] I hear myself reasoning, all lies. (379) The instability of this voice does more than displace our confidence in its narration, it fractures and overturns our trust in language. The difficulty of The Unnamable’s speech and writing is bound up with the issue of identity. This question is constantly posed and reimposed by a voice which desires to name its speech. Early in this fiction, the voice describes its monologue as a dissertation (288). This recognition, however, is soon overthrown by a panegyric (286) which is later renamed a death-bed confession in order to be immediately converted into an indictment (379). These radical shifts in object identification, however, fall short of a speech that fulfills none of the generic codes specific to these forms. The unnamable’s seemingly interminable capacity to name and rename its subject-matter (in spite of the fact that its speech represents nothing other than or outside its circular pattern of sound and image production) culminates in its radical decomposi298

tion. The strained and difficult relationship between self and language is taken a step further by the unnamable’s closing references to external agencies: “I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words [...] they say me [...] perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story [...]” (381). Language neither coheres with nor represents the self but expresses the perpetual displacement between voice and being. The marked yet subtle shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’ in “I can’t go on, you must go on,” and then to ‘they’ in “you must says words [...] they say me [...] they have said me [...] they have carried me to the threshold of my story”, interpolates other voices or existences within the sparse and myopic space of the unnamable’s speech. Blanchot’s concept of the neutral, as a narrative voice, as either a ‘he’ or an ‘it’ could be extended to include a ‘you’ and a ‘they’. In the closing lines of The Unnamable, what is perhaps more telling than the movement of pronouns, is the change in tone. The shift from the tight dualism of ‘I’ and ‘not I’, to a less rigid ‘you’ and ‘they’ represents a further step toward dispossession – the self not only “surrenders in order to speak” but also suffers in the process (1986, 148). The narrative voice bears the neutral. It bears the neutral insofar as: 1. To speak in the neutral is to speak at a distance, preserving this distance without mediation and without community, and even in sustaining the infinite distancing distance – its irreciprocity, its irrectitude or dissymmetry: for the neutral is precisely the greatest distance governed by dissymmetry [...] 2. Neutral speech does not reveal, it does not conceal ... the neutral does not signify in the same way as the visible-invisible does, but rather opens up to another power in language, one that is alien to the power of illuminating (or obscuring), of comprehension (or misapprehension) [...] (1993, 386) If a narrative voice “bears” or “carries” with it the neutral, then what is implied in this formulation is an element of suffering. The kind of pain endured, however, is not necessarily felt by a self or an individual but by a language detached from matter and memory. The abstraction and impersonality of a language divorced from the empirical 299

world of sensation and experience neither shows nor tells, it is not diegetic or mimetic, but works anterior to these representational and dialectical models. Its very lack of reference or connection to anything other than its internal formulation and pattern of sound produces a kind of language that skirts the outer edges of thought and imagination. Both the neutral, as an over-arching force outside of language, and the neutral as a disembodied voice, are united in their otherness. For Blanchot, the neutral as a narrative voice and as voice outside of voice and narrative, is an entity that resides behind all voices, representations and narratives. The neutral, however, does not merely serve as a celestial background or support base through which language arises and dissolves, since its restless life also undermines and overturns its very instrumentality. The neutral’s constant oscillation between words and images, thoughts and impressions and memory and forgetfulness introduces a mediatory and unbridgeable distance between these categories. As unquenchable, constant movement, the neutral keeps language and narrative anxiously poised between the empirical world of matter and the abstract world of ideas. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot believes that Beckett’s fiction has such a distancing affect. The neutral, as a ruthless process of reconnaissance, is integral to the autonomy of the work. The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere [...] The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of line [...] What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. (1979, 311) This restless “ball”3 of energy which claims languor in the dubious comfort of a rack is far from calm and serene “in the blissful knowledge” of being “nobody for all eternity”. The phrase, “squirming forever”, provides us with a less mendacious image of one whose agitation and disturbance translates into a constant process of invention. But it is in and through the unnamable’s nervous and perpetual struggle to make and to remake the here and now that the work comes to speak independently of readers and writers. Blanchot believes that The Unnamable is such a work. He writes that in this kind of fiction “the 300

voice doesn’t speak, it is [...] and it is always new and always beginning again” (1986, 147). Simon Critchley’s essay, “Know Happiness – on Beckett” associates Blanchot’s obscure concept of the neutral with The Unnamable’s character of Worm. He argues that Worm is neutral in the sense that “he” or “it” remains “outside of life and the possibility the death” (1997, 168). Worm is not yet born and therefore cannot die. The neutral, as the impossible, is brought into the realm of possibility through this name, Worm. The absurdity of the name Worm, regardless of ‘his’ or ‘its’ possibility or impossibility, places the neutral into the human sphere of folly, error and language. The neutral’s alliance to the sacred is diffused by the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘it’, and the silly name Worm. The ridiculous in Worm is made even more absurd by the fact that ‘he’ or ‘it’ is caught up in a seemingly endless series of names. For he is also known as the anti-Mahood, who is the alter ego of Mahood, who is a pseudonym for Basil, who is given this name by another name, Matthew, who is described as “the angel [...] who came before the cross”, who is given this identity by The Unnamable’s ‘I’ who also refuses to be an ‘I’ and instead wants to be known as a voice – for as this voice constantly reminds us – what “it all boils down to” is “a question of words [...] it’s a question of voices” that “keep going” (308). This chaotic jumble of names, voices and characters are reduced to figures and sounds which have lost their living connections to bodies, places, spaces and things. The Unnamable begins with a number of questions, one of those foremost is to do with the relation or irrelation between people and things “people without things” and “things without people” (268). For this voice who has and hasn’t a body, it is not just a problem of where and when to start or end, as the title of Blanchot’s essay “Where now, Who Now?” suggests – it is not just a question of place or selfhood. We know who is doing the talking: it is an ‘I’ who is also ‘not I’. The Unnamable’s difficult and manic voice who “can’t go on but must go on”, who is an ‘I’ but who claims to be ‘not I’, and who cannot begin or end because ‘he’ or ‘it’ can only speak from the here and now, a middle that is an endless present – is for Blanchot and Critchley – an expression of the neutral. Critchley calls this noise that never seems to stop “the tinnitus of existence” (1997, 175). And as I’ve mentioned, Blanchot claims that such a “voice does not speak, it is” (1986, 147). 301

The Unnamable’s voice is neutral in the sense that it is a reduced and generalised version of all voices. It is noise abstracted from speech and marks of notation abstracted from writing. There is a kind of singularity and generality expressed in this. The narrative ‘I’ or ‘he’ is pared down to chatter, murmurs and sounds. When all is stripped down, what is left is the neutral. The neutral is that which cannot be eradicated – it survives. What Beckett’s writing brings to the fore is a kind of experiential and interpretive freedom forged through formal and conceptual difficulty. The severe reduction of matter in The Unnamable (there is no context, location, plot or narrative) pushes language and comprehension to a place yet to be colonised by interpretation. By reading The Unnamable we are implicitly asked to enter a place of paradox, pain, despair, humour and alienation. The capacities of thought and sensation are at once extended and tested by our protracted and uncomfortable occupation of this (no) place. Language transforms and is in turn transformed by a thought process that hovers between knowledge and oblivion, confidence and alienation. We are exposed to the convergence and dissolution of stories and images that change and overturn into abstract bits and pieces of truncated memory and augmented perception. The fragility and difference of language is characterised through the pain and suffering of a persistent noise that threatens to never stop. The density of reading pages and pages of words without paragraphs, chapters or headings expresses the obsession and tenacity of a voice that wants to stop but cannot for fear of silence. Silence is equated with death, and yet its constant chatter enunciates a living death — or the death of silence. To refer to Blanchot again, The Unnamable descends “into that neutral region where the self surrenders in order to speak” (1986, 148). Such a movement or surrender could be compared to Orpheus’ descent into the underworld, except this time the breach is not against vision or his lover, but silence. For Blanchot, Beckett’s writing is truly thoughtful and philosophical in that true thinking is never developed but discontinuous. He writes that “True thoughts question, and to question is to think by interrupting oneself” (1993, 340). The “halting and jerky” movements of The Unnamable’s consistently unreliable narration refuses to keep us spellbound – the voice persistently fractures our thought and imagination (1986, 144). The exhaustion announced in and through 302

The Unnamable’s speech is paralleled by the frustration of reading a fiction that demands our concentration yet at every turn refuses us such closeness. But it is in and through this kind of distance, resistance and difficulty, that a work comes to be a work – as Blanchot says, “its moorings are cut” and the “props are removed” (1993, 382). 3. Beyond Blanchot The relentless cycle of repetition and amputated movement endemic to this kind of writing is, however, undermined by an otherness yet to be named in this essay. If the neutral is understood as an interrupting force that secures the work’s autonomy, then the neutral must ‘itself’ be detached. Interruption is a sign of resistance and resistance arises out of a desire for autonomy. Blanchot certainly suggests that the neutral, as a “movement” which has “neither beginning nor end”, is an expression of “pure resistance” (1993, 343). He also goes on to claim that “The work of Samuel Beckett in every way reminds us of this” (343). But what remains unthought by Blanchot is the link between repetition and interruption. Blanchot places his trust in the sheer force of insistence that characterises the perverse repetitions of Beckett’s writing. But is relentless repetition rigorous enough to overturn and change the trajectory of our thought? What is missing in this formulation and moreover, what Blanchot (and indeed Critchley) overlook in their reading of Beckett, is the striking absence of woman. In The Unnamable, as a truly elided other, the feminine is negatively inscribed as a form of interruption. Although the names of women pass briefly through the alternating consciousness of the narrator – she is Madeleine “the proprietress of the chop-house” (301) – or the forgettable Marguerite. The most notable references to her existence involve an expressed desire to violate her being: “I like to fancy, even if it is not true, that it was in my mother’s entrails” 4 (297). Womanhood is again threatened and violated when the voice later berates himself for forgetting to kill his mother: “I’m looking for my mother to kill her, I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being born” (360). What these passages reveal more than their disturbing content, is the effect of woman: they express everything but indifference. More than these violent and alarming images, she appears as a body whose smell and memory cannot be forgotten. Somewhere between Krapp’s tenderness and the unnamable’s sadism, the efficacy of the feminine subsists. Woman, as an idea and a body 303

whose sexuality is deeply disturbing and foreign to this work, appears in the form of a neutral silence that dispels and protects the autonomy of a ‘he’ who is at once indebted to and resentful of her existence. Interruption, true and lasting, comes in the form of her voice, a sound unheard but distinct in its absence. Notes 1.

Beckett’s minimalism has the effect of eliciting responses that are equally contracted. Jacques Derrida provides us with such an instance where he claims to be short-circuited by his theoretical and emotional proximity to Beckett’s writing, see “ ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”, in Acts of Literature (1997, 60-61. Simon Critchley’s essay, “Know Happiness – on Beckett”, shows similar signs of contraction and elision. The confidence and detail with which he surveys the plethora of critical material on Beckett is undercut by his noncommittal and diffident reading of his work, see Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature (1997, 141-208). It seems that in order to avoid the repetitive treadmill of Beckett criticism, one has to either resort to silence or provide a reading that is deferent or reductive in its resistance to saying anything. This kind of non-responsive response goes against the inventiveness and rigour of Beckett’s writing.

2.

See Derrida’s The Gift of Death, and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, for their readings of the Abraham story.

3.

Early in The Unnamable, the voice describes itself as a “big talking ball” but this idea is soon transformed into a “cylinder, a small cylinder” and then this image is immediately changed into “an egg, a medium egg” (280). The countless series of image conversion generated by this voice is testimony of The Unnamable’s capacity for invention regardless and in the face of its reduction to matter.

4.

The “it” in “it was in my mother’s entrails” refers to the ends of the unnamable’s crutches (297). At this stage in the fiction the unnamable describes himself as legless. The phallic resonance of “it”

304

cannot be ignored since the theme of incest runs throughout the Trilogy.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Krapp’s Last Tape in Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 9-20. –, The Unnamable in The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979), 267-382. Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1993). –, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1989). –, “Where Now? Who Now?” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1986), 141-149. Critchley, Simon, “Know Happiness — on Beckett,” in Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature (Routledge: London, 1997), 140-180. Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995). –, “ ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”, in Acts of Literature (Routledge: London, 1997), 33-75. Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

305

RECONFIGURING THE WAITING FOR GODOT: Explorations within some Paradigms of Hindu Philosophy Ranjan Ghosh

The concept of ‘waiting’ in Godot is here brought into line with several paradigms from Indian philosophical thought. The relation of Godot with Vladimir and Estragon (the authentic reflexivities within the contingent situation, the values and ethics of the situational whole) are explored and possible new lines of inquiry are opened. Drawing on the complex philosophical tradition of Karma, Dharma, and the Indian value-system, this article relocates these issues in the very ‘act’ of waiting. The ‘waiting’ is, then, interpreted as being less absurd, less nihilistic, and more positive and authentic. Indeed, this article seeks to reorient our approach towards the ‘waiting’ for Godot.

Circumscribing Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the philosophy of ‘waiting’ within several intriguing parameters of Hindu philosophy can be a challenging and a celebratory experience, not just because it unearths new interpretive spaces, but also for the critical temerity that this venture entails, given Beckett’s unendorsed association with Indian philosophical systems. Unlike Eliot or Arnold or Emerson or Thoreau, the authenticity of Beckett’s personal linkages with the complicated matrix of Indian philosophy is suspect. However, given the conceptual pliancy of the play, the provocation to offer philosophical re-constellations in line with Indian philosophical systems can hardly be ignored. This article sets out several epistemological strands of Hindu philosophy, such as the concept of Karma, Dharma, and the Indian value system, so as to offer a new perspective on ‘waiting’. The critique of ‘waiting’ concentrates on Hindu philosophical-metaphysical-ethical interpretations and tries to unearth a fresh dimension to the relational plexus between Godot, Vladimir and Estragon, which in a way, reorients our entire approach to the play itself.

In the light of Hindu philosophy, the Godot-denied world of the play can be categorized by pramada, alasya (passivity) and nidra (torpor) as mentioned in the Gita (XIV.8). It is a drugged state reeking with the ‘incomprehensibility’ (read, here, more of the Buddhist sense of the term) of the ‘real’ – a near misguided obstinacy. So the initial feeling for the situation in the play speaks of the tamasic state which is born of ignorance: it deludes. From a tamasic state, (apratishtham, lacking usual foundation and reciprocity, aparasparasambhutam) we find at a certain stage in the drama, a clearer conative perception in a rajasic state that is, however, void of the unity of existence. It lacks the deeper insight into the unifying factor that Godot’s anticipative presence purports to bring to the surface. It is Karma, samsara, and then the inevitable bandha (domain of bondage) that constitute the fundamental existential matrix of Vladimir and Estragon. But what I propose here is that, when drawn into relation with certain paradigms of Hindu philosophy Beckett’s work does not just foreground an incessant undertow of non-knowledge, nescience or avidya but also (through the diligent, at times distracted, anticipation of Godot), a possibility for ‘discriminative knowledge’ figuring the ways of release (moksha-sadhana).1 It needs to be understood that, in Hindu philosophy, ‘waiting’ is the unity of existence, the inspiration to reorient the undertow of moral slackness and other entropic forces. Following such premises, the ‘waiting’, as conative persistence (dhrti) can have as consequence a ‘consummation’ that provides a clear understanding of the self and its relation to the situation – a state of being-free from the morbid transition of matter. So a positive liberty is underlined where self-determination can adjudge the possibilities for selftranscendence (there is clear evidence of this in the play which we shall turn to later). The ‘inauthentic’ milieu in the ‘waiting’ brings us to the concept of the Adhyasa in Advaita philosophy. Steeped in avidya (loosely translated as ignorance), the world of Vladimir and Estragon becomes a state of consciousness (I am referring here to the philosophical ramifications of one of the three stages of existence within this particular paradigm of Hindu philosophy) where realizing Godot would be realizing Brahman, the ultimate reality under Advaita Vedanta of Sankaracarya. Adhyasa is brought by Maya (it is the power that creates delusion: mas ca mohartha-vacanah yas ca prapana-vacakah/ tam prapayati ya nityam, sa maya parikirtita – Brahma-vaivarta Pu308

rana, XXVII): Maya is Avarana (concealment) and Viksepa (superimposition). Maya in the Vladimir-Estragon world springs from ‘inauthenticity’ and gives rise to Aviveka (indiscrimination) and this leads to abhimana (attachment: in the play it is the repetitive atmospheric stupor) to Ragadvesadi, to Karma, to embodiment, and finally to misery. It is this misery that forbids the Kierkegaardian leap into enthusiasm and thus promotes a dichotomized entity in reading Godot. It is worthwhile to note that the interpretations arrived at within this as well as other paradigms of Hindu philosophy cannot be conclusive, because the pregnant conceptual ‘fluidity’ of the play enables a plurivocity of philosophical interventions. However, the problems of inauthentic modes of existence can be seen to revolve around the Mimamsa philosophy of holding the individual to be morally responsible for his actions. This is not the concept of Karma as found in the Nyaya-Vaisesika system or Buddhist philosophy; it is, rather, the judgmental axis of ‘performance’ (a potent word for my argument) of the Mimamsa. So here we have vidhi (injunctions, one part of the performance) which means one has to wait for Godot and Nisedha (prohibitions, another part of the performance complex) which implies that one cannot move away but simply wait (waiting as performance) for Godot. The Karma of waiting (to be read in conflation with Heideggerean anticipation) has for me a truth of the scriptural world; the karma-vipaka or fruition of action is in waiting for the moment that decides the arrival of Godot. The philosophy of Avidya might interpret the situation to be noumenally false yet it is not simply a nonentity or a purely subjective experience for it is here, within it (read positive inauthenticity/avidya) that the struggle is actuated, the karmic process to realize the dharma of Godot’s Dasein. The Godot-awaited world is the product of avidya which is a kind of non-discriminative knowledge where jivatman (the individual self) is caught in sansara or transmigratory existence.2 Godot, understood in this way, is the ultimate form of cognition, the Brahmanic state where jivatman is exempted from avidya (cf. Spinoza’s amor dei). It is avidya (which, for me, can be equated with positive inauthenticity) that inspires the momentum for salvation or salvaging the ultimate Dharma. With some effort the inauthentic, adharmic state of being can be interrogated when anticipating the future (Vorlaufen) is privileged over mere waiting (Erwarten). 309

Under the Sankhya system, we know that no action can take place unless there is a decision to act. The arrival of the boy bearing a message from Godot is a stimulation to initiate, or rather manifest, ‘action’. Vladimir: It’s starting that’s difficult Estragon: You can start from anything. Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide.

(63, my italics)

Without fatalistically waiting for the future to draw near, Vladimir understands the difficulty of starting amidst avidya and the evolution of a situation that makes for karmic flexibility. Godot and the duo of Vladimir and Estragon range in the scale of Hindu philosophy between monism, perfection and being eternal (Godot) contrasted with pluralism, incompleteness and transience (the duo). The hesitant inability to offer a rejoinder to Godot’s ‘deferred’ visit – ‘Tell him… (he hesitates)… tell him you saw us (pauses). You did see us, didn’t you?’ (52) – underwrites an incompetence in their conduct of temporal/circumstantial affairs which precludes the essential means to a spiritual realization in Godot. Godot within the value-system of Hindu ethics is integrated consciousness. Vladimir and Estragon cannot respond to this naked condition of pure selfhood because acting in the realm of dichotomous being they fail to achieve an integrated personality. However, the rajasic state of affairs puts the creation of their personality in train (several incidents in the play such as the entrance of Pozzo and Lucky point to it); it is a state that preludes a condition of ‘recuperation’. Godot has the potential to reveal an order of being which, more than being merely human, is a spiritual reality which is also the source of the significance of what happens in the temporal order of being. But importantly, despite the hesitant rejoinder to the boy, the message they wish to communicate concerns the persistent act of ‘waiting’. They have not left their ground despite Godot’s absence. Hindu ethics would suggest that the waiting needs to go on because one needs to figure the relation between the ‘ground’ and the ‘consequent’. The situation of Vladimir and Estragon cannot carry its own final meaning: avidya springs from the acceptance of this world as final and conclusive. Wherever the result of action may lie, whether in the 310

action itself or in the agent, or somewhere else, it becomes obvious that it has been generated in the course of the ‘performance’. Vladimir thinks of change, desires reconfiguration, contemplates a ‘performance’ and thereby lends the power of contingency to their predicament. Vladimir says, ‘Let us do something while we have the chance…. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!’ (79). This ‘performative’ potency insinuates the finality achieved in/through Godot, the karma-vipaka. In the theory of Prabhakara, Godot could be the Niyoga; it is the incentive to prompt the Apurva to realize the dharma of authenticity. Kumarila’s theory of Karma would attribute the seeds of actions to Vladimir’s contemplative, though intermittent, vitality. Beckett’s passive depiction of Estragon is deliberate: the dynamic sparks flying from the dramatic situatedness of Vladimir point to a realizable finality within the philosophy of karma (‘Vladimir: But it’s the way of doing it that counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on living.’ 60, my italics). So, the Karmic potentialities in ‘waiting’ need to be carefully considered. ‘Waiting’ promotes struggle and action reaches outward and inward at the same time. Hindu philosophy would choose to believe that more than being an outward manifestation it should be a soul-opening inwardization (do not Vladimir and Estragon realize the need for fellow feeling, sentiment and moral reflexivity in their interaction with Pozzo and Lucky?), a subjective pathos, that bludgeons through avidya to reach the state of liberation which I would qualify as the yukta-biyukta dasa (the bonded-liberated state). I would prefer to look at Godot as the ‘true self’ and waiting as an act of ‘desiring’. Meeting Godot would be realizing Godot which is the ideal of atmaprapti or atmalabha. For me there is inherently a substantial integration to the Godot-being (yukta). Vladimir and Estragon cannot go for they have to wait for Godot; they cannot hang themselves because Godot could be arriving anytime; their indecisiveness is not existential enigma but the yukta-biyukta dasa which is integral to the Godot-being within the Indian concept of values. That they cannot hang themselves does not point to any pointlessness of stigmatized existence but to an underlying prospect of a ‘becoming’ where values wait to be sublated through the intervention of karma and jnana (the biyukta dasa). Within the existential milieu of the whole act of ‘waiting’, the three entities – Godot (for the sake of my argument here I would prefer to read Godot as Brahman), the individual souls, and the world – 311

share a relationship, according to the theory of Madhava Vedanta, to an extent. Godot is not completely independent (not to forget the ‘partnership’ principle which we shall discuss later) and the other two are not wholly dependent either. As the light of the sun is reflected through a rainbow, similarly the light of Godot in the form of consciousness is reflected through the individual souls of Vladimir and Estragon. But there must be a certain incompleteness and incompetency in the ‘reflection’ that denies the ‘usherance’ of Godot even for the second time; this incompetency springs from the avidya: avidyayam bahudha vartamana vayam krtartha ity abhimanyanti balah.3 Following Madhava’s theory the ‘will’ of Godot (implied, inherent, immanent) essentializes the bondage so that the only way to overcome such a predicament is to comprehend the true nature of the ‘bondage’ – the dynamics of the Godot-Vladimir-Estragon partnership, the subtle matrix of the yukta-biyukta dasa. What Godot’s intimation through the boy and the possibilities of ‘homecoming’ suggest is that the knowledge of the true nature of the self in its relation with Brahman-Godot is incomplete. It is the lack of aparoksa jnana. Within the Nyaya-Vaisesika system, adrsta, which is the unseen potency, is an unintelligible principle and Vladimir and Estragon cannot lay claim to any absolute knowledge of adrsta. However, they might accept it as adrsta, which in the context of my argument is not correct, as I have argued that the repetitiveness and lassitude they experience are born from avidya. Within the Nyaya-Vaisesika system, the unfolding dynamics of the play, despite the prevalent avidya, would encourage the luminous presence of Godot; hence the mandatory ‘waiting’. It is Godot who bears upon their consciousness, the constituent atoms of their being. So in Nyaya, Godot is the Karmadhyaksa, the Phaladate (moral governor). We presume that Karma in the Vladimir-Estragon world can be exercises in efficient causality but not without the actuation of Godot. It is Godot’s karma that establishes the Dharma both at the micro and the macrocosmic level in the Vladimir-Estragon existential circuit. So Godot can be interpreted as an efficient cause. But under the theory of the Sahakarivada of the Naiyayikas, Godot’s causal efficiency needs to take into account what Vladimir’s and Estragon’s ‘being’ and ‘actions’ deserve. Vladimir: Let’s wait and see what he says. Estragon: Good idea. 312

Vladimir: Let’s wait till we know exactly how we stand. Estragon: On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes. Vladimir: I’m curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we’ll take it or leave it. (18, my italics) So in a way, Godot exists because Vladimir and Estragon wait; Godot stands to be realized because of the Karmic self-reflexivities of the two. So the possibilities of Godot’s ‘being revealed’ are ingrained in the givenness of Karmic potency, the whatness of things. Hindu ethical philosophy would argue that ‘waiting’ in its steadfastness then becomes the functioning unity of the personality that is realised when thought ripens to judgment through valuechoices. Vladimir assesses the situation appropriately when he stresses the need to know exactly how they stand. It is a critique of the relation he has with the ground and the consequent. Within the philosophy of Karma, waiting, then, calls for an intensely self-critical awareness where the functional and intentional capacities available to Vladimir (there are selective instances in the play where he thinks of a ‘struggle’, stressing on the ‘way’ to ‘do’ it and stating: ‘we’re inexhaustible’ 62) demand the responsibility of exercising them. Within such tenets of Hindu philosophy reaching for/at Godot would mean a combination or synthesis of jnana and karma under the theory of samuccaya. So, if efforts are directed at the karmic honesty of the situation, we can have conditions suitable for the revelation of knowledge (Godot). The ‘inexhaustibility’ reminds me of what Krishna tells Arjuna on the eve of the Kurukshetra. If filled with pride, you say, I will not fight it is all in vain you are foolish. Fight you will, your nature will make you fight. Your karma will make you fight. You are foolish. You will fight in spite of yourself Doesn’t the world revolve like the magic wheel? Isn’t Brahman the hub? (Lal 1965, 110-11) The question here is: Isn’t Godot the hub? According to the Bhartrprapanca, karma is essential to the process of Brahman313

realisation. Godot’s implicit ‘you ought’ awaits the right response of ‘I ought’. Volitionally, Vladimir needs to set in place an attitude of standing firm among the unceasing flux of becoming, an attitude which acts like the formation of a centre of gravity in a cosmic nebula. He understands the need to ‘wait’ – ‘Let’s wait and see what he says’ (18); he grows curious to learn what Godot is capable of delivering. His karma will make him fight. Vladimir and Estragon, for me, are one self with two faces. Despite the words of separation exchanged between them the bond remains firmly in place, with a clear stress on a unity of existence which I qualify as the common act of waiting. This indirectly promotes Godot’s dharma that underscores this unity of existence. So within this status and as part of the intentional and functional capacities mentioned above, we have in Vladimir and Estragon the urge to interrelate with ‘others’ (Pozzo, Lucky and the world) and an impetus to conduct oneself with knowledge that imbibes the social ethics of dharma. Clearly it is Vladimir who sees the positive inauthenticity of the situation, sallies at the dharma of being, while most often Estragon questions Vladimir as an extension of negativity. So the problem of apparent irreconcilability – the incessant dialectic between the Godothoped-for and the Godot-denied world – stimulates the they-He relationship. The relational schema is potentially intriguing. This intriguing status in the relationship is typical of the correspondence between the Brahman and the world within Upanishadic philosophy. It is a relationship that cannot be logically articulated. It must be admitted that both the characters as ensouled individualities are not the whole of this larger whole (Godot); they cannot be exhaustively identified with the focus of their awareness of the whole. They are a collection of experiences and memories and it is only by probing into the meaning of their life-experiences, which is the prevalent avidya that forbids discriminative knowledge, that they can become aware of the whole. Karmic dynamism is again a case in point. Here in the regnant Rajasic state of the play, dharma stands to be ‘possessed’. ‘Waiting’, thus, is to be in Godot, the participatory experience in ‘New Being’. So ‘waiting’ accentuates svabhava within the functional ramifications of dharma. Svabhava is self becoming – a self-piloted growth to the ontological verity of contentment in Godot. Vladimir maintains that they need to represent themselves worthily for they have not exhausted themselves yet (‘we are inexhaustible’ 62). The instrumentalities of 314

the dharma of Dasein inspires the svabhava, the being-in-the-world. In the action of the modes (rajasic being the predominant) the dynamics of intentionality (‘Let’s do something while we have the chance…’ 79) provide a point d’ appui, a leverage point that promises experiential self-transcendence. The ground of the great Godot-world is not a near insentient Brahman, but an intentionality, a will. Vladimir and Estragon need to know that they are mounted on a machine (yantrarudha, Gita XVIII.61). The svabhava for the situation turns Vladimir into a yagarudha with a skill in action that discriminates what is of moment to the spirit from what is not (‘…Then we’ll take it or leave it.’ 18). The poignancy of Zarathustra – ‘this is my way where is yours’ – makes us remember Vladimir’s assertion: ‘Vladimir be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle’ (9, my italics). With the word ‘struggle’ in mind, the complexity evolving out of the karma-vikarma-akarma matrix in the Vladimir-Estragon world is, to an extent, owing to the potent question in Gita ‘What is action?’. In fact Gita states that, the way of work is deeply hidden, with the stress on ‘skill in action’ (karmasu kausalan) which means the skill in discriminating what is of moment to the spirit from what is not. This karmasu kausalan can emanate from the attitude that decides to wait and figure out where exactly they stand. This understanding would open before them the great design of Godot, the consequence of which would be no deferral of arrival; tomorrow would appear in the present. Within the context of the discussion so far, it would be improper to interpret Godot as demanding a fettered allegiance to an ideology. Rather by not choosing to reveal itself, Godot indirectly instructs a probing into the realities of enacted being attesting itself in action. Akarma has it that not to choose to act is to choose not to act. This forbids any transition from the being of ‘human reality’ to the ‘being free’. The conclusion – I think therefore I am – becomes inadequate and has to shift to the position ‘I choose and therefore and thereby I am, opto ergo sum’. Pointing to the distinction between en soi and pour soi, Hindu philosophy would propose an insightful accounting for the field of ‘choice’ and ‘praxis’, inspiring in Vladimir and Estragon a steady enlargement of the repertory of its efficacies and the radius of its revolutionary awareness. 4 What forbids authenticity of existence is the lack of realization of what Kant would call the ‘hidden plan’ (19). The underlying thrust 315

of the play is to make Vladimir and Estragon exercise and develop their capacities or else perish in ‘thrownness’. Hindu ethical philosophy would not consider this temporal ‘waiting’ as negative and meaningless. We cannot reject becoming: the order in becoming points to a being behind the becoming. One cannot overlook beingneeds. History, here, in the Vladimir-Estragon world of Godot is founded on a true ontological principle that has its beginning and fulfillment in the depths of the ultimate experience (Godot). Here historical process, with the power to engage in deep communion with the finality of experience, can be realized in a profound sense in ‘partnership’ where possibilities are raised for a reconfiguration of the inauthentic situation. It is like Arjuna’s deeply distracted state before the war – indecisiveness and purposive inaction – which required Krishna as the ‘force’ to the ‘hidden plan’ to change his course. Godot has a forceful though implicit presence that promotes tropism towards values that tends to probe the dead level of energy in existence. The necessity of ‘waiting’ in existence can graduate to a necessity of freedom/ individuality. It thus raises the possibility for a graduation to a stage that should dissolve any confusion between the contingent and the absolute. One which would overcome the benumbed state arising out of a misappropriation of finitude. Godot almost like an incarnated state (Sambhavami yuge yuge) waits upon Vladimir and Estragon’s realization of the need to right the course of history that drifts beyond man’s possibilities of evolutionary and experiential transcendence. As Krishna is to Arjuna (referring to Bhagavad Gita again), so is Godot to Vladimir and Estragon. In the battlefield just before zero hour, Krishna reveals his cosmic form, reveals himself to be immeasurably great. But then does Arjuna become a mere marionette in the hands of the deity who forecloses Arjuna’s freedom and responsibility? Rather, Krishna leaves Arjuna to form his own authentic modes of reflection and action (yathe chhasi tatha karu). Correspondingly, Godot’s overpowering stature reveals itself when the boy arrives with the news that Godot shall come tomorrow. What must be noted is that the ‘waiting’ for tomorrow is that which Godot indirectly provides as the site for independent action (‘Vladimir: I’m curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we’ll take it or leave it’, 18, my italics). It provides a vectoral thrust toward maturation within becoming – a dharmic and karmic entelechy from externality to inwardness and from particularity to universality (‘Estragon: what do you expect, you always wait till 316

the last moment.’ 10). Again the karma of waiting in the dharma of the Godot-world is clearly emphasized. The Gita’s profound principle that God has a programme which needs the partnership of man in order to be fulfilled is quite evident here. The objective substantiation of Godot’s rightness or dharma of design (‘hidden plan’) inheres in the consciousness and intentionality of Vladimir and Estragon as they try to align themselves with such purposes as might reformulate their current state of being. So mere ‘waiting’ has to change to ‘active waiting’ that calls for a ‘partnership’ (‘Estragon: All my life I’ve compared myself to him,’ 52) where Godot’s impact, which lacks the transactional nature of a two-way process, would not allow the existential spiritual program to bear fruit. We need Vladimir’s ‘struggle’ – ‘the way of doing it’. Circumstantial awareness can mature into a realization that deepens one’s being using one’s own resources of causal initiative. The dead energy in the play, to which all are in thrall, is not Godot’s doing but a betrayal of the partnership undertaken on behalf of man (as Vladimir observes perceptively: ‘There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.’ 11). It is a misappropriation of the essential correspondence among – Karta-adhishthanam karanam-chestha-daivam. Knowledge of the vyakta (‘what is manifest’, here, positive inauthenticity) is essential to a realization of the moksha (it resonates in several places in the play, for example: ‘we will be saved’, or ‘we shall have mercy’, or Godot shall arrive with ‘reinforcements’ 77). The dramatic milieu foreground the dialectic with the avyakta (‘what is unmanifest’, the ‘hidden plan’ in waiting) – the perishable and the caused conflated with the manifold, the emergent and the all pervading. In fact ‘waiting’, inveterate anticipation, ascertains and appends ‘value’ to reality where the totality of reality is realized in the maturity of the ‘partnership’. Godot’s values are not karmasadhya; they are intrinsic and absolute beyond the scope of human agency (Singh 1949, 84). So it is pointless to believe in the pointlessness of existence in the Godot-delayed-denied-deferred universe of man. Its basic resistance to analysis defies all categorized hermeneutics of self. For me, its silence revels in interpretation: ‘waiting’, non-appearance calculates the modes of appearance. At most, a kind of ‘self-realization’ is hinted at by Beckett where more than ‘voidness’, it is self-identity with the existent; it is a striving towards attainment of identification with the ultimate (Godot). Vladimir, thus, admits that they are ‘inexhaustible’. Within Ramanuja’s concept of moksha, the self, having an 317

intuition of the supreme self (Godot), is a conscious self persisting in the state of release. Vladimir: Tied. Estragon: Ti-ed. Vladimir: But to whom by whom? Estragon: To you man. Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! (20-1) It is a liberating ‘idea’ to be tied to Godot. So the effort to ‘struggle’, to maintain – ‘Let us do something, while we have the chance […] Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!’ – is the restoration of a ‘natural position’ (Ramanuja’s idea of liberation), a preservation of the self’s distinctive essence through being identified with Godot. And within both Sankara and Ramanuja’s premises we can argue for the possibility of a restoration to a state of harmony (a Godot-ownedembodied state) through karman. So what I term a Godot-liberated status is a positive state of consciousness, not a bare existence afflicted by desolate materiality and soul-stultifying inertia. It should be a freedom that makes a claim on value and puts a premium on knowledge that affects, influences and purifies being. Within the formative matrix of the play there is a clear change in the trajectory of knowledge, especially for Vladimir, and in the knowledge content which is implicit in the play. For instance, the insistent enquiry, ‘will night never come’ (for with nightfall the prospect of Godot’s arriving on the next morning intensifies) and Pozzo’s affirmation that he would have waited for Godot till it was black night, point to changes in process that border on Karmic and the Dharmic entelechy as mentioned above. Estragon’s Adam-like stature confirms a ‘struggle’ and Pozzo’s call to be a ‘little more attentive’ (37) reinforces greater involvement with self-reconstruction. However, Karma, is a more significant paradigm and Beckett seems to put greater emphasis on karma than knowledge. Reorienting, then, the concept of dharma, as traditionally propounded, intimations of Godot and its consequences for the inmates of the Godot-world make us believe in interrelatedness (the ‘partnership’ as I have argued), implicating a possibility for ‘growth’. The dharma, as implied through the Godot world, is a philosophical reinterpretation of the temporal 318

schema. Dharma, for Beckett, would propose a valued order which more than a specific order of life is ‘thoughtful’ orderliness. Godot, thus, within several traditions of Hindu philosophical thought defies law; the uncertainty concerning Godot is a revaluation of the Hindu view of the temporality and materiality of existence. The dharma in ‘waiting’ would never discount the samsara or Vladimir and Estragon’s circumstantial immediacy. The ethical perfection waiting to be actualized (the pluripotency in the ‘waiting’) is the condition which precedes the achievement of a liberation through karman which does away with the sacred-secular dichotomy (‘All my life I have compared myself to him’ 52). Karman would brighten the possibilities of being identified with Godot and the dharma of ‘waiting’ foregrounds the ‘partnership’ that decimates this dichotomy. In the event of this realization in ‘waiting’, the situation, conceptually, leads us to a site where dharma and moksha can intertwine, the ethical and the spiritual can enmesh. The intermeshing is graded: in the ‘interactive’ situation involving Vladimir and Estragon the values in the lower rung of the Indian value system are put on trial and are sublimated and transformed in the light of the ‘waiting’ for Godot (in the context of the play one can find such values in the hesitancy of Vladimir and Estragon to formulate a response to Godot’s prospective visit, the material desire that terminates in physical comfort, the impatience to see the end of a thing or phenomenon, blindness to the underlying value of their existential reality etc.). So, following the graded systems of value of Hindu philosophy, Godot has intrinsic value whereas the rest of the values are instrumental. In line with my thesis, then, I would refuse to read the play as predominantly ‘absurdist’ because ends can be ascribed to most of the actions (each action, if not formally, intrinsically outlines the ‘waiting’ for the ultimate experience) and most of the consequences are meaningful and symbolically fruitful. The frustration and resistance involved in the temporal situation of Vladimir and Estragon is integral to the very ontology and teleology of the ‘waiting’. The message contained in the ‘waiting’ concerns a correspondence between matter (individuality and action) and Brahman (the Godot-liberated or Godot-possessed state) with stress being laid on a new degree of ethical activism. Thus, with the right kind of realization of the dharma of the existential situation one would be assured of reaching the gateway to moksha. Vladimir and Estragon need to understand that the moral 319

ethos of the ‘given’ in their existential circuit is not the absurd realm, which is self-sufficient and self-complete. One has to go beyond the ethics of the situation to reach the state of being free where, in the complete experience of spiritual freedom, all contradictions will be resolved. Nothing would then remain uncertain thereby negating Estragon’s assertion: ‘No, nothing is certain’ (53). The re-imagined state of ‘waiting’, will have Godot as the finale, the all sufficing human good, and, following the philosophy of authenticity, Godot is ‘seduction’ and ‘enticement’.5 Notes 1.

I have chosen to interpret this ‘everydayness’ in ‘waiting’ in the light of positive inauthenticity which would mean evoking the ‘guilt’ in the ‘givenness’. In Heideggerean terms Godot could be the ‘caller’. I suggest a provocative correspondence between ‘discriminative knowledge’ in Hindu philosophy and the authenticinauthentic binarism in modern European philosophy. Premised within this dialectic, the ‘waiting’ would signal Godot’s dharma or authenticity as something yet to be realized and the moment of Umkehr as a delayed phenomenon.

2.

See, Sankara-Bhasya on the Brahma-sutra 1.IV.3. Accepting the situation ‘finally’ as absurd, fraught with a dead level of energy, is another version of avidya. It falsifies the truth of the being. There is no harm in accepting the multiplicity of the world; but to look at it as ‘final’ and ‘fundamental’, as a self-existing cosmos, would be tantamount to a misappropriation of finitude. Chandogya Upanishad or the Prasna Upanishad pontificates about overcoming the avidya of the situation for a proper state of becoming.

3.

Mundaka Upanishad (I.2.8). Radhakrishnan translates it as: the immature, living manifoldly in ignorance, thinking we have accomplished our aim.

4.

When Hindu philosophical ethics can be used to configure a dynamic potential in the situation of the play, I would place the dynamics of Karma in the vestibule between Sanchita Karma and Agami-Karma. In Agami-Karma we can propose a greater possibility of Karmic control, futurity and greater degree of consequen-

320

tiality. The Godot-world emphasizes that action will have effects with respect to the Godot-law and the Godot-order. 5.

Nietzsche claims that the wine of absurdity and the bread of indifference cannot thwart authenticity and a star is only born from chaos. If any possibility of authenticity exists, it is in the ‘affirmation’. The affirmative thrust in the anticipation of their waiting would promote the values that could initiate authenticity. Godot’s dharma lies in stretching the ‘waiting’; waiting with no result is an authentic ploy to make them answerable to the responsibilities of existence. This weighs the ‘positive’ element of waiting; this is the moment of their ‘enticement’.

Works Cited Atreya, B.L, The Philosophy of the Yoga Vasistha (Delhi: Theosophical Publishing House, 1936). Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, (London: Faber & Faber, 1956). Kant, Immanuel, Eternal Peace, (trans.) W. Hastie (World Peace Foundation, 1914). Lal, P, The Bhagavadgita, (transcreated) (Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1965). Radhakrishnan, S, The Principal Upanisads, (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1994). Sharma, D.S, Pearls of Wisdom, (Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1962). Singh, R.P, The Vedanta of Sankara: A Metaphysics of Value, Volume I (Jaipur: Bharat Publishing House, 1949).

321

This page intentionally left blank

“VASTS APART”: Phenomenology and Worstward Ho Garin Dowd

Through an attention to the vestiges of concepts resonant of phenomenology, and an analysis of the ways in which the verbs “to see” and “to say”, inter alia, mingle, swap places, fold, and combat each other, this article seeks to show (to borrow the words of Deleuze on Foucault) that in Worstward Ho “[phenomenological] intentionality gives way to […] an endless interplay between the visible and the utterable. Each breaks open the other” (Deleuze 1995, 108).

Phenomenology should be thought of less as a doctrine than as a method, defined by Martin Heidegger as “the process of letting things manifest themselves” (Heidegger in Richardson 1963, xiv).1 That being granted, however, the plenitude surveyed by the Husserlian transcendental ego is replaced by a somewhat more bereft landscape in Heidegger, who took many opportunities explicitly to distance himself from phenomenology as embodied in the thought of his former teacher (xiv).2 For the Heidegger of “What is Metaphysics?” human beings hover in a state of anxiety confronted by a situation within which beings – qua beings – slide from themselves, thus remarking the loss of their very ‘being-ness’. It is not, however, Heidegger writes, as though “you” or “I” feel ill at ease; rather, it is this way for some “one”. In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Dasein is all that is still there. (Heidegger 1993, 101) The occurrence of anxiety, and its coextensive relation with the nothing, have the consequence for Heidegger that, in lifting the human

being out of the confines of its facticity we “complete the transformation of man into his Da-sein” (102). In its emphasis on the appearance of the phenomenon, phenomenology is in the opinion of Derrida essentially a treatise on light, abetted by the inevitable domination of the concept of form upon which such a “photology” is founded (Derrida 2001, 31). 3 Hence, for Merleau-Ponty language is subject to a universal anonymous visibility. Speech is, in the words of the unfinished book Le Visible et l’invisible, a “gaze of the mind” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 154, italics added), while “the whole landscape ... is […] but a variant of speech before our eyes” (155). As Derrida shows, phenomenology entails “a submission of sense to sight, of sense to the sense-of-vision, since sense in general is in the very concept of every phenomenological field” (Derrida 1982, 158). Despite his deep indebtedness to the philosophy of Heidegger, Blanchot’s thought has to be understood partly in terms of its critique of a cornerstone of phenomenology (hermeneutic and otherwise), a critique which can be encapsulated in one phrase, appended to an essay in L’Entretein infini (1969): “Parler ce n’est pas voir.” There, against the grain of phenomenology, Blanchot sets up “speech” as the defiant locus of a resistance towards the privileging of light in the specific context of the Western tradition.4 To grant pre-eminence to speaking at least serves to reverse the prejudice in question: Speaking [in Blanchot’s words] frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence. [In the tradition] one must think according to the measure of the eye. (Blanchot 1993, 27) Although Blanchot’s distinction remains contentious in its presumption of receptive passivity on the part of seeing, whereas speaking is figured as active, the fundamental assertion that “to speak is not to see” has been a rich resource for both Deleuze and Foucault.

324

Foucault’s fold Insofar as the question of the interrelationship of seeing and saying specifically is concerned, Martin Jay has argued that, considered as a whole, all four of Foucault’s books of the so-called archaeological period – Les Mots et les choses, La Naissance de la Clinique, Raymond Roussel, and L’Archéologie du savoir – present an “unsublatable dialectic” in which phenomenology’s “imbrication of the eye in the flesh of the world” is sharply contested (Jay 1994, 398). 5 However, the Foucaultian “archive” has two distinct modalities: it is both audio and visual (Deleuze 1995, 97). When confronted by a given historical formation, the archaeological task is to distinguish two regimes – the systems of language and of light, respectively – which pertain to the formation in question. Having been thus isolated the subsequent task is to “split (“fendre”) the words and things operating within their respective regimes. From these splits will emerge the énoncés and visibilities with which the archaeologist is concerned, those at once made possible, and caused to mutate, by the archive in question: “isolating the occurrence of the statement-event is the manner in which one avoids the synthetic operations which must be set aside” (Foucault 1989, 29). However, this aspect of Foucault’s analysis is historically specific. In his analysis of Las Meninas, for example, or of Rabelais, the work becomes an index of an epistemic rupture. In Las Meninas Foucault finds that scintillating in the crevice caused by the painting’s “faultline” is to be found a “visibility” which ruptures the continuity of the projective geometry of the Cartesian gaze. Hence Las Meninas functions in the opening pages of Les Mots et les choses as a diagnostic tool to facilitate the articulation of the collapse of the episteme associated with the classical age, by prying loose “the limits of practical knowledge that find expression equally in aesthetic practice and in institutional foundations of that practice” (Rodowick 2001, 58). Its examination of the particular manner in which the age in question handled the relation between seeing and saying is primarily connected to this larger project. However, in the more localised and discrete analysis of Magritte’s well-known works featuring the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe (La Trahison des images from 1929 and Les deux mystères from 1966), for Foucault the relationship between the regimes of language and light comes to rest in a context no longer determined primarily by the question of epistemic rupture in a strictly 325

historical context. Here, to a certain degree, the handling of the relationship between seeing and saying, forms – as far as our purposes are concerned – a bridge between specific diagnostics in a historical context (Les Mots et les choses) and a way of reading Worstward Ho as a contribution to a reflection on that relation detached from the specific question of epistemic rupture.6 In his condensing of the visible and the linguistic, Roussel would succeed in creating according to Foucault’s later study the “sun of language”. Roussel’s twofold fictional world consisted of, on the one hand, the qualities of the visible which he summarised as metamorphosis, and, on the other, qualities of the linguistic which can be summed up in the term labyrinth. In the words of Simon During: in Roussel’s work, the visible (metamorphosis) and the linguistic (the labyrinth) fall away from one another in their coming together. The sun, source of light, cannot be looked at; language, source of sense, can’t be made sense of. (During 1992, 78-9) What the experiments of Roussel furnish is a visibility outside the gaze; this visibility is not defined by sight but is rather, in Deleuze’s Foucaultian formulation, a complex of “multisensorial” impressions equally defined by hearing and touch (Deleuze 1988, 59) and which is co-extensive with the “blindness” of that hearing or touch (Baross 2000, 30). In short “the unique limit that separates each one [language and sight] is also the common limit that links one to the other, a limit with two irregular faces, a blind word and a mute vision” (Deleuze 1988, 65). In Roussel we locate the “visually opaque dimension of language itself” (Jay 1993, 399). Never in a full light at the same time can being and representation be staged: there will always be a (residual) void or an absence. Thus for Foucault “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (Foucault 1970, 25).7 That operation summarised as the folding of “one over the other (the space where one speaks and the space where one looks) as though they were equivalents” becomes no longer valid, a failure of the sort famously remarked upon by Beckett in Watt via the story of the breakdown of a correlation of being and representation exemplified in the story of Mr Knott’s (non-) pots (Beckett 1976, 78). 326

“Blind word, mute vision”: seeing and saying in Worstward Ho At a certain level Worstward Ho exemplifies an anxiety towards what Steven Connor has called “economies of nothing” (Connor 1992, 85) of Heideggerian dimensions, while its encounters with that nothing might be said to recall the operation essential, in the thought of Heidegger, to the transformation of man into his Dasein. In addition, the “on” of Wortsward Ho is of course, as well as a state of being switched on, also, via the Greek, Being itself (notwithstanding the preposition’s “grim” palindromic relation with “no” [Connor 1992, 83]).8 Finally, as if to reinforce this Heideggerian template, if nothing is the slipping away of the whole, Beckett’s text seems to allow us to observe this fleeing scenery, and what is more to offer us snapshots of its disappearance, in a manner captured in the Heideggerian formulation: “saying lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish” (Heidegger 1993, 415).9 Expanding from Heidegger to the phenomenological tradition more generally, the much commented upon notion of ‘onwardness’ (see Krance 1990) in Beckett’s text for example might easily be read as the inscription of the equivalent of intentionality (every loving is a loving of something) as understood by Husserl, or as later reconfigured by Merleau-Ponty in his focus on Husserl’s understanding of operative intentionality conceived simply as : “Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xviii). The ‘ward’ of ‘Worstward’ might then suggest ‘word’ on the one hand and orientation (or directedness towards) on the other, in short the ‘aboutness’ identified as intrinsic to the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000, 20). Let us now test the degree to which Worstward Ho allows this template to be placed upon it. The text opens in the domain of what Foucault calls l’énonçable (articulable) with the words: On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nowhow on. Said nohow on. (Beckett 1983, 7) Once it has been announced that something may be underway and/or exist, the prose stammers and staggers over the elements of conjured spaces, bodies and locations – all hypothetically posited under the 327

demands of what would appear to be an imperative. Each of the oscillations or vibrations which will in due course be felt between saying and seeing comes under the inaugural injunction: “Say.” Between the first instances respectively of the verbs to say (paragraph 1) and to see (paragraph 12) the only notable activity is concentrated in “it stands” (paragraph 6) – an aspirant act of self-assembly presided over by a quasi-Heideggerian Sorge: “With care never worse failed” (9, paragraph 7).10 The dim light (paragraph 8) that emerges following the recapitulation to a programme of failure, recalls in part the omnipresent gleam suffusing the interior of the cylinder of The Lost Ones. There are, likewise, echoes in this paragraph of a Plotinian, or more generally neoplatonic, conception of light and illumination. However, while it is feasible to associate the ‘fallen’ body with a specular narcissism, with the body conceived of as the tarnished reflection of a Plotinian Intellect/One, it seems to be going too far to claim, with Amiran, that Worstward Ho itself is the journey identified by Plotinus of the (fallen) emanated being(s) towards the One (Amiran 1993).11 Nonetheless, an attempt at standing is made again without avail, the effort culminating in the emergency of “groan”, and then “pain”. It would, however, be to neglect something fundamental to Worstward Ho to fail to notice that before the next instance of the word “say” we read “see” as in the sequence: “Try see. Try say. How first it lay” (10, paragraph 9). First, then, there has been a flicker of the visible with “dim light”, followed now by a fully-fledged act of sight, or at least injunction to see, or to try to see (paragraph 9). The status of the “Another” who is announced in the subsequent paragraph (paragraph 10) is, not surprisingly, unclear. It is introduced in a sequence that follows the pattern of the opening sentence of the text, with the word ‘another’ now taking the place once occupied by “on” or on. Quite abruptly, however, here we have what is – at least for an instant – quite a humanoid, quite substantially more than a mere bag of hypothetical bones. Suddenly everything – head, hands, and eyes – seems possible: an entire evolutionary unfolding promised in the phrase: “Seat of all. Germ of all” (10). The text is swift, however, to dispel the solace of teleology before revivifying it equally abruptly : “No future in this. Alas yes” (10). Despite the setback, the visible is at last vying for position with the articulable: “It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands. In 328

the dim light source unknown” (10, paragraph 12). In the void which is helpfully, if impossibly, illuminated – in the void equivalent to light – the apparition stands. But it stands “at last” only when ‘to say’ and ‘to see’ coalesce. Matters then have – albeit minimally (meremost minimally?) – progressed. With a said and a seen confounded, melded “at last”, we now meet for the first time “That shade” (11, paragraph 13). The text is at this point occupying a zone comparable to that in which the narrator of the Recherche of Marcel Proust finds himself, whose magic lantern enables him to be pulled up out of le néant (Proust 1954, 12). Indeed, if the magic lantern in the Recherche facilitates “le souvenir – non encore du lieu où j’étais, mais de quelquesuns de ceux que j’avais habités et où j’aurais pu être” (12), then the equivalent apparatus in Worstward Ho can also be quite potent in its summonsing. A figure identified as “The first” is clothed with hat and the remains of a black greatcoat. The two (who have the good fortune to both be robed in full-length rather than cut-off greatcoats), who augur future sundering by means of the archaic word “twain”, will eventually not only diverge (equal plod maintained as a side-effect of erstwhile union), but also be reduced to one ambulant headless, legless trunk (albeit still capable of persevering with a plod equaled by its other half, so to speak). Appending numbers to these figures, images or shades, yields 1, the back turned shade, 2, the man and child and 3, the skull. The text busies itself by switching back and forth amongst these as if they were so many images activated by a slide-projector. There is, however, momentary respite from the projectionist frenzy, as the “seat and germ of all”, in a manner more promising as far as ontological stability is concerned than anything else encountered in the text up until this point, becomes “Scene and seer of all”. Both set and camera are in place. It is almost time to shout “Action!” (or to prod something into life in the manner of Act Without Words II). However ‘to act’ is not one of the verbs available to the text. To stare, to say, to see, to secrete, to ooze: these are available, and it is indeed to this last that the second half of Worstward Ho will soon turn.12 What it is here proposed can be called the second half (that is, after paragraph 47) opens with a very insistent positing of “Stare” in place of the corresponding verb (“Say”) in the first paragraph in section one. Instead of a “say” undercut by the passive modulation “be 329

said” (as in the first paragraph of the first half), section two gives in sequence: “Stare on. Say on. Be on” (paragraph 48). Such a sequence, with a verb of vision, the imperative and/or infinitive of the verb ‘(to) say’ synthesized into the imperative/infinite ‘(to) be’ might confirm that Worstward Ho will, finally, conjure Dasein. Indeed it could bear out Carla Locatelli’s insistence on the outlines of what she calls Worstward Ho’s “phenomenological hermeneutics of experience” (Locatelli 1990, 264), wherein a supposed “ineliminable residuum of a deconstructed but irrecoverable representation” (263) is abetted by the central organising principle of the text, in the guise of its quasiphenomenological cipher and touchstone: the word somehow, or as Locatelli glosses it, the intentionality of thought (260). In contrast to Locatelli, however, our consideration here of the disjunction of seeing and saying (things and words, in the distinction of Foucault’s book of 1966) in Worstward Ho does not support the claim either that there is a sublation and eclipse of one regime by the other, nor does it uphold the more tentative but equally problematical claim that there obtains, at the very least, a consonant liaison between them that is tantamount to the birth of intentionality. The lesson of Foucault as passed on to us by Deleuze is that intentionality must collapse in the space that opens up between two regimes that are effectively monadic in their maintenance of a relation of non-relation (Deleuze 1988, 109). Hence, while according to the Foucaultian principle of the fêlure words are split to allow the secretion of l’énoncé, and things are riven to permit the scintillation of the visible, that is not the whole story. Foucault’s study of Roussel had already shown how l’énoncé does not only “ooze” out of the split in words, and the visibility13 does not only scintillate from within the breach in things. Rather, there is an underground criss-crossing, a transversal interanimation of each regime which cannot be resolved into a consonant relation. In Worstward Ho words and things operate as forces upon oneanother, bending each other, countermanding each other. A fault divides visible form from the form of what can be uttered, and they are thus held in irreducible relation (that is to say, non-relation). While it is quite right to point out that in the phrase “nohow on” Beckett gestures towards the problem of knowledge (‘knowhow’) – epistemology being indebted to the metaphor of light we have been discussing here – this is a transitional manoeuvre. At a key point in his study of Fou330

cault Deleuze reproaches phenomenology for its dream of a “savage” experience – most famously characterised by Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, but equally contained in Merleau-Ponty’s primordial flesh (Deleuze 1988, 112). Beyond epistemology, Beckett’s archive takes us to a stage where as forces, words and things act upon oneanother strategically. If “nohow” – the coinage which appears in Worstward Ho and which now acts as a title for the ‘late trilogy’ – gives on, as most commentators agree, to the word ‘knowhow’ and hence the problem of knowledge or epistemology, then the lesson is clear. Because there is a dislocation or breach between seeing and saying, and a “vastness” which maintains them “apart” in a relation of non-relation, then Beckett’s text accords with the judgement Deleuze discerns in Foucault: that “you can’t solve the problem of knowledge ... by invoking a correspondence or conformity of terms” (Deleuze 1995, 96). Which is precisely why that word ‘knowhow’ is occluded in a partial negation; the residual “_no_how” which emerges via a process of puncturing – a dehiscence as announced in the German letter of 1937 – exposes the word to an “outside”. Said (i.e. verbalized) “nohow on” (which includes ‘knowhow’) is not the same as seen “nohow on” (which excludes it). Yet there remains a transversal threading together of the two regimes, but in what Deleuze calls “another dimension”. This is the dimension of the “outside”, an outside that is “further from us than any external worlds, and thereby closer than any inner world” (Deleuze 1995, 97). It is the dimension where “one speaks” (as in Blanchot’s on) or in Beckett’s terms (straddling English and French) where ‘on’ speaks. Appropriating Deleuze’s own formulation apropos Foucault’s disagreement with phenomenology, addressed via his celebration of the procedures of Roussel, what Worstward Ho illustrates is that: rather than any agreement or homology (any consonance), you get an endless struggle between what we see and what we say, brief clutchings, tussles, captures, because we never say what we see and never see what we say. The visible bursts out between two propositions, and an utterance bursts out between two things. Intentionality gives way to a whole theatre, an endless interplay between the visible and the utterable. Each breaks open the other. Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology is there, unannounced, in Raymond Roussel. 331

(Deleuze 1995, 108) Worstward Ho is, as we have begun to see, a contribution to a ‘nonphilosophical’ exploration of a problem, via sensations of concepts, which as concepts proper lie at the core of phenomenology: what it is to appear.14 The language of apparition, revealing and glimpsing as well as of occlusion, dimming and shading is pervasive. Likewise its landscape is populated by – and to some degree equivalent to – shades, blurred objects or images. The “narrow field” coextensive with this landscape is said to be “rife with shades”. Words in the text are said to ooze from a “soft of mind”. Resonant or not of the expression “soft in the head”, it is undeniable that a rationalist conviction that reason is in any fashion sovereign with respect to the contents, operations or products of this mind, is severely compromised in what Worstward Ho proposes. While the jettisoned (“shed”) words ooze in a fluid continuum and are notable for the extent to which they are never quite got rid of, the outward-directed gaze is itself subject to never quite being total or able to capture: “Stare by words dimmed” degrades so that it becomes “dim dimmed”. Accumulations of discrete events of dimming remind us that in general here accumulations are ambiguous: do they have the effect of subtraction, proliferation, reduction, and purging – all of which processes allow a progressive or regressive (as Locatelli argues) linearity to be felt by the reader? For Locatelli this “powerful apotheosis of subtraction” is “an epistemological instrument” (Locatelli 1990, 225); at the very least, as Connor remarks, the frequent redundancy of negation “creates a tiny surplus, the first smear of what will build into an Augean deposit of negative affirmations” (Connor 1992, 84). The stare is said to be dimmed by words. However while freshly undimmed several lines later, having fallen into that state of dimness, it is due to commerce with words that vision is obscured, or is rendered inefficient – in Foucaultian terms the regime of light is hampered by the domain of language. Paragraph 81 performs a reverse debilitation, this time of vision by words: “Back unsay shades can go”: the apparitions – the shades, themselves possibly already owing their shadiness to their necessary commerce with words (with these words, the worst or “worse words” – paragraph 83, 41) – are unsaid by the text’s winding back. 332

It seems that while words can go (leaving blanks), shades cannot go; they can only fade or blur. When words are gone and blanks remain then the seen is unsaid, and there is, moreover, no ooze (associated with words as secretions from the “soft of mind”) to speak of. Ooze can only be equivalent to “seen”, the text reports, when it is seen with “ooze”, which would mean when it is seen with words (“with” here could mean “in the company” of or “by”), but ooze is not equivalent to words; rather, ooze is the modality of words, their manner of being projected, expelled or shed. Hence to be seen with ooze would be a) to be seen alongside the process of oozing, or, b) to be seen in conjunction with the outcome of oozing (words), or c) to be seen by ooze, or by the process of oozing – a process which although associated by the text with words need not be solely associated with words. But when the seen is undimmed – that is, not in the presence of, or not caused to appear by way of, words – there is no ooze. To be seen is also possibly posited here as equivalent to “nohow on”. This would mean that when “nohow” is ‘switched on’, i.e. when the occluded problem of knowledge (the first of the three essential Kantian questions – “What can I know?” – and its repetition and reduction in Beckett) is ‘on’ as opposed to ‘off’ the terrain of enquiry, it is in the service of the privileging of light identified by Blanchot (Blanchot 1993), or of the gaze as identified by Foucault (Foucault 1976, 166). An undimmed seen – arrived at by the demotion of words – would be one wherein ooze (and the processual, fluid nature of that medium) itself was deleted or “gone”. If the ooze is arrested by the need to have an undimmed seen, that, however, does not remove entirely from the “scene” – itself a highly resonant word – the “soft” which has been its point of origin, or, at least, prolongation (“seat of all scene of all”). Worsened words, or the better-worsened words will produce blanks. The text gets to work on the images (paragraph 83), or on how the images are said in words, so that when it states “Back worse worsen twain” it means that the way in which whatever is said is said (whatever it is reported to be said) must be worse said. The semiotic parasitism or entropy finds an echo at another level in the shape of a newly introduced verb: to prey. What is attempting to prolong itself here? Is something trying to stay on, or be off? Words perhaps, those which prey upon each other (the already attempted words eaten by the newly worse said versions of or re333

placements for those not-ill-enough said words) in order to worsen themselves. The preying itself cannot be arrested (“No stilling preying”). Why, however, is it a case of “faintly preying” (my emphasis) – in other words why this sense of a preying that is blurred or indistinct? Perhaps it is because the battle of regimes is still at work – dimming being the effect of words, or of ooze of words, upon the seen. Saying – or ill-saying – is the only way to worsen the said seen, and thereby to “be gone”. With the project gathering a momentum that is palpable, the gnawing, the preying, the worsening, in short the series of operations which are either cumulative or dissipative, eventually yields three pinholes separated by “vasts” at the bounds of a void which is also boundless – at impossible locations, unlocatable, unseeable and unsayable loci. The way to attain the unsayable and the unseeable is to refine the ooze such that it lacks any vestiges of an intentionality: agency, location, summonsing up, conjuring – all of these are such vestiges. If this is a reduction then it has nothing of Husserl’s reduction: a hyle that cannot be inventoried (an inventory is based on attribution, ascription, and being accounted for in terms of value and location). If the soft is in some ways close to Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”, then it is a flesh subject to the workings of forces across it, depriving it of its aspirations to form. Finally, the “thenceless, thitherless there” of the impossible site of the three pinholes, if it has an affinity with Heidegger’s Dasein, then it is without the comforts of his Lichtung.15 This is the “Outside”; this is the other dimension, because the outside is where the threads between the regime of language and the regime of light are located: in this narrow field, the field towards which Beckett’s work is always to some extent moving, there is still an ooze, an oozed said (an énoncé), still a shaded seen (a visibility). The final words of the text, then, “Said nohow on” are an oozed said, not a said said. Thus, in the form of words which pierce themselves and visions confronted by their own blind-spots – in short in ill saying and ill seeing – in a work of prose directed not towards a “somehow” (meaning ascription, retrieval of the deconstructed subject or object) but implicated in a debilitating spiral of worstwardness, both saying and seeing are exposed to their constitutive outside: “ooze” (or matter not rendered into hyletic data). The principal contention of this essay, then, has been that the uneasy alliance of seeing and saying is sub334

jected in Worstward Ho to a thoroughgoing and meticulous interrogation. What results has suggested to some the viability of a hermeneutical-phenomenological reading of Beckett. If it is true, as Garner comments in respect of Thomas Trezise’s broadside against phenomenology in his book of 1991, that the study is a “polemical construction, narrowly derived from a single reading of historically limited texts [essentially Husserl]” (Garner 1994, 23), it is hoped that this essay has gone some way towards presenting the case that, insofar as it insists on thinking under the guaranty of light or the threat of its absence, a broader phenomenological tradition, encompassing Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, finds itself scarcely better off in Beckett’s Worstward Ho. Notes 1.

The present essay is based on a paper first delivered to a conference held in Sydney in January 2003 to mark the 50th anniversary of the first performance of En attendant Godot. 2003 was also the 50th anniversary of the publication of two seminal and celebrated works of Beckett criticism by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot, 1959) as well as of Gilles Deleuze’s first book, Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume, in which Deleuze can be seen to adopt a critical position on phenomenology, partly enabled through an attention to Hume’s empiricism as oppositional to “all forms of transcendental philosophy” (Boundas 1991, 2). Edith Kern adds her voice to the Beckett-Heidegger question in 1962. Dasein has an enduring appeal for Beckett scholarship. See Garner (1994, 6).

2.

For a detailed study of the complex interplay of indebtedness and dismissiveness as these inform Heidegger’s statements overt and covert on Husserl see Overgaard 2003.

3.

See also Lingis, in Dillon ed (1991, 114).

4.

“Parler” in Blanchot”s idiom is quite distinct from the sense in which Derrida employs the term, not least in the context of the latter’s critique of phonocentrism.

335

5.

While there is an indebtedness in Deleuze's Logique du sens to one aspect of Husserl, this in no way counteracts the strong line against phenomenology in Deleuze's work. Certainly it does not give the phenomenologist sufficient grounds – recently claimed by Dermot Moran (2000) – to assert that the indebtedness amounts to an inadvertent declaration of assent, and thereby honorary membership.

6.

For a reading of Beckett and Magritte see Bryden and Redfern 1999.

7.

On this point see also Lorraine (1999, 193). On the Foucaultian formula as it pertains to other works by Beckett see also Clément (1994, 71-74: 71).

8.

For Krance “On is the one right wrong word” (132). See Krance 1990 in Butler and Davis 1990.

9.

Beckett”s letter to Kennedy of 1967 on the theme of “nothing” is in Disjecta (Beckett 1984, 113).

10.

See Butler 1984 for a reading of Beckett in terms of Sorge (2933).

11.

See Dowd 2000 for an application of this distinction to The Lost Ones. It is beyond the scope of the present essay to do other than suggest that the concept of Beon – the Anglo Saxon term used to translate Heidegger’s archaic spelling of Seyn (for the modern Sein) – in the short text “The Pathway” (Der Feldweg, 1949) describes a journey out of the fallen state (without the Christian associations, the fall in Heidegger is into “technicity”). See Richardson (1963, 559-561) for an account of the place of Beon in “The Pathway”.

12.

For Connor “secrete” is the verb favoured to describe articulation in the second half (Connor 1992, 88). It might be argued, however, that a related verb “to ooze” is more dominant, if only because articulation proper is becoming lost in a pervasive slippage (see Beckett 1984, 128).

13.

“Visibilities are not forms of objects, but forms of luminosity” (Deleuze 1988, 52); “Visions or sounds: how can they be distin-

336

guished…they are said to be ill seen ill said whenever words pierce themselves and turn against themselves so as to reveal their outside” (Deleuze 1998, 173). 14.

Colombat argues that literary critics deal with “sensations of concepts” whereas “the philosopher deals instead with the concepts of sensation that can be derived from a writer”s work” (Colombat 1997, 591). See also Uhlmann 1999.

15.

On the distinction between the Open and the Outside see Deleuze 1988, 108-113.

Works Cited Amiran, Eyal, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993). Baross, Zsuzsa, “Deleuze and Derrida, by way of Blanchot: an interview,” Angelaki 5: 2 (2000). Beckett, Samuel, Collected Poems in English and French (New York and London: Grove P and Calder, 1977). –, Worstward Ho (London, Calder, 1993). –, Disjecta, Ruby Cohn, ed., Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (New York: Grove Press, 1984). Blanchot, Maurice, Le Livre à venir (Paris, Gallimard, 1959). –, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1993). Boundas, Constantin V., “Translator’s Introduction,” in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. and introduction Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 1-19. Bryden, Mary and Redfern, Walter, “Pipedreams: Beckett and Magritte,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4.3 (1999), 1716. Butler, Lance St. John, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable (London: Macmillan, 1984). Clément, Bruno, L’Œuvre sans qualités – rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1994). Colombat, André Pierre, “Deleuze and the Three Powers of Literature and Philosophy: To Demystify, to Experiment, to Create,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.3 (1997), 579-97. Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988).

337

–, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia U P, 1990). –, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam (London: Athlone, 1986). –, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). –, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin ( New York: Columbia UP, 1995). –, “The Exhausted,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans Daniel Smith and Michael Greco, (London: Verso, 1998). Derrida, Jacques, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead and Chicago: Harvester Wheatsheaf and U of Chicago P, 1982). –, “Force and Signification,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Dowd, Garin, “Figuring Zero in The Lost Ones,” in SBT/A 9, Beckett and Religion /Aesthetics /Politics, Beckett et la Religion /L’Esthétique /La politique, Marius Buning et al eds. (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 67-80. During, Simon, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970). –, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1976). –, This is not a pipe, trans James Harkness (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981). –, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. C. Ruas (London: Athlone, 1987). –, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, (London: Routledge, 1989) Garner, B. Stanton Jr., “Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body,” in Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1994) Heidegger, Martin, “What is Metaphysics” (1929), in Heidegger: Basic Writings. From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking, David Farrell Krell ed., revised and expanded edition (London: Routledge, 1993), 93-110. – , (1993a). “The Way to Language” (1959), in Heidegger 1993, 397-426. Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: California UP, 1994).

338

Kern, Edith, “Beckett’s Knight of Infinite Resignation,” Yale French Studies 29, Spring/Summer (1962), 49-56. Krance, Charles,“Worstward Ho and On-words: Writing to(wards) the Point,” in Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis, eds., Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 124-140. Lingis, Alfonso, “Imperatives,” in M. C. Dillon ed., Merleau-Ponty Vivant (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). Locatelli, Carla, Unwording the Word: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990). Lorraine, Tamsin, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). –, “The Intertwining – The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969). Moran, Dermot, Introduction to Phenomenology (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Murphy, Timothy S., “Only Intensities Subsist: Samuel Beckett’s Nohow On,” in Buchanan and Marks eds., Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 229-250. Overgaard, Søren, “Heidegger’s Early Critique of Husserl,” in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11.2 (2003), 157-175. Robbe-Grillet, Alain, “Samuel Beckett or Pres-ence on Stage” in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1965). Proust, Marcel, Du côté de chez Swann, A la recherche du temps perdu 1 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1954). Trezise, Thomas, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).

339

“A FRAGMENT OF A VITAGRAPH”: Hiding and Revealing in Beckett, Geulincx, and Descartes Anthony Uhlmann

The exact nature of the relationship between a work of literature and the life of the writer who creates that work is, evidently, impossible to perfectly describe. It does not follow, however, that the problem is therefore without interest; on the contrary, attempting to trace some elements of its outline remains an endeavour of some importance. This essay considers how notions of occlusion, or hiding and revealing at once, are important to our understanding of Beckett’s use of the seventeenth century philosophers Descartes and Geulincx.

The problem of the nature of the relationship between the writing subject and what is written was clearly an important one in the post World War Two France in which Beckett wrote his best-known works. In order to begin, it is worth noting how Michel Foucault’s comments on this question, in “What is an Author” and elsewhere, are often misinterpreted. Foucault further focused on what is at stake with this problem in an interview in 1983: . . . someone that is a writer doesn’t simply create his work in his books, in what he publishes . . . in the end it’s himself writing his books. And it’s this relation of he to his books, of his life to his books, which is the central point, the seat of his activity and his work. . . . The work is more than the work: the writing subject is part of the work. (1985, 104). The problem does not require the obliteration of the question of the relationship between the writing and the writing subject, then; on the contrary it is the complexity of this relation which is, precisely, the problem, and which therefore requires ongoing examination. No doubt readers will be jarred by the transitions between ‘works’ and ‘lives’

which will follow throughout this essay, but the shifts are not accidental and the paradox of this interrelation, which many critics have noted as being important to our understanding of Beckett, is one of the problems I would like to outline in this article. 1. Occlusion In a number of intellectual traditions, the idea of ‘the truth’ has been linked with revealing what is hidden. There is a dual process involved with such revelation. The truth is at once seen or shown, but it is also hidden or secret. Two important images that have been linked with the process of discovering the truth which is hidden are that of illumination and that of inspiration (the voice of the god, muse, or some other authority which breathes into and through a speaker). Though I only have space to discuss the former here, both are important to Beckett’s works. Illumination is linked with shadows and obscurity as well as with clarity, visibility, distinctness, to secret knowledge systems such as the occult, or to revealed knowledge systems such as the revealed truth offered to the prophets of religions, or to the truths revealed by nature through science (the image of enlightenment indicates processes of illumination). In the history of art, the interrelation of light and dark is tied to understandings of the chiaroscuro, or, in French, the clair-obscur which also indicates ‘twilight’, a process through which forms are revealed through the gradations of light and shadow (shades of grey). In considering this interaction of light and dark and ideas of the truth one calls to mind Manicheanism, which argued for the complete separation of light (the truth, the good) and dark (the false, evil). Students of Beckett will recognise many images and strategies that recur in Beckett’s works in this list. Drawing on discussions with Beckett and detailed textual scholarship over a number of years James Knowlson has written convincingly of the importance of Manichean imagery in Krapp’s Last Tape. The colour that is synonymous with Beckett’s late works in particular is ‘grey’. We see extensive interplay between darkness and light in most of Beckett’s plays after Krapp. Play, of course makes use of the light as a means of interrogation (a relentless probing after the truth) and the protagonists revert to silence when they return to obscurity. In Come and Go, Footfalls, … but the clouds… Rockaby and What Where protagonists move from light to 342

shadow and back. In other plays, such as Not I, That Time, A Piece of Monologue, Ohio Impromptu and Nacht und Träume there is a stark contrast between the small extremely bright circle of light which the protagonist (or part of the protagonist) occupies and the density of a surrounding darkness. The interplay between ‘the truth’ or rather, in Beckett, what might be known, and the depths of surrounding ignorance, is certainly not all that is at stake in the stark contrasts between light and dark in these works, but it is clearly an extremely important aspect of it. Many of these works involve some form of interrogation, and this process turns remorselessly about what can be known. In The Unnamable, the narrator asks: . . . and what is one to believe, that is not the point, to believe this or that, the point is to guess right, nothing more, they say, If it’s not white it’s very likely black, it must be admitted the method lacks subtlety, in view of the intermediate shades all equally worthy of a chance. . . . (Beckett, 1979, 344) 2. Arnold Geulincx Arnold Geulincx (1624-1699), while remaining obscure in and of his own right, is extremely well known in the field of Beckett studies. Indeed, mention of ‘Geulincx’ along with the citation of his key moral premise, ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ (‘where one can do nothing one should want nothing’) has become a critical commonplace in Beckett studies. Given this, and the challenge to critics Beckett details in this letter to Sighle Kennedy where he specifically mentions Geulincx (1983, 113), it is perhaps surprising that so little by way of sustained study has yet been undertaken 1. Such an absence in the field is less surprising when one considers the difficulty of accessing Geulincx’s works which Beckett read in Latin and which until very recently have not been available in English2. In a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 1936 (Knowlson, 219) Beckett wonders whether his interest in Geulincx might in part stem from Geulincx’s very obscurity, but he dismisses this idea, as he feels that there is a genuine chord struck between his own ideas and those of Geulincx. 343

I have been reading Geulincx in T.C.D., without knowing why exactly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is a rationalisation and my instinct is right and the work worth doing, because of its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remaining alive. (Knowlson, 219) Geulincx, of course, did not set out to be obscure. At the time he wrote Latin was a ‘universal’ language, which offered a greater, rather than a more restricted, potential audience. He also translated his own work into the Dutch vernacular. Unlike his Dutch contemporary Spinoza, who did not publish his Ethics in his own lifetime for fear of reprisals from the religious, political, and intellectual establishments (see Nadler), Geulincx published the greater part of his Ethics and continued to openly teach his controversial doctrine despite apparently strong opposition. It was quite likely to have been such opposition, manifested in powerful academic enemies, which led, directly or indirectly, to Geulincx being stripped of his professorial position at the University of Louvain in Catholic Flanders in 1658. The University process, which led to this expulsion, was held in camera and the reasons for his expulsion remain unknown but are likely to have been linked to his adherence to Cartesian philosophy at a time when this was considered impious by the Aristotelians who dominated the academy. He removed to Protestant Holland where he began to teach in a lowly position and in virtual poverty at the University of Leiden. Told that he could teach only Aristotle and under the cover of doing so, he in fact continued to teach his own version of Cartesianism (See Land, Terrallion, 216-221). He seems not to have shirked such conflict, then (indeed, accepting the trials of fortune with indifference as things outside one’s power is a principle of his Ethics). His motto was ‘serio et candide’, or ‘with seriousness and candour’ which suggests openness and expressing oneself without reservation notwithstanding the catastrophic potentials of this when confronting powerful opponents. One can contrast this with the more politically pragmatic practices of Spinoza (whose motto, which was also something he practiced in avoiding the sorts of conflicts which overtook Geulincx, was engraved on the underside of his signet ring: ‘caute’ or ‘be cautious’, Rabouin, 21) and 344

Descartes, whose motto, which was also something he practiced was ‘bene vixit, bene qui latuit’ or ‘he lives well who is well hidden’ (Gaukroger, 16). Interestingly Beckett provided the unnamable with a Latin motto in similar form: ‘De nobis ipsis silemus’ (58) or, ‘we can say nothing about ourselves’. 3. Whoroscope Beckett’s first separate publication was the poem Whoroscope, which was written for a contest for poems written on the theme of Time offered by The Hours Press in Paris in 1930 (Knowlson, 111-112). What interests me most about this poem is how it is concerned both with the nature of the description of a life (here the life of René Descartes) and with kinds of obscurity. Knowlson has shown how the judges, Nancy Cunard and Richard Aldington, were impressed both by the poem’s apparent erudition and its obscurity (Knowlson, 112). Evidently, then, the idea that obscurity in and of itself could be considered a virtue in a poem was a view shared in some measure by an intellectual community with certain aesthetic assumptions in common. That is, an aesthetic community to which, in some sense, Beckett might be said to have belonged or, given the nascent stage of his development as a writer, aspired to belong. So too, it is difficult to agree with Knowlson’s view that the footnotes to Whoroscope (which were supplied at the suggestion of the editors, Doherty, 28) are meant to parody Eliot’s notes to The Wasteland. Knowlson’s point largely turns on the idea that the notes offer inadequate information (as if, meant ‘seriously’, they would be more fulsome); yet this certainly fails to distance them from Eliot’s notes which are equally inadequate and equally able to be read as parodic. Rather, it is hard not to see in Beckett’s gesture a measure of conformity or solidarity with one of the key representatives of the style of the aesthetic community to which he belonged or wished to belong (and Knowlson also informs us that Beckett’s closest friend, Thomas MacGreevy, was working on a book on T. S. Eliot at this time, Knowlson, 113). Yet, this relationship with an aesthetic milieu does not fully explain Beckett’s hand in the critical reception of this poem. Lawrence Harvey, who offers what remains one of the most extensive treatments of Whoroscope cites Beckett’s main source as Adrien Baillet’s 1691 biography of Descartes, La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes and this 345

claim has been repeated by numerous critics. Anyone who has visited the Dartmouth archives and seen how the first draft of Harvey’s book had been severely edited by Beckett after Harvey had sent it to him to vet (numerous passages are marked through by Beckett with comments such as ‘I told you this in confidence. Delete.’) will recognise that Harvey’s critical methodology relied heavily on answers given by Beckett himself to questions Harvey posed about Beckett’s own experience and its relation to the themes and images in his poems. It is likely, then, that it was Beckett himself who pointed Harvey towards Baillet. So too, it is apparent that Beckett was keen that much biographical material remained obscure. Critics had believed, then, that most of the details used in Whoroscope had been taken from Baillet, an old and difficult to come by source. A more recent article by Francis Doherty, however, has shown how Beckett also used a short biography written by an Irishman, J.P. Mahaffy, which was written at the turn of the century, and which, at least at the time of composition of Beckett’s poem, would have been a far more easily obtained and digested source. This in turn begs the question as to why one source might be revealed to critics and another obscured, and while it is necessarily impossible to answer such a question, one might at least guess that the status and availability of sources had at least something to do with it. If Beckett’s interest in remaining obscure is readily apparent, it is worth noting that Descartes shared this interest in both hiding and revealing. Both in the poem’s title and in the notes provided with the poem Beckett points us towards what is perhaps the most famous story concerning Descartes’ desire to hide: his refusal to give out his date of birth for fear of others casting his horoscope. Indeed, the pun, ‘whoroscope’ suggests that the poem itself is in some sense violating the propriety of Descartes’ nativity and the philosopher’s wishes as to what might be done with it, in some sense procuring fast and loose intercourse between the philosopher’s life, the poet’s muse (or those themes which preoccupy her) and the reader’s tendency to voyeurism. So too, Descartes’ fear of horoscopes, and his desire to be left alone so as to be free to think, connects with Beckett’s works and legend in a number of places. Bair noted in her biography both the controversy over Beckett’s real date of birth and that Beckett seemed both amused and pleased by the confusion this led to which he refused to shed light on (1). Elsewhere in Beckett’s writings, Murphy has his 346

horoscope cast and wonders whether he should destroy the document for fear of it falling into the wrong hands (1957, 75). 4. A Fragment of a Vitagraph The composition of a biography, to a certain extent, mirrors, with the inverted form of a mirror, the process of casting the horoscope, with both involving the description of an individual life: the former offering an interpretation of evidence from the past, the latter offering an interpretation of what are considered signs for a future. They are further alike in that both forms are certain to fail in points of detail (if for different reasons and in different ways). In the final lines of Whoroscope Beckett’s narrator ‘Descartes’, on the brink of death, requests a ‘second starless inscrutable hour’ (1977, 4), and this line, perhaps, offers some insight into Beckett’s concerns about both biography and horoscopes. Life is inscrutable: in Murphy no stars mark its course as Murphy moves from a deep (if heavily ironized) satisfaction with the horoscope cast by Suk (34) to a realisation that his sky is a starless sky, like the patch overlooked by his garret window (1957, 251). So too, no meaning can be drawn from a life other than that salvaged by the one who lives it: Between him and his stars no doubt there was correspondence, but not in Suk’s sense. They were his stars, he was the prior system. He had been projected, larval and dark, on the sky of that regrettable hour as on a screen, magnified and clarified into his own meaning. But it was his meaning. The moon in the Serpent was no more than an image, a fragment of a vitagraph. (1957, 183) It is worth looking at some of the implications of this passage in some detail. The word ‘vitagraph’ was the name of a motion picture company, established in 1896, which prospered until it was sold to Warner Brothers in 1925 (Katz, 1417). Its relation to cinema would have still been familiar to the first readers of Murphy, then, but I would suggest that Beckett’s use of the word relates to the structure of the word itself as much as its relation to motion pictures. ‘Vita’ is the Latin word for life, and the termination ‘-graph’ refers to ‘that which writes portrays or records’ (OED). A ‘vitagraph’ is, literally, the portrayal or record347

ing of life, and one might venture that this can be presented through the ‘fiction’ of a novel or poem as much as through the ‘non-fiction’ of a biography. The whole status of what is true in relation to a life is being reintroduced for consideration: the horoscope is not yet true, is that which might become true (perhaps influencing that process); biography seeks (in vain) the truth of the life, yet, in ways which is often nowadays overlooked, fiction is also somehow involved in the creation of truths related to lives. 5. He lives well who is well hidden The desire to reveal truths Descartes betrays through his works is married to cautious modes of presentation and careful hiding both of the self and, perhaps, some potential implications of his ideas. As mentioned above, Descartes’ personal motto was ‘bene vixit, bene qui latuit’ (he lives well who is well hidden), (Gaukroger, 16) and, as Gaukroger shows, Descartes lived out this credo: in moving to the Netherlands which he called ‘his desert’ from his native France (185); in hiding his address; and at times deliberately avoiding meeting people who had travelled great distances to see him (225). The desire to reveal as well as to hide, however, is obviously found everywhere in Descartes’ work. Descartes considered that ancient mathematicians must have hidden their true methods as their discoveries and their methods did not seem compatible to him. There is, of course, a long tradition of hidden knowledge in the west with the strictures of Pythagoras’s school being among the most famous examples, and this tradition is also clearly well known to Beckett (1957, 31). One might understand certain of Descartes’ gestures in a similar way. Gaukroger argues Descartes had to change the direction of his research in midcareer after the condemnation of Galileo by religious authorities as, in a real sense, openly professing certain tenants of rational philosophy was not safe (despite the liberal climate in the Netherlands of the time) (291). For Gaukroger, this change of direction manifests itself in the way Descartes chooses to reveal or present what he has discovered. Indeed for Gaukroger there is a split in Descartes’ works between his methods of discovery (which might have appeared potentially heretical) and his method of presentation (375-380). The interrelation between hiding and revealing here becomes extremely complex as the method of presentation (Cartesian Metaphysics) hides aspects of the 348

method of discovery (Cartesian Physics) at the same time as it presents it in such a way that it will both be acceptable and convincing to the religious authorities of the time. Spinoza’s friend Adrian Koerbagh would die in prison for propagating what he saw as the truths of the new philosophy that were at times unpalatable to the theological and political authorities (Nadler, 269). Spinoza’s motto as we have seen was caute (be cautious) (Rabouin, 21). The age was full of such caution. Descartes’ first biographer Baillet wrote another book: on the anonymous (Baillet, 1690). Yet Descartes’ ultimate aim, according to Gaukroger, is to reveal most clearly, he is not interested in presenting either a metaphysics or a natural philosophy which might be in any way duplicitous or even paradoxical, yet the complex nature of his strategy leaves him open to misinterpretation, just as, according to De Vleeschauwer, the history of Geulincx’s reception has been that of a series of misinterpretations interrupted by long periods of silence (De Vleeschauwer, 1957). One might argue this imperative to hide or be cautious is not quite so pressing for a 20th century novelist living in Paris, at least if one sets aside the fact of his participation in the Resistance which involved dangerous covert activities (for which he received the Croix du Guerre, see Bair, Knowlson). Yet, why wouldn’t fame be understood as potentially just as oppressive a means of destroying the self? Knowlson tells the following story from the 1960s: Clancy Sigal… told Beckett one day how Doris Lessing, with whom Sigal had lived in the late 1950s, had introduced him as an identifiable character, ‘Saul Green’, a macho kind of American, into several of her books. He explained to Beckett what a disturbing experience this had been. ‘Beckett shook his magnificent head. “Identity is so fragile – how did you ever survive?” He looked at me more closely. “Or did you?” (514) As ever, the apparently serious situation is cut through with humour in Beckett’s comment. Yet one needs to balance the apparent fear of exposure and the spotlight with, on the one hand, so many of Beckett’s works which mercilessly strip back and hunt down their subjects 349

to the point where subjectivity disperses (Worm, for example in his lair in The Unnamable, who is surrounded by others who train their lights upon him and hurl their words at him) and, on the other, the paradox that fame, which might destroy the writer, is effectively produced by the process of writing (or, rather, being seen to be a writer). 6. Nescio If the importance of Geulincx to Murphy is recognised by Beckett critics (if yet to be adequately explored) The Unnamable has been seen almost universally as using Descartes’ cogito as a point of departure. The reading is sustainable up to a point when the well-worn narrative of radical doubt leading to cogito ergo sum is recited again. Once we become aware of Geulincx, however, and his reading of Descartes’ cogito it begins to become apparent that this connection might be a less precise formulation than has been thought. Beckett was no doubt also playing with Descartes’ system, yet the Geulingian system, although developed from Descartes, offers a significantly altered focus: one which is not without interest to readers of Beckett, and one which illuminates the play of light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, in Beckett’s art. While numerous similarities exist between Geulincx and Descartes, to the extent that Geulincx is rightly considered a Cartesian philosopher, there are also original aspects to Geulincx’s work, which are key to the question at hand. Bernard Rousset underlines the importance of ignorance to Geulincx; he indicates the prevalence of the word nescio (I do not know) throughout Geulincx (55), as a key word, just as Beckett stated ‘perhaps’ was the keyword to his own plays (Driver, 23). It is interesting to compare the use of God as foundation in Geulincx and Descartes. God provides the firm Christian foundations on which (finite) knowledge is built for Descartes and this role as guarantor of human knowledge is one of the key functions He performs. Gaukroger has argued that Descartes’ Metaphysics are, primarily, a way of presenting his Physics, and so, in effect his Metaphysics are haunted by this new science (362, 375). Geulincx’s Metaphysics, however, and his Ethics are haunted not by his Physics (which bears a marked resemblance to that of Spinoza on some points as well as the Cartesian system on which it is based) but by the concerns of Theology (which is the title of Book Three of Geulincx’s Metaphysics). If Descartes uses his Metaphysics as a means of allow350

ing the reception of his Physics, by rendering them compatible with Christian tenants, Geulincx uses his Metaphysics to reaffirm the ongoing importance of the Christian God, not only in the face of the true Philosophy and the true science based on Descartes but through and in that true Philosophy and science as the prime mover of all. In practice, this difference translates into God providing different kinds of certainty to the Geulingian as opposed to the Cartesian system. Whereas God underwrites the clear and distinct ideas of Descartes, for Geulincx God provides the overriding human certainty: that we do have adequate knowledge of things. Not only do we not know anything, for Geulincx, we are certain that we do not know anything (Part 3, Prop. 3, Annot. A, 98). Yet this assertion of human ignorance is not only key to the understanding of Geulincx’s ethics but strikes a profound chord with Beckett who stated: ‘I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a nonknower, a non-can-er (somebody who cannot)’ (see Shenker). We have seen how Beckett pointed to the formulation Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis (where one can do nothing one should wish for nothing) as being of interest to him, and it is this formulation around which Geulincx builds his ethics. Only God has adequate knowledge. It is one of Geulincx’s key statements of human ignorance in his Ethics and finds a corollary in his Metaphysics in the key formulation Quod nescis quomodo fiat, id no facis (What you do not know how to do is not your action) (Part 1, Prop. 5, 35). Geulincx returns to these two key tenants to secure his system again and again. It is important to notice not only the emphasis on human ignorance they affirm but the concomitant powerlessness this ignorance brings with it, especially when we begin to consider The Unnamable, who tells us (and shows us) he is ‘all-impotent’, and developing Geulincx’s favourite word ‘nescio’ (to not know) ‘all-nescient’ (82). Mixing Geulincx with Democritus he says: ‘Nothing then but me, of which I know nothing’ (21), and elsewhere, as noted above, he claims his motto should be: ‘De nobis ipsis silemus’ (58) (we say nothing about ourselves). These points of emphasis and interest lead Geulincx into developing a cogito, which, despite initial appearances, is quite different to the well-known Cartesian cogito on which it is based. Whereas the conceptual persona in Descartes empties his mind in order to get rid of the baggage of false opinions about the workings of things he has 351

carried since childhood so as to open the way for clear and distinct ideas (see Descartes, Principles, Part 1), Geulincx’s conceptual persona empties his mind not to this end but in order to focus more fully on the self. In his Metaphysics this intense focus on the self and what the self knows or properly does not know is called ‘Autology’ and Rousset considers this to be the most original component of Geulincx’s thought (45). In the Ethics this focus leads to what he calls the Inspectio sui or inspection or examination of the self, which leads immediately to a Despectio sui or disregard for the self or its worth, because in looking into our selves we realise we know nothing and have no real power. Descartes leads us from obscurity to clarity (knowledge), whereas Geulincx leads us into obscurity (and offers no real hope of our departing from there) so that we might recognise our own ignorance and in turn recognise the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Paradoxically, then, for Geulincx, God is revealed not through the light of truth, but through the obscurity of our ignorance. 7. Images in Arnold Geulincx and Samuel Beckett For Geulincx, to accept and recognise the power of God is to turn towards Him, to reject that power is to turn away from Him. In the Metaphysics Geulincx describes the kind of existence we might experience after death and this involves the soul released from the body and having shed the memories and sensations, for which that body was (through God’s intercession) the instrument, either turning towards God and realising the joy of that understanding, or turning from God and recognising the hell of utter confusion: If death should befall me… All I can do is await His decision concerning me…. He can leave me without a body at all, and absolutely in that state in which I shall find myself when I am released… in which case it is clear that I am to be divested of all my senses, even of memory (which no less than any of the senses depends on the body), and that I am to be conscious only of desires and ideas. Wherefore I understand that if I turn to my God when I am released, I shall be happy, and happy for ever; but if I turn away from Him, unhappy. If I turn to Him, I shall understand to what it is that I turn, and how blessedly (but not without repentance, an act 352

of the utmost affliction of mind): if I turn away, and how damnably; but I shall not know to what it is that I turn (and not without the utmost confusion of mind). For that to which I had used to turn myself was but an appearance, which will be there for me no longer once I am released from my body. (Geulincx, 1999, 45-46, Part one, Prop. 13). These images might be said to resonate with Beckett’s works in many places. The Unnamable, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine to name some of the more obvious (the latter two texts describing the stripping back of sensation and images). The Unnamable has often been considered to perhaps describe a beyond or a hell, and, with good reason, Dante has been mentioned in respect to this idea. Yet if, as Knowlson contends, Beckett was interested in images from the visual arts which he found in paintings and adapted to his works, why should we be surprised if he at times used the images of philosophy in a similar way, why should we not consider the Geulingian hell to be as much a point of reference or possibility in The Unnamable to the far more complex hell of Dante. So too Geulincx’s cogito which strips the world away so as to look within and find absolute ignorance, seems closer to the situation described in The Unnamable than that of the cogito of Descartes who quickly finds a road map to the world. 8. The Hidden and Revealed self I have been attempting to make a few steps towards a set of complex problems here, yet I feel I have already begun to establish the important ways in which an understanding of Geulincx’s system helps us to see this complexity from a usefully different angle. There are so many images of being exposed, revealed in Beckett’s purgatorial works; characters divested of everything; the figure of the tramp being the epitome of this – the utterly exposed, public self. So too many of Beckett’s stories, are stories of an attempted annihilation of the self acting on the self in some space which is somehow divested of the public or other people: Imagination Dead Imagine; The Lost Ones; Stirrings Still. How might one interpret these figures that speak of both hiding and revealing the self to oneself and others? Here are two more, belated, attempts. According to Michel Serres who offers the examples of Diogenes, Jesus and St. Francis of Assisi, the tramp is the utterly exposed, 353

the truly public man. How can one bear this exposure and not be annihilated, he asks. Their saintliness, for Serres, stems from their openness to the world, which is a gift to it (247-266). In his Ethics Geulincx says something which is quite different, even the direct opposite to Serres. He suggests that politics, relations with others, the so-called public sphere is, in fact, the most hidden of all things, while the self is that which must be revealed (but only to the self) (see Rousset, 170). Notes 1.

The only real attempt at carefully engaging with some aspect of Geulincx in relation to Beckett to date is Rupert Wood’s article. A few other critics have made interesting comments in passing about Geulincx but none of these have examined his system in any depth or dedicated more than a few pages to him.

2.

Martin Wilson’s translation of Metaphysica Vera was published in 1999. Wilson is currently translating Geulincx’s Ethica in an edition to be edited by Han Van Ruler and myself.

Works Cited Baillet, Adrien, Auteurs déguisez sous des noms etrangers: empruntez, supposez, feints à plaisir, chiffrez, renversez, retournez, ou changez d'une langue en une autre (Paris: Chez Antoine Dezaleier, 1690). Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990). Beckett, Samuel, ms. Letter to L. E. Harvey ‘Ussy, 24.2.67.’ Beckett collection, Rare Books Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA. –, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957). –, Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove Press, 1977). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Edited by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983). –, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958). Blackburn, Simon The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 1994) de Lattre, Alain. L’Occasionalisme d'Arnold Geulincx: étude sur la constitution de la doctrine (Paris: Minuit, 1967). –, Arnold Geulincx: présentation, choix de textes et traduction (Paris: Seghers, 1970).

354

Descartes, René, “Principles of Philosophy” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol I. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). De Vleeschauwer, H. J. Les Antécédents du Transcendentalisme kantien. Geulincx et Kant (Cologne: Kantstudien, 1953-1954), 245-273. –, Le problème du suicide dans la morale d’Arnold Geulincx (Pretoria: Uni of South Africa, 1965). –, Three Centuries of Geulincx Research (Pretoria, South Africa: Communications of the University of South Africa, 1957). Doherty, Francis, “Mahaffy’s Whoroscope”, in The Journal of Beckett Studies, vol 2, Number 1, 1992, 27-46. Driver, Tom F. Beckett by the Madeleine, Columbia University Forum, Summer 1961, pp. 21-25. Foucault, Michel. 1985. “Archéologie d'une passion” [interview with Charles Ruas]. Magazine littéraire. Numero 221, Juillet -Août. 100-105. Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Geulincx, Arnold. Metaphysics. Translated by Martin Wilson (Wisbech: Christoffel Press, 1999). Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). Kennedy, Sighle. Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1971). Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). –, “Krapp’s Last tape, the evolution of a play, 1958-75” in Journal of Beckett Studies, Number 1, Winter, 50-56, 1976. Land, J. P. N. “Arnold Geulincx and His Works,” 223-242, in Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, edited by George Croom Robertson, Vol. XVI, 1891. McCracken, D. J. Thinking and Valuing: An Introduction, Partly Historical, to the study of the philosophy of Value (London: MacMillian, 1950). Nadler, Steven, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Nuchelmans, G. Geulincx’s Containment Theory of Logic (Amsterdam: KNAW, 1988). Rabouin, David, “Spinoza en liberté”, in Magazine Littéraire, No 370 Novembre 1998. Rousset, Bernard. Geulincx: Entre Descartes et Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1999). Serres, Michel, Atlas (Paris: Julliard, 1994).

355

Shenker, Israel. 1956. “Moody Man of Letters”. Interview with Samuel Beckett. The New York Times. Section Two, 6 May. 1-3. Terraillon, E. La Morale de Geulincx (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1912). Wood, Rupert “Murphy, Beckett, Geulincx, God” in The Journal of Beckett Studies, Spring 1993, Vol. 2, No. 2. pp. 27-51.

356

BECKETT’S WINDOWS AND THE WINDOWLESS SELF Naoya Mori

Beckett uses a “window device” that appears open to the outer world, yet is really closed, viewless and practically “windowless”. From “a small frosted skylight” of Murphy until the last window of Stirrings Still, the “windowless” window has kept evoking a condition of issueless room/mind inhabited by protagonists like Murphy, Watt, Malone, and Hamm. Focusing upon the window in Beckett’s oeuvre, this article formulates his strategic use of the window device as a solipsistic expression, that is, the Leibnizian monadic “windowless self”.

The theme of the connection between Beckett and Leibniz is not new. Ever since Germaine Brée claimed in 1963 that “Beckett’s Watt is a re-incarnation of Voltaire’s Candide, a metaphysical Candide to be sure, a real Leibnizian windowless monad” (Brée, 572), there have been numerous suggestions of Leibniz’s influence on Beckett. Despite Garin Dowd’s attempt, following Deleuze, to detail the many resonances of Leibnizian themes and concepts comprehensively,1 it seems that the theme has still not been fully explored. By shedding light on Beckett’s windows, as a starting point, I will show how the metaphysics of Leibniz gives a fundamental framework to Beckett’s window. It is a cliché that the window represents the eye of the mind, the room, or the body. The cliché draws upon John Locke, who describes the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa comparing it to “the yet empty Cabinet” and to the “dark Room” upon which experience imprints knowledge (Locke, 162-3). Leibniz, who asserts the contrary and believes in innate ideas refutes him. Beckett knows their arguments and writes in his “Whoroscope” notebook: “Leibniz to Locke”/“Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus” (Nothing is in the intellect that will not first have been in

the senses, except the intellect itself).2 Against this background, Beckett makes a number of references to windows throughout his oeuvre. The window, in general, has a dual function; it makes a threshold of inside and outside. It constitutes a wall against the outer world, but through its transparency the exterior merges into the interior, and vice versa. The duality of Beckett’s window, however, parts company with this traditional notion. Not only are Beckett’s windows more complex, as we shall see, they do not actually let in the outer world at all. To summarize, there are three remarkable dualities of Beckett’s window apparatus: the real/unreal, the inside/outside, and the closedness. 1. Real/Unreal Of the real/unreal dualism, Malone describes his bedside window as something real and plausible: “My bed is by the window. I lie turned towards it most of the time. I see roofs and sky, a glimpse of street too, if I crane” (1958, 184). Yet elsewhere Malone evokes skepticism about its existence, so that the window bears a shade of unreality and implausibility: And if I succeed in breathing my last it will not be in the street, or in a hospital, but here, in the midst of my possessions, beside this window that sometimes looks as if it were painted on the wall, [...].3 (235) A similar phenomenon that offers ambiguity and incredibility to the seemingly ordinary window is also perceptible in Endgame and Company. At the beginning of Endgame, Clov looks out of the windows, and reports to Hamm what he could see from them. But, after all, the outer-light does not seem to reach Hamm through the window: HAMM: Bring me under the window. [Clov goes towards chair.] I want to feel the light on my face. [Clov pushes chair.] […] [Clov stops the chair under window right.] There already? [Pause. He tilts back his head. ] Is it light? CLOV: It isn’t dark. HAMM: [Angrily.] I’m asking you is it light. CLOV: Yes [Pause.] 358

HAMM: The curtain isn’t closed? CLOV: No. HAMM: What window is it? CLOV: The earth. HAMM: I knew it! [Angrily.] But there’s no light there! The other! [Clov pushes chair towards window left.] The earth! [Clov stops the chair under window left. Hamm tilts back his head. ] That’s what I call light! [Pause.] Feels like a ray of sunshine. [Pause.] No? CLOV: No. HAMM: It isn’t a ray of sunshine I feel on my face? CLOV: No. (1986, 123) Although Hamm orders Clov to open the window to hear the sea, Clov’s opening the window makes no difference to Hamm, so that the dialogue arouses only skepticism about the window and its reality. Also, in Company, a voice tells of a past, “with occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future” to “one on his back” (1996, 4) in the dark, referring to four windows. The first window appears in what the voice describes as “you” at birth: “You first saw the light in the room you most likely were conceived in. The big bow window looked west to the mountain” (7). The second window concerns “your” childhood memory of an old beggar woman, “half blind”, “stone deaf” and “not in her right mind”. As she is fumbling at a big garden gate, “you” dismount from “your tiny cycle and open the gate for her” (10-1). Some words of thanks that issued from her are still inscribed in “your” memory: “God reward you little master”. Curiously, she “was sure she could fly once in the air” and launched herself from “a first floor window” (10). The third window is connected with “your” adulthood memory of rendez-vous at the little summer house: “You open with quickening pulse your eyes and a moment later that seems an eternity her face appears at the window”(29). From the fourth window, light shines upon “you” as “you” lay on “your” deathbed: “The low sun shines on you through the eastern window”(44). Thus these four windows vividly reflect the chronology of “your” whole life from birth to deathbed (except death itself). On the other hand, the narrator of Company, who states in the first paragraph: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine”(3), 359

makes only one reference to what might be the same window “you” are looking at: As the window might close of a dark empty room. The single window giving on outer dark. Then nothing more. No. Unhappily no. Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. (15-6) If we assume that the fourth and the fifth windows are the same and that “you” and “one in the dark” signify the same person, the statement that “The place is windowless”(44-5) issued by the narrator in the penultimate paragraph contradicts the voice’s previous remarks concerning the same window. As a result, unable to judge whether there is a “single window”, or that there are at least two windows (as the phrase “the eastern window” does imply), the readers would be driven into a state of epoché.4 After all, there is no window in the place, and there is nothing but “the fable of one with you in the dark”(46). Just as, in Watt, Beckett describes the relationship of Watt/ Sam (the narrator) as “in our windowlessness” (150), “one in the dark”/a voice/the narrator in Company are all in their “windowlessness”.5 Before we conclude that the window in Beckett is a simulacrum, an illusionary device in disguise, we need to investigate two more windows. Note that Murphy’s garret has a window whose view is consistently dark: But the garret that he now saw was not an attic, nor yet a mansard, but a genuine garret, not half, but twice as good as the one in Hanover, because half as large. The ceiling and the outer wall were one, a superb surge of white, pitched at the perfect angle of furthest trajectory, pierced by a small frosted skylight, ideal for closing against the sun by day and opening by night to the stars. 6 (1993, 93, my italics) Seen from these phrases like “[a] small frosted skylight” that commands “only that most dismal patch of night sky” (106), and “the skylight, open to no stars”(141), Beckett's intention that the skylight should command no view is clear. Moreover, Beckett’s specific concern for the viewless window is confirmable in his manuscript: 360

“fenêtre borgne, donnant du jour mais pas de vue”.7 It is this “small frosted skylight” of Murphy’s garret that is to become the prototype of Beckett’s windows because of its closedness, its viewlessness, and thereby its virtual windowlessness. Beckett continues to use the image of the closed window until his last, for the “one high window” in the chamber of a dying old man in Stirrings Still “was not made to open”, nor he “could or would not open it” anyway. Why he did not crane out to see what lay beneath was perhaps because the window was not made to open or because he could or would not open it. Perhaps he knew only too well what lay beneath and did not wish to see it again. So he would simply stand there high above the earth and see through the clouded pane the cloudless sky. (1995, 259, my italics) Unable to move, the moribund old man now “sat at his table head on hands” and “saw himself rise and go”. Yet, he used to mount a stool to see the sky. This image of the old man on a stool seeing “through the clouded pane the cloudless sky” reminds us of Clov in Endgame trying to get an outside view on a ladder, and, originally, that of Murphy on a rocking chair looking through “a small frosted skylight” the starless night sky. To all of them, the window must be closed for the author to depict their souls apart from the world and their issuelessness of present conditions. Significantly enough, Beckett writes a Leibnizian key word about the last old man in the manuscript of Stirrings Still: “So dark in his windowless self that no knowing whether day or night”. 8 In the published text, Beckett wrote simply “One night or day” and erased this phrase “in his windowless self”. The erased key word suggests that neither “the feeble light” nor “the one high window” in his room is real, but what counts to Beckett is the interior of “his windowless self”. In any case, it is quite noteworthy that Beckett is so preoccupied with a key concept of Leibniz’s monadology in his creation of mysterious windows in both Murphy and Stirrings Still.

361

2. Inside/Outside If Beckett’s window is practically “windowless”, the alleged inside/outside partition of the room occupied by Malone and others is also, for the same reason, fallacious. And yet Malone draws a contrast between outer light and inner light: The light is there, outside, the air sparkles, the granite wall across the way glitters with all its mica, the light is against my window, but it does not come through. So that here all bathes, I will not say in shadow, nor even in half shadow, but in a kind of a leaden light that makes no shadow, so that it is hard to say from what direction it comes, for it seems to come from all directions at once, and with equal force. […] In a word there seems to be the light of the outer world, […], and mine. (220-1, my italics) As in Endgame, however, “the light of the outer world” does not reach Malone, while “a kind of a leaden light”, or the light of “mine” which might be termed as “the light of the inner world” fills in his room. Indeed, the contrast of outer and inner appears to be made clear. On the other hand, Malone does not know where he is: “Unfortunately I do not know quite what floor I am on, perhaps I am only on the mezzanine”(218). Then he comes to a conclusion that he is “in a kind of vault”, and that the space which he takes to be the street is “in reality no more than a wide trench or ditch with other vaults opening upon it”. At last, Malone goes so far as to doubt the validity of his conclusion: In which case the question arises again as to which floor I am on there is nothing to be gained by my saying I am in a basement if there are tiers of basements one on top of another. 9 (219) This is how Beckett leads Malone into the abyss of infinite space where the distinction of inside and outside, if any, does not make sense; how can he find where he is in infinity? Then the division of the inner/outer light falls to the ground, too. In effect, for Malone, 362

there is no outside, no outer light. In his words, “it is never light in this place, never really light” (220). Moreover, the nature of light in Beckett is not physical but metaphysical; in the physical world, there is no light with no shadow, no source. Still, even the outside light described in an addendum of Watt is: “[t]he source of the feeble light diffused over this scene is unknown” (1978, 249). Also in the stage direction of Ghost Trio, we find a strange, and yet similar combination of window and light to that of Malone Dies mentioned above: “The familiar chamber. At the far end, a window. The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous. No shadow” (1990, 408). Of the bizarre light whose source is unknown as well as the invalid distinction between inside/outside, Beckett creates them not by caprice but by applying a monadic principle to the description. The fact that Watt’s internal world mirrors everything that happens outside it stems decidedly from the monadology. In Mr. Knott’s house, Watt talks about his strange feeling: my personal system was so distended at the period of which I speak that the distinction between what was inside it and what was outside it was not at all easy to draw. Everything that happened happened inside it, and at the same time everything that happened happened outside it. (1978, 41-2, my italics) With this monadic perception Watt becomes so synonymous with the world surrounding him that he feels, “I was the sun, need I add, and the wall, and the step, and the yard, and the time of year, and the time of day”(40)10. Watt accepts the sensation as “harmony”, not as confusion, or madness, at least at the beginning of his stay in Mr. Knott’ house: The sensations, the premonitions of harmony are irrefragable, of imminent harmony, when all outside him will be he, the flowers the flowers that he is among him, the sky the sky that he is above him, the earth trodden the earth treading, and all sound his echo. (39, my italics) 363

It is this singular perception that causes an epistemological crisis in Watt, and which finally drives him mad. Leibniz calls this “apperception” which means perception with more or less clarity given to “every created monad” that “represents the entire universe” (Leibniz, 25). Ironically, a perfect concord with the mind (inside) and the material (outside) is for Leibniz harmony; for Beckett disharmony. 11 Yet the monadic space both offer is similar. In a word, the monad is “the autonomy of the inside, an inside without an outside” (Deleuze, 28). 3. Closed Interior: Microcosm Being windowless signifies that monads have no means for communication with others. That means solipsism. Elsewhere Leibniz writes: But monads alone do not make up a continuum, since, in and of themselves, they lack all connection, and each monad is, as it were, a world apart.12 (Leibniz, 1989b, 206) For Leibniz, what sustains the windowlessness of isolated monads is the doctrine of the pre-established harmony whereby neither the mental nor the material has any direct effect on the other, and yet both are preprogrammed to act in perfect harmony. Beckett’s attitude toward Leibniz is a blend of the pros and cons. Although he frequently shows his indignation against this principle of Leibniz, Beckett still uses it and twists it in various ways, driving his characters to struggle within and without. Consider Murphy, who suffers from his madly beating heart; who suffers from being with other people, so that he searches for “absolute freedom” in the depth of his mind by binding his body to a rocking chair. Despite such conflict Beckett delivers, Murphy’s mind is modeled after the monadic principles. Like a monad, he neither has means of communication between himself and others, nor between his mind and his body. Like a monad, his microcosm is “hermetically closed”, preprogrammed, and represents “the universe”. Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, 364

or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it.13 (1993, 63) Comparing this to Leibniz’s assertion that “Every individual substance [monad] contains in its perfect notion the entire universe and everything that exists in it, past, present, and future”, 14 it would be difficult to deny Beckett’s debt to the monadology. Of course, close inspection will reveal that Beckett is twisting and reversing the monadology secretly and yet importantly by changing Leibniz’s “plenum” into “hollow”; by modifying the Aristotelian-Leibnizian teleological “virtual-actual” (one-way) traffic into more or less the BergsonianDeleuzian free randomness in which there are both “virtual-actual” and “actual-virtual” (two-way) traffics.15 In fact, the chaotic virtual-actual relationship modified by Beckett comprises quintessential problematics for both Leibniz and himself, because it disintegrates teleology, determinism, and preestablished harmony. Watt has a celebrated example of this sort. Describing the endless arrivals and departures of servants at the house of Mr. Knott in a sort of binary progression (invented by Leibniz), Beckett writes ironically: “the notion of the arbitrary could only survive as the notion of a pre-established arbitrary” (132). Beckett’s debt to Leibniz and his mixed drive for the philosopher, expressed especially in the passage of “Murphy’s mind”, seems to be his own, as seen in a letter to MacGreevy, written in 1937: The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgements. I lie for days on the floor, or in the woods, accompanied and unaccompanied, in a coenaesthesic of mind, a fullness of mental self-aesthesia that is entirely useless. The monad without the conflict, lightless and darkless. (Knowlson, 269) Like Murphy’s closed mental space, the interior of his consciousness is neither orderly nor teleological, but it is “the chaos” and “a fullness of mental self-aesthesia that is entirely useless”. It is certainly “reminiscent of Murphy’s lowest zone of mind” (Knowlson), where “there 365

was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion” and where “he [Murphy] was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom” (1993, 66). Yet Beckett expects the monad to be, unlike Leibniz’s, “without the conflict, lightless, and darkless”. The way in which Beckett twists the monadology has been shown to have a certain disposition. While he follows Leibniz in that each monad is isolated, self-contained and has no interaction with others, the microcosm reflects the universe from a particular point of view16; he reverses Leibniz in that the Beckettian monads are far from being in harmony, and that everything is so pre-established that this is the best of all possible worlds. Of Beckett’s solipsism, it is quite proper for Dowd to direct his attention to what Beckett calls “baroque solipsism” 17 in a letter written in 1935 (Dowd, 15). Also, as early as in 1930, in his early essay on Proust, its first symptom may be read: We are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known. ‘Man is the creature that cannot come forth from himself, who knows others only in himself, and who, if he asserts the contrary, lies’ (1970, 66)18 Thenceforth such a view held by Beckett will remain unchanged to his last. Beckett creates one solipsistic monad after another: It is clear we have here two distinct and separate bodies, each enclosed within its own frontiers, and having no need of each other to come and go and sustain the flame of life, for each is well able to do so, independently of the other. (1958, 238.) What Malone says about the view of a couple “loving each other” from his so-called “painted” window is a product of Beckett’s ironic application of the monadic independence to his works, like a frog chorus in Watt (135-7), the complicated dance of bees in Molloy (1689) and a series of automated dance by the four dancers in Quad. Accordingly, even their “loving each other” can be explained by their “windowlessness”, that is, by the pre-established harmony with no a posteriori interaction. 366

Conclusion Beckett’s refutation of Leibniz is abundant but partial, for he never denies the total framework of the pre-established harmony. Thereby a paradox is inevitable for the Beckettian protagonists. That which Beckett calls “a pre-established arbitrary” in Watt may deny the “harmony” of monads, but not the premises: determinism and windowlessness. That Murphy’s consciousness is composed of two-way traffic may dislocate the teleology, suggesting the possibility of freedom. Yet how can one be free in the pre-established universe, in the windowlessness? Beckett neither evades the paradox, nor criticizes it straightforwardly. Instead, he lets his protagonists (and even the beings that they created) face the paradox until their agony becomes unbearable and absurd. The window device and the “windowless self” have always played a major part, explicitly or implicitly, in Beckett’s expressions of solitary souls. Notes 1.

Garin Dowd’s “Nomadology: Reading the Beckettian Baroque” is the most important essay written in this context since Germane Brée.

2.

This Latin dictum is half repeated by a parrot in Malone Dies. See James Knowlson (374).

3.

See Naoya Mori’s “Leibniz in Beckett: Beckett’s Windowlessness” (Mori 12). See also Dowd (24).

4.

Compagnie, the French version of Company, recalls the two windows of Endgame, where “the eastern window” is “la fenêtre côté mer”(1980, 83).

5.

In “Verbatim”, the earliest manuscript version of Company, Beckett writes: “Speech by A overheard by B described to C, i. e. recta converted to oblique. A, B, C, one & the same.” (Reading University Library MS2901)

6.

It is well known that, in translating Murphy into French, Beckett added the name of Leibniz to this passage: “Murphy avait occupé à Hanovre, assez longtemps pour faire l’expérience de tous ses

367

avantages, une mansarde dans la belle maison renaissance de la Schmiedestrasse où avait vécu, mais surtout où était mort, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz” (1965, 119). 7.

Reading University Library MS3000 (Whoroscope notebook)

8.

Reading University Library MS2935/1.

9.

Quoting the passage from Malone Dies, Dowd makes a reference to “Lebniz’s great pyramid in the Theodicy” which has “an apex but no base; it went on increasing to infinity” (Dowd, 25). Deleuze, in Le pli, to which Dowd probably owes much, compares the Leibnizian monad to Baroque architecture: “The Leibnizian monad and its system of light-mirror-point of view-inner decor cannot be understood if they are not compared to Baroque architecture. […] The monad is a cell. It resembles a sacristy more than an atom: a room with neither doors nor windows, where all activity takes place on the inside” (Deleuze, 28). In a wider context, Malone’s horror of infinity may be explained in what Deleuze claims “l’univers en escalier de la tradition néoplatonicienne”(41), or it may be compared to Pascal’s horror vacui, as Dowd suggests elsewhere (Dowd, 18). See §189 and §201 of Pensées.

10.

The same sort of phenomenon takes place in Malone: “You may say it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head”. See Dowd (26).

11.

“Beckett is reducing”, wrote Brée, “ad absurdum Leibniz’s wellknown assertion “that the individual notion of each person involves once and for all everything that will ever happen to him” (573).

12.

Leibniz to Des Bosses, 29 May 1716.

13.

A related statement by Leibniz is: “Thus each individual substance [monad] or complete being is as a world apart, independent of every other thing except God. There is no stronger demonstration, not only that our soul is indestructible, but also that it preserves always within its nature the traces of all its preceding conditions with a virtual memory which can always be awakened because the soul has consciousness of, or knows within itself, that which each

368

one calls ‘myself.’’ (Leibniz, a letter to Arnauld, dated July 14,1686). (Leibniz, 1989a, 337). 14.

See Leibniz’s, “Primary Truths ” (Leibniz, 1989b, 32), and the Monadology, §22.

15.

See Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant.

16.

Molloy echoes this principle: “In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe” (1958, 68).

17.

Deirdre Bair writes: “He [Beckett] could find no relief in anything but what he called baroque solipsism” (Bair, 198).

18.

In “Proust”, Beckett uses some of Leibniz’s terminology: “occult arithmetic” (91) and “impenetrability”(63).

Works Cited Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1978). Beckett, Samuel, “Whoroscope” notebook: MS3000, Archive of the Beckett International Foundation, U of Reading. –, “Verbatim” (Company manuscript) MS2901, Archive of the Beckett International Foundation, U of Reading –, Stirrings Still manuscripts: MS2935/1, Archive of the Beckett International Foundation, U of Reading. –, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, TheUnnamable (New York: Grove P, 1958). –, Murphy (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965). –, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder,1970) –, Watt (London: John Calder, 1978). –, Compagnie, (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). –, The Complete DramaticWorks (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). –, Murphy (London: Calder Publications, 1993). –, The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989 (New York: Grove P, 1995). –, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1996). Bergson, Henri, La pensée et le mouvant (P. U. De France, 1934).

369

Brée, Germaine. “Beckett’s Abstractors of Quintessence,” in French Review 36 (1963), 567-76. Deleuze, Gilles, Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988).The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (New York: U of Columbia P, 1993). Dowd, Garin, “Nomadology: Reading the Beckettian Baroque” in Journal of Beckett Studies, 8. 1 (1998), 15-49. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1986). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989). (1989a) –, Philosophical Essays. Trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis & Cambridge, 1989) (1989b). Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding II (Oxford: The Clarendon P of Oxford U, 1975). Mori, Naoya, “Leibniz in Beckett: Windowlessness,” in Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences of Okayama U. vol. 2 (1996): 1-22. Pascal, Blaise, Pensées. ed. Louis Lafuma. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962). Rescher, Nicholas, G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for Students (U of Pittsburgh P, 1991).

370

THE ABSTRACT GROTESQUE IN BECKETT’S TRILOGY David Musgrave

Through an examination of Beckett’s usage of the rhetorical device of the ‘enthymeme’ I try to show how the grotesque in Beckett’s Trilogy differs from previous literary examples of the mode. The article takes as its starting point Bakhtin’s periodization of the grotesque in terms of carnival culture (Rabelais) and the ‘subjective grotesque’ (Sterne) and puts forward the argument that the abstractness of Beckett’s grotesque is its defining feature. By positioning Beckett’s work in a general history of the grotesque, I hopefully provide a context for understanding Beckett’s ‘modernist’ grotesque and show how it is primarily concerned with the discovery of the new.

Much of the work carried out in recent years assessing Beckett’s achievements in the light of the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin has tended to focus on questions of dialogue and genre: the bedrock, in other words, of Bakhtin’s ideas that are often referred to under the rubric of ‘dialogism’. Henning’s work on Beckett and carnival, for example, works under the assumption that “Beckett shares Mikhail Bakhtin’s criticism of the repressive monologism that is so characteristic of Western thought with its penchant for abstract integrality” (Henning, 1) and proceeds to discuss some shorter works of Beckett in terms of “carnivalized dialogization” (29-31). While the Bakhtin of menippean satire is to some degree evoked, the historian of laughter and the grotesque is scarcely dealt with in this and other recent studies.1 Similarly, work which focuses on the grotesque aspects of Beckett’s work has tended to dwell on established theories of the grotesque and has not attempted to determine how the grotesque in Beckett’s works differs from other representatives of the mode.2 My primary goal in this article is to describe how Beckett’s grotesque represents a significant development in the history of that mode.

Most of Beckett’s oeuvre belongs squarely in the tradition of the grotesque. While the grotesque nature of The Trilogy, the other prose works and even the plays is beyond question, the exact nature of the grotesque which characterises these works is harder to define. Like any tradition or mode the grotesque does not remain unchanged over time. Following Bakhtin’s work on the grotesque, I want to develop a periodization of the grotesque and then assess Beckett’s Trilogy in relation to what I believe to be its current phase, which I term the abstract grotesque. Even a cursory familiarity with Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais is enough to make clear the almost nostalgic place Rabelais holds for Bakhtin. He is the paradigmatic example of the height of so-called carnival culture and the grotesque forms associated with it. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin identifies this phase of the grotesque as grotesque realism: in general terms this grotesque is characterised by its objective quality. Images of the bodily lower stratum give birth to a “new, concrete, and realistic historic awareness” which is “not abstract thought about the future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create history”, (1984b, 367). For Bakhtin, Rabelais is the prime example of the direct influence of folkcarnivalistic culture on literary forms. I say nostalgic, because the history of the medieval grotesque after Rabelais is, for Bakhtin, one of attenuation and involution. After Pope’s and Swift’s neo-classical, but nonetheless rumbustious grotesques, Laurence Sterne’s menippean satire is the first important example of the next phase of the grotesque which suffuses the pre-romantic, romantic and early modern periods. The grotesque in this phase becomes the expression of a “subjective, individualistic world outlook very different from the carnival folk concept of previous ages, although still containing some carnival elements”, (1984b, 36). The subjective grotesque can be characterised in terms of two symbols: the mask and the marionette. At the height of carnival culture, in the phase of grotesque realism, the theme of the mask is connected with a “merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself” (Bakhtin 1984b, 39-40) and establishes a cheerful similarity with the other. In the Romantic period, the mask is torn out of its original, carnival context and invested with an often dark interiority. The open-endedness of the grotesque body known to carnival culture makes possible the development, in the Romantic 372

phase of the grotesque, the “interior infinite” of the individual, (Bakhtin 1984b, 44). The theme of the marionette play is another important aspect of the subjective grotesque: “the accent is placed on the puppet as the victim of alien, inhuman force, which rules over men by turning them into marionettes”, (Bakhtin 1984b, 40). Beckett’s fascination with Kleist’s essay on the puppet theatre is a point to which I shall return: it demonstrates how Beckett’s work departs and develops from the subjective grotesque to constitute what is perhaps the first example of the current phase of the grotesque. The abstract grotesque, which is coeval, if not synonymous with modernism can best be imagined as the carnival mask objectified and abstracted, rather than isolated from its original context. That is, there is a renewed focus on the carnival mask as an abstraction in itself, in a way that is similar, but not identical, to the popularity of African tribal designs or the primitive mask in early modernist art. In the modernist context, the mask is simultaneously abstract and grotesque; it resonates with the radical heterogeneity of carnival, but it no longer suggests the interior infinite of the individual. If anything, harking back to the notion of grotesque marginalia or frames it suggests the radical play of carnival but on a more abstract plane than the earthy realism of a Rabelais. Similarly, the emphasis on severe restraint and economy of movement in Beckett’s later plays, or in the style of his prose, can be regarded as an abstraction from Kleist’s parable of the marionette or bear. In Kleist’s essay, the gracefulness of a marionette or a fencing bear is compared favourably with the disaster of self-consciousness and the gracelessness that ensues from this microcosmic fall. The puppet motif recurs a number of times in The Trilogy. “I suddenly collapsed,” Molloy tells us, “like a puppet when its strings are dropped” (51) and later the voice of the unnamable tells us: I shall have company. In the beginning. A few puppets. Then I’ll scatter them, to the winds, if I can. (267) Obviously, the inference can be drawn that this puppetry is merely that of narrative manipulation. But it is possible that Beckett is departing from Kleist’s idea that “in the same measure as reflection in the organic world becomes darker and feebler, grace there emerges in 373

ever greater radiance and supremacy”, (1997, 416). If Beckett, however, has taken up from where Kleist left off, it is not on the level of the subjective grotesque that he does so. Rather, it is on an abstract plane of reflection in which the metaphysical aspects of the traditional grotesque are extrapolated to the nth degree; or it is where authorial disengagement coincides with the grotesque aspects of the works’ “vice-existers” such that a redemptive radiance emerges from their frequently obscene autonomy. ***** Chief among the rhetorical features of the abstract grotesque is the enthymeme, or incomplete syllogism. Although the enthymeme is a common rhetorical feature of most comic structures, Beckett’s take on the enthymeme differs from those of previous phases of the grotesque. After discussing the abstract nature of the grotesque in The Trilogy and distinguishing the abstract grotesque from manifestations of the Rabelaisian or subjective forms in the work, I will return to consider the rhetorical device of the enthymeme, silence and the notion of play in The Trilogy. Any genre or mode has a memory of its past. Generic memory is perhaps what constitutes a genre: a genre simultaneously inhabits the present but remembers, or is marked by its beginnings and its past. In this sense, genre can be regarded as a principle of creative memory which is active in the process of literary development (Bakhtin, 1984a 106). In The Trilogy, grotesque realism is well and truly alive in a form little different, at times from that in, say, Dante. The anus, or scatological imagery in general, stands in relation to the whole of The Trilogy in a similar way to how Satan’s anus relates to the whole of the Divine Comedy. Satan’s arse-hole is the means by which Dante and Virgil ascend from Inferno to Purgatorio: And if I stood dumbfounded and aghast, Let those thick-witted gentry judge and say, Who do not see what point it was I passed. (287)3 In The Trilogy Molloy writes 374

We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen-door. (74) The Rabelaisian, grotesque body pervades all three novels. Where the different voices possess a body (and even when they don’t) there is a general sense of distortion, occasionally on a Gargantuan scale. This distorted, grotesque body is usually linked with notions of fecundity and renewal, often in a literary sense, as well as an ambivalent degradation. Malone, for example, speaks of his arse, which if it suddenly began to shit, the lumps would fall out in Australia (215) and the unnamable threatens, “I’ll let down my trousers and shit stories on them” (350). Molloy, for example, tells us that he was born through the hole in his mother’s arse, if his memory is correct (17), which recalls Gargantua’s first, false birth when Gargamelle’s bum-gut prolapses after having eaten too much tripe. This concept of a Rabelaisian, grotesque birth is echoed later with the first of Moran’s list of theological questions, where he asks “what value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam’s rib, but from a tumour in the fat of his leg (arse)?” (153). Worm also wonders if “I couldn’t sneak out by the fundament, one morning, with the French breakfast. No, I can’t move, not yet. One minute in a skull and the next in a belly, strange, and the next nowhere in particular” (324). This grotesque birth also evokes the topos of the delayed birth which famously comprises the first part of Tristram Shandy. Towards the end of Malone Dies we find ourselves in the general territory of the Swiftian grotesque: “My name is Lemuel, he said, though my parents were probably Aryan, and it is in my charge you are from now on” (244). If the name alone is not enough to evoke the protagonist of Gulliver’s travels, Lemuel’s Aryan parentage is sufficient to distinguish him from Solomon, with whom the name is traditionally associated in the Bible. While in many ways the voyage to the island at the end of Malone Dies parodies the first two voyages of Gulliver’s Travels, the giant recalling the Brobdingnagians and the small thin man the Lilliputians, it is not until The Unnamable that the theme of the houyhnhnms emerges. Mahood, in his jar, can see a statue which he refers to as the “apostle of horse’s meat, a bust” (300) and later confesses that “with a yo heave ho, concentrating with 375

all my might on a horse’s rump” he might not find “manstuprating” an entirely fruitless exercise (305). Lemuel Gulliver’s misanthropic hippophilia is here taken to a logical (and grotesque) extreme as the character of Lemuel and some of his associated, intertextual characteristics are subsumed within the grotesque voice of the unnamable. It is, however, the Sternean, subjective grotesque which, of the previous phases of the grotesque, predominates in Beckett and the one from which he departs with most creativity. If the primary feature of Tristram Shandy is the associational, digressive narrative, which is itself a kind of grotesque, then Beckett’s advance upon this is to delve into the disjunctions which allow association in the first place. That is, the suggestive heterogeneity which allows the vast cock-and-bull story of Tristram Shandy to proceed along its eccentric course is held under a magnifying glass in The Trilogy so that the differences, gaps and the lacunae which separate one element in an associational chain from another are accentuated, explored and embodied. Let an example from Molloy suffice: Often when one crest is discerned, in reality there are two, riven by a valley (T 11) The grotesque in literature is often as manifest visually, on the page, as it is in terms of diction, imagery, and structure. Where The Trilogy appears to be seamless prose, it is, in fact, riven by abyssal silences. It may well be the case that silence is the goal of Beckett’s work, as Martha Nussbaum has argued, (286-313) and that, “writing is the necessary desecration and desacralization of silence: we have to talk”, (Critchley 1997, 152). But in the context of the grotesque, I would take this one step further: as Molloy tells us, there is a strong temptation “to fill in the hole of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery” (14). In other words, the turbid undercurrents of silence running through the text of The Trilogy enter into each utterance, each word, combining with them to make of each an abstractly grotesque whole. Or to put it another way, silence is not passive absence but rather an active presence which contributes to the shape of the work as a whole. 376

There is a rhetorical term which is adequate to the task of describing this abstractly grotesque whole I am talking about. It is the enthymeme, which in many ways can be said to be a defining character of all true humour, in that it requires the audience to undertake an act of mental collaboration which can be described as bridging a logical gap, moving between alien codes, frames of reference, or universes of discourse (Branham 1989, 54). The enthymeme encompasses various definitions: 1 – It is a rhetorical syllogism, or a syllogism in which one premise is unexplained or assumed. 2 – In Greek, enthymeme literally translates as “something located in the heart or mind” (Volosinov 1976, 100). 3 – Another translation renders the same term as “under-mind-ed”, suggesting Bakhtin’s notion of the material lower bodily stratum. 4 4 – The enthymeme is “maintaining the truth of a proposition from the assumed truth of its contrary”, (which recalls the nature of the sentence structure in Molloy, which Wolfgang Iser has observed is “frequently composed of direct contradictions”) (164). 5 – Walter Ong makes a link between the unspoken aspect of the enthymeme and the operation of the psyche, or subconscious. He writes: enthymema primarily signifies something within one’s soul, mind, heart, feelings, hence something not uttered or ‘outered’ and to this extent not a fully conscious argument, legitimate though it may be. Aristotle’s term here thus clearly acknowledges the operation of something at least very like what we today would call a subconscious element. (12) The enthymeme according to each of its varying definitions is one of the defining rhetorical characteristics of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. In Molloy, the narrative voice proceeds by way of “long and easy, elegiac” sentences which effortlessly create a world of complexity and undecidability (Kenner, 92). The reticulation of apparently simple sentences forms an uncertain aggregate precisely because of the enthymemic relation of each to its successor and predecessor. In other words, the seemingly simple anaphoric style of much of The Trilogy is far from straightforward at all, and the aggregation of 377

repetitions with slight variations serves, in the context of the work, to emphasise the gaps between the sentences and the leaps which must be made in order to comprehend them in something approximating a whole. Similarly, the second half of Molloy concludes with Moran’s list of questions of a theological nature, all of which function as incomplete syllogisms, albeit posed in the form of questions. Their enthymemic quality, however, is emblematic of the abstract grotesque: metaphysical questions are conjured with and it is often left to the reader to supply an answer which “under-minds” them. And this very same list of metaphysical questions, remnants of the menippean impulse which charge through Murphy5 and Watt, pose us another question altogether, which is, what can be more abstract than the distinction between the metaphysical and the grotesque? ***** Much of The Trilogy recalls Bakhtin’s concept of the threshold: that is, a dialogue which takes place at a transitional point between two states. In The Trilogy, this threshold is abstract and the utterances which take place are monologues, or possibly one part of an overheard and internalised dialogue. The threshold of which I speak is that of life and death or, in the case of the unnamable, possibly birth and life. But it is also the threshold of the utterance and of utter silence, or the boundary where the surd, as a non-rational ratio, meets the surdus of deafness and silence.6 In many ways, the silence which is referred to in The Trilogy and which figures so largely in a stylistic sense is mythic, particularly in the sense that myth, like silence, demands interruption in order for the space of literature to come into being, and in the low mimetic, or grotesque mode, we are never very far from myth. The most powerful symbol of the relation between the threshold and silence is the unnamable’s declaration: “I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world” (352). Here the threshold is at once a membrane and a boundary between two realms. The materiality of the ear, or specifically the tympanum is inescapably grotesque, for it is, after all, a hole like any other, and this point is rammed home remorselessly. The unnamable assures us at one point that “I shall transmit the words as received, by the ear, or roared through a trumpet into the arsehole, in all their purity and in the same order, as far as possible (321),” while at another point he tells us that 378

“in at one ear and incontinent out through the mouth, or the other ear, that’s possible too (326).” But why this particular instance of the grotesque is abstract and not Rabelaisian is because it is fused with the notion of silence. “I sum up,” says the unnamable at a point when he is very far from summing up at all, “I and this noise, I see nothing else for this moment (357).” The disembodied, being-less narrator fuses with noise in similar fashion to utterances not merely bounded by silence, but incorporating into themselves the surdity of quasiirrational non-utterance. Stanley Cavell’s contention that the style of Endgame consists in an “uncovering of the literal” could well be said to be an example of this “incorporation” of surdity into the utterance (119-127). Whereas Cavell identifies the “literalization” of curses, for example, as a grammatical feature of the language of Endgame, there is equally a sense in which it is a feature of the “social purview”, to use Volosinov’s term, of the interlocutors. If the social purview that accompanies the utterance comprises “1 – the common spatial purview of the interlocutors [...] 2 – the interlocutors’ common knowledge and understanding of the situation, and 3 – their common evaluation of that situation,” (99) then the totality of these features of the situation enters into the utterance as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its impact. A behavioural utterance consists of two parts: 1 – the part realised or actualised in words and 2 – the assumed part. On this basis, the behavioural utterance can be likened to the enthymeme. In other words, there is a material unity, in terms of the social utterance, of the world and the speaker’s purview in any utterance such that “every utterance in the business of life is an objective social enthymeme” (101). The same objective social enthymeme is of particular importance in considerations of art. In the broadest terms, the difference between discourse in life and discourse in art is the degree to which the objective social enthymeme enters into that discourse as a constitutive part of the structure of its impact. In Beckett’s Trilogy, the objective social enthymeme is broadened or generalised to the extent that it no longer has an objective quality. The linguistic horizon of the shared social purview of each voice and their utterances is that of utter nullity and silence; it is a horizon which can also be said to be on the threshold of individual consciousness. Despite the pervasive grotesquery of the works in an objective sense, the “extraverbal” purview of silence constitutes in an abstract sense the linguistic horizon of 379

virtually every utterance in The Trilogy. That is, instead of each utterance being completed by the recipient for which it is intended, it is completed instead by the emptiness with which it starkly contrasts. This emptiness can also be said to coincide with the figure of ‘the other’. Henning’s remarks in relation to “First Love” could well be said to apply to the Trilogy: The Other whose voice the narrator resists, we must realise, exists on many levels and is ultimately abstract – this is reflected in the entire plan of the work. (399) The reception and completion of utterances becomes a part of a larger elaboration of musical and rhetorical shapes and patterns, fusing with the silence against which it is predicated and forming a grotesque ‘whole’. It might be objected that the very notion of a grotesque fusion implies some kind of duality, and that the abstract nature of the grotesque to which I am referring is nothing more than a Cartesian dualism entering through the back door, as it were. Perhaps it is best to address this issue by way of analogy. Comparing Sartre unfavourably with Beckett, Adorno writes, “in Sartre the form – that of the pièce à thèse – is somewhat traditional, by no means daring, and aimed at effect, in Beckett the form overtakes what is expressed and changes it”, (241-275). I would make the same claim for the traditional grotesque: that it overtakes the serious, the quasi-philosophical, the high falutin’ in other words, and changes it, in the case of The Trilogy, resulting in an abstractly grotesque whole. Even if the grotesque relies on a discernible disjunction between the categories which are mixed, in the first place, in order to bring it into being, it is by no means reducible to those categories. Beckett’s abstract grotesque is not, properly speaking, reducible to the play of philosophical ideas nor the scatology which “under-minds” them. It is a new category of aesthetic enterprise which overtakes both and changes them. It could further be objected that all grotesque works could be described as abstract in this way, for the grotesque is a combinatory mode, and it can only be recognised in distinction to the unalloyed, the classical, the beautiful or the pure. The grotesque in all its phases consists of radical heterogeneity, which is usually made manifest at 380

the level of form. Any radical heterogeneity therefore implies disjunctions and disjunctive connections which are, invariably in the grotesque context, enthymemic. If this is the case, what is it about The Trilogy which makes this enthymemic grotesque abstract? I would argue that the enthymeme, rather than consisting of somewhat passive holes into which the sensibilities of the reader are stuffed, is actually fundamental to the architectonics and structure of the work, and this is part of what constitutes the movement towards abstraction in the work. But perhaps this point could be made more clearly by way of a comparison. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land works primarily on the level of fragments and their enthymemic relations to each other. The whole which The Waste Land evokes, however, is ironically at odds with the elegiac tone which pervades it, and its notions of loss, waste, sterility and so on, do not sit well with the work of cultural resuscitation which proceeds enthymemically by way of such textual fragmentation. But this enthymemic fragmentation connects directly with a specific cultural context, the loss of which the work as a whole supposedly mourns. The Trilogy, on the other hand, makes no such concessions towards the rhetorical syllogism, but exacerbates its abyssal nature by way of a vast array of minute incompletenesses. The thirty odd years that separate the appearance of The Waste Land and The Trilogy mark the transition from the late subjective grotesque to the abstract grotesque. In Beckett’s work, the cultural sphere in general is approached only indirectly, and it is this indirection which also helps define the abstract quality of his grotesque. The abstract grotesque differs from its predecessors in that it is not a world upside down, as most superficial readings of Bakhtin would have it, but rather it is an example of play at a remove: of playing at play, or pretending to play. Molloy is as good a spokesman for this as anyone: without going so far as to say that I saw the world upside down (that would have been too easy) it is certain I saw it in a way inordinately formal, though I was far from being an aesthete, or an artist. (47) Playing at senility, playing at being, or at non-being as the case may be, are appropriate descriptions of the kind of play at work in the liter381

ary form of The Trilogy: it is not a direct play, but it is indirect, a playing at play, an abstract play. Perhaps the formalisation of the radical heterogeneity of the grotesque is an appropriate response to a world in which everyday concrete life is less important to experience than abstract, global structures, such as capital or even information. Wolfgang Kayser’s characterisation of the grotesque of modernism as a structure, the nature of which can be identified with “the estranged world” is an accurate, if overly negative summation of the abstract phase of the grotesque (184). For if it is true that in Beckett the abstract nature of his grotesque bears an indirect relation to the cultural sphere, and that this indirection can be described as “estranged”, then it is equally true that there is a tendency in his abstract grotesques to enhance the heterogeneous nature of the world, the self and the not-self, through his ability to make ordered wholes. This enhancement of the heterogeneous nature of the world through an aesthetic enterprise inevitably carries with it a political dimension: in the case of The Trilogy, it takes the form of anarchy, even though the abstractness of its grotesque dictates that the work’s relation to the cultural sphere is indirect. And while the traditional concept of grace seems to lie at a very far remove from all of Beckett’s work, his preoccupation with the gracefulness of a puppet or marionette, as James Knowlson remarks, seems to imply the possibility of a kind of immanent grace deriving from the aesthetic principle of the abstract grotesque (277-85). Like the other phases of the grotesque, the abstract grotesque is concerned with being a mode of discovery, a means of uncovering, possibly of escape. In Beckett, this usage of the grotesque tends towards abstraction: not away from the concrete, but towards the concrete in general. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the abstract grotesque is the singularity of the heterogeneous world it evokes. Sir Thomas Browne once famously remarked that there are no grotesques in nature, perhaps commenting on the artificiality of the baroque, ornamental grotesque of his era, and the intrinsic humanism of satire. But the abstract grotesque in Beckett’s work begins at a point undefined and consistently, compassionately orients itself towards the concrete and especially towards the non-terminating end of being: the moment when a life may end, not with a mirror held to the mouth to be misted by a last breath, but held to the fundament to be clouded by that last, tragi-comic sigh (14). And if abstraction is a fundamental 382

characteristic of Beckett’s grotesque, then it is everywhere, and it is appropriate that the last word on the grotesque belongs to Molloy, who may or may not belong to Samuel Beckett: “There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common (15).” Notes 1.

See Ayers (1998), Thobo-Carlsen (2001) and Hornung (1987) for recent examples.

2.

See Thomson (1972) 1-24 as an example.

3.

Canto XXXIV, ll. 91-3. For reasons known only to herself, Sayers opines that “we may perhaps, without offence, explain that the “point” was the centre of gravity, which was situated precisely at Satan’s navel.” (290n)

4.

Shukman notes that “The Russian word here translated as implies is podrazumevaemoe, lit. (under-mind-ed)” (Bakhtin 1983, 12n). Abbott’s concept of the “intercalated or non-retrospective narrative”, which he calls a mode, relies on two fictions: that the narrative we read is written by at least one of its principal characters and that the time of its writing is contained by the time of the events recorded.” In Abbott’s estimate, Malone Dies is the extremest example he knows and is tempted to call it “travesty or grotesque satire” (1983, 71). The simultaneity of the writing of the narrative with the grotesque, bodily process of dying is an example of enthymemic “under-mindedness”.

5.

Henning writes that “Robert Harrison in his Samuel Beckett’s Murphy: A Critical Excursion (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1968) was perhaps the first to describe Murphy as a Menippean Satire” (203n).

6.

Molloy equates the surd of pi with the peace which comes from being beyond knowing anything: “It is then the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last, but I would rather not affirm anything on this subject.” (59-60).

383

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter, “The Harpooned Notebook: Malone Dies,” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Pierre Astier et al. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983), 71-79. Adorno, Theodor, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann , trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992). Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy 1: Hell, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). Ayers, Carolyn Jursa, “An Interpretive Dialogue: Beckett’s ‘First Love’ and Bakhtin’s Categories of Meaning” in SBT/A 7, “Beckett Versus Beckett” ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Bakhtin School Papers – Russian Poetics in Translation, Volume 10, ed. Ann Shukman (Colchester: RPT Publications, 1983). –, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984) (1984a). –, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) (1984b). Beckett, Samuel, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, (London: Picador, 1976). Branham, Robert Bracht, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989). Cavell, Stanley, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame” in Must We Mean What We Say?2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). Critchley, Simon, Very Little – Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, (London: Routledge, 1997). Henning, Sylvie Debevec, Beckett’s Critical Complicity: Carnival Contestation and Tradition, (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1988). Hornung, Alfred, “Reading One/Self: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet” in Exploring Postmodernism: Selected Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism at the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress, Paris, 20-24 August 1985 ed. Matei Calinescu & Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987).

384

Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974). Kayser, Wolfgang, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963). Kenner, Hugh, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973). Kleist, Heinrich von, “The Puppet Theatre” in Selected Writings, trans. and ed. David Constantine (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 416. Knowlson, James, “Beckett and Kleist’s Essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’” in Knowlson, James & Pilling, John. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, (London: John Calder, 1979). Nussbaum, Martha C, “Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love” in Love’s Knowledge, (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). Ong, Walter J., Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971). Thobo-Carlsen, John, “Beckett’s Dialogic ‘Design; and Rhetoric of Impotence” in SBT/A 11, “Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000” ed. Angela Moorjani & Carola Veit (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2001). Thomson, Philip, The Grotesque, (London: Methuen , 1972). Volosinov, V.N, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, trans. I. R. Titunik, ed I.R. Titunik and Neal H. Bruss (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976).

385

SAMUEL BECKETT'S THE UNNAMABLE: The Story of that Impossible Place Named Silence Amir Ali Nojoumian

The Unnamable is the story of a search to define and name oneself. This article examines the role of language in this regard, elaborates the notion of ‘beyond’ and its possibility, and finally assesses the possibility of silence ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ language and being. I argue that silence is ‘the promise’ that the language of the novel constantly makes, yet is never able to fulfil. Silence (and death) paradoxically motivates language and becomes part of (inside) the language of the text while always pointing to the outside. In order to discuss the above ‘signifying forces’ of the novel, it seems inevitable to read the novel in the light of deconstruction.

I shall have to speak of things which I cannot speak. [...] I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never. (Beckett, 294) Death strolls between letters. (Derrida 1978, 72) Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable is a monologue told by an unnamable narrator. The fact that it is narrated by one person is, of course, not so certain. The narrator in parts is called Mahood, and in parts Worm, but his search for his ‘self’ makes us less certain about his connection with either of these two. In fact, Mahood and Worm seem to function as foils – or “vice-existers” (Beckett, 317) as the narrator calls them – in order to enable him to situate himself outside so as to see himself: “Mahood. Before him there were others, taking themselves for me” (Beckett, 317). The novel is about the search to define and name oneself, to examine the role of language in this definition, to

look at the ‘beyond’ and examine the possibility of it, and finally to assess the possibility of silence within and beyond language and being. The novel seems to be derived from the voices inside the narrator. The voices sometimes do not seem to be addressed to a reader, but in fact address themselves to the self. And the dialogue between the voice inside and consciousness seems to be the way the self tries to find his name. This self-searching is the main motivation for speaking during the first half of the novel which gradually overlaps and becomes overshadowed by the search for silence and peace. The Unnamable is also closely linked to the main themes of negative theology. Although Beckett always resisted any assimilation between his works and theological discourse, his writings contain strong biblical themes and allusions. The title phrase, ‘the unnamable’, as the first point, can be attributed to both God and différance. Yet, it is not simply an allusion; it deals with the same mystical themes of negation, the limits of language and self, the beyond and the impossible. The mystic wants to reject language and speaking (because language is inadequate to tell us anything about truth, unity, beyond, and so on). Similarly the narrator of The Unnamable starts by saying “I shall have to banish them in the end, the beings, things, shapes, sounds and lights with which my haste to speak has encumbered this place. In the frenzy of utterance the concern with truth” (Beckett, 302). However, one should note that although the structure of the quest in both is the same, as I will demonstrate later, the way the narrator looks at the world beyond, as well as the questions of truth and unity in The Unnamable, is fundamentally different from negative theology. The Unnamable is an example of literary discourse with close relations to apophatic discourse. While dealing with the theme of ineffability and negation throughout, the structure of the novel also demonstrates, in practice, the limitations and ‘pains’ of both language and self. It unfolds and practises three main points: 1) The language of the novel is based on aporias and paradoxes. Beckett puts dualisms into question. The oppositions of body/spirit, negation/affirmation, silence/speaking, self/other, subject/object are recurrent motifs of the novel that are constantly being deconstructed. 2) The negation of the subject (self) is juxtaposed with the negation of language. They are both under erasure. I and more generally the name are persistently negated throughout the novel along with the language emerging 388

through (and in spite of) the self’s struggle to silence it. 3) The impossible and the impossibility of beyond are the main motifs of the novel. The novel tells us the story of an impossible place named ‘silence’. I would argue that silence is ‘the promise’ that the language of the novel constantly makes yet is never able to fulfil. Silence – and its connotation, death – becomes part of (inside) the language of the text while always pointing to the outside. The Unnamable is thus about three things, as Beckett’s narrator tells us: “in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of” (Beckett, 400). The Unnamable is the story of the self who strives for silence but is obliged to go on. Aporias and paradoxes of The Unnamable The structure and the logic of the argument in The Unnamable is built upon an unorthodox relation between oppositions, i.e. paradoxes and aporias. From the very first page, the narrator warns us that the negations and affirmations here are not kept separate or confirmed in their own place. He tells us that he is unable to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to questions easily. He asks a few fundamental questions to begin with and leaves them unanswered until the end: What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? [...] With the yesses and noes it is difficult, they will come back to me as I go along and how, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception. (Beckett, 293-4) The narrator has a real problem with affirmative and negative statements throughout the novel. The logic in the novel is based on suggesting a position and immediately overturning it. For most of the ‘opinions’ and ‘emotions’, we can easily find contradictory statements. In other words, the structure of the novel is primarily based on the undecidability of meanings and intentions and the constantly oscillating negative and affirmative remarks: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, 418). Wolfgang Iser asserts this point in his reading of The Unnamable: “The moment one tries to restrict [Beck389

ett’s texts] to a specific meaning they slide away in a new direction” (1974a, 258). Iser elsewhere points to the same logic when he argues that the structure of the novel is a “relentless process of negation [...] a ceaseless rejection and denial of what has just been said” (1974b, 707). As Shira Wolosky correctly contends, this logic not only demonstrates the logic of the narrator but it also challenges the readings of the novel as it defies any kind of closure for these readings: “This unrelenting process of retraction grips not only the narrators, but also the reader, who must ceaselessly undo his own readings. Every construction for interpreting the text must be constantly reviewed and revised” (67). I think it is important that any commentary or reading of The Unnamable should take note that to read this kind of discourse is possible only if we allow paradoxes into the commentary, and eventually unfold and deconstruct these paradoxes and double binds. In order to give an example of the way these oppositions have been read, let us look at the classic commentaries by Hugh Kenner. Kenner has interpreted Beckett’s plays with the opposition of subject/object on the basis of the Cartesian duality of mind and existence (130-131). In the Cartesian thought, ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ are in the relation of cause and effect. Yet, Beckett’s the Unnamable neither thinks nor is in this world. I believe Beckett’s point of departure from Cartesian logic is the way the ‘self’ finally situates himself: “in the middle” of this duality. The Unnamable is between the object and the subject. Through this, he shatters or deconstructs this duality as well. This paradox is blatantly against the Cartesian epistemology. Therefore, the following reading is based on the assumption that the novel unfolds while the language and the self both situate themselves in the middle of oppositions. Towards the end of the novel, the Unnamable finally manages to become close to where he thinks he has stood all the time: Perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other side the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either. 390

(Beckett, 386) The above lines are interestingly very close to Derrida’s notions of ‘hymen’ and ‘tympan’. The Unnamable finally situates himself as being inside and outside, being always at the threshold. And as we have learnt from Derrida’s paradoxes, the threshold (the tympanum) is where negation and affirmation meet and coexist. For Derrida, ‘tympan’ is the place where the inside and the outside are not clearly defined. “Tympan” as the first article in the collection of articles, Margins of Philosophy, points to the way Derrida tries to situate the limits and margins of philosophy (‘tympanizing’ philosophy) as tympans that signify the inside and the outside (1982). Beckett’s story finally ends with being at the threshold: “you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story” (Beckett, 418). The ‘threshold’ of the story is that thin line between the world and beyond. The end of the novel is where the narrator has always been standing: at the edge of here and there. As I will argue later, silence as beyond, on the one hand, is a counterpart to the language of the self, and, on the other hand, it remains far from language because it requires the negation of language and being. Self and language as counterparts One of my main contentions regarding the novel is that in The Unnamable, the self and words are constantly placed next to one another where their negation, their limits, and their movements are examined in a parallel way. In other words, the limits of language are juxtaposed with the limits of being and the world. The novel starts with the questions of language and self. Yet from the middle of the novel onwards, the question of silence and the place to go beyond in the light of language, self, and knowledge becomes important to the narrator. At this point, I will present ten theses regarding The Unnamable and their relation to the paradox of negation. These ten theses are divided into two groups: the first five explore the relation between subject and language and the next five examine the motif of silence. 1) One lives in words and in self without knowing either of them. One’s knowledge of oneself is based on words. 391

The Unnamable is the story of soul-searching: “All these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when [...] I should have spoken of me and of me alone” (Beckett, 305). From the very first pages, the narrator realises that his name and self are not stable, predetermined, centred entities: “I like to think I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain” (Beckett, 297). Therefore, the self ends up building itself (or hopes to build itself) based on the words on the page. Yet the outcome is that the self effaces itself in the process of writing. While the self is itself a word or caught in words, it wishes to be in a wordless state (silence). In Wolosky’s terms, the self becomes “ineradicably linguistic” (128-9): I’m in words, made of words, others’ words [...] I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling [...] I am they, all of them, [...] nothing else, yes, something else, [...] something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, [...] where nothing stirs, nothing speaks. (Beckett, 390) Language and self are both impossible for the narrator to ‘know’ since he is imprisoned within both of them: “Words, he says he knows they are words. But how can he know, who has never heard anything else” (Beckett, 358)? This helpless state continues until the very end of the novel: “it has not yet been our good fortune to establish with any degree of accuracy what I am, where I am, whether I am words among words, or silence in the midst of silence, to recall only two of the hypotheses launched in this connection” (Beckett, 392). 2) Limits of existence are the same as the limits of language. The narrator is imprisoned in this inability and inadequacy yet keeps speaking since he has nothing else to do: “you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me” (Beckett, 418). The inadequacy of expressing oneself is adjacent to the inability to find a name for oneself. The narrator, whose identity changes a number of times throughout the novel, rejects the ability of language to formulate a name for himself. The Unnamable tries tragically to define his being based on his words and simultaneously tells us about 392

the limits of language itself. He knows that the only thing he has in his hands to define the ineffable is temporal language, i.e. through the temporal pace of language, through the narrative of words. Although the theme of the limit of language is a prevalent one in the novel, I believe many critics have come to wrong conclusions. As Shira Wolosky reminds us, the main corpus of works on Beckett is based on the assumption that Beckett’s texts are all about the inability of words to convey the ‘essence’ of the ‘true self’ (82-3). However, I believe that these critics look at the self and the name as the “hyperessential” (as in onto-theology) that cannot possibly be explained in language. Let me mention two exemplary readers that Wolosky invokes. For instance, Federman believes that Beckett is in fact dealing with a “universal problem, [...] the dilemma of existence above and beyond all physical and linguistic limitations”, that explains “the inadequacy of language as a means of artistic communication” (Wolosky, 82). Wolosky also mentions Ross Chambers who thinks that the narrator wishes for “a new language, of timelessness and speechlessness”, a true “language of the self”, and “the silence of eternal selfpossession” (83). But do the characters in Beckett’s writings in fact look for a pure notion of reality, truth or self-hood, i.e. a pure name (Wolosky, 83)? Although, at the beginning, the Unnamable is in search of his name, he later finds out that this is not only possible, but that the self is always inscribed within other pronouns. Therefore, the ideal state of self or truth is already shattered in the course of the novel and is replaced with the search for silence. 3) One knows that in order to ‘go on’ (breathe, live) one has to speak. The self’s constant questioning of the significance of ‘going on’ is not only an existential question but also a question directed at his writing. The Unnamable questions both the extent to which one must carry on using language and carry on ‘being’: “I have nothing to do, that is to say nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak” (Beckett, 316). The narrator speaks in an endless manner waiting to be put into silence by words (the novel of over one hundred pages has only seventeen paragraphs which consist of a stream of short sentence-phrases). The long string of words on the page shows us the 393

self’s obligation to speak in order to ‘be’ as if to have a short pause in between – even for thinking in advance about what to say – might end in non-being: “One starts things moving without a thought of how to stop them. In order to speak” (Beckett, 301-302). In fact, one can compare the flow of the sentences in The Unnamable to the flow of breathing. The self speaks (or rather, he ‘is’) in language. Steven Connor correctly argues that the only thing the narrator has is speaking, and yet speaking cannot evoke the self and his name at all: “Speaking is the only means available for knowing the self, but, at the same time it only ever allows the articulation of a borrowed self, since one can never speak with one’s own voice” (74). This statement echoes Derrida’s argument that there is always a gap and a delay between what the text is meant to say and what constrains the text to mean. In The Unnamable, we read: “I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know” (Beckett, 309). 4) Language affects the self and vice versa. Language and the self define one another. Language and the world determine each other’s limits, as Witgenstein reminds us: “The limits of my language means the limits of my world. [...] We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either” (115: 5.6-5.61). In The Unnamable, language and the subject are not only studied in a parallel position but they also affect one another: “I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge” (Beckett, 305). While the words are defined and used by the narrator, they also become the defining factor for him. In other words, the self tries to define himself through words. For the narrator of The Unnamable, to destroy life (existence) is the same as to destroy language. This relation is also of an exclusive nature. Language is stopped for the self to begin, or the words are used to forget the self: “Mean words, and needless, from the mean old spirit, I invented love, music, the smell of flowering currant, to escape from me” (Beckett, 307). 5) To define or know language or self, one has to see the other selves, words or pronouns. The Unnamable is in search of his name and identity or, more importantly, a proof for his existence. He first understands that his name is inscribed within other subjects. Therefore, he embarks on first identi394

fying who he is not: “First I’ll say what I’m not, that’s how they taught me to proceed, then what I am” (Beckett, 328). This act of ‘unnaming’ carries on through the novel. The narrator unnames himself even in the shape of pronouns: “Someone says you, it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me” (Beckett, 408). Ironically, the narrator takes the word ‘me’ as the self and as a pronoun as well. Gradually throughout the novel, the Unnamable realises that to find his self as a singular unity seems more and more an impossible task simply because words and subject alike are defined through other words and subjects: “I have no language but theirs, no, perhaps I’ll say it, even with their language” (Beckett, 328). His name depends on other pronouns: “I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I” (Beckett, 407). He tells us that he is neither Murphy, Watt, nor Mercier. This is followed by a list of negative attributes that eventually amounts to total nothingness: “I never desired, never sought, never suffered, never partook in any of that, never knew what it was to have, things, adversaries, mind, senses” (Beckett, 328). Wolosky argues that pronouns, like any other words, only mean anything within “a web of syntax”, a web that entangles not only the words but which the self is strongly attached to and “can never finally evade” (127): “In a sense, his [Beckett’s] pronouns are nonreferential, underscoring their grammatical function rather than pointing beyond themselves as though to some fixed, extralinguistic identity” (126). This treatment of the subjective pronouns as part of the linguistic structure reinforces Beckett’s interweaving of human identity and language. In other words, the motif of pronouns that are always in the way of the Unnamable’s quest point to both the multiplicity of language and subject: someone says you, it’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it’s a kind of pronoun too, it isn’t that either, I’m not that either, let us leave all that, forget about all that, it’s not difficult, our concern is with someone, or our concern is with something, now we’re getting it, someone or something that is not there, or that is not anywhere [...] no one can speak of that, you speak of yourself, someone speaks of himself, that’s it, in the singular, a single one. (Beckett, 408) 395

As a result, the Unnamable searches for ‘me’ through other ‘subjects’: “It’s I who am doing this to me, I who am talking to me about me [...] there’s someone there, someone talking to you, about you, about him, then a second, then a third [...] these figures just to give you an idea, talking to you, about you, about them” (Beckett, 398). The self cannot define itself separately; there are always other names and subjects that relate themselves to him. This leads to the multiplicity and multiplication of the self, as Wolosky argues (127). This multiplication happens all the time; there is no singularity for either the text or the self. Yet, more importantly, the self depends purely on words to tell us and tell himself about who he is. This aptly accords with the way language works within the novel. Words are in need of one another, yet all are entangled in the syntax. The search for something beyond language ends in more words. Therefore, the search for a singular self within the novel is juxtaposed with the search for something beyond language. The impossible space named silence The Unnamable illustrates that language and self are counterparts in impossible search for a beyond. This is the same paradox one can see in apophatic discourse. The negation of language, despite its pervasiveness in The Unnamable, is not the end. Beckett reminds us constantly that the self is part of the play of language and in fact there is no alternative to this aporia. He must go on writing but this writing is deeply inscribed in the promise of silence. The Unnamable does not speak of the transcendental self nor does it show us the way to a ‘beyond’ of language as if silence is a close counterpart to language and is not its opposite. It deconstructs the opposition of language and silence telling us that they are inscribed within one another. The next five theses explain this ‘inscription’.

396

6) One strives to go beyond language towards silence as the moment of self-recognition. Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader points to the search for selfhood within the novel and reminds us of “an extraordinary paradox”: The novels show how it becomes increasingly impossible for their narrators to conceive themselves – i.e., to find their own identity; and yet at the same time it is precisely this impossibility that leads them actually to discover something of their own reality. (174) To a reader of Derrida, this formula seems very familiar. The impossibility of “going on” (aporia) once again shows us the way forward. But, does the Unnamable gain any self-recognition in the end? I would think that although the structure of Iser’s paradox works in the novel, the novel does not necessarily end in a discovery. Instead, I would argue that the narrator’s search for identity gradually becomes overshadowed by another impetus – to achieve silence and peace: I know that no matter what I say the result is the same, that I’ll never be silent, never at peace. Unless I try once more, just once more, one last time, to say what has to be said, about me, I feel it’s about me, perhaps that’s the mistake I make, perhaps that’s my sin, so as to have nothing more to say, nothing more to hear, till I die. (Beckett, 397-98) Silence, as the death of language and the death of the self, is ultimately what the Unnamable longs for, especially when he fails in his search for selfhood as I discussed above. Silence is a “relief from the deceptions and travails of the world of utterance. [...] Words are denounced as opposing the self that they represent” (Wolosky, 120). The Unnamable, in the very first pages, reflects on the possibility of becoming silent and becomes concerned as to what would happen to his search for self: “Talking of speaking, what if I went silent? What would happen to me then” (Beckett, 309)? The Unnamable assumes that silence can lead him to selfrecognition or replace his search for self-recognition: “I’ll speak of me 397

when I speak no more” (Beckett, 396). In other words, the narrator is convinced that if he can achieve silence he can also define his self. Silence becomes the “only chance [...] of saying something at last that is not false”. It tells him the way “to get back to me, back to where I am waiting for me” (Beckett, 324). This idea of silence as selfrecognition becomes so forceful in the novel that at one of the final points, the narrator dreams of a self that is “made of silence” and wishes to be he: he who neither speaks nor listens, who has neither body nor soul, it’s something else he has, he must have something, he must be somewhere, he is made of silence [...] he’s in the silence, he’s the one to be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the one to speak, but he can’t speak, then I could stop, I’d be he, I’d be the silence, I’d be back in the silence, we’d be reunited, his story the story to be told, but he has no story, he hasn’t been in story, it’s not certain, he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable. (Beckett, 417) 7) Beyond (silence) is the place of reunion; it is the beginning. Silence is not only what the self is looking for but it is also what he wants to be united with. It resembles immanence, the ineffable state of existence where the only words that exist are the unspoken ones: “I’ve shut my doors against them [...] perhaps that’s how I’ll find silence and peace at last” (Beckett, 395). This theme unfolds more and more as we get near to the end of the story: the attempt must be made, in the old stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his, it must be there somewhere, it must have been mine, before being his, I’ll recognize it, in the end I’ll recognize it, the story of the silence that he never left, that I should have never left, that I may never find again, that I may find again, then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place, the silence, the end, the beginning again. (Beckett, 417) Gradually, silence takes the role of that transcendental ideal which is longed for and cannot be achieved: “I am going silent, for want of 398

air[...] this time is the true silence, the one I’ll never have to break any more, when I won’t have to listen any more, [...] the one I have tried to earn, that I thought I could earn. [...] the real silence at last” (Beckett, 397). Silence and death eventually become “a blessed place to be” (Beckett, 378). It is not surprising, then, to see that critics take silence as the God of Beckett’s negative theology: “This is the silence which some have praised as the very union with truth beyond speech that mystical transcendence seeks” (Wolosky, 120). However, what follows in my argument takes this idealist view into a Derridean paradox. 8) Beyond (silence) is the place of non-knowledge. One can only reach silence (beyond) when one does not know anything anymore. Another point which contributes to taking silence as an immanent space of beyond is its equation with non-knowledge. The notion of non-knowledge that has always been associated with the garden of Eden and knowledge as the reason for the Fall could be reinvoked here. In The Unnamable, silence is the place where knowledge does not exist: “in the silence you don’t know” (Beckett, 418). It is the place of “feeling nothing, knowing nothing, capable of nothing, wanting nothing” (Beckett, 351) and again “between them would be the place to be, where you suffer, rejoice, at being bereft of speech, bereft of thought, and feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that would be a blessed place to be, where you are” (Beckett, 377-78). Silence is not only the place of non-knowledge but the place one does not have knowledge of: “This silence they are always talking about, from which supposedly he came, to which he will return when his act is over, he doesn’t know what it is, nor what he is meant to do, in order to deserve it” (Beckett, 379-80). One can also note, “what can be said of the real silence, I don’t know, that I don’t know what it is, that there is no such thing, that perhaps there is such a thing, yes, that perhaps there is, somewhere, I’ll never know” (Beckett, 412). And finally these two points are joined together when the Unnamable says: “in the silence you don’t know [...] I’ve journeyed without knowing it” (Beckett, 418).

399

9) Silence paradoxically motivates language. As I have already shown, the search for selfhood ends in the emergence of future ‘pronouns’. Similarly, the search for silence (concealing) ends with the multiplication of language that is spread over more than one hundred pages: “One starts speaking as if it were possible to stop at will. It is better so. The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue” (Beckett, 301-302). This wish for silence, expressed on nearly every single page of the novel in one way or another, reminds us of the main theme of the novel: ineffability. However, this place of silence is finally a place of affirmation, a place of “going on”: “It will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, 418). Shira Wolosky argues that, “the movement into silence constantly impels the texts into further utterance. [...] Beckett’s work, in denying self-denial and negating negativity, finally reemerges toward affirmation […]” (132-3). Wolosky, then, suggests that “Beckett’s texts arrive at a sense that silence not only cannot be accomplished, but that silence is not an accomplishment” (132-3). I would contend, however, that the impossible silence is, indeed, an ‘accomplishment’ and an inevitable one at that. 10) Silence is the impossible place since it does not belong to ‘being’ or language; it is also inevitable since language (and our breathing) always already promises silence.

My final argument, here, is that silence in Beckett’s text acts like the Derridean paradox of negation. Silence is an impossible state yet, throughout the discourse, its inevitability is constantly promised. As I demonstrated earlier, the Unnamable strives for silence: to silence himself. Yet this is precisely what is not achievable as long as there are words to be said. The narrator wants to leave the words to get united with himself, but leaving language equals leaving the world. He considers all the possibilities: If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? Then I might escape being gnawed to death [...] But it seems impos400

sible to speak and say nothing. [...] In a word, shall I be able to speak of me and of this place without putting an end to us, shall I ever be able to go silent, is there any connection between these two questions? (Beckett, 305) The theme of the impossible is closely linked to the theme of silence. The Unnamable wants to go beyond expression: “Overcome […] the fatal leaning toward expressiveness” (Beckett, 394). However, he becomes gradually convinced that to go beyond language and thinking is impossible. I believe that the promise of silence that pervades the novel functions in the same way as Derrida’s ‘promise’. The promise of silence is accompanied by every single utterance of language. The words in this novel point always already towards this silence, however impossible to fulfil: “I want it [the voice] to go silent, it wants to go silent, it can’t, it does for a second, then it starts again, that’s not the real silence [...]” (Beckett, 412). The aporia is that silence cannot be achieved through language. This is the problem of the narrator since the only thing he can hold on to is words. Eventually, he seems to decide that he has to “go on” with the words till he is stopped. It is only then that the impossible place of silence arrives – ‘impossible’ because it happens “outside the text”. To achieve silence is to know it and possess it (like a final truth), but how are we to know it if it does not exist within language? This is, in short, the paradox of apophatic discourse and The Unnamable. Regarding this point, Leslie Hill argues: “The end of speaking, in the shape of that strange figure of truth and silence promulgated by the narrator of L’Innommabale, is somehow already located within the process of speaking itself” (82). But is silence really still within language? If that was the case, the narrator had little problem in achieving it. I have to disagree with Hill and argue that silence, truth or death is standing at the ‘threshold’ of the text in the shape of the ‘tympan’. Silence or death is inscribed within language and at the same time it is the outcast of language, it is the negative and the positive of language. It can only exist at the point that we cease ‘being’ yet it exists only within language and being. And it seems that the narrator of The Unnamable gradually becomes more and more aware of this aporia and double bind. Therefore, silence becomes impossible and inevitable: 401

I’m not outside, I’m inside, I’m in something, I’m shut up, the silence is outside, outside inside, there is nothing but here, and the silence outside, nothing but this voice and the silence all round, no need of walls, yes, we must have walls, I need walls, good and thick, I need a prison. (Beckett, 414) This forceful undecidability is a sign of the double notions of death or silence. The Unnamable is not sure if his quest towards silence is an act of courage or cowardice: “with you, you might have the courage not to go silent, no, it’s to go silent that you need courage, for you’ll be punished, punished for having gone silent, and yet you can’t do otherwise than go silent” (Beckett, 398). Let us compare the above with the following: you want yourself, you want yourself in your own little corner, it’s not love, not curiosity, it’s because you’re tired, you want to stop, travel no more, seek no more, lie no more, speak no more, close your eyes, but your own, in a word lay your hands on yourself (Beckett, 403-404) Perhaps these mixed feelings regarding silence have led critics to be uncertain about the motive behind silence. David Hesla, in The Shape of Chaos, writes that he is unable to find “the remarkable impetus” of the novel (115). Steven Connor seems to give an answer to Hesla’s question in his book, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Connor sees the technique of repetition as the only impetus the narrator has in hand to find his selfhood (72-8). Connor brings a few examples from the novel including “if I could remember what I have said I could repeat it, if I could learn something by heart I’d be saved, I have to keep on saying the same thing and each time it’s an effort, the seconds must be alike and each one is infernal” (Beckett, 399). Repetition is an integral rhetorical device in the novel. It is not only inevitable because of the circular narrative of the novel, it also suggests that perhaps we are waiting in vain for a quest to take place. I would say the “remarkable impetus” of the novel derives from the obligation to go on towards silence. Yet, silence and death are accompanying the 402

reader and the narrator from the very beginning. Derrida writes about this “lapse”, “silence”, or death in discourse as an impetus itself: The caesura does not simply finish and fix meaning. [...] the caesura makes meaning emerge. It does not do so alone, of course; but without interruption – between letters, words, sentences, books – no signification could be awakened. Assuming that Nature refuses the leap, one can understand why Scripture will never be Nature. It proceeds by leaps alone. Which makes it perilous. Death strolls between letters. To write, what is called writing, assumes an access to the mind through having the courage to lose one’s life, to die away from nature. (1978, 72) The Unnamable has always already been standing at a position of a ‘tympan’, unsure if he is inside or outside illustrating Beckett's parody of modernist wishful thinking. From the very outset of the novel, death and silence are inscribed and evoked, while they also remain an ‘other’ to the Unnamable who desires them till the very end. Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder Publications, 1994). Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Derrida, Jacques, “Edmund Jabès and the Question of the Book,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 6478. –, “Tympan”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982), ix-xxix. Hesla, David H., The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1971). Hill, Leslie, Beckett’s Fiction in Indifferent Words (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1990). Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1974). (1974a)

403

–, “The Pattern of Negativity in Beckett’s Prose,” in Georgia Review 29.3 (1974), 706-719. (1974b) Kenner, Hugh, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: John Calder, 1961). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).

Wolosky, Shira, Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995).

404

BECKETT’S ENDLESSNESS: Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime Russell Smith

This article considers the pervasiveness of the theme of ending both in Beckett’s work and in Beckett criticism. Accepting the view that Beckett’s experiments with narrative undermine the possibility of closure, the article examines the nature of Beckettian temporality, its sense of “finality without end”, in relation to the temporality of postmodernism as discussed by Fredric Jameson and Frank Kermode. Drawing on the work of Jean-François Lyotard, the article seeks to understand Beckettian temporality as neither a continuation of, nor a rupture with, the time of modernity, but a “rewriting” akin to Freud’s interminable analysis.

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on” (Beckett 1958a, 44). Hamm’s words in Endgame define as well as any others the nature of temporality in Beckett’s works: simultaneously a longing to end and an imperative to go on. As The Unnamable’s narrator says, “The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue” (Beckett 1958b, 15). Although a whole series of Beckett’s works, from The Unnamable through to Stirrings Still, set themselves the task of making an ending, it is widely accepted that ends, however desired, are never attained in Beckett’s fiction, and indeed that Beckett’s experiments with narrative form explicitly undermine the possibility of coming to an end. By ending repeatedly, they fail to end definitively. If Beckettian temporality is, in Moran’s fine phrase, “finality without end” (Beckett 1955, 152), what can it mean to come “after Beckett”, as criticism surely must do, since Beckett never comes to an end? How can we conceive of Beckett’s work in a way that neither condemns this endlessness as a denial of history, nor celebrates it in an incantation that signals a foreclosure of criticism?

This article consists of two main parts. The first part, in three sections, reviews the ways in which Beckett’s works subvert the notion of an ending, examines the rhetoric of ending in Beckett criticism, and then considers Fredric Jameson’s condemnation of postmodern (and in passing, Beckettian) temporality as a kind of paralysis of historical development. The second part, also in three sections, considers Beckett’s narratives in the light of Frank Kermode’s classic study The Sense of an Ending, and then turns to the work of Jean-François Lyotard for two notions useful for re-thinking the relation between Beckettian time and postmodernity: the concepts of “rewriting modernity” and the “postmodern sublime”. Part 1 Beckett’s narratives evade closure in various ways, both in the characteristic structures of their “non-endings”, and in the ways the texts as a whole continually displace narrative sequence or development. At the same time, however, Beckett’s narratives continually wrestle with teleological tropes, with forms of narrative that would seem to provide what H. Porter Abbott calls “an arrow of meaning” (Abbott, 110). Among Beckett’s characteristic “non-endings”, a first example might be those texts that end with a repetition suggesting circularity, such as Waiting for Godot, most famously, but also, in a more extreme form, Play, which consists of the same text performed twice, suggesting an endless, hellish repetition. A second form is the ending presented as an arbitrary cut in a continuous and apparently endless stream of speech, such as the terminal “I’ll go on” of The Unnamable, or, in Not I, the fade-out on the words “pick it up”, signifying a resumption of the flow of speech (Beckett 1985a, 223). A third form is the text which breaks off suddenly, as if the jagged edge of an incomplete fragment, most notable in the texts Beckett published as fragments: the Texts for Nothing, the Fizzles, and From an Abandoned Work. A fourth form is the text which ends with a supplement, such as Watt’s famous addenda of “precious and illuminating material” (Beckett 1953, 247). The addenda destabilise the novel’s ending with what Derrida calls “the strange structure of the supplement” (Derrida, 23), undermining any unity and completeness the novel might have claimed. 406

A fifth form of non-ending relates to the characteristic texts of Beckett’s later period, most notably the “second trilogy” of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho. These texts enact a verbal creation and decreation of imagined worlds, in which, in Abbott’s words, the voice “packs up its construction” (Abbott, 115) at the end. Beginning with nothing – “Say a body. Where none” (Beckett 1983, 7) – the text constructs a world, perhaps even a narrative, only then to dismantle it, ending with the void with which it began. The gesture of erasure nevertheless leaves the cancelled contents faintly legible, as an “unlessenable least” (Beckett 1983, 36). Among Beckett’s strategies of narrative displacement, the most pervasive relates to the re-ordering of narrative sequence, in terms of both the sequence of events and the sequence of their narration (the relation between histoire and récit in the terms used by Gérard Genette). Thus Sam, the putative narrator of Watt, informs us at the beginning of Part IV that Watt “told the beginning of his story, not first, but second” and told the end of his story “not fourth, but third” (Beckett 1953, 215). This might lead us to assume that the “real” ending of the novel is the conclusion of Part III. But to complicate matters further, Sam informs us that Watt was in the habit of making inversions in the order of his speech – of letters in the word, of words in the sentence, of sentences in the period – leaving the “real” ending of Watt’s narrative completely indeterminable (Beckett 1953, 164168). Another more subtle means by which Beckett undermines the sense of an ending is the way in which, as Andrew Gibson notes, “the completed work flaunts its own paradoxically untidy incompleteness” (Gibson, 145). Bruno Clément calls this Beckett’s “rhetoric of illsaying” (Clément, 1994), arguing that the plethoric signs of narratorial incompetence in Beckett’s fictions – mistakes, corrections, hesitations, retractions, changes of plan and abandoned searches for le mot juste – combine to give the impression of the text as an unfinished draft, in which the ending, like the rest of the text, is provisional rather than definitive, an end “faute de mieux” (Clément 1996, 123). But perhaps the most characteristically “Beckettian” means by which Beckett destabilises ending is in the way his texts are permeated from start to finish by a rhetoric of ending. Thus Endgame begins: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (Beckettt 1958a, 12). Endings, or putative endings, ceaselessly 407

interrupt the course of Beckett’s narratives with their falsely dying cadences. In such texts, which become, in a sense, all ending, the conclusiveness of the final words is radically undermined: a definitive end cannot be reached precisely because ends are so continually rehearsed and unsuccessfully invoked. The two forms of teleology that characterise Beckett’s narratives are also widely familiar: the individual theme of the quest or journey, and the cosmic theme of entropic decay, the sense of “something […] taking its course” (Beckett 1958a, 17). Sometimes these themes are deployed in parallel, most notably in the trilogy, where Molloy presses on in search of his mother, and Moran in search of Molloy, in the face of advancing physical decrepitude; where both Malone and the voice of The Unnamable pursue their ill-defined goals in a world that is inexorably disintegrating. It is possible to see in Beckett’s later works a progressive undermining of these teleologies (although this itself is a teleological reading). The theme of the quest becomes simply the theme of walking, without goal, prompted by an inscrutable restlessness: the narrator of From an Abandoned Work says “I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way” (Beckett 1995, 155-56). So too, the theme of an embodied narrator’s entropic decay is replaced by a disembodied narration which constructs and dismantles its imaginary worlds, seemingly not subject to the vicissitudes of the body, or even the laws of the physical universe (the light and heat without source in the “cylinder pieces”, for instance). Arguing that Texts for Nothing, with their “wilful shredding of narrative linearity”, represent a turning point in Beckett’s fiction, H. Porter Abbott suggests that the inspiring genre of the Texts is “not the quest but the broad non-narrative category of the meditative personal essay” (Abbott, 107). If narrative is teleological, and requires an ending, the essay is inherently speculative, provisional, open-ended: Beckett’s fictions, and their bristling impatience with the conventions of narrative, can be read, not just as narratives, but as critical essays on narrative itself. *****

408

If Beckett’s narratives subvert the notion of ending, there are many ways in which critical discourse nevertheless constructs Beckett’s work as enacting endings. Firstly, Beckett’s work is often seen as bringing an end to modernism or modernity. Anthony Cronin’s biography calls Beckett The Last Modernist, and Richard Begam argues that Beckett’s five novels from Murphy to The Unnamable “provide the earliest and most influential literary expression we have of the ‘end of modernity’” (Begam, 3). Secondly, and as a corollary, Beckett’s work is also read in terms of the end of humanism, as contributing towards the “Death of Man”, when, as Michel Foucault writes in The Order of Things, “man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1973, 387). To cite just one example of this reading, Gabriele Schwab describes Beckett’s work as “a philosophical literature that explores the condition of the posthuman” (Schwab, 58), with the cylinder of The Lost Ones enacting “the end of the human as we know it” (Schwab, 60). Thirdly, another important theme of the end of humanism is the “death of the author” and the liberation of pure textuality, a project which Beckett’s writing is seen to enact in exemplary fashion. This is evident most notably in Michel Foucault’s use of the line – “What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking” (Beckett 1995, 109) – as the epigraph to the enormously influential essay “What is an Author?” (Foucault 1977, 113). A fourth influential reading sees Beckett’s work as enacting the end of narrative as such, or rather, of the kinds of narratives in which endings are possible. Thus Richard Begam writes of Malone Dies: “Every time the novel takes two steps forward, it takes one step back, and while it doggedly pursues its particular ‘ends’, it never decisively achieves them, since one of the things it wants to end is precisely the idea of ‘ends’” (Begam, 125-126). No doubt there are other “ends” with which Beckett’s work has been associated. However, all the readings outlined above may be broadly classified as poststructuralist, and consist in reading Beckett as a poststructuralist avant la lettre, an uncanny precursor of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. While the poststructuralist re-reading of Beckett has uncovered deep affinities between Beckett and poststructuralism, what I wish to explore further is the mode of temporal409

ity which governs these readings, and in particular, their use of a particular rhetorical locution: the “end of”, followed by a more or less weighty substantive – “modernity”, “humanism”, “the author”, “narrative”. One of the primary aims of poststructuralist criticism is precisely to question the logic of binaries that underpins the historical dialectic and the theme of revolution, which would posit epochal shifts such as the “end of modernity” as necessary stages in an unfolding teleology. Thus, for instance, Richard Begam is careful not to suggest that Beckett’s work is a definitive “overcoming” of modernism, and in particular of the figures of Joyce and Proust: Beckett uses these writers […] as points of reference in his own evolving dialogue with the modernism he seeks to overcome. But that overcoming does not occur – at least not in any ultimate sense – for the pentalogy ‘ends’, in effect, by not ending (“I can’t go on, I must go on”). (Begam, 7) Despite Begam’s precautions, however, it is notoriously difficult to avoid teleological language in making claims for Beckett as an uncanny precursor of poststructuralism. Thus Begam writes in his “Afterword”: In taking up these Beckettian pretexts and contexts, in developing them in his own uniquely philosophical and literary idiom, Derrida carries forward the postmodern project that Beckett first articulated at the end of World War II. (Begam, 186) This notion of a project being carried forward attributes, I think, a kind of instrumental teleology to Beckett’s work that is really not justified within the terms the work sets itself. By contrast, Anthony Uhlmann’s study Beckett and Poststructuralism is careful to situate Beckett, not as a precursor of poststructuralism, but as a contemporary, a writer whose intellectual preoccupations arise from historical conditions shared by the French theorists who came to prominence in the 1960s. 410

Nevertheless, the “rhetoric of ending” continues to permeate poststructuralist readings of Beckett. This is the paradoxical temporality of poststructuralism, littered with “end of…” formulae, but deeply suspicious of the “rhetoric of overcoming” characteristic of modernism. In the opening to one of the most influential theories of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson claims: The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. (Jameson, 1) Although Jameson sees postmodernism as a distinct historical epoch, characterised in part by its anti-modernism, he doesn’t see this “sense of an ending” as a positive “revolutionary” moment of rupture with the past, but as a “crisis in historicity” (Jameson, 25) where teleology has failed, where the historical sense has ground to a standstill. So too, Gianni Vattimo writes that postmodernism can be read, not only as something new in relation to the modern, but also as a dissolution of the category of the new – in other words, as an experience of ‘the end of history’ – rather than as the appearance of a different stage of history itself. (Vattimo, 4) Postmodernity thus has an ambiguous relation to modernity: being a product of modernity, postmodernity succeeds modernity and thus continues modernity’s project of exceeding itself. But as an antimodernity, postmodernity rejects modernity’s supreme values of innovation, the historical dialectic and the teleology of the avant-garde. Whereas in modernism the “sense of an ending” was simultaneously replete with the promise of historical recommencement, in postmodernism, the “sense of an ending unending” is symptomatic of histori411

cal paralysis: repetition, stasis, marking time. As I will argue in the second part of this essay, there may be more productive ways of thinking about postmodern temporality than the “end of history” model outlined here. First, however, I want to look further at modern and postmodern temporality through an examination of Beckett’s reading of Proust. Part 2 A key text for understanding Beckett’s approach to time, narrative, and the question of endings is his essay on Proust. It is sometimes underestimated how Beckett’s early essays on Proust and Joyce enabled him to formulate his own differences from them, even while paying credit to their achievements in dismantling the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. The key concept in Beckett’s reading of Proust is the notion of Habit, the self’s defence mechanism against the suffering caused by genuine perception: Habit is “the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of existence” (Beckett 1965, 19). Beckett opposes two terms – boredom and suffering: the boredom caused by Habit’s smothering of perception, and the suffering caused by experiences that pierce this defensive shield, “when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being” (Beckett 1965, 19). If Habit is able to adjust to circumstances, the incursions caused by the famous Proustian involuntary memory offer painfully pleasurable glimpses of a reality which the boredom of living habitually obscures: “in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal – the real” (Beckett 1965, 33). This awakened perception is explicitly defined by Beckett in terms reminiscent of Kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful: “The suffering of being: that is, the free play of every faculty” (Beckett 1965, 20). Beckett distinguishes Proust’s “inspired perception” (Beckett 1965, 84) from that of the “classical artist” who “raises himself artificially out of Time in order to give relief to his chronology and causality to his development” (Beckett 1965, 81). However, as Beckett is well aware, the revelations of Time Regained do, in fact, raise the narrator “artificially out of Time”: Proust’s “mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence” (Beckett 1965, 75), recasting the vast expanse of time elapsed in the Recherche in the retrospective 412

glow of boredom and suffering redeemed by the power of art. “The Proustian solution consists […] in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead. […] Time is not recovered, it is obliterated” (Beckett 1965, 75). There is a useful discussion of the nature of narrative time in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. Kermode distinguishes between two conceptions of time: chronos, which he defines as clock time, passing time, waiting time, “one damn thing after another” (Kermode, 47); and kairos, defined as “a point in time charged with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end”(Kermode, 47). Kairos is “our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future, in a common organisation” (Kermode, 46). The importance of kairos is, of course, a cornerstone of modernist aesthetics, which valued Bergsonian durée, the vivid, qualitative, subjective experience of lived time, over quantitative, objective, drearily rationalist “clock time”. Proust’s involuntary memories, like Joyce’s epiphanies or Woolf’s “moments of being”, are the realm of kairos. But if the modernists sought to discover outcrops of meaning and value in the dull grey sea of passing time, Beckett’s strategy is just the opposite: instead of transcending chronos by striving to present an elusive kairos, Beckett strips away the consolations of kairos to make us perceive the chronos underneath, the passing of time in all its painful, meaningless dullness. Time in Beckett is not an extratemporal arrangement of significant spots of time, but a relentless sequence of ordinary moments, in which any supposedly transcendent moment of ending, revelation, summation or closure is immediately replaced by another moment in which it is questioned, undermined, cancelled or forgotten: It’s the end that is the worst, no it’s the beginning that is the worst, then the middle, then the end, in the end it’s the end that is the worst, this voice that, I don’t know, it’s every second that is the worst, it’s a chronicle, the seconds pass, one after another, jerkily, no flow, they don’t pass, they arrive, bang, bang, they bang into you, bounce off, fall and never move again, when you have nothing left to talk about you talk of time, seconds of time, there are some people add 413

them together to make a life, I can’t, each one is the first, no the second, or the third … (Beckett 1958b, 151-52) This is a temporality in which, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “A New Refutation of Time”, “each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments” (Borges, 322). Or to take another example from Pozzo’s famous speech in Waiting for Godot: Have you not done tormenting we with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Beckett 1985b, 89) Thus Frank Kermode writes of Beckett’s temporality: “Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, ‘a passion without form or stations’ […]. It is a world crying out for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx” (Kermode, 115). Jameson associates this “series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (Jameson 27) with postmodernism’s crisis of historicity, and comments that “some of Beckett’s narratives are […] of this order, most notably Watt, where a primacy of the present sentence in time ruthlessly disintegrates the narrative fabric that attempts to reform around it” (Jameson, 28). For Jameson, this incapacity or unwillingness to make historical sense of the present amounts to an ideological refusal to confront contemporary reality. Jameson’s “epochal” model of postmodernism stresses its discontinuity, its rupture with modernism issuing in a historical impasse. Kermode, on the other hand, underlines Beckett’s continuity with the modernism of Proust: In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will 414

bounce. […] But of course it is this order, however ironised, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett’s point. (Kermode, 115) Where Jameson dismisses Beckett’s temporality as postmodern nihilism, Kermode seeks to rescue Beckett’s “signs of order” as a last-ditch recovery of a quasi-religious form of continuity. I would like to propose a different understanding of Beckettian temporality, based on the work of Jean-François Lyotard, that resists both Jameson’s “epochal” model of the end of history, and Kermode’s model of a “continuously transmitted idea of order”. One of the most influential definitions of postmodernity is JeanFrançois Lyotard’s formulation in The Postmodern Condition, where he associates postmodernity with an attitude of “incredulity towards meta-narratives” (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). While this aspect of Lyotard’s thesis has been widely influential – the collapse of meta-narratives leading to postmodernist scepticism about progress, enlightenment, the “unfinished project of modernity” – what is less often remarked is how Lyotard’s discussion of the postmodern subtly undermines its own epochal implications, its reading of the postmodern as a successor to modernism. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard makes the surprising claim: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (Lyotard 1984, 79). This construction of postmodernism as a latency within modernism is at odds with the epochal implications of the term itself, leading Lyotard later to revisit the concept: ‘Postmodern’ is probably a very bad term because it conveys the idea of a historical periodization. ‘Periodizing’ however, is still a ‘classic’ or ‘modern’ ideal. ‘Postmodern’ simply indicates a mood, or better, a state of mind. (Lyotard 1986-7, 209) Lyotard’s most notable rethinking of postmodernism is in the essay “Rewriting Modernity”. “Rewriting modernity”, Lyotard argues, is a 415

better way of understanding postmodernism because it emphasises the extent to which the postmodern is a work carried out within the terms of modernity: the postmodern is always implied in the modern because of the fact that modernity, modern temporality, comprises in itself an impulsion to exceed itself into a state other than itself. […] Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity. (Lyotard 1991, 25) Lyotard then goes on to distinguish two models of “re-writing”: “rewriting” as the revolutionary gesture of wiping the slate clean and starting the clock again from zero, and the model of “re-writing” associated with psychoanalysis, Durcharbeitung, or “working through”. Citing Freud, Lyotard further distinguishes between “repetition”, “remembering” and “working through”. If repetition is a kind of paralysis, the symptomatic temporality of the neurotic, the process of “remembering”, as an Oedipal search for the origin or hidden cause of one’s sufferings, is little better, tending merely to perpetuate the crime rather than putting an end to it (Lyotard 1991, 28). Instead, Lyotard stresses the value of the concept of Durcharbeitung, of “working through”, arguing that Freud himself abandons the ideal of a cure based on a definitive remembering of first causes, and instead “opens himself […] to the idea that the cure could be, must be, interminable” (Lyotard 1991, 30). Thus, for Lyotard, “contrary to remembering, working through would be defined as a work without end and therefore without will; without end in the sense in which it is not guided by the concept of an end” (Lyotard 1991, 30). For Lyotard, this is an essentially constructive process, a means of going on without succumbing to the desire for narrative closure. This model of “working through” seems to me a useful way of thinking about Beckett’s work, which can be read as a kind of critical “rewriting of modernity” that denies itself the solace of kairos, of an ending that would explain, illuminate and redeem Lost Time, that is dedicated, instead, simply to chronos, to putting “one damn thing after another”, to going on. ***** 416

Finally, a further distinction can be made between modernist and Beckettian time in terms of Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime. Kant’s definition of the sublime is based on its distinction from the beautiful: where the beautiful concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being “bounded”, the sublime is associated with the formless, with a quality of “unboundedness” (Kant, 265). The essence of the sublime is its endlessness: it is a vastness that cannot be apprehended all at once by the imagination; instead, the mind must draw upon its capacity of reason to comprehend the magnitude of the sublime, a process which involves a mingling of pleasure and displeasure: a displeasure arising from the failure of the imagination to grasp the object, and a pleasure arising from the confirmation of “the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers, over the greatest power of sensibility” (Kant, 269). In an aesthetic sense, therefore, the sublime is unpresentable: by definition it exceeds both perception and imagination, and can only be intuited by an exercise of rational thought. Lyotard distinguishes between modern and postmodern versions of the sublime. Arguing that modernism (Proust is one of his examples) is concerned with the task of enabling the perception “of something which does not allow itself to be made present” (Lyotard 1984, 80), Lyotard argues that, by figuring the unpresentable as “lost”, the modernist sublime is essentially nostalgic: It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognisable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept. (Lyotard 1984, 81) The Beckettian sublime, I would argue, inheres in its evocation of chronos. It is impossible for us to perceive the infinity of passing time; it is only by an effort of rational thought that we can comprehend even small magnitudes of elapsed time, such as the span of a 417

human life. Thus Beckett’s characters are always trying to calculate the number of minutes they have been alive, or the number of steps they have taken in a lifetime of aimless wandering, or the number of times they have encircled the earth. But the sublime also requires a painful sensation that alerts the senses to their incapacity to apprehend its immensity. To give just one example, one of my favourite passages in Waiting for Godot has always been the exchange between Vladimir and Estragon after the departure of Pozzo and Lucky: VLADIMIR: That passed the time. ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case. VLADIMIR: Yes, but not so rapidly.

(Beckett 1985b, 48) For a long time this last line irritated me. It seemed to rescue a harrowing perception of the indifference of chronos, of a time that “would have passed in any case”, with the platitudinous consolations of kairos (“time flies when you’re having fun”). Many years later I realised that, in the context of Beckett’s theatre, the last line – “Yes, but not so rapidly” – might be taken ironically. With its agonising temporality of waiting, its wearying pauses, and the sputtering exhaustion of its dialogue, the theatrical time of Waiting for Godot has been slowed down to the tempo of chronos: rather than it passing the time, time just passes, at the rate of exactly one second per second. Thus Beckett can be seen as rewriting the temporality of modernism, but with all the “modernity” taken out. Time is deprived of the values that belong to kairos: meaningfulness, transcendence, a specific relation to origins and ends. Stripped back to chronos, to isolated seconds of “one damn thing after another”, time is not obliterated, it is revealed.

418

Works cited Abbott, H. Porter, “Beginning Again: The Post-Narrative Art of Texts for Nothing and How It Is”, in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 106-121. Beckett, Samuel, Watt (New York: Grove P, 1953). –, Molloy (New York: Grove P, 1955). –, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1958). (1958a) –, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1958). (1958b) –, Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1965), 7-93. –, Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1983). –, The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 1985). (1985a) –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber & Faber, 1985). (1985b) –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Begam, Richard, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Borges, Jorge Luis, “A New Refutation of Time”, in The Total Library: NonFiction 1922-1986 (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 317-332. Clément, Bruno, “A Rhetoric of Ill-Saying”, trans. Thomas Cousineau, Journal of Beckett Studies 4.1 (1994), 35-54. –, “De bout en bout (La construction de la fin, d’après les manuscrits de Samuel Beckett)”, in Genèses des fins: de Balzac à Beckett, de Michelet à Ponge, ed. Claude Duchet and Isabelle Tournier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1996), 119-66. Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1973). Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). –, “What Is an Author?”, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977), 11338. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Gibson, Andrew, Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990). Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991).

419

Kant, Immanuel, “Analytic of the Sublime, from the Critique of Judgement”, in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 264-273. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). –, “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix”, Cultural Critique 5 (19867): 209-19. –, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). Schwab, Gabriele, “Cosmographical Meditations on the In/Human: Beckett’s The Lost Ones and Lyotard’s ‘Scapeland’”, parallax 6.4 (2000): 58-75. Uhlmann, Anthony, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). Vattimo, Gianni, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988).

420

THE CRITICAL ASPECTS OF BECKETT’S TRILOGY Sabbar Saadoon Sultan

Beckett’s name is associated with the absurd theatre and literature of “exhaustion” and silence. But he has remarkable interest in criticism and literary theory. His “Dante … Bruno. Vico .. Joyce” (1929) and Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1965). The present article attempts to read his Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) from this perspective. The first part is introductory as it discloses the critical insights explicitly stated about the language, self, philosophy and existence. The second section deals with the controversial issues of language and narration, especially Beckett’s use of narrators whose physical status is abnormal, but whose tales are convincing enough.

Beckett’s Trilogy (1959) has never ceased stirring heated controversy among critics and scholars. This is partly due to the literary mode it represents (metafiction or anti-novel) and the startlingly pessimistic view. Man here loses nearly all human qualities: identity, name and character. The only thing that keeps him going is the language, the ability to describe and identify things. This last tie to human existence is what is striking in the whole Trilogy. As a metafiction, the novel consciously turns into a treatise where Beckett’s ideas of philosophy, culture and the process of writing are investigated in detail. The present concentration here is on the critical insights that eventually render the Trilogy almost a critical text paving the way for the philosophical views of the poststructuralists and deconstructionists. Beckett’s interest in critical activities dates back to the days when he was a student in Ireland where he had a great admiration for his former French professor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown (Mercier, 35). His great interest in French language and literature turns out to be a decisive force in Beckett’s future. Indeed, his two seminal critical texts

centre on the two figures of Ireland and France, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. The significance of the literary innovations of these two in terms of technique and content lies in that they anticipate what Beckett himself is going to explore in his Trilogy. Almost all the characters in the Trilogy, including Worm, are at pains to express what haunts them. If Moran and the Unnamable fear that they talk about others while they ostensibly talk about themselves, the same holds true to Beckett’s own judgments of Dante, Joyce, Bruno, Vico or Proust. Beckett begins “Dante … Bruno. Vico .. Joyce”, by offering tribute to his master, James Joyce whose feat, Work in Progress, typifies in Beckett’s view what the literary text ought to be. Here, argues Beckett, words are assigned a particular function, they are alive, “they elbow their way on the page and glow and blaze and fade and disappear” (14). More important, however, is Beckett’s critical emphasis on the necessity of obliterating the distance between form and content as felt through Joyce’s onomatopoeic use of the language, “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not “about” something; it is “that” something itself […]”. (p.14) Such powerful arguments about the crucial role assigned to the language will be echoed in his own novels. In Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1965), Beckett’s interest moves beyond the purely linguistic level. If Proust’s In Search of Things Past (1922-3) chooses the mind, memory and consciousness as an area for exploration, Beckett’s Trilogy and the other texts penetrate this world skillfully. As he puts it, Proust’s book is “the search, stated in the full complexity of all its clues and blind alleys, for that resolution” (Beckett 1965, 47). John Pilling refers to the significance of the critical insights of this book when he labels it as “one serious attempt at a sustained piece of literary evaluation” and that it has “the benefit of a programmatic, self-administered disciple” (Pilling, 12). In another context, Beckett specifies the artistic drive not as “expansive, but as a contraction” (1965, 47). It is this painful exploration of the self in its twists and turns that will be the main issue in his Trilogy. Another relevant area is his statement in Three Dialogues about the paradox of the nihilist view of the nothingness of things and 422

the impossibility of keeping silent, “The expression that there is nothing to express […], no power to express, together with the obligation to express” (103). Such is the significance of this critical statement that Beckett finds it apt to terminate the third part of the Trilogy with sdomething similar. Here the narrator is put almost in the same dilemma where he cannot remain silent and at the same time he realizes there is nothing to express: You must grow, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already […] it will be the silence, where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (382) Beckett’s Trilogy stirs in the reader’s mind a host of philosophical questions pertaining to man, existence and what forces that exert their influence on the individual. Significantly, Beckett was so affected by Descartes’s views that he chose to study them, only to abandon it later because “Descartes’s search for systematic clarity was foreign to his nature” (Davis, 44). But Descartes’s postulates, particularly the priority given to thinking as the only clue to verifying the essence and identity (the Cartesian cogito states “I think therefore I am”) inform the main body of Beckett’s writings. The great extent of the characters’ anxiety about identity and self is rooted in this point, i.e., because “thinking is largely conditioned, no man can know who and what he is, save by a ruthless process of putting down and pulling off” (Adams, 107). Indeed the Trilogy’s intellectual thrust is post-Cartesian in that it reflects the futility of reasoning and thinking. The Trilogy doesn’t only refer to Descartes but also to Schopenhauer who is quoted in Proust. Here it is advisable to recall Lawrence’s dictum about the necessity of trusting the tale itself when we read Beckett’s claim that “There’s no keep or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophical terms” (Mercier, 161). The Trilogy abounds with philosophical views particularly the pessimistic or rather deterministic philosophy of Schopenhauer. All the characters of the Trilogy whether men or women, persecutors or persecuted, cripples or bums are at the mercy of a power beyond their will in the form of a God, an authority or inner physical needs or disabilities. The idea of choice 423

serves as the basis of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He has been quoted to declare that “the desiring self does not exist in any real sense except through suffering, the painful consequences of wilful self-assertion” (Kennedy, 10). The absence of choice (Alexander, 382) and the phobia and fear of “others” who represent a kind of menace is admittedly a philosophical standpoint. Existentialists like Pinter, Fowles, Barth will follow this stand in their writings. Beckett’s Trilogy raises first the question of the appropriate approach to be employed. Obviously linguistic one is the most helpful and relevant as Beckett’s concern makes him close to postmodernists and their excessive interest in the language and the potentialities it can offer or withhold. Beckett’s book hinges on the duality of silence and speech, subject and object, which we often encounter in contemporary literary theory. Molloy tells two stories. The first is narrated by Molloy himself, a typical Beckettian bum whose simple nature is expressed by a humorous and smooth-flowing language. The lapses of memory and follies increase the irony of the book. The search of time past represented by Proust’s book is felt through Molloy’s futile search for his mother. Beckett’s critical view of this thorny matter is ambivalent in that Molloy’s recollections of his mother are not sentimental, yet he does his best to be reunited with her. It is an abortive desire in the Trilogy in a long list of frustrations: And if ever I’m reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you can never tell, it’s in that poor old uniparous whore and myself, the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast. (19) This view of the mother as being the source of content and sense of guilt has already been reflected in Joyce’s, Ulysses (1921) where Stephen’s attitude towards his mother when she is moribund is memorable. Leaving aside Molloy’s treatment of his mother and his communication with her (each knock on her skull suggests a specific thing (18), Molloy betrays a genuine feeling of longing to be with her, though life’s distractions (such as involvement with the police for causing the death of a dog, and the subsequent involvement with a 424

Circe – like woman) drive him away from that objective. Thus the search for identity or meaning is reflected through this vicious circle. Indeed, the topic of identity is central here. Not only is Molloy unable to know exactly who and what he is when the policeman investigates him for causing the death of the dog Teddy, but also there is a deliberate irony in the book suggesting the similarity between the dead dog and Molloy. This is because he “was old, blind, deaf, crippled with rheumatism and perpetually incontinent” (32). Molloy is treated immediately as if he replaced the dead dog: the place where Molloy spends his time (the garden) is suggestive enough. His benefactor, suffers too from this ambiguity in her character. The original name Sophie is replaced by Lousse for no specific reason. Her shockingly sexual life indicates some qualms about her gender as she “was a woman of extraordinary flatness, physically speaking of course, to such a point that I am still wondering this evening […] if she was not a man rather or at least an androgyne” (53). Their sexual life and practices deepen these misgivings. This consciousness of identity and its role in Molloy’s life is once again felt through his complaints about the terrible blow Molloy receives at the hands of the cruel charcoal burner (78). Such intrusions in the privacy of the subject and the puzzling mystification of the ego are emphasized again in the second part of the book where Moran replaces Molloy in the narration. This time the search centres on Molloy himself for implausible reasons. Molloy starts his search for his mother willingly, out of a genuine desire for seeing her. In his recollections she “seemed far away, my mother, far away from me, and yet I was a little closer to her than the night before […]”(37). In contrast, Moran’s search is extrinsic. In his bourgeois home, Moran’s peace is interrupted when the agent Gaber conveys the orders from the mysterious Youdi that Moran do such a task. Similarly, Moran’s mission is abortive too. Again the problem of identity is focal. The moment Moran is instructed to fulfil such a task, his mind keeps turning the idea of this Molloy, oscillating between reality and illusion, “Molloy, or Mollose, was no stranger to me. If I had had colleagues, I might have suspected I had spoken of him to them, as of one destined to occupy us, sooner or later […]. Perhaps I had invented him” (103). As the narrative proceeds, it turns out that Moran’s fancies of a Molloy are so complex that Moran is unable to identify him exactly: 425

The fact was there were three, no, four Molloys. He that inhabited me, my caricature of same, Gaber’s and the man of flesh and blood somewhere awaiting me. To these I would add Youdi’s. (106) The similarity does not rest in the ambiguity and illusions enveloping the subject and object, hunter and quarry or narrator and narratee, but also in the situation of the two in question. If Molloy is the homeless, wandering and restless man in search of his mother, Moran has been put in a similar situation. He has to leave his rich, though uncomfortable home and break his routine to implement Youdi’s orders. At the end of the search, the narrative indicates that Moran and Molloy have much in common, particularly the status of physical depravity and loneliness. At a certain moment, Moran compares himself to Sisyphus and his painstaking efforts (122). He suffers from a growing process of deterioration so that he uses crutches. He tells us about his experience which brings to mind what has befallen Molloy in the first part when he states that “I awoke with a start, feeling as if I had just been dealt a violent blow” (121). The tyrannical Moran who checks everything in the behavior of both his son, Jacques, or the servant, Martha, ends his tale by referring to the idea of choice and freedom. It represents the core of the intellectual line of the book. The tone of uncertainty prevails: But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps. It told me to write the report. Does this mean I am freer than I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. (162) The search for the other (Molloy) precipitates the recognition of the self. Confidently Moran tells us that “I not only knew who I was, but I had a sharper sense of my identity than ever before, inspite of its deep lesions and the wounds with which it was covered” (156-7). 426

In Malone Dies, the same artistic and intellectual line of Molloy is followed up. The paralytic cripple of the title is spending his last days in an asylum “I shall soon be quite dead at last inspite of all” (165). In the meantime his mind is engaged in a ceaseless process of search, in the past, in the memory where so many things remain engraved. This mental excavation is an attempt to see the self in isolation from any adventitious influences that befall the individual in his painful circumstances. This Proust-like search is technically linked to the first part in the position of the narrator. Like Molloy and Moran, Malone has to do the double function of narrating the events and participating in them. Malone resembles the physical situation of Molloy and Moran (in his last stage) in that he is a cripple. Such is his immobility that his only means of assistance is his stick “When I want to eat I hook the table with my stick and draw it to me” (170). Another similarity is the inexplicable blows and pains inflicted on him: “perhaps I was stunned with a blow on the head, in a forest” (169). The only means of mitigating suffering, then, is the written word, the art of telling stories as a means of keeping the mind away from its present status. The result is that the tales are inevitably coloured by the narrator’s mood and perspective. One of his tales is that of Saposcat or Sapo where Malone virtually talks about himself or, confesses things to the reader, “Sapo had no friends – no, that won’t do. Sapo was on good terms with his little friends […] Sapo loved nature, took an interest. This is awful” (174-5). Another parallel line between these two parts is the man/woman relation as represented by the horrifying sexual relationships between Macmann (originally young Sapo) and the grotesque woman, Moll. What happens between Macmann and Moll is an example of Beckett’s shocking nihilistic view of man’s existence as simply a double function of charging and discharging “What matters is to eat and excrete” (170). In Murphy, Beckett elaborates this issue and describes it as “Humanity is a well with two buckets, one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied” (58). Here is Beckett’s philosophical stand of mankind and how it is relegated to its terrifying biological needs: And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and 427

feeble clips a kind of sombre gratification. So that Moll exclaimed, being (at that stage) the more expansive of the two, oh would we had but met sixty years ago! (38-9) Apart from its irony, there is a clear critical viewpoint shown here through the attitudes and behaviours of its characters. What they actually represent is a very bleak image of life. All of the characters and their narrator are in a process of search for defining the self and the other. What is foregrounded is the violence and sadism (first by old Lambert and his frightening way of slaughtering pigs and later with the new caretaker of the asylum, Lemuel, who replaces Moll after she dies and eventually kills a number of people). Beckett ignores the tenets of realistic tales or any dictate of cause and effect. The fluidity of characterization and often inexplicable transfer of one character into another makes Beckett’s text a most demanding one where the language is in a state of flux. A good example of this is the final lines of that part where the ‘death’ of the character is expressed by the fragmentation of its language: Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone anymore, he will not touch anyone anymore, either with it or with it […] or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean never there he will never never anything there

any more. (263-4) The Unnamable is the climax in the Trilogy and reveals Beckett’s critical bent in its most striking way. The philosophical issue of identity and its meaning is at work here. The narrator is in Lee’s statement, “the unmamable namer, the self, to whom all […] are ‘other’” (Lee, 218). This voice is stripped of any name or identity. This is not very surprising given the process of minimalizing going on throughout the Trilogy – loss, degradation, and death. The only manifestations of the 428

unnamable are reflected in the stories of Mahood and Worm. Again the presence of this disfigured character (Mahood, a torso in a jar that hangs before a restaurant) is felt through discourse: I know I am seated, my hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet, against the palms of my hands, against my knees […] (279) At certain moments Beckett suggests that the unnamable is identified with his “next vice-exister” (289), Mahood. He confides in the reader “the admission that I am Mahood after all and that the stories of a being whose identity he usurps, and whose voice he prevents from being heard, are all lies from beginning to end” (285). Mahood’s story of the mysterious destruction of his family falls in line with the intellectual side of the book where violence and cruelty prevail. He tells us that he found himself “stamping under foot the unrecognizable remains of my family, here a face, there a stomach, as the case might be […]” (297). The story of Mahood (originally Basil whose identity is transformed into Mahood and then leads to the story of Worm) has nothing human to maintain except the tales of violence and destruction. This part has successfully dispensed with all tools of narrative art – characterization, plot, setting, structure. It is only by undermining all reasoning and acceptable order that some meaning could be attained, “Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end” (298). The only fact that remains is the language and narration which represents that main critical argument. II While I have touched upon the philosophical and epistemological level of the Trilogy, there is another equally important critical side. Such is Beckett’s preoccupation with the linguistic and narrative potentialities of the text that critics and academic researchers find themselves attracted to it. Ruby Cohn, for example, concludes that “No living author in English or French has molded words so skillfully in fiction and drama, while paradoxically protesting his own failure” (Cohn, 70). Beckett’s grappling with the language is felt through the struggle of his characters to be precise, and through Beckett’s struggle 429

with the medium to make it expressive enough. As he states in his famous letter to Axel Kaun, “Let us hope that the time will come when language is most efficiently used when it is being efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least have nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute” (Beckett 1984, 141). But this subtle consciousness of the language and its nature can turn into a cause of unease and alarm for his characters and indirectly for the author himself. Indeed the failure to control the language as an individual activity is indicative of some sort of alienation, the sense that one automatically repeats what others are saying “All lies […] I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak” (288). Although all his characters (his gallery of cripples, paralytics, tramps, a torso or even Worm) speak in a meticulous language, the final conclusion is that this should not be taken as a blemish due to the imbalance between the range of the character’s mind and its discourse. This is a book that celebrates Beckett’s critical preoccupations. Apart from the Cartesian and Schopenhauerian echoes about reason, knowledge, the subject and existence, the Trilogy devotes a good deal of space to Beckett’s concept of the language and narration. In Three Dialogues, Beckett raises the position of the painter Bram Van Velde which is applicable to his writings when he states that “there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with” (8). Thus every artistic work is simply another failure because of the tool’s inherent deficiency. Critical theory has often discussed the relation between the language and its practitioner and whether it serves his purposes. David Lodge has raised this time-honoured topic by his questioning about whether books are made out of the writer’s experiences or out of other books. “Does the writer write his novel or does the novel “write” the writer?” (Lodge, 126) Another relevant matter here is that the language’s effect on the writer transcends the merely idiosyncratic use. Truth, any truth, is determined by language. That it turns into a kind of influential power is felt through Nietzsche’s early insight. That it is “a prison house where we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really limit” (Jameson, 1). The deconstructionists represented by Miller opt for the priority of the language “Language rather thinks man and his ‘world’” (Miller, 224). Beckett tackles this critical issue with success. The tale is refined, contra430

dicted, negated so that their complete signification can be reached, a point the Trilogy shows in its impossibility: While waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I can. They will not be the same kind of stories as hitherto, that is all. They will be neither beautiful nor ugly, they will be calm, there will be no ugliness or beauty or fever in them anymore, they will be almost lifeless, like the teller. (165) But such an ambitious project is doomed to fail. The ephemeral nature of the language, the rift between what is visualized and what is finally achieved is suggested by Beckett’s handling of this matter throughout the whole Trilogy. He makes his tramps face this problem “Words and images run riot in my head pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference” (182). In another context, Beckett calls for making the language self-referential. It is this state which he calls “the beginning of writing, the condition of pure textuality […] that seeks to free itself from representation and expression” (Begam, 155). The word or the signifier, irrespective of its inadequacy, remains the last clue for recognising the identity. The narrator states the issue as follows: Is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice, in this matter I have none. That’s one of the reasons either, no reason why I confused myself with Worm but I have no reason either, no reason, I’m like Worm, without voice or reason. (319) The impression such arguments leave on the reader is that though the Trilogy is a creative text, its interest in critical matters, is no less interesting. The characters of the book are enmeshed in their claustrophobic world, and their medium is always baffling. It remains basically a voice where “neither the centre, the source, nor the direction of the voice can be determined” (Kurik, 227). If there is a sense of discontent as regards the practices and effects of the language, the other alternative is no less problematic, because silence means death. All the characters are obsessed by voices 431

which seek an expression, an elegant one that runs counter to the mundane and disgusting details. Is narrating or the process of reflecting those voices, within the control of the character or the author? Beckett claims that he virtually hears voices and that he “simply recites in his book words spoken by outside agents” (Adams, 106). If we recall Jung’s view of the artistic creation as an act in which the artist is completely under its grip and that Beckett was closely associated with him at a certain time in his life (Davies, 44), it becomes evident that Beckett manipulates the archetypal concepts in his presentation of this issue. The most important aspect of the Trilogy lies in the obvious attempt to deal with the mechanism of writing, its adequacy or failure and above all its significance. The ugliness and horrifying existence of the Trilogy’s characters can only be alleviated by their obsessive use of the word and its shades of meaning. Here is one of the examples the Trilogy abounds with where the narrator or the author refers to his culde-sac as a writer and how he has got involved in this onerous activity of writing: My little finger glides before my pencil across the page of the line and gives warning, falling over the edge, that the end of the line is near. But in the other direction, I mean of course vertically, I have nothing to guide me. I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end […]. (191) In another situation this mysterious drive for creating and writing may spring, from the deep recesses of the unconscious that sweeps anything before it, “it is not a sound like the other sounds, that you listen to, when you choose […] it is a sound which begins to rustle in your head, without your knowing how, or why […] I shall hear it always, no thunder can deliver me, until it stops” (39). The Trilogy is not only suggestive of Jung, but also of other Freudian elements. Writing or narrating here serves as a kind of therapy or solace for Beckett’s woe-begone characters. From this angle, fictionalizing reality and its painful experiences might be taken as some sort of therapy or relief from what is going on: “Nothing was being left to chance. I recount those moments with a certain minuteness, it is a relief from what I feel coming” (37). 432

Conversely, the whole process of writing fiction is often accompanied by a painful sense that it is after all a falsification of the real experience. As a practitioner of metafiction, Beckett’s critical insight touches upon this area which will be a fertile field for subsequent writers-critics like Barth and Fowles. The struggle with the signifier springs from the fear that it is not up to the accuracy aspired to: I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point […]. And after all why a ball, rather than something else, and why big? Why not a cylinder, a small cylinder? […]. No, no, that’s the old nonsense. (280) This process of stating the thing first and then weighing the extent of its accuracy is judged by the same narrating voice. There is always a painful sense of the possibility of sidetracking or missing the point or to anything outside itself, “[…] How proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered […]? (267). Is not this the main argument of the structuralist and deconstructionist controversy that the text, any text, is inevitably involved in a process of referring to something outside it? It is in Derrida’s statement, “the text is no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself” (Bloom, 89). If we remember Beckett’s success in entering the thorny field of language, meaning, the nature of the subject and the narrative material, it becomes evident that his critical sense remains in the background, enriching his creative texts. This keen critical awareness makes us unwilling to take his words literally when he states “I’d be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my own works” (Worton, 67). He has already done that with amazing skill.

433

Works Cited Adams, Robert Martin, After Joyce: Studies in Fiction after Ulysses (NY: Oxford UP, 1977). Alexander, Marguerite, Flights from Realism: The Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy, (London: John Calder, 1963). –, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, (London: Calder, 1965). –, The Beckett Trilogy (London: Pan Books, 1979). – et.al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare and Co, 1929). Begham, Richard, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Cohn, Ruby, “Samuel Beckett,” 20th Century Fiction, ed. George Woodcock (London: Macmillan, 1983), 68-72. Davies, Paul, “Three Novels and Four Novellas, Giving up the Ghost to be Born at last, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 38-45. Derrida, Jacques, “Living on Borderlines,” trans. James Hullbert, Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929), 175-76. Fletcher, John, Samuel Beckett’s Art (London Chatto & Windus, 1979). Hayman, David, “Molloy or the Quest for Meaninglessness: A Global Interpretation,” Samuel Beckett Now, ed. Melvin Friedman, (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1970), 129-150. Jameson, Frederic, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972). Kennedy, Andrew R., Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Kurik, Maine Janus, Literature and Negation (NY: Columbia UP, 1979). Lee, Robin, “The Fictional Topography of Samuel Beckett,” in The Modern Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Work, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (London: Open Books, 1996), 106-23. Lodge, David, “The Novel Now,” Novel: A Forum of Fiction, 21 (Winter/Spring, 1968), 125-8. Mercier, Vivian, Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977). Miller, J. Hillis, “The Critic as Host,” Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 217-53. Pilling, John, “Beckett’s English Fiction,” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 3-20.

434

Worton, Michael, “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as Text” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 67-87.

435

ABANDONING THE EMPIRICAL: Repetition and Homosociality in Waiting for Godot Andrea L. Yates

Much has been written on Beckett’s use of repetition in Waiting for Godot but none have addressed the ways in which this repetition informs the relationship of the two men. To assume that either is simply a tool for comic effect, or that the one has no relation to the other is to lose the ways in which the play explores relationships between two men. This article addresses the ways in which repetition both affects the relationship of these two characters and is a reflection of that relationship. I will argue that their relationship, and the repetitive behavior and dialogue on which it is predicated, constructs the only ‘truth’ that Vladimir and Estragon know, and that the shared recognition of that ‘truth’ is their fundamental bond.

There are friends to whom one abandons the empirical and friends to whom one confides the essential. Friendship is this as well. (Derrida, 2000, 84) Other parts of Beckett’s work might seem a more obvious choice for a discussion of repetition; Watt, for example, comes to mind. But Waiting for Godot offers a unique opportunity to put this device into dialogue with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s neologism “homosocial”, a term which refers to the problematization of men’s relationships with other men. In Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist Anthony Cronin interestingly likens the relationship of Vladimir and Estragon to a marriage. “There is the comedy of the married couple, deeply conscious of each other’s weaknesses, but bound indissolubly by need, custom and, mysteriously, even love” (Cronin 391). Note that Cronin’s astute observation about the characters’ relationship qualifies the love as mysterious. Why “mysteriously love”? This analogy overlooks the crucial specificity of the male bond. That is, the heterosexuliazed term

“marriage” masks the unique nature of a same-sex bond and the ways in which that bond expresses itself because of societal pressures. In Waiting for Godot, this bond is both predicated on and resultant of repetition. Vladimir and Estragon’s repetitive and rhythmic behavior and dialogue functions as both cause and effect and constructs the only ‘reality’ that these two characters know. The shared recognition of this ‘reality’ and the ‘truths’ it masks produce their fundamental bond. Critical discussion surrounding the play discusses repetition with recourse Beckett’s self-translation, to its function as a decentering agent, as a figuration of negation and as a tool for comic effect. Like the play, the term repetition itself has a rich critical atmosphere surrounding it. Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin talk of testimony and works of art respectively as having repeatability as a condition of possibility – that is, both must be singular and universal at once.1 This suggests a simultaneity which resonates with the duel function of repetition as it relates to Vladimir and Estragon. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is a text crucial to any critical discussion of this term. Deleuze divided repetition into the clothed and the naked.2 The mechanical, or naked, preserves for Deleuze the ontological hierarchy of the original as privileged over the repetition, while the disguised or clothed repetition adds to or in some way affects the original rather than blindly copying it. This subversion of the platonic parasitic conception of repetition is both explicated and collapsed in Waiting for Godot. While the dialogue and action of the play presents a Deleuzian naked repetition (that is, the repetition blindly copies that which is repeated) the larger critical work being done by the play makes graphic a disguised repetition that not only reiterates but re-presents the characters ways of knowing each other, and the audience/reader’s way of knowing a certain kind of relationship. Deleuze’s argument is inclusive, as well, of a discussion of the repetition of habit, which he describes as referring to a “fusion of successive tick-tocks” that constitute “our habit of living, our expectation that ‘it’ will continue, that one or two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case” (74). The “fusion” that for Deleuze exists in the “contemplating mind” is dramatized in Godot through the characters’ use of and dependence on their repetitive actions and dialogue. The habit they have fallen into assures the “perpetuation” of their “case”. The habit both produces this per438

petuation and is produced by it, out of need for each other’s company and for a way to pass the time. Part of this need, and intrinsic to it, is tied to recognition. Deleuze describes a “repetition of need” and states that repetition is “essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition: which forms the for-itself of repetition and the for-itself of a certain duration” (77). The relationship of need to repetition is crucial to the relationship of Vladimir to Estragon. Though it is Estragon whose dialogue most often repeats itself, the two also repeat each other and the play makes graphic the repetitive nature of their days: Gogo gets beaten up; they are visited by Pozzo and Lucky; the boy comes; they wait. Despite repetitive visits by the recurring characters, Vladimir and Estragon are the only ones who recognize and remember each other. The boy, Pozzo and Lucky re-appear but do not remember Didi and Gogo. In fact though Vladimir ostensibly remembers them, he also doubts himself. “We know them I tell you. You forget everything. (Pause. To himself.) Unless they’re not the same…”. To Estragon’s “Why didn’t they recognize us then?” Vladimir replies that “nobody ever recognizes us” (32). Thus it would seem that Didi and Gogo need each other to remember as much as to be remembered by. Without each other they would be looking at a mirror with no reflection and the reflection verifies their own existence. As Connor argues, “It is repetition that makes the difference, for it demonstrates to us that the sense of absolute presence is itself dependent upon memory and anticipation” (119). “We always find something, eh Didi,” Estragon says, “to give us the impression we exist?” (44). In On the Margins of Discourse, Barbara Herrnstein Smith discusses need in terms of listening. “Of the strictly physical afflictions to which we may fall victim through such misfortunes as exile, imprisonment, illness, and old age, perhaps the one most acutely felt is loneliness – which means, among other things, the sheer unavailability of listeners” (108). Consider the importance of listeners in the context of Waiting for Godot: Vladimir: Gogo!...Gogo!...GOGO! Estragon wakes with a start. Estragon: (restored to the horror of his situation). I was asleep! (Despairingly) Why will you never let me sleep? Vladimir: I felt lonely. 439

Estragon: I had a dream. Vladimir: Don’t tell me! Estragon: I dreamt that — Vladimir: DON’T TELL ME! Estragon: (Gestures towards the universe)This is enough for you? (Silence). It’s not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private thoughts to if I can’t tell them to you? Vladimir: Let them remain private. You know I can’t bear that. (11). Smith goes on to argue that when “there is ‘no one to talk to’ (note that we far more rarely complain of no one to listen to), we are manifoldly deprived; for, lacking listeners, we not only lack the opportunity to affect others instrumentally, to secure their services in ministering to out physical needs and desires, but we also lack their services in providing […] cognitive feedback, that is the occasion they offer us to verbalize and thus to integrate, discriminate, appreciate, and indeed experience our own otherwise elusive perceptions” (108-9). Smith’s words work with the previous exchange between Vladimir and Estragon in two crucial ways. Without each other, Vladimir and Estragon not only have no one to recognize or who recognizes them, they have no one to effect, to affect, and no one to experience their own perceptions and emotions through and this is, as Smith suggests, tantamount to having no experience at all; indeed, no reality. Note that Estragon wants to tell his dream to Vladimir, to have his friend share that experience. And, note that Vladimir refuses to listen, as he also recognizes the shared experience in which this act will result. Thus, though Vladimir woke up Estragon to assuage his own loneliness, he is unwilling assuage his friend’s. Both acts however confirm that each has the ability to confirm or at least recognize the ‘reality’ of the ‘other’ even if at times they are unwilling to do so. If they are the reflection in each other’s mirror the repetitive aspects of their relationship are the verbal and physical manifestations of that reflection. If someone repeats what I say and do I know not only that I am not alone, but that I have been heard, that my voice has been recognized. While the repetition sets into relief this recognition it is also a figuration of a kind of negation – Vladimir is heard by Estragon and vice versa, but nothing is really or significantly ‘said’, no change is ef440

fected; nothing happens as Vivian Mercier famously points out, twice. Thus as the repetition dramatizes the ineluctable banality and mundanity of their existence it simultaneously frees the two characters from actually discussing the desperateness of their situation; it in effect protects them from certain ‘truths’. When Estragon attempts to reveal a truth, that of his dream, he is immediately cut off by Vladimir who is unwilling to hear the dream and who is, as Smith suggests, more interested in someone to talk to than in someone to listen to and who in this way remains protected in conversation that is tantamount to silence. If the repetition informs the friendship in that it provides the reflection and recognition the two need, it is also a reflection of that friendship in that it provides an outlet for affection they can in no other way express, and it masks the need that they have for each other by preserving certain illusions which, when fractured, reveal a reality more frightening than the one established within the context of the friendship. They have, at least, an ‘other’ to repeat and to be repetitive with. Certain routines – Didi giving Gogo a carrot, Gogo telling Didi about his being beaten up, their exercises “Vladimir: Our elevations; Estragon: Our relaxations; Vladimir: Our elongations. Estragon: Our relaxations (49) – and certain phases (“Vladimir: So am I; Estragon: So am I”) are repeated, re-presented and provide an apparent source of comfort to one or both of the characters. Although it is Vladimir who ostensibly takes care of Estragon, it is most often Vladimir who seems to need Estragon’s presence. It is he who wakes Gogo up because he is lonely and he who need to hear that Gogo is happy to see him. This synthesis of loneliness and need is the text’s concomitant illustration of Deleuze and Smith’s thought. Vladimir: You must be happy, too, deep down, if only you knew it. Estragon: Happy about what? Vladimir: To be back with me again. Estragon: Would you say so? Vladimir: Say you are even if it is not true. Estragon: What am I to say? Vladimir: Say, I am happy. Estragon: I am happy. Vladimir: So am I. 441

Estragon: So am I. Vladimir: We are happy. Estragon: We are happy. (Silence) What do we do, now that we are so happy? (38-9) If repetition is a tool with which the relationship is reflected or expressed, why would such a tool be needed? That is, why must their closeness be expressed in some ‘other’ way? Repetition, it has been argued, is a figuration of negation in the play, but its function is simultaneously productive. In an essay called “The Exhausted” Deleuze discusses alternatives to ‘language’. “If one thereby hopes to exhaust the possible with words one must also hope to exhaust the words themselves” (156). In Waiting for Godot, repetition functions as a language; using language, but creating new meaning and thus subverts what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls homosexual panic3. This is not to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon have a sexual relationship, but that the ways in which they relate to one another are informed by a continuum inclusive of both homosexuality and what Sedgwick calls homosociality. Because male friendship and male sexual relationships exist on the same continuum, all signs of male affection become suspect and other outlets of affection are necessitated by this problematization. “Homosocial is a word occasionally used in social sciences […] it is a neologism, obviously formed by an analogy with homosexual, and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from homosexual” (1). Sedgwick goes on to argue that the “potential unbrokeness of this continuum is not a genetic one – I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual desire as at the root of’ other forms of male homosociality – but rather as a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other men” (2). Sedgwick’s work is crucial to this reading of Godot in that she not only looks at the ways in which men relate with other men socially, but she does so in the context of literature and to the exclusion of women, who are of course notable absent from the play. In fact, her argument states that the homosocial continuum is entirely different for women, with less recourse to homosexual panic. “The diacritical opposition between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual’ seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women in our society than 442

for men” (2). Crucial for Sedgwick is that the homosocial and the homosexual exist on this same continuum and that, for this reason, homophobia necessarily affects the behavior of both. She states that “[n]onhomosexual identified men are subject to control through homophobic blackmailability” (90). Estragon: You wanted to speak to me?...You had something to say to me?...Didi? Vladimir: (without turning) I have nothing to say to you. Estragon: You’re angry? Forgive me…Give me your hand…Embrace me!...Don’t be stubborn! (Vladimir softens. They embrace.) Vladimir: What do we do now? (11) This fight, as well as other similar ones found in the play 4, is figured as one of Vladimir and Estragon’s many attempts to pass the time but can also be read as making graphic the problematization that Sedgwick addresses. That is, men cannot embrace or otherwise show affection without a ‘good reason’, here their argument. They ‘need’ the fight as a condition of possibility for the embrace. Not only does the fight provide an excuse as it were for physical contact as a show of the affection of friendship, it also provides an outlet for the hopelessness the men feel but avoid discussing. The fight therefore saves them from admitting that they feel affection but also that they feel a despair so intense that it might warrant the need for an embrace. The play dramatizes that Vladimir and Estragon need each other, but that they need equally to believe that they do not need, both because of the homosocial implications as described by Sedgwick and because of the protection or illusion that their peculiar friendship gives them. Obviously it is crucial to every aspect of a social structure that heavily freighted male bonds between men exist, as the backbone of social form or forms. At the same time, a consequence of that structure is that any ideological purchase on the male homosocial spectrum – a perhaps necessary arbitrary set of discriminations for defining, controlling, and manipulating these male bonds – will be a disproportion443

ately powerful social control. The importance – an importance – of a category ‘homosexual’ I am suggesting comes not necessarily from its regulatory relation to a nascent or already-constituted minority of homosexual people or desires, but from its potential for giving whoever wields it a structuring definitional leverage over the whole range of male bonds that shape the social constitution. (86) They need each other; they don’t know how to express the need, and they resent both the need itself and the inability to communicate it. As was mentioned earlier, in addition to the relationship between repetition and homosociality, the friendship between Vladimir and Estragon also creates a reality which masks ‘truths’ the two characters might rather not recognize. This mask, or illusion, remains in the custody of the friendship. As Jacques Derrida states in The Politics of Friendship; the protection of this custody guarantees the truth of friendship, its ambiguous truth, that by which friendship is founded – more precisely, which enables it to resist its own abyss. To resist the vertigo or the revolution that would have it turning around itself. Friendship is founded, in truth, so as to protect itself from the bottom, or the abysmal bottomless depths. (53) What are these truths, both masked and created within the play? What bottomless depths do Vladimir and Estragon need desire protection from? Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently) Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let is represent worthily for once the foul brood to 444

which a cruel fate has consigned us! What do you say? (Estragon says nothing.) It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his cogeners without the slightest reflection or he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come…Or for night to fall. (Pause). We have kept our appointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much? Estragon: Billions. (51) Although Vladmir mentions that one thing alone is clear, he goes on to offer two possibilities thus showing the illusion that there is ‘a’ truth; this is dramatized again when Estragon, in a rare moment of lucidity, points out their lack of accomplishment, their lack of singularity with his “billions”. Though the repetition is structurally and textually important, it is equally important to note that nothing significant is actually said and then repeated, no progress made; rather, the repetition in this way is, as has been discussed, tantamount to a kind of silence and this silence is, in Derridian terms, crucial to the preservation of the friendship – it produces a reality that in essence allows the characters to deny certain other (potential) realities: Godot is not coming, they cannot do without each other though they threaten to leave, and there is nothing unique about them or their situation. Not only does the repetition create an illusion to mask certain ‘truths’ and in so doing avoid certain unhappy realizations (like Estragon’s “billions”), but is also masks the illusion that there is a truth at all. The fact that there are so many possible truths (they are waiting for Godot or for night to fall) rather than a singularity that can ever be attained is almost as frightening as the prospect of their interminable wait. This is dramatized in the plays confessional moments. Vladimir: Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today” That with my friend, Estragon, at this place, 445

until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed with his carrier and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. (58) The characters are looking for an end, a closure represented by Godot’s anticipated coming but the play emphasizes a process – of producing truths, establishing realities, and of sustaining friendship. Beckett’s use of repetition is at once a propellant of this process and a figuration of its frustrating effect on participants who do not understand the rules of the game. The play often progresses repetitively but the condition of possibility for repetition is that it re-figures what has already past. Deleuze addressed the relationship of repetition to temporality in Difference and Repetition: The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time is the synthesis of all time which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist but insists, it consists, it is. It insists with the former present, it consists with the new or present present. It is the in-itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time. In effect, when we say that it is contemporaneous with the present that it was, we necessarily speak of a past which was never present, since it was not formed ‘after’. It’s a manner of being contemporaneous with itself as present is that of being posed as an already-there, presupposed by the passing present and causing it to pass. (82) For Beckett, in this play, cause and effect are as Derrida might say, neutered5 as the opposition between the two is overcome and the repetition itself is always already as important as the words and actions it repeats, rather than subjugated to them. As Steven Connor points out, 446

Repetition is different of course from simply copying or imitation, for repetition aims to cut out every vestige of difference between itself and its original. Repetition aspires to the condition of an invisible membrane that encloses its original without impeding access to it in any way, or interfering with its nature. But even this close self-effacing servitude displaces the authority of the original. (4) The earlier comparison between repetition and silence brings us back to the though of Derrida. “That is why friendship had better preserve itself in silence” he writes “and keep silent about the truth […] The truth of the truth is that the truth is there to protect a friendship that could not resist the truth of its own illusion” (1994, 53). Derrida’s way of knowing friendship, as based on abyss and protecting illusion (for example, that Godot will come) is hospitable to an understanding of the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon. As Anthony Uhlmann points out in Beckett and Poststructuralism when he discusses the scene in which Didi and Gogo discuss the Gospel 6: What is even the truth of your own voice were brought into question, or further still the existence of your own voice? Your own voice as a source that is, the source of your own story. How could the voice be said to be your own when it merely recounts stories which may concern you, but always at one remove? One begins to feel the ground fall away. (155) Just as the boy can be said to verify the existence of Godot – since someone must have sent him – Vladimir and Estragon verify each other’s existence and the reality they share. This protects the ground beneath them even if at times it does quake. The repetition in Waiting for Godot helps to mask these quakes, to convince Vladimir and Estragon that they do indeed exist and to silence at least temporarily the meaninglessness of that existence. As Derrida contends “[f]riendship does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to itself, friendship inverts itself. Hence it says to itself, saying this to itself, that there are no more friends: it avows itself in avowing that. Friendship tells the truth – and this is always better left unknown” 447

(1994, 53). In Waiting for Godot, ‘truths’ are both veiled and revealed by acts of repetition. Notes 1.

See Derrida’s Demeure and Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” for their discussions on reproducibility and repeatability.

2.

Steven Connor’s Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (cited at the end of this essay) includes a very fine discussion of Deleuze’s “naked” and “clothed” repetition. See also, his chapter “Presence and Repetition in Beckett’s Theatre” which includes a fascinating discussion of Godot. While his book was crucial to the development of this essay, my own argument attempts to move in a different direction, the relationship of Vladimir and Estragon.

3.

Sedgwick describes this term thusly: “So-called ‘homosexual panic’ is the most private, psychologized form in which twentiethcentury western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail” (89).

4.

See also pages 48-9 in which Vladimir and Estragon engage in a similar altercation followed by a similar embrace.

5.

“The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite without also overcoming the opposition” (Derrida 1994, 90).

6.

Vladimir and Estragon discuss the thieves the Gospel relates as being crucified with Jesus: Vladimir: But one of the four says that one of the two was saved. Estragon: Well? They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it. Vladimir: But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others? (9)

448

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove P, 1982). Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Harper Collins, 1996). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. (New York; Columbia U P, 1994). –, “The Exhausted.” Trans. Anthony Uhllman in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993). Derrida, Jacques. Demeure. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford U, 2000). –, Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1994). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia U, 1985). Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979). Uhlmann, Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P, 1999).

449

This page intentionally left blank

TEXTUAL GENESIS, CONTEXTUAL GENESIS AND LANGUAGE

This page intentionally left blank

THE “UNTIDY ANALYST”: Dialogue Form, Elenchus, and Subversion in “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” David A. Hatch

Beckett and Duthuit's use of the dialogue form suggests that they play with critical conventions in order to blur the lines between criticism and fiction, increase audience investment in their discussion, and communicate a subversive message to the aesthetic elite.

Philosophical dialogue is a peculiar vehicle for art criticism; it presents engaging arguments, but it is also deceptive and indistinct almost to the point of incoherence. In a discussion of Plato’s use of the form, Michael Stokes argues that philosophical dialogue is, rhetorically, a “very inefficient method of communication” because the verbal exchange by which it presents information becomes a “vehicle of ambivalence” (27). Yet he also suggests that this ambivalence is a benefit and that it allows for a certain rhetorical flexibility. When Plato makes assertions in his dialogues, he explains, “it is possible to suppose that Plato intended his readers to just pause and think. Possibly at every question of Socrates we were meant to step back and wonder whether the embodied proposition is being implicitly communicated or denied” (27). Finally, Stokes stresses that the choice to use dialogue is purposeful and significant, that the form does not result from some kind of “historical accident” (27). Unfortunately, the common explanation for Beckett and Duthuit’s choice of the dialogue form is based on historical accident. Martin Esslin, for example, cautions that the text “may or may not be a true record of conversations that took place” between Beckett and Duthuit. He records that when asked about the conception of the text – “Would it be true to say you wrote down what had been said”? – Beckett responded: “I suppose you might say down, I’d rather say up” (2). No comprehensive formal analysis of “Three Dialogues” exists, and when form is considered critics usually dismiss the dialogue as

incidental to the existence of what Mark Moes labels a “proto-essay”. Those who subscribe to this notion believe that the dialogue form is not essential to the purpose of the author, but that it disguises a more conventional argumentative structure. Moes argues that such an approach is based upon the assumption that the author’s purpose is: to construct valid arguments yielding true conclusions about matters of philosophic import, and to articulate rigorous methods, either for defining necessary and sufficient conditions for the possession of properties and the truth of theses, or for acquiring a technical grasp of any subject matter. (1-2) Because the text is based on historical discussion and correspondence, Beckett critics often fail to consider how the form and content of “Three Dialogues” function concurrently to communicate the author’s argument, with the result that the fictional and critical elements of the dialogue form are often conflated, and subtleties of argument revealed by the reasoning of two or more characters are neglected. 1. Dialectic Departures In “Three Dialogues” Beckett and Duthuit depart from traditional Socratic form in a number of significant ways. Unlike Plato, for example, Beckett and Duthuit use untenable logic and self-effacing language, which suggest that the assertions presented should be approached with caution. We observe this undermining of language, for example, when B prefaces his final monologue on van Velde by informing the reader that what follows will be droll supposition: B. - How would it be if I first said what I am pleased to fancy he is, fancy he does, and then that it is more than likely that he is and does quite otherwise? Would that not be an excellent issue out of all our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness? (102) The sardonic tone B uses in this passage suggests that he is merely playing at criticism, that he is stating his fancy with no intention of supporting, defending, or even articulating this notion fully. This ma454

neuver displays two aspects of witty dialogue, which Andrew Kennedy designates as “‘out-witting’ (at the expense of other characters) and ‘in-witting’ (the flux of knowing and capping remarks)” (106). This technique destabilizes any attempt at serious interpretation because the author directs this humor both outward and inward; the dialogues are, as Leo Bersani notes, both “cryptic” and “self-mocking” (301). Beckett and Duthuit assault the high and serious nature of art history, for example, by means of B’s suggestion that the Italian masters are nothing more than “building contractors.” They question philosophical complacency when B ridicules the incongruity of Pythagoras’s pursuit of mathematical truth and his belief in metempsychosis by suggesting that critics react “with a kind of Pythagorean terror” to the “irrationality of pi” (103). Yet this comment is directed inward at “Three Dialogues” as well, for the comment questions the function of criticism itself. “You realise,” D puns, “the absurdity of what you advance”? To which B replies with an unsteady, “I hope I do” (101). Other examples of this self-conscious humor include the fact that Beckett and Duthuit portray B, who is driven forth “weeping” from the end of dialogue two, as a bit emotionally unstable, or the fact that B displays his critical ignorance and impotence. When asked why van Velde is obliged to paint, for instance, B. replies: “I don’t know.” And when D challenges his intimation that “the painting of van Velde is inexpressive”, the text records that B’s response is returned “a fortnight later”. Bersani argues that this exchange underscores both the ambiguity present in the text and the self-deprecating nature of the humor. The author has, he writes, “in this way either established the importance (or perhaps the silliness) of the question, or raised doubts about using Bram van Velde to illustrate this idea, or suggested that to formulate the idea is an agony, perhaps an impossibility” (302). This ambiguity of language, labeled by David Fortunoff the “liquidity” of dialogue, allows the authors to create these mutually exclusive interpretations (65). Rupert Wood explains that the dialogues thus: [they] enjoy a status somewhere between philosophical aesthetics and dramatized repartee. The dialogue form leaves no space for ‘serious’ authorial intervention, either to come to the aid of or to ironize B’s theorizing. In the less confined 455

space of the dialogue form, the contradictions and lacunae of B’s theorizing can be highlighted. (12) Although Wood notes the existence of the rhetorical flexibility outlined by Stokes, he hints that the ambivalence found in the dialogues is self-consciously intentional and more significant to interpretation than merely an invitation by the author to pause and think. He contends that when the character “B” attempts “to outline the philosophical framework that he uses, it collapses into a jokey non-seriousness”, and that Beckett “fails to draw up stable ground-rules” for discussing the subject at hand (14). Yet Wood also suggests that the contradictions revealed by the dialogue form are linked to the subject of this work, that the author is less interested in arguing a thesis than in highlighting the importance of what is left unsaid. Beckett and Duthuit's self-effacing language contributes to this suspicion that one is being misled, that the authors are disguising their agenda behind clever verbal exchange and outlandish assertions. Kennedy argues that dialogue depends on this duplicity, that it often “releases the doubleness” in a character or work, “through the verbal aspect of disguise: costume language giving way, at appropriate moments, to the felt language of the ‘real’ person” (121). A similar doubleness exists in “Three Dialogues”, which both hinders the clarity of the argument and enhances the mystery and appeal of the text. For, as Rupert Wood contends: clarity and seriousness are undermined, but not destroyed. So the drama we are presented with in the Three Dialogues is a kind of endgame of aesthetic theorizing; it is a drama which is neither entirely serious nor entirely playful, but one where playfulness and seriousness continuously infect one another. (12) The combined difficulty and allure for the Beckett critic lies in the futile attempt to detect the boundaries of the serious and playful, and to assign meaning accordingly. The dialogue form, as modified by Beckett and Duthuit, resists criticism. 456

In addition to this unconventional use of humor and duplicity, Beckett and Duthuit depart from traditional philosophical dialogue form in the way that they draw the reader through these arguments. Traditional philosophical dialogue constructs arguments by means of extractive questions. Richard Robinson observes that the philosophical dialogue customarily begins when a teaching character asks an initial question in an effort to solicit a definition or explanation from a learning character. Subsequent questions challenge this primary statement and are designed to elicit affirmations or denials. These disconnected answers are then “syllogized” to refute the original answer and suggest other alternatives (Urmson 299). In Plato's dialogues, for example, Stokes observes that Socrates “often claims ignorance, and usually adopts an obviously questioning stance” (7). Beckett and Duthuit invert and rupture the technique of using one character as the “straight man” in a teacher/learner binary. Hugh Kenner suggests that this binary exists in the dialogues when he identifies B as “an Irish pawn who quails before a Frenchman’s dialectic” (28). Yet, in “Three Dialogues” no clear teaching character emerges: the subject is not introduced clearly at the beginning of the discussion, definitions are created by D and B in concert, and the bulk of the argument is formed by informative assertions instead of through extractive questions. D emerges as the inquisitor and B the respondent only in the third dialogue, and this practice is short-lived. D does not lead B through a process of Socratic discovery, nor is B overcome by D’s eloquence, acumen, or superior consistency. B collapses because of his own inability or refusal to argue or respond to questions. The inconsistency of his assertions seems obvious to both characters and reader, but unlike Plato’s victims B refuses to acknowledge defeat or retreat from his argument. Finally, Beckett and Duthuit depart from traditional dialogic inquiry by under-arguing their assertions. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that “Three Dialogues” does not examine specific works or techniques of Tal Coat, Masson, or van Velde. In addition, points are raised in the dialogues that are neglected at best and more often ignored completely. There is no critical reply, for example, to D’s challenge at the end of each of the first two dialogues, or any indication that D’s argument is so crippling that B should be driven from the scene weeping. Also, when pressed about the logic of his argument, B attempts to retract his earlier statements about van Velde, 457

which causes D in frustration to demand, “Come, come, my dear fellow, make some kind of connected statement and then go away” (102). This lack of concrete argument suggests that the fictional B may know less about van Velde than he pretends, that the character demonstrates the topic under examination – the inability to express. As quoted above, B qualifies his own understanding of this absurd argument as a “hope” instead of a certainty. Rupert Wood illustrates this uncertainty and impotence when he observes: How van Velde sees the world is inaccessible to B; so, too, is how B sees the world to D who, like the psychiatric nurses at Murphy’s hospital, functions as a ‘sane eye.’ B’s views neither make sense to D, nor, ultimately to a reader looking for a stable argument. (14) In contrast, as Leo Bersani claims, the assertions articulated in the text are “disturbing without, in a sense, being radical” because of this lack of coherent argument. Yet Bersani agrees that the core questions and conclusions are unexamined: “Why this peculiar ‘obligation to express’ when there is nothing to express? Even more fundamentally, what makes expression impossible”? (305). Critics like Wood and Bersani are disturbed by these questions because they seek a protoessay. Yet as Lawrence Miller observes, dialogue allows Beckett and Duthuit to avoid this type of argument: The form makes few demands in the way of conclusions: its prototype, the Socratic dialogue, does not require (and in its most basic form does not even provide for) positive or constructive results. A thesis submitted for elentic dispute is either proven false or shown to be supported by an invalid argument. The ‘Three Dialogues,’ accordingly, allow Beckett to carry out his reactive, deflationary programme, without having to propose a ‘correct’ alternative to the views he undercuts. At Duthuit’s insistence, Beckett does give an affirmative account of how artistic failure is to be preferred to any possible success, but, by virtue of the form of the dialogue, he need not prove its validity or truth. (61) 458

Unfortunately, as Miller hints, the same process that provides the above flexibility also hinders the discovery of the above “programme”. Overlooked by Miller, who operates on the assumption that this agenda exists, is the fact that B never gives any affirmative account at all – the dialogue is unfinished. B prepares to leave after the final monologue and is called back by D: D. - Are you not forgetting something? B. - Surely that is enough? D. - I understood your number was to have two parts. The first was to consist in your saying what you – er – thought. This I am prepared to believe you have done. The second – B. - (Remembering, warmly) Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken. (103) The missing element is the promised, more critical explanation of van Velde’s work: “what it is more than likely that he is and does” (102). B delivers only his fanciful speculation, after which he intimates that he was mistaken to suggest he had any substantive ideas about Bram van Velde at all. Rupert Wood notes that by means of these passages: we are shown the impossibility of foundation; there is nowhere to start, for as B’s admission that he cannot properly say anything about van Velde shows, the real discussion never got started anyway. What van Velde in fact is and does was never really on the agenda, and so the whole text has been circling around an absent centre. (14) The reader is led to believe that the missing section – the unsaid theory – contains the more important of these two explications, and thus this intentional absence undermines the validity of the whole enterprise. Like Bersani, however, Wood overlooks the dramatic elements of dialogue in his interpretation and approaches this text as traditional discursive criticism. He ignores, for example, the fact that B may be able to articulate what he thinks van Velde is and does, but simply refuses to do so directly. 459

2. Enthymeme and Elenchus In addition, in “Three Dialogues” Beckett and Duthuit do not follow through completely in the “step-by-step” collaborative process of syllogism. The characters discuss specialized knowledge and theoretical principles but fail to isolate terms and definitions, the terms occasion and void, for example, are discussed and partly defined, but never placed in a context of art history or applied to specific critical arguments. Nor do Beckett and Duthuit supply the expected “syllogized” definitions and applications. B argues that van Velde “is the first to desist from this estheticized automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation”, but he neither demonstrates how this has been observed nor articulates how Van Velde accomplishes this action (103). Because the dialogue is constructed by means of informative assertions instead of traditional Socratic extractive questions Beckett and Duthuit appear to use discursive rhetoric instead of syllogism. Yet the authors sabotage this process when they argue using the tools of enthymeme and the structure of traditional Platonic syllogism. They build an argument by means of assertions instead of demolishing an argument by means of questions, and thus B and D fail to isolate important terms and ideas as Socrates would have done. Yet Beckett and Duthuit also offer only one of two promised possible explanations for van Velde's success – which explanation B dismisses as mere supposition – and leave the second, potentially more accurate and insightful explanation unexpressed. With this maneuver the authors deny the reader the opportunity to accept or reject these assertions. B's comments suggest, for example, that the reader cannot accept his first “fanciful” explanation, and that the reader must supply the missing second explanation because B both maintains that it exists and neglects to articulate it. Thus the dialogues do not function as a syllogism or enthymeme, but as an incomplete syllogism where one of the terms has been intentionally and emphatically denied. This strategy suggests that, like Plato, Beckett and Duthuit envision a purpose for dialectic exchange that stresses the process itself instead of the structure or success of the argument; that, as Joanne Waugh observes in Plato, the dialogues “do not present philosophical truths, but, instead, teach others how to philosophize” (49). Kenneth Seeskin contends that this purpose is accomplished through the proc460

ess of elenchus. “Socrates”, he writes, “does not just have conclusions to impart but a method for arriving at them.” The method is elenchus, which means to examine, refute, or put to shame – but with the intent of self-discovery and moral self-improvement: “The first rule of Socratic elenchus is that the respondent must say what he really thinks” (1). This exchange demands greater audience involvement because the dialogue facsimilates conversation, and the reader thus identifies with participants who make errors and commit themselves to dubious critical positions. Seeskin argues that the demonstration of these mistakes is vital to Plato's purpose. It follows that elenchus is more than an exercise in philosophical analysis. In asking people to state and defend the moral intuitions which underlie their way of life, Socrates inevitably reveals something about their characters. Elenchus, then, has as much to do with honesty, reasonableness, and courage as it does with logical acumen: the honesty to say what one really thinks, the reasonableness to admit that one does not know, and the courage to continue the investigation. Most of Socrates’s respondents are lacking in all three. (3) B lacks none of these qualities. Nor do Beckett or Duthuit. Yet clearly B's oversights and retractions, together with his refusal to retreat from an apparently untenable position, exemplify the process of elenchus. This suggests that the authors are more interested in displaying the process of critical thinking than in presenting a theory about art. Notably, Both B and Socrates are eager to admit their lack of knowledge. Having read “Three Dialogues” one can imagine that B might even associate himself with Socrates, who claims in the Apology that he is the wisest man in Athens based on his argument that, “I neither know nor think that I know” (Halverson 7). Seeskin maintains that the purpose of elenchus is “to enable the respondent to say what he feels he was trying to say all along” (5). B functions as the respondent in the final section of “Three Dialogues,” but having struggled to articulate his views about the void and van Velde's navigation of it, he ultimately states what he has been trying to say all along, the only state461

ment perhaps, that he can make with complete honesty: “I am mistaken.” 3. Subversion and “Sciagura” This renunciation suggests that Beckett and Duthuit use an important, but less recognized aspect of Platonic dialogue: subversion. At times, Plato’s community reacted violently to philosophical criticism: Socrates was executed, Anaxagoras and Protagoras were exiled, and the writings of the latter burned publicly. Plato came into conflict with the established order as soon as his philosophy, to use the words of David Fortunoff, “entered into analysis of the human world” (61). Thus, following the execution of Socrates, Fortunoff asserts, Plato “wittingly and stunningly developed and exhibited the literaryphilosophical genre of dialogical drama as a multipurpose ‘instrument’ to meet crucial political as well as intellectual requirements” (62). In short, dialogue circumvents official scrutiny both from the state; it has the salutary effect of rendering all philosophical, ethical, and political assertions contingent upon the doings of the dialogues’ dramatis personae. Because Plato makes his reader aware both of the fictional and innocuous natures of the dialogue by means of temporal inconsistency, allusion, and humor, he could “flirt with potentially subversive, or even seditious connotations while figures in the dramas could continue to act with impunity with regard to the political context outside the drama” (Fortunoff 65). Readers who apprehend the allusions in the text would understand the criticism being tendered, but others would be distracted or mollified by the dramatic elements. Plato may have been added to the list of the proscribed, Fortunoff adds, “had he not already found a dialogical vehicle through which to alert the cognoscienti of his Socrates’s dialectical inquiries, while remaining just ambiguous enough to leave his adversaries in doubt” (72). Dialogue functions as this type of vehicle for Beckett and Duthuit as well. With “Three Dialogues,” Beckett and Duthuit question the form and function of both critical and creative works, and subvert the binary definitions that separate them. Yet the work is not the Beckett’s first attempt to experiment with critical form. In “Che Sciagura”, for example, he makes us of the subversive attributes of dialogue to point out inconsistencies in the conservative political position regarding birth control in the Irish state. According to Federman and Fletcher, 462

Beckett “was inspired by the embargo on the import of contraceptives into the Republic of Ireland” (3). The text appeared in the 14 November 1929 issue of T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, the weekly undergraduate newspaper published at Trinity College. The title of the work refers to the exclamation of the eunuch upon encountering the naked and helpless young countess at the end of chapter eleven in Voltaire’s Candide: “O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!” (53).1 An examination of “Che Sciagura” may seem digressive at this point, but this text reveals Beckett's early use of the subversive aspect of dialogue, and thus provides insight into the more sophisticated subversion he and Duthuit develop in “Three Dialogues”. The work consists of an introduction, in which Beckett communicates the necessity for subterfuge and outlines the heavily coded subject, followed by a series of propositions that deal with specific birth control practices, and concludes with an allusion to institutional scrutiny of the debate. The first interlocutor begins by asserting that birth control occurs in Ireland, and intimates that due to the embargo, the methods utilized are unorthodox. - “Frequently.” - “In this country?” - “Strictly speaking – never in this country.” - “Permit to protest against the double-barrelled qualification. Am I to reduce the coefficient of spatial, or that of qualitative elasticity?” - “You will excuse my disability to apprehend inaccurate scientific illustration.” - “I understand you to have implied the danger of conceptual non-conguence.” Initially, both speakers are confused by the other’s coded comments: The second speaker rejects the “double-barrelled qualification” that birth control can occur and not occur at the same time; and the first speaker protests against his counterpart’s attempt to differentiate the process into “the coefficient of spatial” birth control – lack of sexual contact – and “qualitative elasticity” – which refers to interdiction via condoms. The latter reminds his associate that precautions such as his “inaccurate scientific illustrations” are necessary due to the danger of “conceptual non-congruence” – that is, of possessing opinions that 463

conflict with the dominant ideology. They finally establish their code and begin to communicate with one another (and Beckett with the reader) when the first speaker asserts that he anticipates the possibility of his partner’s response to “terminological stimuli” – coded phrases – that will implant “cerebral reactions” like a nucleolus inside a nucleus. They then proceed to discuss the “mode and sphere of activity”, or, in other words, the method of birth control and the sexual activities about which they intend to debate. Following this exchange, the first speaker presents a series of proposals in which he alludes to various “modes” of birth control and asks his associate to comment on the legitimacy of these practices. - “I propose the uncompromising attitude as advocated by the Catholic Truth Society.” - “Though unfamiliar with the publications of that body, I understand that the bulk of their pronouncements is of a purely negative nature.” - “Maximal negation is minimal affirmation.” - “I have considered it expedient to reject their unexpressed clock-wisdom.” The Catholic Truth Society was founded in 1868 in order to evangelize and spread the Catholic faith. Their “uncompromising attitude” to which the speaker refers is a complete rejection of birth control in any form. The result of this stance, the other participant suggests, is the use by Catholics of the rhythm method – abstinence during ovulation – which here is labeled “unexpressed clock-wisdom.” This conventional proposal having been denounced, the inquisitor presents masturbation as an alternative. - “I propose the sophisticated, amoral, and specifically bipedal mode, as depreciated by that organ.” - “We are not concerned with abstract concepts. I am afflicted with an extreme form of the disfaction complex. I extend my apprehensions to a variety of objects.” The “sophisticated, amoral” label refers to the Theosophical Society, some members of which were famous for their strict chastity, and specifically to the infamous “Leadbeater Affair” when a leader in the 464

London branch of this organization wrote a letter to the thirteen year old son of a Chicago theosophist, in which he advised the boy to masturbate twice weekly “as a preventative against unchastity” (Mullin 88). The respondent in Beckett’s dialogue rejects this option as well, for he is preoccupied with “disfaction” – unmaking or the prevention of insemination – instead of with “abstract concepts” associated with autoeroticism (the “bi-pedal” or two-feet alone mode), which he views as separate from the issue of birth control. His comment that his concerns extend “to a variety of objects” reinforces the above reference to masturbation; it alludes to Madame Blavatsky’s use of such objects for self pleasure, specifically to her admission that “I could never have connection with any man because I am lacking something and the place is filled up with some crooked cucumber” (Neff, 187-8). This work is one of Beckett’s earliest, yet the dialogue form he uses provides him with a sophisticated amount of critical flexibility and anonymity; he is able to address issues that are sensitive politically and morally, and which would undoubtedly have been declared obscene by his audience.2 As drama “Che Sciagura” is amusing and suggestive, but from a critical perspective the work itself is, like “Three Dialogues” an “untidy analyst,” that is, the text largely fails as criticism if one is not familiar with the issue at hand. Ruby Cohn observes, for example, that the text “is so opaquely learned that no one thought to censor it from a student newspaper” (1973, 11). Apparently the Editorial Subcommittee at Trinity appreciated the danger; they note that the dialogue “was extremely clever,” but observe with some relief that the text is “fortunately a trifle obscure for those who do not know their Joyce and their Voltaire” (T.C.D. 6 March 1930, my emphasis). Although the potential for state censure due to the issues discussed in “Three Dialogues” is extremely slight, Beckett and Duthuit face possible social or ideological censure because of their dismissal of the modernist traditions in general, and of specific artists and movements. More importantly, in the work the authors also struggle to avoid the duplicity and compromise Beckett denounces in “Che Sciagura,” that is, each must confront the censure of his own conscience if he fails to examine the problems he observes in various theories of aesthetics. 465

Beckett's comments in relation to “Three Dialogues” suggest that subversion is a primary goal. In her introduction to Disjecta, Ruby Cohn reflects on Beckett's remark to Martin Esslin “that he wrote the talks up rather than down”, and asserts: “Like Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, those of Beckett are dramatic enough to perform” (14).3 “Three Dialogues” is performed occasionally,4 but the wealth of reference used in the text makes the work far too complex for aural consumption, and suggests that the work is to be studied carefully. In one of those happy critical accidents, however, Cohn's comparison may intuitively suggest more than she intends, for in a short essay entitled “Writing the Truth, Five Difficulties,” 5 Brecht writes: Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. (133) In his discussion of the cunning necessary to spread truth effectively and without censure Brecht suggests that one must write “up” or “down” to reach the selected audience. “It is indeed the case that the high literary level of a given statement can afford it protection,” he writes, “Often, however, it also arouses suspicion. In such case it may be necessary to lower it deliberately” (143). Although Beckett’s comments about his own work should be approached with caution, an interpretation informed by Brecht's observation suggests that like Plato – and as he had done previously with “Che Sciagura” – Beckett wrote the dialogues “up” in a heavily coded and rhetorically flawed manner to reach the aesthetic cognoscienti.

466

Notes 1.

“Oh the disaster of being without balls!” Beckett refers to the entire phrase by means of the title and the pseudonym “D.E.S.C.” (“d’essere senza coglioni”) with which he signs the text.

2.

The phrases from Ulysses to which Beckett alludes, for example, were largely responsible for the censorship problems Joyce faced with this text. See Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship, 1-9.

3.

These dialogues are about the about the place of art in society. Actor, Actress, Dramaturg, and Electrician argue with a Brechtian Philosopher who wants to exploit their talent.

4.

Orlando Harrison and Will Cox presented a reading of the text at a conference organized by the London Network for Modern Fiction Studies on the subject of “Three Dialogues,” which took place at South Bank University, London, on November 10, 2001.

5.

This essay appeared in German in the Paris journal Unsere Zeit 8.3 (April 1935): 23-34. It was reprinted in English in Twice A Year, Tenth Anniversary Issue (New York 1948).

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, “Che Sciagura,” in TCD: A College Miscellany 36 (14 Nov. 1929), 42. Beckett, Samuel, and Georges Duthuit, “Three Dialogues: Tal Coat /Masson/ Bram van Velde,” in Transition Forty-Nine 5 (Dec. 1949), 97-103. Bersani, Leo, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction, (NY: Oxford UP; 1970). Brecht, Bertolt, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” in Galileo, (NY: Grove Press, 1966). Cohn, Ruby, Back to Beckett, (Princeton: Princeton UP; 1973). –. “Forward,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, ed. Ruby Cohn, (New York: Grove Press; 1984). Esslin, Martin, “Introduction,” in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall; 1965).

467

Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press; 1970). Fortunoff, David, “Plato’s Dialogues as Subversive Activity,” in Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Gerald A. Press, (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield; 1993). Halverson, William H., Concise Readings in Philosophy, (NY: Random House; 1981). Kennedy, Andrew, Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP; 1983). Kenner, Hugh, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, (NY: Farrar; 1973). Miller, Lawrence, Samuel Beckett: The Expressive Dilemma, (London: Macmillan; 1992). Moes, Mark, Plato's Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul, (NY: P. Lang; 2000). Mullin, Katherine, “Typhoid Turnips and Crooked Cucumbers: Theosophy in Ulysses,” in Modernism/Modernity 8.1 (2001), 77-97. Neff, Mary K, Personal Memoirs of H. P. Blavatsky, (Illinoise: Wharton; 1971). Seeskin, Kenneth, Dialogue and discovery: A Study in Socratic Method. (Albany, N. Y.: State U of New York, 1987). Stokes, M. C., Plato’s Socratic Conversations: Drama and Dialectic in Three Dialogues, (London: Athlone Press; 1986). Urmson, J. O., and Jonathan Rée (editors), The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, (London: Routledge, 1991). Waugh, Joanne, “Socrates and the Character of Platonic Dialogue,” in Who Speaks for Plato?: Studies in Platonic Anonymity, ed. Gerald A. Press, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; 2000). Wood, Rupert, “An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, 1-16.

468

CONJUNCTION OF THE ESSENTIAL AND THE INCIDENTAL: Fragmentation and Juxtaposition; or Samuel Beckett’s Critical Writings in the 1930s Takeshi Kawashima

Beckett’s reviews of the 1930s witness his wide-ranging interests: from painting and music to literature. Although Beckett criticism has not yet developed a comprehensive examination of them, these writings indicate his radical interrogation of the historical condition of literary movements in the 20th century. The purpose of the present paper is to identify an underlying thematic element in these seemingly disparate essays. By focusing on the ideas of fragmentation and juxtaposition, I will explore Beckett’s preoccupation with an insistent rejection of the reductionism which symbolically unifies the works into a unitary and essential meaning.

1. Impulse toward fragmentation It is well-known that in the 1930s Beckett determined to be a professional writer and began to write experimental novels such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks than Kicks (1934), Murphy (1938).1 It is less well known, however, that at the same time, Beckett wrote some reviews for magazines and periodicals such as Spectator or The Bookman.2 Starting with Proust (1931), in this era, Beckett devoted himself to writing literary reviews, which show his huge knowledge not only of literature but also of art, music and social problems such as censorship. While these reviews were not necessarily written in response to Beckett’s inner motivation and artistic need but to the external and contingent commission of publishing companies and periodicals, it is possible, I believe, to distil his aesthetic vision from these writings. Even a first glance at the texts can reveal that Beckett is anything but a critic who depends exclusively on his own dogmatic, aesthetic intuitions and standards, and that he stays away from random remarks and

arbitrary speculations. Rather, these texts are obviously inspired by consistent criteria of evaluation. What characterizes his reviews is the valorization of fragmented and aleatory elements over the essential integration apparent in the works of the contemporary writers. Beckett stubbornly asserts a resistance to the reductive readings of literary convention which symbolically and synthetically unifies all accidental and incidental elements into a logically unitary meaning in art. In reviewing contemporary poets and writers, he appreciates the work which defies a unified image and criticizes texts which require symbolical signification. Beckett’s concern with fragmentation is not an entirely new theme in Beckett criticism. In Accommodating the Chaos, J. E. Dearlove elucidates how fragmentation is an important process in Beckett’s works: The fragmentation is the result of Beckett’s unremitting efforts to find a shape for the possibility that no relationships exist between or among the artist, his art, and an external world. Once his earliest fictions had mocked traditional relationships and once Murphy had exploded them by following them to their logical ends, Beckett sought to create a nonrelational art by breaking apart whatever pieces of identity, time, space, and language remained. (Dearlove, 39) Dearlove’s argument in this passage is revealing and crucial to our reading in that it draws attention to the impulse toward fragmentation in Beckett’s work. Her claims concerning fragmentation and nonrelational art remain insufficient, however, because they are at risk of being confounded with the autonomy of art. Beckett’s concern with fragmentation is at odds with – or even opposed to – the concepts of aesthetic autonomy and the self-sufficient work of art. The main purpose of the present paper is to distil Beckett’s view of the work of art – the claims of fragmentation and the resistance to symbolic reduction – from these seemingly miscellaneous and contingent texts. Questions which then arise are: what works does Beckett appreciate? What writings does he reject? Or more fundamentally, how does he read books? By considering three texts which indicate Beckett’s main insights as a young critic, with these questions in my mind, I would like 470

not only to bring his underlying ideas concerning literature and art to the surface, but also to reveal what fragmentation is in Beckett. 2. Fragmentation in “Proust in Pieces” (1934) Beckett’s criticism of the reductive process of drawing fragments into an essential unification is remarkably witnessed in a review “Proust in Pieces” which deals with Albert Feuillerat’s Comment Proust a composé son Roman.3 As a matter of fact, there are two versions of A la recherché du temps perdu: the pre-war version of Grasset and the post-war version of N. R. F., but the Grasset version had not been completely published because of the War and Proust’s revisions. According to Beckett, Feuillerat identifies in A la Recherche du temps perdu “grave dissonances and incompatibilities, clashing styles, internecine psychologies and deplorable solutions of continuity, such chaos in short as could only be explained by the inharmonious collaboration of the two Prousts” (Beckett 1983, 63). The project of Feuillerat’s book is therefore to recover the lost volumes of the Grasset version in order to restore the coherent order of this masterpiece; or in other words, to synthesise the two versions of A la Recherche into a coherent and total image of the work. Beckett, significantly, criticises Feuillerat’s preoccupation with deducing “rigorously from that cast-iron collation, the first draught of the remainder” (63). This does not mean, however, that Beckett considers the published edition of A la Recherche to be the apotheosis of the work. Rather he takes issue with Feuillerat’s uncritical belief in the possibility of recovering the coherent intention of the great writer. The following passage reveals that Beckett’s view of Proust’s novel is at odds with Feuillerat’s intention: Uniformity, homogeneity, cohesion, selection scavenging for verisimilitude (the stock-in-trade exactly of the naturalism that Proust abominated), these are the Professor’s [Feuillerat’s] tastes, and they are distressed by the passage of intuition and intellection hand in hand, by Mme de Marsantes a saint and a snob in the one breath, by the narrator boy and man without transition, by the inconsequences of Swann, Odette, Saint-Loup, Gilberte, Mme de Villeparisis and even poor Jupien, but most of all by the stupefying antics of those two indeterminates, Charlus and Albertine. 471

(64) It is clear, in this passage, that Beckett wishes to demonstrate the resistant elements of Proust’s work to Feuillerat’s tastes of “uniformity, homogeneity, cohesion”. By indicating the juxtaposition of incongruent and opposing components, such as “intuition and intellection”, and “a saint and a snob”, he appreciates the work’s tendency toward a deliverance from unifying homogeneity. In the same vein, Beckett’s statement that “If there is mésalliance […] it was there from the start” (Beckett 1983, 65) is a severe criticism of Feuillerat’s absolute confidence in “the initial conception and method” of Proust. The emphasis on the resistance to “uniformity, homogeneity, cohesion” in Proust was already manifested in Beckett’s 1930 essay Proust, which focuses on the peculiar description of subject in A la Recherche. If Proust’s subject formation is fascinating to Beckett, this is because it juxtaposes multiple and sometimes fragmentally incongruent elements which cannot be consumed in the unification of a total subject (Beckett 1965, 47-9). For Beckett, the celebrated “involuntary memory” is not only the temporal duplication of past and present but also a moment which explodes the unitary formation of the subject. This view is still maintained in “Proust in Pieces”, when Beckett asks: “And is it not precisely this conflict between intervention and quietism, only rarely to be resolved through the uncontrollable agency of unconscious memory, and its statement without the plausible frills that constitute the essence of Proust’s originality?” (Beckett 1983, 65) As this passage clearly attests, Beckett praises Proust not for the intellectual unification of opposing contraries but for the juxtaposition of incommensurable elements and for the uncontrollable agency of unconscious (involuntary) memory. Proust does not give priority either to “intervention” or “quietism”. Rather, Beckett stresses that inconsistent and contradictory oppositions are affirmed without synthesis in Proust’s work. It would be oversimplification, however, if we were to consider that Beckett simply praises an impulse toward fragmentation over integration. For, strangely enough, Beckett does not reject the idea of unification and even admits that there is a kind of integration in A la Recherche du temps perdu: “These [Proust’s material], no doubt, when finally by chance the resolution is consummated in the Hôtel de Guermantes and the comedy announced as shortly to be withdrawn, 472

may be added up, like those of a life, and cooked to give unity” (65, my italics). Our questions thus are: what “unity” does Beckett embrace? What distinguishes Beckett’s unity from that of Feuillerat? We may be allowed, in this respect, to think of the following statement by Beckett as a reply to our questions: “such a creditable act of integration would not do for Professor Feuillerat who desires, nay requires, that the right answer, the classical answer, should be ostentatiously implicit in every step of the calculation” (65, my italics). It is easily understood, from this passage, what kind of unity Beckett imagines and how his “unity” differs from Feuillerat’s. On the one hand, Feuillerat presupposes that every part and sentence should have a symbolical meaning which is, by “the compte rendu” or “the calculation”, expected to be synthesised into the totality of signification. Beckett, on the other hand, holds that the integrity of the book is only given by the accidental such as “chance” or “uncontrollable agency” (65). What Beckett emphasises in A la Recherche is the integrity which is not confounded with the logical and calculated integrity Feuillerat embraces and which preserves accidental and incompatible elements without dissolution. In Proust’s novel, Beckett foregrounds inconsistent and aleatory elements which are incommensurable with the tendency toward essential integrity, rather than the latter’s dialectic subsumption of the former. 3. Juxtaposition in “The Essential and the Incidental: Windfalls by Sean O’Casey” (1934) The priority Beckett gives to accidental agency and the rejection of intellectual unification pervade almost all the reviews in 1930s. “The Essential and the Incidental: Windfalls by Sean O’Casey” also attests to this tendency.4 More clearly than “Proust in Pieces”, this text focuses on the incidental and fragmentary elements in O’Casey’s book. Beckett’s intention is encapsulated, for example, in the following passage: “If ‘Juno and the Paycock’, as seems likely, is his best work so far, it is because it communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation – ‘chassis’ […]” (Beckett 1983, 82, my italics). Beckett does not ask for clear and transparent communication from aesthetic creation; instead, he affirms the heterogeneity and discontinuity which creative works inevitably include.5 473

If we were to understand that Beckett’s main interest is the binary opposition of “the essential” and “the accidental” and that he gives priority exclusively to the latter, we would overlook the most important point in this essay. Just as “Proust in Pieces” is an attempt at locating integrity without calculation and “compte rendu”, so in “The Essential and the incidental”, Beckett never excludes the centripetal tendency in the works of O’Casey. When Beckett states that “he [O’Casey] discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion” (82, my italics), he praises not only the destructive power, but also, as the oxymoron “the principle of disintegration” suggests, the contradictory interrelationship between disintegration and integration. If Beckett says, about two pieces which conclude O’Casey’s Windfalls, that the “impulse of material to escape and be consummated in its own knockabout is admirably expressed in the two ‘sketches’” (82-3, my italics), it is because his interest is not so much in the material’s escape from an integral meaning as in the antithetical conjunction of escape and consummation. The two terms in the title of the review – the Essential and the incidental – must not be, therefore, considered to be mutually exclusive categorizations. The following rather general statement clearly points out what draws Beckett’s interest: What is arguable of a period – that its bad is the best gloss on its good – is equally so of its representatives taken singly. A proper estimate of Molière as master of prose dialogue depends largely on a proper estimate of him as a very humdrum practitioner of the alexandrine – teste for example ‘La Princesse d’Elide’ where the passage from the latter to the former vehicle is one of the great reliefs in literature. Similarly to Chaplin’s comic via his mièvre, Eisenstein’s cinematography via his Moscow copybook. This is the interest of ‘Windfalls’ – that by its juxtaposition of what is distinguished and what is not, the essential O’Casey and the incidental, it facilitates a definition of the former. (82, my italics, except first paragraph) In this passage, as in “Proust in Pieces”, Beckett keeps the mythical belief in the possibility of the construction of a total and pure image of 474

the author at a distance. Insofar as the essential and the incidental O’Casey are inter-dependent, it is theoretically impossible to distil the pure and quintessential image of the writer from the commingling of the essential and the incidental. What Beckett attempts here is not the inversion of the hierarchical values of bad and good so as to give priority to the former, but to identify the complicit interrelationship between the incidental and the essential, and the inevitable “juxtaposition of what is distinguished and what is not” (Beckett 1983, 82). “The Essential and the Incidental” orients Beckett’s thinking away from the autonomy of art. Beckett rejects the possibility of selfsufficiency not only for the artist but also for the work of art. If O’Casey’s Windfalls is important to Beckett, it is because it illuminates the impossibility of distinguishing the essence from the incidence of art. 4. Image in “An Imaginative Work!: The Amaranthers. Jack B. Yeats” (1936) It would be a great mistake, if we were to consider that Beckett is asserting the rejection of any artistic unification in the surrealist fashion. As “Proust in Pieces” and “The Essential and the Incidental” bear witness, it is certain that Beckett does not intend to sweep away all the possibilities of integrity, unification and totalisation. He does not seek the totality of a work through inductive reduction to essential meanings; but in an a-symbolical way that conjoins heterogeneous and fragmental elements without synthesisation. David Weisberg’s argument is, in this sense, of crucial importance because he clearly draws attention to Beckett’s deliberate avoidance of unification in the short prose work “Dante and the Lobster” in More Pricks than Kicks: In fact, the appearance of an attempt toward some kind of unification or epiphany is perhaps the only thing that holds the story together and prevents it from becoming an indeterminate collage of contradictory aesthetic modes. But the last line [of “Dante and the Lobster”] merely suggests an overarching intention. That the suggestion is made through an ethical judgment seems to indicate an overall aesthetic confusion. The only thing that could bring “Dante” and the “lobster” together in a meaningful way is the very thing that 475

parodic and juxtapositional structure of high culture and crustacean cannot create: a meaningful judgment. (Weisberg, 24) Weisberg astutely demonstrates Beckett’s effort to elude any conclusive judgment in the prose work. The point is concerned with how the text can maintain the mode of juxtaposition as well as exclude any movement toward a symbolic conclusion; or in Weisberg’s phrase, “a meaningful judgment”. In this respect, among all the literary reviews Beckett wrote in the 1930s, “An Imaginative Work!: The Amaranthers. Jack B. Yeats”6 is the most significant, as it not only most clearly illustrates Beckett’s antithetical aesthetics of integration and disintegration but also describes the literary understanding of juxtaposition. By reading this text in the light of insights gained from “Proust in Pieces” and “The Essential and the Incidental”, I intend to elucidate how fragmentation and juxtaposition work in the literary text. This review, dedicated to the novel of his friend, the painter, Jack B. Yeats, starts with the distinction of “the artist” (Yeats) from the “chartered recountants”: The chartered recountants take the thing to pieces and put it together again. They enjoy it. The artist takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things. He must. Mr Jack Yeats is an artist. The Amaranthers is art, not horology. (Beckett 1983, 89) Instead of the enterprise of the “recountants”, that is, the fragmentation-reunification process, the preoccupation of “the artist” is to describe a transformative becoming which is like a strange puzzle making a different image every time. Beckett emphasises that the work of art must avoid reunification and reduction to the unitary conclusion. What is more important is that Beckett considers this process in terms of temporality. When Beckett writes that “The Amaranthers is art, not horology”, he indicates that Yeats’ book is incongruent with the linear temporality. What kind of temporality is thus possible for The Amaranthers? The following passage illustrates the temporality Beckett finds in Yeats’ The Amaranthers:

476

The moments are not separate, but concur in a single process: analytical imagination. Not first the old slum coming down, then the new slum going up, but in a single act slum seen as it is and other. (89, my italics) The rejection of horology – the unified temporary construction of fragmented moments – does not necessarily assert the fragmentation of chronological structure into discrete moments. What Beckett stresses by claiming that the moments “concur in a single process” is the suggestion of a densely multilayered moment which refers to the different orders of temporality. It in a manner which is similar to the Proustian fusion of presence and the past in “involuntary memory”, invests time with multivocal referents in which moments are never reduced to the unified construction of chronology but, on the contrary, are dispersed into plural orders of temporality. For Beckett, artistic creativity is an undertaking which makes the dense and concurrent moment, which is neither reducible to unitary meaning nor scattered to pieces. This tendency is apparent in his concern with the “image” (90) and the working of the imagination (the “analytical imagination”, 89). In Beckett’s aesthetics, the image is more than a visual and optical conception; it is an epiphany of creative activity. Beckett’s interest in the image is also witnessed in the review “Intercessions by Denis Devlin” dedicated to his Irish friend. 7 The following passage, in particular, helps to depict Beckett’s approach to image: It is naturally in the image that this profound and abstruse self-consciousness first emerges with the least loss of integrity. To cavil at Mr Devlin’s form as overimaged (the obvious polite cavil) is to cavil at the probity with which the creative act has carried itself out, a probity in this case depending on a minimum of rational interference, and indeed to suggest that the creative act should burke its own conditions for the sake of clarity. (Beckett 1983, 94, my italics) In the poetic creativity of Devlin, the mode of clear communication is abandoned and “rational interference” is thwarted (“art has nothing to 477

do with clarity”, 94). Beckett stresses, instead, how his poems privilege the “overimaged” form which attests to “the probity” of poetic creativity. It is obvious that Beckett’s aesthetics as they are manifested here have an affinity with the binary oppositions Russian Formalism established between poetic expression and everyday language: poetry is defined by its separateness from ordinary expression. In a crucial sense, however, Beckett’s approach toward art must not be confounded with Russian Formalist propositions, for this might end up with the autonomy of art, which Beckett is struggling to debunk and rebuff in the reviews. We should understand, therefore, that the image Beckett embraces is different from – and even opposed to – the poetic expression of language. This is readily found in the way he discredits metaphorical rhetoric in “An Imaginative Work!”: There is no allegory, that glorious double-entry, with every credit in the said account a debit in the meant, and inversely; but the single series of imaginative transactions. The Island is not throttled into Ireland, nor the City into Dublin, notwithstanding ‘one immigrant, in his cups, recited a long narrative poem’. There is no symbol. The cream horse that carries Gilfoyle and the cream coach that carries Gilfoyle are related, not by rule of three, as two values to a third, but directly, as stages of an image. There is no satire. Believers and make-believers, not Gullivers and Lilliputians; horses and men, not Houyhnhnms and Yahoos; imaginative fact, beyond the fair and the very fair. ‘God is good, so why not Brown?’ (Beckett 1983, 90, my italics) Beckett underlines how Yeats’ work rejects metaphorical transference: the translation of a signifier into a signified and the dialectical exchange of the described objects with the higher meanings. Beckett’s stress on the rejection of rhetorical figures illuminates how Yeats’ text resists the dialectical and hierarchical signification which inevitably asigns the signs in the text to a symbolical constellation. It is important here to note that this rejection is paralleled by Beckett’s praise for Joyce’s “direct expression” in “Dante … Bruno. Vico .. Joyce” (Beck478

ett 1983, 26) and Proust’s “autosymbolism” in Proust (Beckett 1965, 80). In fact, in this review, Beckett touches on the similarity between Yeats’ temporality and Proust’s in a parenthesis: “a world of the same order if not so intense as the ‘ideal real of Prowst [sic], so obnoxious to the continuity girls” (Beckett 1983, 89). Furthermore we need to note that “allegory” and “symbol” are described by the metaphorical terminologies of the economy and mathematics, such as “double entry”, “every credit in the said account a debit in the meant” and “rule of three” (Beckett 1983, 90). It is important that Beckett sees in these rhetorics of metaphor the mechanical and mathematical movement of transference and exchange. Contrary to this movement, by rejecting the works of figure such as “allegory”, “symbol” and “satire”, Beckett foregrounds in Yeats the unexchangeability of the “image” which defies the transferring movement toward symbolical meaning. The image and the works of imagination are clearly distinguished from metaphorical meanings, just as “the City” in Yeats’ The Amaranthers is not immediately associated with “Dublin”. Rather “image” and “imagination” can be defined as an opposing process to the movement of the figure. The “analytical imagination” indicates a “concurrence” of discrete moments and has much to do with excessiveness and surplus. Beckett rejects the work of “horology” – the chronological order of the novel, because it unifies discrete and fragmented moments into an hierarchical order of temporality. In The Amaranthers, Beckett stresses, the discrete moments are not synthetically reunified into a higher symbolical level but rather are densely conglomerated – or concurring – with each other without hierarchical sublimation. In opposition to the dual stratification of symbolic exchange, that is, “that glorious double-entry, with every credit in the said account a debit in the meant”, what Beckett finds “in the single series of imaginative transactions” (Beckett 1983, 90) is horizontal juxtaposition and the excessiveness of the image. Conclusion In the reviews written in the 1930s, Beckett fumbles his way toward a kind of totality: not a totality which ignores fractional, heterogeneous and discontinuous elements, such as “the incidental” (Beckett 1983, 82), “dissonance and incompatibilities” (63); but a totality which affirms fragmented and discrete elements without symbolic reduction. 479

Neither in “Proust in Pieces” nor in “The Essential and the Incidental” does Beckett simply foreground the tendency toward fragmentation. Rather, what he seeks can be encapsulated as “the principle of disintegration” (82). Beckett extends this principle, revealing the act of imagination and the explosive power of the image in Yeats’ The Amaranthers. In this “analytical imagination”, he emphasises how each incidental element concurs in “the single series of imaginative transaction” (90) which prevents the chronological reunification of discrete moments and disenables the symbolic exchange of signification, or the metaphorical transference of a signifier to a signified. While it seems that Beckett’s statements are filled with contradiction and inconsistency. It is true that the dual opposing impulses – the juxtaposition of disintegration and integration – inspire and motivate Beckett’s desire of writing. The difficulty in reading his texts obviously results from this impossible coexistence. In a celebrated interview in 1961, Beckett states: What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (Graver and Federman 1979, 219) The point for Beckett is not to synthesise “the form” and “the chaos”; but, on the contrary, to maintain or even enhance the intense relation between them. Similarly what Beckett’s reviews in the 1930s foreground is holding the dual and contradictory forces of binary oppositions: fragmentation and unification; disintegration and integration. The image is of significance for Beckett, not because it is a device for synthesising the form and the chaos but because its excessiveness explodes the intimate equivalence between form and content by illuminating an irreparable discrepancy between them. The image provides a negative surplus which is inconsumable in the dialectical proc480

ess and contributive to the incompatible conjunction of the essential and the incidental. Notes 1.

Dream of Fair to Middling Women remained unpublished until the death of the author, the authorised version appeared in 1993.

2.

These reviews are included in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, Beckett, 1983. Among twelve reviews appearing in Disjecta, the first “Schwabenstreich” (Spectator, March 23, 1934) was written in 1934 and five other texts were written in the same year.

3.

Beckett’s article first appears in Spectator (June 23, 1934) and later is included in Disjecta. Henceforth in this paper abbreviated as D with page number when quoted from this text.

4.

First publication in The Bookman, Christmas 1934.

5.

Awareness of dissociation and discommunication is one of the most fundamental characteristics in Beckett’s reviews. For instance, the first paragraph of the most celebrated text in the reviews “Recent Irish Poetry” (The Bookman, August 1934) clearly witnesses this concern: “I propose, as rough principle of individuation in this essay, the degree in which the younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mystical or spook. The thermolaters – and they pullulate in Ireland – adoring the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjurable and unchangeable, never at a loss to know when they are in the Presence, would no doubt like this amended to breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing – rupture of the line of communication” (Beckett 1983, 70).

6.

First published in Dublin Magazine, July-September 1936.

7.

First published in transition, April-May 1938.

481

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1965). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, (London: John Calder, 1983). Dearlove, J. E., Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art, (Durham: Duke UP, 1982). Driver, Tom, “Interview with Samuel Beckett,” Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961), reprinted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 217-223. Feuillerat, Albert, Comment Marcel Proust a composé son roman, (Paris: Réimpression de l’édition de Paris, 1934). Graver, Lawrence and Federman, Raymond (eds.). Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). O’Casey, Sean, Windfalls: Stories, Poems, and Plays, (London: McMillan, 1934). Weisberg, David, Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural Politics of the Modern Novel, (New York: State U of New York P, 2000). Yeats, Jack B., The Amaranthers, (London: W. Heinemann, 1936).

482

‘(HIATUS IN MS.)’: Watt and the Textual Genesis of Stirrings Still Dirk Van Hulle

“So on”, the first words of the last section of Stirrings Still could serve as the motto of Samuel Beckett’s poetics of process. His last piece of prose shows that in order to study this poetics, it is illuminating to concentrate on moments in the genesis when he could not proceed. One such cul-de-sac in the writing process is based on an intratextual reference to the first sentence of Watt, omitting a few words. Even though this passage did not make it into the final text of Stirrings Still, it is an integral part of Beckett’s work, showing the importance of pauses, gaps, hiatus, breathing spaces, as well as the significance of punctuation and – perhaps even more the striking – the lack thereof.

During the Second World War, when Beckett was writing Watt, his French colleague Francis Ponge (1899-1988) published Le Parti pris des choses.1 One of the texts in this book, Escargots, is conceived as a modest poetical statement on writing. Ponge describes the snails’ main activity simply as “Go on”. In retrospect, from a post-Unnamable perspective, these two English words sound very Beckettian, especially since they are italicized and highlighted as foreign words in this French text: Les escargots aiment la terre humide. Go on, ils avancent collés à elle de tout leur corps. Ils en emportent, ils en mangent, ils en excrémentent. Elle les traverse. Ils la traversent. (Ponge 1999, 24-5) Go on was to become the motto of Beckett’s poetics, and precisely because it is such a crucial notion in his writing, it is important to

focus on those instances in the writing process where he could not go on. This genetic study is an attempt to assess the importance of textual dead ends in Beckett’s poetics of process by focussing on a cul-de-sac in the writing process of Stirrings Still. Around the time Beckett was writing the Ur-Watt in 1941 (Cohn 2001, 108), Francis Ponge wrote a set of reactions to Albert Camus’ essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe.2 As an alternative to Camus’ notion of the “nostalgie d’absolu” Ponge suggested the notions of “mesure” and “succès relatifs.”3 Ponge did not deny the nostalgia of absolute perfection. In Escargots he praises the snails’ example: “ils font oeuvre d’art de leur vie, – oeuvre d’art de leur perfectionnement” (Ponge 1999, 27). The difference between “perfection” and “perfectionnement” is crucial. Even though it is impossible to reach absolute perfection, it may still be worth striving for. This applies to writing as well. Eventually Ponge decided to publish what he called his failures to describe, “échecs de description” (Ponge 1999, 207), regarding his drafts as an integral part of his work and publishing them as such. In 1949, one year after the publication of Ponge’s intention to publish his échecs,4 Beckett’s Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit came out. Beckett always stuck to his statement that “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail” (Beckett 1984, 145), even after having “said nohow on” (Beckett 1989b, 128). After Worstward Ho he continued to “[f]ail better.” The result was called Stirrings Still. It was first published in a limited de luxe edition and in a newspaper edition (The Guardian and The Irish Independent, 3 March 1989). The first manuscripts were written almost six years earlier, in the summer and fall of 1983, shortly after the opening production of three plays directed by Alan Schneider in New York on 15 June 1983 (Catastrophe, What Where, and Ohio Impromptu). The good reception of his plays may have been an incentive to start writing a new piece, as the first date on the first tentative drafts of Stirrings Still (27 June 1983, RUL MS 2933/1/1) suggests. Although the writing proceeded slowly, especially when in January and May 1984 Roger Blin and Alan Schneider died, Beckett showed his determination to try and “eff” the “ineffable departure” in spite of the sad circumstances (in a letter to Anne and Avigdor Arikha, 27 April 1984; Knowlson 1996, 697). In this letter, Beckett quotes the first sentence of the piece he is working on: “From where he sat with his head in his hands he saw himself rise and disappear.” In August, 484

Beckett changed the opening words “From where he sat” into “One night as he sat . . .” (RUL MS 2934, 1) This was a first step toward the opening of Stirrings Still as it eventually appeared in the published version: “One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.” (Beckett 1995, 259). But before he arrived at this result, the text underwent numerous changes. The genesis of Stirrings Still started as an attempt “to tell his end”.5 One of the first things Beckett wrote on a loose sheet of paper preserved in the Beckett Archive in Reading was: “No words for his end” (RUL MS 2935/1/1) – which is another way of saying that the departure is ineffable. Although there are “No words for his end” he goes on nonetheless. The next lines on the same manuscript are: Some of the attempts to tell his end Hereunder [...] scenes ^snippets^ from his close. [one line blank, DVH] Here ends snippet one. With or without change ^of voice^ after the hiatus. (RUL MS 2935/1/1) The hiatus6 had already preoccupied Beckett for quite a few decades – for instance the “(Hiatus in MS.)” in Watt, between two statements by Mr. Gorman (Beckett 1976, 238). In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Belacqua already predicted: “The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement” (Beckett 1992, 138). A remarkable aspect of Beckett’s writing is that the more experienced he was as a writer, the more hesitant his writing seemed to become. Whereas the drafts of En attendant Godot show how Beckett wrote a large part of this play in one smooth movement,7 it took him almost thirty drafts and hundreds of deletions to write Stirrings Still. This increasing hesitation is more than merely a textual curiosity; it goes to the heart of Beckett’s poetics of process.8 Because this hesitancy is such an important element in Beckett’s writing, it is illuminating to concentrate on a dead end in the genesis, a passage which eventually did not make it into the published version of Stirrings Still, but which elaborates on the hiatus or the intervals between the phrases. The scene takes place in a room. The protagonist has gone to bed and “they” come and read to him. It remains unclear who “they” 485

are. It is possible that the pronoun refers to other people reading to him. But it can also refer to the obligation to express, i.e. to some kind of internal voice, like the voices in Texts for nothing or the voice “from deep within” in the last part of Stirrings Still. The only thing he can tell about the voices is that there are two of them, both quite different in timbre.9 What they say or read to him is described as follows: Fragments of what he heard [...] he seemed to have heard before. For example10 Mr Knott turned the corner and saw his seat. Example chosen for its frequency. (RUL MS 2935/2/3) In a first overlay addition, Beckett has replaced Mr Knott by Mr Hackett. This is indeed an abbreviated version of the first sentence of Watt: Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some little distance, his seat. (emphasis added) The two elements that are omitted – the failing light and the little distance – are the subject of the earliest manuscripts of Stirrings Still. So in a way, Stirrings Still is very literally a reader’s experience of an interval “between the phrases”, an elaboration of an ellipsis. The following genetic examination can therefore be divided into two parts, corresponding to the two elements of this ellipsis. 1. The Failing Light This failing light is the subject of the opening paragraph of Stirrings Still. Here, Beckett makes use of the Proustian technique of internal rhymes, causing a repetitive alternation of “night” and “light”, leading to the last word: “out”. Its faint unchanging light unlike any light he could remember from the days and nights when day followed hard on night and night on day. This outer light then when his own went out became his only light till it in its turn went out 486

and left him in the dark. Till it in its turn went out. (Beckett 1995, 259; emphasis added) This internal rhyme of “night” and “light” is reminiscent of the keyword “nightlight” which does not appear in the published text, but was the core around which this paragraph was written. During the writing process, this concrete object illuminating the room is gradually replaced by a more abstract light, which is a typical procedure in Beckett’s later writings. The manuscripts suggest that, rather than an abstract writer, Beckett was an “abstractor”. The abstraction in his work is a dynamic process. It implies a movement from the concrete toward the abstract. Beckett did not simply juggle with abstract concepts. He often started from a concrete situation and subsequently took away, subtracted or “abstracted”, these concrete objects. For instance, in the early manuscripts of Stirrings Still the initial situation is quite concrete: a man in a room with a window, a stool, a bed, a mattress, a chamberpot, and a nightlight. For at night the ^his^ sole light is ^was^ the dim light shed by the solitary glim or nightlight at his ^the^ bedhead leaving much of his ^his^ surroundings in the dark. (RUL MS 2935/1/2) One of the explanations for the presence of the nightlight is simply to facilitate his movements when he must must needs rise to relieve himself in the heart the small heart-shaped plastic pot at his bedhead also. For improbable as he may be he is not so improbable as not to must needs from time to time to relieve himself. (RUL MS 2935/1/2) Beckett has deleted this passage, abstracting his text from the realistically described, heart-shaped plastic pot. During the process of abstraction, half of the objects were removed from the room. Apart from the nightlight, which became a more abstract light, the bed, the mattress and the chamberpot disappeared. But not completely. Beckett did preserve his manuscripts and gave them to the Beckett Archive. 487

They are the material evidence of the process of abstraction, the stirrings underneath the seemingly still surface of the published text. 2. The Little Distance The second omitted element, the distance, is the starting point in the very first sketches of Stirrings Still, opening with the words “Tout toujours à la même distance”.11 The “little distance” of the second element in the omitted passage from the first Watt sentence is translated from a spatial to a temporal dimension in the quotation of this sentence in the Stirrings Still manuscripts. The ellipsis in this quotation creates a breathing space, a comma in musical terms, which can be shifted by the performer. The narrator presents the sentence as an “[e]xample too of how by means of an unwarranted hiatus” the meaning of the sentence can change. He then gives three examples of how the placement of the hiatus changes the “lame hexameter” – as he calls it: for example yet again [,] Mr Knott ^Hackett^ ruend ^turned^ the corner ... and saw his seat, ^or Mr K turned the corner and ... saw his seat.^ or[,] Mr Knott turned the corner and saw ... his seat (MS 2935/2/3) If the hiatus is seen as a musical comma or breathing space, it is not unimportant that Beckett deleted some of the commas he had initially written. Gradually, toward the end of the writing process, the text of Strirrings Still is systematically stripped of commas. As Karine Germoni argues in her fascinating study of the punctuation and rhythm in the plays En attendant Godot and Fin de partie12, punctuation in the texts of these plays is a precision instrument to mark the rhythm in Beckett’s drama. To a certain extent, this also applies to his prose. In “A Note on Punctuation in Watt” Frank Shovlin draws attention to Beckett’s letter to the editor of the Irish magazine Envoy, which published the first extract from Watt in January 1950. When Beckett sent the corrected proofs to the editor John Ryan on 15 December 1949, he added a note: “As you will see I have restored my punctuation which I still prefer to that of your compositor”. He refers to the manuscript he sent to the editor and emphasizes again: “Its punctuation is the one I 488

should like” (Beckett, quoted in Shovlin, 72). Beckett’s extreme awareness of the importance of punctuation makes his decision to do without commas in his late prose all the more interesting. The drafts of the “come and read” passage – even though it did not make it into the final version of Stirrings Still – can shed some light on this remarkable characteristic of the published text. On the second page of the so-called Super Conquérant Notebook (RUL MS 2934), in between the drafts for Stirrings Still, Beckett wrote a very short piece of drama with the same “come and read” theme: Come & read to me. What? That Shakespeare sonnet we once ^used^ to loved. You mean “No longer weep ...” What? (P.) No longer what? Weep. (P.) [“]No longer weep ...” No no. We loved ^used to love^ it too. Yes, but not now ^tonight^ ^this evening.^ “Let me not to –” Yes. "Let me not to -" How did it go on? P. Instead of pausing after the important words “go on” Beckett decides to go on immediately and crosses out the “P.” Apart from the “P.” to indicate a pause, the comma is used to mark a shorter break when after admitting they do not remember how the sonnet goes on, the characters do remember the way they used to perform it: “One would say the first quatrain, then the other the second.” (RUL MS 2934, 2) The comma not only indicates a short pause for the performance of this play, it also marks the insertion of a blank space between the first and the second quatrain, as well as between the remembered acts of the “one” and the “other”. This moment of “suspense between the two acts” is thematized in the “come and read” piece of prose in MSS 2935/2/1-3, which can be interpreted as a “performance” (on paper) of the so-called lame hexameter “Mr Knott/Hackett turned the corner ... and saw / and … saw / and saw ... his seat” (RUL MS 2935/2/3). Whereas the first sentence of Watt (“Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some little distance, his seat.”) has 489

three commas, the triple quotation in the Stirrings Still manuscripts has none. Leaving out the commas increases the text’s ambiguity, which is a distinctive feature of Beckett’s late prose. If his works can be said to undo themselves, Beckett could only achieve this result by taking back his own words, which is what happens with the words “…, in the failing light, at some little distance,…”. The length of the first Watt sentence is halved and the ellipsis is subsequently turned into a moment of suspense which can be shifted. Consequently, all the intervals between the terms of the statement become potentially reminiscent of a loss, moments of suspense, or “blanks for when words gone” (Becket 1989b, 124). Beckett knew that his strength was in “taking away,” as he described his writing method in general (Knowlson 1996, 352). More concretely, by taking away the commas in his prose, he created the effect he described by means of the three versions of the “lame hexameter” and the subsequent exclamations: How various thus this simple set of words! With what choice of xx sensations the corner turned! The seat seen! The suspense charged between the two operations ^acts^! (RUL MS 2935/2/3) In a previous version (RUL MS 2935/2/1), the word “various” appears to be a substitution for the deleted adjective “elusive”. 13 This deletion is significant because it reveals a crucial aspect of Beckett’s prose. Ever since his essay on Proust, Beckett was aware of the artistic paradox expressed at several instances in A la recherche du temps perdu – especially La prisonnière and La fugitive (Albertine disparue): any attempt to grasp life’s elusiveness is doomed to fail, for as soon as it is grasped it looses precisely its elusive nature. Fifty years after Proust, Beckett formulated this idea most concisely in Stirrings Still, expressing the impossibility to write a still of oneself, because one is always being watched, chased, and moved by one’s own reflections and self-consciousness. Instead of trying to fix or grasp the elusiveness, he left his prose as open as possible. Beckett illustrates this in the avant-texte of Stirrings Still, choosing the first sentence of Watt as a representative example. In the quotation it looses fifty percent of its words, but what his prose has gained since Watt is indeed the ellipsis, the “silence, communicated by the intervals” (Beckett 1992, 138), the enormous “suspense charged between the 490

two acts” (RUL MS 2935/2/3). The later prose presents each interval as a potential breathing space, undoubtedly the most vital of readerly experiences between the phrases, to use Belacqua’s words. While in Room Temperature Nicholson Baker praised the comma as “an oasis of respiration, a point of real as opposed to grammatical breath” (66), Beckett suggested the potential presence of such an oasis in every single interspace. In the “lame hexameter” the hiatus can not only be shifted, but also be prolonged as long as the performer deems necessary. Thanks to the length of the hiatus, [t]he statement may be made to mean not merely more ^or less^ than it was meant to mean but other. Particularly when the hiatus prolonged beyond reason resumption delayed beyond all reason. Like that of a last breath long after pious fingers have closed the eyes. (RUL MS 2935/1/1) So here the musical comma or breathing space is in fact the most extreme fermata imaginable: the hiatus is prolonged to such an extent that the performer is believed to have died before he could resume his reading. But then, after pious fingers have already closed his eyes, he takes a last breath. This is the ultimate application of The Unnamable’s famous last words “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” The last words of Stirrings Still may sound like a wish to die (“Oh all to end.”), but Beckett was well aware that writing about the end was also a way to defer it.14 After the “end” of Stirrings Still, Beckett went on writing Comment dire, the way he had gone on after Worstward Ho’s final “Said nohow on.” Beckett’s last piece of prose is a moving attempt to paint a still of the always stirring consciousness, the “Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable” – as he called them in Company (Beckett 1989a, 16). Every attempt to “eff” the ineffable created more versions and delayed the departure. Beckett was eighty-two years old when he finished Stirrings Still in 1988, the year Francis Ponge died. Although Beckett did not publish his work as a succession of drafts the way Francis Ponge did, his works do seem to be the result of a poetics of process, with the two opening words of section three of Stirrings Still as his motto: “So on …” He did write toward a final version of his text, but he was well aware that any attempt to reach perfection and to 491

utter or eff “what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable” is “doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail” (Beckett 1976, 61). From this perspective, the “final” version of Stirrings Still is just as much an attempt to fail better as the unfinished fragments in its genesis, such as the passage on the hiatus, which never made it into the deluxe edition. Therefore, my suggestion is that the avant-texte of Stirrings Still is an integral part of this literary work, which deserves a bilingual genetic edition. For the manuscripts relate to the published text the way the “Stirrings” relate to the “Still”. The words are as good as their bond – neither shaken, nor stirred, but indeed still stirring nonetheless. Notes 1.

Le Parti pris des choses appeared in Gallimard’s collection ‘Métamorphoses’ on 19 May 1942, two weeks after Beckett began his third notebook (5 May 1942), following the two Ur-Watt notebooks written in Paris in 1941.

2.

The subtitle of the first text of Pages bis is: “Réflexions en lisant l’essai sur l’absurde” (26-27 août 1941).

3.

“Dans une certaine mesure, dans certaines mesures, la raison obtient des succès, des résultats. De même il y a des succès relatifs d’expression” (Ponge 1999, 207).

4.

Pages bis was published in 1948 as part of the collection Proêmes.

5.

MS 2935/1/1. The manuscripts preserved in Reading are referred to by means of the numbers of the Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading (Reading, Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International Foundation, 1998). The aim of the transcription method is to represent Beckett’s drafts with a minimum of intimidating diacritical signs, crossing out deletions and using carets for ^additions^. Italicized brackets indicate an [editorial comment].

6.

MS 2935/1/1. On MS 2934, page 2v, Beckett jotted down the word ‘lacunes’, which is another indication of his preoccupation with gaps during the early composition history of Stirrings Still.

492

7.

En attendant Godot was written in less than four months (between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949) and with relatively few corrections. Cf. “Silence to Silence”, produced and directed by Seán ó Mórdha (Dublin, RTE, 1984).

8.

For a more detailed discussion of this hesitation, see Dirk Van Hulle, “‘In twosome twiminds’: A Reconstructed Genesis of Beckett’s Stirrings Still.” TEXTE: revue de critique et de théorie littéraire 29/30 (2001): 81-104.

9.

“Two organs and two only so distinct in timbre and accent as to render improbable the imitation of either by the other in order to delude him” (MS 2935/2/3).

10.

Here, Beckett originally wrote a comma, which he subsequently crossed out again.

11.

Or “All always at the same remove”, as in The Unnamable, where “Malone appears and disappears […] always at the same remove” (Beckett 1979, 269). Beckett constantly switched from French to English and vice versa in the earliest stages of the writing process. At a certain point, he even considered a formal way to express the “to and fro” between French and English by turning his so-called “Super Conquérant” notebook upside down and starting at the back, under the heading: “Repeat in different order.” (RUL MS 2934) The first page in retrograde direction is a French translation of the “One night …” paragraph, the second page an English translation of the very early French sketch “Tout toujours à la même distance …”

12.

Karine Germoni, “Ponctuation et rythme dans En attendant Godot et Fin de partie,” paper published elsewhere in this volume.

13.

“How elusive various thus this simple set of words! How variously ^With what choice of emotions sensations^ the corner turned! The seat seen! The suspense charged between the 2 operations!” (RUL MS 2935/2/1)

14.

In “Stirrings Still: the disembodiment of Western tradition” Paul Davies notes: “The ‘end’ which Beckett so famously longed for was not a finished text” (Davies 1992, 137).

493

Works Cited Baker, Nicholson, Room Temperature (London: Granta Books, 1990). Beckett, Samuel, Watt (London: John Calder, 1976). –, The Unnamable (London: Pan Books [Picador], 1979). –, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984). –, Company. Nohow On (London: John Calder, 1989), 3-52. (1989a). –, Worstward Ho. Nohow On (London: John Calder, 1989), 99-128. (1989b). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992). –, Stirrings Still. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995). 259-65. –, Manuscripts of Stirrings Still: MSS 2933-2935, 2859, 3543, 3559, 3405, Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading. Brater, Enoch, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills, Beckett at Reading: Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading (Reading: Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International Foundation, 1998). Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2001). Davies, Paul, “Stirrings Still: the disembodiment of Western tradition” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading: the Beckett International Foundation, 1992), 136-51. Finney, Brian, “Still Stirring to Be Still,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Spring 1992), 129-30. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Ponge, Francis. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Bernard Beugnot (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). Shovlin, Frank, “A Note on Punctuation in Watt,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 11.1 (Spring 2001), 71-2. Van Hulle, Dirk, “‘In twosome twiminds’: A Reconstructed Genesis of Beckett’s Stirrings Still,” in TEXTE: revue de critique et de théorie littéraire 29/30 (2001), 81-104.

494

THE ECSTASY OF WATT Mark Byron

Watt is a study in orientation. It plays upon the ability to locate itself (or oneself), or to be located, in space and time. In time Watt performs a double-move of inheritance and prolepsis, looking both forward and backward in Beckett’s writing career and also in the very peculiar circumstances of this novel’s composition and journey into print. In space the irregularities of the text’s surface hint at the complex and partially submerged relations between the text and its looming, unruly archive. This essay will enumerate some of the ways in which Watt is an ecstatic text – in which it is beside itself and never simply just ‘there’.

MR. HACKETT turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some little distance, his seat. It seemed to be occupied. This seat, the property very likely of the municipality, or of the public, was of course not his, but he thought of it as his. This was Mr Hackett’s attitude towards things that pleased him. He knew they were not his, but he thought of them as his. He knew were not his, because they pleased him. (Beckett 1953a, 7)1 Watt begins with a minor character entering the space of the action at twilight, attempting to identify the object of his search: his – the municipality’s – seat. Mr Hackett’s entrance appears to orient the narrative but in fact only serves as a discontinuous prelude to the action, just as the corner he turns is not an identifiable prop or thing, but simply a definite noun. The corner, the first object of the narrative, does not present the same hacceitas2 as the seat. Yet the actual seat is not so important to Hackett as the way he thinks of it. In a slow waltz of minimal orientation and diminished ownership, Hackett’s knowledge

stems more from pleasure than thought, and actually in spite of thought (it does not stem from justified true belief, as the epistemologists would have it). Hackett’s method of knowing is only a part of his initial conundrum. His journey is caught in the conventional epic moment, in medias res (in the middle of things). If he is to navigate towards the object of his desire, he is required to orient himself in space and in time. This moment of hesitation and suspension is caught in the first word of the next paragraph, “Halting”. This moment is visibly present in the space that separates the two paragraphs, where the last word “him” dangles there alone, an orphan. Hackett’s tentative stroll, the opening gambit of the text, draws up the basic elements of story and of structure, of space and time. The hesitation one experiences in reading Hackett’s mental processes draws attention to the temporal dimension of narrative. In later printings of the text the spatiality of the type on the page is flagged by its large white frame and its generous gutters and margins. The narrative action and the physical dimensions of the text object are set off by another textual element in this (apparently) innocuous first paragraph. A word is missing in the final sentence: “He knew were not his, because they pleased him”. This error stems from the first Olympia Press edition of Watt, published in 1953 in Paris. Beckett detected 76 errors in the first printing, but, strangely, not this one. The error was transferred into all British Calder editions up to the latest 1998 reprint of the 1976 edition, despite the Calder text being typeset completely anew with a different typeface and pagination. When Barney Rosset published the first US Grove Press edition, using the original Olympia Press plates, he made several corrections to the text including this line. His technique is clearly evident – the ink is much lighter and the alignment is skewed. Stripping back the layers of the text’s production to yet a more basic level, it transpires that this episode appears late in the manuscript record, after the original character called Hackett has been transformed into the title character, Watt.3 Mr Hackett is a decrepit remnant, or revenant, of this text history. This simple narrative episode probes into complex territory: Mr Hackett is caught within a history that envelopes the larger part of the narrative and its eponymous character; and his attempts to orient himself mentally and physically are gestures mimicked on the printed page and at every level of 496

the text’s identity and history. Hackett turns the corner, the reader turns the page, and both enter into a complex field of seriality. Each is open to an ecstatic perception if only a suitable mode of orientation can be found. ***** Watt is Beckett’s last long novel in English. Although it was begun early in 1941 and substantially drafted by 1945, it was not published until 1953 by Olympia Press under the banner of Editions Merlin. Watt did not see the light of day until after the première of En Attendant Godot in Paris and after each of Molloy (1951), Malone Meurt (1951), L’Innomable (1952), and Godot (July 1953) had been published by Editions de Minuit. In other words, Beckett has already begun to make his name as a French writer when this novel, written in an estranged kind of English, eventually made it into print. The complex textual history of Watt – its composition and journey into print – can provide a way to sharpen an understanding of Beckett’s aesthetic development and the unfolding of his writing output. The composition and publication of Watt traces out an ecstatic process: it occurred alongside the emergence of other significant work and can be seen to complicate notions of literary influence, genealogy, and the literary object. Given that Watt presents some unique problems for interpretation, not least in its physical and conceptual integrity, it provides an opportunity to rethink the status of the literary work at the time Beckett was producing his famous Francophone challenges to the novel and to dramatic form. Watt performs a double-move of inheritance and prolepsis: it looks both forward and backward. Part of this can be ascribed to historical circumstance: at the time of its eventual publication Beckett had already shifted to French as his preferred language of literary composition. Even prior to the Trilogy and Godot, he had published a series of poems in French and half of the prose narrative “La Fin” (“The End”) in the journal Les Temps modernes in 1946. Yet Beckett had begun composition of his narrative, in fits and starts, as early as 1941 around the time of the German occupation of Paris. The large stationer’s notebooks that comprise the novel’s manuscript indicate Beckett’s uneven and sporadic attempts to construct a new story. The early notebooks in particular often record the time and place of com497

position, and an otherwise obscure picture of events can be gained from this information. For example, when Beckett’s Resistance Cell, codenamed Gloria SMH, was very active and then infiltrated in 1942, the notebooks contain only disjointed fragments. But when he managed to flee Paris to the town of Roussillon in the Vaucluse, a more consistent and persistent pattern of composition begins to emerge from fragments and short digressions. A complex history dwells within this material, from which two obvious points can be drawn: firstly, in addition to the long lapse between composition and publication, the manuscript provenance of Watt reflects the difficult writing conditions Beckett faced during wartime; secondly, the manuscript notebooks provide some sort of documentary evidence for the atmosphere of physical and psychic estrangement that seems to pervade the novel and its major characters. Of course this second point might be made to indicate the continuity of Beckett’s creative output before, during, and after the war. An attentive reader in 1953 might have been startled to discover that Beckett himself had said, in a letter to George Reavey as long before as May 1947, that his then-unpublished novel “has its place in the series, as will perhaps appear in time” (quoted in Bair, 386-387). In that same letter, Beckett attributes the rifts in the text material to the composition process: “It is an unsatisfactory work, written in dribs and drabs, first on the run, then of an evening after the clod-hopping, during the occupation” (Bair, 387). If the progress of Watt from manuscript to published text traces out a history parallel to that of the emergent ‘French Beckett’, then surely there must be identifying characteristics of “its place in the series”. There are several straightforward linguistic and thematic elements to support this notion. Watt inherits from Murphy a central character who seeks meditative quiescence. Each novel provides a persona who relishes every opportunity to permute and combine abstract or concrete objects and relations, to introduce lists and numerical calculations, and to draw attention to “how the story is told”. Other features of Watt might be seen as proleptic with regard to the Trilogy. In these texts, central characters expend much time and energy contemplating their own roles and actualities, and the meaning to be found in relation to their immediate surroundings. Most face a locomotory challenge of a greater or lesser kind, combined with a compulsion to travel or wander. 498

The use of language in Watt provides a suggestive means of transit from Beckett’s early writing in English to his productive switch to French. As Daniel Katz has pointed out,4 bilingual puns litter the text, and rather a few can be found in the early episode where Mr Hackett converses with Goff and Tetty Nixon (1953b, 9-25). Significantly, this episode preserves one of the earliest passages Beckett composed in his notebooks, and performs the instruction recorded in the Addenda to “change all the names”. Elsewhere, the novel’s eponymous character famously meditates on the troubled relation between a word and the thing it doesn’t quite signify – the famous ‘pot’ episode. These examples of wordplay suggest the way French was inserting itself into the author’s mind as a preferred medium of literary composition. No doubt there were other motivations for Beckett’s narrative preoccupations in this novel. Critics have suggested his self-avowed “boy-scout” code work for the Resistance may have had a direct influence on the catalogues of permutation in the narrative (Kennedy, 116; Knowlson, 307-308). In a broader sense, his familiarity with Pascal and with Descartes (particularly the latter’s Discourse on Method), would help explain the persistence of these iterative predilections. The double-move of inheritance and prolepsis in Watt is illustrated in a passage from Mercier and Camier. This text endured an even longer delay into print that Watt. It was composed in French immediately after the war but not published until 1970 (the English translation was first published in 1974), and was the cause of a more profound ambivalence on the part of its author. Yet Watt himself turns up as a character in the final chapter, bringing the two eponymous characters together to conclude a quest they had not yet managed to achieve themselves. At this point, Mercier addresses Watt: I knew a poor man named Murphy, said Mercier, who had a look of you, only less battered of course. But he died ten years ago, in rather mysterious circumstances. They never found the body, can you imagine. My dream, said Watt. (111)

499

This delicious episode brings together the elements of the series (the novels Murphy, Watt, and Mercier and Camier), and anticipates the troubled relation between the figure of the Unnamable and the characters of Beckett’s other novels. Do they create the Unnamable, or is the process of imagining the other way around? In the passage above, Watt’s response to Mercier’s recollection of Murphy suggests a number of things: it mimics the vague, dreamlike recollections that Goff and Tetty Nixon have of Watt at the beginning of the novel bearing his name; and it places any thought of narrative objectivity in Murphy into even greater relief. When Watt states, “My dream”, does he mean it is his desire to vanish without a trace, just as Murphy seems to have done? Or is he suggesting that Murphy’s narrative was actually his own imagining, his concoction all along? That Watt then addresses Mercier and Camier as “my children” only exacerbates this ambivalence concerning narrative autonomy and the status of the characters with respect to each other.5 Does Watt speak figuratively, or might they too be part of his phantasmagoria? We might note that even the internal chronology described by Mercier translates into the author’s historical time. Murphy died ten years ago: this sentence occurs in a text written in 1946, precisely ten years after the final draft of Murphy was composed, when Murphy could be said to have first “died”. The double-move of inheritance and prolepsis also applies to narrative strategies in Watt, and in Beckett’s novels generally. The meditations of central characters and their narrators preponderate in the novels. Yet as much as Murphy might wish to assert control over his being, he has no control over his narrative or its telling. Watt too tries to understand his world, but seems to have an inkling that he might be caught in a fiction partly of his own making. The complex and partly-submerged identities of various narrating voices in the novel complicate the relation between Watt and the telling of his story. The reader is made aware of this through the multiple and shifting narrating voices, an editorial voice towards the novel’s end – “(Hiatus in MS)” (238) – and through Watt’s own eccentric narrative experiments. Watt is a conventional narrative subject when he makes his first appearance at the tram stop. Mr Hackett and Tetty and Goff Nixon talk about Watt after figuring the object they see before them is indeed a person and not a rolled-up carpet. But Watt might be said to be the author of other aspects of the novel: he is the author of his admittedly 500

troubled perceptions of Mr Knott, and he is, in a sense, the author of the enigmatic figure seen from the wicket towards the novel’s end. The various narrative digressions throughout the novel – the dog responsible for eating Knott’s leftovers, the painting in Erskine’s room, the arrangement of Knott’s furniture – are all ultimately mediated by Watt’s perceptions or imaginings. The real change is that Watt seems aware of his constructive role in propelling the novel to its uncertain finish. He is in this sense truly the forerunner of the characters of the Trilogy – figures such as Malone, Moran, or the Unnamable, who compose their own voices, stories, and identities as essentially narrative entities. Perhaps there is nothing particularly surprising in this continuity and progression in Beckett’s prose, from English to French, and at the levels of theme and of narrative organisation. Yet Watt takes up an exceptional position in this scheme, partly due to the extremities endured in its composition and journey into print, and partly due to its function as a reservoir for ideas past and future in Beckett’s writing. This second notion demands closer scrutiny: if Watt functions as a kind of archive and as prolepsis for other texts, its physical constitution might offer equally reticulated alternatives to a simple teleological composition process. In other words, the effects of competing voices and identities of Beckett’s prose works can be telescoped into the composition process of this one novel. The notion of self-aware composition is at the heart of Beckett’s enterprise, and some critics have developed specific terms by which to understand this method. H. Porter Abbott defines Beckett’s prose composition as autography. The “doomed effort of selfrendering” in autographic writing (Abbott, 604), in which the actual subject of the story is its telling, is evident in the episodic repetition that occurs throughout the manuscript notebooks and the typescript of Watt. Abbott’s idea of composition, as autography, refers to a narrative disposition. The text’s challenge to the possibility of selfsameness extends further: to its complex relations with its manuscript archive and with Beckett’s past and future literary productions. Watt establishes the groundwork for the aesthetic project later developed in Waiting for Godot and the Trilogy: the troubling uncertainties of authorship, narration, and identity. In this sense Watt is Beckett’s truly ecstatic text. By archiving and submerging earlier stages of composition in the published text, it questions its own status 501

as a literary work and questions the legitimacy of the artistic enterprise more generally. These submerged earlier manifestations act as prolepses with relation to the published narrative. Nowhere is this double-move more strikingly visible than in the Addenda section that concludes the physical text. Several examples of this process of archiving and encoding will illuminate the aesthetic question posed by Watt and its challenge to the conventions of literary texts. Even a passing familiarity with the novel instils an awareness of its convoluted and reticulated narrative structure. The four parts are related by Watt to his scribe in a chiasmic fashion: “As Watt told the beginning of his story, not first, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end” (215). To complicate this narrative strategy, the scribe Sam transcribes Watt’s tale in such a way that he transposes, inverts and reverses his deranged language in Part III. This uneven narrative structure is amplified by various typographical and musical incursions in the text. It is far from certain that the narrating voice is responsible for the inclusion of the musical scores, the footnotes, and the Addenda. On the other hand, the aporias in the “MS” are reported towards the novel’s end by a kind of editorial voice who indicates the tale’s status as a transcribed manuscript. These are somewhat separate textual effects with distinct hermeneutic implications: does the editing voice add the musical scores? Is the editing persona actually Sam the scribe, or another persona altogether? How does one orient oneself in the face of a telescoping series of manuscripts and scribes – including Ernest Louit’s “lost” dissertation (171), The Mathematical Intuitions of the Visicelts? The Addenda to Watt is a series of fragments that illustrate the compositional displacement or ecstasies of the entire narrative. It has been described as a collection of “fossils” by one critic (Ackerley, 175); by another a “sibylline” example of Dionysian frenzy that contrasts with Watt’s own Apollonian quest for order (Henckels, 146147). Whichever persona might be responsible for the Addenda material, it returns the reader to a problematic text, and suggests the looming presence of the Watt archive. But the Addenda items constitute a return in themselves: they are elements within a process of textual realisation, not so much signifying other parts of the text or archive in a deictic fashion, but presenting the process of submergence at its distilled point. That is, the Addenda items are not more efficient repetitions of earlier draft material, or mere remnants of material not 502

deemed appropriate for inclusion in the narrative proper, but are textual moments encoding their ancestry and the process of modification. Some of the Addenda items explicitly and sardonically refer to their codifying and archiving functions. The fragment in Latin, “pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt” (251) – let those who used our words before us perish – derives from Saint Jerome’s commentary on Ecclesiastes (Rabinovitz, 218). Despite its illustrious provenance, the quotation warns against the very notion of quotation. Other Addenda fragments rub against their ostensible function: the famous “no symbols where none intended” appears to disavow interpretation whilst simultaneously enticing the reader to interpret its own meaning. The narrating and editing personae indulge in scribal disclosures at various points throughout the manuscripts and the text, perhaps best illustrated in the footnotes that appear sporadically throughout. Several items of the Addenda also cut across the dimensions of the text, and function as reminders to the author or editor: two examples are “Watt learned to accept etc.” and “Note that Arsene’s declaration gradually came back to Watt” (248). At these points composition crosses between historical fact and a fictional dimension of the tale. Another such item simply states “change all the names” (254). It is worth noting that in the course of the 945 pages of manuscript, Beckett does just that, more than once. Not only does he change all the names, but he records and memorialises earlier incarnations of several characters either by putting them in his narrative (as Mr Hackett is the earlier incarnation of Watt), or by retaining vestiges of manuscript episodes in the Addenda. The Addenda fragment concerning the “second picture in Erskine’s room” (251-252) cuts across the dimensions of the text. Within the course of the narrative, Watt breaks into Erskine’s room in the house of Knott and discovers a visually inscrutible object – “a picture, hanging on the wall, from a nail” (128). The painting occupies Watt’s attention for some time (128-131), and for much longer (twenty pages) in the typescript. He attempts to describe the painting, and also tries to discover the relation between the circle and the centre. The suspension of the narrative in this frustratingly circular logic game is entirely typical of the narrative, and of Watt’s alienated consciousness. Watt shifts the painting around to try and figure it out. This fails, naturally, but it does prompt him to ask: “Was the picture a fixed and stable member of the edifice, like Mr Knott’s bed, for ex503

ample, or was it simply a manner of paradigm, here to-day and gone to-morrow, a term in a series, like the series of Mr Knott’s dogs, or the series of Mr Knott’s men, or like the centuries that fall, from the pod of eternity?” (130-131). The patient reader knows that the series of paintings has at least one other example, in the Addenda. But submerged here is the knowledge that the portrait is of Mr Knott’s father, or rather his earlier incarnation in the manuscripts, Mr Quin. This grotesque painting of the naked Alexander Quin at his piano once rested on the wall of the music room: in the manuscripts. Both the bust of Buxtehude and the ravanastron6 that originally appear in this Quin portrait survive in the published narrative: The music room was a large bare white room. The piano was in the window. The head, and neck, in plaster, very white, of Buxtehude, was on the mantelpiece. A ravanastron hung, on the wall, from a nail, like a plover. (71) Alexander Quin and the painting have disappeared from this scene in the published text: instead the “Galls father and son” tune the piano in an Irish Bull episode. The portrait of Alexander’s wife, Leda Quin, also appears in the manuscripts. We are told early in the Addenda, cryptically, that her portrait is painted by “the Master of the Leopardstown Halflengths” (247). So the answer to Watt’s question is yes, the painting is one of a series, just like Knott, the furniture, the dogs, and Knott’s men. Watt’s perplexity about the painting is the perplexity of a character who is realized at one point within a manifold text system, and who somehow has an inkling of this, but who cannot see beyond his point of incarnation. Watt’s concern with the fate and function of the artwork is an expression of the larger concern of the novel: its status, its complex provenance, and its uncertain future during the composition process. The text of Watt implicitly preserves an internal record or code of its archive, and constitutes a meditation on exile, on varieties of narrative and psychic suspension, and on the very possibility of literary composition. The processes of composition and assemblage cannot be assimilated simply under the rubric of an aesthetics of failure, 504

of generic innovation, or of the dismantling of the narrative project itself. Watt interrogates the constitution and status of literary texts, all the time literally beside itself. It embodies its system of intervening parts – the texts, manuscripts, episodes and characters that chart its space and time. That it performs alongside Beckett’s Trilogy and Waiting for Godot is accomplishment enough; that it also precedes and anticipates these texts makes it truly ecstatic. Notes 1.

Unless otherwise noted, all references to Watt refer to the first US edition (New York: Grove, 1953) and are incorporated in the text.

2.

Hacceitas might be defined, after Duns Scotus, as the individuating identity of a particular thing, what makes it unique; quidditas is the simple essence of the thing, or its “thingness”. For the link between Scotist philosophy and Watt, see Michael Beausang (500501).

3.

The episode appears from page 177 in the fourth of the six large stationer’s notebooks that comprise the manuscript of Watt. These notebooks are housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful for the assistance extended to me by the staff in two visits to the Center in August 1999 and December 2000, especially Linda Ashton, Associate Curator of the French Collection, and Pat Fox.

4.

See the chapter “‘Ways of Being We’: The Subject as Method, Method as Ritual in Watt”, in Daniel Katz (43-70).

5.

Other stylistic features of this episode point to the relation to past and future narratives, for example: “the old joke that has ceased to amuse, the smile unsmilable smiled a thousand times” (109) recalls Arsene’s meditation on the nature of the laugh, ending in “the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh” in Watt, and “the guffaw of the Abderite” in Murphy; and the “expiring greens and yellows” (109) recall the colours of Watt’s hat and coat, and of various objects in his quiet meditations. Other examples might be cited, such as the policeman “dying for a snite” (113), recycling the English word relegated to the Addenda in Watt, “Watt snites”.

505

6.

The ravanastron is an Indian stringed instrument played with a bow, perhaps originating in Rajasthan. It is not, as Coetzee quotes from the Watt manuscript, a “Chinese Violin” (474).

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter, “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories”, in New Literary History 19 (1988), 597-615. Ackerley, Chris, “Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt”, in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2, “Samuel Beckett in the 1990s”, ed. Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 175-188. Beausang, Michael, “Watt: Logic, Insanity, Aphasia”, in Style 30.3 (1996), 495-513. Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978; London: Vintage, 1990). Beckett, Samuel, Watt (Paris: Olympia, 1953). (1953a) –, Watt (New York: Grove, 1953). (1953b) –, Watt (London: Calder, 1963). –, Mercier and Camier (1974; London: Picador, 1988). Coetzee, J. M., “The Manuscript Revision of Beckett’s Watt”, in JML 2.4 (1972), 472-480. Henckels, Jr., Robert M., “Novel Quarters for an Odd Couple: Apollo and Dionysis in Beckett’s Watt and Pinget’s The Inquisitory”, in Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 2.2 (1978), 141-157. Katz, Daniel, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999). Kennedy, Sighle, “‘Astride of the Grave and a Difficult Birth’: Samuel Beckett’s Watt Struggles to Life”, in Dalhousie French Studies 42 (1998), 115-147. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Rabinovitz, Rubin, “The Addenda to Watt”, in Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric, ed. Edouard Morot-Sir (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1976), 211-223.

506

MISE EN MOTS DE LA SOUFFRANCE DANS WATT: “A Soliloquy under Dictation” Diane Luscher-Morata

Cet article se propose d’examiner la manière dont la souffrance, si omniprésente dans le roman Watt, est articulée par le protagoniste. Celui-ci, nommé Watt, apparaît d’abord comme un être passif, mutique; ce n’est qu’au terme d’une série d’expériences douloureuses qu’il commence à mettre en mot une souffrance devenue intolérable. Ce sont les conditions d’émergence de cette parole et la nature de ce récit que nous voulons examiner ici. Les souffrances du protagoniste semblent se situer au carrefour d’une constellation d’expériences à la fois individuelles, singulières et collectives, ou génériques.

Samuel Beckett commence son roman Watt à Paris mais en compose la plus grande partie lors de son exil à Roussillon, où il se réfugie en 1942. Beckett avoue en jour à John Fletcher qu’il a entrepris son roman “to get away from war and occupation” (Fletcher, 59). Dans ce roman, Watt apparaît comme une figure solitaire. Sa place dans le monde qu’il traverse se dessine comme en creux. Watt émerge comme une image en négatif, un moment instable dans un processus interrompu, lesté de son poids, de sa force affirmative. Watt est d’abord une figure de l’exil et du silence. Il “speaks only three or four times in the book” (Fletcher, 63). De tous les protagonistes beckettiens, il reste le plus malheureux et semble condamné à être affecté sans cesse. Il glisse peu à peu vers un centre nodal, une souffrance pure et inexprimable. Watt semble incapable de prendre en charge la narration de manière directe; ses expériences deviennent de plus en plus “unspeakable” (Beckett 1998, 82). Le rôle que Watt joue dans ce récit semble correspondre à une absence de rôle. Une fois cependant que Watt paraît plongé dans un état de stupeur, la parole jaillit du plus profond de son être en un flot étrange qui relate son passé et ses errances à un mystérieux narrateur: Sam. Le flux verbal qui compose la chronologie heurtée des quatre chapitres du roman ménage des “plages de visibili-

té” et des “champs de lisibilité” (Deleuze, 55) que traverse furtivement le protagoniste. Watt figure, bien avant le narrateur de Comment c’est, le premier “narrator/narrated” dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett. Dans Watt, comme Ruby Cohn note à propos de Comment c’est: “the immediacy of the pain is such that we feel it directly, forgetting that the narrator is narrated” (Cohn, 236). ***** Au cours de cette réflexion, nous examinerons en premier lieu la forme que prennent les souffrances (physiques et psychiques) de Watt puis la manière dont elles apparaissent dans le roman, leurs particularités, de même que leur inclusion dans un champ de significations plus vaste. Les souffrances de Watt, tout en restant singulières, débordent aussi cependant les frontières d’un individu, d’un être singulier, pour se dessiner sur le fond d’un large tableau de la misère humaine. Nous nous interrogerons ensuite sur la manière dont Watt commence à moduler sa plainte. Son étrange lamentation semble constituer la réaction de Watt à sa situation douloureuse, réaction qui paraît à la fois active et passive. L’environnement dans lequel le protagoniste est plongé, qui correspond souvent à un espace clos, semble aussi exercer une influence sur cette naissance de la parole. Nous tenterons de montrer que cette parole trouve son origine dans la douleur profonde de cet individu. Avant de nous pencher sur cette émergence de la parole, nous étudierons la situation douloureuse de Watt. Entre les séquences plus factuelles du roman (une arrivée, un séjour, un départ) et la relation de l’histoire proprement dite, la chronologie apparaît comme étant disjointe. Au cours de cette étude, nous tenterons d’épouser le mouvement logique d’un texte qui devient plus complexe à mesure que l’on tente de circonscrire les modes ou possibilités de son apparition et de comprendre comment, au terme d’une longue période de gestation, ce récit est formulé. Watt est sans cesse victime d’agressions physiques et verbales. Alors qu’il s’achemine vers l’établissement de Mr. Knott, il reçoit à la tempe une pierre violemment lancée vers lui par Lady McCann; la blessure occasionnée par cette attaque l’oblige à se reposer dans un fossé. Il a également une “poor healing skin” (30) et, au côté droit, “a running sore of traumatic origin” (30). Lorsqu’il marche à reculons dans ce qui paraît être le jardin d’un asile d’aliénés, les marques de ses 508

souffrances physiques sont décrites ainsi par Sam: “His face was bloody, his hands also, and thorns were in his scalp” (157). La misère physique de Watt semble liée à ses contraintes psychiques. Alors que son corps tente “to adjust itself to an unfamiliar milieu” (81), c’est toujours “in mind as well as body” (134) que Watt lutte, dans ses tentatives désespérées de s’adapter aux conditions étranges dans lesquelles il se trouve. Arsene assimile Watt à un type de serviteurs auquel il appartient, selon lui, en raison de son apparence physique. La constellation de caractères débiles qui articulent l’étrange apparence du protagoniste est décrite par Arsene comme étant “the result of too much solitude” (57). Au terme de son séjour au premier étage, Watt doit admettre qu’il se sent à la fois “sicker” et “aloner” (147). Ses souffrances physiques et psychiques semblent s’accroître de manière parallèle. Si son isolement paraît total, Watt, cependant, “found it a help, from time to time, to be able to say, with some appearance of reason […], Watt is in the street, with thousands of fellow-creatures within call” (79). Dans cet acte de foi désespéré, Watt s’imagine, en dépit de tout – “with some appearance of reason” – qu’il peut compter sur l’aide de ses semblables. Le roman entier offre un démenti à cet espoir. Watt, comme plus tard Molloy, se trouve dans un monde qui “pour [lui] est sans bras” (Beckett 1994, 14), plongé dans un univers où il évolue seul malgré son “désir d’un frère” (1994, 18). Dans les manuscrits de Watt, le protagoniste peuple sa solitude en se lançant dans d’étranges soliloques qui prennent souvent la forme de dialogues, comme ici: He ventured within himself to make enquiry […] with the pleasing result that after quite a short time he had quite a new subject of conversation with himself, and sitting quietly in the kitchen […] would say, Watt, what do you think of all this? […] Then Watt […] would say, yes, Watt, that is a possible explanation. Then would say Watt, yes Watt, is it not? 1 Dans le roman, l’isolement du protagoniste est dénué de ces nuances comiques. Avant de quitter l’établissement de Mr. Knott, Arsene formule une étrange prophétie, déclarant à Watt: “You will travel alone, or with only shades to keep you company” (62). Watt est, comme plus tard le narrateur de Comment c’est, “un monstre des solitudes” (1999a, 509

18). Sam paraît figurer une des ombres – “shades” – prédites par Arsene, un reflet ou un fantôme postulé par l’esprit de Watt; il est le produit d’une stratégie mentale élaborée par Watt “to keep [him] company” (62). Watt semble gagné par une sorte de pétrification; vers la fin de son séjour au premier étage, il paraît “not wholly awake, not wholly asleep” (207) et de plus en plus immobile et inerte. L’idée de perte semble dominer toute l’histoire de Watt chez Mr. Knott. Watt tente de pallier cette perte et de combattre le double sentiment d’absence et de manque qui l’accompagne. L’impression d’une immobilité statuaire qui se dégage du protagoniste est peut-être liée à cette “loss of species” (82), à cette transformation radicale de Watt, qui correspond à un état dans lequel ce dernier se sent privé de son identité. L’épuisement physique et psychique de Watt semble être à l’origine du glissement du protagoniste d’un état de désespoir profond vers une forme de stupeur. La notion de stupeur paraît préférable à celle de folie dans la mesure où elle permet un dépassement de la ligne de partage entre normalité et anormalité, entre raison et déraison. La source de la stupeur de Watt semble résider dans sa conscience soudaine, traumatisante, que sa situation ne peut s’améliorer. Watt, qui s’est rendu chez Mr. Knott dans l’espoir “to get well” (147) veut croire, dans un premier temps, que son malheur trouve son origine dans sa mauvaise santé et que bientôt, elle “[will be] restored” (81) et qu’il trouvera la paix qu’il est venu chercher. Cependant, au terme de sa première période de service chez Mr. Knott, il doit admettre que, “of his anxiety to get well”, “nothing [remains]” (147). Il est le premier personnage beckettien à prendre conscience du côté permanent et irréversible de la souffrance. Samuel Beckett a donné une dimension visuelle à la misère physique et psychique de Watt en le comparant “to the Christ believed by Bosch, then hanging in Trafalgar Square” (157). Aux cours des années 1936 et 1937, Samuel Beckett fait un long voyage en Allemagne qui le mène de musée en musée; il admire des centaines de peintures de la Renaissance figurant des sujets religieux. Dans ses “German Diaries”, une série de notes inédites sur les peintures qu’il a vues, il écrit un commentaire frappant sur les “prophets and apostles” de Bosch, qui semblent “tense and remote […] still and withdrawn to the point almost of petrification”.2 Dans The Divided Self, Laing lie la pétrification à une “particular form of terror, whereby one is […] turned to 510

stone” (Laing, 48). Elle peut aussi correspondre à “the act whereby one negates the other person’s autonomy, ignores his feeling, […] kills the life in him […] depersonalises him” (Laing, 48). Cette pétrification est à la fois “la plaie et le couteau”3, une forme de blessure physique et psychique et sa menace même ou l’acte par lequel elle est infligée. Le mot “pétrification” qu’utilise Beckett pour décrire les figures religieuses de Bosch entre en résonance avec un autre passage de ses “German Diaries”. Dans cette séquence, Beckett fait allusion à Bosch pour décrire une peinture de Dierick Bouts l’Ancien représentant une Résurrection: “Interesting type for Christ”, écrit Beckett, “approaching Boschian, half idiot, half cunning. The remoteness almost of schizophrenia”.4 Beckett lie cette impression visuelle d’un Christ qui semble avoir été transformé en pierre à une forme de schizophrénie. Dans le “Christ Crowned with Thorns” auquel Beckett fait allusion dans Watt, Bosch peint un Christ qui semble (aux yeux d’un observateur moderne du moins) au seuil de cette forme de déshumanisation dont parle Laing. L’intensité de ses souffrances semble constituer une menace pour sa santé psychique. Christ, au centre du tableau, paraît totalement impuissant face à son destin. C’est ce Christ à l’air absent et isolé qui bientôt s’écriera: “Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, pourquoi m’as-tu abandonné?” (Matthieu 27: 46; Marc 15: 34). Pour Laing, la détresse profond du schizoïde apparaît au travers de sa “distinctiveness and differentness” (Laing, 39); il est “simply without hope” (Laing, 39) and “experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation” (Laing, 15). Les marques d’un désespoir profond que Beckett a observées dans ces tableaux imprègnent fortement l’apparence de Watt. Dès le XIIIe siècle, sous l’influence des Franciscains et de Saint-François d’Assise, une attention particulière est accordée à l’humanité du Christ. La théologie kénotique, qui se développe au cours du XIXe siècle (exprimant l’idée d’un Christ qui, en s’assujettissant, en renonçant à soi-même, passe par une séparation d’avec la plénitude du Père, un Christ qui s’est “dépouillé lui-même” (Philippiens 2: 7), en mettant de côté ses attributs divins), articule et élargit cet intérêt pour l’humanité du Christ. Lorsqu’il contemple des tableaux figurant des sujets religieux, l’attention de Samuel Beckett semble être dirigée tout entière vers la manière dont la souffrance, mise à nu, apparaît dans le tableau. Les œuvres picturales qui fascinent Beckett semblent permettre une rencontre, un face à face avec 511

une souffrance pure. Beckett a été spécialement attiré par des tableaux figurant les souffrances du Christ dont le sacrifice s’inscrit, pour lui, dans le vaste tableau des souffrances humaines. La livrée de malheur et les peines immenses de toute l’humanité, loin d’être allégées ou rachetées par l’agonie du Christ s’y ajoutent. Dans un poème qu’il écrit en 1938, intitulé “Ooftish”, Beckett écrit que “Golgotha was only the potegg” (1999b, 31). Comme le souligne Mary Bryden: Golgotha merely dissolves into a huge cauldron of human misery […]. The litany of human distress recited in the poem […] is not elided or accounted for. It remains, as an aching bursting hernia of ills. (Bryden, 148). Watt porte les stigmates du Christ; il est condamné, en raison de sa “poor healing skin” (30), à vivre avec une plaie ouverte. Au-delà des particularités de la représentation du Christ et des caractéristiques de la misère de Watt, celui-ci, tout comme le Christ, semble être une part d’un paysage plus étendu de la souffrance. Dans le roman, le narrateur dit une fois de Watt qu’il occupe “a post-crucified position” (139). Cette remarque mérite d’être considérée non seulement comme un détail visuel, factuel ou même comique, mais de manière littérale: Watt ressemble à une icône, à un Christ dont la crucifixion est sans cesse amorcée puis différée, dont les peines paraissent éléatiques, indéfiniment divisibles “en autant de parcelles qu’il […] reste à vivre” à Watt.5 Chez Watt et chez ses successeurs, cette souffrance reste vide et gratuite, sans espoir de mort – autre que cette mort à crédit – ou de rédemption. Après qu’il a été blessé par la pierre jetée par Lady McCann, Watt s’allonge dans un fossé pour reprendre des forces; c’est alors qu’il perçoit: “The voices, indifferent in quality, of a mixed choir” (32). Selon l’excellente analyse de Warhaft, les deux couplets que Watt entend constituent: “A kind of fragmentary summary of […] the human condition moving through the full term of life in a cold and meaningless universe” (Warhaft, 262). Les mots de cette séquence mélodique sont ceux d’un “ancient chant, a threne or lament for his dimly realized entanglement with uncertain reality” (Warhaft, 272). Il semble, à un niveau plus large, que le récit qu’articule finalement Watt renoue précisément, comme celui de Comment c’est, avec une 512

“inchangeante antienne” (1999a, 209), avec les bribes d’une plainte immémoriale. Le récit de Watt ressemble à la déclaration d’Arsene dans la mesure où il formule une histoire de la souffrance. Dans les manuscrits de Watt, Arsene présente sa propre déclaration comme la “lamentable tale of error, folly, waste, ruin” (“Typescript”, 143). 6 La discussion portant sur les réactions de Watt à sa souffrance s’articule selon une série de paradoxes et d’antithèses, avec d’un côté une forme de passivité, de silence et de mutisme – ou d’aphonie – de Watt et de l’autre, une activité, une rumeur constantes, faites de voix murmurantes et, finalement, une mise en voix, une articulation de l’histoire. Ces deux séries de réactions que Watt oppose à sa situation douloureuse sont absolument contradictoires; la réponse active de Watt correspond à une réaction seconde du protagoniste. Ainsi, ces réactions paradoxales correspondent à deux moments distincts. Lorsqu’il est la victime d’agressions physiques ou verbales, Watt continue son chemin, sans un murmure: This he found the wisest attitude, to staunch, if necessary, inconspicuously, with the little red sudarium […] the flow of blood, to pick up what had fallen, and to continue, as soon as possible, on his way, or in his station, like a victim of mere mischance (30). Dans sa passivité et son apathie, Watt refuse de voir derrière les violences qu’il subit une intention délibérée; il se considère comme “a victim of mere mischance” (30).7 Tout se passe comme si, dans l’esprit de Watt, au-delà de ses nombreux agresseurs et de leur brutalité, sa souffrance était la règle et comme si ses multiples rencontres avec cette souffrance ravivait le mode normal de son existence; le seul qu’il connaît. Pour Warhaft: “Stones and blows can no more affect his destiny than they can change the meaning of past history” (Warhaft, 277). Durant une bonne partie du roman, Watt figure un auditeur muet. Dans les manuscrits, il émerge pour la première fois des profondeurs vers la surface comme un auditeur silencieux, qui perçoit d’étranges voix. Dans le roman, l’esprit de Watt s’oppose clairement à celui de Nackybal, qui est une “ecstasy of darkness […] and of silence” (173). Watt entend des voix “whispering their canon [in his 513

skull]” (231). Avec ces dernières, Watt “was not familiar”, nous dit le narrateur, “he was not unfamiliar either” (27). Ces voix, “singing, crying, stating, murmuring” (27), constituent les fragments, encore inintelligibles, d’une histoire que Watt commence à pressentir en lui, d’une fable qui résonne dans sa tête. La voix, pour la première fois dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett, semble être désincarnée. Toutes les bribes de voix mortes semblent converger en une seule voix anonyme, murmurant un texte unique. La voix, écrit Blanchot, “apporte à la littérature une expérience indécise à laquelle elle s’éveille comme au seuil de l’étrangeté” (Blanchot, 386): La voix qui parle sans mot, silencieusement, par le silence du cri, tend à n’être, fût-elle la plus intérieure, la voix de personne: qu’est-ce qui parle quand parle la voix? Cela ne se situe nulle part […] mais se manifeste dans un espace de redoublement, d’écho et de résonance où ce n’est pas quelqu’un, mais cet espace inconnu […] qui parle sans parole. (386) Les bribes de cet étrange idiome, Watt, comme plus tard le narrateur de Comment c’est, est le “seul à les entendre seul à les murmurer” (1999a, 180). Avant de prendre le relais de ces voix désincarnées, faites des bribes “d’une voix ancienne” (1999a, 207), Watt constitue d’abord pour elles un lieu de passage, un espace de résonance. Watt paraît de plus en plus enchevêtré dans des lambeaux d’histoires. Comme le dit Paul Ricœur: “L’enchevêtrement passif des sujets dans des histoires qui se perdent en un horizon brumeux” suscite un besoin de raconter puisque “Toute histoire de la souffrance […] appelle récit” (Ricœur 1991a, 143). Lorsque Mr. Nolan vient pour libérer Watt de la salle d’attente dans laquelle il a dû passer la nuit, il ne fait pas attention au “disquieting sound” émis par ce dernier, “that of soliloquy, under dictation” (237). La répétition des souffrances du protagoniste, leur manifestation chronique semblent donner naissance à une voix qui commence à réciter une série de mots comme “sous la dictée”. Sam commente ainsi cette récitation de Watt: The labour of composition, the uncertainty as to how to proceed, or whether to proceed at all, inseparable from even 514

our most happy improvisations, and from which neither the songs of birds […] are exempt, had here no part, apparently. But Watt spoke as one speaking to dictation, or reciting, parrot-like, a text, by long repetition become familiar. (154) Watt, comme plus tard Molloy, “Ne fait que balbutier sa leçon, des bribes d’un pensum” (Beckett 1994, 41). Ce passage constitue, de manière significative, l’écho d’un passage précédent. La première fois que le narrateur parle d’un événement qui, à force de répétition, est devenu familier au personnage, correspond au passage relatant la manière dont Watt est blessé par le projectile que lui lance Lady McCann. Watt a fini par s’habituer aux coups et aux violences dont il est l’objet, à ces agressions qui, administrées “with frequent repetition” sont devenues “so part of his being” (31). Un tissu de résonance est ainsi constitué entre cette récitation mécanique, cette scansion étrange qui, “by long repetition [has] become familiar” (154) à Watt et les violences ou les coups qui, “with frequent repetition” (31), ont fini par correspondre pour Watt au mode normal de son existence. Les bribes de ce texte ancien, avec lequel le personnage est devenu familier, ont d’abord été assenées, martelées dans son crâne. Lorsqu’il ouvre enfin la bouche, Watt commence à moduler une longue plainte faite de mots qui sont véritablement devenus une part de son être. Ricœur a lié ce qu’il appelle “le mode de la plainte” à la notion d’injustice; il note en effet: C’est sur le mode de la plainte que nous pénétrons dans le champ de l’injuste et du juste. […] Le sens de l’injuste n’est pas seulement plus poignant, mais plus perspicace que le sens de la justice; car la justice est […] ce qui manque et l’injustice ce qui règne, et les hommes ont une vision plus claire de ce qui manque […]. (Ricœur 1991b, 177). À part un texte médiatisé, rien ne survit de ce discours oral, de cette rumeur sauvage que constituent la parole et la voix de Watt. Sam, qui – nous l’avons souligné déjà – est inventé par Watt, incarne aussi le principe de la parole: il représente la possibilité même de ce discours. Le couple Watt et Sam préfigure la situation qui sera celle de Com515

ment c’est, où le narrateur – qui fait naître cette apparition pour se tenir compagnie – témoin de la difficile progression de l’autre vers lui pense: “Il arrive j’aurai une voix” (1999a, 119). 8 L’asile dans lequel Watt paraît résider après qu’il a quitté la maison de Mr. Knott désigne à la fois un endroit et un état. 9 Sam définit son enfermement et celui de Watt dans un espace clos comme correspondant à une forme de “windowlessness” (150). Beckett, qui a lu la Monadologie de Leibniz, à laquelle cette “windowlessness” se réfère, note dans ses “German Diaries”: “How absurd to conceive of a chain of solitudes successively liquidated”, puisque “the monad is windowless”.10 Une fois qu’il se trouve dans l’asile, Watt est entièrement retranché du monde extérieur. L’asile est situé, comme la maison de Mr. Knott, dans des limbes indéfinissables; ces deux lieux sont aussi improbables l’un que l’autre. Sur l’asile, on ne peut rien affirmer, à part qu’il constitue un lieu d’enfermement et qu’il est le lieu de la parole pour Watt. Après qu’il a quitté le domaine de Mr. Knott, Watt est enfermé pour la première fois dans la salle d’attente d’une gare. Alors qu’il est confiné à cet espace clos, Watt commence à formuler, dans un “impetuous murmur” (Watt, 154), “the soundless tumult of the inner lamentation” (215). Pour Deleuze (qui commente l’Histoire de la folie de Foucault): “L’enfermement renvoie à un dehors, et ce qui est enfermé, c’est le dehors” (Deleuze, 50). Maurice Blanchot note à propos de cet “espace fermé” qu’il constitue cette “sorte de vide murmurant au cœur du monde, vague menace dont la raison se défend par les hauts murs qui symbolisent le refus de tout dialogue, l’excommunication” (Blanchot, 295). De “fleeting acknowledgements” (66) parvenaient encore de l’extérieur à l’établissement de Mr. Knott. Dans le jardin de l’institution, l’espace dans lequel Watt évolue est entouré d’une clôture qui le sépare du monde extérieur à l’asile; ce dehors lui est défendu. De cet enfermement, qui paraît psychique ou mental – comparable à cette “windowlessness” à laquelle se réfère Sam – de cet isolement absolu, va naître le récit de Watt, celui d’une “solitude où la voix la raconte seul moyen de la vivre” (1999a, 200). ***** Un certain nombre de paradoxes demeurent au terme de cette discussion. Watt est une figure isolée qui semble néanmoins liée à un vaste 516

tableau de la souffrance. Il apparaît le plus souvent comme un auditeur passif et muet, mais il est également le locus d’un thrène puissant. L’horizon problématique de toute réflexion sur Watt et son personnage éponyme réside peut-être dans un fait que souligne Paul Ricœur: Si nous avons quelques traditions bien constituées concernant le mal moral, le péché, nous n’en avons point concernant le mal subi, la souffrance, autrement dit la figure de l’homme victime plutôt que de l’homme pécheur. L’homme pécheur donne beaucoup à parler, l’homme victime beaucoup à se taire. (Ricœur1998, 57) Dans Watt, le discours est lié à des “unfathomable abysses of silence” (Beckett 1983, 172) C’est cette absence fondamentale de moyens et de mots que l’on perçoit au travers des flux verbaux du roman. Un étrange silence entoure ce récit. Parce qu’elle est secondaire à l’expérience vive du protagoniste, qu’elle s’inscrit dans un moment second, la parole paraît déplacée, périphérique, coupée de son centre névralgique, déterritorialisée. La voix de Watt est perceptible grâce à la transcription d’un scribe; son récit, cependant, semble dominer parfois l’ordre muet du discours. A partir de Watt, l’œuvre de Beckett décrit “un monde fini, malgré les apparences”, que “sa fin […] suscita” (Beckett 1994, 53). Au cours de cette discussion, nous avons évolué, à partir de l’expérience vive de Watt, vers un temps qui se situe au-delà du cadre du récit, un temps futur au cours duquel l’histoire nous est contée. Watt, dans sa “post-crucified position” est le premier personnage de l’œuvre beckettienne qui n’en “sait pas plus qu’au premier jour” qui ne fait “que souffrir, sans comprendre” (Beckett 1992, 115). Watt semble constituer la genèse de nombreuses situations que subissent les personnages des œuvres à venir. La terrible souffrance de Watt, “laquelle entre toutes la profonde hors d’atteinte” (Beckett 1999a, 50), comme dans Comment c’est, préfigure un futur constitué de mots toujours “afar away” (Beckett 1999c, 27), où un individu à la fois singulier et générique, un être au carrefour entre l’individuel et le collectif: “X, paradigme du genre humain” (Beckett 1991, 163), essaie sans fin de formuler cette misère.

517

Notes 1.

“Notebook 3”, p.161. (Cité avec l’autorisation du Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).

2.

“German Diaries”, “Notebook 5”, 20 février 1937 (Reading University Library). Cité avec l’autorisation du Beckett Estate.

3.

“Je suis la plaie et le couteau!” est un vers d’un célèbre poème des Fleurs du mal, intitulé “L’Héautontimorouménos” (Baudelaire, 79).

4.

“German Diaries”, “Notebook 5”, 9 mars 1937. Cité avec l’autorisation du Beckett Estate.

5.

Comme à l’esclave chez Michel Foucault (Surveiller et punir, 113).

6.

Cité avec l’autorisation du Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

7.

Ce qui, bien sûr, le distingue du Christ, qui n’est pas “a victim of mere mischance”, puisque la violence qu’il subit correspond à un plan divin. Pour Beckett, la souffrance ne peut être que gratuite et aléatoire.

8.

Watt reste le personnage qui, le premier, se tient compagnie: “Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company” (Company, 34).

9.

Arsene, déclare déjà, juste avant son départ de chez Mr. Knott, qu’il se trouve au point de quitter “this state or place” (Watt, 47).

10.

Beckett rapporte ici une conversation qu’il a un soir avec Kaun et l’un de ses amis, Meier, avec lequel Beckett n’est pas d’accord. Il écrit, en allemand: “Die Monade ist doch Fensterlos”, “German Diaries”, “Notebook 4”, 15 janvier 1937. Cité avec l’autorisation du Beckett Estate.

518

Ouvrages cités Baudelaire, Charles, “L’Héautontimorouménos,” dans Œuvres Complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1993), 78-9. Beckett, Samuel, “German Letter of 1937”, dans Disjecta, éd. par Ruby Cohn (London, Calder, 1983), 170-173. –, Nouvelles et textes pour rien (Paris: Minuit, 1991). –, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1992). –, Molloy (Paris: Minuit / Coll. “double”, 1994). –, Company (London: Calder, 1996). –, Watt (London: Calder, 1998). –, Comment c’est (Paris: Minuit, 1999). (1999a) –, “Ooftish,” dans Collected Poems: 1930-1978 (London: Calder, 1999), 31. (1999b) –, “What is the Word,” dans Stirrings Still (London: Calder, 1999), 25-28. (1999c) La Bible, trad. par Louis Segond (Genève: Nouvelle édition de Genève, 1979). Blanchot, Maurice, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Bryden, Mary, Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Macmillan, 1998). Cohn, Ruby, Back to Beckett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976). Deleuze, Gilles, “Un nouveau cartographe,” dans Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 31-51. –, “Les strates ou formations historiques,” dans Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 55-75. Fletcher, John, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto&Windus, 1964). Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Tel/Gallimard, 1994). Laing, Ronald David, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960). Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit I: L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil/Coll. “Points essais”, 1991). (1991a) –, Lectures I: Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil/Coll. “Points essais”, 1991). (1991b) –, “Le scandale du mal,” dans Esprit 140-141 (juillet-août 1998), 57-63. Warhaft, Sidney, “Threne and Theme in Watt,” dans Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 4 (Autumn 1963), 261-278.

519

This page intentionally left blank

ENGLISHING GODOT Gerry Dukes

With reference to Grove Press/Beckett correspondence and to the archive of the Pike Theatre in Dublin, a precise chronology for Beckett’s translation into English of his play En attendant Godot is established. Some features of the Pike Theatre typescript – the only prepublication document yet to enter the scholarly domain – are discussed.

A surprising aspect of Beckett studies and one not often noticed, is that a serious lacuna exists in the documentary record of the translation of En attendant Godot into English. A trawl of the Grove Press/Beckett correspondence held at Syracuse University in the United States discloses that at least two, and possibly three, copies of the play in typescript were already in the States by late July, 1953. In the correspondence with Barney and Loly Rosset of Grove Press, Beckett admitted that “the first version of Godot” (Beckett’s phrase) he had sent was “rushed” and therefore, from the author’s perspective, unsatisfactory (1953a). He undertook to revise this version as soon as he could find the time. The revision was performed between November and late December of that year. But here we need to go back a little so that the full complexities of the story may emerge. When Beckett finished En attendant Godot back in January 1949 it was simply another item in the growing list of his unpublished works in French. It joined another, more complicated play with a much bigger cast – Eleutheria – three novels – Mercier et Camier, Molloy and Malone meurt – and four novellas, only one of which had so far achieved partial publication. The English language novel Watt is in the background too, but let us leave it there for now. Beckett had a contract with a publisher but the commercially disastrous experience for Bordas of publishing the Beckett/Alfred Péron translation of Murphy in 1947 had killed off any interest the company might have had in the author’s subsequent work.

The breakthrough came for Beckett in 1950 when he met Jérôme Lindon of Les Éditions de Minuit and the actor/producer Roger Blin. These are matters that are well known and do not require that we spend any time elucidating them here. For our present purposes the salient points are that En attendant Godot was published by Minuit in 1952 and that some scenes from the play had been performed and broadcast on French radio ahead of the first production at the Théâtre de Babylone in January, 1953. By that date both Molloy and Malone meurt had already been published and had attracted more than a modicum of critical interest. Those novels had also attracted the interest of Barney Rosset of Grove Press, so much so, in fact, that he was encouraging Beckett to translate the novels into English and, when Godot began to make a noise in the world, Rosset pressed for a translation of the play as well. Beckett was unwilling to undertake the task because of other commitments – he was working intensively with Patrick Bowles on the translation of Molloy into English and he was collaborating with Elmer Tophoven in revising Tophoven’s translation of Godot into German. The draft German translation was passed to Beckett by Lindon only a month after the play opened at the Babylone, a fact which suggests that Tophoven had begun his translation before the French production had opened. Tophoven’s draft translation had used the Minuit 1952 edition as base text. Beckett’s input into the collaboration was to bring Tophoven’s translation into alignment with the text of the play as it was being performed at the Théâtre de Babylone and to transfer the French specifics in the play to appropriate German ones. For example the wine-grower Bonnelly à Roussillon becomes Guttmann in Dürkweiler and the Vaucluse/Merdecluse pairing is translated by the Breisgau/Scheissgau one. There are numerous examples of linguistic localisation in the German version, particularly in Lucky’s Spiel, localisations that strike me, at least, as having authorial sanction and endorsement. I find it inconceivable that a translator such as Tophoven would have the temerity to replace Beckett’s Seine/Oise/Marne litany in Lucky’s speech with the Rhine/Ruhr/Main parallel litany in German, unless authorial sanction was forthcoming. The notion that Beckett was committed to preserving the French ambience of the play – a notion that is almost axiomatic in Beckett criticism – is not well founded. French elements (the Eiffel Tower, the Pyrenees mountains to the south, the Macon country) are retained, but they reside, in the 522

various translations, alongside geographical specifics native to the language into which the translation has been made. Nor is the localisation process without its typical complications. In English, Lucky refers to “Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham” (places in the London area) and, a moment later, reference is made to the paradoxical condition of being “stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara” (an area in the west of Ireland). I have dwelt lightly on the first full translation into German for a particular reason. I want to suggest that when Beckett finally got around to his own translation of the play into English in the early summer of 1953, his experience of working with Tophoven coloured his practice. Beckett’s English translation is, literally, mediated. It should be borne in mind also that Beckett attended the German première of Wir warten auf Godot (as the play was then titled) in Berlin in September 1953, prior to undertaking his revision of the unsatisfactory and rushed first version completed during the summer. In a typewritten letter to Loly Rosset addressed from Paris but written at Ussy on 20 November 1953, Beckett says, “I am glad you have decided to bring out Godot in the Spring. As you say there is no point in waiting for the performance. I am beginning now to revise my translation and hope to let you have the definitive text next month.” (1953c). He returned to this point in a letter sent to Grove Press on 14 December: “Could you not possibly postpone setting of galleys until 1st week in January, by which time you will have received the definitive text? I have made a fair number of changes, particularly in Lucky’s tirade, and a lot of correcting would be avoided if you could delay things for a few weeks.” (1953d). He finished the revised translation on 28 December, 1953 and sent the typescript with a covering letter to Grove Press from Paris on the following day. In that letter he pulled back somewhat from the notion of a definitive text: “Herewith revised text. I can’t improve it further for the moment though I am dissatisfied with a number of things and there is no point in holding it up any longer. You won’t mind if I make some final changes at the proof stage.” (1953e). Just ahead of the closing salutation in this handwritten letter Beckett wrote: “Forgive this awful writing. I can’t have a typewriter today.” (1953e). This is a most curious remark that opens up a number of fascinating interpretative possibilities. Beckett did indeed possess a typewriter but it was located at Ussy and, besides, it was a machine with a French keyboard and not the standard 523

QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers. An examination of the numerous and recurring typing errors in the Pike Theatre typescript (about which more in a moment) reveals that it was typed on a French keyboard. Beckett had a lot of trouble trying to write the word “ballocksed” in Vladimir’s line in the second act – “That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be ballocksed.” What he first typed was “bollowed”, b,o,l,l,o,w,e,d. He caught the erroneous w, spaced back and overtyped an x on the w. Later he manually emended the first o to a, giving the word the perfectly acceptable Hiberno-English orthographical form as “balloxed”, b,a,l,l,o,x,e,d (1954a). Later again, most likely at the Grove Press proof stage, he settled for the standard orthography of “ballocksed”, a form which had the endorsement of having been used by Joyce in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But behind all of these orthographical fun and games there is a serious point. Beckett had finalized the typescript of the novel Watt, in English on a QWERTY keyboard, back in 1945 in Paris, just ahead of exiting France for London and Dublin for the first time since the war began. He resumed his Paris life in January 1946 after he had fulfilled his contract with the Irish Red Cross at Saint Lô. While engaged in the composition of the novella Suite (later titled La Fin or The End in English) in February and March of that year, having written some twenty-nine pages of the text in English, he drew a line across the page and continued composing in French. I guess that Beckett regarded his decision to write in French as irrevocable and very soon traded in his QWERTY keyboard for a French model or otherwise disposed of it. For the production of occasional magazine pieces and other fugitive writings in English Beckett could simply hire a typewriter with the appropriate keyboard. I believe that is what lies behind the sentence in the letter of 29 December 1953, “I can’t have a typewriter today” (1953e). It would be a great contribution to Beckett studies if some researcher of genius and unlimited funding could establish precisely when it was, in the mid-fifties, that Beckett acquired a standard English machine. Before moving on from those days of late December in 1953 I should point out something that has not been generally noted: the short days and long hours of darkness at mid-winter in the northern hemisphere were always a particularly fruitful time for Beckett. He 524

was a non-hibernating Hibernian and there was precious little gardening to be done at that time of the year in Ussy. The Grove Press/Beckett letters at Syracuse and the Alan Simpson/Beckett letters at Trinity College in Dublin allow us to retrieve the progress of the revised translation but, more importantly, the letters reveal that Grove Press, despite Beckett’s pleas that they should delay, had already gone ahead and typeset their edition of the play using the first version translation as copy text. Beckett airmailed his revised text when he had completed it and this crossed the posting of the Grove galleys to him. Nevertheless, he entered his revisions and corrections on the galleys and noted, in a letter dated 22 January 1954, that nine tenths of his entries were author’s pentimenti (1954b). This suggests that there is not a great difference between the rushed first version and the revised version that finally appeared in book form from Grove in September 1954. Curiously, neither Beckett’s revised typescript nor the marked up galley sheets or page proofs are in the Grove Press archive at Syracuse. Barney Rosset has assured me that he does not know where these crucial documents are at the moment. I do not know either but, to quote Molloy, I have my suspicions. They are more than likely in private hands and will doubtless come to light in a generation or two. In some departments at least Beckett studies are still in their struggling infancy. We should mention, by the way, that a similar situation obtains for the pre-publication documents for the Faber and Faber British edition of 1956 and the “post-Lord-Chamberlain” revised edition of 1965. In so far as I have been able to determine the case, the files of Faber and Faber have been stripped and the one crucial document that has been located is currently the subject of litigation or, rather, it was when last I checked with the publishers. We owe it to the late Alan Simpson and the recently deceased Caroline Swift of the tiny Pike Theatre in Dublin that one pre-publication document has entered the scholarly domain and is held at Trinity College in Dublin. This is, of course, the Pike Theatre typescript I have alluded to earlier. Alan Simpson of the Pike Theatre had first contacted Beckett through his publisher Minuit in October 1953, seeking a copy of Beckett’s translation of Godot. Simpson had learnt from his friend Con Leventhal, whom he did not then know was also a close friend of Beckett’s, that Beckett had translated the play some months earlier. Beckett arranged for Minuit to send Simpson a copy of the French 525

edition and he wrote to Simpson on 17 November 1953, that is three days ahead of the letter to Grove Press alluded to earlier: “I have translated it [i.e. Godot] into English, as literally as I could, and am now revising this translation for American publication in the Spring. Frankly I cannot see how an integral performance would be possible in Dublin, even in a theatre such as yours, because of certain crudities of language, if for no better reason. These remain in the English version and I would not consent to their being changed or removed.” (1953b). Beckett already had some experience of censorship in Ireland having had his collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, banned by the Censorship Board in 1934, most probably on the basis of a misreading of the book’s title by some readers unfamiliar with the letters of St Paul. That banning had upset Beckett considerably and had caused some difficulty in his rather fraught relationship with his mother. The upset drove Beckett to write a scathing attack on the antiintellectualism of “Official Ireland” for The Bookman magazine the following year, a piece which he concluded by citing, with some pride, his official banning order number – 465. These matters were live again, so to speak, in November 1953 as Beckett had received the news, a couple of days before writing to Simpson, that the Censorship Board had banned Watt which had been published in late August for the Collection Merlin by the Olympia Press in Paris. On this occasion it was probably the reputation of the Olympia Press which motivated the Board’s banning order because no action had been taken against the brace of Irish literary magazines that had published substantial extracts from the novel earlier in the fifties. Simpson’s facility in French was sufficient for him readily to see that Godot with its small cast and pared-back scenic and technical requirements was ideally suited for performance on the tiny stage of the Pike Theatre in Dublin, which was even more modest than many of the so-called pocket theatres in post-war Paris. Armed with this knowledge Simpson pressed Beckett for a copy of the translation and Beckett finally relented in March 1954 when it became evident that Grove Press had decided to delay publication of the American edition until September of that year. Beckett sent a copy of the typescript of his revised version to Simpson and this typescript is, as I said earlier, the only pre-publication document to have entered the scholarly domain. It is held at Trinity College in Dublin where it is catalogued as MS 10731. I think Beckett was pleased with the prospect of a produc526

tion in Dublin, once he had Simpson’s assurance that the problem of censorship did not arise because the Pike Theatre was a private club. For reasons far too convoluted to go into here the first Dublin production had to be delayed until a week after the play opened at the Arts Theatre Club in London in August, 1955. What was not generally realized at the time by those fortunate enough to see both concurrent productions was that the American Grove Press text was being played in Dublin while the London script was a version of the revised translation with some, not all, the additional changes and revisions Beckett had introduced at the Grove Press proof stage. A further complication arose with the transfer of the London production to the West End when the filthy synecdoche of the Lord Chamberlain had to be honoured. It is well known that the Lord Chamberlain required a change to Vladimir’s line in the first act, delivered just after the arrival of Pozzo and Lucky, as Pozzo introduces himself. Vladimir says, “I once knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had the clap.” In the West End production the line was given as: “I once knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had warts.” What is not so well known is that the latter version is what Beckett actually wrote in the Pike Theatre typescript. The shiver of distate recorded by the joint editors of the revised edition of Waiting for Godot in the Theatrical Notebooks series at the expurgation of the text at this point is, therefore, a redundant gesture. In fact Beckett exploited the required expurgations to indulge in a few jokes of his own. The Lord Chamberlain inevitably insisted that the word “ballocksed” we noticed earlier be altered. Beckett simply substituted the word “banjaxed” – a high carat Hiberno-Englishism with precisely the same meaning. The Journal of Beckett Studies (Volume 4, number 2) has already published my detailed description of the typescript and a full collation of it with the Grove Press edition, so there is no need to repeat any of those details here. What I propose to do in conclusion is to adduce a small number of textual details from the typescript to demonstrate that, far from retaining the French ambience of the play, Beckett, while translating it into English, took pains to inflect the characters’ speech with Hiberno-English forms and usages. A particularly interesting example occurs in the “carrot eating” passage in Act 1. The Pike Theatre typescript gives the following – it is substantially the same in all published editions of the play: 527

Estragon: tied. Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir:

(chews, swallows). I’m asking you if we are Tied? Ti-ed. How do you mean tied? Down. But to whom? By whom? To your man. To Godot? Tied to Godot! What an idea! (Beckett, 1954a)

In conversation with Beckett in June, 1988 I reported that a then recent production of the play in Cork had substituted “To himself” for Estragon’s line, “To your man” for the simple reason that the cast (all of whom were from Cork) had insisted to the director Colm O Briain that, for Corkonians, the epithet “your man” is slightly derogatory, whereas “himself” is properly neutral. Beckett was amused and gratified by the production’s attention to nuance and went on to say that he had considered changing the line for the 1965 revised Faber and Faber edition. The change he had had in mind was “To his nibs,” a phrase that is quite respectful in Hiberno-English and which he had used some months before when writing Eh Joe for television, though on that occasion he had capitalized the phrase because it refers to the deity. He conceded, however, that he did not make the change because he was aware that the phrase carried some demonic or satanic overtones in certain sub-dialects of Hiberno-English. On two occasions in the typescript Beckett manually altered “talking” to “blathering” and once “talked” to “blathered.” This is strong evidence that Beckett took to heart the clear distinction Synge made between talking and blathering in the closing scene of his play The Shadow of the Glen (1904). A similar commitment to the use of Hiberno-English is evident in a line given to Pozzo in all published editions but absent from the Pike Theatre typescript: He wants to cod me, but he won’t. On the other hand there are traces of contrary evidence. Early in Act 1 as the pair discuss the appointment with Godot the published texts read: 528

Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir:

We’ll come back tomorrow. And then the day after tomorrow. Possibly. And so on. The point is – Until he comes. You’re merciless.

The Pike Theatre typescript has Vladimir say “You’re unmerciful.” The two terms are fully interchangeable in Hiberno-English but could well give rise to unnecessary ambiguity in English, hence Beckett revised for the Grove and subsequent editions. The typescript also offers another manual alteration in Estragon’s description of Lucky – “He’s puffing like a grampus.” That last word is inserted manually beside the blacked out, but still legible “walrus.” It is likely that Beckett here memorializes his early enthusiasm for the work of Dickens, not discernible in the original French “un phoque.” The typescript offers unparalleled opportunities for textual scholars to attend upon the translation acts of Beckett as he worked to a tight deadline. The existence of the typescript allows for the emergence of other, more important issues. When Beckett performed his editorial operations for the revised Faber edition of 1965 he did not bring his text into alignment with the Grove text of 1954 – in fact at that meeting in 1988 he told me that the revised Faber was his “preferred” text. He was quite happy to countenance two unaligned versions of his text – in a later postcard he berated himself for his “deplorable neglect of successive editions” – because his experience as advisor and later as director impressed upon him that there is no such thing as a fully stabilized text. Productions vary according to the exigencies of theatres and casts, directors lapse into error and actors forget their lines. A stabilized or definitive text is not of this planet.

529

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks than Kicks. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1934). –, Murphy translated by Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron (Paris: Bordas, 1947) –, Malone meurt. (Paris: Minuit, 1951). –, Molloy. (Paris: Minuit, 1951). –, En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 1952) –, Letter to Barney Rosset, Bird Special Collection Manuscripts, (Grove Press Records, 1953-1985, Syracuse University, 25 June. 1953). (1953a) –, Letter to Alan Simpson, (Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Library Dublin, Republic of Ireland. 17 Nov. 1953). (1953b) –, Letter to Loly Rosset, Bird Special Collection Manuscripts, (Grove Press Records, 1953-1985, Syracuse University, 20 Nov. 1953). (1953c) –, Letter to Grove Press, Bird Special Collection Manuscripts, (Grove Press Records, 1953-1985, Syracuse University, 14 Dec. 1953). (1953d) –, Letter to Grove P ds, 1953ress, Bird Special Collection Manuscripts, (Grove Press Recor-1985, Syracuse University, 29 Dec. 1953). (1953e) –, Watt. (Paris: Collection Merlin, The Olympia Press, 1953). (1953f) –, Waiting for Godot. Typescript ‘Pike Theatre’. (MS 10731. Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Library Dublin, Republic of Ireland. 1954). (1954a) –, Letter to Grove Press, Bird Special Collection Manuscripts, (Grove Press Records, 1953-1985, Syracuse University, 22 Jan. 1954). (1954b) –, Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955). –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1956) –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1965) –, Mercier et Camier. (Paris Minuit, 1970) –, Warten auf Godot, Deutsche Übertragung von Elmar Tophoven; Vorwort von Joachim Kaiser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. –, Eh Joe, in ed. The Complete Dramatic Works. (London: Faber, 1990). –, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1 Waiting for Godot. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson (London: Faber, 1993). –, Eleutheria translated from the French by Barbara Wright. (London: Faber, 1996). Dukes, Gerry, “The Pike Theatre Typescript of Waiting for Godot: Part 1”, Journal of Beckett Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, 1995.

530

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Seamus Deane. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1992). Synge, J.M. Four Plays and the The Aran Islands. Edited with an Introduction by Robin Skelton (London: OUP, 1962).

531

ESSE AND PERCIPI IN FILM: A ‘Note’ upon the Beckett-Schneider ‘Correspondence’ William Martin

The status of Berkeley’s thesis (esse est percipi) is open to interpretation in Beckett’s Film, because the perceptions of the spectator must be taken into account when determining the relation between the film and the written notes. The delay which prevents Beckett from sending the completed notes to Schneider until the final edit of the film, has the effect of retrospectively constructing the literary intention behind the film. An excavation of the Beckett-Schneider correspondence reveals that a working version of the script titled ‘The Eye’ is erased by the final version of the ‘script’.

The title of Beckett’s Film gives the ‘impression’ that the work is engaged in a reflexive critique of the medium itself, yet it becomes clear after a single viewing that the position of the spectator is necessarily involved in this process of filmic introspection. Beckett chooses to theorize his own conception of film in terms of the philosopher whose ‘point of view’ most clearly pertains to the essence of film – George Berkeley. The Irish philosopher’s famous maxim (esse est percipi) limits the being of material things to the mode of perception, however the question must be asked: what is the ‘textual’ status of the esse est percipi principle for the spectator who experiences Film? For unless the spectator is actually aware that Beckett is making an ontological statement about the essence of cinema, then it is likely that the significance of the Film will be completely overlooked. The proper experience of watching Beckett (and Schneider’s) Film calls for a supplementary reading of the written notes. The exact status of Beckett’s written notes remains ambiguous, because the ‘notes’ have appeared in various forms, and have been published in many different contexts. The completed notes appear for the first time in a letter which Beckett sends to Schneider (during the editing process) in September of 1964. Some publishers have chosen

to include the notes alongside Beckett’s shorter plays, however this leads to the naïve conclusion that Schneider’s film is an ‘adaptation’ of Beckett’s original intention: one cannot argue that the film is a reproduction of an original prose work, because the finished notes only come upon the scene as part of the film’s overall production. Nor can the notes be simply considered a set of ‘suggestions’ for Schneider, because Beckett subsequently publishes “Film (a script with illustrations)” as part of the definitive 1972 edition. The only adequate way to approach the notes is to consider them in the context of the film’s actual production, which is given detailed description by Alan Schneider’s essay “On Directing Film”. The notes can be conceptualized as a circulating letter within the written archive of the film’s production. According to this deconstructive concept of the archive, the erasure of the written notes from the spectator’s experience of the film, is the impossible condition of the possibility for them to reappear within the film – as a ‘trace’ of the postal circuit which regulates the Beckett-Schneider correspondence. The hostile reaction of the audience to the first screening of Film at the New York Film Festival in the summer of 1965, serves to highlight the pivotal position of the philosophical schema in relation to the actual experience of watching the film. Schneider makes the point that the film “was sandwiched between two Keaton shorts”, and explains that it failed to satisfy the audience for two reasons: first, because Beckett ‘screens’ the appearance of Keaton's face until the end of the film (“The professional film festival audience of critics and students of film-technique started laughing at the moment the credits came on, roaring at that lovely grotesque close-up of Bustor’s eyelid. For good. All through the next twenty minutes they sat there, bored, annoyed, baffled, and cheated of the Keaton they had come to see”, 93); second, because no-one was aware of Beckett’s use of Berkeley’s maxim (“The critics, naturally, clobbered or ignored us […] and even told us how stupid we were to keep Keaton’s back to the camera until the end. As to the “message” – esse est percipi – not one had a clue”, 93). It should be noted that these two reasons are intimately related, because the concealment of Keaton’s pantomime is a direct consequence of the cinematic convention which Beckett establishes in order to prevent the gaze of the Eye (E) confronting the face of the Object (O). Therefore, the loss of Keaton’s pantomime is compensated by the profundity of Beckett’s message. The limited range of camera place534

ment is not due to the poor technique of the cameraman Joe Coffey, it is a direct consequence of Beckett’s artistic intention.1 According to this convention, we must interpret the movement of the camera (and the gestures of the actor which it perceives) as the ‘corporeal medium’ through which the gazes of E and O can be sutured at the end of the film. The issue at stake is the status of the filmic fiction instituted as “Beckett’s Film”, a title which appropriates the counter-signature of the film’s director Alan Schneider, to the signature of the writer and dramatist Samuel Beckett. The opening sentence of Schneider’s essay “On Directing Film” makes it clear that the purpose of this essay is to position Beckett’s signature as the authentic origin of the film: “With every new wavelet of contemporary cinema turning directors, in effect, into authors, it took the surprising author of Film, playwright Samuel Beckett, to become, not too surprisingly, its real director.” (63) Thus Schneider reveals to us that he is only masquerading as the director of Film, and as a proxy, he only represents (in the sense of a delegate) the “real” director, Samuel Beckett. If one were to doubt the efficacy this imperative, namely, the call to ascribe the philosophical and literary intention of the film to the haunting presence of Samuel Beckett upon the set, then such doubts will be dispelled as soon as the reader casts their eyes upon Beckett looking through the “eye” of Joe Coffey’s camera.2 The presence of two bodies behind the camera (Coffey and Beckett) makes it evident that in the experience of watching a film, the body is always already doubled – it appears only as the invisible trace of the camera’s point of view. The ghostly presence of a body behind the camera is made necessary because the position of the visual field is always conditioned by the orientation of the body (whether it be lived or prosthetic). Schneider’s essay conceptualizes Beckett’s ghostly presence in terms of the co-ordinated possibilities of seeing and moving: “He was always there and always watching from above the set, unobtrusive but dominant, always eager to answer or to look through the camera, or help with a move.” (85, my italics: WSM) The dual economy of moving and seeing is crucial to the convention which structures the relationship between E and O; for the position of the camera is determined by the relation between the present body of the Object (O) and the absent body of the Eye (E). As we shall see, this 535

so-called “convention” is as questionable as the legal status of Beckett’s Film. The definitive version of the notes appear in the 1972 Faber edition of Film: by Samuel Beckett. The only significant difference between the “script with illustrations” and the ‘notes’ which appear in Beckett’s letter to Schneider of 1964, is the addition of a preface whose purpose is to explain the deviations of the film from the ‘script’. The preface therefore functions as an addition which compensates for the lack of continuity between the notes and the film. Despite the fact that stills from the film appear in a temporal sequence determined by the order of the notes, Beckett maintains in the preface that no steps have been taken to ensure the coherence of the notes with the film: This is the original project for Film. No attempt has been made to bring it into line with the finished work. The one considerable departure from what was imagined concerns the opening sequence in the street. This was first shot as given, then replaced by a simplified version in which only the indispensable couple is retained. For the rest the shooting followed closely the indications of the script. (Beckett, 10, my italics: WSM) The sections of Schneider’s essay which deal with the shooting of the opening sequence betray an admission of his failure as a director. Schneider spends a considerable amount of time detailing the technical difficulties involved with shooting the street scene, only to have the problem resolved with the authoritative appearance of Beckett upon the scene: “Sam proposed in a quiet voice the ultimate solution: eliminate the entire sequence. Start with Buster running along the wall (preceded by E’s eye).” (77) The most significant aspect of Schneider’s description of the “departure from what was imagined” is the parenthesized inclusion of Buster Keaton’s eyelid. It is revealed later in the essay that the decision to use the close-up of the Eye at the beginning of the film, was made only once the opening sequence had been cut: “We had decided, once the original opening sequence was eliminated, that we would open with a huge menacing close-up of an eye, held as long as possible and then opening to reveal the pupil searching and then focusing – and then cut to Keaton running along 536

the wall. The texture of Buster’s own eyelid was beautifully creased and reptilian; he was willing to sit for interminable periods of time […] always ready for another take, always somewhat bemused by it all, behind his silence.” (87-88, my italics: WSM) Schneider’s description reveals to us that the framing of the film’s borders are determined by the omission of an entire sequence. The super-imposition of the film’s title upon the close-up of the Eye, therefore marks the point whereby the ‘indispensable’ parts of the notes are differentiated from those considered technically impossible to translate into the film. Is Beckett’s decision to begin the film with a close-up of Buster Keaton’s eyelid merely an arbitrary one, or is there a underlying reason which makes the inclusion of the opening and closing frame a matter of essential necessity? If the eye were merely an ‘arbitrary’ symbol chosen to signify the beginning and end of the film, then the sceptical interpretation would be correct. Yet the inclusion of the eye at the beginning and end of the film is of utmost importance to the philosophical “message” of the film, because it is only the referential appearance of the eye at the limit of the text, which makes the ontological identity of the Eye with the camera an actual possibility. In Film, the eye is the ‘corporeal substrate’ of the cinematic apparatus. Schneider’s essay reveals that a working version of the script titled “The Eye”3 was in circulation during the production of the film, which suggests that the film’s title was altered to render the referential appearance of the “Eye” transparent: The script appeared in the spring of 1963 as a fairly baffling when not downright inscrutable six-page outline. Along with pages of addenda in Sam’s inimitable informal style: explanatory notes, a philosophical supplement, modest production suggestions, a series of hand-drawn diagrams. Involving, in cosmic detail, his principle characters, O and E, the question of “perceivedness”, the angle of immunity, the essential principle that esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived […] What was required was not merely a subjective camera and an objective camera, but actually two different “visions” of reality: one, that of the perceiving “eye” (E) constantly observing the object (the script was once titled The Eye), and one, that of the object (O) observing his environment. O was to possess varying degrees of awareness of 537

being perceived by E and make varying attempts to escape from this perception (in addition to all other, or even imagined perceptions). The story of this highly visual, if highly unusual, film was simply that O’s attempt to remove all perception ultimately failed because he could not get rid of selfperception. At the end, we would see that O=E. Q.E.D. (Schneider, 64-65) Schneider’s description of the notes is illuminating because he reveals to us that the “general” section of the notes, which contains Beckett’s definitive statement of the filmic convention which relates O to E, appears only as a “philosophical supplement” to the working version of the script titled “The Eye”. It becomes clear that the referential appearance of the eye as something both ‘seeing’ and ‘seen’ functions as the sign of equality in the final suture (O=E). As a consequence, the signified concept of the ‘Eye’ is substituted for its referent, and the title of the film is effaced in the enunciation of its presence. The letters of “Beckett’s Film”, which are super-imposed upon the surface of the Eye, must become the transparent medium through which the spectator is able to perceive. The erasure of the working title (“The Eye”) from the institution of “Beckett’s Film” therefore incorporates the ‘real’ eye into the perspective of the spectator, and a phantomatic substitution takes place between the bodies of the spectator and the actor. The institution of the work’s title involves a systematic erasure of all the non-essential elements of the film, and the existence of the referent is reduced to a reflective surface that supports the introspective process of the film’s reflection. The Eye appears as something external to the film, yet it is located in the position where one looks into the film – through the ‘film’ of the eye itself. The referential appearance of the eye marks the point at which the notes (in particular, the philosophical schema) intrude into the experience of watching the film, and the screen becomes the surface which marks the limit of the film as a ‘text’. If there is supposed to be an essential correlation between the frame of the film and the terms of the notes, then for what reason does Schneider refer to the “general” section of the finished notes as a “philosophical supplement” to the original version? The answer to this question is directly related to Beckett’s statement that with regard to the cinematic convention which relates E and O, “No truth value at538

taches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience”. The ‘convention’ which structures the film represents its only “truth value”, because the identity of the esse est percipi principle is maintained by the angle of immunity. As soon as the consciousness of O is reflected by the gaze of E, then the former experiences anguish, precisely because he has been made aware of his irreducible finitude as represented by the absolute exteriority of the Other (i.e. esse is not percipi). On the other hand, if we interpret this convention as merely a filmic device which institutes the work as a fiction, then the identity of E=O at the end of the film must be interpreted as the specific illusion which is fundamental to the constitution of cinema as an aesthetic medium. Both essential and supplementary, Berkeley’s thesis is either the ‘truth’ of Beckett’s film, or merely a filmic ‘convention’ which institutes the text as a work of fiction. Before we can decide upon the status of the “convention” which Beckett establishes in the ‘notes’, we need to examine the textual enunciation of Berkeley’s thesis, and determine its exact relation to the mode of being of the cinematic apparatus. The institution of the work as a fiction coincides with the substitution of the Eye for the cinematic apparatus, but the esse est percipi thesis needs to be grafted onto the surface of the film for this “convention” to become something truthful. In fact, esse est percipi must become the transparent medium of the film itself. The only trace of Berkeley’s thesis within the finished film is the ‘hssh’ which Beckett insists upon in his letter to Schneider in September of 1964. Beckett’s insistence upon the ‘hssh’ in this letter shows us that it is impossible to consider the true significance of the notes without considering the context in which they come upon the scene. The letter is crucial because it determines the limits of the Beckett-Schneider correspondence, and relates the philosophical schema to the experience of watching the film: Forgive delay in sending these notes. They are no more than suggestions. Don’t act on them if you don’t agree. The movieola here was bad and I in poor form. I’m getting used of a better one in a few weeks and shall write again then. But don’t hold up the final cut on that account if you are in a hurry to get it done for any other reason. I don’t expect to have much better to offer. 539

I have had two screenings here … After the first I was not too happy, after the second I felt it was really something. Not quite in the way intended, but as sheer beauty, power and strangeness of image. The problem of double vision for example is not really solved, but the attempt to solve it has given the film a plastic value which it would not have otherwise. In other words and generally speaking, from having been troubled by a certain failure to communicate fully by purely visual means the basic intention, I now am being to feel that this is unimportant and that the images probably gain in force what they lose as ideograms and that the whole idea behind the film, while sufficiently expressed for those so minded, has been chiefly of value on the formal and structural level. After the first screening I thought again a lot, and spoke to Hodeir, about the possibility of reinforcing the E-O distinction by means of sound. Now I am definitely opposed to any sound apart from the ‘hssh’ which I think should be as brief and uninsistent as possible … I described it [Film] as an “interesting failure”. This I now see is much too severe. It does I suppose in a sense fail with reference to a purely intellectual schema, that is in a sense which only you and I and a few others can discern, but in so doing it has acquired a dimension and a validity of its own that are worth far more than any merely efficient translation of intention. (Harmon, 166, my italics: WSM) All the elements which regulate the postal system of the BeckettSchneider correspondence can be found within the context of this short letter. The italicised sections are crucial to our interpretation because they illustrate the following set of points: 1.

540

Beckett’s delay in sending the completed notes to Schneider has the effect of retro-spectively constructing the literary intention ‘behind’ the film. The displacement of the work’s title from The Eye to Film reveals to the spectator-reader that some kind of alteration has taken place to ensure the correspondence between the notes and the film. The effect of this displacement is to make the film an ‘imitation’ of the notes, and the completed notes are posited as the authentic origin

2.

3.

4.

of the film (even though we are now aware that a working version of the script titled “The Eye” was in circulation during the production of the film). The presence of the two screenings demonstrates a shift in Beckett’s attitude which reverses the priority of the original over the copy, for the notes now appear as an ‘imitation’ of the film. There is an event of expropriation because Beckett’s attitude towards the film is altered: “After the first I was not too happy, after the second I felt it was really something. Not quite in the way intended, but as sheer beauty, power and strangeness of image”. What has occurred between these two screenings to alter Beckett’s emotional reaction so strongly? Beckett’s initial anguish at perceiving the film is tied to the film’s failure to fulfill his poetic intentions; yet by the second viewing, Beckett has submitted to the film as an artwork in its own right. If we position Beckett in the space of the ideal spectator-reader, then we can see that an interminable doubling takes place in-between the film and notes. The closed constitution of “Beckett’s Film” coincides with the institution of the Beckett-Schneider correspondence, because a postal system begins to circulate around the written notes which have been erased from the film. Beckett negates the literary intention of the film and subordinates the text to the pure image of the silent film. Consequently, a “purely intellectual schema” is isolated from the film, which is known only to the addressee and the sender of this letter – to the ‘You’ and the ‘I’ – which correlates to the shot/reverseshot formation of the film’s final suture. The identity of being and perception is only maintained if the letter from Beckett to Schneider arrives at its destination, but we can already sense that another spectator (“that is in a sense which only you and I and a few others can discern”) is involved in the ‘truth’ of this ‘correspondence’. The notes are erased from the film, but this movement of supersession (aufhebung) is simultaneously the possibility of their ‘preservation’ within the written archive of the film’s production. It is ironic that Beckett says that the ‘sssh’ should be as uninsistent as possible, because this is the very thing in the film about which he insists. Beckett’s intention is grafted upon 541

the filmic text via the sound-track, which announces the silence of the film through a signifier whose signified withdraws into silence in the moment of its becoming-audible. Film is an audio-visual medium and the purely filmic image emerges only in its opposition to the sound-track. Thus Beckett restores the precedence of the original over the copy by prioritizing one kind of silence over another: the intention of the written text is elevated above the ‘occasional’ aspect of Bustor Keaton’s pantomime. Indeed, Schneider remarks in a letter written after the film had just been completed that “I feel the film is more Beckett than Buster, but both work” (Harmon, 160). Beckett grafts the notes upon the film by excluding them, for only by excluding the sound of the voice from the film can Beckett truly claim that esse est percipi – ‘ideograms’ are necessarily suppressed from the film because they are extraneous to perception: “the images obtained probably gain in force what they lose as ideograms and that the whole idea behind the film, while sufficiently expressed for those so minded, has been chiefly of value on the formal and structural level.” The very question of the relation between text and film is taken into account by Beckett in this comment, because the ‘ideogrammatic’ dimension of the image passes over to the pure image, which severs any written or ‘textual’ content from the filmic image. It seems strange in this case to refer to the film as “Beckett’s Film” – a title which reeks of a vitiated counter-signature. According to the ‘general’ section of the notes, the dialectical identity of being and perception is grounded in the possibility of self-same reflection within the Ego of a transcendental subject, but does not the final suture of the film ‘repress’ the notes within the film in the very attempt to ‘suppress’ them? The truth of esse ‘is’ percipi is dependent upon the exact ‘correspondence’ between Beckett and Schneider, because the filmic convention must exactly translate the ‘truth’ of Beckett’s intention as stated in the notes. But can one fail to notice the similarity between the “convenience” of the notes, and the very “convention” that structures the angle of immunity in Film? Both words stem from the Latin convenire – which means ‘to gather’ or ‘to bring together’. At the limit of absolute 542

convenience the filmic ‘convention’ comes into being as something ‘true’, because the film achieves a level of perfection that validates it formally and structurally. This impossible economy with the absolute effects a filmic suture which places E and O in the position of dialogue without a word being said – that much is guaranteed by Beckett’s ‘sssh’. The negation of truth coincides with the institution of a fiction via the filmic suture – namely, that the Object was always already the Eye, and what we supposed was the camera’s Eye was in fact Buster Keaton’s (and vice-versa). Truth is bracketed because the convention establishes the film as a fiction in the identity of selfperception. But we now realise that the dialectical interpretation of the self-identical ego is an illusion, because of the necessary delay that distances the gaze of E and O. Does not this delay resemble the delay for which Beckett asks for forgiveness? The event of rupture between being ‘and’ perception is only accounted for if the closed postal system between ‘You’ and ‘I’ is constituted as an identity. The ideal of the perfect adaptation therefore ruptures between the first and second screenings of Beckett and Schneider’s film. After the second screening Beckett recognizes the impossibility of efficiently (or conveniently) translating the literary intention into the film, because a certain economic impulse ensures that the adaptation necessarily fails to achieve its ideal. The economy of delay and re-turn which the sending of the notes from Beckett to Schneider implies, thus marks the limit between convenience and convention, between economics and law; and Beckett asks Schneider in his letter to excuse his guilt, fulfill his promise, and erase his confession. Here the moral imperative of efficiently translating the notes into a film demonstrates its double condition: 1) “Act as if you already had the notes”; 2) “Forget about the notes, they are useless anyway”. Beckett sends the notes back to the origin of the film, and erases the very production of the film in bringing it to the screen. Now we are in a position to appreciate what happened between the film’s first two screenings. The first screening is supposed to be a reflection of Beckett’s original intention, but the second screening marks a break. The film exceeds the schema of being ‘is’ perception, and in the gap a kind of extraneous perception is introduced – an event of appropriation and expropriation takes place, and the film economizes upon the impossible lack of Beckett’s literary intent: 543

I am on the whole pleased with the film, having accepted its imperfections, for the most part only perceptible to insiders, and discern how in some strange way it gains by its deviations from the strict intention and develops something better. The last time [I watched Film] I found myself submitting, far from the big crazy idea, to a strangeness and beauty of pure image. The few reactions I have had from others are strongly positive. All sound is definitely out as far as I am concerned, except for the hssh. (Harmon, 188, my italics: WSM) Beckett’s final aesthetic judgement in March of 1965 condenses all the anxieties that characterise his earlier letter to Schneider. Yet the final letter contains a cryptic element that can only be deciphered if we take into account the closed postal system that circulates between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ (with the addition of a few others) of the Beckett-Schneider correspondence. Beckett’s statement that the film’s imperfections are “for the most part only perceptible to insiders”, implies logically, that the film’s imperfections are ‘imperceptible’ to outsiders. But is not the message of the film that esse est percipi? Does this mean that for outsiders (i.e. normal spectators), the imperfections of the film are negated as non-existent, as not-being perceptible? Or does this nothingness which pertains to the imperceptibility of the film’s imperfections render their invisibility supersensible? During the first screening, Beckett is an insider who attempts to regulate the intentions of the film. During the second screening, Beckett forgets about the imperfections, which are now imperceptible, because the “extraneous perception” of Schneider’s gaze is staring back at him. Beckett represents the ideal spectator-reader who is both inside and outside Film. The “strange way” in which the film gains from its deviations describes the logic of expropriation and appropriation, whereby the film economises upon the lack of literary intention to become a pure image. The image sheds any ideogrammatic remainder and is elevated into the Eidos that is represented by the ‘eye on the screen’. The transition from the cinematic image to the pure Idea, occurs when the imperceptible deviations become the supersensible face which perceives the perceiver. As Berkeley knew well, the perceiver is perceived by a transcendent Other (God), who imprints ideas upon the soul. 544

Notes 1.

Here is the philosophical schema as it is stated in the “General” section of the notes. The suppression of “extraneous perception” is achieved by a “convention” which shields the face of the Object from the Eye of the Camera: “All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in escapability of self-perception. No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience.” (Beckett, 11)

2.

The photograph is reproduced on p70 of the 1972 Faber edition, and pictures Beckett peering through the camera with his glasses on. However, Coffey’s hands are positioned on the wheels used to adjust the settings on the camera, which suggests that there has been a disruption of the usually ‘natural’ co-ordination between the hands and the eye’s of the camera operator. This photo is extremely interesting because it exhibits at first hand the substitution of bodies that needs to occur between the camera-operator and the film’s “real” director (i.e. Samuel Beckett) in order for the ‘technical’ production to become transformed into the ‘artistic’ intention behind the film.

3.

In his essay “On Directing Film”, Schneider mentions an earlier version of the script titled “The Eye”, which is never explicitly linked to the original draft – however, it can be inferred from Beckett’s letter to Schneider in May 1963 that the writer had a rudimentary version of the script without an official title, for Beckett writes that: “I was in the country these last 10 days and did more work on film. I hope to have a fairly detailed (but quite untechnical) script to show you when we meet”. (Harmon, 137) In Beckett’s next letter to Schneider, written in July 1963, we must infer that Schneider has been given the original version of the script, because Beckett writes: “From Austria I sent Barney a further note on the film which he’ll show you. I find it hard to make it any clearer than in the outline.” (Harmon, 133) Without having access to the working versions of the notes, we must infer that The Eye

545

emerged upon the scene during the production of the film. The title was subsequently erased when it became clear that the referential appearance of the eye was a sufficient ground for the philosophical schema.

Works cited Beckett, Samuel, “Film (script with Illustrations),” in Beckett, Samuel Film: by Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 1972). Harmon, Maurice (ed.) No Author Better Served (London: Harvard UP, 1998). Schneider, Alan, “On Directing Film,” in Beckett, Samuel Film: by Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 1972).

546

PONCTUATION ET RYTHME DANS EN ATTENDANT GODOT ET FIN DE PARTIE DE SAMUEL BECKETT. Karine Germoni

Dans En attendant Godot et Fin de partie, l’utilisation de la ponctuation – entendue comme l’ensemble des signes de ponctuation, des ponctuants gestuels ou prosodiques tels que Un temps ou Silence – et de l’a-ponctuation crée une rythmique paradoxale qui oscille entre un rythme dense et un rythme ‘zéro’. Or, c’est à partir de l’alternance entre rythme, dirythmie et arythmie que s’élabore l’“hypothèse rythmique” beckettienne dont les contrastes tranchés sont destinés à exercer sur l’acteur et le spectateur un effet cathartique et maïeutique qui leur fait retrouver leur propre rythme, corporel et langagier.

Dans le chapitre intitulé “La prosodie” de son ouvrage Le Langage dramatique, Pierre Larthomas (66) constate la pauvreté de notre ponctuation linguistique par rapport aux ressources dont dispose le langage parlé, en matière d’arrêt du débit vocal, de pauses et de silences. Il regrette que les dramaturges n’utilisent pas un système plus précis, comparable à la notation pausale musicale et usent surtout de sa fonction logique. S’il ne donnait comme exemple de “rémunération” prosodique de notre ponctuation le verset et le blanc claudéliens, on croirait que c’est à Beckett que songe Larthomas. Lorsqu’il se tourne vers le théâtre, Beckett continue à mettre à mal l’usage logique de la ponctuation comme Beckett romancier et poète en bannissant de ses pièces, à de rares exceptions près1, le deux-point et le pointvirgule, honni depuis Watt2, pour privilégier sa fonction rythmique. Parallèlement à cette restriction du nombre des signes de ponctuation, à cette économie de moyens qui ne cessera de s’accentuer dans les pièces et les textes en prose ultérieurs conformément à son credo “less is more”3, il est le premier à “rémunérer” – pour paraphraser Mallarmé – le défaut prosodique de notre ponctuation. De fait, dès En attendant Godot, il systématise les didascalies Silence, Un temps, véritables

ponctuants rythmiques. Or, Un temps ou Pause, dans le texte anglais, servent autant à régler le débit de paroles que les intermittences de l’éclairage ou de la gestuelle. Par conséquent, les différents langages dramatiques usent de moyens communs pour ponctuer et rythmer. Néanmoins, il serait plus juste de parler de ‘ponctuations’ “avec un s! ” – selon l’expression de Hamm (Beckett, 1957b, 17) - puisque chaque partition sémiotique a sa propre syntaxe, sa ponctuation; et par suite, il conviendrait également de parler de ‘rythmes’ au pluriel. Si la définition de l’universel du rythme “défini comme une alternance de marques (temps fort, temps faible) du même et du différent” convient à la rigueur au rythme biologique, elle ne convient pas au rythme linguistique qu’Henri Meschonnic (1995, 151) définit comme “l’organisation d’un discours par un sujet et d’un sujet par son discours” et par suite comme “l’organisation du continu dans le langage”. Si le rythme du discours déborde le discontinu du signe, c’est parce qu’il entre dans le langage de l’extralinguistique et notamment du corporel, surtout dans le théâtre de Beckett où, comme le dit Pierre Chabert (224), “la parole n’est jamais conçue en dehors du geste, du mouvement, d’un lieu, d’une position physique, d’une posture corporelle”. Ainsi, malgré leur relative autonomie, les diverses partitions théâtrales et les ‘parties’ des différents personnages entrent en interaction dans le continuum de la pièce et l’utilisation de leur ponctuation, sur le mode de la complémentarité ou de l’opposition, crée tantôt un rythme dense, tantôt un rythme plat qui tend vers l’arythmie. Or, le rythme n’opère que dans la différence et sous cette rythmique paradoxale, se trouve l’“hypothèse rythmique” (Deguy, 77) beckettienne, rythmique du creusement et des “sons fondamentaux”4, déjà en acte dans En attendant Godot et Fin de partie. ***** Ce qui apparaît avant tout caractéristique dans les deux pièces, ce sont les échanges des couples Vladimir/Estragon, Hamm/ Clov qui se renvoient les mots comme des “balles”. Le tempo de ces échanges est d’autant plus alerte que les répliques sont brèves voire monosyllabiques, comme les fréquents “oui” et “non” de Clov. Le rythme de ces échanges est dense, poétique et “oralisé” car il s’appuie sur “un accompagnement prosodique»5 soutenu, dont les phénomènes marqués 548

sont l’allitération, l’assonance, l’attaque consonantique chère à Claudel6 et la rime, véritable ponctuation pour Aragon. Le texte d’ En attendant Godot est parsemé de ces micro-séquences (27-28, 34, 46, 47, 97, 107) dont voici un exemple (c’est nous qui soulignons): Estragon: Et qu’a-t-il répondu? Vladimir: Qu’il verrait. Estragon: Qu’il ne pouvait rien promettre. Vladimir: Qu’il lui fallait réfléchir. Estragon: A tête reposée. Vladimir: Consulter sa famille. Estragon: Ses amis. Vladimir: Ses agents. Estragon: Ses correspondants. Vladimir: Ses registres. Estragon: Son compte en banque.

(23-24)

Comme les acteurs de la commedia dell’arte, les personnages usent de la technique du mot-rebond: le mot qui sert de palier dans la réplique est repris avec des intonations différentes dont les contrastes rythment ces échanges du “tic au tac” (Beckett, 1952, 51), comme dans Fin de partie: Clov: Je regarde le mur. Hamm: Le mur ! Et qu’est-ce que tu y vois, sur ton mur? Mané, mané? Des corps nus? (26) Cette densité rythmique se retrouve dans la partie des personnages. Si la phrase est longue, la virgule joue le rôle d’une barre de mesure qui sépare des cellules isosyllabiques, comme dans cette réplique de Clov, qui compte respectivement 8,7,7 et 7 syllabes: Clov: […] Ce sont de jolies dimensions, je m’appuierai à la table, je regarderai le mur, en attendant qu’il me siffle. (16)

549

La virgule donne du mouvement à la phrase,notamment dans les nombreuses prolepses; dans les exemples suivants, le pronom “toi” ou le groupe nominal “ ta lumière” se trouvent mis en valeur par l’accent rythmique qu’ils reçoivent: Vladimir: Alors, te revoilà, toi. (9) Hamm: […] Eh bien, elle mourra tout aussi bien ici, ta lumière. Regarde-moi un peu et tu m’en diras des nouvelles, de ta lumière. (26-27) Néanmoins, les phrases sont généralement brèves, morcelées en syntagmes holophrastiques (Dupriez, 296) ou mots-phrases, ponctuées abondamment de points. Or, comme le note Roger Blin, “[c]’est la quantité de points et leur place dans les répliques qui donnent le rythme et la respiration du texte, le rythme lyrique qui oblige le comédien à un travail très particulier” (Bellity-Peskine, 94). Si la ponctuation linguistique note la hiérarchie des pauses créatrices de rythme, il y a des phrases que “les comédiens sont tentés de dire d’une seule traite” (Bellity-Peskine, 94) parce qu’elles se poursuivent audelà du point qui, mis à la place de la virgule, n’a plus de fonction logique mais pneumatique, comme dans cette réplique de Hamm:

Hamm: […] Si je dormais je ferais peut-être l’amour. J’irais dans les bois. Je verrais…le ciel, la terre. Je courrais. On me poursuivrait. Je m’enfuirais. […]. (33) Par conséquent, les ponctuants forts (point, point d’exclamation ou d’interrogation) sont fréquemment renforcés par les ponctuants didascaliques dont la réitération oblige l’acteur à marquer de vraies pauses, par un effet comparable à celui de la note pointée en musique, comme dans cet exemple: Nagg: Et maintenant c’est du sable. (Un temps.) De la plage. (Un temps. Plus fort.) Maintenant c’est du sable qu’il va chercher à la plage. (32) 550

La question de leur durée qui varie d’une représentation à l’autre se pose aux metteurs en scène. Dans En attendant Godot, Silence qui peut durer plusieurs mesures, comme en musique, apparaît plus long que Un temps qui est presque toujours une “coupure interne propre à un personnage” (Ernst, 220), contrairement à Silence. Dans Fin de partie, où est utilisé exclusivement Un temps, c’est le passage à la ligne avec décentrement vers la droite qui semble indiquer une différence de durée entre coupures internes et communes. Le nombre de ces pauses est fonction du temps de parole, des caractéristiques et préoccupations de chaque personnage: la partition du penseur Vladimir compte 43 Un temps et 9 Silence, les trois monologues du narrateur Hamm qui commencent par “A moi. (Un temps.) De jouer.” comptent respectivement 12, 25 et 38 Un temps. Les pauses et les fréquents changements d’intonation ou de voix donnent la parole en spectacle comme dans la description du ciel par l’acteur raté Pozzo: Pozzo: Il y a une heure (il regarde sa montre, ton prosaïque) environ (ton à nouveau lyrique) après nous avoir versé depuis (il hésite, le ton baisse) mettons dix heures du matin (le ton s’élève) sans faiblir des torrents de lumière rouge et blanche, il s’est mis à perdre de son éclat, à pâlir, (geste des deux mains qui descendent par paliers), à pâlir, toujours un peu plus, un peu plus, jusqu’à ce que (pause dramatique, large geste horizontal des deux mains qui s’écartent) vlan! fini! il ne bouge plus! (Silence.) (51-52) Dans cet exemple, le rythme gestuel figure le rythme du discours comme dans Pas et Va et vient: les paliers marqués par les deux mains sont des virgules gestuelles tandis que leur ouverture horizontale, comme des tirets, interrompt simultanément la parole et le geste. Toutefois, la gestuelle est souvent autonome par rapport au discours ne serait-ce que dans le jeu des chapeaux hérité des Marx Brothers ou dans l’inspection liminaire du propriétaire par Clov qui ponctue d’un “rire bref” chacune de ses phrases corporelles. Cette dissociation se fait souvent sur le mode de la rupture. Par un effet de syncope, la parole est démentie par le geste ou son absence: Clov, Vladimir ou Estragon menacent souvent de quitter l’autre alors qu’ils ne bougent pas. En outre, Clov et Nell sont spécialistes de la dissonance car ils interrogent souvent à contretemps, de manière comique, comme ici: 551

Hamm: Tu n’en as pas assez? Clov: Si! (Un temps.) De quoi?

(19)

La discordance, le contretemps sont créateurs de tension comme en musique et de la «ponctuation de déhiscence» que Beckett trouve idéalement chez Beethoven7. L’aposiopèse “si particulière de Malone meurt”, comme le note B. Clément (1998, 144), produit fréquemment une dirythmie, comparable à la dissymétrie. Sur un fond régulier et continu, tranchent de soudaines interrogations et exclamations obtenues par une forte accentuation et un allongement des syllabes comme dans l’exclamation lyrique de Clov “Autrefois! ” (20), ou “élégiaque” de Nell: “ Ah hier! ” (34). Le visage devient alors l’écran de la voix comme dans cet autre exemple où les points de suspension laissent à peine le temps à l’acteur interprétant Vladimir de moduler sa voix et sa physionomie pour produire l’effet de cascando requis par les didascalies: Estragon: Et maintenant? Vladimir: (s’étant consulté) Maintenant… (joyeux) te revoilà… (neutre) nous revoilà… (triste) me revoilà. (82) Bien que ces ruptures soient “organiquement” impossibles à effectuer d’après Blin, Beckett “ne voulait pas le comprendre, cet impératif physiologique”car il “se moquait de ceux qui réclament le droit aux harmoniques” (Bellity Peskine, 115-116), qu’ils soient acteurs ou spectateurs. De fait, en saturant le texte de ruptures, la parole se brise et entre deux séquences de répliques au tempo rapide, le silence s’installe souvent et menace de durer, rendu absolu par l’immobilité, silence gestuel; ainsi, les différents rythmes s’aplatissent pour produire une sensation d’arythmie. ***** Dans les deux pièces, “Le temps s’est arrêté” (Beckett, 1952, 50). Or, le rythme ne se crée que dans le temps et le mouvement. L’immobilité s’accentue entre Godot et Fin de partie, où Clov est le seul person552

nage mobile et dans cette dernière pièce, elle s’intensifie encore entre la mise en scène berlinoise en 1975 et celle de Londres en 1980, aux Riverside Studios, avec la troupe de San Quentin. Dans le cahier préparé par S. Beckett pour cette mise en scène, après “ Then move! ” et “ Then open it”, Clov ne fait entendre que le bruit des pas et reste sur place (Gontarski, 193); les phrases de sa gestuelle s’aplatissent, réduites au point. D’ailleurs, dès la mise en scène berlinoise, sa place n’est plus derrière le fauteuil mais à O, point à mi-chemin entre le fauteuil de Hamm et la porte de la cuisine (Gontarski, 175, note 1). Le point, spatial ou linguistique rassure, car de même que la paronomase et l’isosyllabisme, il apparaît comme un repère, garant de l’identité et du sens: Hamm est obsédé par le “centre” tandis qu’Estragon s’agrippe à sa pierre. Cet attrait pour l’inertie du point gagne aussi bien les objets que les corps qui chutent ou “s’agglutinent” en tas ou tels deux pions d’échec, comme Vladimir et Estragon. Comme les corps, le rythme s’aplatit lorsque les points ou les mots s’empilent, comme les grains de sable dans la valise de Lucky. Dans Fin de partie, après la première réplique de Clov, “il ne se passe plus rien”, a dit Beckett à Blin: “il y a un remuement vague, il y a un tas de mots mais il n’y a pas de drame” (Bellity Peskine, 115). Ainsi, les “bicyclette” qui ponctuent ces quatre répliques isosyllabiques, s’entassent dans la verticalité textuelle: Hamm: Va me chercher deux roues de bicyclette. Clov: Il n’y a plus de roues de bicyclette. Hamm: Qu’est-ce que tu as fait de ta bicyclette? Clov: Je n’ai jamais eu de bicyclette. (22) Ailleurs, c’est un tas de “lunettes” (Beckett, 1957b, 44-45) ou de “bouillie” (Beckett, 1957b, 23-24) qui se constitue. Or, “La répétition d’un seul et même événement (un, un, un, un, etc.), identité sans altérité” est “l’annulation du rythme” (Dessons & Meschonnic, 53) comme dans l’écho. Ainsi, en est-il de la berceuse de Vladimir qui répète la même note “Do” ou des appels de Hamm. Beckett, en effet, concevait l’appel “Clov” “comme une note de la partition” de Hamm que l’acteur devait reproduire à l’identique d’une voix neutre (Bellity Peskine, 113-114). 553

La répétition concerne également les coupures du discours. Quand les Silence et les Un temps se multiplient, les intermittences naturelles de la parole deviennent des béances que les italiques superposés font sauter aux yeux et pendant lesquelles nous voyons et écoutons le vide. La partition du silence, tissée entre les marqueurs de suspens, ralentit la lecture à moins d’ignorer les (Un temps.). Dans cet exemple, le dialogue est jeté aux quatre coins de la page: Hamm: S’il existe il viendra ici ou il mourra là. Et s’il n’existe pas ce n’est pas la peine. Un temps. Clov: Tu ne me crois pas? Tu crois que j’invente? Un temps. Hamm: C’est fini, Clov, nous avons fini. Je n’ai plus besoin de toi. Un temps. Clov: Ça tombe bien. (105-106) Dans En attendant Godot, les coupures communes, signe de la “divine aphasie”, sont de plus en plus nombreuses dans l’acte II, plus silencieux que l’acte I8: alors qu’il y a un Repos pour 31 répliques dans la micro-séquence (23-24) que nous citions, dans les 34 renvois grippés de balles au sujet des “voix mortes”, on compte 5 Silence et deux Long Silence pour lesquels Beckett, dans une lettre à Peter Hall du 14 décembre 1955 (Schneider, 5)9, demande qu’ils soient pleins, full, pour faire ressortir l’angoisse des personnages, immobiles. Non seulement, “ça n’avance pas” mais lorsque “ça avance”, c’est à reculons comme Lucky – Lucky entre à reculons (31) – ou le paralytique B dans Fragment de théâtre I: B. – Un seul problème: le demi-tour. […] Par exemple, je suis à A. (Il avance un peu, s’arrête.) J’avance jusqu’à B. (Il recule un peu.) Et je reviens à A. […] (Beckett, 1974, 24-25) Sur la scène de théâtre comparable à un espace géométrique, les mouvements s’annulent mécaniquement. Ainsi en est-il dans la pantomime 554

initiale de Clov, qui monte puis descend de son escabeau, fait quelques pas puis retourne chercher l’escabeau qu’il a oublié, ou dans la promenade de Hamm: dans la mise en scène de Berlin, le second tour s’effectue dans le sens inverse des aiguilles d’une montre contrairement au premier (Gontarski, 141). Ce mouvement de reflux est également caractéristique de la progression palinodique des phrases car, comme le remarque Blin, “ce qui est dit après le point va en général dans le sens de la négation de ce qui précède et une autre phrase arrive qui nie encore […]” (Bellity Peskine, 87). C’est le cas dans cette réplique de Hamm, par exemple: Hamm: Non, tout est a- (bâillements)- bsolu, (fier) plus on est grand et plus on est plein. (Un temps. Morne.) Et plus on est vide. (7) Ce vide ou “absence de vie intérieure”, comme l’appelle Ionesco (253), dont témoignent la répétition à l’identique et le refus des personnages que “ça avance”, culmine avec le psittacisme provenant de la dislocation syntaxique et de la suppression des signes de ponctuation. ***** Dans le discours de Lucky, l’absence de ponctuation ne signifie pas l’absence de construction mais la volonté, comme dirait Hugo, de “démantibuler” la période française, construite sur des rythmes rhétoriques artificiels et qui de parenthèses en parenthèses opacifie le sens “inachevé[s], inachevé[s] ”, comme dit Lucky dans sa fatrasie (59-62). La jargonophrasie de ce «knouk», atteint d’une aphasie sensorielle de Wernicke, aboutit à un flux verbal brut, délivré d’une «voix monotone» qui s’accompagne d’un tremblement incessant de parkinsonien qu’imitait de manière hallucinante Jean Martin, “personnage d’une cruauté formidable” d’après Blin (Bellity-Peskine, 91), à tel point que certains spectateurs quittaient la salle du théâtre de Babylone. La monotonie implique, sinon un tempo rapide comme dans le pnigos du coryphée, un flot uniforme, “a steady flow” (Kalb, 187) comme le précise Alvin Epstein, autre interprète de Lucky. Dans nombre de pièces postérieures à l’étape décisive de Comment c’est en 1961, la platitude du rythme, visuelle et verbale, se 555

systématise, impliquant une tension impitoyable pour l’acteur: dans Comédie (1964), les voix sont “atones” et le “débit rapide”; 10 dans Pas moi (1972),le flux de Bouche “breathless, urgent, feverish” (9), est matérialisé par les points de suspension; dans Cette fois (1974), les “bribes” aponctuées ABC de la voix du “vieux visage blême” “s’enchaînent sans interruption”; dans Berceuse (1982), le visage doit être “sans expression” comme dans Comédie et les yeux ne doivent pas ciller, comme dans Dis Joe (1965). Néanmoins, le rythme “zéro” n’existe pas plus dans Godot et Fin de partie que dans les pièces ultérieures qui tendent vers l’arythmie comme vers une limite, atteinte ponctuellement ou artificiellement, par assistance mécanique, comme dans Cette fois11 ou Berceuse. C’est à partir de l’alternance entre rythme, dirythmie et arythmie que s’élabore l’“hypothèse rythmique” beckettienne dont les contrastes tranchés sont destinés à exercer sur l’acteur et le spectateur un effet cathartique et maïeutique, qui leur fait retrouver leur propre rythme, corporel et langagier. ***** Dans les pièces postérieures à Fin de partie, la rythmique dramatique beckettienne est de plus en plus paradoxale car sur son apparente uniformité grisâtre, elle oscille entre les contraires, noir et blanc, immobilité et mobilité ininterrompue, silence et flux langagier. Ces contrastes impliquent la tension et l’attention du spectateur. Pour le faire entrer dans la durée textuelle, Beckett retarde toujours l’entrée en scène de la parole soit par des “pantomimes” liminaires qui créent l’attente comme dans Fin de partie ou La Dernière Bande; soit par une image forte12, véritable “explosante fixe” bretonnienne obtenue par l’immobilité et qui, détachée par l’éclairage sur un noir uniforme, exerce un effet hypnotique auquel contribue le flux langagier. Inversement, les ruptures de rythme langagier ou gestuel, les noirs de l’éclairage coupent le personnage et avec lui le spectateur du temps dramatique pour lui permettre de retrouver le temps théâtral et audelà, “la durée propre au sujet parlant, qui se retrouve devant ses problèmes de pensée et d’expression, sinon d’existence” (Dupriez, article “Pause”, 236). L’effet de distanciation qui permet d’éviter le pathos est encore plus brutal lorsque les pauses se raréfient comme dans Cette 556

foisou dans Berceuse. Ce mouvement de va-et-vient figuré dans la pièce du même nom, entre le spectateur et le spectacle s’effectue grâce à cette rythmique paradoxale, ce “flux épanorthique” qui est à l’œuvre dans Bing, comme le montre B. Clément (1998, 148-149). Cette creusée dans l’horizontalité discursive et scénique ne produirait pas chez le spectateur des émotions si contrastées et simultanées, rire et émotion, si elle ne se doublait d’un mouvement de vaet-vient vertical, figuré par l’anadiplose ou l’épiphore comme dans ces deux exemples: Vladimir: En effet, nous sommes sur un plateau. Aucun doute, nous sommes servis sur un plateau. (104) Clov: Plus de calmant. Tu n’auras jamais plus de calmant. Cette creusée de la parole est perceptible visuellement dans la disposition typographique où le silence creuse son lit avec des marques suspensives dans et entre les parties des personnages pour qu’émergent ces “mystérieuses poussées” qui s’enracinent dans “la peau dutendu” dont il est question dans Le monde et le pantalon (2122). Si le théâtre de Beckett s’inscrit dans la lignée du théâtre artaudien, c’est parce qu’il part de la “nécessité de la parole beaucoup plus que de la parole déjà formée” (Artaud, 132), régie par une ponctuation logique et syntaxique, pétrie de rythmes culturels mécaniques qui en font, comme le remarque M. Rooney, “une langue morte” (Beckett, 1957a, 64). Il s’agit donc, comme le souhaite Beckett, d’y “percer dedans trou après trou jusqu’à ce qui ce que cache derrière (que ce soit quelque chose ou rien du tout) commence à s’écouler au travers”.13 Il faut, comme le réclame Artaud, que “les mots au lieu d’être pris pour ce qu’ils veulent dire grammaticalement parlant, soient entendus sous leur angle sonore, soient perçus comme des mouvements”. C’est en effet avec une minutie extrême que Beckett fait ressortir un mot. Par le jeu de l’accentuation linguistique – “naturellement” / “naturellement”, accentués respectivement sur la pénultième et première syllabes (Beckett, 1957b, 40) – l’allongement vocalique qui à la différence de l’anglais n’est pas phonologique: “Estragon.[…] (Rêveusement.) Les Anglais disent câââm. Ce sont des gens câââms. […]” (20). Estragon savoure avec autant de volupté 557

qu’une carotte le mot ‘calme’ de même que Krapp savoure le mot “Bobiiine! ” comme une banane (Beckett, 1959, 11-12); par le détachement syllabique et accentuel induit par les tirets dans “li-és” (Beckett, 1952, 27) ou “E-POU-VAN-TÉ” (Beckett, 1952, 12). Ces procédés, parmi d’autres, permettent d’explorer gestuellement le mot par une articulation exagérée, d’en habiter le sens par le rythme et le plaisir phonatoire permet de retrouver les “sons fondamentaux” et les mots dans leur corporéité. Ainsi dans les bâillements de Hamm, le rythme corporel devient rythme langagier par l’entremise des tirets, véritables ponctuants de la déhiscence: Hamm: A – (bâillements)- à moi. (Un temps.) De jouer. […] Peut-il y a – (bâillements) – y avoir misère plus … plus haute que la mienne? […] Non, tout est a – (bâillements)bsolu […] (17) Par conséquent, la ponctuation se corporéise: dans Berceuse et Cette fois, c’est l’ouverture et la fermeture des yeux qui ponctuent le flux verbal; dans Impromptu d’Ohio, c’est le “toc” digital de l’Entendeur qui oblige le Lecteur à des retours en arrière; dans Comédie, c’est le hoquet qui ponctue la parole de H (Beckett, 1966, 12, 17, 26, 29). Bien plus, la ponctuation se choséifie de manière amusante car les objets, prolongement du corps, ponctuent la parole et ses silences: Hamm joue avec son “vieux linge”, Pozzo avec son fouet, son vaporisateur, ses lunettes, sa pipe et Clov avec l’élastique de son pantalon, aussi sonore que les boîtes métalliques que Krapp envoie valser et piétine. ***** Si le théâtre de Beckett est un théâtre de la cruauté métaphysique et physique, c’est parce que le langage dans le mouvement même de sa naissance est lié aux nerfs et qu’il éprouve sans cesse le corps des acteurs et des spectateurs. Lorsque l’apnée et le recto tono sont exigés de l’acteur, lorsque le flux impitoyable et déréglé de la parole ou de la pensée figure un dérèglement sensoriel ou va de pair avec l’atomisation du corps comme dans Comédie, Pas moi ou Cette fois, le spectateur souffre, comme Pozzo devant Lucky, et chaque pause qui 558

lui est octroyée est un soulagement. La continuité, en effet, est insoutenable parce qu’antinaturelle. 14 C’est le corps qui affleure dans les bégaiements et tâtonnements de la pensée, matérialisés par les pauses et les points de suspension, matériel ponctuant de la déhiscence qui désigne l’“ouverture naturelle, à maturité, d’un organe clos”. Se remettre au monde, comme Bouche ou dans Pas, May qui n’est jamais née, c’est habiter son langage de manière immanente, en “refaisant toutes les opérations par lesquelles le mot a passé” (Artaud, 132), ce que figurent l’épanorthose, l’épanadiplose et les syntagmes holophrastiques qui, tout en reposant sur le geste et les mimiques, reproduisent le rythme de la pensée. La redécouverte du langage suppose une subjectivisation maximale du discours, ce qui implique de soustraire le rythme à un schéma logico-syntaxique, de refuser aux signes de ponctuation l’organisation du sens et d’accroître l’ambiguïté sémantique en généralisant l’incertitude accentuelle. Ce à quoi tend l’usage d’une ponctuation minimale comme dans Compagnie ou l’aponctuation qui oblige à trouver ses propres marques. ***** Ainsi, par la nature et la fonction de sa ponctuation dramatique, Beckett semble donc avoir répondu au souhait d’Artaud, d’abord en élaborant une “grammaire” (Artaud, 132) de la scène qui permet “des rapports nouveaux entre le son, le geste et la voix” (Artaud, 170). Puis, en donnant au spectateur éprouvé “un profit d’acteur“ non “un profit artistique et statique, un profit jouisseur” (Artaud, 15). Notes 1.

Fin de partie, p.111; deux points-virgules et deux deux-points; En attendant Godot, un deux-points, p. 29.

2.

“Quelle horreur que le point et virgule”.

3.

That Time: notes.

4.

Lettre de Beckett à Alan Schneider du 29 décembre 1957: “Mon oeuvre est une question de sons fondamentaux (sans plaisanterie)

559

rendus aussi complètement que possible, et je n’accepte la possibilité de rien d’autre”. 5.

“On peut appeler oral le mode de signifier caractérisé par un primat du rythme et de la prosodie dans le primat du sens” (45).

6.

Claudel cité par G. Dessons: “Pour l’écrivain et surtout pour l’écrivain dramatique, l’élément essentiel de la diction est la consonne. La voyelle est la matière, la consonne est la forme, la matrice du mot, et aussi l’engin propulseur dont la voyelle avec tout son charme n’est que le projectile” (97).

7.

Il est question de cette “ponctuation de déhiscence” dans Dream of Fair to Middling Women écrit durant l’été 1932 puis cinq ans plus tard dans une lettre adressée en allemand par Beckett à son ami Axel Kaun, publiée pour la première fois dans les Disjecta (Beckett, 1983, 51-54).

8.

Le silence s’intensifie entre les deux actes: l’acte II, pourtant plus court, compte 59 “Silence” et “Long silence” contre 50 pour l’acte I.

9.

A l’entrée 58, on peut lire: “Full value to silences throughout dialogue between boy and Vladimir”.

10.

Beckett à Alan Schneider dans une lettre datée du 16 octobre 1972, p.283.

11.

Voir le témoignage de Klaus Hermdans Jonathan Kalb, op. cit., p.203: “ The breathing was cut out by the sound technician. Beckett didn’t want any pauses except for the three specified in the text. Without period or coma, and as much as possible without breathing! And technically that was exceedingly difficult.”

12.

Pas moi, Berceuse, Cette fois, Impromptu d’Ohio.

13.

Extrait de la lettre à Axel Kaun mentionnée dans la note 6 traduit dans B. Clément (1994, 238).

14.

Comme le remarque Claudel au début des Réflexions et propositions sur le vers français: “La pensée bat comme la cervelle et le

560

cœur ”. Hamm ne dit-il pas: “Il y a une goutte d’eau dans ma tête. (Un temps.) Un cœur, un cœur dans ma tête.”(Beckett, 1957, 33)?

Ouvrages cités Artaud, Antonin. Le Théâtre et son double, Œuvres complètes IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Beckett, Samuel. Dream of fair to middling women (Londres: Calder, 1993). –, Le Monde et le pantalon (Paris: Minuit, 1989). –, En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 1952). –, Tous ceux qui tombent. (Paris: Minuit, 1957). (1957a) –, Fin de Partie (Paris: Minuit, 1957). (1957b) –, La Dernière Bande (Paris: Minuit, 1959). –, Fragment de théâtre I (Paris: Minuit, 1974). –, Comment c’est (Paris: Minuit, 1961). –, Comédie et actes divers (Paris: Minuit, 1966). –, Va et vient (Paris: Minuit, 1966). –, Dis Joe (Paris: Minuit, 1972). –, Pas moi (Paris: Minuit, 1973). –, Pas (Paris: Minuit, 1977). –, Cette fois (Paris: Minuit, 1982). –, Compagnie (Paris: Minuit, 1980). –, Impromptu d’Ohio (Paris: Minuit, 1982). –, Berceuse (Paris: Minuit, 1982). –, Disjecta édités par Cohn, Ruby (Londres: Calder, 1983). Bellity Peskine, Linda, Roger Blin, souvenirs et propos (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Chabert, Pierre, “Samuel Beckett metteur en scène ou répéter La dernière bande avec l’auteur,” dans Revue d’esthétique (1976), 224-248. Clément, Bruno, L’ Œuvre sans qualités (Paris: Seuil, 1994). –, “Le sens du rythme” dans Samuel Beckett: L’écriture et la scène, onze études réunies et présentées par Evelyne Grossman et Régis Salado (Paris: SEDES, 1998). Deguy, Michel, Choses de la poésie et affaire culturelle (Paris: Hachette, 1986). Dessons, Gérard & Meschonnic, Henri, Traité du rythme (Paris: Dunod, 1998). Dupriez, Bernard, Gradus (Paris: 10/18, n° 1370, 1984). Ernst, Gilles, “ ‘Un temps’ pour Beckett, Etude des coupures du discours théâtral ,” dans Texte et théâtralité, Mélanges offerts à Jean Claude (Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2000).

561

Gontarski, S. E., The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett; Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Ionesco, Eugène, Notes et Contre-Notes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Kalb, Jonathan, Beckett in performance (Cambridge U. P., 1988). Larthomas, Pierre, Le langage dramatique (Paris: PUF, [1972], 1990). Meschonnic, Henri, Politique du rythme, politique du sujet (Paris: Verdier, 1995). Schneider, Alan. No author better served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, édité par Harmon, Maurice (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1998).

562

LE BILINGUISME DANS L’ŒUVRE DE SAMUEL BECKETT: pas d’après Nadia Louar

Cet essai aborde quelques-unes des questions auxquelles m’a conduite l’étude du bilinguisme dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett. Je m’interroge ici sur la relation singulière que Beckett entretient avec la langue maternelle et ‘étrangère’, puis reconsidère le va et vient entre les langues afin de redéfinir le concept du bilinguisme. Je conçois le passage d’une langue à l’autre comme un passage stylistique et définis le bilinguisme comme une figure de style permettant à l’œuvre de vaciller entre media et de glisser de l’un à l’autre. Le bilinguisme provoque ainsi une incertitude formelle par laquelle l’œuvre contourne les ‘impératifs catégoriques’ de la composition littéraire traditionnelle.

La débandade La tache primordiale de l’artiste selon Samuel Beckett est de permettre au désordre de se faire entendre. Lors d’un entretien mené par le critique Tom Driver l’écrivain émet le souhait de trouver une forme d’art qui puisse accueillir le désordre ambiant: Until now Art has struggled to withhold the mess and impose form, but because we have come into a time when it invades our experience at every moment, it is there and must be allowed in. […] To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (1961, 21-25) La langue de Beckett fait en effet entendre une confusion qui laisse le locuteur perplexe. L’ordre et la droiture d’une langue unique et pleine qui s’applique à aplanir toutes aspérités trahit sa bizarrerie par les

mots qui ne sonnent plus justes à celui qui les prononce. Madame Rooney, par exemple, formidable présence de la pièce radiophonique Tous ceux qui tombent, sonde l’excentricité de ses mots: – Vous ne trouvez pas ma façon de parler un peu… bizarre? Je ne parle pas de la voix. (Un temps.) Non, je parle des mots. (Un temps, presque à elle-même.) Je n’emploie que les mots les plus simples, j’espère, et cependant quelquefois je trouve ma façon de parler très… bizarre. (10) À cette bizarrerie de la langue parlée s’ajoute dans les années cinquante une duplicité linguistique sans précédent dans l’histoire de la littérature moderne. En effet, avec la publication de la trilogie en anglais, on parle désormais de l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett comme d’une œuvre bilingue. Dès lors, la question de la langue, langue maternelle et langue étrangère, se complique. Toutes les lectures critiques laissant supposer le choix du français ‘contre’ la langue maternelle, qui dans le cas de Beckett reste à définir, ne peuvent logiquement rendre compte du retour à la langue anglaise et du va-et-vient consécutif entre les deux langues. Le problème de l’alternance (français ET anglais)1 se greffe à celui du changement (français contre anglais) en brouillant les premières pistes interprétatives. Le français mais aussi l’allemand, autre langue d’affection, s’ajoutent ainsi à ces “déjà autres langues” auxquelles se confrontent l’écrivain et ses narrateurs. Dans cet essai, je me propose de reconsidérer les questions de langue maternelle, étrange et étrangère, afin d’aborder le phénomène du bilinguisme dans sa fonction créatrice. Je m’intéresserai en premier lieu au fonctionnement ludique et onirique de la langue de l’auteur afin de redéfinir le bilinguisme comme une figure de style génératrice d’une œuvre ‘en écho’. Je m’efforcerai ensuite de démontrer que considérer l’œuvre bilingue comme une œuvre ‘en traduction’ oblitère l’écart formel dans lequel est conçue cette œuvre unique. J’aurai enfin recours à la notion de bégaiement pour décrire le devenir-bilingue 2 de l’œuvre.

564

Le “parler” de Beckett Dans son hommage à Jack B. Yeats, reproduit dans Disjecta, Samuel Beckett souligne la singularité de sa relation à la langue maternelle et à la terre paternelle: Strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilations to holy patrimony, national and other. […] The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere and has no kith. (148) Tout sentiment d’appartenance à une communauté se présente en effet à l’auteur comme contraire au projet artistique. ‘Donner sa voix’ à une quelconque tradition, idée ou philosophie, c’est la perdre. De même, ‘prendre la parole’ est impossible dans l’espace littéraire beckettien où la parole s’empare du locuteur et le laisse pantelant. Il est incontestable que la question de la langue se pose de façon extrêmement aiguë pour les écrivains irlandais qui grandissent au rythme des changements politiques de la nation irlandaise, et assistent à la naissance politique d’une ‘mère patrie’ au langage inintelligible. Cependant, l’élément irlandais se fond dans une réflexion dont il est impossible de distinguer les diverses influences, mais qui sans aucun doute dépasse toutes considérations nationales pour se concentrer sur le mot comme le suggèrent ses derniers textes: “What is the word? ” ou “Comment dire? ”. Le phénomène du bilinguisme permet de poser ‘en écho’ les véritables problèmes auxquels se confronte le ‘parlêtre’, comme l’a nommé Lacan3. Il ne s’agit pas pour l’écrivain de se défaire d’une langue (l’anglais) ou d’une autre langue (le français), ou même d’y revenir. Il s’agit plutôt pour l’écrivain de ne pas succomber au joug de la langue comme parole tyrannique. C’est ce que nous montrent bien les deux passages suivants, extraits de L’innommable et de The Unnamable. Dans les deux citations, le narrateur s’attaque, quasi en stéréo, au pouvoir d’appropriation que la langue exerce sur son locuteur, et dénonce l’usurpation: Ne pouvoir ouvrir la bouche sans les proclamer à titre de congénère, voilà ce à quoi ils croient m’avoir réduit. M’avoir collé un langage dont ils s’imaginent que je ne 565

pourrai jamais me servir sans m’avouer de leur tribu, la belle astuce, je vais le leur arranger leur charabia. (63) Sans autre forme de procès, il écrit en anglais: Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that’s what they imagine they will have me reduced to. It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them together without branded as belonging to their breed. But I’ll fix their gibberish for them. (51) On peut bien sûr s’intéresser aux disparités entamées dans le processus de traduction, et apprécier l’aisance avec laquelle l’écrivain évolue en français. On peut aussi s’interroger, comme le fait Mary Lydon (1995: 238), sur l’identité de la langue en question: “Which language is he dissenting from, French or English?” Il est clair cependant que la confusion, le (mal)entendu dans l’écho bilingue concerne plus le statut de la langue que son identité. En effet, charabia ou gibberish, peu importe, puisque ces parlers ne font référence qu’à une langue qui n’en est pas une. On pourrait très bien remplacer les deux galimatias par deux langues “réelles”, sans que ne se rétablisse la moindre distinction. N’est-ce pas ce que nous laisse entendre Molloy lorsqu’il déclare: “Tears and laughter are so Gaelic to me.” ‘Pour moi c’est de l’hébreux’, dirait-on familièrement en français. Autrement dit, la langue, que ce soit le gaélique ou l’hébreu, tout comme charabia et gibberish, est considérée non pas comme un véhicule de communication, mais comme une marque d’inintelligibilité. Le célèbre dialogue entre l’auteur et un journaliste français qui interroge Beckett sur ses origines géographiques réitère sur le mode de l’humour les problèmes de langue en terme d’appartenance nationale; à la question: “êtes-vous anglais?” Beckett répond un “au contraire” déconcertant qui nous éclaire sur sa position à l’égard de la hiérarchie linguistique et nationale entre l’Angleterre et L’Irlande. Mary Lydon souligne à ce propos la conception singulière de cognation de l’écrivain: 566

What interests me is the economy with which Beckett’s “au contraire” undoes and displaces the hierarchical English/Irish opposition and, by resituating it, makes the opposition yield to difference, while identity is deferred. (Lydon, 238) Le décalage que le jeu de mot provoque dans l’écriture de Beckett rend compte de l’indécision formelle intrinsèque à l’œuvre et illustre en même temps la nature complexe des relations qui se tissent entre l’appartenance à une communauté linguistique, l’identité nationale et le rapport entre les deux. L’humour, atout majeur de l’auteur dans le jeu des questions sans réponses, permet du même coup de substituer le principe de la débandade à celui de l’ordre. La figure du bilinguisme Il est important de rappeler ici que Samuel Beckett débute officiellement sa carrière littéraire en tant que critique et traducteur. Son écriture garde de cette initiation la qualité de l’exercice de style souvent suscité par un intitulé similaire à celui d’un devoir d’école tel que: “Imagination Morte. Imaginer”; ou “Une voix vous parvient dans le noir. Imaginez.” Dans les romans de la trilogie un ‘ils’ autoritaire vient chercher les devoirs écrits des narrateurs. Dans L’innommable, le ‘ils’ force le narrateur à pratiquer des mots qu’il ne comprend pas, mais qu’il connaît par cœur, tel un mauvais élève qui retient sa leçon sans la comprendre. Dans Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien, le mot d’ordre est de raconter des histoires. A ce processus ordonnant l’écriture se conjugue le principe paradigmatique du jeu de mot (c’est à dire, un mot pour un autre), et dont l’hypostase beckettienne substitue au principe biblique “Au commencement était le verbe” le principe ludique “Au commencement était le jeu de mot” Ces nouvelles règles créent un espace textuel dont l’agencement syntaxique imite celles qui régissent les contenus manifeste et latent du rêve: Les pensées du rêve [contenu latent] et le contenu du rêve nous apparaissent comme deux exposés des mêmes faits en deux langues différentes; ou, mieux, le contenu du rêve nous apparaît comme une transcription (Ubertragung) des 567

pensées du rêve, dans un autre mode d’expression. (Je souligne.) (Freud 1926, 301) Les termes freudiens, ‘latent’ et ‘manifeste’, sont aisément remplacés par ceux de ‘présence’ et ‘absence’ dans le contexte beckettien. Le mécanisme à l’œuvre dans la composition littéraire de Samuel Beckett imite parfaitement celui du rêve. Pensons à Pas, à cet égard, “perché en équilibre entre le factuel et l’imaginaire” écrit Gontarski.4 Si l’on en croit Sigmund Freud le rêve fonctionne selon deux modes de comportements: ‘condensation’ et ‘déplacement’: Ce processus de condensation est particulièrement sensible quand il atteint des mots et des noms. Les mots dans les rêves sont fréquemment traités comme des choses, ils sont sujets aux mêmes compositions que les représentations d’objets. Ces sortes de rêves aboutissent à la création de mots comiques et étranges. (320) Je souligne, dans la citation ci-dessus, la qualité onirique freudienne que l’on reconnaît dans l’univers linguistique de Beckett. Les deux modes fondamentaux d’arrangement utilisés dans le comportement verbal du rêve représentent deux figures bien connues des stylisticiens: métaphore et métonymie. Ainsi, à la source même de l’écriture bilingue de Samuel Beckett, qui, dans une citation célèbre, justifie son va-et-vient entre les deux langues comme une tentative de se défaire de ses automatismes stylistiques, deux figures clés, constitutive de la rhétorique/stylistique se combinent pour ‘fabriquer du langage’. La figure de style, en tant qu’écart de langage, est ainsi exploitée dans la composition de l’œuvre bilingue dans sa capacité à condenser et déplacer le signe de deux systèmes linguistiques et circuler entre deux codes sans se soucier des entraves formelles. Le bilinguisme en tant que figure surgit et se réalise dans cette écriture ‘écartelée’ et en devient l’élément focal au sens formaliste du terme, l’élément primordial d’une œuvre autour duquel tous les autres se définissent. La langue ne constitue qu’un seul des codes sémiotiques que l’écrivain exploite de façon ludique. Le glissement du champ 568

sémiologique au champ cinématique (et vice versa) se produit d’une façon similaire au passage d’une langue à l’autre. Phonie et graphie, voix et texte, scène et page, anglais et français, le relais d’un médium à l’autre, plus que ce qui en résulte, importe. Les jeux visuels et corporels permettent également d’instaurer des règles esthétiques similaires à celles qui régissent l’univers linguistique de Samuel Beckett. Ainsi les nombreux actes sans paroles, les foirades et le film sont conçus selon le même glissement, et réitèrent l’intervalle dans lequel se constitue l’écriture beckettienne. Le processus de condensation et de déplacement permet à l’artiste d’aller et venir entre plusieurs systèmes de signes et de confondre et conjuguer, par exemple, ce qui est audible à ce qui est visible lorsqu’une voix off accompagne les jeux visuels silencieux sur la scène ou lorsque la parole s’active au rythme sémantique des jeux de lumière. Je propose ainsi de définir le bilinguisme dans l’œuvre de Beckett comme l’expression de plusieurs codes sémiotiques qui s’interposent et s’engendrent. Dans la figure de l’écart – l’impossibilité de passer littéralement d’une langue à l’autre – la figure du bilinguisme en tant que processus créatif de l’œuvre fonde son existence. C’est à l’intersection de l’anglais et du français que l’écriture beckettienne accède au ‘devenir-bilingue.’ Michel Foucault (1977, 425) distingue, à cet égard, deux sortes de traduction, “celles qui vont du pareil au même” et “celles qui jettent un langage contre un autre”. Le va et vient entre les langues dans l’œuvre bilingue de Samuel Beckett frôle constamment la collision. Traduction? Au contraire! Bilinguisme. Au cours du travail de traduction de son œuvre, Samuel Beckett ne commet ni de contresens, ni d’incohérence linguistique car dans cette œuvre, il ne s’agit pas de contourner les difficultés ou d’éviter les incongruités linguistiques: “au contraire! ” Il s’agit de les exploiter exhaustivement de façon à mettre en action la qualité quasi élastique du langage. Dans le passage d’une langue à l’autre, d’une langue ‘contre’ l’autre, l’intention n’est pas de se traduire ou de se trahir. Dans le cas de l’écrivain, l’auto traduction signifie l’impératif de se dé-marquer. L’auteur/narrateur se démarque, dans le sens littéral de ce verbe, il ôte toute marque de reconnaissance: il bifurque, annule, ajoute, corrige, en un mot, va et vient. 569

Le bilinguisme dans l’œuvre de Beckett doit s’envisager à la lumière d’une langue arrivée au bout d’elle-même, plutôt qu’à celle d’un locuteur arrivé au bout de la langue. (Cf. Joyce) Il ne peut se concevoir chronologiquement, comme une langue de départ et une langue d’arrivée, (français puis anglais ou vice versa) mais dans une relation de suppléance entre les langues dont on ne peut rendre compte que par une métaphore cinesthésique.5 Considérer alors, comme le fait la théorie de la traduction, un texte plus original que l’autre omet de considérer la relation dynamique qui constitue le mouvement de l’écriture de l’œuvre. De nombreuses analyses insistent sur le décalage sémantique que les auto-traductions de Beckett provoquent. Elles partent du principe qu’il y a un texte de départ et un texte d’arrivé, et concluent que lorsque l’auteur fait face à une difficulté particulière en français ou en anglais, il supprime, en ajoutant ailleurs quelques traits de compensation ou il change carrément de registre. De nombreux théoriciens de la traduction interprètent ainsi la distance qu’ils rencontrent dans les auto traductions de Samuel Beckett. Linda Collinge (1994, 100-124) par exemple, considère les deux textes, anglais et français, de Happy Days et Oh les beaux jours et souligne contresens et omissions dans une entreprise comparative. Dans la pièce en anglais, Winnie s’interroge sur un problème linguistique très significatif: elle demande à son partenaire: What would you say Willie, speaking of your hair, them or it? En français la question devient: Est-ce que ça peut se dire, Willie, que son temps est à Dieu et à soi? Selon Collinge, on a affaire ici à une traduction ‘oblique’, méthode que le traducteur utilise lorsque l’expression équivalente n’existe pas. 6 Cependant, si l’on ne part pas de la théorie traditionnelle, selon laquelle il y a un texte de départ et un texte d’arrivée, et que l’on envisage un texte bilingue au lieu d’un texte original en traduction – c’est à dire non dans une perspective chronologique et comparative mais dans sa dimension de suppléance – on entend la véritable question qui se pose ‘en écho’ dans les deux versions (originales?) 7 et qui remet en question le véhicule d’expression utilisé, le médium utilisé: “Est-ce que ça peut se dire? ” et “What would you say?” En effet, Winnie s’interroge sur une propriété formelle de la langue: le nombre grammatical. Le nombre ainsi que le genre grammatical signifie que les noms ne sont pas classés selon leur signification mais selon leur forme. En français, le genre et le nombre est dit formel, l’anglais a un 570

genre dit “naturel” selon les grammairiens, c’est-à-dire lié au sens et non à la forme. Cette question est donc envisageable grâce à l’écart et à la reconnaissance de cet écart: les différences formelles entre les langues. Lorsque Linda Collinge parle de “compensation des pertes” ou de “contresens”, elle envisage une hiérarchie textuelle traditionnelle qui n’a plus cours dans cette œuvre singulière. La question de Winnie concerne la forme de la langue, non le lexique qui, le rappelle le linguiste anthropologue Franz Boas (In Jakobson, 1959, 197) “offre des possibilités infinies. […] Or, ajoute-t-il, le caractère obligatoire des catégories grammaticales est le trait spécifique qui les distingue des significations lexicales. La grammaire est un vrai ars obligatoria: elle impose aux locuteurs des décisions par oui ou non! ” Et là est le cœur du problème. Le bilinguisme contourne la question fermée et offre une élasticité entre le oui et non. A l’expression idiomatique ‘de deux choses l’une’, la langue bilingue oppose un risible “Hélas.” Cet échange qui a lieu entre les deux héros du roman éponyme Mercier et Camier condense dans le jeu de mot bivocal toute la complexité esthétique du dilemme de l’artiste, dilemme qui pourrait aussi bien se formuler en termes ontologiques, psychologiques ou narratologiques mais que ‘l’aimable humoriste’ choisit de présenter dans un dialogue qui accueille la structure idiomatique littéralement. Either/or, neither/nor, neither alive nor dead, ni “tout à fait mort enfin”, ni tout à fait vivant non plus, “mais à cheval sur une tombe”, le caractère dynamique de l’esthétique beckettienne empêche toute virtualité de se réaliser. D’une façon analogue, le choix de la langue ne peut se faire mais seulement se défaire constamment dans le va et vient qu’autorise le bilinguisme tel qu’il s’ordonne ici. ‘Oui ou non’, ‘l’un ou l’autre’, hypostasie du destin humain, le texte beckettien refuse l’alternative et y oppose un ET sonore et bégayant, qui ressasse et prolifère, qui empêche de faire le point, de mettre un point, d’en finir. Le ET majuscule que nous offre opportunément Gilles Deleuze décrit parfaitement l’hésitation prolifique que déclenche l’œuvre bilingue: Nous devons passer par les dualismes parce qu’ils sont dans le langage, pas question de s’en passer, mais il faut lutter contre le langage, inventer le bégaiement. […] On peut toujours ajouter un 3e à un 2e, un 4e à 3e, etc., ET, ET, ET, le bégaiement. Et même s’il n’y a que deux termes, il y a un 571

ET entre les deux, qui est ni l’un ni l’autre, mais qui constitue précisément la multiplicité. (1997, 43) Savoir bégayer “Devenir bègue du langage lui-même”, pour reprendre la formulation du philosophe signifie le devenir-bilingue de l’œuvre. Avant de tomber dans la prose désincarnée que l’on découvre après la trilogie, la lassitude de Beckett à l’égard des systèmes d’écritures, de lecture et d’interprétation enjointe à l’artiste le conduit d’abord à exercer l’écart, la distanciation, dans une langue étrangère, et ‘tendre’ vers un art en exergue8 de l’art canonique. Towards an art “turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploit, weary of pretending to be able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further a dreary road. (Disjecta, 139) Les sentiers battus de l’avenir de l’art sont ainsi abandonnés et c’est vers l’art de faillir que s’oriente l’écrivain. Si d’aucuns contestent à juste titre l’idée suggérée par Beckett lui-même, selon laquelle seule l’absence de style du français lui permettrait de faillir, la complexité de ses choix esthétiques vient précisément d’une notion de style qui se donne comme absence et par laquelle Beckett formule un art de l’échec: To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. (145)9 La période qui suit la trilogie, et durant laquelle Samuel Beckett passe de l’anglais au français, est en effet marquée par une sorte d’entropie linguistique. L’indigence stylistique fait écho dans la forme à la clochardisation des personnages, et la pauvreté dans le texte se fait littéral. Dans cet univers idiosyncrasique il est, de fait, ‘impossible de joindre les deux bouts’. L’expression familière subsume les mouve572

ments d’appauvrissement tels qu’ils se mécanisent dans le texte beckettien: Les deux bouts d’un essieu jamais l’un vers l’autre, rien que deux taches floues aux limites du chant sans jamais se toucher. (Cette fois) Dans leur ouvrage critique, Arts of Impoverishment, Ulysse Dutoit et Léo Bersani (1993, 13) décrivent cet espace textuel comme une lacune. Le paradoxe esthétique de l’art de l’échec plutôt que l’échec de l’art, pour simplifier ici la pensée des deux auteurs, s’énonce dans le titre de leur livre dans lequel ils soulignent d’emblée la contradiction au cœur de la composition de Samuel Beckett: “There is an indigence that far from being a simply thematic component however important, is inherent in the very writing of that work”. Le protagoniste éponyme de Molloy, annonce également que “tout langage est un écart de langage” (179). Samuel Beckett suit cette affirmation à la lettre et soumet la norme linguistique à un écartèlement qui affecte toutes les strates de l’écriture. À l’imaginaire débridée de chaque narrateur se conjugue ainsi la dérobade fondamentale du signifié qui échappe à tout épinglage à un signifiant déterminé qui permettrait de répondre aux questions narratologiques les plus élémentaires, telles que: “Qui Parle? Quand, Quoi? Où? ” Ces questions initient le récit de L’innommable, puis deviennent le titre de certains textes (i.e. la pièce Quoi Où ou le récit Comment c’est) La fonction constitutive du langage – fonction nominaliste – est systématiquement remise en question et le langage est ainsi déchu de ses fonctions fondamentales. Cette dislocation linguistique se manifeste par un trope que Bruno Clément (1994) identifie comme l’épanorthose. Cette figure consiste en l’affirmation d’une proposition immédiatement renoncée, puis légèrement modifiée et réaffirmée selon une progression constante. Dutoit et Bersani (1993, 83) font référence à cette figure de style sans lui donner de nom et parlent simplement d’un “language that eats at what it refers to”. Les deux critiques identifient un cratylisme à l’envers selon lequel: “the signifier is motivated not by its epistemological adequacy to its referent, but rather by its capacity to gnaw away at the referent by getting it adequately wrong”. Je reprendrai pour ma part l’image acoustique que m’offrent Barthes 573

(1983, 11) et Deleuze (1996, 99) dans leur essai sur le style pour décrire cette disparité stylistique. Barthes appelle “bruissement […] cette très singulière annulation par ajout” et Deleuze décrit un langage bégayant pour identifier le traitement stylistique auquel le langage est soumis. Le premier vers de Fin de Partie exemplifie le trope et donne ainsi sa tonalité à la pièce qui s’applique en vain à finir. “Fini. C’est fini. Ça va peut-être finir.” Le langage de la trilogie dépend aussi généreusement de cette figure, l’exemple suivant est extrait de Molloy: A and C I never saw again. But perhaps I shall see them again. But shall I be able to recognize them? And am I sure I never saw them again? And what do I mean by seeing and seeing again? De même, le premier paragraphe de Malone Dies se construit par cette figure. I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April, or May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Batiste day, and even the fourteen of July, festival of freedom. I think but I don’t think so9 devient l’illustration constante de cette figure dans le texte, et la systématique remise en question de l’énoncé constitue le mode de fonctionnement fondamental de l’écriture. En effet, comme l’écrit Michel Deguy dans sa préface au texte de Bruno Clément: La figure n’est pas, un procédé épars, local, facultatif, repérable ça et là dans le texte; bien plutôt l’écrit est-il dans la figure et dans l’emphase d’une figure qui la tient et qui d’une certaine manière vaut pour toutes les autres. (Clément, 15)

574

Pas d’après Beckett L’absence de style que revendique Samuel Beckett lorsqu’il est assigné à répondre de ses choix linguistiques en vient à signifier un va et vient dans l’œuvre bilingue qui fait entendre le bégaiement dont nous parle Gilles Deleuze lorsqu’il définit le style: Je voudrais dire ce que c’est qu’un style. C’est la propriété de ceux dont on dit d’habitude “ils n’ont pas de style”. […] Un style, c’est d’arriver à bégayer dans sa propre langue. C’est difficile, parce qu’il faut qu’il y ait nécessité d’un tel bégaiement. Non pas être bègue dans sa parole, mais être bègue du langage lui-même. Être comme un étranger dans sa propre langue. [Faire] une langue à l’intérieur de la langue. (1997, 11) La figure du bilinguisme telle que je la conçois dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett est la figure phonique de ce “sans style” décrit par Deleuze. Je considère le bilinguisme comme une figure de style dans le sens où elle est un choix esthétique qui fait entendre dans son bégaiement la précarité intrinsèque du sujet parlant et l’incommensurabilité de l’expérience humaine. La voix parfois laconique, parfois prolifique de l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett est une voix étrange et familière – unheimliche. Comme l’écrit Marcel Proust (303): Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère. Sous chaque mot chacun de nous met son sens ou du moins son image qui est souvent un contresens. Mais dans les beaux livres tous les contresens qu’on fait sont beaux. L’œuvre de Samuel Beckett est une ‘belle œuvre’ parce qu’elle parle une langue étrange. Elle invente sa propre langue et s’entend à ne pas engendrer de discours que le lecteur peut reprendre à son compte et auquel il peut s’identifier. L’auteur de l’œuvre bilingue s’efforce de faillir seulement dans le sens où il s’efforce de ne pas créer de parole qui peut se transformer en discours et ‘donner voix à’. Ne pas “instiguer” de discours dans le sens où Michel Foucault définit les “insti575

gateurs de discours” (1977, 141-160) signifie ne pas produire de lignée et succomber au leurre de l’originalité. Ne pas suivre les traces et ne pas en laisser est ce que le bilinguisme de l’œuvre accomplit. Neutraliser l’originalité, c’est peut-être aussi être capable de neutraliser les impératifs esthétiques de la tradition dans laquelle chaque artiste se trouve enfermé et confronté. En faisant en sorte que chaque version de ses textes puisse se revendiquer la vraie, l’unique et l’originale, aucune ne peut prétendre au statut d’originalité, ni celle écrite en premier, ni celle écrite dans la langue ‘maternelle’, ni toutes celles écrites par l’auteur puisque toutes les lectures d’un texte appellent forcément un autre texte toujours ailleurs. En révoquant l’autorité hiérarchique de l’original sur la traduction, et en imposant un va et vient entre les deux, les limites de l’œuvre deviennent précaires et échappent alors à la taxinomie traditionnelle. Notes 1.

Comme Deleuze (1996, 16) définit cette conjonction à qui il accorde la majuscule: “Montrer ce qu’est la conjonction ET, ni une réunion, ni une juxtaposition mais la naissance d’un bégaiement, le tracé d’une ligne brisée qui part toujours en adjacence, une ligne de fuite active et créatrice? ET…ET…. ET…..” Je reviendrai plus en détail sur cette conjonction au cours de cet essai lorsque j’aborderai la notion de bégaiement pour décrire le mouvement bilingue de l’œuvre.

2.

Notion que j’emprunte à Gilles Deleuze, op.cit., 8.

3.

Désigne l’homme comme animal parlant, possédé par le langage.

4.

Dans Revue d’Esthétique Numéro Spécial Beckett (1986).

5.

Une langue est “un voile qu’il faut déchirer” écrit Beckett dans la lettre adressée à son ami Axel Kaun. (Disjecta, 51).

6.

Cette méthode à recours à la transposition, la modulation, l’équivalence et l’adaptation, procédés linguistiques que les traducteurs utilisent pour passer d’une langue à l’autre lorsque la traduction littérale est impossible. (Vinay et Darbelnet 1977, 44-54).

576

7.

J’aborde ailleurs la question de l’originalité dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett au cours de mon étude sur le bilinguisme.

8.

Du latin exergum: espace hors de l’œuvre.

9.

A propos de Bram van Velde dans Three dialogues with Duthuit, in Disjecta, op. cit., 138.

10.

Ou en français: “Non, oui, quand même.”

Ouvrages cités Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984). –, Fin de Partie (Paris: Minuit, 1957). –, Imagination morte imaginer (Paris: Minuit, 1965). –, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953). –, Mercier et Camier (Paris: Minuit, 1970). –, Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1951). –, Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien (Paris: Minuit, 1958). –, Oh les beaux jours (Paris: Minuit, 1963). –, Tous ceux qui tombent: Traduit de l’anglais par Robert Pinget (Paris: Minuit, 1957). –, Happy Days ((New York: Grove Press, 1961). –, Malone Dies (New York: Grove Press, 1956). –, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958). Barthes, Roland, Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Le Seuil, coll. Poétique 1984). Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1993). Clément, Bruno, L’œuvre sans qualités, Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Le Seuil, coll. Poétique 1994). Collinge, Linda, L’imaginaire du traducteur littéraire: d’après les autotraductions de Samuel Beckett (Septentrion: Presses Universitaires 1994). Deleuze, Gilles et Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion 1997). Driver, Tom, “Beckett by the madeleine” (Columbia University Forum, vol. IV. n.3 Summer 1961, 21). Foucault Michel, Dits et écrits 1954-1969 ( Paris: Gallimard, 1977). Freud, Sigmund, L’interprétation des rêves (PUF, 1976).

577

Lydon, Mary, Skirting the issue: Essays in Literary Theory (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Jakobson, Roman, Essais de linguistique générale: Les fondations du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1978). Proust Marcel, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). Vinay, J.P et J. Darbelney, Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (Paris: Ed. Didier, 1993)

578

HOW IT IS: The Epical Call to Voice at the Limits of Experience Curt G Willits

The voiceless voice and a subject-less – yet still (although barely) human – scribe: these two literary figures designating Blanchot’s ‘primal scene of the writer’ are the subject for a reading of Beckett’s How It Is. In analyzing a script that parodies an imperceptible, unrealizable speech uttered by no one to no one, the following article focuses upon the conundrum of narration; how ‘light’ suggests the involuntary, yet compulsory, mnemonic and phantasmal faculties of the demented witness/writer; and how the “coupling” in “part two” of the novel discloses the linguistically tormented limit-experience between self and unself – human and inhuman – toward neither.

To contend that the origin of literature derives not from the foundational positivism of epistemological verities but from the foundationless vagaries of ontological liminality necessitates testing the threshold of the il y a – i.e., engaging what there is, as Maurice Blanchot indicates, after every thing has been annihilated, “when there is no more world, when there is no world yet” (1982, 33). Blanchot summons the writer toward the limit-experience of the eternal return of naught anterior to language – of “my consciousness without me” (1981, 47) – the naught without which the playful, ambiguous, protean nature of language could not exist. Imagine, therefore, the writer’s consciousness in the throes of an unrelieved solitude void of subjectivity, a consciousness deprived of signifying, mediating powers, having thought without thinking, having heard without hearing, having said without saying. Such ontological exile, opening upon an oppressive, schizoid wandering – as Beckett depicts in neither, “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither” (129) – forces the writer to submit to the neutral worklessness of language, to

a silence that speaks. In How It Is the composite interplay of this speechless speech, which Blanchot calls the “narrative voice”, and the estranged humanity of the witless writer discovers both its appropriate epic form and its apposite epic material. Leslie Hill indicates that “the theme of the journey [...] which sustains the novel’s overall narrative structure is quite clearly exploited as a metaphor for the act of writing”. Hill points out that the West to East movement of “bodies crawling through the mud” suggests “the words themselves crossing the page”; that the movement of “ten yards fifteen yards” at the novel’s beginning shifts to “ten words fifteen words” by its conclusion; and that “the major event in the epic is an act of inscription: the writing of a text on the body of another (by the name of Pim, just as one’s own name is Pim) [...]” (137).1 The ever present “mud”, in conjunction with this writerly theme – tempting the mouth to open so that the tongue may come out and loll in it, thereby abating thirst while restoring humanity (1964, 27) – assumes both the familiar nature of human waste, parole, and the alien nature of linguistic waste, langue. Susan D. Brienza notes a similar play upon fecal effusion and linguistic egestion, one that converts subject-object confusion into a subjectless-objectless voidness. Citing the line “world for me from the murmurs of my mother shat into the incredible tohu-bohu” (1964, 42), Brienza indicates that Beckett’s punning of the Hebrew word “tohubohu” has more to it than the toilet humor it suggests; for “tohu-bohu” translates as “‘emptiness and desolation’ [. . .], rendered in the King James version as ‘without form, and void’”, and in the “Oxford English Dictionary [...] as ‘chaos; utter confusion’” (1987, 99). Brienza further points out that “the latter phrase [i.e., “utter confusion”] surfaces in the coupling [episode]: ‘YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME utter confusion’ [1964, 73-74]” (99) – a phrase that we are no doubt to equate with YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME tohu-bohu, that is, as just so much ‘utter’-ed ‘shit’, “without form, and void”, in a word ‘impenetrable’, and ultimately ‘unnamable’, for How It Is turns essentially upon “YOUR LIFE HERE in a word my voice otherwise nothing therefore nothing [...]” (1964, 95). What remains on Beckett’s page, punctuated only by blank gaps that separate the verbal fragments, is the perpetual contestation toward effacement between sense and sound – between the transparent idea and the opaque materiality of language – represented by shards of a 580

possible infinite series of enigmatic voices, although singularly monotone, uttering a speech never ending yet never spoken: “vast stretch of time this voice these voices as if borne on all the winds but not a breath [...]” (1964,106). In the wake of these murmurings, the narrative etches, fairly recognizably, the two idiosyncratic Blanchovian figures: the condemned writer, bereft of cognizance, and the “narrative voice” that cannot speak. The latter figure, interestingly, feigns at times a distinguishable form. That is, The Unnamable’s allusion to the “one outside of life we always were in the end”, the one “come in the world unborn, abiding there unliving, with no hope of death” (1991, 347) which The Unnamable’s narrative had teasingly promised to elaborate upon – “But perhaps I shall speak of him some day, and of the impenetrable age when I was he” as “that unthinkable ancestor, of whom nothing can be said” (357) – is deployed again in How It Is, but now more vividly fabricated. How It Is proffers, to be sure, not the Biblical Yahweh, nor any other deity, nor another “Poor Worm, who thought he was different […]” (1991, 349), but rather the unknowable, irreducible naught of human intersubjectivity.2 The text alludes seemingly to the Hindu atman, the impersonal ‘outside’ of existents, neither self nor non-self, yet immanent infinitely within and without all that is, the primal, myriad scene of unabated absence qua difference upon which an illusory world and the tragicomic procession of the individual/mankind are born and extinguished: […] lie there in my arms the ancient without end me we’re talking of me without end that buries all mankind to the last cunt they’d be good moments [...] hearing nothing saying nothing capable of nothing nothing (1964, 61) Blanchot writes that the narrative voice that is inside only insofar as it is outside, at a distance without any distance, cannot be embodied: even though it can borrow the voice of a judiciously chosen character or even create the hybrid position of mediator (this voice which destroys all mediation), it is always different from what utters it, it is the indifferent-difference that alters the personal voice. 581

(1981, 142) Accordingly, Beckett’s judiciously chosen, atman-like caricature – “[...] I have the suffering of all the ages I don’t give a curse for it and howls of laughter in every cell [...]” (1964, 38) – personifies intermittently, playfully, the “ancient voice,” maintaining by allusion the overall movement of the text’s general economy: “I am an instant that ever so dwindling little [...] the voice of us all as many as we are as many as we’ll end if we ever end by having been something wrong there” (1964, 108). About the writer’s dire situation, Blanchot writes: “The poet is he who hears a language which makes nothing heard” (1982, 51). As if parodically taking its cue from Blanchot’s statement, How It Is refers to the dispossessed writer’s insomniac fascination of [...] an ancient voice ill-spoken ill-heard murmur ill some ancient scraps for Kram who listens Krim who notes or Kram alone is enough Kram alone witness and scribe his lamps their light upon me Kram with me bending over me till the age-limit then his son his son’s son so on (133) As this passage suggests, How It Is – as part of Beckett’s subject-less, post-Malone Dies prose series – is to be understood as no longer ‘authored’ and therefore textually contingent upon the exigent, schizophrenic condition of the particular writer’s annihilated consciousness – horrifically mad yet adroitly sane3 – leaving a marginally ‘human’ imagination (“a kind of its own”, as Company informs, 24), unaware recitalist, dispersed at the inhuman threshold of the il y a. escape hiss it’s air of the little that’s left of the little whereby man continues [...] a fart fraught with meaning issuing through the mouth no sound in the mud it comes the word [...] signifying mamma or some other thing some other sound barely audible signifying some other thing no matter [...]

582

[...] loss of species one word no sound it’s the beginning of my life present formulation I can go pursue my life it will still be a man (1964, 26-27) Ebbing from sense to nonsense toward both presence and absence denied, as a porous density of underdetermined words whisking across and down the page, an unremitting convergence of nothingness embodied/humanity disembodied announces itself. Expressive of a dementia perversely wed to what little to nothing thought can possibly think, Beckett’s script intimates a cogito-less field of mental activity that can only helplessly listen to and hopelessly “quote” an ever recoiling, nullifying litany of words entombed in an unthinkable, irremissible milieu of deathless dying. Interestingly “light” functions in the novel as an attribute of the liminal situation of the writer’s dimmed consciousness – a coding already, subtly, implemented in The Unnamable and Texts For Nothing – suggesting a narrowed theatre spotlight ill-illuminating short, cinéma vérité scenes (“earth sky a few creatures in the light”, 1964, 8) confluent with the writer’s involuntary, impaired traces of remembrances as a once substantial human being-in-the-world-with-others (“the humanities I had”, 42). A ‘cut scene’ device that will be both extended and more detailed in Company, “rags of life in the light” (21) act as a fleeting, flickering, mocking ‘luminosity’ of random, “illrecaptured”, human disposed memories, fantasies, “old dreams” (“Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind”, to quote Company, anticipating its reiteration of this theme, 15). One particular “image” in How It Is beckons our attention: “asleep I see me asleep on my side or on my face [...] Belacqua fallen over on his side tired of waiting [...]” (24). The figure of Belacqua evokes, of course, Samuel Beckett as our demented, anonymous writer, and any additional references to Beckettian affinities – such as those that “recall images from other Beckett texts or even memories from the author’s life” (Hill, 139) – can only further support the integral role that the writer plays in our analysis. “life above in the light”, with its landscapes of color and sketches of local imagery, contrast dramatically to the staging, in the darkness and squalor below, of the desolate “procession [of both a humanity interrupted and a language forsaken] advancing in jerks or 583

spasms like shit in the guts”, a procession whose multitudes dream of ending by continuing in a blissful hereafter: “being shat into the open air the light of day the regimen of grace” (1964, 124). The Unnamable had already, of course, established this dichotomous positioning of light and dark. In How It Is, though, “life in the light” not only plays the foil to the “impenetrable dark” (11), but functions more prominently as a quasi-transparent regional economy of involuntary wish fulfillment, “humanity regained” (27). Indeed, the phantasmal images of seemingly autobiographical content – disrupting the text’s otherwise desire for an unaccomplished general economy – reinforce, in effect, the notion of a textual haunting by the inadvertent yet conative imagination of the writer/recorder’s all-too-almost-human, vanishing presence. We must approach How It Is, then, as having unquestionably no center from which the narration originates: “recorded none the less it’s preferable somehow somewhere as it stands as it comes my life my moments not the millionth part all lost nearly all someone listening another noting or the same” (7). The entirety of How It Is hinges unsettlingly upon an inaudible oracular echoing, upon the enigmatic origin of the saying and the said, distinguished by the riddling “I say it as I hear it” (7). Presumedly this quoted line is inclusive with the rest of the text’s words claimed to be heard and then quoted in turn. The “I say it as I hear it” is therefore necessarily one instance in an unlimited series of “I say it as I hear it” echoes, as if heard from a voice that in turn is saying or quoting “it” as heard, ad infinitum, reminiscent not only of the revolving “dog’s gravestone” story in Watt and recalled in The Unnamable, but also of The Unnamable’s “caged beast seeking itself”. To further complicate matters, we read: “in me that were without [...] scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine.” If the “ancient voice” is as indicated that which is quoted, then the ambiguous “me” of the fragment quoted – other than being merely a word – must refer to the nondeictic and nonrelational “ancient voice”. The “me” therefore – by its mendacious referencing of the “voice”, a non-presence, as if it were a presence – mirrors the “voice” as always being without itself, outside its own existence, colonizing a time without duration from which the quote impossibly originates. Nothing is resolved by the information that soon follows: “how I got here no question not known not said and the sack whence the sack and me if it’s me no question impossible too weak no importance” (7). Again these so584

called quoted lines festering with destabilized, specular pronouns attest to the paradoxical limitations of the narrator-narrated project: an infinite regression of echoes and denials from a myriad of voiceless voices. A pitiless impasse, the conundrum of voice in How It Is mocks itself as a narrative of citation, the opening “invocation” invoking no one – a ridiculing condemnation of the seminal ‘Word’ in God’s judgmental ‘beginning’: “had I only the little finger to raise to be wafted straight to Abraham’s bosom I’d tell him to stick it up” (38) – the witless writer ill hearing, ill quoting, ill recording a streaming speech of utter silence, leaving the text’s afflicted “midget grammar” in nomadic flight toward a relentless, wordless dispersion. Consequently, the “billions of us crawling and shitting in their shit” (52) is a scene gorged with no one or no thing but verbal excrescence and disjection. Among the ruins, however, a prominent Beckettian theme prevails: that of an unknowable other unceasingly on its way to an unknowable other unceasingly on its way to an unknowable other, ad absurdum. nameless each awaits his Bom nameless goes toward his Pim Bom to the abandoned not me Bom you Bom we Bom but me Bom you Pim I to the abandoned not me Pim you Pim we Pim but me Bom you Pim something very wrong there (114-15) to play at him who exists or at least existed [. . .] what does it matter it does no harm to anyone there isn’t anyone (57) And because “there isn’t anyone,” How It Is continues The Unnamable’s signature Beckettian formula: “no more [...] I must make an end” (1964, 106). With the admission of bizarre lies and the desire to “die no answer DIE screams I MAY DIE screams I SHALL DIE screams good” (1964, 147), all dissolves, except the words; yet there is no consolation, for words reinstate a “life”, and death inevitably remains an always receding metaphysical carrot on a stick. Yea, to end absolutely and in the same moment to know one has ended – alas, the rub. Thus “a creature [...] always the same [...] spent looking for a 585

hole that he may be seen no more [...] who drinks that drop of piss of being and who with his last gasp pisses it to drink the moment [...]” is ultimately denied that totalized possibility; for as the passage explains, “it’s someone each in his turn as our justice wills and never any end it wills that too all dead or none” (1964, 132). This passage suggests a Blanchovian infinite time of dying (“never any end”) juxtaposed to a dialectical time telically contingent upon the certainty of death (“it’s someone each in his turn”). In the Blanchovian “everyday” we can only continue to die; but as the fanciful “someone each in his turn” we die indeed, yet are cursed to never know we have. Death’s ungraspability denies our cognitive assurance – hence “all dead or none”. Exhibiting a similar dilemma, writing at the limits of language entails a return to a linguistic void, the impenetrable stillness that language dissimulates, the silence intimate with the material being of pure, opaque sound. Writing necessitates, therefore, the death of signifying speech while simultaneously, paradoxically, articulating it. Such a writerly movement echoes as well the futility of ending knowingly, marking the impossibility of signifying speech fusing with its brethren speech of nonsignification. The liminal desire to die and acknowledge it, like speech articulating its own absence, can only portend autistic paralysis and the amnesic fabling of an uneventful journey in the dark the traveller [...] coming so utterly from nowhere and no one and so utterly on his way there that he has never ceased from travelling will never cease from travelling [...] (1964, 132) There is only the motionless, nonsignifying eternal flow of the “everyday”, timelessly always already now. Yet, the language bearing species resides as well in a time toward death, wherein ‘today is the first day of the rest of your life’, a time of organizing one’s life toward ends and the end – “in the deeper silence [...] vast stretch of time a distant ticking I listen a good moment they are good moments [...] a watch wristlet [...] it will have its part to play [...]” (1964, 58). “To play” occasions spatiality and temporality reduced to personal, societal commodities constricted by artificially imposed boundaries – of ownership and loss, origins and finales (“better a big ordinary watch complete with heavy chain [...] I drink deep of the seconds delicious 586

moments and vistas”, 58). Most importantly, we dare not transgress certain regulatory conditions: as Nietzsche observes, we may embrace a world of eternally repeating becoming qua naught, disbelieving in any metaphysical worlds, but we cannot endure our disbelief – thus “before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts” (1964, 7). Of course, by the conclusion of How It Is, the façade of these imposed conditions collapses, and the once impregnable ‘epic’ artifice of traditional narrative forms – of beginnings, middles, and ends – is exposed for what and how it is: the deceit of necessary fictions that parallel the ‘comforting’, ‘personalized’ structures by which we narrate our existence and simplify our world: “the distant ticking I derive no more profit from it none whatever no more pleasure count no more the unforgiving seconds [...] it keeps me company that’s all its ticking now and then but break it throw it away let it run down and stop no something stops me [...]” (59). The contesting issues of language, subjectivity, and temporality in How It Is suggest similarities with Deleuze and Guattari’s striated “body without organs”. Analogous metaphorically to the ‘atman’, the “body without organs” is an unindividuated, nonrelational “plane of immanence” existing both within and without the human subject’s field of being4. Correspondingly, by the virtual creation of an ‘individual’ and therefore of a unified ‘organism’ – with name, occupation, residence, beliefs, etc. – the “BwO” becomes striated with emotivecognitive commands, fantasies, memories, in short, language, oriented toward the ‘survival’ of the ‘individual’ in a world-with-others: “I pissed and shat another image in my crib never so clean since” (1964, 9); “it’s not said where on earth I can have received my education acquired my notions of mathematics astronomy and even physics they have marked me that’s the thing” (41). As Deleuze writes: “You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body […]. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted […]. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement – otherwise you’re just a tramp” (159). How It Is puts it this way: problem of training and concurrently little by little solution and application of the same and concurrently moral plane bud and bloom of relations proper [...] 587

he had no name any more than I so I gave him one the name Pim for more commodity more convenience [...] (57, 59) with the nail then of the right index I carve [...] on Pim’s back [...] from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilization I carve my Roman capitals (70) the curtains parted the mud parted the light went on he saw for me that too may be said there is nothing against it [whereby the “nothing against it” suggests the liminality of the “nothing” – i.e., the nonstriated “BwO” as the anterior, nonoriginary plane of consistency – proximate to its altered mirror image, the myriad planes of the particular human subject’s striated, ‘organized’ “BwO”] (72-73) At length, though, the text reveals: “we at a loss more and more he for answers I for questions sick of life in the light [...]” (75). The ‘narrative voice’ then attempts to return Pim’s striated state of being to an unviolated ‘body without organs’, so that Pim may forget his “LIFE ABOVE” and re-member and utter his irreducible, unvoiced ‘self’ in the mud – “from hell to home hell to home [...] divine forgetting enough” (79). The method used to escape striation, however, is to apply, paradoxically, perversely enough, more striating inscriptions. I pricked him how I pricked him in the end [...] in the mud vile tears of unbutcherable brother (74) Then appears an aporea, nearly chiastic in structure, echoing Watt’s mirrored proximity to Knott: “love a little without being loved be loved a little without loving.” Of course the nonrelational event of forgetfulness that this passage implies – “leave it vague leave it dark” (74) – leaves and leads to only more writing at the margin where inhuman lies with human:

588

if only that if he had ever heard a voice voices if only I had asked him that I couldn’t I hadn’t heard it yet the voice the voices no knowing surely not (74) [...] and Pim to speak he turns his head tears in the eyes my tears my eyes if I had any [...] (75) [...] very little these last tracts they are the last extremely little hardly at all [...] enough to mark a life several lives crosses everywhere indelible traces (103-04) Inevitably, when seemingly on the brink of bodies (or body) merged in elision (“glued together like a single body [...] how at each instant each ceased and was there no more either for himself or for the other vast tracts of time”, 122), “indelible traces”, “enough to mark a life several lives”, prevail, both the “indelible traces” that score the “BwO” as an ‘organism’ with “humanities”, and the “indelible traces” that fail to inscribe the void, whether the latter say, “the voices no knowing surely not”; or “so no voice only his only Pim’s not his either”; or “no more Pim never any Pim never any voice” (74). Similarly, dispatching the writer to transgress the bounds where nothing happens consigns the writing to an always vanishing verbal lag of vacillating departures and returns irretraceably postponed. Writing “in the end”, therefore, amounts to only “samples whatever comes remembered imagined no knowing life above life here [...]” (74). At length, no change is possible for the striated “BwO”, except for a mocking intensity of the impasse, but not as before, by the indirection of aporea – rather, now, by means of a direct, totalized, dialectical overcoming, by inscriptions marred with resentment: “soon unbearable thump on skull long silence vast stretch of time soon unbearable opener arse or capitals if he has lost the thread YOUR LIFE CUNT ABOVE CUNT HERE CUNT [...] and to conclude happy end cut thrust [in vain anticipation of penetrating beyond the always withdrawn threshold] DO YOU LOVE ME [...]” (75); but what remain only “howls in the black air and the mud [...] HERE HERE to the marrow howls to drink solar years no figures until at last good he wins 589

life here this life he can’t” (96). Within this writerly economy all is, after all, bluster. Inevitably in Beckett’s oeuvre, ‘causality’, ‘totalization’, and ‘the end’ are just so many fictions among fictions. Yet, throughout Beckett’s canon, to end properly and finally, as much as can be hoped, is necessarily always the “last present formulation” (1964, 133): now the first second and third now the fourth first and second now the third fourth and first now the second third and fourth something wrong there (130-31) And, as we may expect, although superceded by “vast stretch of time”, on (and at) the heels of Pim’s abandonment – Pim who “never was only me me Pim” (105) – “the [impossible] day Bom comes YOU BOM me Bom ME BOM you Bom we Bom” will insure the continuation of the nomadic, errant theatre of ‘life’ below and above. And although reversing the torturer-tortured roles, the ensuing “coupling” promises to repeat inconsequentially the former (non)event, the linguistic torment between self and unself toward ‘neither’ echoed in the incessant inscription of writing’s demise, which must at last amount to little more than “almost nothing left almost nothing” (1964, 104). Beckett’s dispossessed writing of subjectivity dispossessed engages a fragmented world whose borders skirt an alterity of nondialectical contestation, committing the writing inexorably to a purgatorial movement already and always circling from the effacing trace of the “very little” to the “indelible trace” of the “almost nothing”. Writing – toward its silent, nonoriginary origin – begins (only to begin relentlessly again) with the limit-experience of an immuring, vertiginous ‘outside’, irreducible to cognition and dissimulated by the very words that give it ‘life’, the very same words that give ‘life’ to Beckett’s disastrous writing without aim or intention; or as Beckett aptly puts it: “whence this dumb show better nothing” (1964, 32). Indeed How It Is ignobly parodies the limit-experience of the Blanchovian writer in situ. The errant burlesquing of an eternally si590

lent voice and a subject-less scripter functions, beginning with The Unnamable, as Beckett’s lynchpin to prick open the equivocating speech of speechlessness and to allegorize in (sham)efully ‘meaningful’ shaggy-dog stories the writer’s tragicomic condition – “there is more nourishment in a cry nay a sigh torn from one whose only good is silence or in speech extorted from one at last delivered from its use than sardines can ever offer” (1964, 143). Tropologically, the voiceless “voice” does speak, although always disguised in the recurring play of simulacra, a speech at times hauntingly confounded by, at times unwittingly uttered from, and at times obtusely in collusion with the parasitic, ‘mind-less’, language-bearing witness/writer/recorder. In his essay “Where Now? Who Now?” Blanchot identifies The Unnamable’s “author” as “no longer Samuel Beckett but the necessity that has displaced him [...] which has surrendered him to whatever is outside himself, which has made him a nameless being” (141). This “necessity”, ill heard “when the panting stops” – “voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me” (1964, 7) – is the speech of nothing at all, a speech that designates for Blanchot “the attraction of [...] indifference”, the “pure movement of writing” (1993, 329), and the very speech How It Is invokes through its ill-murmured tale of “being” and “Bem” and “balls” in “mud” without end. A writing void of individual enunciation or a subject of enunciation, How It Is evokes the absence of God’s judgment (“Belacqua fallen over on his side tired of waiting”, 24), relegating human consciousness to the casuistic trash bin of purgatorial exhaustion – “what the fuck I quote does it matter who suffers faint waver here faint tremor the fuck who suffers who makes to suffer who cries who to be left in peace” (131-32). A detached, torpid skullduggery of words that once demanded the author’s (as it now demands the reader’s) self-abandonment and merciless obligation to a forsaken language, How It Is, Blanchot affirms, is “our epic”, our “tacit song”, a return “at the limit of effacement” to “the source of the novel” (1993, 329). Notes 1.

See as well Victor Sage’s “Innovation and Continuity in How It Is”, in Beckett the Shape Changer, ed. Katharine Worth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1975, 85-103; as well as James

591

Knowlson and John Pilling’s Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979). 2.

For a detailed explanation of ‘interiorized’ intersubjectivity, the ‘outside’ within, in regard to especially Beckett studies, see Thomas Trezise’s Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 11-39.

3.

See Blanchot’s “De l’Angoisse au langage” in Faux Pas (1943), the seminal text of Blanchot’s “situation of the writer”, published during Beckett’s penning of Watt.

4.

See Chapter Six of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia titled “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs”. Among Deleuze and Guattari’s many definitions of this nonrelationality “populated only by intensities” is the following: Still, the [nonstriated] BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass [among which are those of ‘the organism, signifiance, and subjectification’]. [...] It is not space, nor is it in space

[...]. It is […] the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero […]. (153) In regard to Beckettian criticism and the “BwO”, see Mary Bryden’s Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (Lantham: Barnes and Noble, 1993), 58-69; and Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 1999, 58-90.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, How It Is (New York: Grove P, 1964). –, neither, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995), 258. –, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove P, 1996).

592

–, Three Novels: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). Blanchot, Maurice, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown: Station Hill P, 1981), 21-62. –, “The Narrative Voice,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown: Station Hill P, 1981), 133-143. –, The Space of Literature (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982). –, “Where Now? Who Now?,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1986), 141-49. –, “Words Must Travel Far,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 326-31. Brienza, Susan D., Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds: Style in Metafiction (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1987). Hill, Leslie, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).

593

THE WORD IN CRISIS: Variations on a Theme by Samuel Beckett Livio Dobrez

What could it mean to say that the word is in crisis? Or that Beckett appears as the best of all possible canaries in the worst of all possible mineshafts? Does it mean that linguistic usage is being debased by the postmodern consumer juggernaut? Why should not language adapt constructively to any historical situation? In which case the crisis of the word would be referable to another, more fundamental, malaise. This essay examines the commodification and technologizing of language in late twentieth century western culture with Beckett’s writing as a touchstone.

Is the word in crisis?1 What could it mean to say so? After all, we’re still talking and, if it comes to that, more than ever writing bad prose and bad verse. Parliamentary debate continues (presently on the inexhaustible theme of terrorism). And Tolkien, talk-back, airport fiction and journalism are doing very well. What, in any case, is bad about bad writing, bad speech, if there are plenty of people to read or to listen? And yet some of us who, it seems, have nothing better to do are uneasy about the future of the word. Samuel Beckett, one of the more laconic members of the chattering class, said it was in crisis, more than that, he faced the odd reflexivity implied in the statement and so said the crisis, in words appropriate to it, to some extent in the absence of words, even to the logical point of silence. Comparison with the other Irish wordsmith, his master James Joyce, is instructive. Possibly more and better than anyone before him, Joyce wrote the world, that’s to say he put (almost) everything into words. Ulysses takes mimetic expressiveness about as far as it will go: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried

hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. (1960, 65) In a passage like this words do their job of materializing experience for the reader without hesitation or doubt. Every term is scrupulously chosen for its expressive nuance. Phonetics effects, including rhythmic patterning, semantic aggregates and associations – it’s all perfectly placed, self-consciously only insofar as it strives for perfect expressiveness. The same may be said of those poetic stream of consciousness passages which express the inwardness of experience. It’s true that Ulysses and, of course, Finnegans Wake also play language games and so crack the psychological realism paradigm. Indeed Joyce’s impatience with the paradigm may be traced back at least to the difference between Stephen Hero and the Portrait. Still, to a degree this impatience relates to a continuing desire to get expression right. And, in the end, even when writing finneganese, Joyce has something to say and he says it in the best possible way. The much to express, the little to express, the ability to express much, the ability to express little, merge in the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one’s ability. (Beckett 1965,120) This is Beckett, despairing ingrate, commenting acidly on the process. But what else is the word to do if not express, tell about, give the feel of, etc? Here’s the not altogether encouraging alternative: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (Beckett 1965,103) Which results in beautiful prose of the ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ kind. It is of course possible perversely to negate the heart and soul of Beckett’s trilogy by returning it to the comforting, tried-and-tested bosom of expressiveness. After all, who ever used the comma to 596

greater effect than Beckett? Doesn’t the anguished poetry of The Unnamable express – for a start, its own crisis? Let’s say this by all means, since in one sense at least it’s unavoidable, provided we also accept that such writing really is critical, that’s to say doesn’t write about crisis but writes the crisis. In short it evidences the crisis itself, unmediatedly. In the words of one of Beckett’s stage characters, ‘something is taking its course’, something is happening to the word, the old Joycean author/medium partnership is no longer what it used to be. From Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Murphy Beckett writes against the grain, in retrospect evidently headed for the collapse of Watt and the new beginning of the Novellas, the trilogy and Godot. And it’s not difficult to read the entire trajectory in the opening of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, with its Joycean echoes on which Beckett dumps horse manure: Behold Belacqua an overfed child pedalling, faster and faster, his mouth ajar and his nostrils dilated, down a frieze of hawthorn after Findlater’s van, faster and faster till he cruise alongside of the hoss, the black fat rump of the hoss. Whip him up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo. Stiffly, like a perturbation of feathers, the tail arches for a gush of mard. Ah...! Capped off with a narrative-breaking irony already foreshadowing the trilogy: And what is more he is to be surprised some years later climbing the trees in the country and in the town sliding down the rope in the gymnasium. (1992,1) Admittedly not everyone writes like Beckett. Still, even those who don’t, have in the last few decades evidenced blushing selfconsciousness in the face of the word. One thinks of Italo Calvino, writing about writing, one thinks of the current plague-proportion passion for quotation, the metastatement, the statement in quotation marks, in Umberto Eco’s example not ‘I love you’ but ‘as Barbara Cartland would say, I love You’. Even Tolkien (not least in the improved Peter Jackson edition) and airport fiction signal crisis, if 597

merely evasively, via retro nostalgia or appeal to high or low brow fantasy, endlessly elaborated in all its unlikely variations, like the Kama Sutra. Still, all this, including airport fiction, Cartland and her avatars – it’s all ‘literature’. Amusement aside, who gives a damn about literature or literary authors? If we were talking about a literary crisis, even a ‘death’ of literature, an impossible self-consciousness in high brow writing, impossible to the point of nervous quotation or, at one extreme, silence – coupled with a collapse of high art into kitsch, commodity writing of the cruder kind – would it matter? Certainly it would matter less. But there is more to it than that: ‘literary’ Becketts function like the caged canary in the mineshaft, warning that the air is becoming unbreathable. Which they do by gasping their little last. It seems to me that equally urgent signals, if in different form, are coming from other quarters. In order to register these, let’s imitate Calvino’s touching invention of the Innocent Reader and propose – the Innocent Theorist (1982,77). This last will assume what we all more or less assume in any given case, viz that we speak or write for the purpose of dialogue, that’s to say to communicate, ideally, though by no means inevitably, to communicate truthfully. Derrida himself, when I heard him lecturing at the Delhi School of Economics, insisted on the necessity of the cornerstone of Truth. No doubt he meant ‘strategically’, but over and above any such strategy he surely intended his audience to engage his ideas as truthful (‘really’ truthful). Otherwise he could not have expected a single one of us to remain there listening to him. If you think the other is, for example, lying or playing games instead of engaging in actual dialogue, you switch off, you go away – unless you’re very desperate for amusement. So perhaps the innocent theorist is not so naïve after all. Gadamer, no less, built his theoretical structure on the, admittedly historically-shifting, foundation of Dialogue – truth, howbeit historicized. We, however (once subjects, then citizens, now consumers), live in a situation which puts dialogic truth under great pressure. Environed by advertising which becomes daily more intrusive (ads playing on the line as we wait – and wait – for the Telstra connection?), by an ad culture which generates ‘image’ as the only real, by the PR and market sales-pitch reality of corporate capitalism (the corporate and its claptrap but ominous manipulations extending to every sphere of social and private life via ‘privatization’, the media etc) – we, who suffer this, enter a new psychosocial space, new in its radicalness: the space of collective fiction. It will be ob598

jected by those who, for good or bad reasons, resist doom-prophecies that societies have always lived by their myths. That may be the case, but even leaving out the issue of superior and inferior myths (the myth of progress through profit must be one of the least edifying ones), the fictionalizing of the world, that is, of our entire lived reality, seems a serious development. The anthropologist Eric Michaels, working at Yuendumu, noted that until the advent of TV and videos the Walpiri people had no notion of fiction, only of truth and lie. In the West ‘fiction’ has existed for some time, but its imperializing ambition dates from the 1960s or 70s. Since when it has successfully blurred the distinction between itself and untruth, with assistance from neo-liberal market criteria and, in the academy, those intellectuals who argue that it’s all a construct anyway. They’re not altogether wrong, of course, and corporate thinking makes them less wrong every day. My point is a simple one: it may well be that, looking at the phenomenon historically, there has never been a more fictive society, one more rooted in lying. Sartre could have had no idea how far mauvaise foi could go. But what does this have to do with the word? Quite a lot, if we allow the innocent theory of dialogic truth, strategically or otherwise. When I switch on the TV and register Coca Cola imperialism I naturally don’t believe a word of it. I no more believe it than the Russians believed Soviet propaganda. America is a more worrying case, as it appears to be immune to self-scepticism. And yet even those who, inside and outside the USA, believe in the great consumer dream, do so and don’t at the same time. The consumer after all is not terminally stupid: s/he reads it as ‘real’ in quotation marks, ‘as if’ reality, i.e. as fictive. This is itself serious, however, for reasons given above, and its linguistic fallout is radical, viz a challenging of the very reason for words. It’s not exactly a question of debasing language, any more than of putting an end to literature. Of course the language of commerce, which presently makes the world go around, is debased, but that’s not the point. One man’s sloppy usage may turn out to be another man’s creativity: who is to judge – except the future? No: what brings the word into crisis, the crisis evidenced by corporatespeak, ad-speak, PR-speak, spin-doctoring and the like, is not any given historical linguistic usage but the fictionalizing of speech itself. One might speculate that it’s in just such a context that words fail Beckett or rather that Beckett’s words themselves protest in the utterance. The word had less to protest over in Joyce’s dear dirty Dublin, it 599

could afford the gentle note of sentiment. Today more words than ever say nothing at all: it’s enough to give the word anorexia. One final piece of evidence for crisis: the word technologized, as Walter Ong puts it in Orality and Literacy. Ong’s story begins at the beginning with – pace Derrida – the primacy of speech. The word within oral traditions functions as act (to say is to do), its role is agonistic, empathetic rather than distancing, situational rather than abstract. Chirography introduces verbal autonomy, solitary rather than unmediatedly dialogic utterance, removal from situation, increased abstraction, saying as alternative to praxis and so on. Moreover it transforms sound/meaning into image/meaning, at least to some extent: you less hear the word and more see it. Typography takes the process further insofar as it accelerates it. The word, already broken down into abstract alphabetic units, now takes letterpress print form: it is easier than ever to think of it as visual and to think of it as a thing. Formalism of every kind from the Russian variety to New Criticism to Structuralism looms on the historical horizon. But the radical shift comes with electronics, something Ong’s text is not in a position to cover, and it does so markedly in the last thirty or so years. In fact the word technologized comes fully into being along with the word commodified. From TV to Internet, speech progressively distances itself still further from origin, reifies, turns virtual. I can claim anything on the Net and no one responding is in much of a position to falsify, or verify, my claim. The technology of TV and www fictionalizes everything from news reporting to supposedly immediate dialogic interaction, i.e. the chat site. Or rather and more precisely it virtualizes it, since it presupposes virtual subjects, virtual contiguity situations, virtual acts, where ad culture presupposes fictive ones. ‘Virtual’ is not unreal in the same sense as ‘fictive’. A fictive rape is imagined to the point of quasi reality; a virtual rape is already real, though immaterial – hence ironic use of the term hyperreal. (Some years ago a student told me that it was possible to be raped online. She meant that seriously, having tested the site in question.) I want to argue that two related but separate effects come into operation in all of this. Recent and especially contemporary technology both virtualizes and minimizes the word. It virtualizes it because of its capacity for radical distancing from any origin – a capacity celebrated, doubtless prematurely, by Roland Barthes and the Structuralist rediscoverers of Saussure. 600

It minimalizes it because more than ever it turns the word into a visual phenomenon, not least by situating it in an information field dominated by the image. As a result of which we complain touchingly and uselessly about a ‘loss of literacy’. The effect is paradoxical insofar as it is partly generated by the low technologies of writing and printing. Hi-tech insists (dubiously) that a picture is worth a thousand words. In cahoots with the profit motive it generates a strange and strangely seductive virtual reality, that of endlessly-deferred desire. We are desiring-machines, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, and if we are not, we’re certainly headed that way. Consider scopophilia, surely the addictive disease of the twentieth and, presumably, of the twenty-first century. Film, TV, videos – now DVDs – and computers have made us all voyeurs and voyeuses, troubled by what Paul of Tarsus termed the Lust of the Eye. It’s an eye which itches, especially for more and more, even if that means, as it must, more and more of the same. Itching not only in the obvious context of pornography, one of our great consumer industries, but in that of consumerism in general. The depressing psychology of the hungry eye is that of unfulfilled and, in principle, never to be fulfilled desire. Wim Wenders nicely captured the obscenity and the hopeless pathos of this in the film Paris,Texas, in which the protagonist gazes at the desired object, the stripper, through glass – not darkly but in an artificial glare which hides nothing from the eye and reveals precisely nothing. Thus allowing everything to be seen while withholding everything. This is the elegant logic of consumption, that I should pass from desire to desire, but without rest, buying more only to desire still more. Having less and less as I acquire more and more. Film images instantiate this moment of noli me tangere desire, which is why they’re sexy even when apparently unrelated to sex. The same is true of advertising, of ‘image’ in the market sense: the commodity is sexy since it promises without delivering, its sexuality is that of look/don’t touch, in short, scopophilic. At any rate my point is that desire deprived of fulfilment is as much the mechanism of contemporary technology as of consumerism. Thus both virtuality and the stress on the visual, that is, the minimizing of the word, feed off a culture of desire: desire commodified, desire technologized. The dominance of the visual media, deeply embedded in the current brand of capitalism, puts the word under stress, demanding of it that it compete with the barrage of images. There is of course no 601

intrinsic reason why the word should not hold its own in this market contest, quite the reverse. The more fundamental challenge in a technoculture is that of virtuality. Why should this signal crisis, however? Language on the www remains language, doesn’t it? The point is that virtuality poses the same difficulty for the dialogic word as does the commercial impulse towards fiction – virtuality simply being the technological face of commercial fiction-making. Either way, ‘real’ and ‘truth’ are handed over to quotation marks. This is what generates crisis, evidences it and offers at least a socioeconomic if not a complete explanation for Beckett’s stressful panting, the word which can’t go on, yet can’t exactly stop either. It offers at least one perspective on the word’s self-loathing, its horror of expressing – coupled with the obligation to express. Once imprinted with a bar code, what else is the word to do at the check-out except gasp out its agnostic narrative of self-doubt? A final restatement of the objection to this reading. Surely commercial/technological alienation, the undermining of the one raison d’être for the word, namely real dialogue, merely provides a new context, howbeit challenging, for speech and for writing? Surely the word adapts to any historical situation? I expect it does. When the noted Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins addressed an ANU audience a few years ago he told us that culture is culture is culture. In other words culture can’t ‘decline’, be ‘lost’ etc. Like it or loathe it, a culture is simply what is there. By this logic Aboriginal groups who complain they’re losing their Dreaming nonetheless retain ‘culture’. All that has occurred is a switch of cultures or, less dramatically, a degree of cultural transformation. It’s true in the most banal anthropological and literal sense, not in the moral sense. Naturally it will be argued: ‘but if you insist on moral/cultural ups and downs, who is to judge sub specie aeternitatis?’ You can’t assess the process from an outside vantage point. This is evident, but it fails to address the issue of judgement. We do pass judgement, from within the historical process, it’s a phenomenological fact that we do so. We pass judgement without certainty, of course, but knowledge may be valid while remaining uncertain. (You don’t have to know for sure in order to know. If you did, very little knowledge, perhaps none at all, would be possible.) Thus it is not self-evidently absurd to talk of the word in crisis. To say this is not to return to the case – dubious at best and in the event undemonstrable – for a debasement of language itself, i.e. of 602

linguistic usage. Liars I suppose are as linguistically adept as people who tell the truth. It’s perfectly conceivable that in a situation in which language overwhelmingly serves purposes of rhetoric, manipulation, mystification and the like, as in ad-speak or publicity babble, or in which it functions through virtual rather than actual encounters, its usage will still be inventive, racy, in its way pointed. But such usage will not amount to exemplary speech or writing, since, regardless of brilliant micro effects, the macro effect contradicts the dialogic dimension of language, that’s to say the one necessary feature of speech and writing. I suppose what I am arguing for here is close to Sartre’s claim in Qu’est-ce que c’est que la littérature? that you can’t write a good anti-semitic novel (which in 2004 might be rephrased as ‘you can’t write a good anti-Palestinian novel’). Framed that way the point is of course overstated. Isn’t Parsifal a good anti-semitic opera? But there is a sense in which Sartre’s argument holds: Parsifal may be a good opera, but not insofar as it’s anti-semitic. Posing, finally, the question common to Nikolai Chernyshevski, Lenin and Luke the Evangelist: what is to be done? 2 The rarelyfulfilled role of the academic intellectual is to bring the issue to public attention. Literary writers have their own ways of living out history and writing its crises. In this country it was the generation of late sixties poets which first took up the challenge of consumer technology and techno consumption and in a book entitled Parnassus Mad Ward I sketched out three poetic options taken up by Australians in the late sixties and early seventies, each one a strategy for managing the word in crisis. For a start you could (yet again) return poetic diction to everyday language – Wordsworth’s solution in the Lyrical Ballads. That means writing transparently, treating the word unproblematically, writing as you speak – a poetic of parole. Some poets, however, could not accept such a seemingly effortless victory, opting instead for a more structural or systemic approach to the word. They needed to wrestle with the word, to make words bodily, breathing their rhythms as much as writing them, actively ‘projecting’ a linguistic ‘field’ in which the word would define itself by its place in the field after the manner of colour splashed over a Pollock canvas. Such poets sought to write their way through the problematic of the word in crisis, writing with utmost consciousness of writing. At a certain point, though, a third option might be activated, resulting in a different and more extreme poetic of systemic langue. Here the word has become its own or 603

even the only reality. The word as body now turns into the body as word, i.e. as text. Fully virtualized, technologized, the word speaks self-referentially, in the end not even that but content-less: signifier which, having abandoned reference, now dumps its signified. What remains is a phonetics game, with ghostly semantic patterns traversing the structure. Does it celebrate the commodified, virtualized word, the demise of meaning, the death of truth? Yes – in the case of a writer like John Tranter, with cynicism, fizz and bravura. But what about the rest of us, not necessarily poets but, inevitably, speakers, writers? Crisis may simply be set aside – I mean with courage and panache, not nostalgia for an ancien régime which after all had little to recommend it or with a reactionary refusal to face contemporary reality, that of maximal techno-managed commodification. It’s not possible to turn the clock back on IT and the bourgeois commercial revolution. But it is possible to affirm other reals. Again, we may choose to engage crisis after the manner of the poetic wrestler, applying pressure until something cracks – in this way fighting postmodernity on its own ground. Naturally these two strategies are not mutually exclusive. Finally, there’s the option of going along for the postmodern ride which, some will argue, is not as bad as I’ve painted it. Beckett’s way, ahead of its time, is to take the second option, that of confronting medium and paradigm head-on and in a manner that takes the logic of the struggle to its conclusion. All this, as Adorno understood, without having to name or indeed being in a position to name the opponent. It’s always difficult, perhaps in some respects impossible, to name hegemony, though one’s obliged to, if only by insisting painfully that Something is Taking its Course. Notes 1.

A version of this argument, focussing on Australian poets rather than on Beckett, is being published by Australian Scholarly Publishing as part of the Proceedings of the ANU Words for their own Sake 2001 symposium.

2.

Luke 3:10-1.

604

Works cited Beckett, Samuel, Three Dialogues in Proust and Three Dialogues (London; Calder, 1965). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York; Arcade Publishing, 1992). Calvino, Italo, If on a winter’s night a traveller (London; Picador, 1982). Joyce, James, Ulysses, (London; the Bodley Head, 1960).

605

UNSAYING AND THE CATEGORIES OF DISCOURSE IN BECKETT’S GESTURAL TEXTS Peter Williams

Beckett was caught amid the stylistic excesses of Modernism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, these excesses worked in the negative direction of ‘unsaying’ and missaying’, subtractive grammatical orders that resist the depths of humanistic hermeneutics in order to emphasise the visual surface and what Beckett called ‘camera images’. Levinas casts the project of ‘unsaying’ as more generally addressing the problem of attaching thought to being, a project Beckett exemplifies in his later texts. His texts are therefore defined not by what they mean, but by our sense of the difference between meaning and non-meaning significance and mere noise. This difference is inaccessible to hermeneutics, but it is the locus of what might be called post-hermeneutic thought.

The American artist, Agnes Martin, once said that her use of the grid form in most of her paintings “encourages the eye to participate in an uninterrupted, non-selective, free and easy wandering” – an activity she hoped would induce a “holiday state of mind” (Haskell, 64). Samuel Beckett seems to embrace a similar sentiment in Proust, though it is expressed in less leisurely terms, when he says that the parameters for the divorce of an alert perception from a convention-bound will depend upon a “relaxation of the subject’s habit of thought and a reduction in the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness” (1957, 56). And so later, in Company, it is not surprising that we learn that “In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the order the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point” (1980, 12). Arguing the toss over the appropriate level of mental activity here may be missing the point: the important aspect is that both Mar-

tin and Beckett propose an agenda that seems to embrace ‘superficiality’ and surfaces, and which resists the modernist tendency of mining for ‘deep structures,’ symbolic systems that stood as a test of the reader’s interpretive fortitude, and for universal aesthetic judgements that form the basis of the modernist criteria for taste and value. Superficiality here may loosely be defined as a resistance to the ‘depth’ of humanistic values, a push away from the discipline of the subject, and recognition of modern Such an aesthetic could be aligned with a version of ‘cognitive primitivism’ which assumes only a prereflective immediacy of response in the individual subject, without recourse to universalising aesthetic judgments or third position positions. This aesthetic, like primitive aesthetics, rejects all modes of reflection and reflectiveness in order to emphasise what Vico terms a ‘robust imagination’ that is both ontologically and historically prior to any sense of a universalising rationality. This shift was best expressed by non-representational artists such as Frank Stella who, by resolving pictorial finish so methodically and definitely, abolished sites of resonance between the audience’s search for understanding and the ambiguous vulnerability that dominated most modernist forms of representation. The ‘loose’ finish of abstract expressionist paintings for example, by artists such as Pollock, Kline and de Kooning, corresponded too conveniently to that inner condition, most popularly articulated by Sartre and the existentialists, but also a staple of liberal humanism, of oneself as perpetually ‘unfinished’ or in a constant state of ‘becoming.’ Stella famously claimed, “If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there” (Rubin, 41-42). ‘Seeing’ interested Beckett in the earlier stages of his career, especially when he was loosely associated with the Verticalists. Eugene Jolas, whose articles and editorials in transition evolved into a liberated style manual for the Parisian writers of 1920’s, declared that the artist is “free to disintegrate the primal matter of the words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries […] to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactic laws” (Gluck, 22). In 1932, Beckett signed a statement titled “Poetry is Vertical” which reads in part, “The final disintegration of the ‘I’ in 608

the creative act is made possible by the use of a language which is a mantic instrument, and which does not hesitate to adopt a revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax, going even so far as to invent a hermetic language, if necessary” (Kennedy, 274). Many of Beckett’s earlier critical comments therefore relate to “grammar” (in the broadest sense) and to the way the text ‘looks’ on the page, to the materiality of the text. He says for example, “For Proust, as for the painter, style is more a question of vision than of technique.”(1957, 7). And in a reading of Finnegan’s Wake, he says, “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not meant to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself” (1972, 14) Beckett’s emphasis on the visual aspects of a piece of writing, writing is to be “looked at” and style is “a question of vision,” reorients our attention away from questions about what a text might ‘mean’ to the arrangement and materiality of the words on the page. There are no hidden truths to be uncovered, no depths beneath the surface of the text that it is our task to appropriate. Everything lies on the surface, or more precisely, everything is the surface which is the site of his works’ historical efficacy simply because of their ability to collapse the distinction between mental and material production, the notions of expression and projection. His texts are therefore defined not by what they mean, but by our sense of the difference between meaning and non-meaning, significance and noise. This difference is inaccessible to hermeneutics, but it is the locus of what might be called post-hermeneutic thought. Of perhaps more interest is Beckett’s insistence that the dichotomies that constitute the complex relationship between form and content, style and substance are therefore collapsed into an emphasis upon the visual and what Beckett termed “camera images.” The fragmented language of many of his later works could therefore be read as verbal snapshots in a procedure of continuous variation within strictly defined linguistic combinations – a style not unlike film and the distracted form of attention it elicits. And because style, for Beckett, is nothing more than an assemblage of enunciation, it unavoidably produces a language within a language. It was Proust himself who said “masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.” That is when Beckett’s style becomes a language, and that is when his language 609

becomes most intensive – a pure continuum of intensities – achieved by a relentless subtraction of representational props and grammatical codes. Beckett’s fiction from the Unnamable, who compulsively and ceaselessly reduces all discourse to sameness, to a uniformity of origin and function, then can continue only by, in a sense, ‘photographing’ itself; style comments on writing in these later texts. It is striking and a bit unnerving to see how persistently and zealously the Unnamable can continue to operate under epistemological premises he has intellectually rejected, as though he could conceive no others. The text continues to pursue a substantialist notion of identity that ‘I’ already knows to be a myth with “affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking” (1958, 291). The Unnamable thus attains the truth of the Lacanian Imaginary, born of and persisting amidst a perpetual negation of self identity that anticipates an illusory wholeness. The tension of his discourse results from an inexhaustible fund of negation, a limitless capacity to deny and reverse. In the tentative, stop-and-go pattern of Texts for Nothing, Beckett “goes on” through linguistic sleights of hand with verbs and pronouns. From an Abandoned Work is the monologue of a disjointed narrator who speaks in inverted and distorted syntax. In Enough the narrator’s self-delusion expresses itself in wistful and contradictory language. The self-destructive short novel How It Is spews bits and scraps of life in fragmented phrases of “midget grammar.” In Imagination Dead Imagine paradoxical language mirrors the impossible feat of creating something out of nothing. Ping seems to embody suffering as represented by an imprisoned creature constrained by the few recycled phrases of the text. By the time we reach Lessness the figure has regressed to a foetus, unable to stand, described with incomplete “issueless” phrases as Beckett achieves the “syntax of weakness” he set as his goal in 1960. In Fizzles the narrative fizzles out, and the bodies are either “Still” (Fizzle 7) or going on in zigzag paths as the sentences collapse or meander in purely parallel ways. Language itself is the narrator’s only companion in Company and both imagination and expression are doubted in the highly self-conscious prose of ill seen ill said. Finally, regressing from the Unnamable’s vow “I’ll go on,” Beckett’s final piece promises only to move Worstward Ho, and manages to do so through the creation of “worse’’ words and “un-“ words. 610

Unlike some critics, I do not here want to suggest that all of Beckett’s later oeuvre is essentially continuous and consistent with itself, the persistent modulation of a few scarce themes. Besides making that oeuvre subject to a rather deadening sameness, such a view fails to explain the well-known difficulty of Beckett in continuing to write at all. But, taken together, these texts represent an opus of overwhelming redundancy and incoherence, each different from the other, each a new confrontation of pen with paper and each a new confrontation with self that cannot be solved with previous solutions. On one occasion, Beckett said “I write because I have to,” and added “What do you do when ‘I can’t’ meets ‘I must’?” He also said that ‘You break up words to diminish shame” (Harvey, 249). These hermetic languages become the enclosed spaces of Beckett’s later fiction – constricted styles delimiting contained shapes – domes, rectangles, cylinders and boxes in which his characters are confined either moving or straining to be still. The reader too experiences a claustrophobic atmosphere when floundering with Beckett’s “midget grammar,” or along maze-like paths or locked inside recursive patterns of repeated sentences, descending to the phrase level, lost or drowned in the syntax, and then surfacing once more for the white spaces. For Beckett’s cast of amnesiacs, ataxics and catatonics identity seems always and everywhere already external to the subject who spends a good deal of time trying to gather it from the linguistic residua in which he is embroiled: the self that is awaiting it is already dead, or the self that could await it has not yet arrived. But unlike many postmodernists who dogmatise irresolution and discontinuity, Beckett exchanges impossible definitions of the real with a lucid tautology that skirts the pitfalls, creases and folds of reality itself. Beckett’s insistence upon the importance of missaying, for example1 seems to reflect a sort of postmodernist/poststructuralist nihilism inasmuch as it addresses the impossibility of defining a meaning, but he never transforms this impossibility into a positive negation. Instead, he accepts missaying as a mode of discourse while seeing, at the same time, that discourse itself keeps changing and does not close on its own impotence. Most narrative theorists agree that the path to narrative interpretation requires an apriori grounding in an understanding of the world and its temporal character; the capacity for identifying action in general by means of its structural features and the very capacity of 611

action to be narrated and perhaps also the need to narrate it. Reading Beckett’s narratives identified above forces us, against our usual reading habits, to suspend that understanding because the direction of Beckett’s subtracted grammar is oriented towards linguistic mediations that express an undefined, perhaps undefinable, action rather than towards the clarification or development of referential elements or representational props that normally constitute an action. “Still,” for example, represents a near static world in a near static grammar; what minimal movement is possible occurs in fragmented phrases and slow motion, in the illusion of change produced by successive still frames. In perhaps the most coherent sentence of the piece, the narrator says, “Quite still then all this time eyes open when discovered then closed then opened and closed again no other movement any kind of course not still at all when suddenly or so it looks like this movement impossible to follow let alone describe” (1976, 49). Either stillness is impossible or, more likely, it is impossible to follow or capture in language. Beckett therefore inverts the dependence of narrative understanding from a pre-understanding of the world as action to making the construction of a hermetic code a prerequisite for the subsequent elucidation of narrative (non)events. Clarification here will therefore not necessarily produce a coherent unit. Rather, clarification is more likely to embrace incoherence. Thus a new post-hermeneutics of experience is expressed by a narrative in which we often do not know what is happening because the ‘grammar’ of Beckett’s texts does not allow us to recognise it. What we can see is a narrative movement of linguistic mediations that suspends definition, but which also reveals the evidence of actions constructed by linguistic residua. Beckett casts this project as “unsaying,” a concern that Emmanuel Levinas defines more generally as the problem of “the attachment of thought to being.” He identifies the negative dialectics of subtraction in the form of “unsaying” as a proper mode of philosophising: I have spoken somewhere of the philosophical saying as a saying which is in the necessity of always unsaying itself. I have even made this unsaying a proper mode of philosophising. I do not deny that philosophy is a knowledge, insofar as it names even what is not nameable, and thematizes what is not thematizable. But in this giving to what breaks 612

with the categories of discourse the form of the said, perhaps it impresses onto the said the form of this rupture (Levinas, 107). In breaking the categories of discourse, we could then say that the reading of these later Beckett texts may be nothing more than a series of “better failures,” to use Beckett’s own term, as “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better” (1983, 7). Better failures catches us in the absorptive processes of these texts in a criss-crossing web of connections between a self-reflexive suspension of meaning producing an epistemological indecision and the impossibility of escaping the search for meaningfulness. We are thus made aware of our existence as embodied subjects living in the phenomenal world and sharing the need for communication. This occurs most obviously at the formal level where the use of fragments with their anti-linear capacity to break up discourse, mimes the process occurring at the level of subjectivity. The connective tissue between character and reader is crossed, because unable to escape Beckett’s “midget grammar” we are forced to coexist in the same world – there is no ‘outside’ to Beckett’s texts. This chiasm is inverted through the presentation of a certain absence, and then paradoxically re-sealed because the density of Beckett’s disembodied narrators seems to limit the possibility of content at a surface level only, emphasizing also the possibilities for process as content whilst resisting the potential for meaning or ‘deep structure’. Midget grammar does not break our contact with ‘things’ but instead draws from our state of confusion a palpable tie that binds us to experiences rendered. If speech, which for Beckett is born from silence, can seek its conclusion in silence, and make that silence not be its contrary, it is because beyond the movement of pure significations, or pre-significations, there remains the silent mass of the discourse, that which is not in the order of the ‘sayable.’ The greatest value of this form of expression is to disclose this interrogative shuttle between the word and being and from being to the word, this double openness of the one to the other. Beckett’s strategy of subtraction and impotence marks a crucial shift in an aesthetic sensibility away from modernist conceptions of the artist or writer characterised by autonomy, expressiveness and creativity towards the potential of language to shape aesthetic out613

comes – a sort of ‘anti-aesthetic’ of the unpresentable. John Ashbery calls this “leaving out,” I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way clean washed sea The flowers were These are examples of leaving out (Ashbery, 3) Accompanying this shift is an aesthetic recognizing the positive value of a precipitant vacuum created by the subtracted form. The aesthetic domain once occupied by modernity’s dream of universal judgement now gives way to the subjective texture of the time it takes to reconcile oneself to the possibility of the Beckettian text’s true and complete emptiness. The subject’s inhabiting of time thus displaces her inhabiting of space, so thematization, tied as it is to the particulars of spatial or representational detail, takes a back seat to sensory provocation. This point marks the difference between thematization and dramatization: Beckett dramatises embodiment with a “midget grammar,” Ashbery dramatises the Now by leaving out. What forms of engagement does leaving out make possible? What is the affect of a form of discourse that breaks with the categories of discourse? Because they so recalcitrantly resist interpretation in the conventional sense, what possibilities are there for a Beckettian aesthetic? Much of the power of these later Beckett texts lies in their attempt to illuminate how, and how much, we communicate by appeals to convention. To then attempt to invoke conventional and overworked hermeneutic and aesthetic codes does little more than demonstrate how easily those codes are exhausted and defeated by the impermeability of these works themselves. If we return to Ashbery’s “The New Spirit,” he goes on to say “These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but – yourself.” The “you” that stands in the place of leaving out is the immediate relationship that forms between the subtracted Beckettian text and the reader which substitutes a 614

conditional, momentary true for a metaphysical, suprasensible Truth. This momentary bond is as brief as it is abiding; it consists, on the one hand, in the act of subtraction which generates a sublime excess of affect, or aura, to use Benjamin’s term, that sustains a real life by marking the limit point of language and representation. Here, in the Kantian sense, cognitive and imaginative processes inhabit discordant antinomies. For Beckett this is the point where language encounters silence rather than silence simply being the absence of language. Here, I would claim, Beckett’s texts produce an excess of signification or, at least, move us to the domain of presignification. It is the point where, meaning is overwhelmed by determination […].We are reading and suddenly we are caught up in a phrase or expression (or any signifying argument) which seems to contain so much there is nothing we ‘cannot read’ into it. What threatens here is stasis. A kind of death by plenitude […]. Which destroys the seeking for a signifier (Weiskel, 26-27). Thomas Weiskel termed this the “positive” or “metonymic” sublime. I would, however, revise his formulation, and by applying it to the subtractive strategies I have identified in Beckett’s later texts align it with the ‘negative sublime’ by supplementing Weiskel’s wording with “seems to contain so [little] there is nothing we cannot ‘read into’ it.” In the next phase of the experience, as Weiskel describes it, “the mind recovers by displacing its excess of signified into a dimension of contiguity that may be spatial or temporal.” On these terms, we compensate for the excess of meaning by channelling it into streams of continuous imagery which expresses, connotes or simply carries a sense of that excess from which it sprang. We are thus plunged into an aesthetic domain, or what Kant would call an ‘aesthetic idea’ which he defined as “that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e. any concept, being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language” (157). Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, puts it another way by saying, “We can conceive of the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute 615

greatness appears to us as painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible” (78). I am not claiming that Beckett’s works are infinitely great nor are they infinitely powerful. I do however think that Weiskel’s formulation of the metonymic sublime applies well to Beckett’s works because they employ subtractive formal strategies which invoke similar over/under whelming associations, though these may develop as a negative potential rather than a positive one. That is, incomprehensibility itself may be considered to be a principle of judgement. Beckett’s violence to our cognitive prowess also resembles Kant’s notion of “negative pleasure” in which “there is a feeling of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the ideas of a whole, wherein the imagination reaches its maximum, and, in striving to surpass it, sinks back into itself, by which, however, a kind of emotional satisfaction is produced” (91). It may be, however, that Weiskel’s notion of the metonymic sublime is too static. In our interactions with the world we do, I think, broadly strive to achieve states of equilibrium, but this striving does not necessarily reduce to a quasi-mechanical balance between loss of meaning at one cognitive level and a gain elsewhere in a constant field of mental energy. In the complexity of our embodied engagement with Beckett’s texts, we can accrue net losses or gains without the mediating ministrations of compensation. Then the excesses of signification may be handled reflexively and immediately in the form of bodily gestures, rather than being channelled into streams of determinate and continuous imagery as we read and re-read, position and re-position ourselves in time with the unfamiliar rituals of language Beckett’s texts present. Gestures may then be the most appropriate aesthetic response to these subtracted Beckettian texts, and their appeal to our own embodiment and sense of presence in the world. Gestures express those excesses of signification that have been pushed down into the nerve nets of physical embodiment in forms that are both singular and communal: singular in their ability to express one’s response to an aspect of the work in an immediate and idiosyncratic way, and communal in their possibilities for an aesthetic language that is “unspoken” or “missaid,” thereby skirting the need for common language rules or even the assumed, consensual grounds upon which aesthetic languages are built. Gestures also release us from the protracted processes of ratioci616

nation common to most aesthetic judgements, and they speak well to the particular forms of ‘leaving out’ in Beckett’s works by implying that this sublime aesthetic questions rules or criteria for representation rather than providing models for it. These gestures are often very public, and are usually fraught with uncertainty and self-consciousness; after all, who among us has not often begrudged Beckett his ability to evoke laughter as the most intelligent response to some perfectly balanced, painfully precise linguistic impasse? Who has not watched fellow theatre-goers squirm in their seats during one of Beckett’s short plays or, finally, succumbing to sheer boredom, rise and leave a performance of one of Beckett’s wordless plays just as the actors have begun to get it right? Boredom may be an appropriate response, especially if boredom is cast as an effect of disrupting the normal movement between the self and the outside world. I have seen it claimed that “boring art is the mirror of repetitiveness, unexpressiveness, abstractness, and obsession with the detail of daily life” (Rosenberg, 124) – surely all criteria that could apply to Beckett’s texts. But these gestures are not just analogous reminders of our own physical embodiment and presence in the phenomenal world; they are also expressive of real and significant affect when an impenetrable surface – one that withdraws from every relationship and refuses all dialogue and dialectic – encounters an engaged consciousness oriented towards and momentarily constituted by its contact with that surface. It might now be appropriate to consider Wittgenstein’s linkage of the apprehension of a literary piece or work of art to “seeing” the expression it embodies in relation to Beckett’s texts. In the gestural communication of that relation, one’s own body becomes a signifier, but one that is not reducible to a linguistic expression. Wittgenstein compares this to how one might come to see or “get” an expression, aligning seeing an expression with expressing a gesture: “The experience is this passage played like this, (that is, as I am doing it, for instance; a description could only hint at it)” (1968, #183) and ‘If a theme, a phrase, suddenly means something to you, you don’t have to explain it. Just this gesture has been made accessible to you” (1967, #158). When it comes to Beckett’s texts, aesthetic predicates may therefore be better expressed as gestural counterpoints in what Wittgenstein would call “a different game”; gestural equivalents to the 617

‘expression’ of Beckett’s works that throw us back onto the exactness of those works immediacy and our own relation to them. Gestures may then become a particular category of aesthetic predicates because they can never be detached from the context of their particular employment, yet they remain responsive to cultural pressure and social praxis without ever setting up residence as a universal language. Their ‘meaning’ is not derived from the distance from social reality that is generally characteristic of the depictive function of a sign, but rather from their concrete role within that reality itself. Post-Cartesian forms of knowledge begin with us as already having a mind inside our heads, and with certain things being present. But Beckett’s ‘unsaying’ asks the question, ‘how is it that the mind comes to have anything present to it at all?’ or, to put it another way, how is it that we come to have a realm of activity, apparently ‘within’ us, that we call the ‘the mental’ or ‘the inner’? Cognitive primitivism, as exemplified by the Beckettian text, begins an answer by first positing what Vico terms a ‘sensory topic’ – the original possibility of everyone in a group or audience being able to feel the same movement within themselves in the same way and by then forming what he calls an imaginary universal – a corporeal image that is rooted in the sensory topic and which shapes its first, socially expressed form of responsive expression to it. These gestures are not images of something, but are images through which or in terms of which we make a certain kind of sense of Beckett’s texts, a sense that is shared with others through bodily gestures as a shared form of judgement without reflection. Then, rather than ‘acting out’ any inner intentions or schemas of our own, we find ourselves ‘acting into’ our surroundings in terms of its callings. We act because we sense specific activities being required of us by Beckett’s texts almost as if they are a living agency. Wittgenstein claims that “Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is [...]” (1968, #373), or that we must “let the use of the words teach [us] their meaning” (1968, 220). Hence, rather than a meaning that we mentally ‘see’ or understand, the rooting of our activity in a sensory topic is much more like an ungrounded way of acting when “Giving grounds […] justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not certain propositions striking us as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the languagegame” (1972, #204). 618

This emphasis on corporeality and gesture has two major methodological consequences for post-hermeneutic criticism. The first is that the notion of agency recedes into the background. The body is not first and foremost an actor or agent, and in order to become one it must suffer a radical reduction of complexity, a “generally diminished tension of consciousness” to quote Beckett again. As a result, literary works can no longer be viewed as dramas in which actors carry out their various projects with intentionality and meaning. Rather the focus of analysis shifts to the processes that make the drama possible: to the Unnamable’s ceaseless writing of the script, the rehearsals and repetitions, the memorizations, and the orders that emanate from a disembodied directorial authority. The second is that posthermeneutics draws its responsibility precisely from the unassimilable otherness of the singular and mortal body as represented in the Beckettian texts I have discussed and this alone is the ethical reason they stop making sense. Note 1.

“Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for missaid” (Beckett, 1983, 7)

Works Cited Ashbery, John, “The New Spirit” in Three Poems (New York: Viking, 1972) Beckett, Samuel, Proust (New York: Grove P, 1957) –, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 1958) –, “Dante…Bruno…Vico…Joyce” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of a Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1972) –, “Still” in Fizzles (New York: Grove P, 1976) –, Company (New York: Grove P, 1980) –, Worstward Ho ( London: Calder, 1983) Haskell, Barbara, Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992) Harvey, Lawrence, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970) Jolas, Eugene transition 3 in Barbara Reich Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1971)

619

Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951) Kennedy, Sighle, Murphy’s Bed (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1971) Levinas, Emmanuel, “The Glory of Testimony” in Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985) Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1984) Rosenberg, Harold, Discovering the Present (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) Rubin, William, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970) Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the structure and psychology of transcendence, (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968) –, Zettel, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970) –, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (New York: Harper, 1972)

620

CONTRIBUTORS CHRIS ACKERLEY, is associate professor of English at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has recently co-edited (with S. E. Gontarski) The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. MARY BRYDEN, is Professor in the School of European Studies, Cardiff University. She has published a number of books on Beckett. Her research interests include literature in dialogue with the visual arts, music, and theology. MARK BYRON, completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 2001. He is currently Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. CHRIS CONTI, received his PhD at the University of Sydney, was co-convenor Samuel Beckett Symposium, Sydney. ANTHONY CORDINGLEY, is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia. BRUNO CLEMENT, est Professeur de Littérature Française à l'Université Paris 8 (Vincennes à Saint-Denis) et Directeur de programme au Collège International de Philosophie. Ses travaux actuels portent sur les rapports entre littérature et philosophie. LIVIO DOBREZ, is Head of the Department of English, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. GARIN DOWD, is Principal Lecturer in Critical Theory and Film Studies in the London College of Music and Media at Thames Valley University, London. He has published essays on Beckett, Blanchot, Joyce and Oppen, is co-author (with Fergus Daly) of a study of the film director Leos Carax. GERRY DUKES, lectures in literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick in Ireland. He recently published Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett - a brief biography. 621

KARINE GERMONI, professeur de Département de langues étrangères appliquées à l'Université de Provence, France. RANJAN GHOSH, Faculty of English, Darjeeling Government College, West Bengal Education Service, India. SUZIE GIBSON, is a Lecturer in the Department of English, University of New England, NSW, Australia. MICHAEL GUEST, is Professor at Shizuoka University's Faculty of Information and Graduate School of Informatics, both of which he cofounded. DAVID A. HATCH, teaches English and Philosophy at Brigham Young University, Utah, USA. His current project is a book-length study entitled Eclectic/Subversive Period: Interdisciplinarity in the Little Magazines. MATTHEW HOLT, teaches art history and aesthetics at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. SJEF HOUPPERMANS, is Professor of Modern French Literature at Leiden University, Holland. He is co-editor of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui. He is also the author of Samuel Beckett et Compagnie, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi, 2003. SEÁN KENNEDY, is Government of Ireland Scholar at National University of Ireland, Galway. MASAKI KONDO, a graduate of the Department of English Literature, Tokyo University, Masaki Kondo is Professor of English at Meiji University and Lecturer in English Literature at the Graduate School, Sensyu University. NADIA LOUAR, Phd Student, French Department University of California, Berkeley. DIANE LUSCHER-MORATA, Swiss National. PhD Candidate at the University of Reading, UK. 622

ANTHONY MACRIS, teaches creative writing and textual theory at the University of Wollongong. WILLIAM MARTIN, is a Ph. D student in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. YANN MEVEL est Professeur de Lettres (Rennes). Thèse de Doctorat consacrée à l'imaginaire mélancolique dans les romans de Beckett. NAOYA MORI, is Professor of English at Kobe Women’s University, and Seto Jr College, Japan and Secretary of the Beckett Research Circle, Japan. ANGELA MOORJANI, is Professor of French and Affiliate Professor of Women’s Studies at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She has published widely on Beckett. DAVID MUSGRAVE, is a Sydney Poet. He Received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Sydney, Australia. AMIR ALI NOJOUMIAN, lectures in the English Department Shahid Beheshti University Tehran, Iran. MINAKO OKAMURO, is Associate Professor of Theatre and Film Arts at Waseda University, Tokyo. TAKESHI KAWASHIMA, is a doctoral student at the department of English and Comparative Literature of Goldsmiths College, University of London. JAMES PHILLIPS, is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Tasmania, Australia.

MICHAEL A. RODRIGUEZ, received his Master of Philosophy in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin. He is a PhD 623

Candidate at Florida State University. He assisted S.E. Gontarski on The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, and he is editorial assistant for the Journal of Beckett Studies. HANNES SCHWEIGER, studies in German and English Literature and in German as a Foreign Language at the University of Vienna and at the University College Dublin. He is currently working on a PhD on GB Shaw in the context of Austrian/German modernism and English modernism. RUSSELL SMITH, lectures in English at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. PAUL STEWART, is an Assistant Professor of Languages at Intercollege, Nicosia, Cyprus. SABBAR SAADOON SULTAN, is Assistant Prof. and Head of the Dept. of English, Ai-Isra University, Amman, Jordan. ANTHONY UHLMANN, is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney and convenor of the Samuel Beckett Symposium 2003. DIRK VAN HULLE, lectures at the University of Antwerp Belgium. PETER A WILLIAMS, is Honorary Research Associate, Department of English, University of Sydney, Australia. ANDREA YATES, is a Ph.D. candidate and teacher at the University of Rhode Island in the United States.

624