Beckett and Eros Death of Humanism
Paul Davies
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Beckett and Eros Death of Humanism
Paul Davies
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08
Beckett and Eros
10.1057/9780230286931 - Beckett and Eros, Paul Davies
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10.1057/9780230286931 - Beckett and Eros, Paul Davies
Paul Davies
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Beckett and Eros
Death of Humanism
10.1057/9780230286931 - Beckett and Eros, Paul Davies
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 0–333–68162–2 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC, Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0–312–23407–4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Paul, 1962–
Beckett and eros : death of humanism / Paul Davies.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–312–23407–4
1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sex in literature. 3. Myth in literature. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Gender identity in literature. 6. Humanism in literature. I. Title.
PR6003.E282 Z62474 2000 848'.91409—dc21 00–023341 © Paul Davies 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Preface
vi
Acknowledgements
viii
Note on Texts and References
ix
Part I Womb of the Great Mother Emptiness: Mythopoetic Contexts for Beckett 1
Beckett and Eros: Mentioning the Unmentionable
2
On Mythographic Reading
23
3
Elysium of the Roofless
39
4
Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen
53
5
On the Descent of the Soul
72
6
Complete Being
90
Part II
3
The Dark Stream: Beckett's Mythologies of Eros
7
What it is their Humanity Stifles
111
8
After the Second Crisis: Entering the Cylinder
125
9
Krapp's Tapes and the Myth of Recurrence
143
10
Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation
152
11
Care and Punish
166
12
Madness of the Norm
179
13
Open Sky Mind
197
14
That Unheeded Neither
215
Notes
224
Bibliography
234
Index
237
v
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Contents
This book is about a pervasive mythic constant across the work of Samuel Beckett. It is not a study of any one period or genre. Some works are mentioned more often than others, and readers may be surprised to find relatively little on the well-known works such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. If I have concentrated on the later works it is partly in an attempt to make an approach to them easier. Some of the plays that proved almost impossible to stage, and many which are hardly ever staged anyway, nevertheless reward the curious reader. I believe when they are read in the light of the mythic constant they will be seen to be of a piece with all those works that have made themselves more accessible to Beckett's audience (simply because they are established in theatre repertory or because they are novels and stories). The other reason the late works feature more than the earlier is that Beckett's art only really found its mature vocation after the turning point of which Beckett said that he had finally dehisced from his literary ancestors and started to write `what I feel'. I do not aim to prove a point and an interpretation against all odds, nor to test it against every one of Beckett's works as though it were a scientific hypothesis. The mythic constant, or mythograph, either convinces or it does not. The aim is to clarify this constant and to give as full an account of it as possible, showing the ways in which Beckett's work encounters and recounts the mythograph, and then leaving it up to the reader to decide how it affects the picture. The first part of the book is intended to be a partial exposition of the method of mythographic reading which has few ± but distinguished ± examples in current critical practice. This book consists of two sections. To understand the second section, about Beckett's works, it will probably be necessary either to read or refer to the first section, which directly introduces the background to the Beckett interpretations. The background section offers few direct individual readings of Beckett's works. This is intentional so that the perspective can be studied without the necessity to match the readings to the perspective all at the same time. But if the readings of the works in Part II are viewed in conjunction with the first section, the argument of the study as a whole will make `what sense it may'. vi
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Preface
Further it should be added that to understand the latter half of this book it will be absolutely necessary to read Beckett. There is no substitute for direct encounter with his work. Only a reader thoroughly familiar with the works will be in a position to decide whether or not the readings presented here add to their appreciation of them. Works to which I have paid detailed attention are: Eleutheria; The Unnamable; Texts For Nothing; All That Fall; Krapp's Last Tape; Roughs for Theatre and Radio; Words and Music; Cascando; How It Is; Imagination Dead Imagine; Eh Joe; Not I; That Time; Footfalls; As the Story was Told; Nohow On; Stirrings Still; neither.
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Preface vii
Thanks are due to Ulster University Faculty of Humanities for the leave granted to complete this book. There are so many people to whom I owe profoundest thanks for their inspiration and help that I cannot name them individually. This book is dedicated to the memory of Ted Hughes, whose death was announced shortly before the manuscript was finished. Acknowledgement is due to Faber and Faber for permission to reproduce the material quoted on pp. 96±9. The publishers wish to state that they have made every effort to contact all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
viii
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Acknowledgements
Quotations are from the editions and works named in the notes and bibliography. In cases of quotations from very short Beckett works, only one page reference is given, on the first occasion of the work being quoted within a chapter. In the notes the following abbreviations apply. CSPL, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. CSP1929±89, Complete Short Prose 1929±89. Footnoting has deliberately been kept light, so far as is consistent with indicating sources and, where appropriate, further references. Short references (name and page number) are given for all works whose full details are carried in the Bibliography. Full references to any works not cited in the Bibliography are given in the notes.
ix
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Note on Texts and References
Womb of the Great Mother Emptiness Mythopoetic Contexts for Beckett
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Part I
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Beckett and Eros: Mentioning the Unmentionable
Myth is the history of the soul. The history of the ego, with its succession of kings and empires, technologies and wars, is what we were all taught in school. William Irwin Thompson When you listen to yourself, it's not literature that you hear. Beckett
Incarnation equals incrimination Beckett's work, like Egyptian myth, relates the sexual life to the life of pure spirit. Both do this by delving into and exhibiting a mythology of incarnation. Incarnation has connotations religious and doctrinal. But in effect, what is meant by incarnation is equivalent to what is meant by the contemporary terms framing and signification. Incarnation is the setting of limits. Ego-identity, gender identity, national identity, all signify the hypostasis of incarnation, the occupation of a body, gender, family, nation. The usages of occupation in terms military, professional and domestic, re-echo the reciprocal mythologic relation between one's surroundings constructing one's identity, and one's incidence as such as a human being in the world. The causation of this state of being is sexual and spiritual. It is characteristically, one might say definingly, so, and this is where Beckett's work has such a powerful effect and compels where it is still thought most obscure. Being born is being an ego, so runs the ethos of a Westernised materialist world-picture. But Beckett unseats this most rooted of western confidences. The power to amaze and baffle in Beckett's art is equivalent to the obscure and similarly 3
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1
baffling power in myth, and like any absorption in the study of myth, encountering Beckett's work offers a challenge to this idea of being born, and of human location and agency. Our ordinary perception of time, for a start, is conditioned by exactly the factors involved in the mythology of incarnation. For the incidence of the human body is the measurer of time more nearly than are the clock and timetable. If the female cycle, the seasons, and the day±night cycle are regarded as initiating the incidence ± and incidents ± of the human biographic journey, from birth to death, we can see that in incarnation, cyclical time is replaced by linear time. Mythopoetic consciousness, by the same token, is replaced by teleology, and the idea of identity is straightaway instated, and guaranteed by a biography ± for instance stereotyped gender roles, career goals and a timetable of the stages of life. In such a situation it is not surprising that the non-linear mode of awareness and interpretation is passed over, because it is more likely to shatter than to confirm the very notion of the chronologic lifecourse. In some sense it is against the grain of the world as we are educated to know it. As if to prepare for the opening of the mythologic landscape of soul, Beckett records the discovery that human behaviour according to western European humanist codifications can be exposed as a farcical display, whether elaborate or simple, brutal or gentle, noble or pathetic. His works record exclusively the experience of a being who comes to the point of ceasing to see that this human behaviour has meaning in the accepted sense. When this point comes, one or more of the usual incentives to continued existence, such as personal survival, the accumulation of property, or of dependants, cease to be compelling. What has lapsed in this ceasing comes to stand as the former `meaning one sees in one's existence' before that meaning has ceased to be meaning. It follows that in the picture of human life as previously seen, personal worth amounts to surviving, reproducing, and finding what pleasure can be consistent with continued survival. Playing them off against one another, the work ethic and the pleasure-principle, `till death', literally, `do them part', is the vocation of the bourgeois order. In this matter Beckett is like Schopenhauer, and like the Buddha figure. Like them and others mentioned throughout these essays, he comes to the point of admitting the absurd limitations of seeing the business of existence as accumulating badges of ego-identity, these badges consisting of forms, masks, aims, achievements, the qualities of what is called life in human society. What, he asks with Schopenhauer,
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4 Beckett and Eros
is it all about, if one does not undertake replication, genetic or cultural, of oneself, or of the species? One might extend the question to the infertile as well as the unmotivated. If one `fails' to reproduce, is it a failure to pass a test required of us? In what sense is this socially acknowledged `failure' a failure? Fail better, Beckett might respond, as no other dare fail. Who sets the test? Who is empowered to determine the value of the results? Once it was the Judaeo-Christian God figure who set it, by saying Multiply and glorify Me. Now it is the genetic reservoir which issues injunctions over the airwaves to find a partner and expand/optimise the reservoir. Beckett, Schopenhauer, the Buddha ± in no sequence of priority other than that Beckett might be called the most recent of the non-dualist seers and the main subject of these essays ± dared to go into this noman's land of asking; asking just why does this assumption about the purpose of human existence continue unquestioned? Why acknowledge as necessary also this greedy race of acquisition, `killing and eating'?1 This question is regarded as bad manners still, notwithstanding an age of nihilism and atheism. A connected question is why did Beckett insist, so often to the point of being ridiculed, on total freedom from censorship in relation to language and subject matter? Not because he wanted to write libel or pornography, but because Beckett ± not just on sex or scatology ± was the mentioner of the unmentionable. His literary contents are hardly mentionable in the same breath as `normal human life'. It is a gross offence to a society that holds its whole sense of identity in the capitalist corporation, embodiment, to speak of `the thing itself, unaccommodated man' as Beckett does. His drama and stories are the grander equivalents of four-letter words in face of the western humanist ego and its constructions, ranging from self and family through to nation and state. Identity facing and fearing the identity of another is at the root of conflict whether personal or international. To question this identity is, then, possibly a development that would not seem naive or idealistic, rather to cut diseased wood out at the root. Nevertheless, to question the very identity that is in equal measure fought for and feared, is to question perhaps the very last `sacred cow' remaining to our hedonisticnihilistic postmodern culture. Beckett saw the emergence of his literary `four letter words' as the symptom of his total censorability, and, in that, he saw his works' necessity for being. The normal arguments against censorship in the arts seem not to account for the exaggerated blows Beckett dealt against censors on behalf of Joyce, himself, and others.2
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Mentioning the Unmentionable 5
Mentioning the unmentionable meant bringing close the question why it is unmentionable, and according to what injunction or law, imperative or prejudice, it is so? Answers were implicit in the Roman tenet about the nobility of suicide. This is where the argument seems inevitably to lead. In face of the emptiness of human endeavour (even that overworn phrase is used too often to explain an evasive too little), what better solution than selfcaused euthanasia, or else that caused by a sympathetic hand? One of the mysteries of Beckett is precisely in this matter. Beckett's imagination doesn't experience the idea of suicide as a clear solution. `You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on'. In terms of question and answer (the socratical dialogue that disconcertingly limits the frame of enquiry), the answer to one's recognising the meaninglessness of identity-ideals seems not to be self-elimination, despite a certain `logic' of argument to that effect. At the point of real despair, the moment in which egoidentity is seen to be the farcical display of a social machine, what keeps us hanging on? Beckett, Schopenhauer and the Buddhist each ask this in their own way. Having come close to death in the realising of suffering and impermanence of self and its structures, nevertheless (in these three contexts at any rate) voluntary death of the body isn't hastened as the logical outcome. What keeps even the disillusioned in this situation? Surely it can't be hope? Surely not anticipating expenditure of the meagre balance of pleasurable sensations and experiences? What is it in life that preserves its exponents? Paradoxically it might be exactly what is most often associated not with life but with death: the unknown. Certainly it is the unknown which links living and dying in the mythology of incarnation. And this is why I propose that it is Beckett's root myth. It might also explain Beckett's answer to Bollmann (who had asked him about suicide): `Only when one has given life its full share can one leave it.'3 It has been said equally often that it is the nature of life to suffer and also that it is in the nature of life to thrive. Common to both these categorical opposites is the phrase `nature of life': a tempting conclusion it would be, then, to say that the nature of life is to suffer and, not or, to thrive. Or that suffering and thriving are much less useful models of living being than their widespread usages would promise. Arguments about the nature of life and suffering have seemed for a long while to be dominantly existentialist, but with the decline of existentialism it became fashionable to consider that being born and dying, not to mention the accursed existentialist baseline, living, were somehow not fit subjects for discussion, restrained by a silent censor. It
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6 Beckett and Eros
is no coincidence that birth and death are precisely the experiences, along with spiritual and erotic experience, that are stubbornly alinguistic, pre-cultural. They present that cocktail of problems which theology and philosophy see as their own ground. It is their prerogative, as well as Beckett's, to try to mention the unmentionable. It might occur to us the more readily to include aspects of sexuality in this extra-linguistic realm if it were not for evidence of culturally-coded experiences in sex which brings it into the linguistic sphere. We encounter a massive cultural investment at this point in the exploration. More than half our culture has invested nearly totally in the value of the linguistic and, predictably enough, it is unhappy about acknowledging the incursions from extralinguistic capacities of human being in the world. It is in this situation that psychoanalysis found its birth, and still experiences its own destruction. And accusations directed against the alinguistic capacity always use epithets such as the irrational, the barbaric, the uncivilised, the inane, the demonic, or the unspeakable; of the terms mentioned, this last is the most emotive, morally loaded, and yet the most referentially accurate. We might recall here, and shall inevitably return to, Beckett's mention of `the unspeakable ancestor of whom nothing can be said.' Beckett plays a curious series of variations on that theme. After psychoanalysis, do we readily swallow the casual yet overbearing judgement that the unspeakable is the uncivilised? Some of the unspeakable may well be uncivilised, but not all. And neither can the speakable, as such, any better be pronounced as the measure of the civilised. What the guardians of the civilised choose to censor in literature, its authors can certainly speak, at least as far as the proof stage. Beckett's works passed that stage, largely owing to the rage of and for modernism, and because of the dogged efforts of Beckett himself and his partner Suzanne Dumesnil. The essays here are attempts to explore this question. They relate to Eros in the direct way in which any concern with birth, death and sexual love (reproductive and non-reproductive) and being born `astride a grave', relates to it. They are not excursions into sexual biography so much as incursions into the potentially eroticised encounter between being and non-being. Beckett's sexual biography can now be read about with a detail which while still scanty is more than was open to any previous readership. The events of that biography do not differ so much in Beckett's case from thousands of similar cases, and this is why I don't intend to make much comment about them in this book. Beckett made himself exceptional not in his sexual relationships, exploits and
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Mentioning the Unmentionable 7
predilections but rather in his literary achievement. We might then ask, what is it in his literary achievement that compels on the preliterary level ± as well as the literary ± in our own experience? What did he say about Eros, and from it, that only his work, not his life and letters, could reveal? We are proceeding on the axiom that his work is the best of him, the deed in which he literally surpassed himself. In this case we need to look at precisely what he surpassed himself with, not at what he settled for in ordinary existence; however interesting the news from that source might be, it is already available.4 I suggest his work opened an imaginative realm in which ordinary problems changed their structure to such an extent that ordinary means to discuss them no longer apply and the moment comes when only the soul-world is an appropriate means of facing soul-problems. In other words, the tools of interpretation must be adapted, through close accustomed contact, to the world in which they are to be used. Beckett's diaries are little help for this, and few of his adventures do more than cast dim light. But the picture of the human soul opened up in his work is extraordinary, and extraordinary in just those matters concerning which popular fiction, music, art and culture often fail to be so. When we say that myth is the history of the soul, we are looking at a panorama which includes cultural practice, interpretation, and life-choices in equal measure, but which is not limited to the boundaries imposed by them. It is little wonder that Beckett's appeal, to those who appreciate him, is at once startlingly personal and over-archingly general and universal. The necessary adaptation of existing tools of interpretation is a process I define as mythographic reading.
Beckett and theorists It is undeniable that many who appreciate Beckett know nothing of the theory with which commentary and criticism has surrounded him and his writings. Any proper appreciation of him must, I am convinced, salute the fact that it is not necessary to have internalised this theory, nor even to be capable of doing so, in order to understand Beckett. If knowing the theory were a prerequisite it would be a tacit insult not only to all the readers and audiences I refer to, but to Beckett as well, who professed himself hardly bothered with the interpretations, `this academic madness'.5 However disingenuous a dismissal of theory from him might appear (and I am not certain that it does appear disingenuous), the evident fact that emotional involvement was as high a priority for him as intelligence was, should demonstrate that his point might as
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8 Beckett and Eros
well be taken at face value. A critique of culture which we could see as inspired by Beckett and appropriate to the spirit of his work might well include a refusal of the indurated practices of criticism, especially if they seem not to be in touch with the emergence/emergency evident to members of that culture. It is axiomatic that the creative arts, not only theory, are the scene of that emergence. No new writing about Beckett can be useful that simply repeats the known categories of theoretical discussion. Accordingly I pay minimal attention to digesting and evaluating the ebb and flow of the critical debate about Beckett which has gone through several well-defined generations each with its own bias and responding to vogues in the development of literary theory itself. Beckett's art and his life-work in various ways not connected with his art6 were dedicated to waging a sort of war against entrenched modes of control-oriented thought. Since the history of literary criticism and theory, along with the curricular rules surrounding its study in Western universities and schools, has recently been held up by the theorists themselves as the record of a patristic, colonial, gender-specific, capitalist model of social order, it need come as no surprise that the heretical practice of Beckett's fiction and drama is devoted to exhuming hidden authoritarian orthodoxies and leaving them exposed as what they are ± dogmas. And where the hidden assumptions are too current and influential to be called buried, Beckett exposes them, witnesses their collapse, and buries them himself. Beckett is a master of exposing assumptions, and the hidden assumptions of the academy were his enemy quite as much as were the talismans of humanism and realism haunting his own background and education. Any further useful study of Beckett must aspire to the attitude of which one could say, after Blanchot, that `it helps man to understand himself by helping to modify the conditions of all understanding'.7 Marxism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis have all found Beckett variously absorbing. What I propose as mythographic exegesis has something of a different twist. The theories of myth generated in the literary theory establishment have not exhausted the potential of mythological analysis, possibly not really appreciated it, and that potential is only contacted through the action of myth itself, which is, if you like, the polyphonic play of the metaphorical organ, the creative imagination. Studying Beckett requires the activation of the mythological organ, and enjoying his work, whether it is read or seen in the theatre, is an effect of his art making contact with this mythological capability. Over the last eighteen years Ted Hughes, whose respect for the modern academy appeared to be practically as scant as the reputation in which
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Mentioning the Unmentionable 9
his critical writing was held by it, singlehandedly found a method of interpreting literature which seemed to spring directly from an experience of the mythopoetic imagination itself. It is obvious from the growth of his interpretative writing that he found this method not only congenial to his own art, but naturally extending into an instrument of extraordinary power, as he investigated first Shakespeare and then other English poetry, notably Coleridge, with its means.8 In essence the method implies reading across a demiurgic account of the so-called sex war from prehistory through to the modern world, and while it has no explicit links with gnostic thought, it is profoundly relevant in reading or de-reading the supposed dualism, say, of high art and popular culture, or of sacred and secular, and it bears a direct relationship to feminist theory while being emphatically not an exhibition or repetition of that theory. Hughes' exposition of the ambiguous relationship of human life to the Great Goddess of Complete Being, a relationship spanning extremes of longing and hatred, applies with resounding conviction to Shakespeare's work, and such is Hughes' confidence that he takes the account of Shakespeare merely to be the spiritual diagram of the life-history of literature in English since the Reformation. Poetry as such, says Hughes, is the record of the struggle of `male' ego-identity in relation to this complete Being of which he is at once enamoured and afraid. Camille Paglia confirms this view of poetry: `since Romanticism art and the study of art have become vehicles for exploring the West's repressed emotional life, though one would never know it from half the deadening scholarship that has sprung up around them. Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion. Every word is a palpitation of the body.'9 Hughes' canvas is large, as befits the mythographic imagination: the myths of Dumuzi and Enkidu, Isis and Osiris, Tammuz and Inanna are taken as originary, replicated in modern literature under different designations. And where Hughes says that poetry as such is the record of this struggle, Paglia has gone further, saying history as we presently configure it is also just such a cultural record as Hughes' account describes: Chthonian nature, embodied in great goddess figures, was Christianity's most formidable opponent. [. . .] The chthonian superflux of emotion is a male problem. A man must do battle with that enormity, which resides in woman and nature. He can attain selfhood only by beating back the daemonic cloud that would swallow him up. [. . .] Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female
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10 Beckett and Eros
Mentioning the Unmentionable 11
Hughes' massive exploration was not undertaken for a simply historical reason. A combination of the mystifying traits of English poetry and drama, and the entrenched European legacy of Christianity, gave him the feeling that there must be a reason for the tenacious assumption that life and creation were somehow irretrievably impure. The doctrine of original sin was not really enough to explain it, or at least that doctrine seems to have come from a larger general family of doctrines in which there is a dichotomy of moral qualities; and resulting from that dichotomy, the establishing of hatred for physical life, and therefore particularly for its occasion, the female in capacity of erotic attraction, conception and parturition. For Beckett and for Hughes, the beginning of the trail of Eros and Psyche is found in an attitude of mind which is prepared to ask where the fearful, envious, judgemental relation of male to female originates, given that love, not hatred, inspired the myth of Eros. Hughes' account is specially significant because it expounds Being as singular in essence, and in devolution sexualised. It combines ± not fortuitously ± the matter of Being in itself (ontology) with the genderedness of Being's myths by which incarnate beings strive to understand themselves. It is special in relation to Beckett because where Shakespeare imaged the contention of a Reformation Puritanism against the Goddess of divine Love, so Beckett imaged in his own mythography of himself and his works the effects of very like forces in his own Protestant background, variously called by him `severe love', `savage loving', `alert mourning'.11 With such similar incentives to create a furnace of imagination against repression, it is no wonder that Hughes' account of this struggle should have such repeated echoes in the world of Beckett. For many cultures, body-hatred is a fact whose grounds taboo forbids the exploration. Bataille writes: The dirty words for love are closely and irrevocably associated with that secret life we lead concurrently with our profession and loftiest sentiments. These unnameable names formulate the general horror for us, in fact, if we do not belong to the degraded class. They express it with violence, and are themselves violently rejected from the world of decency. No communication is conceivable between the two worlds.12
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nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from bellymagic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilisation.10
Beckett's work as a through-composed myth, and Ted Hughes' mythographic pursuit of Complete Being, are bold steps in understanding this dichotomy between two worlds. Hughes starts by saying that the the dichotomy itself is mistaken vision, the two worlds are an illusion. The fact of the matter is Complete Being, the Unity of existence, and simply following that without accepting it is the shadow of fear which is experienced only by the fabulous Other, or non-existent ego. That non-acceptance is the root of evil, hatred and violence, according to Hughes.13 For where in the state of Complete Being there is no other than the one reality, there can, it follows, be no `Other' that is not a pretence or a phantom; and similarly unreal is the corresponding insecurity felt by the ego-agency apparent under that name. (We might pause to compare the very similar state of the figure of the Vampire, whose existence is quite as precarious as the Cartesian ego, and symbolically endowed with a supernatural power combined with a preternatural vulnerability.) In the eyes of the Great Goddess, according to Hughes, the male ego is profoundly weak, and weak in exact proportion to its refusal to recognize its contingency. The ego which recognises its contingency immediately becomes an agency of strength, strangely increasing in capacity as it dies in recognition of its illusory nature. That death is the symbolic sexual union described in the Sumerian tales and after. Hughes sees it repeated in the tale of Venus and Adonis, which in turn he sees Shakespeare revisioning in nearly all his dramatic works.
Life: its origin in the unknown To understand Beckett's myth of Eros and incarnation it is vital to accept the currency of two contrary usages of the word life, first and foremost so that we are not fooled by the illusion of inconsistency attending the use of a word in contrary senses. Of the first meaning of life we can take Beckett's remark as representative: `failure is [the artist's] world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living'. The second meaning we can take from Bram Van Velde's words: `This mechanical world is asphyxiating us. Painting is life', or `All I have sought to do is not to betray life'. Not only do the two usages suggest there is a separate significance for each one but also, far more crucially, they force us to recognise that the one meaning of `life' is at constant pains to annihilate the other. Life as indurated routine is the killer of the Living principle. Where Beckett says `Habit is a great deadener' in Godot, he could just as easily have said life (in the first
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12 Beckett and Eros
sense) is a great deadener. The sense of life as habit is categorically opposed to the sense of life as life-giver, creator spiritus. It could be said that one of the horrendous and necessary ironies of the artist's existence as Beckett understood it is that the infinitely desirable, and the infinitely undesirable, should have to be referred to by the same word. But so it is. From reflecting on this distinction something further becomes clear about the shared aesthetic of Beckett, his friend Van Velde, and Jung with whom they were earlier associated. The meaning of life which attracted these artists and thinkers, the opposite of the deadening edifices of ordinary `life', was indissoluble from the equivalence of the living and the unknown. This expands our understanding of Beckett's perspective beyond that of a pessimist materialist, addicted to a sort of repose in despair. For it is out of the unknown that creativity comes. If, Van Velde said of his own work, these gouaches live at all, it is because they are true, they derive from life. They are born of the unknown ± and not of habit, or intention, or of some recipe.14 This way of saying it ensures that the unknown is understood as origin of the living. If we compare what Beckett similarly has to say about habit, intention, knowledge, the control of the intellect, we can see that he is staring his own humanist culture in the face and denouncing it as dead. He insists the real creativity of his career began when he gave up the illusion that `equipping yourself intellectually' would bring success. Quite the contrary. `I had to eliminate all the poisons. . . . when I wrote the first sentence of Molloy, I had no idea where I was heading. And when I finished the first part, I didn't know how I was going to go on. It all just came out like that. Without any changes. I hadn't planned it, or thought it out at all.'15 Why should it seem necessary to emphasise how close the meaning of the unknown is to the meaning of creativity and life to Beckett and his like-minded contemporaries? I think because the emphasis of our culture, as of his, is all on the side of saying that the unknown is at worst the abyss following death, or the incoherence of idiocy, or at best the white space into which a schedule must impose itself. In a humanist culture, as Beckett spotted, life is identified with intellectual equipment and the exaltation of competence. In the art to which Beckett aspired, life is identified with none of these things as a first principle, but rather with the unknown as the creative level out of which the vital future
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Mentioning the Unmentionable 13
14 Beckett and Eros
Up to 1946 I had always wanted to know, in order to be able to act. Then I realised I was going about things in the wrong way. [. . . .] Up to that point I had thought I could rely on knowledge. That I had to equip myself intellectually. That day, it all collapsed. [. . .] I'm not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I'd been. I began then to write down the things I feel.16 An artist's fidelity to what he feels is a pledge to the unknown. Such a pledge is not a case of refusing to face the stultification of the known, nor is it the male refusal of the Great Goddess, or terror of the so-called dark well (in King Lear's demented judgement, `sulphurous pit'). The female energy is on the contrary a figure of the creative unknowable, feared and resisted by realists and compulsive moralists alike, and loved by artists. The creative imagination is, literally, the `mother of invention' and Beckett along with others made that clear in the `Poetry is Vertical' tract when they denounced materialism as `the sterilisation of the living imagination'. For Beckett in quest of life as the unknown, the concern to seek silence must add up to much more than simply peace and quiet, or aural silence. With Beckett's abandonment of `reliance on knowledge', we are put in mind of the cessation of cultural noise, the ceasing of the clatter of ego-states whose existence relies so much on a languagescaffolding to make its precarious temporary sense. This expanded understanding of silence, of its metaphorical `resonances', is the impulse overshadowing Beckett's search for silence. It could be no other, if we consider the context of his search ± that of the writer's life. It could only mean gross hypocrisy (silence-bound, the artist still produces words!) or else what I take it he does mean, the dismantling of the accustomed glories of the discourse-machine in all its historical and cultural pomp and circumstance. In this sense a painter or musician or poet or thinker, anyone seized of the essential of life, and the appetitive destructiveness towards it represented by `life', can indeed devote their existence to silence without incurring the charge of paradox or tautology. It turns out that the meaning of life for someone like Beckett or Van Velde is just as unmentionable as the meaninglessness of life is for the bourgeois.
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unfolds of itself according to its laws, without being manhandled, forced, or engineered into the daylight by humanist intention, which translated usually reads coercion.
Mentioning the Unmentionable 15
A prison, a paradise ±
Tell me, dear friend,
Beyond those gates never to be unbarred, where pass
A people of dreams,
This world, which now it seems?17
This question is asked by the poet Kathleen Raine. The Eleusinian myth of the descent of the soul, explored again in Romanticism and revived by Jung and the avant-garde, has analogies in Buddhist and Native American mythology and survives hidden in the Western mystery tradition. It is a means of rehearsing for death in meditation, and functions as a tool for comprehending the facts of suffering, old age and death, and the mysterious fact of sexuality that compels in one direction (mutual attraction and conceiving descendants in order to resist death) and repels in another (traps descended soul in the `mortal coil' or `prison-house'). The avenues explored by these essays take two apparently contradictory directions: one being the proposition that at the end of Beckett's `final analysis' of subjectivity, undertaken cumulatively throughout his literary lifetime, there is no remaining self following this analysis; and the other, the proposition that the pre- and post-existing soul undertakes a journey suggestively similar to that described by the Egyptians, the cult of Eleusis, and Neoplatonists; and that, undertaking this journey, the soul inevitably responds, and makes its attitudes apparent in a gesture, image or text which I propose to call a mythograph. These are the two directions. The question immediately asked is: if no self subsists, how is it possible to speak of a journey, descent, ascent, indeed of a lifetime at all? If there is no I, how can there be my story? We might begin solving this contradiction by saying that in fact the last illusion is the illusion of soul. Its journey is perhaps the most elevated picture of the relative world known to man; the soul is known at the very least as the meetingpoint of self, not-self, outer environment, history and social order. The last journey the soul makes before its own status is realised as the very last illusion is the one from disincarnation into incarnation, with its longing for existence in physical space and sensation, and its corresponding suffering, infliction of suffering, longing for liberation from suffering, and thence its progressive illusion of process from incarnation into disincarnation; as the Buddhists put it, sickness, old age and death:
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Habitativity and descent of soul
Craving culminates in grasping: that is, one takes over this feeling, identifies with it, and tries to repeat it. From this grasping, becoming occurs; [. . .] Becoming ends in birth, which, for us, translates as obtaining a body. Birth causes the appearance of old age, which finds its accomplishment in death, ending the cycle of the twelve interdependent links. [. . .] These links appear only as a manifestation of the mind that functions in an illusory mode.18 Whereas spiritual language often requires belief in the myth of the soul's journey, the essence of Buddhism presents together the two directions I referred to above. The dzogchen tradition maintains: All apparent phenomena of waking consciousness, dream states, the bardo state between death and rebirth and future lifetimes manifest yet are non-existent. Confusion comes about because we invest them with a truth they do not have.19 Throughout his work, Beckett raises exactly that question about identity: who is the I which has its claimed existence so summarily destroyed by Beckett's special literary and dramatic practice? The self's history and continuity, which grant the self its place in the world just as they do in an extended sense the soul its place in a metaphysical journey, is progressively eroded, and ends up denied existence altogether. This is entirely in accord with the picture of self given by the Buddhist Prajnaparamita Sutra (Heart Sutra), in which all attributes and qualities owned (in other words, possessed and confessed) by the ordinary sense of self in the world are declared non-existent. Pleasure, pain, hope, fear, desire, aversion, all fall into the void of non-reality. They do not even fall, for to fall would be to be granted the self-subsistency to fall. This is why the dzogchen Buddhists use the phrase `self-liberate into pure void'. Beckett as a Western-educated explorer of consciousness doesn't openly use oriental language to describe his insight. But when the elements of his texts are compared structurally with those of the Tibetan metaphysical tradition, or with the Upanishads, we find exactly the same procedures in play. In those traditions we also find, significantly, that the discourse of the nonexistence of self proceeds alongside a discourse of the journey of the soul, all without an overt sense of conflict or contradiction. In Beckett's case and the case of the metaphysical texts, we shall be asking how and why this apparent paradox can subsist unchallenged. For in the literary context of Beckett it certainly does subsist unchallenged, and in large measure likewise in esoteric metaphysics. If there is
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16 Beckett and Eros
no journey, and no self undertaking it that we can define by our own conditions, what sense is there in speaking of the journey? If no word speaks the reality, what word is the remotely right one, or even the least wrong one? Such speculations are as much with Beckett as with the Buddhist receptive to enlightenment.20 A precocious answer would be that the only self undertaking this journey is that which Beckett calls the `unthinkable ancestor', the self not defined by our own conditions. But the only method of unlocking this trapdoor is the mythographic one, in which the unthinkable ancestor becomes thinkable as soul. How is this picture of the void, of the world non-existent, which is offered by Beckett and the traditions mentioned, at the same time a place and a non-locality? The non-existent universe is nevertheless that fivestoreyed palace21 described by Dante, and likewise that universe inhabited, constituted, by the Buddhist deities and Western angels. Beckett's characters move in a groundless universe, `No ground but say ground'.22 Why is its mythology so unrelentingly that of the here and the simultaneously not-here? And how does it impinge on the ordinary life that Beckett, Dante and the Buddhists all emphasised as the genuine field of awareness, narrative, and communication? For it is indisputable that the world of the ordinary everyday is as close to these people as it is to the ordinary man. They all admit to living in an ordinary world. The matter of identity's relapse from locality, and following on that the eventual non-existence of ego-identity, is bound up with an enduring metaphorical relationship between body, location, space, territory, enclosure, incarnation, self and selfhood. Beckett called this relationship one of `habitativity'.23 In the language of analogy, the language of imagination, existence in the body is equivalent to domicile, territory, belonging in a place, and being somebody. Being nobody is belonging to no place. Kathleen Raine writes . . . from their hearts who pass,
The lifelong moment breaks
Into death's boundless now:
Shelterless their state, and ours.24
It is in this non-location that Beckett, too, lives, and at the moment of acknowledging this, it becomes necessary that the words life and living enjoy a meaning that does not depend on the chain of locality-identity signifiers just described as the topos of home location. For many first approaching Beckett, one could only die, not live, in non-locality. Similar critiques arise from a partial appreciation of Buddhist philosophy.
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Mentioning the Unmentionable 17
But in this book I suggest Beckett's art is precisely the art of finding in non-location. `My concern is with someone, or something, which is not there.'25 Beckett proposes the seeing of the ego-less witness, the `power to see before the eye is formed'; he proposes that there can be a radical change in perspective which disallows, dismantles, the ordinary assumptions about ego-structure implicit in a post-Cartesian worldview. It should be borne in mind that the mythographic consciousness which Beckett exemplifies and records is not answerable to the debate about mysticism and Gnosticism which disputes the monistic versus dualistic origins and consequences of Gnostic thought.26 My exposition of Beckett's work does not depend on whether Gnosticism is dualistic or monistic, nor does it interpret Beckett according to Gnosticism of either supposed type, but it is an exploration of exactly how his art is an instance of neither but a comprehension of both. Beckett's art is not theory, theology, nor debate. In Blake's sense, it is prophetic, in other words receptive and projective of the world of soul, the substrate of myth. The critical method best employed in studying works by Beckett is that for which the coinage oneirocriticism (the study of the relations between dream and narrative) is ideal.27 Beckett is not interested in socio-cultural information. So any appreciations and criticisms of his work which use the co-ordinates established by socio-cultural information are going to be in some inevitable sense beside the point, if not pointless altogether. This is what made Beckett say in the end, that whatever fun the critics might want to have with their industry, `let them'. Beckett's inscribed selves, the voices who speak his dramas and narratives, are the instruments of enquiry as well as the subjects of enquiry. It is important to state this because the normal practice of interpretation of literature assumes that a methodology is necessary and that the interpretation proceeds by making a hypothesis and giving evidence for it point by point in order to justify it to a panel of experts. Beckett expresses an entirely opposite attitude. There will be no more from me about bodies and trajectories, sky and earth, I don't know what it all is. They have told me, explained to me, described to me, what it all is, what it looks like, what it's all for, one after the other, thousands of times, in thousands of connections, until I must have begun to look as if I understood. [ . . . ] And man, the lectures they gave me on men, before they even began to trying to assimilate me to him! What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them. It's all the same to me, but it's no good, there's no end to it.28
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18 Beckett and Eros
Mentioning the Unmentionable 19
It's of me I must now speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don't concern me, that don't count, that I don't believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put and end to it, from doing what I have to do. The attempt to bring back such a report is not so much concerned with the reception or the consequences of that report in a public debate as keen to enter into the process of what is being reported as completely as possible. As Shelley remarked to Byron on the matter of searching for the irreducible principle of Life, `We ourselves are the depositories of the evidence of the subject we consider.'29 Before the difficult point comes at which the illusion of soul is seen to be just that, the last great illusion, it serves the seeker or explorer as a stair to another level or layer. The myth of the descent of the soul offers us a perspective on the condition of deadness within ordinary life, which is one of ordinary life's paradoxes.30 Knowing well enough the problem of impending death as cessation of the organism, the sentient being is nevertheless almost equally impressed by the sensation of dying within a supposedly living situation. The word death is as often used figuratively as it is literally, if not more often. When Beckett opens a narrative with `Birth was the death of him' he is pointing into this space. Birth pulls the being into the solidity of the illusion of separate existence, and an alienation occurs from the pure ground of unobstructed clear emptiness. The mythography of soul-descent is not an exotic belief-system but a tool for engineering in the realm of psyche, the region between subjectivity and reified extension. This is the world of soul, an intermediary technology, if you like, which works with the energy of poetic consciousness. Beckett is not asking us ± any more than the neoplatonic thinker is asking us ± to believe literally in a sort of scifi scheme of ascent and descent of the parcelled personality through worlds and hierarchies.31 He is asking us to occupy without
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Fifteen years' contact with Beckett's work deepens my conviction that if he was as unconvinced by established discursive practice as he appears to have been, there is scarcely any use hoping that that method will do anything to help us understand his writings. Bringing back a living report from the laboratory of awareness is another matter:
judgement an imaginative space, and to experience the effects of doing this.32 Along with life, birth and death, the idea of unbornness is systemic in Beckett's writings, and in the Platonic and Buddhist traditions. Whether or not the same conclusions are finally drawn, the imaginative structure ± the mythograph ± is closely similar. The story, becoming better known as Beckett studies reach their third generation, of Beckett's contract with Jungian therapy and his attendance at a lecture by Jung, illustrates just where his famous addendum to Watt ± `never properly born' ± originated. For Jung had concluded the lecture by saying that the incurable amongst his psychiatric patients were so on account of their inability to fully assent to the fact of having been born. Charles Juliet quotes Beckett: I have always had the feeling that somebody inside me had been murdered. Murdered before I was born. I had to find that person and try to bring him back to life. I once went to a lecture given by Jung. He talked about one of his patients, a girl. At the end, when the audience were filing out, Jung stood there in silence, and then he added, as if to himself, in amazement at a sudden discovery, `In fact, she had never really been born.' I have always had the feeling that I had never been born either.33 Mrs Rooney in the play All That Fall relates precisely the same event, adding that the `mind doctor' concluded `nothing can be done about those people'. In the mythographic system, incarnation is an equivocation point. So is it also in the language of Tibetan esotericism, dzogchen (and particularly fascinating in that it appears as the only metaphor in a largely imageless teaching). Here, the primordial perfection of existence is said to be unborn ± and this not in the mistaken sense that the only happy are those who have never incarnated, but that the fundamental quality of unbornness can invest any being whatsoever, visible or invisible: Our experience is unborn because when we look into the self who is experiencing the world we can't find anything, and when we look out everything is shimmering and alive, but without any essential self-substance because it is transforming all the time. That unfolding is undying or unceasing, since, because things have never been born, because they have never come into a separate, `true' existence, there is nothing there to die. [ . . . ] The mirror seems to be empty in itself,
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20 Beckett and Eros
Mentioning the Unmentionable 21
The meanings of unborn for the Jungian analyst, the dzogchen practitioner, and Samuel Beckett are, then, while slightly different from one another, yet closely related. The therapist considers it a human prerequisite to agree to having been born in order to reach capable adulthood and the related, accumulated, sense of identity. Hence Jung's great regret, or more precisely, his realisation of the limits of his therapeutic practice. He continually tried to expand it on recognising these inadequacies, and the more he tried to expand it the further he departed from the norms of orthodox scientific method. The Buddhist has a different attitude which proposes right from the beginning the potential to recognise the `unborn' state during incarnate life and seeing if that loosens the overlayings of conditioned identity that constitute samsara, the karmic chains. Hence unlike Jung he has freed the human state from the polarities of madness/no-madness. And Samuel Beckett, standing in self-enquiry between the two, has resolved to write of the event of shedding one identity and remaining in open questioning about the subsequent nature of life following that identity-collapse ± In the end, you don't know who is speaking any more. The subject disappears completely. That's the end result of the identity crisis.35 Realising that literally speaking one has of course, whether willingly or not, been born ± undergone the great separation of parturition ± one also still appreciates and responds to the residual, metaphoric soulcharge of the condition of shimmering unbornness, in which suffering, `grief, time and self so-called'36 have no reality whatsoever. From the point of view of the witness here, as Kathleen Raine writes, I stand condemned, being born,
To cast the human shadow;
We darken each our sun,
Who have not done, but are, that wrong.
Downcast on the ground,
The form of spirit
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but the surface of the mirror is always shimmering and full of images. The images seem real and yet they are unborn, they cannot be separated from their situation. They are devoid of separate, inherent existence. A traditional way of describing this is to say that all things exist within the womb of the great mother, emptiness.34
22 Beckett and Eros
Those words illustrate the two poles of actual spiritual perception. We can never speak of the either/or in the mythography of soul, but only of two points of view, the two directions of the path of return. The advantage of this perspective is that we can make sense of both optimism and pessimism and not stumble over a supposed inconsistency. The mythopoetic space of incarnation, then, is where the myth of soul-descent merges with the myth of sexuality. This mergence is what these essays seek to reflect in Beckett. The reason why Beckett and Eros stand at the grave of humanism is that the dissolving of self implicit in both events is, at the mythographic level, the shiver in the mainstay of Western culture, presaging its elimination.
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We are but do not know Save by a shadow Distorted, earthbound37
2
Since all forms of spirituality have dried up, modern artists are discovering their true role. Bram Van Velde The fall of a leaf and the fall of Lucifer are the same thing . . . It's marvelous, isn't it? The same thing. But the problem is, how to express that. Beckett
Mythographic representation The term mythography is not used here in the ordinary sense of the encylopaedic study of myths. Rather it indicates a graph or display of the action of mythic capacity, which is an intermediary communicator or isthmus between the cerebral and the emotional; between philosophy and creativity; between the discipline of analysis and the effects of art. A mythograph is a chart of the world of soul, the nearest thing to a chart, because soul, emotion, mood and affective colour are resistant to quantification and yet they record messages to the highest degree significant for our culture. Cultural commentary comes not only from theorists, but from artists and other seismographs of the soul world. Indeed, if a critic and an artist talk to one another, it is only in the world of the mythograph that they can do so. Otherwise their worlds are almost closed one to the other. On the subject of myth, and its closely related `hieroglyphic' mode of thinking, William Irwin Thompson writes: Myth in the Platonic tradition [is] a hieroglyphic mode of thought whereby the Archetypal forms and the sensations of the physical 23
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On Mythographic Reading
plane come together in a mode of consciousness in which the ego becomes empty to be filled with the Daimon. Since the root-ideas of myth are at a deep and basic level of consciousness, they are not always expressed in day-to-day casual descriptions, but when a person sinks into an imaginative reverie to write a book, or to synthesize the factual results of research, then he or she is likely to move into a more mythopoeic form of narrative, for even science can be a form of storytelling.1 I would go further and say even the mythic narrative is only one step towards the cessation of linear social coding; the narrative of soul being the last of the great illusions, it persists after literalism is already long abandoned; but in the end even soul, daimon, will not do. It is this extreme which Beckett's works seek to address: occupying the soul world, they nevertheless constantly press on its outer limits. For as long as the mythic plane is in operation, soul is the denizen, the identifiable witnessing consciousness. The ego takes second place to the daimonic self or soul, and from this apparent distinction in the mythic mode, there arises what Thompson calls the relationship with the spiritual twin: each one `lives the other's death, dies by the other's life', in the esoteric words of Heracleitus. [. . .] Like the twin souls of Gnostic mythology, when one half of the soul is incarnate, the other half remains above. [ . . . ] What is going on in all this religious mumbojumbo that is so foreign to the positivism of contemporary scholarship is a re-enactment of the history of the soul before the beginning of terrestrial evolution. The ritual of initiation in the bardo realm is just such a re-enactment which seeks to awaken the deeper memory of the soul and thus enable the initiate to become enlightened to the truth of existence. To remember, [he] must overcome the racial amnesia, the illusory history which locks him into a local time and place.2 This condition in which the witness feels locked in a local time and place is the `hypnosis of positivism' identified by the Verticalist Manifesto3; and alike the locked-in state of Beckett's jar/cylinder/pile of earth/urn. It is experienced mythically as immolation of soul. The entire humanities is an immolation edifice in which the soul is trapped. Beckett illustrated this situation on all levels: mind/self, immolated in skull; soul immolated in body weight and limits; collective soul immolated in the dark difficulty of a hypnotic but illusion-ridden world-picture that
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24 Beckett and Eros
prides itself on conferring dignity upon on a travestied version of the soul. What we find in the mythographic method with which I propose to read Beckett is that the cultural immolation technique of modern humanism, a collective hypnosis, is imaged as the burial of soul that is familiar in mystical philosophy. Beckett is affirming the poetic value of the mythographic mode without committing himself or the reader to any doctrine that might be contained in the myth. This new mythographic method fully compensates for the decline in the number of tools for interpreting mythic plane information; as Thompson writes: `In the old days of the scholarship of F. M. Cornford and Henri Frankfort, the expressions of mythopoeic thought were seen as products of a prelogical mentality, because Aristotle's law of the excluded middle was ignored, and one thing could be two things, or more, at the same time. Had the Platonic tradition in Western thought triumphed over the Aristotelian, then the linear misunderstandings of the polyphonic thought of myth might not have led us astray.'4 So what is proposed in Beckett's modern mythographic consciousness is what he outlined early on in his essay `Dante..Bruno.Vico . . . Joyce' when he said, contrary to orthodox western mentality, that `the only reality is to be found' not in the sense data of the so-called outer world, but `in the hieroglyphics of inspired perception' ± terms which had occurred to him in connection with Joyce's anti-linear experiments in writing. Most writing ± certainly the humanist account of lucid communication (in which dream and myth are anathema or madness) ± is held to occupy a linear paradigm, and it's a paradigm that extends beyond writing: What the written word is to the sensorium, the ego is to the entire consciousness, and the city is to the entire encirclement of nature. Writing, individuation, and civilisation are all parts of one cultural phenomenology.5 This is a phenomenology which the Buddhist dzogchen calls a phantom, illusion, error, responsible for the karmic chain of dependent origination. No wonder, then, that Beckett felt the way he did, and why his generic voice speaks so despondingly of its so-called life.
Mythopoetic function and planes In his definition of mythopoetics, Ted Hughes took trouble to describe different levels of literary representation. When and if it is clear what
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On Mythographic Reading 25
they are, and approximately how to read them, they make sense of aspects of Beckett's writings which don't always make sense when they're looked at from only one level. The realistic plane is the level most often applied and the one most familiar to us, the level of realistic representation of human situations. This is the level on which we look for plausible plots, that is, stories that make sense, which could be told as anecdotes; for well-rounded character studies; and for variety. We take it that on this level the more like the real world the fiction seems, and the more detail it can pack in that reinforces that impression, the better the fiction is. This level has some subdivisions which are all related to the main level. Psychological realism is one. Social relevance and absorption of a historical context is another. Construction such that each character is given consistent treatment and not changed, or left behind in the action, is another. One of the first formulations of the realistic plane of interpretation comes from Aristotle's Poetics: the idea of the unities of time, place and action. Although we tend to think that realism reaches its height in the nineteenth century, with novelists such as Zola, the principles basic to realism were quite old and already well in place in Shakespeare's age, which made it easy for Samuel Johnson to define Shakespeare as a realist with his motto `Nothing can please many and please long, except just representations of general nature'. But in Shakespeare's age the realist position, though present, was not dominant, and merely accounts for one of the planes on which he was active. Whereas an enormous amount of post-Renaissance literature sees to it that the most important realist criteria are respected, we find it obvious, as well, that the realist plane doesn't account for everything in the representation. The hint that another level of interpretation is going to be needed starts to be felt when we realise we are not dealing with familiar human interactions, but rather with actions and relationships charged with enormous symbolic and dramatic force. Beckett's works, like Shakespeare's, don't provide the reader and audience only with pictures of human negotiations, but more often than not with a level of emergency directly related to the extent to which the work is perceived to be tragic. At these moments of crisis ± it seems Beckett's works are forged directly from crisis rather than making crisis their main event ± the realistic plane seeks an extension; it veers into trajectories much larger, longer, faster, where the phrase `larger than life' might come to seem more than proverbially appropriate, and by this extension it threatens the world of realism. We might say that the realistic plane, at the
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26 Beckett and Eros
acutest crisis, reaches a ceiling which could be termed the tragic plane, the uppermost reaches of the realistic. Obviously, in a non-artistic arena of realism, such as the news media, the same emergency point is reached whenever serious crimes become the subject of a story. Their appeal, oddly, is that they threaten the confines of the normal real with some element of emergency, crisis, abnormality. And in both cases, fiction and news media, this largerthan-life element, reaching the ceiling of the realist space, breaks through it altogether and directly stops realism from being that cosy room of the plausible, the convincing and the normal. At these moments the TV set becomes the object of terror rather than comfort. The confines of the normal are breached and opened to the skies, opened to attacks from storms and hurricanes, monsters, from a place obviously quite as real as the normalised real world, but excluded from that world most of the time. Beckett asks us to image to ourselves a `ruinstrewn land', something well-known from our newscasts at the same time as utterly alienated from the world of the everyday. This hiatus is due directly to the incursion of the next plane in the series, the mythic plane, whose suggestion is that when the tragic incident is reached, when the dramatic force of the emergencies depicted outstrips the capacity of negotiation and speech, at that time realism shades off, and what comes next comes from the mythic or elemental plane. This plane could be called the source of deep or primordial motivations, a plane obscurely accessed just as often in the news media as it is in fiction and drama. Whatever affair is concerned, whether general or personal, whether treated by the media or by fiction, cinema and theatre, the mythic dimension is occasionally touched by all these forms of expression. And since it appears that, at such moments, realism is no longer of much use, and perhaps even seems a little absurd, almost unreally humdrum in face of the magnitude of the crisis, then we begin to ask whether these events might not best be read as coming from another plane. They're definitely coming from somewhere. If not from the realist, then perhaps from the mythic plane. Reading from this plane, we are looking at primal scenes of encounter, of approach and retreat, of domination and submission; if you like, from a point of view which can survey the essential games and strategies which underlie, or over-arch, the specific encounters between particular people that realist conventions portray. So the first `lesson' in mythical reading is that a particular constant on the mythic plane might be portrayed on the realist plane in numerous different ways. So different that without the mythical key, as
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On Mythographic Reading 27
it were, they would seem totally unrelated. When the realist plane is strained to breaking-point by tragedy, then the occasion becomes less important and its underlying mythical essence burns more brightly in the field of aesthetic vision. Is this where the terrible force of the tragic comes from at those moments? Is it also an explanation, in part, of why the Beckett work is so typically imbued with tragedy and considered as generically pessimistic? Shakespeare's plays are realist but also require a mythical vision in the watcher. We can recognise this from the fact that, looking over the plays and poems even on the realistic level only, we find recurring types of character, situation, and image. Even given the vastly differentiated worlds of his plays, we find recurrent patterns. Looking likewise at the entire range of Beckett's works, dramatic and non-dramatic, and allowing that Beckett's literary heritage is as far post-realist as Shakespeare's is prerealist, we can start to apprehend the same recurrence of the mythic plane. In any customary realist study of the works of Beckett or Shakespeare, when we start noticing the presence of recurrent motifs, then we are getting a vague indication of the mythic overtones, or underpinnings, of these narratives. While it is extremely unfair to conclude that all Beckett's plays and prose are telling the same story, some conjecture that they may be revolving the same mythic constants in varying ways will help us recognise what the idea of mythic plane information might mean. It is much more difficult to talk about than the realist plane. The mythic is in the obscurer parts of the psyche, labelled since the early part of this century the unconscious. Indeed, the history of aesthetics is largely the history of distinguishing the conscious and the unconscious in ways that are useful at the time. The distinction of planes is equivalent to the distinction between everyday psychology (the realist) and depth psychology (psychology of the unconscious, mediated by mythic events and symbols). Of the unconscious and its relationship to the imagery of soul, Ted Hughes says: [The soul] appears on that stage which I call the mythic plane, where events and figures and images come into focus from beyond consciousness, and where they perform, so to speak, in obedience to the preconscious laws of their association and meaning, indeed so much in obedience to those laws as to remain mysterious to the observer. The soul is that whole dimension, in its allegiance to those preconscious laws. In another sense the soul lives within that dimension like a creature within a universe full of other creatures. All ritual drama is drama about this `soul'.6
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This matter is obviously very important to any exposition of Beckett's ritual dramas (the term suits many of the later short plays) and his prose, which could well be called literature of soul. In relation to myth's `preconscious laws', we should recall Beckett's hope that his own work might come to explore the `pre-uterine' and `those palaeozoic profounds'.7
Self and its relation to the mythological If we go back to the ancient world, not only chronologically but also synchronically/geographically in the present, by investigating the spiritual teaching, dream life and myths of present indigenous peoples, we find an interesting difference between the ancient and the modern in the agreed level of fact. The ancient individual is found to be absorbed in the all-encompassing Unity of existence, a kind of holistic participation in the Great Nature, named variously in various traditions. In this mode of life the individual is not what the individual signifies to the modern or western civilisation, that is, it is not a being cut off from other beings, independent, liable both to the privileges conferred by a sense of freedom and the anguish entailed in experiences of isolation. In the ancient world a person is not valued for possessing independence but actually for the contrary, for total dependence on, and integration in, the Greater Universe of which he or she is organ or expression, even deed; apart from this humans actually have no existence whatsoever; here they are not cut off from the ancestors, the soul-world, the numinous, the creative and the metaphorical. They are one with it, with the flow, existing as a note in a chorus, or a tone in a chord, and crucially then, they are distinct as qualities in a complex whole but not separated as individuals from that whole. The very words individual and independent, characteristic of the modern self, imply the mechanism of splitting and separation, and this is the psychological factor nearly always present in humanist assertions of the value of autonomy, independence, and individual initiative, as well as in the orthodoxy of object-perception. Reflections in Pirsig's novel Lila relate to this matter, by suggesting a parallel between ontogenesis (development of the individual) and phylogenesis (development of the race): [I]t is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience.
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On Mythographic Reading 29
Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and found this pattern to work well, he quickly develops a skill and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it. [. . .] Only when [. . .] an `object' turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become aware of the deductive process. That is why we think of subjects and objects as primary. We can't remember that period in our lives when they were anything else. [. . .] This [is] why little children are usually quicker to perceive dynamic quality than old people, why beginners are usually quicker than experts, why primitive people are sometimes quicker than those of `advanced' cultures. American Indians are exceptionally skilled at holding to the ever-changing center of things. That is the real reason they speak and act without ornamentation. It violates their mystic unity. This moving and acting and talking in accord with the Great Spirit and almost nothing else has been the ancient center of their lives.8 Pirsig isolates a correlation between the process of conditioning by which we come to see objects as separate and split-off, and the process whereby our self, psyche and respondent individuality is seen to conform to the same `objectizing' regime. As he almost instinctively notes, the history of man from ancient to modern is paralleled in microscopic form in the family, where dependence is followed by independence in a sort of order of development, which proceeds according to the emphasis placed on these criteria at a particular time. Beckett invokes examples of these criteria and of their failure in the Sapo family `saga' that occupies part of the opening of Malone Dies, and recurs in How It Is.9 Between the two world-views there is a great difference as regards personal responsibility. In the perspective of the ancient world the individual does not have a separate existence (except of course relating to his physical organism, but even this is totally dependent on atmosphere and climate to maintain the belief that it can go where it likes). It follows that the power of decision is not vested in the individual mind but rather in its relationship with the Whole mind; the collective Unconscious, as Jung called it. This is precisely why decisions were taken by the use of divination, practised by oracles, seers, sages and prophetic traditions: `Suprahuman intelligence has from the beginning made use of three mediums of expression ± men, animals and plants, each of which pulsates in different rhythms. Chance came to be utilised as a fourth medium; the very absence of an immediate meaning in chance permitted a deeper meaning to come to expression in it.'10 In some cultures
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this sort of invocation is still the basic meaning of prayer. Here prayer is not the request for advantage to the individual from a personal God, but rather an invocation of the great order into which the person seeking guidance wishes to harmonise. For the supplicant in the ancient world, then, there was, literally, no individual for whose advantage a prayer could be said. It is in this condition, of invocation without individual, that the myth of soul is replaced by a cessation of the identity that persists even in soul,11 and this cessation is revealed in the dzogchen tradition of Buddhism and paralleled in Beckett's demolishing of humanist identity. Beckett's art, narrative and dramatic, is linked indirectly to the ancient world through the traditional medium of classical tragedy and much more directly by his artistic method, which I call mythograph. He is half in and half out of the world of divination, and this intermediate position connects him to the modern world, the opposite kind of world to that of the mythological; in the modern world, as they say, humans do not believe in superstition any more, but are free-thinking individuals whose highest responsibility appears to be the capacity to take decisions without recourse to fortune tellers, religion, or a higher order principle. Where there does exist a higher order principle it is always and only secular and social, rather than sacred or interior. Beckett's birth and death imagery is a gate between ancient and modern. Like Hamlet, the Beckett persona does not live in the world of the gods, but he receives a visit from the world of the gods; a crack in the carapace of individual self opens up to reveal the `ancestor' in the intermediate world between life and death. That breaching of the carapace is both the problem and the opportunity which occupies in varying ways all his works and sets the agenda for their effect on their public. The modern author in contact with a mythological tradition from the ancient world uses it to dramatic effect, with an eye forward and an eye back, to emphasise the great difference between the two types of insight. Anyone vulnerable, like May in Footfalls, to visitations from the spirit world, from the world of the gods which the modern world is about to forsake, is nevertheless detailed to become a modern spirit or postRenaissance human, or postmodern `head abandoned to its solitary resources', whose noblest characteristic is supposed to have been to take full responsibility for his own decisions and to act on them, thus defining himself according to humanist criteria as a real individual instead of a `distray' or `dreamer' type. This development, the intellectual faculty, is realised today, says Ted Hughes, as left hemisphere brain activity:
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On Mythographic Reading 31
Alignments of specialized energies behind left side and right side have implications that are only just beginning to be appreciated. Excluding imagery and emotion, and promoting the rational, analytical verbal formulation of life, in other words lifting the left side into dominance literally by suppressing the right, seems desirable in some situations. But where it becomes habitual, it removes the individual from the `inner life' of the right side, which produces the sensation of living removed from oneself. Beckett lives in both modes, asserting the primacy of the life of soul, but doing so by means of soul-pictures of the effect of left-brain overemphasis. Hughes' phrase `the sensation of living removed from oneself' is eerily appropriate to the state in which the vast majority of Beckett characters find themselves. He adds: Not only removed from oneself, but removed from the real world also, and living in a prison of sorts, since the left side screens out direct experience, establishing its verbal `system' as a hard ego of repetitive, tested routines, defensive against the chaos of real things, resisting adaptation to them.12 This shift of brain activity has a great part in what went to change the composition of self-awareness from the ancient to the modern worldpicture. The self, from being a boundaryless participant in the universal real, became an observer, thinking itself apart and precisely because apart, qualified to observe. The humanist is the rational man, from which followed the enlightenment mind of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which left the world of dream, myth, and the ancestors ever further behind in what came to be seen as the world of superstition ± at least that is how it appeared from the dominant point of view of the increasingly prevalent rationalising principle. But the `Beckett eventuality' (as we might be tempted to call it rather than the Beckett work, for the eventuality occupies author, text and reader equally) is to expose the impossibility of autonomous being. Knowledge of self is affected by the view of the self which you grow up believing. `The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought': Hamlet can know his fault, as he reveals in that self-analytic phrase, yet lacks the capacity to act which would complete his selfknowledge. Therefore, however true the recognition of his irresolution may be, it is still not complete self-knowledge, because it sticks in the realm of analysis without moving into its own possible future. Many of
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Beckett's males, like Hamlet, are stuck in the left-brain. The reason or one of the reasons why the Beckett male rejects women so strongly, even cruelly, is perhaps that their influence reminds him frustratingly of the complementary right-brain functions which are intuitive, and sensitive to aspects of the psyche which are neither rational nor irrational but an area of contact between those poles. Why does it remind him frustratingly? Because he is also aware of that side of his self, but has refused to deal with it. This is the tragedy and the felicity of his encounter with the great Goddess. Hughes writes of the male's refusal: [The male ego's] intellectual rejection of that unwanted half of the Goddess, and thereby that unwanted half of himself (and of life), is the tragic error from which his (and her) tragic fate explodes.13
Myth and the death force Mythographic reading offers new insights into Beckett's peculiar concentration on the fact of death. Again we can see that although traditional forms of tragedy would steer our awareness towards death simply owing to the subject matter, Beckett shows a more involved interest in the meaning of the death process and the death force itself. Again, it is precisely because the view of humanity changes so drastically once the spirit-world is excluded, as it is by modern scientific orthodoxy, that death comes to have such a correspondingly different meaning. Consider three accounts of humanity given by differing traditions. The Bible: Man is made in the image of God. Shakespeare: What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god ± the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.14 The twentieth-century English painter Francis Bacon: I think that man now realizes he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. All
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34 Beckett and Eros
Compare these and it will be clear that, in death, the ceasing of life as we commonly recognise it will have radically divergent implications depending on the view of humanity which the witness takes in the first place. Beckett, being on the edge of leaving behind the old world of man as the image of the spirit-world, and witnessing aghast the new world in which a separate detached ego is put in the position of total responsibility, is in a strange position vis-aÁ-vis death. He resembles Hamlet again: he looks at it from all angles and considers, from the angle of the rationalist sceptic, what could possibly follow it; from the angle of a ghost-haunted vision, what horrors might lie in wait for one who has died with unfinished business; and from the angle of pure speculation, what harm could possibly result from suicide if not for the fear that something will indeed happen to the soul after such a suicide. Given that, the fear must after all be well founded, even amongst atheists. Such are the rationalist's speculations. Beckett, like Shakespeare, goes further than this, getting his narrators talking on the subject of graveyards, in graveyards, like Hamlet face to face with the skulls of which one is the skull of a former friend. Few scenes could bring a person closer to the shock of the distinction between a physical body with life and a physical body from which life has evaporated. The weight is the same, but beyond that the difference is huge and yet completely unaccounted for by a rational or mechanical model of the human. From that conception of humanity the living principle is excluded, in the way proposed as the `laboratory standard' behind Beckett's group of texts Imagination Dead Imagine; and, as in Damien Hirst's presentations of dead animals in formaldehyde, the aim is to try to suggest there is no difference between the living and the dead. Yet no-one stops there who has seen a living being expire. And Beckett cannot stop at a scene in which there is `no way in, none out'.16 So Beckett's death imagery, his preoccupation with near-death, beforedeath, before-birth, illustrates a threshold between the ancient and modern world, imaged forth in the mythographic suggestion that ± as Owen Barfield said ± a living creature is held together, kept from mere riotous multiplication, only by its death force. It is the skeleton that binds the body together and keeps it on the earth. It is the force we acquire from
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art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself.15
On Mythographic Reading 35
Hovering between life and death, between solidity and spirituality, this sort of awareness pervades Beckett's important works, and absorbs itself in and concerns itself equally with material, semi-material and immaterial; between (i) `a shimmering as of bones'; (ii) living flesh; (iii) visionary experience, and (iv) spirit. It is imbued with the apprehension that to be alive is simultaneously to wear out, that life serves no purpose unless it wears out and dies in the process of supporting the life of the planet of which it is a part. The ancient world saw spirit everywhere. The modern world sees matter everywhere. The sort of ambiguous stage represented by Beckett's mythographic consciousness seeks for matter in order not to confuse it with spirit, so as to find a way, perhaps, of seeing life as a symbiosis of both solidity and immaterial force. That remark of Barfield's bears thinking about again: the skeleton is that most solid and nearest-mineral attribute of the human body, the closest element to death both physically and in popular iconography. Without this, none of the living properties of humanity and none of its acts would be able to manifest. Humans would be immobile couch potatoes, without structure, without motion, without the capacity to respond to the incoming dictates or invitations presented from the future possible world for us to actualise. It is a function absolutely essential to life that this skeleton should be hard, nearly dead, a structural frame to support life. `He comes and goes as he pleases, his great balls and sockets clacking',18 says Beckett in Malone's voice. The skeletal function is what gives such finally negative force to the vernacular judgement that someone is spineless or lacks backbone. Here the death force is regarded even in popular language as being essential to the life process, even essential to its enjoyment. It might not be irrelevant to reflect also on the moral, not only physical, connotations of the word spineless used as a derogatory term. This distinction, between solidity and death on the one hand and fluidity and life on the other, is a particularly suitable mythograph for a situation in which the protagonist is so constantly preoccupied with the possibility of non-existence and abdication of responsibility, while yet being still alive and in a position to take decisive action for the sake of life, life individual and life collective. Isolated here is Beckett's mythograph. The meaning of ceasing to be, the meaning of death, is not at all clear when one stands at the threshold between the ancient world and the modern. In the mythographic
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having, or having had, a skeleton, which makes constancy and stability possible.17
36 Beckett and Eros
imagination, the meaning of the word death crucially depends on what it is that dies. This is as true in the mythographic interpretation of literature as it is in esoteric psychology.19
The intrinsic or defining advantage of mythic plane representation is that, as in the case of living and dying, it can allow an ambivalence not to amount to a contradiction. The language of soul which exists on the mythic plane allows the attraction and the repulsion which the soul in its dual state necessarily feels; as Heracleitus said of souls, `We live their death, they live ours'. In such a situation it is possible to say that when incarnation on the material plane is in question, then it is a sexual situation, whereas when incarnation from the mythic or spiritual plane is in question, then the matter is looked on with dread from the metaphysical planes while still with longing from the physical. This goes some way to explaining why Beckett's attitude to sexuality has for so long been considered either inconsistent or warped: the expectation on the non-mythic plane is for a yes or a no to life and all that it engenders and is engendered by. When the planes merge into one another, as they do in art, or in spiritual practice, or in dream, the discourse cannot be of the yes or the no, but only really between the yes and the no. At that point the flexibility exists to record messages coming from manifest life and the unmanifest potential for life, all at the same time. On this basis, unfathomable statements like these from the Texts for Nothing become self-explanatory: An instant and [the lids] close again, to look inside the head, to try and see inside, to look for me there, to look for someone there, in the silence of quite a different justice, in the toils of that obscure assize where to be is to be guilty. That is why nothing appears, all is silent, one is frightened to be born, no, one wishes one were, so as to begin to die.20 But the phantoms come back, it's in vain they go abroad, mingle with the dying, they come back and slip into the coffin, no bigger than a matchbox, it's they have taught me all I know, about things above, and all I'm said to know about me, they want to create me, they want to make me . . . 21 this pensum is perhaps among the dead, and the station in ruins where I sit waiting, erect and rigid, hands on thighs, the tip of the
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Between fluid and solid, between yes and no
On Mythographic Reading 37
has it knelled here at last for our committal to flesh, as the dead are committed to the ground, in the hour of their death at last, and at the place where they die, to keep the expenses down, or for reassignment, souls of the stillborn, or the dead before the body, or still young in the midst of the ruins, or never come to life through incapacity or for some other reason, or the immortal type, there must be a few of them too, whose bodies were always wrong . . . 23 All these utterances can only be from mythic-plane consciousness (no realist any more than surrealist criteria will make sense of them). The pull `natureward' and away again is fully accommodated, the amplitude of this plane doing away with the either-or of rational analysis. In a sense Beckett's words declare not only their own message but also the necessity of the mythic plane report, and of the lost opportunity for understanding human predicaments which has accompanied the lapse in appreciation of the language of soul, the mythic register. As always, Beckett's works tell of a culture's endemic pain as well as that of a persona/personality in crisis or transformation. And the second advantage of contemplating Beckett's utterances from the world of myth ± in and as an agent of that world ± is that we can escape from the rather constricting model of Beckett studies in which the either/or, yes or no substrate of evaluation has recourse to the `redemptive' or else the `consumptive' reading. On the one hand the redemptive says, for example, that Beckett's bleakness is redeemed by humour; on the other the `consumptive' reading reduces the author and reader to a verification of the destructiveness of blank despair: each reading has a moral overtone, one commendatory, the other radically doubting (and in its marxist phase disapprobatory). The redemptive reading would appear to be sentimental and not to exhaust the resources of an oeuvre like Beckett's; the consumptive reading is all too close to the other type of bias, that of the `tragic view' of which Paglia said Modern humanists made the `tragic sense of life' the touchstone of mature understanding. They defined man's mortality and the transience of time as literature's supreme subjects. In this I again see evasion and even sentimentality. The tragic sense of life is a partial response to experience. It is a reflex of the west's resistance to and misapprehension of nature.24
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ticket between finger and thumb, for a train that will never come, never go, natureward.22
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A mythographic reading of Beckett, I suggest, falls into neither of these difficulties. Being as open to image as it is to language, indeed depending on the effect of images to be convincing at all, it results in an environment in which the literary work is not confined to a binary debate within sequential argument.
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3
In claiming my actions as mine, not only do I separate them from the actions of others but I place myself within myself. I have my territory to maintain and protect, and this will keep me very busy and very fearful. James Low
Beckett on the theme of No Culture: fixture and flow Beckett's place in modern culture might appear familiar for the oddly various ways in which he has been categorised and appropriated by literary history, literary theory and in higher education curricula. But in total contrast, the way in which his texts seem to inscribe their world according to the axiom `Know Culture equals No Culture' has no parallel in modern theory. We shall return to this paradox. Beckett's achievement of an `inscription of voidness' has been celebrated and recognised in detail by many critics. What claims immediate interest here is not that it has been done, but what the implications are for a culture which fully recognises the emergency/emergence that Beckett has written down. What we are talking of is the effect of a creative activity whose results cause a deconditioning of the accumulated cultural materials with which modern Europeans have defined themselves and imaged themselves to themselves and to one another. It is undeniable that feminist theory and deconstruction have effected in our culture a very similar deconditioning to that offered in a parallel area by Samuel Beckett, and in the area of esoteric education by the Tibetan dzogchen tradition. This can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. The perspective of esoteric tradition is not confined to the culture of those traditions' origins. The Buddhist dzogchen View (ghZi), for 39
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Elysium of the Roofless
example, is applicable to Beckett's works for precisely this reason and despite the fact that Beckett is not known to have studied or practised a system specific to Buddhist philosophy and culture. Asked whether he had studied the mystics in any depth he replied that he had not studied them in any more depth than anything else, and this ambiguous reply is enough to encourage at least a comparison of his own figurings and defigurings of self and identity with those offered in the sutras of vajrayana and dzogchen, two of the forms of Buddhist expression that depend least on the national culture and religious identity of their countries of origin. It is vital to recognise that the parallel I expose between Beckett and Buddhist thought is not intended to gather the cultural materials associated with Beckett and contemporary theory into the fold of a beliefsystem. We are concerned only with the outlines of self-imaging and its mythographic inscription in art, religion, philosophy and social practice. All the said practices employ myth systems at some point in their evolution, and they do so because they need anchors not only in the rational sphere but also in the language of the soul, the soul's substrate, which is myth. The matter of identity is so all-inclusive that it would be surprising not to find that it is deeply implicated in all the cultural spheres we have mentioned. That the early Beckett and the surrealists in their day, and in ours the western Buddhists and Beat art, should all have focused on a grand illusion shared by nearly all post-Renaissance human values in the West, should not come as a surprise either. Religion entering into a discussion of art need not, according to the ordinary rules of discussion, be any cause for concern, but there have accumulated so many instances where discussion of religion has abruptly ended on the note that it must necessarily import the forbidden `transcendental signifier', that a question has arisen whether this nervous proscription is not itself the result of a dogma in relation to other discourses. Ted Hughes' bold reading of Shakespeare and Coleridge is a case in point, having earned his essays the scorn of some reviewers whose ostensible sympathies are all in his direction. Far from steering us away from his poetry into irrelevant realms, Hughes' essays have shed light on the poetry itself and its place in a much larger mythos which our culture is the bearer of, and which it is struggling as much to relinquish as also not to recognise in its full emotional and psychological impact. What we are experiencing at the moment is the microclimate of the `hermeneutics of suspicion' which seems to have gained the status of immovable orthodoxy: notwithstanding its sceptical bias, it risks domesticating even itself as the only valid intellectual framework
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of inquiry. If there is sense in echoing (while reforging) an indurated phrase, we might argue that a hermeneutics of compassion is a far more interesting road of inquiry in regard to Beckett. Is not suspicion really too easy? Suspicion's watchword is noli mi tangere; yet the essence of compassion is contact, touch, the condition of `in touch' between beings hitherto conceived as separate. Beckett's correspondence with the Buddhist account is exact. The indices of name, age, gender and station are the precise points on which Beckett's texts lay great and constant stress, to the point of the virtually categorical collapse, so often misappreciated as absurdist aesthetics. The indices of the error of samsara are identical ± name, age, gender and station are the principal illusions with which the human is preoccupied in such a way as to make it appear as if the state of pure mind is completely obscured, replaced with a virtual world that has had conferred on it the status of reality. Beckett had recognised this existential usurpation early in his life when he co-originated the phrase `hypnosis of positivism'. With an esoteric axiom, for instance that `spirituality is not an experience, it is the search for that which experiences all', we come close to the enigma which preoccupies Beckett and the Buddhist practitioner. Normally there is a problem talking about spiritual experience and spiritual development. When we try to say that spirituality is an experience, the destination of a search or a path, the attainment following on years of ascetic effort, and so on, we recognise in application to the matter of the spiritual a well-known language that is usually reserved for the strivings of the homme moyen, in the ordinary world. There is the ever-present feeling that this language ± basically that of struggle and acquisition, and defence, the ethos of teleology ± is somehow hypocritical when appropriated for the area of spirituality, and of course the same goes for high art as well, which is held to be a realm of pure contemplation rather than the scene of ambition, competition and struggle. When we come to the point that Beckett came to, we may propose or agree that spirituality cannot be an experience, simply because in its nature it does not recognise the real presence of an experiencer in the terms of the ordinary human boundedness and localisation that we call personality. From this stage onwards, the establishment of humanism can only point us in the direction of orthodox religion (as `saving illusion' or `opiate') or towards the diagnosis of mental illness (as the arena of the socially incompetent). The decentredness expressed by the philosophy of post-structuralism and postmodernism has eroded many fixed ideological determinants in
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cultural interpretation. Lyotard launched critiques of universalising historical strategies and narratives; and in the wake of such critiques, traditions of realism collapsed along with Western metaphysics and its correlative, subjectivity, as viewed through a Cartesian lens where focus comes to equal force and the the power/knowledge equation is instituted in the form Foucault described. But such resistances to a masterlanguage of categorisation, as Said argued, risk instituting a resistor as masterful in its practices as the oppressor to which it responds. So it happens that one fixed cultural position is unseated by another. The word fix is already a trap. To be fixed up is satisfying after a long search for a solution; fixing faulty gear is no less satisfying. Even the quick fix, though second best, is often indispensable. In subjectivity too, say sexual subjectivity, the word offers the possibility of satisfaction. `At one time there was nothing wrong with me', says an ironic Bob Dylan love song, `that you could not fix.'1 But in recording precisely that long-lost confidence, related in a cliche of personal history, there's a pain hidden, which is the trap of the word fix no less than of its denotate. For it's precisely when we can't have things fixed that we say with urgency, we are in a fix. Stuck. The advantage suddenly secedes and the negative images gather. Stephen Heath entertainingly describes the `sexual fix' of modern life.2 Stuck, we are in a fixture we can't loosen. We are entering the vocabulary of contemporary cultural theory, or we're nearly there, beginning to stifle in the threatening climate of fixed positions, binary oppositions, fixations even. The new cultural sin is hypostasis, another name for malign fixing. Social and individual responses can all fall into this danger area. Indeed a lot of the post-colonial theorizing we have come to accept as an industry with an ethical intention is devoted to dissolving hypostatised ± fixed ± fixated ± perspectives which legislate human being in terms of stasis (fixedness) rather than process (unfixedness). Conscience acts on Macbeth, to `unfix [his] hair'. Fixed resolve gives way to flow. We can zoom out the semantic map somewhat further, to find the obvious relationship between fixed ideas and an urge present in contemporary cultural debate towards establishing positions. What is your position on this? Have you got an opinion? Have you established a theoretical base? Mouths are for rent, commentary is invoiced. Beckett's staged mouth in Not I has a strange commentary to offer indeed. This question, What is your position on this? must, in the end, equal the question, In which position are you at present fixed? and it leaves less room ± spectacularly less ± for the question, Might you change your mind? In this sense, nothing is less reassuring than having one's mind
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made up ± instead, resolution tails off into, or dovetails into, that unregarding fixedness which attracts the exclusive label bigot. Of course it's not cast as that. It's cast as its opposite, the exercise of free speech in a free space, in a democratic age of information. Although the debate stages itself in cultural and literary studies as though it is at a level above party politics, nevertheless the recurrent impression left by many debates is that they are marshalled in an environment of lines and perspectives which, when rubbed free of their surface deposits, are nothing other than party lines. The theoretical underpinnings of the enquiry are repeatedly extorted. The enquiry itself is not enough. Whatever may be the practical uses of established positions, they confine the possibility of inquiry into hopelessly narrow limits, and almost always reduce anything that proceeds from the actual avant-garde into a system of vested interests where group identity, protection of a field, begins to stand in place of the process and intention of the original inquiry. Although it doesn't always happen, it happens recognisably often. A few more reflections of this sort result in our confronting that ultimate postmodern dogma, which is: all statements in all languages are still bound within the system of limitations which the discipline of culture-criticism arose to abolish. Its punch-line: Any resistance to this dogma is a case of pot calling kettle black. We might retort that there are political and ethical underpinnings that validate the dogma just outlined. The crusade against the master/ phallus/logos/patriarchal discourse is implicated in nearly all of the ethical justifications of the current dogma that I know. Any genuine interest in where this double bind will end up must surely be interest in whatever justifications don't set up a new dogma in place of the old. Where it might be thinkable that not all communications are contingent upon the terms of their sign-systems. So I don't intend wheeling onstage the great writer Beckett. But I do propose him as a genius capable of unfixing discourse. The ways Beckett has been `adopted' ± another anodyne version of fixed ± are as oddly numerous as his ability is unflagging to dispatch them all into irrelevance. He has been eagerly embraced as: one of the greats in English Literature; as a French writer; as an Irish writer; as a European writer; as an Anglo-Irish writer; as a world writer. As a Nobel prizewinner. As a pioneer of underground glamour. The act of embrace and adoption is of course the characteristic operation of a group consciousness which survives by recruiting new members. The loving and protecting connotations of embrace and adopt have a history of shading
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off into less happy versions: capture and appropriation. Surely this fact is behind Beckett's legendary shyness of the public eye, a proprietorial realist eye which allays its inward insecurity by making things its own. If Beckett ever made any politically significant statement, it was this refusal to be domesticated into a theoretical stable. It's notable that his own explanation for writing in French as well as English was that he was seeking a way of writing `without style'.3 Style is equivalent to subjectivity in this equation. Style is to language what self is to city or community. The history of the theory of Western communication has been inevitably the history of realism, the post-Renaissance human perspective on life, on the polis, on the universe and everything. Beckett's entire literary work, but perhaps especially the late fiction, is the most advanced stage in the preparation of a language laboratory, so to speak, which makes an antidote to the poison of realism. Beckett foresaw and foresaid the dissolving of history which such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida theorized. All three suggested that the Western humanist sequencing of historical events, and the act of representing them as a chain of causation, is itself the imposition of a type of story into the cultural fabric, the story being the grand narrative of Western metaphysics. Beckett very early on saw that same problem in realist aesthetics, which he called the `vulgarity of plausible concatenation'.4 Along with his verticalist5 peers in late 1920s Paris, Beckett saw the realist programme as being precisely the repressive and narrow regimen which contemporary thinkers see in the realist account of historical progress. One perhaps wonders, while attending to Beckett's aesthetic choices only, why he should have taken such a harsh stand against realist practices. After all, many say, realism didn't die after Beckett, it has triumphantly soldiered on as the dominant aesthetic in novels, drama, cinema and popular culture, whereas, is Beckett read by anybody much at all? The harm Beckett saw in realism is the harm of a self-validating but deceptive system of communication and reception, which claims to be truthful in the very moment it deceives. The political underpinning, if you like, of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism, and of its colloquial names `slice of life', verismo, is the author[ity figure] who says: (i) I am reliable. (ii) I know how the world works. (iii) My account of it is therefore the truth. (iv) My account of it puts everything in its proper place without mystifying. (v) My aesthetic practice is able to produce receipts, inventories, and is as far as possible exhaustive. (vi) It is therefore accountable to you, the public. Essentially the same guarantees are
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offered by politicians and historians. They are all realists, and it is at just this kind of moment that the aesthetic usage of the word segues into the self-congratulatory usages of politicians and commercial speculators, who extract votes and sales by saying `Trust us, we are realists.' This is why, for Beckett, to know culture in any depth ± after extracting realism, its dominant narrative strategy ± is to be faced with no culture whatsoever. The cultural soup has been evaporated in a kind of crucible. Realist discourse is so important an ingredient in Western culture's image of itself, its `home page', that once it has gone it really looks as if there is nothing left at all. This state of affairs is reflected in the `vertiginous panic' spreading through centres of cultural theory and debate in the last two decades. The arenas of debate are full of hungry humanists and realists with nothing left to eat. A further matter arises here. Beckett is famed for giving the world the consciousness of `going on' with `nothing to go on'. The locutions You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on and Nothing to express, nothing with which to express, together with the obligation to express are legendary. Each new book that came out during his lifetime, each one shorter than the last, was welcomed as proof that the ever less that Beckett could say was somehow preferable to more and more profuse declarations about what could not be said. Nevertheless the question is often asked, especially by those who wonder whether Beckett is overrated: Why didn't he simply stop writing if he had nothing left to say, instead of piddling on in what he himself once called a kind of `strangury'?6 If Wittgenstein is right in saying `all descriptions are misdescriptions', and if, as Beckett says in Worstward Ho, `Said is missaid', why bother? Just stop, save everyone the trouble. Beckett wondered this in print quite often too. Non-western perspectives on human being in the world offer modes of reception which have not imported the conditionings of realist discourse. When we look at their metaphysics we find a language much less susceptible to the charges made against Western metaphysics with its logocentric/patriarchal/phallocentric orders. Lao tzu in the Tao Te Ching says of perfected being, it does nothing, and through it everything is accomplished. The sufi Ibn `Arabi speaks of perfected being as `without
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Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim. All so seen unsaid.7 Beckett's writing ± his language laboratory ± works in this way. When he says Nohow On, he means that there is no how to this existence without quality. It has no trappings. It just is. Why on, then? Because to live is to undergo the process of conception, birth, life, death. And the way it's seen is as something that goes on. The on is the quality, colour, specific contingency of this lived life. After tragic accidents, `life goes on', as Arnold Schoenberg wrote in his diary.8 But as the Vedantists say, that going on is the illusory element, the mirage, dream, the snake in the piece of rope. If, then, all saying is missaying, one might as well stop as go on. Possibly. But there may be a real difference between going silent and staying in touch. Emmanuel Levinas observed The greatest virtue of philosophy is that it can put itself in question, try to deconstruct what it has constructed and unsay what it has said. Science, on the contrary, does not try to unsay itself, does not interrogate or challenge its own concepts, terms or foundations: it forges ahead, it progresses.9 There, in Levinas's description of science, is the `going on' of teleology, that additional demon of Western realist discourse. Beckett's going on is something else. It is the unsaying of the said, the loosening of fixture, the reintroduction of mobility. Levinas again: Saying is ethical sincerity insofar as it is exposition. As such this saying is irreducible to the ontological definability of the said. Saying is what makes the self-exposure of sincerity possible; it is a way of giving everything, of not keeping anything for oneself. In so far as ontology equates truth with the intelligibility of total presence, it reduces the pure exposure of saying to the totalizing closure of the said. [. . .] The human being is characterised as human not only because he is a being who can speak but also because he is a being who can lie, who can live in the duplicity of language as the dual possibility of
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quality', a substrate for the clear light which Tibetan Buddhists, along with Shelley, imagine as lighting the world, infusing `the dome of manycoloured glass', which in its turn, as the world, `stains the white radiance of eternity'. Beckett's version of this:
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± or he can unsay his said, so as to avoid the totalizing closure of the said, the fixed position, the glib statement. `Language as saying is an ethical openness to the other', writes Levinas. `As that which is said ± reduced to a fixed identity or synchronised presence ± it is an ontological closure to the other.'11 Refusal to speak is perhaps an ethical evasion. Yet, to trust the said as real is the vulgarity of the realist discourse which fixes and fixates in a totalizing and potentially totalitarian closure. But Beckett's experiment, to unsay as one says, is a direct facing, to `give oneself in saying even to the point of poetry'. Is this why Beckett, like many of the most radical of mystics, Zen masters and spiritual teachers, did not give up speaking altogether?
The homeless under appropriation and predication There is a culturally established affinity between seeing self and seeing territory. Both modes of apprehension assume appropriation, what could be called `making sub-wholes' and asserting ownership over them. David Bohm says: There's nothing I can do to stop creating sub-wholes, and that is OK as long as my identification isn't in those sub-wholes. I have a responsibility for them, for the things I make manifest. But the I AM is not something I am trying to predicate. It will be predicated through me, and that then becomes my friend, my home. . . . I accept that I am going to make sub-wholes, but I don't want to treat that as me. [. . .] Whatever is predicated through me, in particular form, is nothing other than what the empiricist calls the world out there. And its amounting to home and friend is what even the enlightened gnostic will find in his or her own life; namely, that because the predication is reversed in gnosis doesn't mean that the world vanishes in a puff of smoke. It is the mercy on the `predications-through-me' that requires compassion to be expressed through me. Whether it happens is the measure of my tact to life.12
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exposure and deception. The animal is incapable of this duplicity; the dog [. . .] cannot suppress its bark, the bird its song. But man can repress his saying, and this ability to keep silent, to withhold oneself, is the ability to be political. Man can give himself in saying to the point of poetry ± or he can withdraw into the non-saying of lies.10
The opposite situation to this tact to life is the colonial appropriation, the political collective version of the Cartesian ego of surveillance that Beckett reduces to its uttermost singular: `One dim black hole mid-foreskull. Into the hell of all. Out from the hell of all. Black hole agape on all. Inletting all. Outletting all.'13 Surveying all it has, like a security camera, the Cartesian ego feels at home once its sub-wholes are bounded, under control. On the other hand, the picture changes with the homeless. The spiritually homeless are not unfortunate but simply empty, empty in the sense of being receptive to signs of the true home, namely the commission of the flow of compassion. `It is the mercy on the predications-through-me that requires compassion to be expressed through me', as Bohm puts it. The condition of the physically homeless also suggests that in their lack of territorial ground there is the potential freedom not to overbear which is denied obvious expression in people who are bound by their ground's conditions and limits. Beckett's humans and their bi-level vagrancy (physical and spiritual) are an exact index, inward and outward, for this process. Do they not only depict but attract and evince compassion? It is this that makes Beckett's work compelling in a not immediately obvious way. Proximity to total emptiness, combined with the unrelentingly and indestructibly human IN-VEST-MENT of a theatre-goer, is in large part the net effect of Beckett's work on his audiences. The Unnamable speaks of the spiritually vagrant state, where location is at one and the same time a relic and a habit of existence, such that sickness is felt not for home as in the adjective homesick, but for the preCartesian Unthinkable, which is not measured by an eye, surveying coordinates, but is in fact the place of the placeless. Even `the world as remembered' itself dissolves here into the `baseless fabric' of which Prospero speaks: Help, help, if I could only describe this place, I who am so good at describing places, walls, ceilings, floors, they are my speciality, doors, windows, what haven't I imagined in the way of windows in the course of my career, some opened on the sea, all you could see was sea and sky, if I could put myself in a room, that would be the end of the wordy-gurdy, even doorless, even windowless, nothing but the four surfaces, the six surfaces, if I could shut myself up, it would be a mine, it could be black dark, I could be motionless and fixed, I'd find a way to explore it, I'd listen to the echo, I'd get to know it, I'd get to remember it, I'd be home, I'd say what it's like, in my home, instead
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of any old thing, this place, if I could describe this place, portray it, I've tried, I feel no place, no place round me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't flesh, it doesn't end, it's like air [. . .] if only I could feel a place for me, I've tried, I'll try again, none was ever mine, that sea under my window, higher than the window, and the row-boat, do you remember, and the river, and the bay, I knew I had memories, pity they are not of me, and the stars, and the beacons, and the lights of the buoys, and the mountains burning, [. . .] or the forest, a roof is not indispensable, an interior, if I could be in a forest, caught in a thicket, or wandering round in circles, it would be the end of this blither, I'd describe the leaves, one by one, at the moment of their growing, at the moment of their giving shade, at the moment of their falling, those are good moments, for one who has not to say, But it's not I, it's not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered, but there it is[.]14 In cultured Humanism the identity of person and place is equivalent to that identity's fixedness: its qualifications, conditions and limits. Parameter, frame of reference, terms such as these link world-view to world-as-seen, world as appreciated. The realist agenda wants to repeat these terms, such that verisimilitude becomes the desirable characteristic of art. What an extreme shift of expectation, indeed extinction of expectation, is invited by the voids of Beckett's imaginative myth can perhaps only be estimated by counting the number of times Beckett's work has been likened to the mind-set of the psychotic or the schizophrenic. We might say that for a spectator for whom the entirety of existence, environment, origin, and aim, is hung on a framework of post-enlightenment humanism, the spectacle of the wraith-like fading of all location, aim, destination and identity is virtually impossible to behold. If beholding itself depends on the prehensility of a post-Cartesian agent, can the witness survive the disappearance of the agent? That disappearance, plus the continuing of the witness, is unquestionably what Beckett's art is intent on evoking. Either it comes across as madness or as the unadorned language of the soul. The identity which Beckett's persona finds is continually about to be spoken but which never can be spoken in the frameworks that `they' have `taught' him, is not the identity of the qualified, as in the familiar post-Renaissance western mind-set, but the identity of the unqualified, the `one true end of time, grief, and self so-called'.15 The tragic myth here is that the conditioned, qualified world (including its corresponding awareness-modes) is hammered to pieces with some of the tools of its own provenance,
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somehow multiplying its own grief while trying to neutralise it. But as the destruction of identity proceeds and the tools become more and more useless ± a literary `wordy-gurdy' no less ± the identity of the unqualified is all that possibly can remain behind. I can't go on normally means `I can't proceed along lines established as meaning on'. When it becomes possible to say I'll go on after saying I can't go on, then that going on is according to another level of process, and this survives, or enters in after, the death of the previous level. In esoteric practice this is what is referred to as the death before death, according to one axiom, or the second birth, according to another. The speaker of a passage like the one quoted above is half immersed in and half lifted out of the waters of the `hypnosis of positivism'. So it comes about that the mention of the outer universe pulls the speaker's emotion or soul-tropism in two opposite directions. One direction has it that the outer world and its phenomena, whether living or dead, are `not I', and that therefore there can be no intimate relation with the world that is not a spurious form of attachment. The other direction has it that the only possible escape from the prison of Cartesian subjectivity is the flight from self into absorbed contemplation of the natural universe: `if I could be in a forest, caught in a thicket, or wandering round in circles, it would be the end of this blither, I'd describe the leaves, one by one, at the moment of their growing, at the moment of their giving shade, at the moment of their falling, those are good moments, for one who has not to say, But it's not I, it's not I . . . ' This is like the root of the Zen practice which stills the hubbub of subjectivity by one-pointed attention. The problem for the Beckett voice here is that all the phenomena of nature are themselves hedged around with humanist valuesystems which link them to personality via emotion and association. So at certain times the one-pointed concentration is corrupted by the very thing it's intended to dissolve. In this sense and in this sense only, perhaps, it is true to say of Beckett that he is an existentialist ± he describes not the desideratum but the emergency of being in the world at this time, half in and half out of the ancient world.
Unthinkable ancestors If home has nothing to do with self, nor with the language it uses to define itself, nor with the world as self-container and the four walls, nor even to do with the natural containers such as forests or holes in the ground, then the meaning of the question Where are you from? changes completely. Facing the emptiness of culture and knowing this leads to
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I who am on my way, words bellying out my sails, am also that unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said. But perhaps I shall speak of him some day, and of the impenetrable age when I was he, some day when they fall silent, convinced at last I shall never get born, having failed to be conceived. Yes, perhaps I shall speak of him, for an instant, like an echo that mocks, before being restored to him, the one they could not part me from.16 It is I who think, just enough to write, whose head is far. I am Matthew and I am the angel, I who came before the cross, before the sinning, came into the world, came here.17 What could Beckett have meant by using these words? First we must acknowledge that we cannot really ascribe meaning to what he said about the unthinkable. Simply because ascribing meaning belongs to the thinkable, not the unthinkable. We might rephrase the question as `why did Beckett use these words?' and then the area of inquiry is wider. `The unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said'. Do we stop there and then and say there is nothing to be said about that which there is nothing to be said about? Earlier in this book, and later, I refer to the necessity for withholding a choice based on yes or no, either/or. In the myth of the descent of the soul, the yes and the no occupy equal status as far as the desire of the monad is concerned. `We live their death', the Heracleitian motto, sums it up. The soul says yes and no to incarnation, not yes or no. This is crucial in understanding Beckett's attitude as something more inclusive than pessimism or nihilism. So also we might approach `the unthinkable ancestor'. Approachable because mentioned in a significant context. Unthinkable because about this ancestor we are informed that nothing can be said. In this spirit it is possible to make observations about the unthinkable. Beckett's art is the effective statement that an understanding of life no less than an understanding of art is possible only if our vision is spread far beyond the confines of the humanist edifice of knowledge, education, human competency. As soon as the `unthinkable ancestor' enters the picture, the humanist injunction to have something to say for yourself that will convince the committee of enquiry (members selfelected by humanist criteria) doesn't apply. Likewise, most resources of judgement for appreciating art are drawn from post-Renaissance
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the condition of having no culture, Beckett's voice here seems to have eliminated all the possible homes.
European values defined by largely materialist notions of `history' and `science'. Beckett, in invoking the unthinkable ancestor, the I which speaks before the Cross, is invoking the precultural continuum, the prehumanist but explicitly not prehuman state of being. Like the artists of the night of modernism, and like the searches into the unconscious revived by psychoanalysis, Beckett explores the `pre-uterine'18 and must therefore, to be appreciated in terms sufficiently wide, not be confined within the humanist inheritance of critical terms and parameters. Since the advent of gyno-criticism and the proceeding dislodgment of the colonial value-system, this basic necessity for the appreciation of modern art has become easier to talk about. Whether it is taken seriously depends largely on the extent to which the enquirer is imbued with the limitations of `stealing from civilisation the criteria for judging art'.19 If the functions of art extend to contacting the pre-cultural and the preuterine, then civilisation is not enough to explain art at all, and can only provincialise it. In present-day humanism, mythic and spiritual languages are not really admitted, because they would immediately unseat the `hard ego of tested routine'20 in which a precarious self-confidence seeks to find itself at home. Territory, domicile, and cultural identity thus share the same mythographic code standing for home. That code is an extremely powerful compound. Breaking it down requires an equally powerful action and provokes a corresponding reaction. It is only through appreciating this fact ± one of the ores on the spoilheap of postcolonial excavation ± that Beckett's diatribes against identity reveal themselves as a meaningful critical message about our culture.
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52 Beckett and Eros
Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen
. . . man prolongs through his whole life the effects of his attachment to himself. He is continually bound to courses of action aimed at a result valid on the plane of the prolonged individual existence. Bataille Our original condition is thoughtless, and thought cannot touch what is beyond thought. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche you will reach the decision that there is no demon other than discursive thought. Dudjom Lingpa
Dzogchen and Beckett Beckett's undisputed impact, combined with what still presents itself as obscurity to the general public and experts alike, might be better understood by referring to the inner aspects of Buddhism. The end of humanism, which we have now reached, can be witnessed possibly at its clearest in the effect of Beckett's creative work. The power of that work is indeed in direct proportion to the disposal of humanist norms which Beckett continued to manage right up until the end of his life. And as if that undertaking were not enough as it is, the incidence of the human, the root (diversely) of humanism and Buddhism together, can only be located in the event of incarnation, whose mythography is Eros. This is why the end of humanism implicates both the world of eros and the picture of the human being with which esoteric psychology replaces empirical psychology. 53
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4
This discussion needs to open with a caution. Whenever we speak of Buddhist philosophy, in an attempt to shorthand the attitude of the Buddhist practitioner, we risk short-circuiting the illustration we want to make. With the heart of Buddhism we are not really talking about philosophy. For what the west knows as philosophy, a Buddhist would call a wrangle, a circumstance, a crease in the cycle of an illusory system which Buddhism arose to expose. The very reason why Beckett's work is so similar in effect to Buddhist method is because they both repudiate the endless round of philosophical argument and speculation, along with that of hope, fear, desire, aversion. If Beckett's works are still a puzzle it is because they do not respond to treatment at the level of philosophy. I make no apology for tailoring this description of Buddhism in such a way as to give little purchase to theologians or philosophers, but maximum proximity to Buddhist evocations that reflect the interests of Beckett. The insights of dzogchen and the vajrayana are closer than any other Buddhist descriptions to the discoveries of what Gontarski called Beckett's `imaginative spelunking'.1 As I have said elsewhere, the sense of such an undertaking does not depend on whether or not Beckett knew Buddhist thought in depth. What it does reveal is simply that the insights of Buddhism are not exclusive to it as to a brandname, and that Beckett and the dzogchen writers were very likely to have been seeing the same thing. Indeed the Buddhist is likely to say of Beckett and of many other writers and artists, they have seen what is simply the case. They do not need to have had the imprimatur of the Buddha to do so, any more than the contemporary artist needs the permission of Derrida or Lyotard to contemplate the shards of ideological historicism. The sky, the space of perception, is wider than that. But the atmosphere in which academic debate of such subjects takes place suggests more the world of the patent-attorney than that of the explorer of consciousness and mind. `If critics want to have headaches amongst the overtones, let them', said Beckett. Comparing Beckett and Buddhism directly also helps to correct some popular misimpressions about Buddhism. Some of those very misimpressions probably explain why it has not been fashionable to discuss Beckett's work in a Buddhist light. Saposcat the younger in Malone Dies has had the experience typical of nearly all Beckett's major self-inscriptions. `He was sorry he could make no meaning of the babel raging in his head, the doubts, desires, imaginings and dreads.'2 Let this be taken as representative. So is the characteristic uncertainty as to who is meant by the first person singular: `I'm locked up, I'm in something, it's not I.'3 Both these massive existential problems are seen by dzogchen (the interior tradition of Tibetan Bud-
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54 Beckett and Eros
Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 55
Immediately following that first impression that a self exists [. . .] there is an underlying consciousness which takes this impression to be an `I' and which is termed `subsequent consciousness' or `discursive thinking'. As it becomes clearer, this impression of a self comes to seem stable and solid. By trying to locate the source from which this so-called I first arises, you will arrive at the conclusion that it has no such authentic source.4 The Beckett character is close to the Buddhist just because he has not swallowed whole the apparent way of looking at things, but rather, he has seen there is a problem with the supposition that self and world are self-subsistent, real entities. Where Beckett takes the story up is on realizing that the supposition is unsustainable. All imagination of `the time before' is merely previous and fictional. That same emergency is typically what launches practitioners on the Buddhist path. Realizing what Beckett called the `hypnosis of positivism', and what vajrayana calls the illusion of self-nature in phenomena, the possibility of esoteric education offers a means of deconditioning the system. Of the methods used to move towards this, one is mythological (which Chapter 5 will address), and one direct. The closest to a direct method is outlined in the Buddhist vajrayana vehicle, and in dzogchen, the strictly nonmythological, esoteric tradition. If we turn to the foundational Buddhist understanding of the human psyche, we will see how closely it approaches the world of Beckett.
Dependent origination The Buddhist chain of origination is rooted in the proposition that it is only out of ignorance that the concept of subjectivity, of a self-subsistent `I', can appear. What the humanist takes to be the baseline and even dignity of human life, the biography from past through present to future, is for the Buddhist the prime error of perception. To clarify what is all too often a mere mnemonic catechism, one dzogchen exponent explains. the basic cause of suffering, ignorance, gives rise to consciousness, which gives rise to our experience of being in the world, which gives rise to involvement, leading to suffering and the intensification of
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dhism) in the same way: they are the inevitable result of taking the apparent world, and the apparent self, and its linguistic methods of describing and explaining, as truly existing.
56 Beckett and Eros
ignorance. Each cause has an effect which becomes in itself a cause for a further effect. This dynamic force rules our busy engagement in a world of things.5
1. This ignorance is at the root itself of the twelve interdependent links, it is the first of them. It is the origin, the beginning, the source of appearance of all suffering in the cycle of existence. However, this ignorance does not cover or veil our mind. The own nature of our mind is emptiness, free of any characteristics. The non-recognition of this fundamental mode of the mind is called ignorance (avidya, marigpa). At our level, it manifests crudely, verifying that we are constitutionally unable to see from where we came and to where we are going. Where do beings come from? Where do they go? What are the causes of suffering or joy? And so on. We are unable to see all these phenomena directly. It is only from this fundamental ignorance that the concept of an I can appear. 2. The second of the interdependent links is mental formation. 3. From mental formation appears the individual consciousness. 4. Individual consciousness allows the manifestation of nama-rupa, name and form. 5. Faculties of perception are organized in visual, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, auditory and mental senses. 6. Contact can happen; contact is the meeting between an object considered as outer and the sense organ. 7. This contact produces pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling. 8. Feeling engenders craving, a desire to make this feeling last. 9. Craving culminates in grasping; that is, one takes over this feeling, identifies with it, and tries to repeat it. 10. From this grasping, becoming occurs; becoming finds its full expression in the so-called three worlds. 11. Becoming ends in birth, which, for us, translates as obtaining a body. 12. Birth causes the appearance of old age, which finds its accomplishment in death, ending the cycle of the twelve interdependent links. The cycle of existence manifests following the mode of the twelve interdependent links, which have their roots, their origin ± not with a temporal meaning but rather as base for appearance ± in ignorance.
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The exposition continues by listing the twelve links as follows.
These twelve links are called interdependent because one link cannot exist without the others. The necessary condition for the appearance of these links is the existence of the other ones. One could believe that it is because these twelve links are real that the cycle of existence can manifest. That is not correct, however. These twelve links appear only as a manifestation of the mind that functions in an illusory mode.6 So with this we are presented with a picture which departs totally from the norms of humanism, norms which seek to endorse precisely the ignorance dzogchen would sooner expose. `Egocentrism' in dzogchen is not understood simply as selfish or inconsiderate action or disposition. It is much more basic than that: The teaching shows emptiness of all phenomena, in order to fight the innate tendency to grasp the I as really existing, as well as grasping material phenomena as permanent.7 It's clear here and elsewhere that the so-called self and the world are subject to the same tendencies in us to believe they really exist. This is what makes us hold onto them, with such tenacity, as the indices of real existence: of me and my world. It will come as no surprise, then, to see Beckett using `time, grief, and self so-called'8 in exactly the same way, all three interchangeably. In this study of his works we are seeing the idea of terrain, territory, ground, land, world, property, as identical in their effects and origins with the sense of self, mine, subjectivity, individuality. In the equation of Buddhism with Beckett's mythographic universe, we are invited to regard the notions of self and world not as opposites and different, as we usually do, but actually as the same stuff. And we are moreover obliged to regard that stuff as being the chimerical arising of ignorance as apparent reality, in the manner we have seen outlined in the chain of dependent origination. Saraha's song relates the two errors, self and phenomenon, which are together the result of attributing existence where it cannot be attributed: If there is an owner then he will have some possessions. But if from the very beginning there has been no self, what can this non-self possibly possess? . . . If mind is something real that one possesses, then all phenomena will also be real and capable of appropriation. If there is no mind, who will understand what something is?9
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 57
One does not need to look far in Beckett to find similar expressions. `When you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.'10 `My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they glutted me with.'11 Probably the only really interesting event in Beckett's work, as in the dzogchen practice, is that a true recognition of the state of ignorance will actually come, of necessity, from the state of non-ignorance. It could be put like this: The witness of ignorance, if it is a true witness, is not ignorant in the same sense as that ignorance which has gone unrecognised. Saraha: `The understander of the illusory nature of appearances is the sky-like nature of mind itself. This true nature is without centre or limit and so who will be able to comprehend it?'12 I think this is the reason for Beckett's refusal to commit the speaking voice of his literary texts to a specific character, whether narrator or narrated. Witness at its most direct is placeless, non-localised. In Buddhist terms, not therefore installed in location; put mythologically, not trapped in a body. `A place, that again. No.' as Beckett puts it. For Beckett and the Buddhist, the sky becomes the epitome of non-locality. As A. Renton said of Beckett: `The recurrence of the featureless sky image [. . .] is significant. [. . .] it actively seeks not to evoke a sensory response by way of materials which will always engender a highly charged, sensory, emotional response. Beckett's tendency to comment on the `emptied sky' rather than a featured one, seems to represent some kind of formal and metaphorical ideal for him.'13 This ideal is more than formal and metaphorical. Like the Buddhist's clear sky, it represents the explicit cancelling of the engineering of egohood. All that presents itself as appearance and all that does not ± everything without exception has never wavered and will never waver from the sky-like nature. Moreover, although we use the term `sky' to refer to the sky, the sky itself has no specific individual nature at all. It is completely beyond being an object to which might be applied delimiting concepts such as `is', `is not', `without existence', and `without non-existence' and all the rest. In the same way, sky, mind, and the actual reality have not the slightest difference.14 Camille Paglia confirms this Buddhist analysis, saying `Name and person are part of the west's quest for form. The west insists on the discrete identity of objects. To name is to know; to know is to control. [. . .] the
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west's greatness arises from this delusional certitude. Far Eastern culture has never striven against nature in this way.'15 There is another reason why dzogchen and the vajrayana vehicle of Buddhism help in understanding Beckett. In the lesser Buddhist vehicles there is a tendency to literalize the chain of dependent origination into a mythology and to expect belief in it on the basis of conventional religious thought. This leads to the simplistic notion of the metaphysical career of an existing personality, the rewards and punishments of the next worlds, and the consequent projects of collecting merits against the moment of death, in the manner well known in western tradition as gathering pardons for sins, or equalling one's lapses by one's confessions. This picture is all familiar. The interpretation of karma in this manner, such that good deeds will neutralise past bad deeds, has tended to obscure the greater vehicles of Buddhism from the western analyst and make him dismiss the Buddhist picture altogether without a second thought. But the dzogchen view and the vajrayana vehicle approach the matter from an altogether different angle, and one with which Beckett's artistic method and manner seem ideally harmonised. In brief, the higher vehicles go a stage further than the lesser vehicle, and cut out the very possibility of taking the mythology as literal fact. This is also in harmony with mythographic reading, because the latter does not require adherence to its images once their meaning has realised itself in the watcher or the reader. At that point the myth, in making its move to the next level, dissolves its narrative-image content. In just this way, having enounced the Buddhist path as we ordinarily recognise it, the Heart sutra adds: There is no ignorance, no cessation of ignorance, and so on up to no old age and death, no cessation of old age and death. Likewise, there is no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path. There is no primordial awareness, no accomplishment, no nonaccomplishment. The commentary offers the following gloss: `We try to travel the path that leads to Awakening and obtain the fruit of this path. [. . .] But at the very instant we attain the goal, we realize that supreme knowledge also is lacking an existence on its own. Tob pa me, there is nothing to obtain. As long as we are buried in relative reality, we go searching for Awakening, Liberation, or Buddhahood, but once Transcendent Wisdom is
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 59
realized, we become aware that there is nothing to obtain. Ma tob pa yang me to, there is no non-obtaining.'16 Likewise also, the lesser vehicle's insistence that nirvana is the desired goal of practice, and the popularised view of nirvana as bliss/liberation, is exposed as a contradiction by dzogchen. If the essence of the practice is relinquishment of goals and of hankering after the fruits of action, then nirvana cannot very well be a goal, since in that case it would be an example of what it itself annihilates. The Heart Sutra and related texts are unequivocal about this. Samsara and nirvana are equal in their unreality, they are both delimitations of the relative mind: awareness of dharmadhatu is realisation of the fact that samsara and nirvana are of one taste in the basic space of the true nature of reality, . . . that samsara and nirvana are of equal purity in supreme emptiness.17 Mind's original nature is not obscured by any good or bad karmic conditions. It is not stained by all the impurities of reliance on signs. The names of all the phenomena of samsara and nirvana cannot be applied to it.18 This gives the lie to the accusation from the deconstructionists that teachings like Buddhism can have no value in literary theory on account of their being religious systems that reimport the transcendental signifier. Dzogchen cancels all traces of reification that may exist in the other Buddhist vehicles. With `there is no obtaining and no nonobtaining' we are pitched beyond the yes and the no, or we could say we are enabled to live and breathe between these poles rather than impelled by fear or hope or other attachment towards either one of them. In that case it would all over again be passion, as Beckett puts it: By passion we are to understand a movement of the soul pursuing or fleeing real or imagined pleasure or pain.19 And this is very important indeed for understanding Beckett, because his explorations of human being are not established within the criteria of either/or, optimism/pessimism, good/evil, yes/no. If they are investigated from within these criteria they will make no sense whatsoever. `Art has nothing to do with clarity, it does not dabble in the clear or make clear' Beckett once said, referring to the certitude of humanist criteria
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 61
There is no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path. There is no primordial awareness, no accomplishment, and no nonaccomplishment. This is almost deed for deed in spiritual practice the same as what Beckett states for creative art: `Nothing to express, nothing from which to express, nothing with which to express, together with the obligation to express.' The comparison need not be forced, merely suggested. It is worth going further in pointing out this non-delimited interpretation of existence. The song of Saraha again pays special attention to just those aspects of human existence that Beckett notices: Whatever moves or does not move, and all that is stable or unstable, and whatever there is that is material or nonmaterial, and all that presents itself as appearance and all that does not ± everything without exception has never wavered and will never waver from the skylike nature. [. . .] In the same way, sky, mind, and the actual reality have not the slightest difference. All the names that indicate difference are merely sudden adventitious titles. They are without true validity and are merely descriptive words.21 When Beckett composes a phrase such as `in the end when all gone from mind and all mind gone [. . .] then none ever been'22 we are in exactly the same mode. In effect we are looking at a method for eliminating the sin of appropriation (discussed in Chapter 3), a sin which, identified as such, is the root-myth of the postcolonial debate quite as fundamentally as it is implicit in the dismissal of subjectivity, property and territory that we have been seeing as the ineluctable tendency of Beckett's works and the dzogchen teachings. Extending this perspective to civilisation as a whole, William Irwin Thompson writes that The name is the label of egohood. . . . what is shut out by both city wall and personal name is the spiritual dimension. . . . He who would separate an ego from the universe to make a name for himself must
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for art and culture. In the world of Beckett's works, such certitude is as far from useful as it could possibly be. This is why the upshot of the Beckett eventuality20 is that the witness must end up at the grave of humanism.
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Considering what this bold leap of thought implies, we can see how compelling the Buddhist view is, especially when it's extended beyond the interior sphere and applied in the global state of humanity: What the written word is to the sensorium, the ego is to the entire consciousness, and the city is to the entire encirclement of nature. Writing, individuation, and civilisation are all parts of one cultural phenomenology.24
The baseless fabric Having viewed culture from the Buddhist angle, such that we might agree with the proposition put forward in the last chapter, that Know Culture equals No Culture, our exploration of the dzogchen view can conclude, now, at the interior level: Believing that things are real, beings are seized by the great demon of thought and thus do they create only meaningless suffering for themselves[;] bound by the discriminations of their intellects some of them believe that reflections are real. Some of them do not cut the root but only cut branches and leaves. No matter what they do they are not aware of being deceived.25 What is so compelling about the dzogchen analysis is that it includes all Buddhists and aspiring Buddhists in its surgery of illusion, and again resists the reproaches of the dialectical materialist thinker who may suspect it of being just another cult. This dzogchen commentary reminds us briefly of the well-known exoteric character of Buddhist philosophy: During the first cycle of teachings, the Buddha began by defining that which one calls I and showed that this I was composed in fact of the five aggregates and the eighteen sense elements. After this he showed, in the second cycle of teaching, the emptiness and nonexistence of these five aggregates, eighteen elements, and twelve interdependent links.26 But it goes on to add a third, esoteric cycle of the teaching which completely alters our understanding of the outer cycles: `One problem remains: the grasping of emptiness as such. When one grasps emptiness
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learn that the very definition of individuality is limitation; the form of a thing is described by its edge, and the edge of being is death.23
as existing, ``it is emptiness'', it is a concept and, by this very fact, it is not really transcendent wisdom.'27 In other words, all the old error risks returning: reification, appropriation and grasping, but this time not of the world, but of ideas. This is why the third cycle says that fundamental reality is beyond any concept and point of view. It is beyond being and not being, emptiness and nonemptiness. In this teaching it is said that all phenomena are tro pa dang drel wa, that is, free of production, diffusion, and characteristics. Phenomena are beyond the characteristic of empty or not empty, having or not having an own existence. [. . .] This mode of the dharmakaya, ultimate reality, is really beyond any concept. It is beyond being or not being, beyond any logical possibility of conceptualisation. Although this ultimate reality can be apprehended neither from the outside by conceptual representation nor transmitted to another, it can, however, be experienced and realized from the inside. It will rise and appear in the mind. [. . .] As long as we do not have this realization, we have no foundation to express ourselves in this manner.28 If we agree words and images cannot be used in relation to the true reality, how can we really undertake to read and discuss writing? Does Beckett's work exist at all? Is is just offering a final demonstration that the tools must be dropped, or is it doing something else? It is certainly a final demonstration that the tools of word and image in literature have formerly been put to extremely elaborate and detailed use in the delineation of an illusion. This is why the Beckett text is so unrelentingly hard on humanism, because humanism is the glorification (just short of religious) of the aggregates and chimeras that Beckett along with the Buddhist practitioner are training to regard as basically without foundation and usually the opposite of glorious. The emotional power of many a drama lies in its ability to evoke sympathy for the love of home, which all descended beings feel once they are locked into the system of self and appropriation. Beckett's emotional power is precisely that of acknowledging how great the pull of relative homesickness is, combined always with the suggestion that a greater homelessness underlies the local and almost engulfs the local's criteria. `Whatever it is they are searching for,' as Beckett says in The Lost Ones, `it is not that', not the local. Sensing and witnessing the emotional rules of a game that has been exposed as obsolete is a special sort of nostalgia, for it has in the midst of its tears recognised its unfoundedness, its needlessness. In such a way, perhaps, in Beckett's admissions of
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 63
the futility of vast ranges of human striving, appears the mysterious compassion of the Buddhist path, which ± when we see and hear of it ± seems to have less and less to do with feeling sad and sorry for people, and more and more to do with seeing clearly just what they and we are deluded with, and how wasteful the delusions are. It is only with this meaning of compassion in mind that we can really undertake the discussion of individual works in the later part of this book.
Beckett's Tempest Having introduced dzogchen as the non-mythological, direct way of deconditioning, a very different way in which Buddhist esotericism relates to Beckett is to consider for a short time the proposition that Beckett is a literary Prospero, and that Prospero's island, and the action of The Tempest, is a good palimpsest for Beckett's literary career, which could be called an esoteric psychological exploration as fittingly as Prospero's work could be called magical. Ted Hughes calls Shakespeare's last play `a keyboard on which to play the Complete Works of Shakespeare'. It is just as appropriate to see Beckett's works as a keyboard on which a mythical history of human consciousness is played to its tragic culmination in the post-holocaust twentieth century. The treatment to which humanity is subjected in The Tempest resembles that given by Beckett ± the Tempest-myth describes the tragic splitting between the flesh and the spirit, between earth energy (and energy of water, fire and air) and the moral rational ego of the human. In Beckett, that rational ego is invested in the tyranny of humanist educators, The Unnamable's `Basil and his gang', a `dirty pack of fake maniacs' who hold Beckett's narrator constantly to account, while gagging the voice of the `unspeakable ancestor' into speechlessness. Shakespeare's Prospero shares with John Dee and Giordano Bruno, and probably derives from them, a form of esoteric instruction which suggested that human beings live on more than one plane at once, and that they are only usually aware of living on one or two of them at most, those usually being the levels of thinking and sensation. The planes ranged from the lowest orders of existence, through the physical and mental worlds and the angelic powers of the planets to the divine Source, which in this system, was Divine Love. Dee and Bruno, like the tantric Buddhists of central Asia, used various systems of images to make maps of these worlds in which humans were said to have, in varying degrees of realisation, their actual and potential existence. The maps came to expression in shamanism, alchemy,
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astrology, angelology, and the cabalistic diagram of the tree of life. All of these systems outline the supernatural capability of human beings, and the totality of the universe to which they related on all these levels. Shakespeare was probably familiar with these mental maps, but he did not introduce them directly into his work. To political and church leaders, esotericists were dangerous dreamers or even worse, devil worshippers, because they did not subscribe to Christian orthodoxy, and some taught doctrines like reincarnation. With this in mind perhaps we can see why Prospero was looked down on by his brother Antonio, to whose ambitious political talent Prospero made over his state, while he attended to what he most cared for, his secret studies, his oft-mentioned books, no doubt manuals of Eastern and Neoplatonic occultism, which claimed that adepts could use them to reach higher states of consciousness and higher capabilities for changing the world.29 Shakespeare's creative people, like Beckett's human forms, are psychologically banished, cast away, shipwrecked and reborn in a new capacity which far transcends the scheming expendiency of the humanist machiavels who have supplanted them. Beckett's literary voice occupies a similar `career' to Prospero's. Prospero lands destitute with his young daughter on Sycorax's island, twelve years before the action of the play begins. He and Miranda are not alone. The mythic inhabitant of the island is a being whose energies are at the opposite pole from Prospero's skills in the spiritual dimension. Sycorax is linked by the play's language and images to all the other symbols in Shakespeare's tradition of Hecate, the `mysteries of Hecate and the Night' as Lear calls them, the witch/ goddess, the goddess in her underworld phase, the chthonic fury power of the Greeks. This was the aspect of the goddess whose passion is simply to return, somehow, into life, which shows in the Bacchic rituals of instinctual and sexual life, of destruction and regeneration. Caliban is Hecate/Sycorax's male incarnation, she now being dead. The unique poetic language in which he is described presents him as at once a fish, a monster, a pig, a man, an ape, a barnacle, a hedgehog, a tortoise, a cat, a moon-calf, a devil, the list goes on and does nothing to pin him into a class of his own. His being seems as fluid as the names he goes under. This is a mythopoetic being par excellence. The fascinating thing about the relationship of this animal, instinctual pole of life to Prospero, the other pole, is not that these poles are forever in conflict, as would have been suggested in the classic religious divide between good and evil, but that they are closely related. Contrary to some opinion, Prospero's job in getting to this island is not to crush the opposite force he finds there, but to acknowledge that it
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 65
is a part of himself. `This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.' It is all too easy to see Prospero as the slave-driver who would rather not acknowledge the existence of a so-called lower force, embodied in Caliban. But what has really happened is that Prospero's power of magical discrimination has strained out of the concentrated witch/goddess force present in the island not only Caliban but Ariel as well, another former servant of Sycorax. So Prospero, although now so to speak the ruler of the island, is nonetheless dependent on the forces which have been present there from the beginning in the form of Sycorax and her witch ancestors. Hughes says of Caliban that he objectifies `the Goddess as the Boar, incarnate in a sexual body, baffled and trapped in all the limitation of existential being, mortal but possessed by the fury of immortal appetite.'30 The Caliban whose skill is to show the visitor `every fertile inch of the island', `its best springs' is not a totally evil hell-being. He asks the humans who find him first, `Hast thou not dropped from Heaven?' The force of purification and discrimination, formerly a force put in the hands of men who turned violently against their women, fearing the power of female sexuality, is now put in the hands of a man who does not hysterically reject the forces of the witch but seeks to relate with them, to distil them, to understand their real function. That understanding is the reason why Caliban, even though so different from Ariel, is also so closely related to him. This difference also has a parallel: it goes to the root of the difference between religion and the type of magic studied and taught in esotericism. The magicians or mystics sought to contact and know directly all the powers of all the kingdoms of nature and of spirit, which formed a kind of continuum. This required an attitude of interest and acceptance, not rejection, of earth energy as well as celestial energy. By stark contrast, the orthodox religion which put Bruno to death also turned reason and instinct into implacable enemies. What Hughes says about Shakespeare and his inheritance in English poetry, I would suggest too about Beckett ± namely that the spiritual laboratory of his work resolves the post-Reformation hatred of earth-energy and the sexual sphere in a non-dualistic way, not the dualistic one that has been attributed in accounts of Beckett's `manichaeism'. So the landscape of Beckett's work is not ± any more than the island is for Prospero ± a nest of vipers to be vanquished, but a series of kingdoms to realise, the various materials for a rich magical music. Beckett's literary landscape, or soul-scape, like the island, or the forest of Arden, ends up being the space in which people can come to realise who in fact they are. That is precisely the function of the wasteland journeys that
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66 Beckett and Eros
occupy a good two-thirds of Beckett's Molloy. Those arrivals who refuse to accept the possibilities opened to them in the new land remain locked in their own world. These living kingdoms of the natural world, the mental world and the spiritual world are like notes on a scale of music which can be heard together, confusedly in dissonance, or better, as a chord, or else separately as individual notes. The true magician, like Prospero, is able to perceive the actual value of each note, and to realise its effect when played or heard on its own. The discipline of the magician is also to learn to hear more notes higher up and lower down on the scale than normal earshot would. Translate this metaphor of notes into the orders of the universe, and the scope of the magic begins to be felt. So Prospero's plots involving the spirits, Ariel, and Caliban are his performance, as it were, of the notes of the various kingdoms of the living universe. In this way he is able to wake people up to the communications of other levels. The magician does not irreversibly change the states of various beings in their kingdoms, but opens their eyes for a while to the contacts they could have between their state and the ones on either side of it. The magician operates in the same sphere as occultism. Prospero's magic reveals what Dee and Bruno hoped to disseminate in their enthusiastically received tours of mystical teaching: namely, that knowledge of the degrees of the living universe, and acceptance of all those degrees with neither hatred nor desire for them, equals knowledge of self, in which all degrees are necessarily represented. This was the teaching about macrocosm and microcosm, the so-called Great Man and Little Man: that the orders and kingdoms of life itself were all present, hologrammed, if you like, in the human individual. The tragic error was to ignore the presence of the energies thought to be harmful and to favour the ostensibly `good' energies. Beckett converts this teaching into the spiritual laboratory or workshop which is the `location' of his texts and plays.
From soul to zero: the vanishing of myth In a speech which has become famous as Shakespeare's farewell to his world and audience, Prospero makes the same point as Beckett and the Buddhist vajrayana: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 67
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, and all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.31
From this point of view, the magical perspective of the multiple levels of being changes abruptly. At this apex point of the magical perspective, as the Buddhists put it, `Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'. What we see and believe in as the real world, real feelings, real conflicts, real objects, are in actuality all constructs and strategies by which we insulate ourselves from the first reality, which is the producer of all the worlds I outlined earlier. But the basic reality is emptiness. Shakespeare's Richard II says the same, this time on the level of ego rather than cosmos, and sounding very like Beckett's Victor Krap in Eleutheria or the voice of The Unnamable: . . . Whate'er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing.32 And in all three cases, for Shakespeare, Beckett and Buddhism, the dual vanity of ego and cosmos is exactly the heart of the matter. They are the same stuff, or non-stuff, and vanish at exactly the same time in the light of the meaning of the teaching. Beckett is the Prospero of the literary island which we all inhabit, and conjures away the edifices which critics and reviewers raise like towers and palaces around them. They might both conclude with the Buddhist, that `All that was said in the Heart Sutra happens when a being who grasps as existing the five aggregates, the twelve interdependent links, the eighteen elements of senses, little by little trains to apprehend them as illusory. This being arrives then at the realization of prajnaparamita, where they are really perceived as not existing.'33 So at one end of the mythographic spectrum of the kingdoms which we have looked into is Caliban/Sycorax, the inchoate creative force or substrate, the prima materia of creation, the material and solid world leading into the organic world. Its power is associated with that of the female, and as such is an existentiation of one aspect of the Great Goddess, Paglia's `marine obscurity of the hormonal cycle'.34
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68 Beckett and Eros
At the other end is the purest possibility without any actualisation having yet entered into the process. Try to imagine a world of sheer possibility, the possibility of every event without the process having moved towards actualisation. As soon as the actualisation process begins, things begin to be ruled out. `The edge of being is death.' What can't be included has to be excluded. Now go back a step to the point where the actualising has not begun, and there we will begin to get the feeling that since there is no definition, there can be no form either: The [ground of being,] ground aspect of dharmakaya as buddha nature is free of all locations, objects or agents of origination, and so is free of the limitation of origination. It is beyond there being any time at which it ceases or any agent that ceases to be, and so it is free of the limitation of cessation. . . . Further, it is empty in that it is beyond upper or lower, cardinal or intercardinal direction, interval or time frame. It is empty in that it is totally pervasive and totally extensive.35 So the world of the formless is also the world of the purest potential of being. That is the life which Beckett and Van Velde insisted came from the unknown. It stands between the not yet and the already. And crucially in this picture, the formless occupies both genders. The spark of unknowness arcs between both poles, the transcendental and the chthonian. In alchemical imagery the spectrum of being begins with darkness, moves through earth, to the more fluid water, then to the air, less solid still, through fire, the air rising and brightening, to light itself, coloured light first, then pure white light. At both ends then, dark and light, there is a sense of absence, nothingness, no quality but the possibility of all qualities. Thus the towers and palaces become baseless fabric, insubstantial, dissolved into thin air. Kathleen Raine refers to Prospero's speech and recalls the balancing act which becomes a necessity for living in a world where all illusion has been taken away: Illusion all ± Yet where for us the real Unless what seems? These cloud-capped towers More durable than brass Our dreams.36
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Beckett, the Heart Sutra, and dzogchen 69
Now most of Beckett's writing, like The Tempest, has been conducted in the upper reaches of the world of limitation, in other words on a `Prospero's island' where there are far fewer constraints on events than there would be elsewhere ± the elements can be controlled, gravity is contradicted, and the normal processes of reasoning are obstructed by trance and reverie. All these are features of Beckett's world and Prospero's island. So we have already seen something of the world of possibility in this borderline occultist realm, between the real we call familiar and the real we cannot conceive. That is the world of soul, of the mythographic imagination. But in this speech of Prospero's we go a step further, further even than the world of soul and dream. His speech `objectifies both as representation and description, the essential condition of the transcendental state of mind, beyond opposites, united with divine being at the source of creation before creation.'37 He is just about to give up even the world of magic now, and, just like the dzogchenpa, relegates all phenomena, ranging from the solid through to the dreamlike, to a state of unreality. In comparison to the pure light of awareness, even the spirits and magically produced effects on Prospero's island are reduced to unreality, `leaving not a rack behind.' When exposed to the light of absolute being, all relative being, all contingencies, even spiritual contingencies, seem only props, as on a stage. That is exactly Prospero's skill: he calls his spirits `actors', so creating for us listeners another play within a play, and reminds us like the Buddhist that the world outside the theatre is also a magical illusion. Similarly, the mythography of culture which Beckett offers as his text is self-collapsing. Its myth is ultimately as disposable as Prospero's. Like the world for Jaques in As you Like it, Prospero's island turns out to have been only a stage. Not only the actors, but the place in which the act is acted, that is, the island, is also the theatre, which is also the real world in which the theatre stands, `the great globe itself'; not only that, but `all which it [will] inherit', that is, all human life, all of this shall dissolve, as befits dream worlds. This resembles ancient Indian teaching, that life and existence can be seen from two points of view; one is as appearance; the other as emptiness, formless possibility, the order of unconditioned or undelimited being, capable of every form but limited by none. What Prospero is saying in this speech is the apex of the magical system of Bruno, Dee and the alchemists; that is, that what we see habitually as the real world and the stuff of everyday life is not what reality really is. Turning this perspective on reality round as Prospero does is a shock to the habituated system by which we assess ourselves in relation to the world. But turnaround has been exactly the purpose behind Prospero's
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70 Beckett and Eros
instinct to study occultism in the first place, and behind his emergency measures taken on the island and on his old enemies. This is a mystical transcending, in other words, of the old elements of revenge tragedy. A final recapitulation will put Prospero's speech further into the Buddhist context. All the levels of being, even those in the magical system, are nothing compared to the power which can actually see these levels without having to occupy or depend on any one of them. This power is a different state, called unconditioned because it is the only state capable of witnessing all the other states and shifting effortlessly, without limitations. Otherwise it would be a state limited by what single state it occupied. Prospero gives up all his occult power at the close of The Tempest, because the aware state need not compromise itself with any condition, even the magical; so when it has fully appreciated it and done therapeutic deeds by means of it, it can let go of the last limiting conditions without reserve. There is a point beyond which it can't go, and he sees it coming when he makes that extraordinary speech. For Shakespeare and Prospero, Bruno and Dee, and the mythical structures of the Buddhists, magic is a laboratory of human transformation, not a quick means to gain power over others or get to heaven or paradise. If Beckett's plays and novels, in their mythopoetic capacity, work as Prospero's working does, and reflect that type of meditation practice, then they are no less realistic in intention than any spiritual method for raising the quality of human life and awareness. From the theurgic use of myth the point is reached where it can be wholly dispensed with. This point is equivalent to passing from the world of colours to the white light, or from the enclosure of theatre and stage to the outdoors. On this transition Reich wrote in a manner strangely faithful to the intentions Beckett, Shakespeare, and the Buddhist view: Somehow the endless heavens on silent nights do not seem in any sort of accord with the show inside the theatre or with the subject of the performance. All that belongs to the show seems far off, unreal, and very much out of place, if seen from outside the theatre building. [. . .] Those who wish to stay inside [the theatre] and refuse to move out, are of course entitled to do so. But they are not entitled to pass judgement on the experience of others who do not believe in the rationality of the stage show, who refuse to accept the dogma that what man displays inside the narrow space on the stage is his true being and his true nature.38
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5
Dark Stream I did not know When to your brink I came How full your flow Of the world's sorrow: I dip my cup and drink. Kathleen Raine I'll be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all its lights fell upon me, the same I had so often gazed on since my first stumblings on the distant earth. Beckett
Occupying and wandering The agenda of humanist culture ± its defining sense of ownership, appropriation, identity and home ± presents, within its own terms, a problem: the defector or dissenter from this dominant political and aesthetic culture must be a wanderer. Compare that orthodoxy with this saying attributed to Krishna: [T]o love with an everlasting love, daylight must disappear. Thunder must fall upon my heart, and my soul must flee beyond myself into the heights of heaven!1 If we think of the Beckett universe whose details are repeated throughout his middle to late work, and interpret them according to this saying, we find the following. Disappearance of daylight signifies fading of 72
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On the Descent of the Soul
terrestrial habit(ation) ± compare this image with Beckett's twilight scenes and shifting landscapes. Thunder on heart signifies destruction of attachment; and the `soul [that] flees beyond itself' means that localised myself is disregarded; this is the inner meaning of the division into body and soul that appears to reimpose dualism but does not: the division is simply an aid to dropping ego. We come to a provisional axiom that will concern us throughout the study: self as owner-occupier equals ego; self as wanderer equals non-ego. We now turn to the region of this wandering, its psychic terrain. How is it that to elucidate Beckett, first Buddhism explains a metaphysics of oneness whose ultimate is to exclude all image, myth, language and interpretation, and then the descent-myth offers an explanation of the world of soul, of the Gods, the mythical and metaphorical world, and an imaginal trajectory in which soul encounters body and leaves it again? It looks from one point of view like a perverse contradiction. The short answer is that myth signifies only at its vanishing-point, and that non-duality is the agent of myth's disappearance. The world we live in is inevitably mythical, since it is the devolved world of number, multiplicity and individuation. So it is not a contradiction to say that it is by means of the soul and by means of myth and metaphor that we come to understand the knowledge of oneness. Through the myth of the descent, and the soul's occupation of beforebirth and after-death states, we come to have a different attitude to material objectification, to name, place, status, belonging, and the types of appropriation and expropriation that govern us as though they themselves were the rules of the universe. Living in a mediated, mythical, numbered world, there is little point in our losing the language of soul, which is the expository vehicle for a myth which dramatizes the only attitude that can really dissolve the poison of false identity. That is the reason why the soul is called `deceiving elf', and why Prospero works magic while knowing that magic is ultimately just another net of illusion. Illusion in one sense only: myth contemplates the false maya world from the vantage point of oneness; literalism contemplates the false world only from the vantage of that false world and blindfolds the viewer. The descent of the soul, sometimes called the path of return, is at once a myth and a reasoning. Its special contribution to the understanding of psychology is that it is the first picture of human subjectivity to make it essential to regard the self not as a fixed quantity but as a process or movement; whether or not we call it development is less important than that we acknowledge the change which characterises the situation. The
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On the Descent of the Soul 73
myth of soul-descent is unique in that on all occasions it is invoked, it instances a problematic rather than imaging a fixture. This is very important. The ascent and descent of the soul only makes sense in the context of an experience unique to humans, the feeling that they belong somewhere else than the place they find themselves. The imagery of homesickness is widespread in traditions that outline the descent of the soul, and there are so many of them that I do not intend to list them all here, but simply suggest a direction towards studying Beckett from this point of view. The terms of this shared mythological axiom are i) that the situation is one in which it appears, although it may not be the case, that there is a soul in some distinction from the body. This may not be recognised with any great pleasure or assent, but for the myth to have any bite in the psychological make-up of the person there is always the body±soul distinction, even if it is only in the form of the wish that such a distinction be abolished or proved not to exist in the first place. ii) that there is a situation in which it is felt that there is an above and a below, from which, into which, the soul can be contemplated as moving. iii) that there is an impulsion, dynamic energy, motive power which effects the movements according to laws known or unknown, or else according to choices made by the free. iv) that there is the possibility to `view' life from one stage in the descent, in further stages, or to `anticipate' the stages not reached. This possibility is emphasised by the stress on the fact that it is only occasional. Normally amnesia, forgetfulness, the draft of Lethe, obscures from the being in one stage the conditions determining another stage. Provisos obtain, to enable a neutral appreciation of this mythology. These are vital because the lore of soul-descent has been seen to be tainted by the muddy waters of inferior mediumship, the `old lady psychics' whose company Yeats was mocked for keeping. In regard to i), it is important that there is no necessary valuation of the one part over the other, soul over body, with the moral overtones that inevitably come crashing in hard on the heels of such a valuation. In regard to ii), it is important that the above and the below are not rigidly tagged to the notions of heaven and hell that subsist in western Judaeo-Christian theory. In regard to iii), it is important that as far as possible the motive power is not attributed right away to the being's achieving one destina-
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tion or the other; and also that the soul seen as descended and ascending is nevertheless not seen as engaged in a career in time, being sent from one place to another like a letter. In regard to iv), it is essential that the possibility of viewing the different stages of soul-descent is not seen as simply vulgar prophecy, for instance, giving details of future events and then tallying them with what happens. The most interesting perspectives to open up as a result of engaging this powerful myth are these: i) it introduces the possibility that the self and what it calls its own are not necessarily correctly attributed by the human ± what I think I am may not be what the situation is in reality. ii) therefore what are taken to be the objects of longing, loss, love, when not those in the familiar world, may be attributed to motives originating in the other world. iii) it is a powerful analogy, or mythograph, for what has been called the unconscious since the dawn of psychoanalysis. (The term mythograph implies a more developed form of consciousness-patterning than analogy alone could be expected to imply.) It explains motives and actions that have no plausible explanation on the plane of the ordinary world-picture, which insists that this world `down here', and its thoughts (rational motivations of the conscious mind) is the only one there is. iv) it offers a completely new, unimaginably different picture of the meanings of origin and destination from the picture which we are accustomed to seeing on the empirical stage. The greatest obstacle to using this ancient mystery tradition is that it has usually been judged to be irrevocably associated with a belief-system. The problem with the myth of soul-descent is that the person mentioning it is immediately thought to believe in it as a doctrine and therefore to be mad.2 The word is not too strong, given the clinical equations of spiritism and insanity. Then there is a problem with even attributing belief to someone else, because it may be an entirely different belief from the one that is assumed to be meant by the words (this accounts for the relative meaninglessness of polls assessing the number of the population who believe in a certain `doctrine' such as life after death, or the existence of God). Furthermore, to cease to contemplate the myth of soul-descent simply on account of a belief the expounder is supposed to have, which doesn't agree with one's own view, just closes the matter and its possibilities before the door is even half ajar.
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On the Descent of the Soul 75
What is undeniable, and what comprehends all the descriptions above, is that the myth of soul-descent, while not locking us into a theology (whether that be oriental or occidental), nevertheless obliges us, while we are engaged with its mythographic perspectives, to regard the possibility that we live in more than one world. It is the possibility of movement between worlds that gives the necessary conditions for the myth to subsist and to have its coherence. In this sense it is no more unusual than the existential positions adopted in science fiction, whose criteria are usually so far from being validated by empirical science that they cause the narrative to be set in a far future when science will have reached the stage depicted and therefore retrospectively (but in future tense) validate the criteria, or else they appear just as otherworldly as theosophy does. Some facts need to be remembered too, for example that this myth is not the exclusive property of one tradition but has its versions in nearly all cultures and all ages. It is no more useful to try to trace the myth to Plotinus than to see its origins in the discourse of Krishna. Once it is recognised it can be seen to be present in a wide range of traditions, È n, Hinduism, amongst them Pythagoreanism, theosophy, Buddhism, Bo Inuit myth, Islam/sufism, Neo-Platonism, Egyptian myth, Christianity, Native African myth; and its particular location fades into insignificance and its common features and contours emerge into clearer and clearer light. The French philosopher Schure gives a good example of the way in which this myth is encountered never as a fait accompli but rather as a predicament, a process: What is the divine Psyche's situation in earthly life? [. . .] one cannot imagine one stranger or more tragic. From the moment it painfully awakens in the dense atmosphere of earth, the soul is entwined in folds of the body. It does not see, breathe or think except by means of the body, yet it is not the body. As it develops, it feels a flickering light forming within itself, something invisible and incorporeal which it calls its spirit, its consciousness. Indeed, man has the inborn feeling of his threefold nature, since he distinguishes even though instinctively, between his body and his soul, between his soul and his spirit. But the captive, tormented soul struggles with its two companions as in the grip of a serpent of a thousand coils on the one hand, and an invisible genius who calls to the soul, but whose presence is only felt by the beating of its wings and fleeting lights, on the other.3
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76 Beckett and Eros
This type of symbolic discourse offers the reader an indication of how the soul is the recording medium of data coming from both worlds, the physical and spiritual; this is why the myth is of such use in clarifying the intention of artistic works, which operate on the same level as the protagonist of the myth of descent. Schure continues: Sometimes the body absorbs the soul to such a degree that the latter lives only by sensations and passions; it grovels in the bloody orgies of madness, or in the thick vapour of fleshly pleasures until it is frightened because of the great silence of its invisible companion. Sometimes, attracted by the latter, the soul loses itself in such lofty thoughts that it forgets the existence of the body until the latter reminds it of its presence by a tyrannical demand. Nevertheless, an inner voice tells the soul that the link between it and its invisible companion is indissoluble, while death will break the soul's attachment to the body. But tossed back and forth between the two in its everlasting struggle, the soul vainly seeks for happiness and truth. [. . .] Finding nothing permanent, tormented, blown like a leaf in the wind, it doubts itself as well as the divine world which reveals itself to the soul through the latter's sorrow and inability to reach it. Human ignorance is inscribed in the contradictions of the so-called wise men, and human sorrow is written in the unquenchable longing of the human glance. Finally whatever the extent of his knowledge, birth and death enclose man between two fateful boundaries. They are the doors of darkness, beyond which he sees nothing. The flame of his life lights up as he enters by the one, and flickers out as he leaves by the other. Is it the same with the soul? If not, what becomes of it?4 Ignore for a moment the nineteenth-century flavour of the prose (which we must as well bear with when reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer), and reflect on the following distilled account of what is as obviously compulsive imagery for Beckett as it is for SchureÂ: It does not see, breathe or think except by means of the body, yet it is not the body. As it develops, it feels a flickering light forming within itself the captive, tormented soul struggles with its two companions
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78 Beckett and Eros
until it is frightened because of the great silence of its invisible companion
Human ignorance is inscribed in the contradictions of the so-called wise men, and human sorrow is written in the unquenchable longing of the human glance. whatever the extent of his knowledge, birth and death enclose man between two fateful boundaries. They are the doors of darkness, beyond which he sees nothing. The flame of his life lights up as he enters by the one, and flickers out as he leaves by the other. Is it the same with the soul? If not, what becomes of it? These phrases parallel the world of soul of the Beckett character in ways that are extremely suggestive. The myth of the descent operates not in belief-structures and doctrines, but only in affinities like these obvious ones between the philosopher and creative writer. Affinities act in the metaphorical medium of soul; this mythographic realm is the only area in which language has a purchase on the matters to which it is normally denied access, and which are especially firmly excluded in the humanist regime of awareness. I would also suggest that the mythographic realm depends more on metaphor as such for its operation, than exclusively upon stories, despite the fact that the presence of story defines the popular conception of what myth is, and represents the narrative norm for a lot of tales based in this mythograph. The term mythograph suggests that it is not only in a story but in a situation, mood, image or even simply vocal inflection that the power of myth to interpret the world of soul exists. And since the world of Beckett so insistently collapses the specifications essential to story in the normal sense, this qualification and extension of what we perceive to be the operations of myth is very necessary. With Beckett's intention to explore the `pre-uterine' firmly in mind, we can perform another mythographic operation on SchureÂ's description of the soul moving this time in the opposite direction, to earth rather than from it. This is the full account: Like earthly life, spiritual life has its beginning, its climax and its decline. When this life is exhausted, the soul feels overcome with heaviness, faintness and melancholy. An invincible force again draws it to the struggle and sufferings of earth. This desire is mixed with terrible apprehensions and a tremendous grief at leaving the divine
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Finding nothing permanent, tormented, it doubts itself
life. [. . .] The heaviness increases; a darkening takes place within it. It sees its luminous companions only through a veil; growing ever thicker, the veil causes the soul to sense its imminent separation. It hears their farewells; their tears permeate it [. . .] and will leave in its heart the burning thirst for a forgotten happiness. Then [. . .] it promises to remember; in the world of darkness to remember light, in the world of falsehood to remember truth, in the world of hate to remember love. [. . .] Now it awakens in a heavy atmosphere. Ethereal star, oceans of light, all have disappeared. Again the soul is on earth, in the vale of birth and death. Nevertheless, it has not yet lost its celestial memory, and its winged guide, still visible to its eyes, points out the woman who will be its mother. [. . .] As the soul is plunged into this warm cave which makes a confused sound and which enlarges, as it feels itself taken into the organism, the consciousness of divine life fades and dies away. Between the soul and the light from above are interspersed waves of blood, tissues of flesh, which bind it and fill it with darkness. Already this distant light is no more than a dying flicker. Finally, dreadful pain compresses it, pressing it into a vice, a bloody convulsion tears it from the maternal soul and fixes it within a throbbing body. The child is born, a pitiful earthly image, and he cries with fright. But the memory of heaven has returned to the depths of the unconscious. It will live again only by science or by pain, by love or by death! The law of incarnation and excarnation [. . .] takes the reason and purpose of immortality out of the abstract or the fantastic. [. . .] Earthly birth is a death from the spiritual point of view, and death is a heavenly birth.5 If we again excerpt what Beckett's mythograph draws upon, we will see that the analogy between the two is hardly coincidental. the soul feels overcome with heaviness, faintness and melancholy. This desire is mixed with terrible apprehensions and a tremendous grief their farewells; their tears permeate it [. . .] and will leave in its heart the burning thirst for a forgotten happiness. the soul is plunged into this warm cave which makes a confused sound and which enlarges, as it feels itself taken into the organism Between the soul and the light from above are interspersed waves of blood, tissues of flesh, which bind it and fill it with darkness.
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On the Descent of the Soul 79
80 Beckett and Eros
Already this distant light is no more than a dying flicker.
Earthly birth is a death The manner in which I display these excisions as isolated `bits and scraps' of the textual weave, is intentional homage to Beckett's method, as he exhibits it for example in the novel How It Is, and also to a method which is, as I say, not concerned with the coherence of narrative but the presencing or aletheia of mythographic materials. For the painter, as for the literary explorer of the soul world, in fact any worker on behalf of the `a-logical movement of the psyche',6 there is no priority of narrative; on the contrary, all that is, expresses.
Born and unborn, fixed and fluid The myth of the descent of the soul offers, like all mythographs, a facility to study the relationship between body and soul, without establishing a fixed demarcation between them. The myth subsists only in this dualitude of process, not in a dualism of ontology. It is viewed from contrary angles, as we have seen, and is not subservient to a description under the criteria of optimism and pessimism. Plotinus says The Soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier realms, has entered body; it is a god, a later phase of the divine: but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge. [. . .] Better for the Soul to dwell in the Intellectual ± we should pause briefly to note the Plotinian meaning of intellect: to quote Beckett, a `higher frequency' is signified by this word `than that of ratiocination'7 ± but, given [the soul's] proper nature, [the soul] is under compulsion to participate in the sense-realm also. There is no grievance in its not being, through and through, the highest; it holds mid-rank among the authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature; thus, while it communicates to this realm something of its own
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Finally, dreadful pain compresses it, pressing it into a vice, a bloody convulsion tears it from the maternal soul and fixes it within a throbbing body
store, it absorbs in turn whenever ± instead of employing in its government only its safeguarded phase ± it plunges in an excessive zeal into the very midst of its chosen sphere; then it abandons its status as whole soul with whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered here, [. . .] more clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost their direct antithesis.8 Almost, the writer takes care to emphasise. The Beckett narrator encounters, in the Lambert family, virtually total immersion, `embedded deep in life, hoping for nothing more, either for themselves or for others' and engaged in the most brutal trade of the incarnate being, `killing and eating'. Mr Lambert is a pig-slaughterer. Where the Beckett narrator comes into the picture of the Plotinian `almost' is precisely the point at which he can witness this fact about the Lamberts and comment on it with a sense of the immersion he could, but does not completely, have, owing to his existence as one of the `never properly born', one of those selves of whom All that Fall and Watt both speak. Here, in this very matter of `unbornness', is the space of encounter where Beckett, Buddhist dzogchen and the mythography of the descent of soul directly intersect. In the myth of descent, unbornness is the condition of not having been cast into limits and perimeter, not bordered by subjectivism and self. In this sense it is identical to what dzogchen, without the imagery of soul-descent, nevertheless still calls unbornness. Here are some dzogchen characterisations of the unborn state: The nature of awareness is the unborn natural mode The aspect of awareness is the innate clarity of the radiant mode The display of awareness is the all-pervading manifest mode In the original nature the three modes are inseparable as the single point of reality.9 Our experience is unborn because when we look into the self who is experiencing the world we can't find anything, and when we look out everything is shimmering and alive, but without any essential self-substance because it is transforming all the time. That unfolding is undying or unceasing, since, because things have never been born, because they have never come into a separate, `true' existence,
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On the Descent of the Soul 81
there is nothing there to die. [. . .] The mirror seems to be empty in itself, but the surface of the mirror is always shimmering and full of images. The images seem real and yet they are unborn, they cannot be separated from their situation. They are devoid of separate, inherent existence. A traditional way of describing this is to say that all things exist within the womb of the great mother, emptiness.10 . . . all things everywhere and at all times have been the unborn play of emptiness. They are untouched by the dualistic view of separate entities.11 the completely pure nature has been unborn from the very beginning.12 Unborn, flowing, flowing. Unceasingly, flowing, flowing.13 We may remark that, according to this poetry of unbornness, as Beckett said once of his characters, `birth' really is `the death of you'. Birth has a special meaning, which is not `coming into life' but in another important sense leaving the primordial state of unconditioned being, and entering into the limitation of context. We may recall Irwin Thompson's remark that the fixing of limits is a kind of death. In the same connection, conversely, dzogchen speaks of unbornness/unfixedness as a way of insight: real understanding has to take place in the face of anxiety and uncertainty, because whatever we know, if it becomes established as a fact, will sooner or later betray us. Fixed knowledge is a particular view of a situation that's embodied in a context that's changing in time.14 Embodiment is like fixed knowledge in this sense, it is death, and that is really the reason why Beckett is against birth, just as the dzogchenpa speaks for the `unborn', fluxial state as the way of awareness. The perspective is opened up here to give Beckett's images of unbornness much more significance than simply that of a sense of psychological debility (with which most commentary has sufficed to explain Beckett's references to the unborn state). The descent-myth saying `earthly birth is a death' is no different from Beckett's saying `Birth was the death of him'. Indeed, something of the poverty, not of the unborn state but of the born state, is further described by Plotinus as encavernment:
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82 Beckett and Eros
souls indeed are thus far in the one place; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and selfcentered; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the Soul is a deserter of the totality; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is [. . .] a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things; thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose depths it henceforth sinks far.15 If we now interpolate this passage with its correlatives for the Beckett eventuality, we find: `souls indeed are thus far in the one place; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centered'; we may compare this to the solipsism of the postcartesian psyche; `in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own.' Here, expressed in phrases that share the tone of Beckett's trilogy, are the roots of appropriation and emplacement in political humanism. `This state long maintained, the Soul is a deserter of the totality; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment'; ± all compelling descriptions of the Beckettian ego which realises its samsaric entrapment while lingering in it; `severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being', the nest signifying the limited domicile of ego-identity falsely known as home and giving way to the great vagrancy of spiritual homelessness such as Rumi's; `for this it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things'; Molloy's precursor in the nouvelles asks himself: `into what nightmare thingness am I fallen?' This is the question always framed in the Beckett mythograph of this soul-descent. We can agree with Yeats in respect of this problem in saying, `The only true history is the history of the soul'. The other mishaps of the Beckett character are incidental and rolled out into insignificance by his repetitiousness and self-parodic treatment of event. `Thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose
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On the Descent of the Soul 83
84 Beckett and Eros
. . . Where human passions dwell
Few flowers spring,
Too far from that remembered hill.16
Here there is the suggestion of a lost celestial earth,17 the mythographic landscape that is the soul's homeland, not the `world out there' of the ordinary empiricist. Speaking of Scotland she suggested the same: Shadow of hills on the still loch, mysterious
Inviolate green land, whose sun is cool as water,
Whose stones bruise not,
Seems soul's native place, this weary road
The dark country in a glass.18
There is always, when dealing in mythographic currency, the sense that when the levels of signification change upwards, then there is still a use for the mythographic imagery of place, nativity and soul. Indeed, mythography is the agent by which the levels of perception can be elevated; metaphor works then as an upward stairway or passagepoint, not simply as a substitution of one thing for another. This is mythography's meaning, in fact; also its difference from ordinary metaphor, and why it deserves study in itself and functions as an unprecedented key to Beckett's works. The two expositions of the descent that we have examined seem to assume that the descent must of necessity emborder tragedy or the danger of tragedy. There is a similar implication in what Keats all but makes an optimistic account of the descent. `Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul, a place where the heart must feel and suffer in diverse ways? [ . . .] I think it probable that this system of soul-making may have been the parent of all the more palpable and personal schemes of redemption, among the Zoroastrians, the Christians, and the Hindus.'19 But as well as tragedy there might be a sense of necessity about the matter. Plotinus again: `Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscernibly buried' (by implication dead, not living); `shapeless within that unbroken whole' (suggesting that the act of breaking while normally seen as destructive `clasm', might have necessity in it):
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depths it henceforth sinks far.' Kathleen Raine writes (reminiscent of Beckett's style) in explanation of this:
On the Descent of the Soul 85
`none of the real beings (of the Intellectual Cosmos) would exist if that unity remained at halt within itself.'20
Finally the question must be asked whether the language of longing, dread, attraction, repulsion, hope and fear ± all of which terms are the humanised language of life in this descended world, can possibly apply to the metaphysics of the universe and its beings, in short, whether we are able to conceive properly of a universe peopled with beings who are not necessarily people. The answer to this question poses the most interesting problem of all and relates directly to the human/inhuman question in the work of Beckett. It lies in the presentation, to the watcher and hearer, of a human universe, or of universal man. Blake offers a direct taste of it: The Light of the Morning
Heaven's Mountains adorning,
In particles bright
The jewels of Light
Distinct shone & clear.
Amaz'd and in fear
I each particle gazed,
Astonished, amazed;
For each was a Man
Human form'd. Swift I ran,
For they beckoned to me
Remote by the Sea.
Saying: `Each grain of Sand,
Every stone on the Land,
Each rock & each hill,
Each fountain & rill,
Each herb & each tree,
Mountain, hill, earth & sea,
Cloud, Meteor and Star,
Are Men seen Afar.' . . .
I stood in the Streams
of Heaven's bright Beams . . .
My Shadow I knew,
And my wife's shadow too,
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Human and cosmos
And My Sister, & Friend.
We like Infants descend
In our Shadows on Earth,
Like a weak mortal birth.
My Eyes, more & more,
Like a Sea without Shore,
Continue expanding,
The Heavens commanding,
Till the Jewels of Light,
Heavenly Men beaming bright,
Appear'd as One Man
Who Complacent began
My limbs to enfold
In his beams of bright gold.
Like dross purg'd away
All my mire & my clay[.]21
This is not conventional anthropomorphism, nor is it by any means a version of pathetic fallacy. It is the intuitive perception which goes with nearly all expositions of soul-descent (this poem of Blake's is another, as the middle lines testify), that the composition of the universe and of the human individual have something important, and formative, in common. This is the origin of the proverbial phrase that calls the cosmos Great Man, and of the tradition of astrum in homine, a person's relationship with a star or stars, that occupied Paracelsus. And Jalal'uddin Rumi offers a complement to this picture of celestial man in a picture of his clairvoyant or mythical vision of the ascent of man through the kingdoms, and his presence in all the degrees and phenomena of Nature. I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man,
To soar with angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on; all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, `To Him we shall return.'22
[ . . .]
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86 Beckett and Eros
First he appeared in the class of inorganic things, Next he passed therefrom into that of plants, For years he lived as one of the plants, remembering nought of his organic state so different; And when he passed from the vegetative to the animal state He had no remembrance of his state as a plant, Except the inclination he felt to the world of plants, Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers [ . . .] Again, the great Creator, as you know, drew man out of the animal into the human state. Thus man passed from one order of nature to another, Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is now. Of his first souls he has now no remembrance, And he will again be changed from his present soul.23 Other accounts of the descent of the soul enforce the same point, that the soul does not only occupy human forms, or more nearly, that the Cosmic Man comprehends and lives in animate so-called non-human states as well.24 This is vitally important to understanding Beckett's evanescent characters and their soul-movement, which no-one among their contemporaries can understand, a movement toward and a sympathy for living beings other than human ± moles, flies, lichens, for example.25 Schure writes of this co-occupation or cosmic/human oeconomia: The soul [ . . .] can climb or descend in the course of its series of incarnations. As for earthly mankind, its journey takes place according to the law of an ascending progression, which is part of the divine order. This truth, which perhaps we may believe to be a recent discovery, actually was known and taught in the ancient Mysteries. `Animals are the relatives of man, and man is the relative of the gods,' says Pythagoras. He developed philosophically what the symbols of Eleusis also taught: the progression of ascending kingdoms, the striving from the vegetable world to the animal world.26 And Darwin wrote in a note, `The soul by consent of all is superadded, animals not got it, not look forward [sic]. If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals ± our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine, our slaves in the most laborious works, our com-
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On the Descent of the Soul 87
panions in our amusements ± they may partake from our origin in one common ancestor, we may be all netted together.'27 In both forms of seeing evolution, that is, under the material and the spiritual perspectives, the essential thing is to perceive toward what the orientation of the view is, and read it from there. The mythic view is different from the materialist, and in products of soul, which artworks are, the mythic must be accounted for. William Irwin Thompson writes, vis-aÁ-vis this double vision of evolution: [whereas] Darwin sees a common ancestor in physical space-time, a theosophical mystic would see the ancestor as preceding the emergence into the time-stream of the physical plane. For the theosophist, the soul descending into the physical plane is something like a space capsule in re-entry: as consciousness descends, various excretions of consciousness spark and peel off. In this mythic tradition, animals are archaic excretions of human consciousness, and when humanity reascends into the spiritual realms, these projections will be reabsorbed, and animals will disappear.28 Having opened up the perspective of the soul's mobility in the myth of the descent, we can now begin to see how it applies to Beckett's literary world. Beckett's self, variously inscribed, is the psyche, not the individual personality. Therefore all the constants and conditions attending the being who is traditionally described as Psyche (Soul) resonate in the activities, states and reflections of Beckett's human figures. Psyche is the archetype of mythographic being, as it combines (a) the word for modern consciousness, (b) the word for modern unconsciousness, (c) the personage of a member of the world of the Gods, and (d) an insect (butterfly) whose stages of transformation, as Goethe noted, replicate visually, and graphically so, the radical metamorphoses that attend the development of organic life. In meaning these four things, whenever its story is told, or is even mentioned, the mythographically educated hearer will intuit the other planes at the same time as attending to the one in the foreground, when there is a foreground. This not to say that we are on the road to confusion or vagueness, quite the reverse, we are in the mythographic laboratory in which it is pointed out, in a display environment, that no level of awareness can be isolated from its interexistence with other levels. Schure broaches `the great inner problem of everyone. It is the problem of the soul, which discovers within itself an abyss of darkness and light, which views itself with a mixture of rapture and fear, saying, `I am
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88 Beckett and Eros
not of this world, for it does not suffice to explain myself to me. I do not come from earth, and I am going elsewhere. But where? This is the mystery of Psyche, which includes all others. [ . . .] The doctrine of the life of the soul through the series of existences is the common characteristic of the esoteric traditions [ . . .] it is of major importance for us since the man of today rejects equally the abstract, vague immortality of philosophy and the childish heaven of elementary religion. Nevertheless the dryness and emptiness of materialism shocks him. Unconsciously he strives for the consciousness of an organic immortality, which responds both to the requirements of his reason and to the needs of his soul.'29 We have to be aware here that we are using the word soul in Jung's expanded sense, such that the `needs of the soul' are not the needs for entertainment, say, or for distraction from work, but an existential hunger whose continued starvation leads to mental illness or some other crisis of collapse. Chapter 6 will explore how the erotic is entwined with the descent myth: why it is, as Schure says, that `these truths are profoundly linked to the mysteries of spiritual generation, and of generation in the flesh, upon which the destinies of future mankind depend.'30
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On the Descent of the Soul 89
6
She is, she exists in one and the same way, she is every way like herself, in no way can she be injured or changed, she is not subject to time, she cannot at one time be other than at another. Beckett `Ah she knew you, heavenly powers!' Beckett . . . great Goddess Night encloses ocean and memory . . . R. Grossinger
Tragic equations in a culture of gender From various vantages we have been circling the point where Beckett's major obsession, birth, comes into view. Birth is the convergence point of matters of human sexuality on the one hand, and matters of concern to spirituality on the other. The only other significant convergence point is love. It may seem odd to spell out that flesh and spirit, each classically at war with the other and divided assiduously from the other by a culture of ethics, gender and practice, should nevertheless occupy the selfsame mythological substrate. But so it is. The language of the soul and spirit is in all traditions involved in describing the choice when, how and whether to incarnate. There is a sequence of Tibetan recitals in which the soul's encounter with the `womb-entrance' is described in detail.1 There is the celebrated poem of Blake in which Thel, a discarnate soul, visits earth in the psychic plane, learns what she can, and resolves not to incarnate in view of the conditions. There is the equally celebrated sequence of gnomons about birth in Beckett, which sound like the retrospective language of a being like 90
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Complete Being
Thel, but whose decision was less easy than hers. `Birth was the death of him.' `I gave up before birth.' The language of `the flesh', of human sexual affairs, which we might expect to contrast with that of the soul, shares just the same preoccupation with birth, which runs a gamut between ± at one end ± the motivation to procreate, the self-validation associated with it, and the catastrophic grief associated with infertility; and ± at the other ± the motivation to prevent pregnancy, the sense of `safety' associated with contraception, and the crisis experienced when its precautions fail, whether through error or design. Spelt out like that it may seem that the concerns of the flesh and the spirit have little to do with one another. But what is beyond doubt is that, first, literary representation takes account of both languages, and must do so, as long as sexual affairs and spiritual affairs occupy the lives of humans. And that second, perhaps more important, upon birth imagery the two languages merge. One conclusion could be ventured in which the continuing significance of sexual/spiritual myth is rooted: when an individual comes to reflect on his or her origin, there is a pointer directed at both a physical and a spiritual ancestor. The value of using a mythopoetic instrument such as the one Ted Hughes evolved to study Shakespeare and English poetry is that it provides some illumination of the psychic traffic passing across this interchange between the language of the soul and the sexual language of humans speaking as earth-bound beings. Even the phrase earth-bound hints at the potential traffic between the world one is persuaded to name the `real one', and the one into which, through `un-binding', one would like access. This interchange between realms Hughes sees as the ground of ritual drama: The deeper understanding, the instinctive prompting, of ritual drama recognizes that a human being is only half alive if their life on the realistic, outer plane does not have the full assent and co-operation of their life on the mythic plane.2 If we anticipate for a second the outlining of this traffic with myth in the form of the Goddess, we see Hughes speaking about both planes, human relationships and the language of the soul, when he says that [The male ego's] intellectual rejection of that unwanted half of the Goddess, and thereby that unwanted half of himself (and of life), is the tragic error from which his (and her) tragic fate explodes.3
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He speaks, in that one sentence, both of the Goddess (clearly a mythopoetic level) and of life (clearly the level we are used to calling the real world). A mythology which can contain the traffic of a spiritual economy and a sexual economy is useful in that it can acknowledge things about both fields that would be impossible to enter into if they were kept apart as they are in the oppositional discourse of flesh and spirit. The example Hughes uses in his book on Shakespeare gives a taste of what his analysis achieves, and at the same time indicates exactly the fulcrum upon which our appreciation of Beckett's inscription of gender must properly rest. The only major difference is that Shakespeare's drama tends toward action, whereas Beckett's tends toward inaction. But the mythopoetic landscape is very similar, as Hughes found it to be in numerous other examples of European literature. Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis describes an archetypal mythical situation, which was in turn described in Greek mythology. In the Greek version, the legendary lovers Venus and Adonis, who are simultaneously gods, tryst in the forest. In the midst of this love scene a wild boar charges into the clearing and kills Adonis, after which there is a long lament from Venus. Shakespeare makes a crucial change to this story when he retells it, and it is the only known change to this story that has occurred. In Shakespeare's version, Venus spends half the poem's length trying to seduce Adonis, but Adonis refuses Venus's advances, denounces her as lustful, and rushes off into the forest to hunt down a wild boar, which he says is a better way of spending time than submitting to, or responding to, Venus' love. Venus goes in search of Adonis the next day, and finds his dead body gored in the groin by a boar's tusks. Her lament takes the form of a prophecy that henceforward all human love will be condemned to certain tragedy, by jealousy, or else by finding `sweet beginning, but unsavoury end'. Then she turns the dead body into a purple flower spotted with white,4 and ascends into the world of the gods with it. That is the argument of one of Shakespeare's long poems. His only other one, describing the rape of Lucrece, is its exact counterpart. Here Lucrece, the female character, is celebrated for her faithfulness in marriage, for her restraint, loyalty and chastity; she is crept up on by the male character Tarquin and viciously raped. She laments the tragedy and kills herself. Tarquin is banished as a result of his crime. The connection between the two poems is obvious in that Adonis and Tarquin are embodiments of anti-female force, one showing it in hubristic refusal and the other through enforcing possession. Both are violent haters, Adonis mentally, Tarquin physically. The male character as
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Adonis makes an intellectual distinction between love and lust; but as Tarquin he acts but does not think: he becomes a rapist, attacking what he once refused to accept. `The male who hysterically rejects what he regards as the female's lust enforces his rejection so violently that he tries to kill her.'5 In the same way, both Venus and Lucrece are embodiments of love ± Venus in the initiative and openly physical, sexual sense, Lucrece in the capacity of faithfulness and devotion to the partner. Now if both narratives, that of Venus and Adonis and that of Lucrece and Tarquin, are looked on as consecutive mythical representations, what we end up with is this. The female sex is given two contrasting forms, love active and love passive; and the male sex is likewise given two forms of hatred, one of fleeing and disinvolvement (the puritan Adonis), and one of pursuit and oppression (the rapist Tarquin). `This sequence of absolute rejection and lustful assault is logical. [. . .] In divining just how the second myth erupts from the first, how the man who rejects the female, in moral, sexual revulsion, becomes in a moment the man who tries to destroy her, Shakespeare has divined a natural law.'6 If we now compare these very plain, uncomplicated, stripped-down Shakespearian plots ± each poem has really only two characters ± with the type of incidents found in literary representation of sex and gender, parallels begin to be seen all over the Western literary scene. What Ted Hughes calls a tragic equation begins to become evident, and he perceives it as a constant in all English poetry.7 The entirety of Hughes' book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being constitutes a theory of tragic equation which is not confined to a single author although Shakespeare is invoked in exposition of the equation. This natural law, as he calls it, if it is traced in the same way and with the same tact as Hughes has done for Shakespeare and Coleridge, applies equally to all the works of Beckett. In Beckett's short story First Love, the role of the female changes, according to this pattern, from the ambivalent erotic attraction of the woman-figure, to become the mother figure who must either be fled from (this story's protagonist escapes) or destroyed: `I'm looking for my mother to kill her', says the voice of the soon-to-emerge Molloy. The mythical contexts of the two Shakespearian poems invite a view of the two female characters as two contrasting faces of the Great Goddess whose worship was contemporary with the formation of these legends and which still had a tradition in Shakespeare's England, not to mention Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The two faces, however, were supposed to be comprehended as belonging to the one Goddess, so that neither was ever really seen without the other. As Hughes says, `In every
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epiphany of the Goddess the two aspects are present ± the one latent behind the other. In the foreground they appear to be two, and opposites, but in the background they are one.'8 The question arises, why did the two qualities of the Goddess come to be distinguished in the first place, and then so separated as to occupy the figures of two different beings? The answer suggested by Hughes and also embryonically by Robert Graves (to whom Hughes acknowledges debt) in his book The White Goddess is that the split between angel and whore, between Lucrece and Venus, came about only through the distorted perspective of the male rational ego, which was obsessed with its own independence, intent on staying in control and trying to ignore or destroy any power which it feared might be greater than its own. It is from this perspective that we find Adonis refusing to encounter the power of Venus' sexuality, and trying next moment to control the wild boar. It of course ends up controlling him. What enriches the story enormously here is that in another different version of the fate of Adonis, the love Goddess has two forms, one in Hades and one in the upper world. Adonis is shared between them, changing over every half-year. But at one point the underworld Goddess, unable to give away Adonis to Aphrodite the upper-world goddess, turns herself into a wild boar and kills Adonis. If this version of the story lies behind Shakespeare's retelling, then it is plausible to think that Shakespeare's Adonis is actually killed by Venus who, angry at being rejected, is infernalised into the boar that kills him. `The rejected Goddess comes to emerge in her animal form, claiming in violence what she has been denied in love.'9 The savage irony in Shakespeare's myth is that the male ego is emasculated by the very creature he tried to subjugate as a diversion from human sexuality. As feminists have made very clear, one of the only ways in which the male rational ego can accept female sexuality is to capture and politicise it in the form of bourgeois marriage. This institutes the idea of the good, harmless, loyal but ultimately dependent, powerless woman ± if you like, a caricatured Lucrece figure. And while the male ego is busy preserving that non-threatening image of femininity, it can simultaneously carry on angrily condemning the sexual initiative of the Venus-like or openly seductive behaviour. So the female force is artificially divided up into two aspects, one to be praised and one to be blamed, and in this way the male ego tries to maintain its precarious, but dominant, sense of equilibrium. But the tragic pattern which often characterises works of literature that depict sexual relationships demonstrates that this artificial division
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cannot succeed. Something always arrives to disrupt it. Going back again to the basic unity of the Goddess, what Hughes calls Complete Being, this Unity of the origin of creation, when faced with the mechanical and conscious attempt on the part of the male to split it into contrary elements, strives to bring back the divided elements to unity again, in Hughes' words, to `return to life' (the artificial division being a clinically imposed form of death/deadness). How does it do this? By destroying the perspective which originally divided them; that means by destroying the patrolling male ego's enforcement system. One other example might help to make clearer the mythical connections between the Great Goddess and literary representations of human life. On numerous occasions the heroic Shakespearian lover projects the beloved, and femininity generally, initially as chaste and saintly, and then in the twinkling of an eye, usually on evidence so slender that you could imagine the hero were positively looking for a reason to convict her, reprojecting her as lust incarnate, the demoness from hell. It is really striking how in every instance where this sudden change happens, the language and gesture are unusually violent and abrupt, as though, almost, a reflex were being triggered. One of the things Ted Hughes goes into in great detail is how these transitions from viewing the woman in one way to viewing her in the other, are the flash-points of a tragic action. When the reversal of view happens, even in the comedies, danger arises. This can be seen in Much Ado About Nothing when Claudio's denunciation of Hero seems to kill her and she is believed dead for a time. An enormous number of Beckett's as well as Shakespeare's men go through this sudden, headlong process of apparent or real disillusionment, so large a number that it seems not to be a coincidence. This suddenly polarised perspective on the female, so obvious in the two Shakespeare poems, is repeated in various forms in nearly all Beckett's portrayals of the male gender, many of the works offering projections of the woman, as hell-being and as beloved. I said earlier, introducing the concept of the mythic plane, that its breaking in on the world of normality and humdrum realism is a feature not only of fiction but of the realism (and its limits) in the news media. It follows therefore that the mythic dimension also informs any social/ historical context a writer works in; in Shakespeare's case it was that of the European Reformation, with its determined effort to put into the enemy camp (and condemn as pagan) not only Catholicism but along with it the remains of the Goddess worship, and other related forms of
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spirituality. Indeed, from the point at which Christianity began to enforce an equation of the pagan with the irreligious, the druidic spiritual perspective was thus obliterated by being called pagan. Of Christianity's encounters, as a collective male, with the Goddess, Camille Paglia writes that `Chthonian nature, embodied in great goddess figures, was Christianity's most formidable opponent. [. . .] It is to [man's] resentment of this daemonic undertow that we owe the grand constructions of our culture. Apollonianism, cold and absolute, is the west's sublime refusal. The Apollonian is a male line drawn against the dehumanizing magnitude of female nature. [. . .] Christianity, wiping out paganism's secular glamours, tried to make spirituality primary. But as an embattled sect, it ended by reinforcing the west's absolutist ego-structure. The hero of the medieval church militant, the knight in shining armour, is the most perfect Apollonian thing in world history.'10 The Reformation effort translated, in England, into a campaign against images in worship, against pleasure generally, and for Hughes, caused a further `demotion' of female sexuality into something somehow infernal: Within Shakespeare's universe the Female is the Goddess Complete until she is divided by the Adonis hero's puritan spectacles, by his loathing terror of that portion of her which his Reformation lenses separate out as the Queen of Hell. Lear [iv.vi.127±33] goes through the speech . . . like one actually being born, with a confused terror of the incarceration into flesh (in the grip of the weaver at the womb door) and broken glimpses of the female genitalia as the topography of Hell.11 The horror or revulsion which Adonis feels in Shakespeare's poem, and his lecture to Venus about lust, would have been well recognised by his readers as a symptom of the Calvinist and puritan drive, just as Tarquin's destructive violence would have been recognisable as a sinisterly mutated dimension of the same religious zeal, `the Reformation's destruction of the dangerously powerful female.'12 Hughes writes in more detailed definition of the equation: The tragic equation can be imagined as taking shape within the mind of one man. At one pole is the rational ego controlling the man's behaviour according to the needs and demands of a self-controlled society. At the other is the totality of this individual's natural, biolo-
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gical and instinctual life. [. . .] [F]rom the point of view of the rational ego this totality appears to be female, and since it incorporates not only the divine source of his being, the feminine component of his own biological makeup, as well as the paranormal faculties and mysteries outside his rational ego, and seems to him in many respects continuous ± coextensive ± with external nature, he calls it the Goddess. Obviously this is only a manner of speaking, or of thinking, but it is one that has imposed itself on man throughout his history. The rational ego can apprehend this Goddess as a totality, but he cannot express the fullness of her life while at the same time remaining a rational ego. The nearest he can come to that is to relinquish his command (as controller of the individual's behaviour) to a state of mind corresponding to that of an infant, or of an ecstatic worshipper, or of a saint ± and with this kind of surrender (as a Puritan of the Reformation, an idealist of rational control) he has difficulty. Nevertheless, the Goddess, being his own nature, insists with constant pressure that the fullness of her life must be somehow expressed. If he is to preserve the equilibrium and control required of him by society, it is obvious what that rational ego has to do, so he does it. He splits the goddess into the part that supports and affirms his rational existence, and the part that would disrupt it. He makes a sacred, binding contract with the one, and suppresses the other. According to the tragic equation, this act of suppression is the beginning of the dramatic consequences.13 These `dramatic consequences' occupy the literary work and formulate its expression of the myth. It's related both to the primordial kinship of male and Goddess Nature (the forces of incarnation), and to the impositional structures of patriarchal authority, forces of illusory self-nature, both of the forces that are specifically questioned by dzogchen, as we have seen. Dramatic consequences are inevitable since drama is actantial, mythically located amongst the demiurges, the dualised universes. Hughes again: The rejected part of the Goddess, angered, so to speak, by the suppression, defies it, and works to find some way back into life. Inevitably she separates herself into an alternative existence, [specifically] inimical to the rational ego, whose regime she now threatens. Since her successful breakthrough into the behaviour of this male individual would have to take a male form [or else the form of a vengeful female?], she creates a male beachhead, a front midway between her
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Underworld and the world of the rational ego. This new personality becomes a secondary ego, as irrational as the Underworld half of the Goddess who has created `him', and, like her, suppressed by the rational ego. [. . .] He serves as a rallying-point, a recruiting officer, for every malcontent impulse that the rational ego continues to reject or suppress. [. . .] As can be seen, there are now four dramatis personae, and all four are linked together with dynamic tensions within the divided individuality of the one man.14 It is precisely a secondary ego of this sort that offers itself as one of the selves into which the Beckett hero finds himself dividing. The Molloy/ Moran mutation is the prime example. The transition of the character Watt from the novel (1938) to his reappearance in Mercier and Camier (1976) is similar. Hughes also gives an account of the tragic situation from the point of view of the woman, not the man. From the point of view of woman, everything is different, in the sense that the `tragic error' belongs exclusively to the psychology of the man (except where woman imitates man). That division of the loved and loathed woman in the one body, which precipitates the tragic equation, is projected onto her (involving her in its real consequences) by the man. And he projects it onto her insofar as his rationality is separated from nature and therefore insecure, is therefore autocratically jealous of power and fearful of what he suppresses, i.e. insofar as he fights against her maternal control, fears her reproductive mystery and is jealous of her solidarity with the natural world. Within her own mind, woman alternates between the Aphrodite of the positive half of her menstrual cycle and the Persephone of her negative half (in her one body). She lives the psychobiological totality of that cyclic alternation which is (and which she in her bones understands to be) inseparable from the organic cycle and vital sympathies of the natural world, and from the electrical character of matter in the laws of time and space. In this sense, [the] Tragic Equation is an aberration that man has to live and suffer, and that woman has to endure and redeem him from (reuniting him to the natural world and to total life and being). On top of this, menstrual woman and rational man, as a sexual pair, have to deal with the psychological reality that the man secretes three women (maiden, mother and crone) ± roughly centered on the internalized image of his mother, while the woman secretes three men (sacred lover, de-
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monic tyrant and holy father) ± roughly centred on the internalized image of her father. These four, the male and his internalized, composite female; and the female and her internalized, composite male, produce the four characters [. . .] of the tragic Equation and the infinite problem of their living together in love as `one flesh'.15 Note that the composite internalized male and female is as much of a projection in oneself as is the treatment of the partner according to projections and transferences. The story of a couple's living and loving under these projections is an impossibility until and unless the projections are dissolved, but then the drama also dissolves. Is this the reason why tragedy really only treats suffering, since the entire suffering of the human state is caused by the error of seeing (dualism) which is alone originally responsible for the problems of the tragedy ± what Hughes calls the `dramatic consequences' that initiate literature? The only love known as genuine to the disillusioned (the dzogchen mind) is the compassion of seeing that all these causes and conflicts are a knot of illusion.16 Following that recognition on the part of both partners, perhaps a satisfactory partnership can ensue. It is certain that the tragedy implicit in Beckett's representation of gender, like Shakespeare's, is that these illusory projections continue to define life and moreover continue to produce more examples of it. From a Buddhist perspective, the procreation of life under circumstances of illusion and non-integration is exactly what encumbers the earth with karmic weight. The solution is not the crude one of not reproducing (which would likely be just a passive form of the rational ego's carapace of refusal, so perpetuating a quietist form of the tragic equation), but rather of reproducing from the integrated state, in which the tragic fabric of projection does not get the chance to take root and spread throughout the next generations. This is what underlies SchureÂ's observation quoted at the end of Chapter 4, on the relation between `spiritual generation, and generation in the flesh, upon which the destinies of future mankind depend.' When Hughes says that the tragic equation is something humans have to live and suffer, he means this only in the sense that the unintegrated man, conceiving of himself as existing in samsara, the relative world, therefore harmable/fearful/aggressive, perpetrates his projections and defences in order to `survive', and so perpetuates, culturally and in the family, the same `karmic accretions' which it is the hope of the enlightenment practice to eliminate, such that future generations might have fewer handicaps to social and cultural evolution.
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1. Lucrece: Patient, submissive, faithful, the perfect wife and mother, powerless to change circumstances through her own initiative. Sometimes viewed as the soul's representative. 2. Venus: Queen of Hell, voluptuous witch, seen to take initiative including sexual initiative, viewed as corrupt. Sometimes viewed as the body's representative. But these aspects are in reality one, and only seem different when seen through the eyes of the male rational ego, which insists on an oppositional relationship between body and soul, the classic war between flesh and spirit; and that erroneously perceived relationship is the main reason behind the splitting of the Goddess. It's not the Goddess's fault; the male ego satisfies its agenda by declaring that it is her fault, but what is effectively at fault is the relationship with the energy of Complete Being, not the being itself. The wrong relationship creates a false picture in the male `viewfinder' and this picture is what leads him to say it is all the fault of woman. This male ego is the ego of Adonis, who wants to control the Lucrece aspect while fearing and shunning the Venus aspect: or else the ego of Tarquin, who wants to destroy the Goddess more than simply controlling her. The tragic error is the male's splitting of the Goddess, his refusal of Complete Being. Having divided himself from Complete Being and from everything else by his illusory independence ± Adonis `doing his own thing' hunting the boar, and Beckett's fathers in Company and First Love, coldly refusing to witness the fact of birth17 ± the male has straight away created enemies. The Goddess rejected is one of these enemies and proves to the hero that his independence is a figment of his own imagination: she turns into a wild animal and kills the self-styled independent man (but also takes pity on his ignorance and takes him to heaven in the form of a flower). One of the most interesting aspects of looking at Beckett's art or Shakespeare's plays mythically is that in the places where realism won't serve to account for what happens in the plot, often the mythical plane will so account. Where the relationships and actions of certain characters remain obscure if looked at realistically, they clarify when looked at mythopoetically. The diverse characters in the drama are translated on the mythical plane into the diverse aspects of the self. So
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To sum up this very brief exploration of one of the projected sexual constants on the mythical plane, the Goddess appears to have twin opposing aspects ±
for example two rival brothers in a plot of usurpation become on the mythic plane the smothering of one aspect of the self by another. A closely similar situation exists between the Moran and Molloy halves of Beckett's Molloy. Or a relationship between lover and beloved ± like Othello and Desdemona, or, differently, Troilus and Cressida, or the narrator of Beckett's novella First Love with Lulu, the main female character, or of Murphy and Celia in his early novel ± may amount on the mythic plane to a person's projection of themselves, along the lines that Jung proposed when he suggested that choice of partners may be according to self-projections that have little or nothing to do with the partner who is actually there. Hughes says: The dramatic characters' flaws and their possibilities for creative interaction are, alike, the flaws and potentials within the individual person. That potential, according to religious, spiritual, shamanic and psychological methods alike, is for integration, even for completion of a task of work on oneself which usually seems only painfully in process, not complete. If the Goddess of Complete Being is really and precisely that, then it follows that every person in whom there is being of any kind must be part, even if small, of the reality of the Great Goddess; and it also follows that only illusion, at worst tragic illusion, at best temporary blindness, can convince a person that things are otherwise. Thus it is that the crime of rejecting the Goddess of Divine love is so tragic: the murder of the Goddess is the murder of the source of life, the destruction of mankind.18 This suggestion of an affinity between the mythic level and personality is very important in studying the parallels between the development of a writer's art and its resonation in a cultural `acoustic'. Too often, interpretation of Beckett has concluded that since so many of his characters put female sexuality at arm's length, then it is somehow fitting that the commentary should also do so and conclude that Beckett's interests did not lie there. But if we absorb Hughes' indication that `if the Goddess of Complete Being is really and precisely that, then it follows that every person in whom there is being of any kind must be part, even if small, of the reality of the Great Goddess', then it is possible to appreciate that both sexes, in non-dual awareness, cannot but acknowledge their own incarnate constitution as the Goddess. The act of `putting at arm's length' is strictly an ontological illusion. E. G. Howe, one of the few published expositors of druidic thinking in the modern west, offers remarks congruent with Hughes':
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Mother is the Body. Your body is a pot, your body is your mother, your body derives from your mother, your body has got just this open-shut principle. It is breathing, so that what enters in also passes out. [. . .] this is all a rhythmical breathing process, what is part of the rhythm of life. So that a man's body is a `mother'. All animals are `mothers' and the relationship of the contained with the container is the important problem; that the child should not exploit the body of the container, that there should not be collusion between the individual and the body which the individual occupies.19 And he continues, extending the mythopoetic field from container/ womb to house and territory, in much the same way as intended by my study of the humanist corruption of these terms ± The house is not to be exploited by the tenant, but is to be used properly and rhythmically in the order of life by the tenant, not only for the advantage of the tenant, but for all life.20
Caught into contact: compassion and the tragic equation The necessity to accept, not to reject, the Goddess of Divine love is related to the mythically necessary contact with the fact of incarnation, as Beckett and Jung bivocally express it, to `be properly born'. The rebellious incoming soul may be hard pressed not only by the womb entrance but by the reluctance to enter into the earth of obscurity having not fully forgotten the earth of visions or celestial earth.21 If the soul can see as Keats did that the earth is a vale of soul-making as well as a vale of tears, then it is likely that in its acceptance of this fact it will accept what Blake calls the `filmy woof' of the womb as a mercy matrix rather than the prison which it is accounted by a fire-predisposed soul such as Shelley's. It might recognise the creative ambivalence of Plotinus' descriptive phrase for the soul in incarnation, `caught into contact'. Caught because in some reluctance, some uncertainty in relation to the reason for its attraction towards incarnation; contact because necessary intimacy is the result, loved or loathed. Loved because of the pleasurable erotic confirmation of earth as home of delight and growing; loathed because in the surrender to that delight, the male ego, (once it has thought itself into that role) is shown up as a deedless and almost useless weakling. The Adonis-figure's extreme reluctance turned to violence is a travesty ± an exaggerated caricature or corruption ± of the reluctance to be born
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of which Beckett's Mrs Rooney reports Jung's view that `there is nothing that can be done for those people'. From the mythographic vantagepoint there can be no simple judgement of the situation such as that it is good to be born, and a psychotic symptom not to accept the fact. The mythography takes into account that there may be a suggestive spiritual aetiology in play. William Irwin Thompson writes about the male/soul consciousness in this mythopoetic borderland, and cites Gilgamesh and Enkidu as men `consumed with a sex drive that is gigantic[.] [They] long for something that is beyond sexuality; they hunger for a complete freedom, an escape from the body of sexuality and death[ ,] for a freedom of soul which is not restricted in bondage to the body, and to the degree that women express the life of the body, they long to be free of women.'22 ± and yet, of course, in doing so, they forget that it was the attraction of man to woman which gave their errant souls a lodging place for this life. That is precisely the point at which the myths of soul and sexual life cross the same imaginal space, appearing for a moment to crash. The relevance of this myth deepens the more it is contemplated with respect to Beckett and the culture he determined to engage with. Thompson's mythopoetic analysis of gender is again suggestive: The body is under the dominance of the female, and no male can resist the pull of mother and lover, but in his mind and soul the male longs for the old freedom, the freedom of the forest before the savannah, the freedom of the soul before its incarnation in the planetary stream of evolution. [. . .] he longs to escape incarnation into the absolute and unconditioned freedom of the soul.23 Though unfortunately, the Buddhist might rejoin, the soul is not on the level at which this freedom exists; the soul is just the isthmus, on which we saw Prospero temporarily active, between unconditioned and incarnate. This is why Beckett's characters are `not properly born', for one thing, and so preeminently creatures of soul-stuff, for another. It is also why his works mean so little unless they are read with the eye of the soul open. Why else is the character in Cascando called an Opener, and his spectacle that of `one world into the other'? In taking note of Thompson's anthropological/spiritual image of the imprisoned soul/incarnate male jibbing at the thought of incarnation and of adding to it by absorption in the life of the body, we might perceive echoes of something similar in Beckett's references in All Strange Away to `evenings with Emma and the flights by night, no not that again'; his gloomy evocations of a
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couple in one of the Roughs ± `studious evenings in our nest in Commercial Road'; and Krapp's uncertain conviction that he `Could have been happy with [Effie] up there on the Baltic [. . .] Could I ? [. . .] And she?' If we have appreciated the nature of this tragic projection in which spiritual, political and gender experience are combined, it becomes much easier to see how the error of dualism, `rumbled' by the Buddhists and esoteric psychologists, is just the same error as is evident in the dualistic male perspective on the female reality of Complete Being. The male `viewfinder' that finds fault with woman/goddess is also of the same ontological family as the principle in visual culture of dominant specularity ± the ego-construct resulting from linear perspective ± and its related linear paradigms involved in the humanist coding of gender and self-awareness. If you like, the erroneous operations of Cartesian awareness become sexualised in the gender conflict revealed in myth and drama. The history of the soul is the history of its illusion as well as of its seeing, otherwise there would be no need for Buddhist teaching nor for the artistic means of exposing the soul's illusions. In this context, William Irwin Thompson writes: The world-view that separates the observer from the system he observes, that imagines that the universe can be split into mere subjectivity and real objectivity is not of [woman's] doing. She expresses the `withness of the body', that Whitehead tried to rediscover in his philosophy of organism and process. Here is the philosophy that stood before the speculations of the pre-socratics; she is the `Holy Mother Church' which Descartes challenged when he cut the umbilical cord between philosophy and the Church and split reality into the res cogitans and the res extensa.24 The fact alluded to here is that the Cartesian system is man's doing, not woman's. Therefore the reason why the sexual matters and the epistemological ones must be treated together is that their representations are gendered in origin. The despotism of the brainbox/skull/awarenessmachine, perpetrated in culture by the humanist philosophical operation, is ultimately the despotism of the frightened but officious male ego. On the other hand, the supervention of the holistic body of oneness ± the manifestation alike of underground awareness movements and of radical new age sexual politics ± is at the same time the return of the Goddess. Although the mythic pattern traced here is not that of orthodox deconstruction nor of mainstream feminism there is obviously a
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relationship to be perceived. The convergence is most significant on the matter of hegemonic cultural conditioning, which affects gender as much as it does theory of knowledge. Such conditioning is the riftpoint upon which all further constructions will simply yield faults in the expression of any relationship. Where a dialectical materialist analysis distances the authoritarian forces from the dissenting voice, a mythographic account of soul distinguishes the redundant imprints of obsolete projections from the evolutionary potential of imaginative perception; and this last depends on the clear mind state described in dzogchen to come about. In approaches to this clear state there is perhaps a starting point for dialogue of great value between radical new age thought and the postmodernism of academe. This clear state, the `pure sky mind' of the distilled Buddhist vehicle, is synonymous with the willingness to die implicit in the mystical traditions, and obviously something which never ceased to preoccupy Beckett. Translated with due regard for its mythopoetic application in mysticism, in modern culture-critical terms we could say the clear state depends on the willingness not to insist on victory in pursuit of fixed positions, nor to hold onto them `for dear life'. For where the `willingness to die' is mythopoetically thought a creative resource, sadly that `hanging on' to `dear life' is precisely one of the things Humanist culture evolved to do. No wonder Beckett's burial of humanism is controversial.
`What it'd be if you ran out of us?': vengeance of the Goddess Although Beckett's males do not themselves repeat the actions of the males in Shakespeare ± this difference is where we may say Beckett's drama of inaction is exhibited at its plainest ± we do not find the tragic equation is made any the less powerful as a means of interpreting the works. All that happens is that when the pre-generic voice of Beckett is given over to a woman speaking, the same mythopoetic constant accrues to the male via attribution. In a gesture that could probably be made only once in a career, Beckett evoked directly the vengeance of the Great Goddess on the male ego. His play Eh Joe, for television, pursues a man whose abandoned lovers have survived in mythic space and are able to communicate with him; some fared well, others less well, and Beckett chooses two of these women to figure in the drama, one of them corresponding to the Venus figure in Hughes' equation, and the other to the Lucrece figure. The play drives the male protagonist's awareness, via a defiant survivor
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of his abuse (`I did all right', she says) back in time to one who has committed suicide rather than enduring the grief of life as it would have had to continue. Joe's watchword is `the best's to come', with which he addresses his soon-to-be-ex lovers as a promise of better in the relationship, and with which he also addresses himself in secret by way of trying to conjure a harbinger of the next `conquest'. On the other hand the accusing woman's voice also has a watchword, `there's love for you' with which she refers to the death of the other woman, `the green one . . . the narrow one', and at the same time reproaches the man for not recognising it. Like so many of Beckett's dramatic statements it is a statement made in absence, but it takes its place alongside moments of lyrical sadness in Krapp's Last Tape and Eleutheria, all related to lost love. In this play, unlike the other two (discussed later in this book), it is not the man, but the woman, whose perspective is used to view the loss, and this is why it comes to seem a more direct onslaught from the mythic plane of the multifaceted Great Goddess, who blames the man for his lack of acceptance, his Adonis-like strategy, which is always to wrap the abandoned lover up in a coat and send her on her way, with the fatuous words `the best is to come.' The accuser is multifaceted because the feminine, while given the face of the determined avenging fury, who has no plausible grounds for complaint (since she `did all right', with another partner) nevertheless uses all her powers in exclusive support of the silenced Goddess, the diametrically opposed feminine figure, tender and self-sacrificial, so devoted that life cannot be continued with dignity after the betrayal by him; yet so much in tune with life that she cannot do away with herself by drowning (first attempt) nor by loss of blood (second): `You know how she always dreaded pain'. Joe is forced to `Imagine what [was] in her mind to make her do that'. The third attempt is through overdose: she has it all worked out this time . . . . finishes the tube . . . .There's love for you . . . . Eh Joe? . . . . Scoops a little cup for her face in the stones . . . . the green one . . . . the narrow one . . . . always pale . . . . the pale eyes . . . . The look they shed before . . . . the way they opened after . . . . Spirit made light . . . . Wasn't that your description, Joe? [. . .] Now imagine . . . . before she goes . . . . Face in the cup . . . . lips on a stone . . . . Taking Joe with her. . . . [. . .] Imagine the hands . . . . [. . .] before they go. . . . Imagine the hands . . . . What are they at?. . . . In the stones. . . . [. . .]
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Complete Being 107
What's striking is how this extreme of love and tenderness in hopeless conditions is insinuated directly into the imagination of Joe, so that he can realize for the first time (`This all new to you, Joe?') what his rejection of the Complete Being can cause. Ophelia comes to mind, of course, but also at the same time the pre-conscious Goddess power that can overcome even the best-established Male god, for which the Joe character (despite his philandering) is said to have had considerable respect (`How's your Lord these days? . . . Still worth having?'). Compared to all other women, `all of us', says the voice of Joe's accuser, indeed compared to God himself, there is no greater love than that shown by the girl in green. She is of course quite ordinary on the realist plane, with coat, pills and razor blade, but on the mythic plane she is the instrument of the shattering power beyond any Judaeo-Christian posture. Meha Mondaito passes the comment about woman: `Man knows that he is cosmically speaking inherently lesser than she. That is, of course, why a male-God was installed in the first place.'26 Beckett's play could be the ideal occasion for such a judgement. It is all too easy to dismiss this most direct appeal to compassion as the stuff of soap opera, and it has often been disparaged by Beckett critics as a slight work.27 But that interpretation would hardly stick if it were not implicitly tied to the aesthetic or else the realist plane. On the mythic plane the work enforces the powers of the Goddess in two modes both of which excoriate the male ego, whose anguished face grows bigger and bigger on the TV screen the closer the accuser moves to the apogee of the story. The mythic power forces a breach in the realist space, at the moment early on when the accuser reminds Joe: The whisper . . . . The odd word . . . . [. . .] It stops in the end . . . . You stop it in the end . . . . Imagine if you couldn't . . . . Ever think of that? . . . . If it went on . . . . The whisper in your head . . . . Me whispering at you in your head . . . . Things you can't catch . . . . On and off . . . . Till you join us . . . . Till you join us: this voice is carrying from the world of `the unborn, or yet to be', the mythic plane of awareness. There can be little sense made of this play without accepting that this is where its focus is. Like some of
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What are they fondling?. . . . Till they go . . . . There's love for you . . . . Isn't it, Joe? . . . . Wasn't it, Joe?. . . . Eh Joe?. . . . Wouldn't you say? . . . . Compared to us . . . . Compared to Him . . . . Eh Joe?25
his other works, Beckett's TV play combines mythic plane tragedy with the stuff of popular culture. What makes it so powerful is the fact that it wears its devastating cultural message so lightly, almost invisibly, without ceremony or overstatement. It also adds up to Beckett's most intimate portrait of a male±female relationship, albeit so briefly executed. In the expostulation `Ah she knew you, heavenly powers!' the mythic plane information and the realist plane cross over one another, at the dialogic climax of Beckett's `designed' artefact. There is some suggestive ambiguity in the exclamation itself, which raises the question over two possibilities: are the powers attributed to her in an apostrophic cry (Oh heavenly powers, she knew you!), or attributed to the girl (she, recipient of heavenly powers, knew you)? ± and leaves both open.
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108 Beckett and Eros
Beckett's Mythologies of Eros
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Part II
The Dark Stream
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7
He is free. He does not allow himself to be led by preconception. He advances alone, in search of that little-known being that lies at the heart of ourselves. Bram Van Velde on Beckett . . . The self, which is all that is known as desire, leads away from fulfilment, and to its own breakdown Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy
Self and zero: Eleutheria and the voice of soul Olga: You used to love me. You used to work. You used to have a joke
with your father. You used to travel. You . . .
Victor: It was bluff.1
Unavailable to the reading public until the mid 1990s, Eleutheria displays the essentially contradictory relationship between the Western humanist identity, which is tagged by the terms self, situation, furniture, and the effected collapse of that identity in the state of Victor Krap. He, as heir to the bourgeois, is supposed to perpetuate its character. The fact that he does not do so exposes the bourgeois' invested expectation of continuity, along with the emptiness of the continuity it is supposed to maintain. Much has been written on the reasons why Beckett didn't want the play published or staged after 1948 and its then rejection.2 But whether or not the reason was its too-plain exposition of the basic theme that all his previous and subsequent works were to more subtly animate, the helpfulness of such a case-note as this play is undeniable. Where the mythic constant is often `subcutaneous' or systemic in Beckett's work, here for once it is graphically plain. 111
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What it is their Humanity Stifles
112 Beckett and Eros
in fact [. . .] not so much a place of action as a site, which is often empty. [. . .] a site and of a person in stasis . . . 3 And of the other half, as in the case of Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, we quickly see that the Krap family's bourgeois clutter of belongings, and corresponding mental furniture, are self-incriminating, especially in view of the dual stage, intended to maximise the `flagrant discrepancy between the furniture on either side'.4 Onto this scene, when not implicit in it, then, are projected the expectations of the humanist egoidentity on the one side, and on the other the condition of a human not subscribing to them but nevertheless surrounded by, immersed in, such a welter of expectations as this: He can drop dead, now [. . .] or he can go back to his family, revive his mother, bury his father, come into his inheritance, satisfy his fiancee, found a review, a church, a family, a film club, God knows what. Dead or alive, he belongs to us, he's one of us again. That's all we had to prove. That basically there's only us.5 That there is only us is all the humanist ever has had to prove, and increasingly anxiously the more doubtful his anchorage of self becomes, through crisis or other happening, or by the example of a man such as Victor. As becomes evident at the end of the play, the very existence of this non-subscription to the humanist order is deeply threatening to that order, such that its exponents cannot leave Victor alone, but must constantly range him against the humanist standards which they are established in. Gradually there emerges the discourse of tolerance, intolerance and interrogation, which characterises the mixed despotism and fear of the humanist order. This is a discourse by which the entirety of Beckett's work from 1945 is to be marked: Glazier: It's time you explained yourself. [. . .] Things can't go on like this. [. . .] it would do you good to explain yourself. [. . .] Define yourself, that's it. [. . .] So that the whole thing can look as if it makes some sort of sense.6
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The evidence is written ± the metaphor hard-wired would not be an exaggeration ± into the play's structure, the split-scene demanding that its one half be regarded as
What it is their Humanity Stifles 113
You're going to tell me that what people say under duress doesn't count as evidence. But it does, it does. Whatever they say, they give themselves away.8 Instantly, the Beckett world becomes recognisable. It is the judgement passed by the orthodox humanist view upon the unconditioned mentation; it is the anxious interrogation of experimental non-being by specious being, the latter anxious only because, dimly apprehending its speciousness, it refuses to give it up, because it is afraid of the void. On the one hand, `A creature like that doesn't make sense', says the Glazier. On the other hand, `He explained. [. . .] It was clear at the time. It isn't a thing you can describe. It's a bit like music.' says Jacques. Those are the two responses to Victor between which a relationship with him can evolve. There are only two, acceptance or rejection. Between these poles the Beckett mythograph swings its needle, finds its reading, time after time. Likewise the sexual life finds two readings here as in nearly all the later works. The rejected element, potentially, is the situation of the sexual within the bourgeois order, what Beckett in a letter referred to as `cordial fucking and fucking cordiality'.9 The accepted element is in the encounter with the Great Goddess of Complete Being, which in its incipient phase is like an encounter with total non-being, total annihilation, total voidness, to which the experience of the daemonic exposes the male, and into which he is at first afraid to `die'. The culprit in both cases is the coding of longing and desire into the four walls of the humanist prison, renamed `house and home', instead of the recognition of the `far' trajectory of true passion according to the mythographic axiom of imagination, which is that the only true home is that which is forever lost. The voice of The Unnamable reaches these dark interiors of the language of soul when it says, much in the vein of Victor, Ah but the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles, the little gasp of the condemned to life, [. . .] to gasp what it is to have celebrated banishment, beware. [. . .] I am walled around with their vociferations, none will ever know what I am, none will ever hear me say it, I can't say it, I won't say it, I have no language but theirs.10
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Let's say: a committee of enquiry. This is the third day, the great day, when all things must be made plain. An hour from now we shall know what to make of it.7
The focus of any thoughtful enquiry must be to ask just what this is that `their humanity stifles'; from what condition one comes to be `condemned to life'. Mythographic treatment of the themes of the works suggests that the phrase `condemned to life' is not really an echo of the idle resentment of a materialist pessimist. In fact its correspondence to that sentiment is as ultimately casual as the sentiment itself. But if we approach it from the mythographic point of view for which, as Yeats says, `the only true history is the history of the soul', then the condemned-to-life has reason to long for its end quite as much as it has obligation to accept it before its end. It is from this area of the spectrum, as it were, that the sexual tragedy comes into view: that the erotic aspect of sexuality is banished in favour of the bourgeois/Cartesian Box, the four walls of home of the nuclear family, barricaded against mystery, enclosing the family neurosis that is, one might say, the ultimate illness of mystery. Given the prevailing conditions in which Victor knows something but `none will ever hear me say it, I have no language but theirs', if we translate this expression so as to include sexual language, we can account for the grotesque misery of M. Krap the elder's erotic feeling for Victor's fianceÂe, along with Victor's paradoxical refusal to respond to the erotic charge he could have found in his relationship were it not for the fact that in every sexual gesture licensed in the bourgeois order `their cast must come to life'. Unconsenting man, once he consents, becomes `one of us'. `[B]asically there's only us.' Misery has triumphed over mystery, and if that seems too bitter an analysis of the situation, consider the lengths to which Beckett has gone in the first act of Eleutheria to incise pain into the very surface of the family: Strindberg-like, all the talk is of prolapsed wombs, failing prostates, hysterectomy. If all speech, location, action and sexual expression, all human identity whatsoever, is determined by the adversaries of `unconsenting man', then where can an unconsenting expression possibly be realized? This might be the very basic question underlying Beckett's life-work, the entirety of his mythograph. Eleutheria is important because this is the one question to ask which the character of Victor exists. `Sub specie eternitatis', wrote Beckett in private, `vision is the only excuse for staying alive.'11 The suggestion Beckett as an artist makes through Victor is equivalent to what has been termed `ontological anarchy and poetic terrorism'.12 His work as a whole, and its effects in vivo, further enforce his suggestion. A conversation ensues at one point between the Glazier and Michel, his son. Like all the others in the play, when asked about happiness,
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What it is their Humanity Stifles 115
Glazier: What do you like doing?
Michel: I don't know.
Glazier: What do you mean, you don't know? There must be some thing.
Michel: I like it when I'm in bed, before I go to sleep.
Glazier: Why's that?
Michel: I don't know, Papa.
Silence.
Glazier: Make the most of it.
Michel: Yes, Papa.
Silence.
Glazier: Come and let me kiss you.
Michel advances. The glazier kisses him. Glazier: Do you like it when I kiss you? Michel: Not much, Papa. Glazier: But why not? Michel: It prickles me. Glazier: You see, you do know why you don't like it when I kiss you. Michel: Yes, Papa. Glazier: Then tell me why you like it when you're in bed. Michel: (after reflection) I don't know, Papa. Silence.13 Of this explanation of happiness we find we can say exactly what Jacques said about the quality of Victor's explanation of his life, that the gist of it is rather like music, but that it makes sense. The implication is that there is a language that operates outside the accepted boundaries laid on knowledge and speech. Michel knows of a condition in which he is happy, and without much trouble he mentions it; but he does not know why it should be like that. The voice of The Unnamable mentions a very similar state to the one desired by Michel: `I can't say why I would have liked to be silent a little before being dead, so as in the end to be a little as I always was and never could be, [. . .] no, it's simpler than that, I wanted myself, in my own land for a brief space'.14 He cannot apply the rationalist's scalpel to the veracity of experience; in the words of The
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Michel cannot find it any more than the adults can. But the conversation proceeds in a manner utterly unlike the interrogations typical in this play and of Beckett's other work. As if exhausted by the profitless probing of Victor, the glazier more gently asks Michel when, if at all, he does feel happy.
Unnamable, he cannot employ `the head splitting with vile certainties'.15 Michel's and Victor's `don't knows' are honest records of the moment of interrogation. Whatever the critics may say, on and off-stage, about the dramatic valuelessness of Victor Krap's state (in that it is the explicit cancellation of agency), it is quite clear that there is a state to be witnessed here, and it is quite as human as it is not humanist. Victor, like numerous other Beckett personae, is not dehumanised by his anti-humanism. He just witnesses what he calls the `bluff', which is exactly what the dzogchen master recognises when he says that `Reassurance about identity can't really work because the self has no substantial basis. If you try to reassure somebody who believes a story that is essentially false, all you do is increase the amount of delusion that they are maintaining to protect themselves against the false story. No amount of cover-up will remove the fact that the basic starting point is wrong.'16 Such is the bluff to which Victor will not assent. In its elaborate claims to propriety and reasonableness, but its ultimate spiritual fraudulence, the articulate structure of humanist personality well deserves to be called, as Beckett wrote, `the deaf and dumb alphabet of convention.'17 Many commentaries say that the play typifies Beckett's interest in Schopenhauer's concept of will-lessness. While I think it is impossible and unhelpful simply to deny that this is true, what is lost in most accounts of this matter is that the concept itself has a much wider context than nineteenth century German philosophy and the version of `existential pessimism' which it is deemed to have sparked off in European writers such as George Eliot, Hardy, Thomas Mann and Kafka. The so-called concept of will-lessness has a much longer history in esoteric tradition throughout the world, and it is fairly certain that Schopenhauer developed his own ideas from a very involved study of Buddhism. As in Buddhism we find that the indices of samsara (falsely based perception of a supposedly real world) are such things as property and sense of selfhood, hope and fear, desire and aversion, so we find in the European current of Buddhistic thinking, typified by Beckett among others, that the bourgeois mainstream, with its defining characteristics, accoutrements, and pervasion of all the metaphorical as well as material extent of the language of relation, is an exact analogue of attachment to the illusory `reality' which it is the Buddhist practitioner's intention to part from in result of the enlightenment practice. So when Victor comes close to explaining himself to his interrogators, he could just as well be speaking in the voice of an esoteric practitioner as in the guise of a disaffected modernist:
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116 Beckett and Eros
I have always wanted to be free. I don't know why. Nor do I know what it means, to be free. If you were to pull all my nails out, I wouldn't be able to tell you. But although I can't put it in words, I do know what it is. I have always desired it. I still desire it. That is all I desire. At first I was a prisoner of other people. So I left them. Then I was a prisoner of myself. That was worse. So I left myself.18 Compare what the voice of The Unnamable says at a similar stage of emergency: my subject, no longer there, or no longer the same, or I mistake the place, no, yes, it's the same place, it's a pity, I would have liked to lose it, I would have liked to lose me, lose me the way I could long ago, when I still had some imagination, close my eyes and be in a wood, or on the seashore, or in a town where I don't know anyone, it's night . . . 19 And sometimes the self-loss goes beyond the ability the speaker there associates with imagination. Even the moorings of landscape are lost: It's a winter night, where I was, where I'm going, remembered, imagined, no matter, believing in me, believing it's me, no, no need, so long as the others are there, where, in the world of the others, of the long mortal ways, under the sky, with a voice, no, no need, and the power to move, now and then, no need either, so long as the others move, the true others, but on earth, beyond all doubt on earth, for as long as it takes to die again, wake again, long enough for things to change here, for something to change, to make possible a deeper birth, a deeper death, or resurrection in and out of this murmur of memory and dream.20 In interpreting a play such as Eleutheria in relation to the totality of Beckett's mythographic practice, there is a real need to go beyond the casual critical judgement of the Krap character as a lazy disaffected mildly psychotic intellectual, a judgement which carries with it the borrowed authority at once to dismiss him and condescend to him. At such a point of dismissal there is no opening whatsoever for enquiry into the state of mind that this play so clearly wants us to contemplate. What is important is not that Beckett's characters might display similarities to Schopenhauer's thought, but why they do so and even more why Schopenhauer's thought was compelled at all in this direction, and
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What it is their Humanity Stifles 117
why he regarded art, not philosophy or religion, as the prime instance of the event of will-lessness. If we accept that, there is not much advantage in interpreting Victor's behaviour in a realist way, which would simply be to point out the social redundancy and immaturity evident in it. The play is far from making naive-realist recommendations about behaviour, and yet the judgement usually levelled at it and implicitly at many other of Beckett's `heroes' is that they display examples of incompetence in the skills of living that are most vaunted and prized by the humanist agenda. As Eleutheria's Dr Piouk says: [Man's] condition is repugnant to him, [. . .] but he resigns himself to it, because he carries resignation within him, the resignation of the dawn of time ± that audacious ellipse! If only he had left it at that, and submitted to his condition! Oh no, though. He speaks well of it! He extols its virtues! He projects it into outer space! He leaves it with regret! Ah, the swine! He finally prefers himself to the moles and the moss !21 The search for the will-less state, as we will see, brings someone directly into contact with the moles and the moss, and out of a state in which `he prefers himself'. That is literally the case with a character in Rough for Radio II who is preoccupied with the fate of a stray mole he has found, cleaned, and let back out into the wild. Where the natural environment is concerned, Dr Piouk's exclamation goes to the heart of a difference between the respective views of nature held by the humanist (who might be expected to show compassion for nature but does not) and by the `unconsenting man' who nevertheless has compassion for living beings even while (perhaps because) he suspects the humanist's attitude. In the later Rough, the humanist's cavalier attitude to nature is spelt out unmistakably: `those everlasting wilds might have their charm, but there is nothing there for us. . . . Those micaceous schists, if you knew the effect . . . they can have on one . . . in the long run. . . . And your fauna! Those fodient rodents!' The view of nature held there by the apparently sane is abruptly juxtaposed with the view held by someone adjudged insane (Fox, aptly named) who is profoundly, involuntarily, interested in the mole he found once. `When I had done soaping the mole, thoroughly rinsing and drying before the embers, what next only but out again in the blizzard and put him back in his chamber with his weight of grubs, at that instant his little heart was beating still I swear, ah my God, my God.' Here, `unconsenting man' is more appalled at that creature's possible death than by his own hardship, `Ah yes, that for sure, live I did, no denying, all stones all sides'.22
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Such an extraordinary contrast between Fox's involuntary feeling, and then the willed, cultured enforcement of nature into the background and of humanity into a staged foreground, leads us to reflect more fundamentally on Beckett's portrayal of will-less compassion for living beings not human. The `moles and the moss' inspire compassion just as humans do, and perhaps it would explain the compassion felt by the psychically `abnormal' for these things if we considered the axiom of occultism and shamanism that they were once us. (See Chapter 4.) If we look at this in the light of the continuity of soul between the kingdoms of nature and of man, identified for example in the magic of Prospero's island, we come to a curiously ecological perspective which suggests that it is through far atavistic memory that we come to feel the urgency of compassion for things living but not human, not human at any rate in the sense we normally ascribe to human in this culture. And in Beckett's case this compassion is pervasive: there are numerous deeply involving reflections on living beings, for instance Moran's bees, The End's observations on `toads at evening', and the recurrent image of the vagrant Beckett persona tending a crocus in a pot outside an urban area flat.23 The affinity even extends beyond plant and moss to wood and stone, further back in the chain of relation but still recognizably `conscious', or impulsed towards form (even in minerals, for instance, in crystal-formation). And of course such a possibility spoken in the cold clinical light of the humanist interrogation chamber could only be judged to be, `like all those communicated to date and by reason of the same deficiencies, totally inacceptable.'24 Lest we doubt and conclude that Eleutheria's assessment of the humanist world picture is an overstatement of the case, or somehow else based by the vantage of the critic, or at any rate one that is insufficiently relevant to Beckett, we should take the opportunity to pause half way through this study to review without commentary his unforgettably archived commitment to the destruction of both humanism and commentary in these four passages from The Unnamable. In the light of Eleutheria I think it is undeniable that the play and the novel are both evidence of the same mythical voicing. All that Victor Krap nearly said, The Unnamable does say. Passage 1 Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle. There will be no more from me about bodies and
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What it is their Humanity Stifles 119
trajectories, sky and earth, I don't know what it all is. They have told me, explained to me, described to me, what it all is, what it looks like, what it's all for, one after the other, thousands of times, in thousands of connections, until I must have begun to look as if I understood. Who would ever think, to hear me, that I've never seen anything, never heard anything, but their voices? And man, the lectures they gave me on men, before they even began to trying to assimilate me to him! What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them. It's all the same to me, but it's no good, there's no end to it. It's of me I must now speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don't concern me, that don't count, that I don't believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put and end to it, from doing what I have to do. How they must hate me! [. . .] Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that's what they imagine they'll 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 up without being branded as belonging to their breed. But I'll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they glutted me with. [. . .] Do they consider me so plastered with their rubbish that I can never extricate myself, never make a gesture but their cast must come to life? [. . .] it's entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate. They've blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it's them I hear.25 Passage 2 They could clap an artificial anus in the hollow of my hand and still I wouldn't be there, alive with their life, not far short of a man, just barely a man, sufficiently a man to have hopes one day of being one, my avatars behind me. And yet it sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation, dumb with howling to be put out of my misery, and all around me the spinach blue rustling with satisfaction. Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but
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suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant. Then they uncorked the champagne. One of us at last! Green with anguish! A real little terrestrial! Choking in the chlorophyll! Hugging the slaughter-house walls! Paltry priests of the irrepressible ephemeral, how they must hate me. Come, my lambkin, join in our gambols, it's soon over, you'll see, just time to frolic with a lambkinette, that's jam. Love, there's a carrot never fails, I always had to thread some old bodkin. [. . .] One of their favourite devices is to stop suddenly at the least sign of adhesion from me, leaving me high and dry, with nothing for my renewal but the life they have imputed to me. And it is only when they see me stranded that they take up again the thread of my misfortunes, judging me still insufficiently vitalised to bring them to a successful conclusion alone.26 Passage 3 To saddle me with a lifetime is probably not enough for them, I have to be given a taste of two or three generations. But it's not certain. [. . .] It's a question of voices, of voices to keep going, in the right manner, when they stop, on purpose, to put me to the test, as now the one whose burden is roughly to the effect that I am alive. Warmth, ease, conviction, the right manner, as if it were my own voice, pronouncing my own words, words pronouncing me alive, since that's how they want me to be, I don't know why, with their billions of quick, trillions of dead, that's not enough for them, I too must contribute my little convulsion, mewl, howl, gasp and rattle, loving my neighbour and blessed with reason. But what is the right manner, I don't know. It is they who dictate this torrent of balls, they who stuffed me full of these groans that choke me. And out it all pours unchanged, I have only to belch to be sure of hearing them, the same old sour teachings I can't change a tittle of.27 Passage 4 one would like to stop, but unconditionally, I resume, so long as, so long as, let me see, so long as one, so long as he, ah fuck all that, so long as this, then that, agreed, that's good enough, I nearly got stuck. Help, help, if I could only describe this place, I who am so good at describing places, walls ceilings, floors, they are my speciality, doors, windows, what haven't I imagined in the way of windows in the course of my career, some opened on the sea, all you could see was sea and sky, if I could put myself in a room, that would be the end of the wordy-gurdy, even doorless, even windowless, nothing but the four surfaces, the six surfaces, if I could shut myself up, it would be a
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What it is their Humanity Stifles 121
mine, it could be black dark, I could be motionless and fixed, I'd find a way to explore it, I'd listen to the echo, I'd get to know it, I'd get to remember it, I'd be home, I'd say what it's like, in my home, instead of any old thing, this place, if I could describe this place, portray it, I've tried, I feel no place, no pace round me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't flesh, it doesn't end, it's like air [ . . . ] if only I could feel a place for me, I've tried, I'll try again, none was ever mine, that sea under my window, higher than the window, and the row-boat, do you remember, and the river, and the bay, I knew I had memories, pity they are not of me, and the stars, and the beacons, and the lights of the buoys, and the mountains burning, it was the time nothing was too good for me, the others benefited by it, they died like flies, or the forest, a roof is not indispensable, an interior, if I could be in a forest, caught in a thicket, or wandering round in circles, it would be the end of this blither, I'd describe the leaves, one by one, at the moment of their growing, at the moment of their giving shade, at the moment of their falling, those are good moments, for one who has not to say, But it's not I, it's not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered, but there it is, that takes the heart out of you, your heart isn't in it any more, your heart that was, amongst the brambles, cradled by the shadows, you try the sea, you try the town, you look for yourself in the mountains and the plains, it's only natural, 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 . . . 28
Texts for Nothing: abstracts for egolessness What a consideration of Eleutheria alongside The Unnamable makes possible is a more inclusive view of the Texts for Nothing, which have been regarded more often than not as failures. The speeches which constitute these texts, written at around the time of the second crisis (see chapter 8) are all about the `not me' which humanism suppresses in its bid for control by means of the crystallisation of an `adamantine western self', in its attitude no less adamant (and, recalling the Hughes equation, Adonis-like) than in its appearance glittering. The prime act of repression is not actually that outlined in psychoanalysis, but rather, humanism's repression of the soul, repression of the pre-logical or a-linguistic moves of the psyche. It is this voice ± repressed by a
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psychosocial neurosis called western ego-identity ± which speaks the Texts for Nothing, creating the acutest crisis-point in Beckett's career. So difficult of access and attribution of voice that critics have often bypassed them, the Texts for Nothing present not only the stifled voice of the soul-world. They also exemplify mythographic speech in the midlands between incarnation and excarnation. In this sense they relate closely to Beckett's last ever work, Stirrings Still (1989), and they include some eerily similar phrases, such as this: `I'm going to rise and go, if it's not me it will be someone, a phantom, long live all our phantoms, those of the dead, those of the living and those of those who are not born.'29 With this sort of expression in flow, neither in self nor outwith it, it can be no wonder that the Beckett persona has such an ambivalent attitude toward sexuality and its results, the `incamination of soul in progress' (as one might adapt the title of the collaborative writing which began Beckett's career).30 At this point the speaker is on the brink of recognising the last illusion. I'm here, that's all I know, and that it's still not me, it's of that the best has to be made.31 The soul has always the same longing, to find what is really me, a longing which arises from recognizing that the accumulation of codings, impressions and attributes known as the human self are illusions, stand-ins, `vice-existers'. In this realm of the mythographic midway between earth/maya and void, longing is transposed. In the ordinary world, `frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away',32 longing is basically the dedicated faculty for acquisition, achievement, conquest, and expresses the erotic zeal which accompanies as well as frustrates these aims. But the longing transposed is for another level. At this level it becomes the longing for the end of illusions, the end of `it all', as Footfalls calls it, bringing to just two words the dozens of pages of The Unnamable. Where the object of longing has changed from material co-ordinates of existence into the far paradise of the forever lost, the only `longer' in the picture cannot any more be the empirical human with its empirical hopes, fears, dominations and submissions. In this midworld of imagination to which Beckett gains access by writing as he does in Texts for Nothing, the voice is of the soul in longing for its lost self, but still individuated, as it must be, into a situation like that of a later text, in which `lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one'.
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We come on an interesting paradox here: if the world of soul and spirit exits its unknownness such as to be individuated as a `longer' at all, then in some sense it must take on body even while remaining soul. Thus it is characteristic of the language of the psychic world that it uses some of the imagery of the physical world without making it necessary to physicalize itself. The Lost Ones' `domain where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one' is an example of the corporealization of soul for the purposes of mythographic representation. (In this sense it resembles the description given by theosophists of the bond between body and soul as a `silver cord': an image could hardly be more grossly physical while simultaneously expecting not to be taken literally.) The function in play here is mythographic or symbolic, and in more and more refined and consistent ways this is to be Beckett's method of writing, inscribing, being, from his mid-life onwards. Not `being in the world', as the existentialists shorthanded it, but being in four worlds. Only symbolic language has the four-track capacity to make a living report from this region. This is why mythographic reading is absolutely necessary in response to mythographic writing. I'm going to rise and go, if it's not me it will be someone, a phantom, long live all our phantoms, those of the dead, those of the living and those of those who are not born. I'll follow him, with my sealed eyes, he needs no door, needs no thought, to issue from this imaginary head, mingle with air and earth and dissolve, little by little, in exile. Now I'm haunted, let them go, one by one, let the last desert me and leave me empty, empty and silent. It's they murmur my name, speak to me of me, speak of a me, let them go and speak of it to others, who will not believe them either, or who will believe them too. Theirs all these voices, like a rattling of chains in my head, rattling to me that I have a head. That's where the court sits this evening, in the depths of that vaulty night, that's where I'm clerk and scribe, not understanding what I hear, not knowing what I write. [ . . . ] But the phantoms come back, it's in vain they go abroad, mingle with the dying, they come back and slip into the coffin, no bigger than a matchbox, it's they have taught me all I know, about things above, and all I'm said to know about me, they want to create me, they want to make me . . . 33
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After the Second Crisis: Entering the Cylinder
The most energetic intellectual and political movements of this century wrote the manifestos of the new liberation. The great artistic statements have recorded the true emptiness of the new prison. Ted Hughes The character of Beckett's work after 1960 had no choice but to be a response to his own self-imposed silence that drew an iron curtain down on his written output at the end of The Unnamable. `You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.' Looking at the development of Beckett's work inevitably means looking at the parallels we can draw between the `I' of Samuel Beckett ± his life progressing as a literary career whose history we follow ± and what the Beckett narrator says about his progress. In some instances we find the literary voice technically almost interchangeable with the voice of the author: `All those Murphys, Molloys, Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time [talking about] them when I should have been speaking about me, and me alone' says the voice of The Unnamable. This is very hard to distinguish generically from the various remarks Beckett has made in letters to friends about the progress of his writing life. We have to be very clear about this, especially in a climate of literary theory which takes the utmost pains to establish that it is naive to suppose that the I of a first person narrative could possibly be regarded as the same identity as the I of its author speaking in the first person. A debate in Beckett studies is long overdue as to whether or not far too scrupulous a distinction has been made over the first person narrator being or not being the identity of Beckett. This has always been a matter for doubt but the available evidence goes increasingly to prove that many of the events recounted by the Beckett narrators are events closely 125
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8
more often than remotely similar to events in Beckett's life. Of course this doesn't establish beyond doubt that they are not just events from his real life being attributed to a speaker who is not Beckett, that is possible. But the gap between fictional and nonfictional self narrows in such writing as Beckett's, and there is no use trying to pretend with ever more sophisticated arguments that it doesn't. I think it is definite that the once popular stage in Beckett studies is over where every work was seen to be simply (or not simply) metafiction, about the process of writing narrative. My study of Beckett leaves me thinking his fictional self-incarnations and his enterprises as an author were overshadowed by a much greater pressure which could apply to any cultural expression, be it fictional, non-fictional, confessional, therapeutic, or whatever. And it is to respond to this pressure, to do something with pain instead of constantly striving to do something about it or escape from it, that I think Beckett's efforts, whether in his own name or the name of a fictional incarnation, are dedicated. It simply doesn't matter much, looked at from this angle, who the narrator is supposed to be, nor whether we are looking at a narratological exercise, spiritual autobiography, or monologic/dramatic fiction. It has variously been claimed of Beckett that we are looking at all three, and it's not my aim to argue that again. What we are looking at and entering into is a tissue of communications originated in the world of soul. We could say the same about an abstract painting, or indeed about many other kinds of painting, since we are not confined to the modern when speaking of the language of soul. But we are certainly not looking at a representation of the ordinary world when we read Beckett's narratives. At the very most we are looking at a picture of the world as perceived by soul as well as by the ordinary senses. It is essential to be clear about the above before considering Beckett's later oeuvre. There is no doubt that the way the works refer to themselves by internal cross-reference means that they are intended to be read each as part of an ongoing process, and once this is acknowledged it can also be agreed that there are two crises or turningpoints in Beckett's creative series, the second and possibly most serious of which occurs between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. In brief, the crisis turned on lying and truth-telling. The narrators of the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable noticed `in the frenzy of utterance, the concern with truth'. The question was: if the frenzied narrative voice can say anything it likes and be believed as telling the truth, then is telling any story essentially meaningless because every detail could easily be replaced by something else without making the slightest dif-
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ference to the communication's truth value? The other dimension of the crisis was finding that this voice was pressed, it seemed, by outside agencies, into giving an accurate account of its state, seemingly before a courtroom. Given this outside pressure there was some excuse for evading with lies the searching eye of the `gang' of evaluators, and this is how the The Unnamable narrative really ended, with an admission that (a) if anything can be said and just by virtue of being uttered claim to be true, the only way to avoid lying is to eliminate speech and `go silent'; and (b) if communication is to continue, it will have to take place not as a result of the demand that the self have something to say for itself in front of the judges. One could add that the trilogy's distilled meaning was perhaps this, that it is precisely because the social expectation is that one should always have something to say for oneself, that one is tempted to feed fabrications to the `evaluators' in order to preserve privacy, dignity, and peace in the interior consciousness. The trilogy was the first of Beckett's works to mount a stupendous, raging banter against the humanist mind-set which prescribes speech as the guarantee of human capability. When speech overspills its limits, as it constantly does over the 300-odd pages of the trilogy, it recognises and enforces its own dependence on the ordinary mind-sets of those who regulate its production and reception. `I have no language but theirs.' Beckett presents there a modern myth of Babel, where the supreme capacity of civilisation, language, is exposed as a treachery almost as great as that of supposing language is able to go to the root of the human soul. It doesn't, as Shelley knew: `These words inefficient and metaphorical. Most words so. No help'.1 Realising this, Beckett says, `You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.' How? If he does go on, this challenge seems to be saying, it will have to be a going on in a totally different manner from the trilogy's literary style which seemed to be exhausted at the trilogy's end. In How It Is he did go on, in a surrealistic and telegraphic style, six or seven-line paragraphs unpunctuated, standing for the gasped elocutions of a narrator who is crawling through mud in a vast circular course along with others trapped in the same hell-realm. Remembering the problems of The Unnamable, the teller has difficulty knowing which of the various figures present is the speaker: can't go on we're talking of me not Pim Pim is finished he has finished me now part three not Pim my voice not his saying this these words can't go on and Pim that Pim that never was and Bom
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whose coming I await to finish be finished have finished me too that Bom will never be no Pim no Bom and this voice quaqua of us all never was only one voice my voice never any other all that not Pim I who murmur all that a voice mine alone and that bending over me noting down one word every three two word every five from age to age yes or no but above all go on impossible for the moment quite impossible that's the essential2
Life in the cylinder Beckett's prose writing after 1960 and before 1980 can seem on first glance not only obscure and unrelated to any concerns normally attributed to the short story or for that matter to the drama or the novel, but as defying any attempt whatsoever to make ordinary sense of them. Alien, untouchable, hermetic, heretical, they seem without antecedent and without legacy. We look to his earlier work and find narrative, character and incident, albeit in modernist guise. We look to his later 1980s novellas, Nohow On, and discover a return of sorts to autobiography and the personal confession. In the middle we come across a series of texts which seem to have taken leave of their senses, almost literally, senses mental and physical, as in this fragment of Ping: White ceiling never seen ping of old only just almost never one second light time white floor never seen ping of old only just almost never one second light time white floor never seen ping of old perhaps there. Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning a nature one second almost never blue and white in the wind that much memory henceforth never. White planes no trace shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not.3 One of the first sketches from which the whole series grew is even shorter than the shortest of the finished pieces. But it contains all the key phrases which are to appear in the associated texts. Imagination dead imagine.
Imagine a place, that again.
Never ask another question.
Imagine a place, then someone in it, that again.
Crawl out of the frowsy deathbed and drag it to a place to die in.
Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after
the war, no, not that again.
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A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there. Couldn't
have got in, can't get out, did get in, will get out, all right.
Stool, bare walls when the light comes on, women's faces on the wall
when the light comes on. [. . .]
Light off and let him be, sitting on the stool and talking to himself
the last person.
Saying, Now where is he, no, Now he is here.
Try as well as sitting standing, walking, kneeling, crawling, lying,
creeping, in the dark and in the light.
Imagine light.
Imagine light.
No visible source, strong at full, spread all over, no shadow, all six
planes shining the same, slow on, ten seconds to full, same off, try
that.
Still his crown touches the ceiling, moving not.
Say a lifetime of walking crouched and drawing himself up when
brought to a stand. When it goes out, no matter, start again.4
It is the world, or non-world, of the post-1960s fiction. But even that sketch was preceded by a snatch in How It Is which probably began the whole initiative. It shows what compulsion already existed to describe and pursue this particular scene. the voice quaqua on all sides then within in the little vault empty closed eight planes bone-white if there were a light a tiny flame all would be white ten words fifteen words like a fume of sighs when the panting stops then the storm the breath token of life part three and last it must be early ended5 The equivalent of the `sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved'6 and the dustbins and urns of the major plays reappear here in the form of the `little vault' which is to dominate the 1960s shorts and signifies imprisonment in the Cartesian I-consciousness, the inability to realise one's unity with what is outside and ± but for the illusion of selfhood ± interpenetrates what is inside. Hence comes the longing for light inside the vault as well as outside. The `bone-white' surface is eminently able to receive and distribute light, but is in darkness. For this quintessentially Beckettian mythography of Cartesian dogma, Iconsciousness is located the skull, the mind-box, therefore bone-white is a deliberate choice of word. As well as being a physical prison, Beckett's chamber is a prison of outlook, in that from it there is no outlook.
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Further features of the closed chamber are that the light changes are accompanied by temperature changes from heat to cold and back again; the temperatures are (to put it mildly) unseasonable, that is, too hot or cold for comfort; and that the closed spaces vary from being cuboid to cylindrical from text to text. But the important thing is that they could all be contained within four vertices within a notional sphere. The word hell is used often enough to encourage us to think the scene might be a figuration of the hell state. Interpreters agree that one must regard Beckett's effort as the maximum dehumanisation of fiction, and that the experimental imperative `try that' is the classic stuff (if there can be such a thing) of the postmodern artistic enterprise. The proposition to imagine a situation in which it is impossible to imagine because imagination has died, is crucial, in that one is faced with the question, who imagines, and with what energy, if there is no imagination to imagine with? We can also readily agree that Beckett is engaged in extreme reduction of the furniture of realism, to the point of stripping down to below the bare essentials, for essentialism is not currency in a postmodern economy. All this can be agreed readily enough, as it could equally be ± and suggestively ± with the paintings of Rothko. But some interesting connections can be noticed with Beckett's other works. The lines `A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there. Couldn't have got in, can't get out, did get in, will get out, all right. Stool, bare walls when the light comes on' and the remarks about the light fades, could as easily be stage directions for late Beckett drama as they are metafictional `directions' for prose. It is just another of the many signs suggesting Beckett might have seen remarkably few meaningful distinctions between spoken and written text, and between fiction (in this form) and theatre. Many of his plays are attempts to stage the world being fictionally executed in the prose. Some, including Embers, That Time, Heard in the Dark, play on such stages as this. The stool and light bulb and solitary figure are irreducible properties. Another property of this chamber which is known to confound critics and appreciators alike is that the attributes it is endowed with are as strongly in favour of death as in favour of life. There is the implication that this chamber, neither grave nor dwelling, and its occupants could signify the hell-like deep structure of life on earth, yet at the same time there is the suggestion of tomb, sepulchre, and the celebrated verbal play on bone walls. The Cartesian mind is at once evoked in its dubious, flickering aliveness, and simultaneously the skull which Hamlet discovers and in which he sees nothing but death. Beckett's chamber is the classic modern locus of what Tennyson called `death in life' and Strind-
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berg called `life in death'. In its many occasional forms the Beckett cylinder is allowed to smell more strongly of burial, in the pile of sandy earth, for example, in which Winnie is enclosed in Happy Days. We are never allowed to shoulder the alternative perspective out of view; and this is a hallmark of the mythographic imagination, asking for fluid receptivity to contraries, according to Heracleitus one of the fundamental necessities, `the compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary'.7 As well as the Cartesian box/prison, which again brings the ideas of home and exile into such uncomfortable cultural proximity, the Beckett chamber evokes the Cavern of Plato, and the Cave of Empedocles, both of which, according to Plotinus, discern and evoke the `commerce of soul with body as an enchainment, an entombment'.8 We also find in this context, as in the case of Beckett's The Lost Ones, that flight has a double meaning too, equally relevant to the state of confinement, imprisonment (which initiates flight to liberty) and the capability of flight (the soul soars as it escapes). The `sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved', as Molloy puts it, is a temporary, unreal self that is actually the result of the soul's temporary perfidy to itself. `Real faith is that speechless fidelity of the soul to itself'.9 But Beckett's peculiar exposure of the perfidy is the fact that, despite its unreality, this `sham self' has been forced by the postCartesian regime of awareness and personal accountability to play the role of the permanent or abiding mark of humanness. As Beckett elsewhere confesses as one self of another, `He had a life, I didn't'. So with this tentative, gradual description of a scene, the picture of the demiurgic fiction-maker, or else theatre director, edges into view, `Urizen at his handiwork', as Blake might have described it, but we are never quite sure whether the solitary figure is speaking about itself, or whether it is being spoken about by another. We shall take up the matter of that ambiguity again. We also feel, repeatedly in these short prose pieces as well as in the plays and longer novels such as the trilogy, that all possible presences in the action, whether of speaker, spoken and spoken-of, are not related, nor identified with one another, as they would be in the normal realist modes of humanist enunciation (confession, narrative, narrative fiction, lyric poetry in first person or apostrophe), but on the contrary unmoored, floating in non-locality. Beckett gave graphic evidence that he was aiming at this effect when he suggested to someone planning to stage the prose monologue From an Abandoned Work that the performer should discover the manuscript as though by chance on stage (in a dustbin), take it out and read it with hesitations such as would be expected in someone reading a strange text (not his) for the first time
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(not seen before such that it could ± even though by another person ± be internalised as to his taste). I would suggest that the most powerful message of all provided by these fictions is, if we may put it like this, the effective consequences of this unmooring of subjectivity. This happening is a story in itself, and obliges us to confront a powerful suggestion about the nature of the criteria by which ordinary narratives, confessions and stories are accorded the dignity of truth-telling or `as-if-truth'-telling, which is the very stuff of the humanist culture of representation and action. The humanist agenda expects a depiction of the world as it is, so that we may learn to perceive it more accurately. If Beckett's world as depicted here is the world as it is, then the humanistic literary conventions of three centuries and more are wildly off the mark. If it is not a picture of the world as it is, it exposes the existing humanist world-pictures as shams. Either way, it is a devastating communication with all the power of a revolutionary political statement, and yet all the pacific force of `ontological anarchy and poetic terrorism'.10 But in offering this, it is not repeating the codes it has come into being to resist. It is revealing to see what becomes of the already quoted formative sketch, when it reappears as the opening to All Strange Away, which is much the longest of the six or so pieces associated with that sketch.11 All of the sketch is re-presented, except that it is in run-on lines in one paragraph. Apart from a few minor changes in punctuation it is exactly lifted, until the point where in the sketch appeared `No visible source, strong at full, spread all over, no shadow, all six planes shining the same, slow on, ten seconds to full, same off, try that.' In the new text Beckett writes No visible source, glare at full, spread all over, no shadow, all six planes shining the same, slow on, ten seconds on earth to full, same off, try that.' If `on earth' appears not much of a change, wait for how the narrative proceeds. Hell this light from nothing no reason any moment, take off his coat, no, naked, all right, leave it for the moment. Sheets of black paper, stick them to the wall with cobweb and spittle, no good, shine like the rest. Imagine what needed, no more, any given moment, needed no more, gone, never was. Light flows, eyes close, stay closed till it ebbs, no, can't do that, eyes stay open, all right, look at that later. Black bag over his head, no good, all the rest still in light, front, sides,
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back, between the legs. Black shroud, start search for pins. Light on, down on knees, sights pin, makes for it, light out, gets pin in dark, light on, sights another, light out, so on, years of time on earth. [. . .] Surprised by light in this posture, hope and fancy on his lips, crawling lifelong habit to a corner here shadowless and similarly sinking head to ground here shining back into his eyes. Imagine eyes burnt ashen blue and lashes gone, lifetime of unseeing glaring, jammed open, one lightning wince per minute on earth, try that. Have him say, no sound. No way in, none out, he's not here. Tighten it round him, three foot square, five high, no stool, no sitting, no kneeling, no lying, just room to stand and revolve, light as before, [. . .] The back of his head touches the ceiling, say a lifetime of standing bowed.12 What we find is that while resolutely erasing the furniture of ordinary life, and contracting the floor and wall space, and taking us further and further from their coordinates, the text nevertheless refers repeatedly to `lifetime', `on earth'. This special emphasis is the major difference between the sketch text and the later version. On first glance we might only infer that the scene on which Beckett concentrates himself and us is meant not to be on earth, and the vantage point is some sort of sciencefiction parallel-state from which life on earth can be viewed from another perspective. But the closer we look the more we are certain that the irreducibles of this hellish environment are precisely those of the bourgeois identity, which is schooled in the lore of the Cartesian Box: it relies for its sense of safety and dignity on the four walls of the home-room; the enclosure of the skull for its private thoughts; and the illusion of fulfilment in the contemplation of sexual imagery (`women's faces on the wall when the light turned on'). While appearing to be dehumanised, this odd locus dramaticus is actually a picture of the world and human life in the world, exactly as prescribed by the text's first injunction to experiment: try to imagine a world without imagination, and having done so, if you can possibly have done so, go further and see what happens. So we are being given a picture of the world, its very `lifetimes' `on earth', human lifetimes, being lived, but viewed not from this world but from a perspective where the illusory consolations of the Cartesian Box are exposed, and life seen just as it is. Since there is no way in, and none out, and `he's not there', then it is fair to ask, is it because he's flown the body? Beckett's picture is unarguably one in which the world is presented as the scene of quite extraordinary suffering. Many comparisons have been made between this cycle of texts and the Inferno ± mythograph of Hell ± of Dante. From the perspective of Buddhism this picture begins to make
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sense. The Buddhist picture of the deception of life proposes that the fabric of the world as we ordinarily recognise it is the aggregation of lifetimes of mistaken views and behaviour, an aggregation known as the chain of dependent origination;13 and that the only freedom from this aggregation and its burdensome suffering is to live through the recognition that what is thought to be so solidly real and so really satisfying is actually not real at all, but a faint picture forged by the dead or dying imagination, not the living one. It is a matter to ponder on more than occasionally how this eruption of desolation in Beckett's fictional and dramatic work is expressly brought about by an abrupt change in the normal attitude to creative imagination. The whole of the 1960s short prose was originated with the motif `Imagination Dead Imagine' ringing in Beckett's head. A world contemplated according to the prescription of Imagination Dead is a largely material world. With imagination also depart emotion and the range of responses that are referred to by the word soul. The world without emotion, be it only the Bovaryesque vain dreaming of the helpless bourgeois, is bad enough. The world without soul is even worse, and it is alas the only possible outcome of taking the appalling nightmare of this Beckett prescription to its furthest extent. Beckett's tales are unique in literature because they temporarily try to undertake creative work having deliberately cut off the fuel supply of creativity. The revolutionary suggestion of Beckett (along with the Buddhist) is that we have dreamed up for ourselves a world as desiccated as this, simply by subscribing to an elaborate illusion. The universe without soul is simply hell, and that is what Beckett writes down. Imagination dead falls in with the reign of quantity (GueÂnon's name for the post-Cartesian world-picture that has swallowed the humanities whole and recycles all creative work as distraction, decoration, or amusement).14 That is why Beckett's narrators spend so long describing the measurements of the spaces their subjects occupy. The Cartesian equation allows for a duality of body (measurable and weighable, documented in detail by the camera-eye of the fictional narrator) and mind (the intracranial station of registering and analysis), but not viewed from any other angle, nor admitting the intermediary, soul, which is a capacity on terms with body and mind but also more highly developed, more fluid, more exact in its perceptions, and most importantly in closer connection with the living principle. The Cartesian equation is literally deadly in its quality: the skull figures death, the graveyard, in the same instant as it figures the mind, the thoughts of the thinker and the I of sovereign individuality. That is the image's horrible power in Beckett's work as a comment on our
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culture. And as far as the body goes, its Cartesian allowance is hardly further from death than is the mind: where the skull survives as mineral remains, the body is pure materia, it merely putrefies. `White bones do not leave the survivor a prey to the slimy menace of disgust. They put an end to the close connections between decomposition, the force of an abundant surge of life, and death', wrote Bataille.15 The Cartesian universe leaves no room for soul, therefore no room for imagination; this is the underlying message of these strange works. So in Rotunda up to now with disappointment and relief with dread and longing sorrow all so weak and faint no more than faint tremors of a leaf indoors on earth in winter to survive till spring. Glare back now where all no light immeasurable turmoil no sound black soundless storm of which on earth all being well say one millionth stilled to mean and of that as much again by the more fortunate all being well vented as only humans can. This `immeasurable turmoil' has close analogies in the Tibetan recitals for the dead, which remind the soul that its karma will bear down upon it like a demon or a great black cloud of dust.16 These parallels are worth pondering, given Beckett's expressly ambiguous method of locating these narrated persons as neither in a lifetime on earth nor quite out of it either, to judge by the `tremors' of the quintessentially human emotions, dread, relief, sweetness, disappointment, longing, sorrow, all given considerable, if faint, weight in this inter-cosmic landscape. All gone now and never been never stilled never voiced all back whence never sundered unstillable turmoil no sound, She's not here, Fancy is her only, Mother mother, Mother in Heaven and of God, God in Heaven, Christ and Jesus and all combinations, loved ones and places, philosophers and all mere cries, in a hammock, etc, and all such, leaving only for the moment, Fancy dead, try that again with spirant barely parting lips in murmur and faint stir of white dust or not in light and dark if this maintained or dark alone.17
Secession of genre: Words and Music Part 2 of the play Words and Music has close connections with the texts we are provisionally reading as prose fiction. But comparing both, and excerpting as prose, we begin to see the pervasive presence of a pre-generic voice.
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The face . . . Seen from above in that radiance so cold and faint . . . with eyes so dimmed by what had passed, its quite piercing beauty is a little . . . blunted. Some moments later however, such are the powers of recuperation at this age, the head is drawn back to a distance of two or three feet, the eyes widen to a stare and begin to feast again. What then is seen would have been better seen in the light of day, that is incontestable. . . . [. . .] Leaving aside the features or lineaments proper, matchless severally and in their ordonnance [. . .] flare of the black disordered hair as though spread wide on water, the brows knitted in a groove suggesting pain but simply concentration more likely all things considered on some consummate inner process, the eyes of course closed in keeping with this, the lashes . . . the nose . . . nothing, a little pinched, perhaps, the lips [. . .] tight, a gleam of tooth biting on the under, no coral, no swell, whereas normally . . . The whole so blanched and still that were it not for the great white rise and fall of the breasts, spreading as they mount and then subsiding to their natural . . . aperture ± so wan and still and so ravished away that it seems no more of the earth than Mira in the Whale [. . .] Some moments later, however, . . . the brows uncloud, the lips part and the eyes . . . the brows uncloud, the nostrils dilate, the lips part and the eyes . . . a little colour comes back into the cheeks and the eyes [. . .] open. Then down a little way through the trash towards where all dark no begging no giving no words no sense no need through the scum down a little way to where one glimpse of that wellhead . . . Down a little way to whence one glimpse of that wellhead18 The above could be straight from All Strange Away or from any of the associated texts, whose tone and themes are so nearly identical as to break the prose-drama distinction: All Strange Away even matches the phrase `lineaments matchless severally and in their ordonnance' with `lovely beyond words', `beautiful beyond words'. when all gone from mind and all mind gone that then none ever been but only silent flesh unless with the faint rise and fall of breast . . . say though no clear image now the long black hair now scattered clear of face on floor so clear when strewn on face . . . gone the remembered long black lashes19 The view of the woman is closely reminiscent of the encounter at the end of The Lost Ones. The male gaze has few equals in literature to the
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watcher in Words and Music, but the important thing is that one can watch Beckett's drama and prose continue reflecting the same mythographic hand. It is for all the world as if Beckett had been writing a large amount of material from the mythopoetic interior, which is preoccupied with the balance between incarnation and excarnation, acceptance and rejection of the Great Goddess of Complete Being, and then when it was done decided to prepare the utterance for stage (as in the case of Words and Music) or for prose fiction (All Strange Away and the other related shorts). My point is that there is an original voice which can be heard, if as reader or listener one ignores the interruptions and stage business and recovers the essentials of the text. To the critic whose emphasis is on the mechanics of genre, this may seem a sacrilegious act of misreading and I can plead no cause other than this, that while I appreciate that the works did emerge finished as either prose pieces or dramaticules, still the overwhelming evidential impression is that in much of what Beckett wrote, typified in particular by the `died on to dawn' passage in Company and A piece of Monologue, but exemplified on other occasions, he could not decide himself what genre to use. It is as though the imperative to express, called `the Great Necessity' by Juliet and others, was anterior to form. So, since the dramatic text `reduced to essentials' reads and sounds so uniform in tone with the prose fiction, the voice slides so easily across genres, I suggest the mythographic voice was the prime mover in the development of Beckett's aesthetic. His prose is dramatic, this has been acknowledged by everybody. That his drama is in a special sense oracular/monologic/prosaic has been less often observed. The case of Words and music is especially illustrative, but it makes the same point as so many of Beckett's other plays do, which is that the primary impressions, scenic, emotional, narrative even, are never staged but always recounted. Think of Not I, Footfalls, That Time, Krapp's Last Tape, Rough for Theatre II, A Piece of Monologue, Eh Joe, and many more. The scene is (in some permutation or other) the scene of a voiced being having been silenced by his story, finding that it is being told by someone else. It is all the more fascinating, having come to the point of countenancing the pre-generic voice across Beckett's entire work, to find that it is always this that really meets head-on the ambivalence at the core of the incarnated heart, and talks directly about the love lost, never had, or, once proffered, declined in obscure refusal. The following minuscule typographical move that could almost be taken for a misprint in fact carries the weight of indicating all the ambivalence of arriving at the `wombentrance', to use the Tibetan symbol for the incident of incarnation:
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138 Beckett and Eros
Down a little way To where one glimpse Of that wellhead
Down a little way To whence one glimpse Of that wellhead. Here, compressed in minute shorthand, such as Beckett worked on throughout the post-1950s writing, is the edge, or the brink, on which his tragic mythography of incarnation is balanced. The erotic allure for the soul is undeniable and fully admitted here. If that metaphoric shorthand were not open enough about the play's mythopoetic character, then its statement of its themes in these `discursive' terms should set doubt aside: What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul? is the first great question asked by all Beckett's voices. The second follows fast, and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?20 It is no idle question either. `Do we mean love, when we say love? Soul, when we say soul?' That is exactly the teetering undecidedness of the never properly born. That is ± in a curiously tragic sense ± their birthright. Only they can say it and only they can ask it in this mode. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the play Words and Music spirals around the mythology of the descent of the soul, in both senses of descent, that is, spiritual/psychological ancestry, and `locational' provenance. But ± as study of the mythograph makes indisputable ± once the soul's provenance becomes the object of study, it disobligingly ceases to have any location at all, such that location evaporates into mere locution and is lost to view in the clear sky of the deep blue void. All attributes cancel, `all that goes before forget', as Beckett put it in another text. `Tonight's theme is Love', says the voice in Words and Music, putting a front up against the interruptions and cacophonic dislodgements of the
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says the erotic watcher in Words and Music. Then
play's other speakers. `Love of woman, I mean, if that is what my Lord means.' The rift between one meaning of love and another is unremittingly opened by these declarations. Nothing else said about love in the rest of Beckett's work contradicts that ambiguity in the slightest, and most goes to confirm it. It is notable here ± and forms the context of many of Beckett's other works such as That Time, Krapp's Last Tape, Eh Joe, and Company ± that sexual fulfilment, while retaining the glow of the highest bliss accorded it by the liberal humanist, is experienced as the death of something else. We are not talking here of the death of innocence commonly understood to be the result of a sexual initiation. Rather we are suggesting that as the sexual is in the ascendant, another component of the human soul is in the descendant, and sounds its grief as keenly as the lover his or her ecstasy. So far ±
Out of the night
We travelled, you and I,
To meet on this small star.
Our chosen fate,
Our meed and sole desire
All we have lost.
[...]
Mist-dwellers:
Love in part remembers,
But who we are,
And where before our eyes had met ±
In soul's far wanderings
What is the glory that we forget?
[...]
The language of the flesh
Too faintly cries:
And yet no lover lies
As the dead so close at heart.21
Kathleen Raine's Deserted Shore poems, like the Buddhist and theosophical recitals, articulate such a powerful sense of mixedness, the supreme longing for fulfilment accompanied by such traumatic though slow grief, that it would not be too exaggerated to apply the upshot to Beckett and say that that very grief is what burdens the teller of the All Strange
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Away tale more deeply than any of the other arrangements in the picture. All reference to emotion, scant though it is, revolves around the `memory of felicity no save one'. It even seems different in kind from another mode of sexual life the text refers to, the `lifetime, gems, evenings with Emma and the flights by night, no not that again', which tends toward the humdrum and habitual, what Mrs Rooney (wistfully nonetheless) refers to as `a little love twice daily, like the butcher boy's . . .' Unlike this, the strangely compelling and haunting encounter in Company (1980) is pervaded not by familiarity but by distance, almost but not quite unearthly: natural pallor is a property you have in common. The violet lips do not return your smile. [ . . . ] You open your eyes to find her sitting before you. All dead still. [ . . . ] Can it be she is with child without your having asked for as much as her hand? You go back into your mind. She too did you but know it has closed her eyes. So you sit face to face in the little summerhouse. With eyes closed and your hands on your pubes. In that rainbow light. That dead still.22
Hypnagogia ± literature ± soul There is one and only one sense in which these texts and the ones related to it could make sense on the realist's agenda of judgement, and that is that the stories record what is essentially in the nature of a free-associative hypnotherapy session in which a patient gives evidence of high intelligence combined with severe psychotic episodes, in a delirium half licensed by the therapeutic context ± one is not required to talk sense but to respond to the unconscious. Looked at from this angle there is not much difference between Beckett's short play Not I and the `story' All Strange Away, except that the dramatic medium, shorter length, and simpler verbiage make Not I the more assimilable to an ordinary reader or audience ± though still not at all assimilable for the great majority of fiction and drama consumers. Without making this `couch diatribe' interpretation of Beckett's mythographic voice need to stick, we can add that it is in states designated as mental illness that genius has often foundered or failed to make its more definitive statement. And the mind-set against which Beckett's art itself is pitched is liable to cause anyone a mental crisis at the best of times. The analysis of humanism and its prized sense of self is an analysis of a collective neurosis, and in this sense we might be hearing from Beckett the suggestion that the world we live in, if registered with sufficient sensitivity,
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would drive anyone so near to madness as to make them come out with the type of monologue that All Strange Away offers. If a `lifetime on earth' is none other than the one inevitably prescribed by the Cartesian thought police, then the end-station of a reflection on that lifetime will not make All Strange Away a surprise, at least not so much of a surprise as it seems if we are expecting a short story, novel, or even modernist stream of consciousness. The other great advantage of not ruling out the possibility that Beckett was experimenting with therapeutic work narrative (he admitted that the novel Watt was precisely that, for his own benefit) is that it opens a dialogue zone between myth, fiction, art and psychology. A criticism of culture, it's becoming clearer and clearer, cannot do without this zone. The language of the consulting room, of the modern painter, of the Beckett character, of the mystic, can be spoken and understood in the realm of soul, and in that realm the disciplines refresh one another rather than batten themselves down in exclusive domains of their own, in which isolation can only breed further madness. The insights offered by Buddhist psychology are helpful in appreciating Beckett's treatment of people who would normally be described as insane. Ralph Metzner raises the matter in a provocative way: The highest state of mystical realization is described in many traditions as seeing the unreality of phenomena, their emptiness, the open-space nature of everything. Yet people in psychiatric institutions, or individuals who are deeply saddened or depressed, may also complain of feeling empty, inner voidness, or spaced-out detachment and unreality. Is the experience in these two states similar, with the difference lying only in interpretation? Or are these experiences forever beyond the reach of words and similes, and the belief that they can be understood a delusion?23 Beckett is working with exactly the possibility hinted at here ± that the answer to both Metzner's questions may be yes. Paradoxically, Beckett's mythograph ± his picture of the chain of dependent origination and its spiritual aetiology ± is prepared from a point of view which, because it exposes the error of subjectivity so painfully, cannot be said to be confined in it or to repeat it. As Robert Sardello perceptively observes, with great relevance to Beckett, the thing that is important about pain is not what to do about it but what we do with it.24 Like the Buddhist practitioner, Beckett does not say this is the world we are forever stuck with, but rather that seeing it for what it is ±
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an unreality, a figment ± we are in a much better position to reach the reality of our nature having cast out the deception, the `hypnosis' under which we live. So Beckett's picture is not complicit with what it pictures, rather the contrary. The vision of a fragmented solidity and unmoored self is one taken from an apex of wholeness, what S. Gontarski agrees is nothing other than a view `beyond recognisable external reality and discrete literary characters, replacing them with something like naked consciousness or pure being (living or dead is not always clear)'. This view is what dzogchen calls simply the View. If all life is approached according to this view, and if it is really experienced directly as the nature of the matter, then the congealed and aggregated trouble with which the human regards himself as burdened disintegrates forthwith, becomes the insubstantial play of shadow.
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Krapp's Tapes and the Myth of Recurrence
Spes unica . . . to turn this dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature. Beckett Once wasn't enough for you. . . . Be again, Be again, all that old misery. . . Krapp In Krapp's Last Tape, without doubt a landmark in Beckett's career as an autographer (self-writer), we come straight up against the problem of author/narrator documentary. The moment we see this work alongside Beckett's biography, the inexhaustible comparisons are nevertheless not fixable, and it is not my intention to try to fix them. There are four major insights which this play tells of. These are not related to the plot proper, a plot which is simply told as the old man Krapp listening to a tape of a diary he made at age 39, part of which refers to an earlier tape, made presumably in his twenties. Half way through the stage play's time Krapp begins to record a new tape himself, relating to the two stages of life adverted to by his hearing the older tape. He gives up shortly after beginning, returns to a favourite point on the earlier tape and hears it once more. The four insights are inestimably valuable communications about Beckett's art and its connections with his own life and human life on earth as such. They all refer intertextually, that is, they have meaning in relation to other of his works. Krapp's Last Tape is not really a freestanding work. The context for all these insights is this: Krapp is keen to record his life in diary form so that thereby he can `separate the grain from the husks': he supposes he means by that `those things worth having 143
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9
when all the dust has ± when all my dust has settled'. The grain in this case amounts to three incidents he names, `mother at rest at last', a `memorable equinox', and a `farewell to love'. These are involved in the insights he is to have during the play as a whole. They are not the private insights of Krapp nor of Samuel Beckett, but apperceptions made by the mythographic imagination characterised sometimes by Beckett, sometimes by Krapp, but evident in all the works, whoever they are attributed to, their narrators or their maker. The first two follow on one another. The first is the fact that Krapp associates the precise moment of the death of his mother with an incident in which he squeezes a small black rubber ball. `All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand . . . I shall feel it in my hand, until my dying day.' This incident is passed on to many more of Beckett's textual incarnations, and explains a few earlier ones. Mr Rooney in All That Fall testily refuses to explain what he is doing with the rubber sphere he too has in his hands; the most we are told is that `it is a thing which I carry about with me'. In All Strange Away, much attention is given to imagining the occupant of the Rotunda gripping a `small grey puncture rubber ball or small grey ordinary rubber bulb such as on earth attached to a bottle of scent or suchlike'.1 Sometimes the rubber object undergoes further mutations, appearing for example as the globe attached to the end of a horn. `To blow this horn was for me a pleasure, almost a vice', confesses Molloy. But considering all these cases we can be sure that the one Krapp describes comes closest to the point of explaining the persistent association. And when we consider what trauma Beckett's mother's death did cause, the fact is not surprising. Krapp says also `I held it out to [the dog] and he took it in his mouth, gently, gently. [. . .] I might have kept it. But I gave it to the dog.' In other fictional self-evocations, Beckett/ Krapp has indeed kept it, and kept close about the reason for doing so. We should also bear in mind what the voice of the Texts for Nothing hints are the only possible certainties: `it's not certain, the way the mother would be certain, the way the tomb would be certain . . . '2 The second insight has been mentioned a lot more often, because of a parallel in Beckett's recorded life-story.3 But to be fully understood it requires the hearer to fill in a few occluded details, words this time. I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This is what I have to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps
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Krapp's Tapes and the Myth of Recurrence 145
Here a break in the audition of the tape misses some words, whose gist I will try to conjecture in a moment. The tape resumes a little later in the anecdote, but not so late as to lose the sense completely: clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most ± here again we must fill in with what is obviously something such as precious asset, or valuable resource. He adds that the result of this experience while standing in the `howling wind, never to be forgotten', is an `unshatterable association . . . of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire'. By this time we are in a position to go back to the other break in the tape and try to fill in. The `belief [he] had been going on all his life, namely ± ' was probably something to the effect that the light of reason was enlisted to solve problems, and that the dark/ night forces should be `kept under' as he says. That belief can be easily identified with the rational axioms of humanism. We see here something quite extraordinary, which links Beckett's work again closely to Jung, for whom the shadow aspect of the human personality, the night-world and its hints and intimations, are as important to inspiration and self-comprehension as is the glare of the analytic daylight. (In All That Fall Mrs Rooney also adverts, by an authorial quip, to Jung's interest in this: trying to remember who the `mind doctor' was, she says his `name will come back to me in the night'.) We can connect it with Beckett's declaration that art `does not dabble in the clear or make clear. It is the sun, moon and stars of the mind'. From that curious hint of echo-dialogue with the cliche `dabbling in the occult', we can see how much more interested Beckett is in the `occulted' (a word used to effect in Ill Seen Ill Said ) than he is in the clear-as-daylight. (And with brisk irony the coinage `dabbling in the clear' suggests his attitude to clarity is as weighted against it as most people's attitudes are against the occult.) What is arresting is that we find Krapp marking out a similar discovery as one of the most important discoveries of his life. We may wish to extend the `belief he had been going on all his life' to include actually all the registers of post-humanist, post-Englightenment conditioning that his educators could `ram down his gullet';4 and thereby also appreciate that this was a turning-point in his life in essential ways
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no place left in my memory . . . for the miracle that . . . [. . .] for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely ±
equivalent to Buddhist enlightenment, the prerequisite for which is the abatement of `beliefs one has been going on all one's life' ± that abatement, in other words, being the very essence of transformation. We should add to our consideration of this insight a very closely similar one in That Time, where instead of `the dark which he has always struggled to keep under' we see the void, with which the speaker has done precisely the same until that time in the end when you tried and couldn't [. . .] when you tried and tried and couldn't any more no words left to keep it out so gave it up gave up there by the window in the dark or moonlight gave up for good and let it in It, the `great shroud', is nothing other than the `dark light', the inspiring soul-`fire' of the Krapp persona. He calls it fire, associates it with `miracle', and repeats it in the phrase at the end of the play, `not with the fire in me now'. What he means at the end we shall explain later, but the fire we may compare now to the sacred fire of Gemistos Plethon: When you behold the most holy fire without form flashing with quivering flames through the recesses of the whole world, then hearken to the voice of that fire.5 Whether or not Beckett was aware of this oracle, he also recalls something very similar in Molloy, the `recesses of night and imminence of dawn' being related to the inspiring power of darkness seen as fire, as it is in this play quite explicitly. The `unshatterable association till my dissolution [is that] of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire'. The speaker of That Time, like Krapp, has tried all his life hitherto to keep it at bay, and yet in the end has to admit he is not only `none the worse' for having accepted the void, but that it might `in reality [be his] most [valuable resource]'. The reason why fire becomes so closely related to the mythograph of voidness, the shroud, is that the dark fire of enlightenment is the burner of the dross of self, grief and time. It leaves in its ashes the unadorned insight that the ordinary light of day will not serve to clarify any but the most obvious and outer of a person's problems. And there is no doubt that problems are what Beckett's characters are persistently beset with, in their own various ways (though not so various as to do away entirely with the supposition that all that happens in Beckett's works is really happening
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to the same person in different guises). In such instances of cross-incarnation of the same matter between works, we see in Beckett something which Ted Hughes identified as the defining factor in Shakespeare's developing greatness: not `philosophical, moral or religious abstraction,' but `slow, laborious transformation of himself. This is attested by the phenomenon of his poetic development. Each phase of his psychic illumination produces a ``physically'' new poetic substance of steadily increasing value.'6 The third insight is the `farewell to love' that Krapp mentions on his tape label, one of the most touching of Beckett's love scenes and again one with reverberations throughout the prose and drama. upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay stretched out on the floorboards with he hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments ± [Pause.] ± after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.7 The tragic aspect of this episode is that to the degree that it is a farewell anticipated long before (`I said again . . .'), it is also, in exact proportion, intimate and of the present moment. Only with her eyes closed does she agree with his farewell. In the erotic present the act of denying the farewell is the same act as his leaning over to `get the eyes in the shadow', whereupon they open and, as he says, `let me in': and here there is the breath of tragedy again, because it is not quite established whether the phrase is in the narrative or imperative (here, pleading). The episode, like the similar one in Company,8 is forever on the edge of intimacy and eroticism, but not there, `not moving'. Well might we and Beckett recall Keats's `ever wilt thou love and she be fair'. There is neither assent nor dissent in this scene, but nor again is there apathy or non-involvement. There is certainly no trace of the irony or bodyhatred that surfaces at other times in Beckett's writing. In whatever way
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this passage is viewed, whether as a testament to Beckett's own private life or as a fictional invention or as an embellished memory of a much less lyrical incident, it has its own inviolable music, an unbreakable rhythm which pictures the nature of the erotic, with accuracy and poetic force, and tact: `We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.' The fourth insight occurs after the opening of the play's second section, when Krapp begins recording his new tape during stage time. It is the revelation of the delusion of `total involvement'.9 Krapp starts with ironic self-deprecation and moves through waves and troughs of varying mental climate. Listen to him. Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway. [Pause.] The eyes she had! [Broods, realizes he is recording silence, switches off, broods. Finally.] Everything there, everything, all the ± [realizes this is not being recorded, switches on.] Everything there, everything, on this old muckball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting of . . . [hesitates] . . . the ages! [In a shout.] Yes! [Pause.] Let that go! Jesus! Take his mind off his homework! Jesus! [Pause. weary.] Ah well, maybe he was right. [Pause.] Maybe he was right. [Broods. Realizes. Switches off. Consults envelope.] Pah! [Crumples it and throws it away. Broods. Switches on.] Nothing to say. Not a squeak. Krapp finds that the dismisser of the previous recording, the `stupid bastard', may after all not be as over and done with as he hopes. Trying to constate that his former self is gone, he is brought up short by his own reflection. `The eyes she had!' Then, we may ask, when he broods, does he ironically dismiss his all-but self-quotation? or brood on it as possibly not over and done with? Dropping the ironic sneer he tries again, saying that `everything there, everything on this old muckball' ± here all the contents of the previous tape is now bundled up and referred to again on the present one ± `all the light and dark and famine and feasting of ±', he means to say, of the world as perceived by the despotism of the outer senses; all of it is just so much useless baggage, what Mahler's Lied von der Erde calls the `morsche Tande dieser Erde', the dross and trinkets, what the Buddhist says is strictly speaking a delusion, not there at all, so in actual fact well over and done with. The `feasting and famine of the ages', Krapp says, `Let that go! Jesus! Take his mind off his homework! Jesus! [Pause. Weary.] Ah well, maybe he was right. . . . Maybe he was
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right.' We are not told whether this he is Jesus or else the former Krapp who at thirty-nine took his autobiography seriously enough to outline it in the way he did on the tape played in the drama's first part. But if we suppose that the `he' is the younger Krapp, then there is real doubt as to whether he properly can dismiss his former love-lorn incarnation as easily as he would wish. He ends up closing the present few moments by telling his tape-recorder he has `nothing to say. Not a squeak.' Which puts him instantly alongside many of the characters of Beckett's later drama, who, when they come to the actual truth of their situation, have nothing to say for themselves whatsoever. Not a squeak. He tries a few pieces of news for the latest tape, but only exasperates himself. `Revelled in the word spool.' `Crawled out once or twice, before the summer was cold. Sat shivering in a park, drowned in dreams and burning to be gone.' `Last fancies. [Vehemently.] Keep 'em under!' (Here he forgets his earlier vow to realise that the dark he was supposed to `keep under' was his most precious resource . . . ) Reminiscing, he starts collecting and deadening his memories, but catches himself short: `Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. [Pause.] Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. [Pause.] And so on. [Pause.] Be again, be again. [Pause.] All that old misery. [Pause.] Once wasn't enough for you.' And as if that were the best he could manage, he stops. Then suddenly, involuntarily, instead of idly trying to choose a few more pleasant memories to drag up, he finds that the most powerful imprint of his life again chooses him, before he knows it: Lie down across her. [Long pause. He suddenly bends over machine, swithces off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants] ± which is the very passage that detained him so long on the previous listening, the scene in the boat with the lover with her hands under her head: the `farewell to love' to which he cannot say farewell. And assuredly this is part of `all the light and dark and famine and feasting', the life of this world. Beckett makes sure that the last words of the play are those significant few which on the previous listening Krapp didn't stop to hear. Here I end this reel. [ . . . ] Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness.
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He must have meant, by this chance, the relationship he has so often played back the reminiscence of. He has withheld dismissal of it until the very last possible moment. But here, if the end of the drama signifies that Krapp the older might be on the point of agreeing with Krapp the younger at this moment, he does come to make a final farewell to love: But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. I wouldn't want them back. We may conclude that the tapes, reels, notes, returns to the tapes, the recording of new tapes, in fact all the rigmaroles of Krapp's life, and the sense that `all that misery' persists throughout successive stages of life, amount together to a recognition that they are all equivalent to the repeated entrapment in misery and attachment, if nothing is learnt from experience in one lifetime. Again it must be stressed that this `karmic' pattern does not involve believing in a system such as theosophy to have its mythographic effect. Any situation in which an error is `renewed incontinent' (as Beckett says of a housefly banging against a windowpane in Company), is the prototype of a meaningless reincarnation or recurrence. The mythographic function of reincarnation-figures is to demonstrate the futility of duration in the absence of learning or transformation of awareness. When Beckett speaks of all that old misery, he adverts to what could have been corrected but was left to repeat itself. It does not matter whether that recurrence is from minute to minute, as in a compulsive behaviour pattern or neurosis; year to year, as in a personality's arrested development; from parent to child, as in a transmitted prejudice or error; from culture to pupil, as in the system of education being regardlessly grafted onto people whose aptitudes may not be suitable; from day to day, as when one forgets that waking up the next day one has tasks and conditions inherited from the previous day; or from lifetime to lifetime, the classic image of reincarnation, where sleep is substituted by death and one awakes anew by being reborn after a sojourn outside time and space. In all these cases, we can say with Krapp, `Once wasn't enough for you.' The myth of recurrence is obviously important to Beckett because his work is so permeated, not to say obsessed, not only with the phenomenon of repetition but equally with the nagging obscurity surrounding why such repetition should be necessary. Why should once not be enough? In Buddhism as in Beckett, the essence of renewed error or blind repetition is identical with samsara, in other words the pervasive
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error that constitutes our accepted picture of identity, locality, and existence, and all the (mis)judgements that are made according to those norms. The boat scene ± `the grain worth having when the dust ± my dust ± has settled' ± is the perfect inscription of forever just having missed the establishment of the incarnation cycle. It's significant that, once again in this play, as in so many others, notably All that Fall, Beckett/Krapp evokes the bourgeois in the form of Effi Briest, a German version of Bovary, and is set wondering if he might have been happy with such a relationship himself. `Could [he] have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes'? He concludes he could not; and concludes this even while wryly stating that although his `best years are gone', he would not have them back, `with the fire in [him] now'. It is tempting to suggest that his humanist inheritance combined with his soul-borne homesickness makes him conclude that the obscure divine fire will not at any point make the love-attraction, so keenly registered, so narrowly missed, and beautifully recorded, tip into the mess and the slime for which Krapp always teeters on the edge of disdain: the other alternative being only total acceptance, and a becoming `embedded deep in life'. Not to have known `love's sad satiety' ± a state Shelley wishes he could share with the skylark10 ± is a gift of the divine fire, perhaps. `Not with the fire in [him] now' would Krapp try again.
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation
I do not exist. The fact is well known. Maddy Rooney All That Fall is not a story about an old woman on her way to and from a railway station in outer Dublin to meet her husband coming home from work. In this play the anguish of an ordinary human being, and the resounding disappointment which her words express, is replaced by something far wider and more general in its address to the human psyche. The pain of somebody whose ordinariness Beckett is constantly stressing, reflects a non-localised, non-personal sphere in which anyone can revive their own reflection. We are not looking at an individual anguished outcast here, although the ordinary plot-structure ± and the critical acclaim for the play as one of Beckett's most accessible ± would have us believe we are. We are looking at ourselves; this is truly a modern-day Everyman. It is an exact mythograph of the descent of the soul into matter and the response of the human witness to this event. Where commentaries invite us to interpret the title according to the Biblical proverb, God raiseth up all that fall . . . , the allusion is more direct than the reference to resurrection and forgiveness of sins. The fall here is not into sin but into matter, quite simply. The reason why this fall is seen as a tragedy is not due to the Christian analysis (reading it as sin), but because of the basic necessity of incarnation according to which John Keats asked, `where but in a world of troubles' like this one is the soul to be educated? Beckett's play is about the soul in education, not about the personality of one neurotic, Mrs Rooney, `a hysterical old hag I know, destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and churchgoing and fat and rheumatism and childlessness.'1 Of course she is all these: every mythograph 152
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10
has its share in a locus and this one uses the old woman and the Foxrock racecourse station. That is not being questioned. But what is being argued is that the power of the drama does not rely in any way on the character of the woman and these local details, nor on their subversion which has been the focus of critics' attention (particularly where the hyper-realism of the play's sound-effects is concerned). But the mythograph, described in Chapter 2, is operating behind and beneath these levels of literary execution. A mythographic study of this play opens another landscape. Clues follow. First is Death and the Maiden. No other pretext exists for Beckett to include this, than the fact that the verse which Schubert set to music records an encounter between a young woman and death, in which death comforts the woman and assures her the fear commonly surrounding death is needless, that death himself (or itself ) is gentle. Das MaÈdchen:
Èber!
Èber, ach, voru
Voru Geh, wilder Knochenmann!
Ich bin noch jung, geh, Lieber!
Èhre mich nicht an. Und ru
Der Tod:
Èn und zart Gebild!
Gib deine Hand, du scho
Bin Freund und komme nicht zu strafen.
Sei guten Muts! Ich bin nicht wild,
Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!2
What Mrs Rooney is later to say, Death says now: ` . . . no coughing or spitting or bleeding or vomiting, just drifting gently down into the higher life, and remembering, remembering . . . [the voice breaks] . . . all the silly unhappiness . . . as though . . . it had never happened . . . ' The scene is set for the contemplation of death not only by the old, as would be expected in this plot, but ± via the maiden in Schubert's song ± by the young also. There is an eerie convergence of this lyric, the dark wishes of Mr Rooney against the survival of children, and the eventual exposure of the catastrophe which had delayed his train, along with the reminiscence of Mrs Rooney's loss of her daughter before, during, or shortly after childbirth. Second is the way in which Mrs Rooney's self-image combines with the questions and conversation addressed to her by others to create a picture of the metaphysical landscape of platonism and alchemy. This is put forth innocently enough at first in Christy's asking `you wouldn't be
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation 153
in need of a small load of dung?' and Mrs Rooney's reply `Dung? what class of dung?' which immediately suggests she realises the world as being divided into many levels of the dung-state. The dung image is woven into the surface fabric of the play, appearing again later, when a hen is run over, and Mrs Rooney speaks of the rudely shattered, yet dubious, idyll of its life, `pecking at the dung', `all that laying and hatching', and later again when she asks Dan Rooney whether he needs any dung. The question is answered in the soul world of Mrs Rooney by the saying, What need do we have of dung when we are more or less made of it? Since the material incarnation is, alchemically speaking, dung, then `What would we want with dung, at our time of life?' She sounds another of the esoteric themes here, namely that life is simply the measure of time, no more, no less, and that at `our time of life' the need for dung, fertiliser, the fecundating force that hastens incarnation as birth of the physical body and temporary death of the spiritual, is at a minimum. Mrs Rooney, we can see, is always on the cusp of equivocation between the world of incarnation and the heaven, or void, of excarnation. Her rambling neurosis dwells on sexuality and fertility to the exclusion of most other concerns: Give her a good welt on the rump. Harder. Well! If someone were to do that for me I should not dally. [. . . ] I was hoping he might shed a little light on my lifelong preoccupation with horses' buttocks. That is right, Miss Fitt, look closely and you will finally distinguish a once female shape. Venus birds . . .! Billing in the woods all the long summer long. Oh cursed corset! If I could let it out, without indecent exposure. Mr Tyler! Mr Tyler! Come back and unlace me behind the hedge! Well if it isn't my old admirer the Clerk of the Course, in his limousine. You'll have to get down, Mr Slocum, and help me from the rear. Notwithstanding these intermittent insinuations of the life-force, Mrs Rooney acknowledges the death of the hen, mother and brooder of eggs, as a `great peace'. Externally speaking, her grief and neurosis are due to thwarted reproductivity, the words barren and childless being used to anguished effect. But one cannot simply stop at the declaration that her life has been a tragedy, and her self-pity a result of it. The human witness behind the masks and incidentals of her personality (and all
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Beckett's characters have these) asks a bigger question about the nature of this tragedy and what it demonstrates about the nature of the life, and capacity to produce new life, that is so much missed. Inarticulate anguish, or being on the edge of it ± `Christ what a planet!', `This is awful!' ± gives way to self-description that tallies precisely, if perversely, with the mythography of dung: How can I go on, I cannot. O let me just flop down flat on the road like a big fat jelly out of a bowl and never move again! A great big slop thick with grit and dust and flies, they would have to scoop me up with a shovel. Without saying it in so many words, few descriptions could better point to a heap of dung than this. It is a translation of the myth of incarnation, just as all alchemical descriptions of substance refer to the materialisation of soul in various keys and qualities. Beckett sounds the note of putrefaction and fertility, their tragic harmony in alchemical terms, right at the start of the play, and continues to weave the mythograph according to its manifest content and contours. Hard on the heels of Mrs Rooney gulping her admission of childlessness (which could have found a narrow escape had it not been for the death at birth of Minnie, Mrs Rooney's only daughter) comes Mr Tyler's seemingly innocent news of his own mother's condition, `fair, fair. They removed everything, you know, the whole . . . er . . . bag of tricks. Now I am grandchildless.' This is typical of Beckett, the way in which the mythographic narrative precedes the story, stalks it as it were, with a relentless coherence seemingly putting at its ironic mercy the diegesis of character and incident. A van hurtles by and nearly runs Mr Tyler down just after this exchange. `That was a narrow squeak.' `I alit in the nick of time'. Real death, coming so near on top of the symbolic death of non-fertility, finds Mrs Rooney adding a final touch to this adagio of the mythograph: It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home, Mr Tyler, what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution. Now we are white with dust from head to foot. This incident with Mr Tyler shows Mrs Rooney to be speaking both for the body and the soul in saying, `it is suicide to be abroad'. For the body, in that it is so easily done away with, as Mrs Rooney's infirmities, the death of the hen, and of the child at the end, all point to. And for the soul, in that it is exiled on earth, it is in a profound sense `abroad' ± that
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation 155
156 Beckett and Eros
Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists [ . . . ]
Till to her own grave plot she came [ . . . ]And heard th[e] voice of
sorrow breathed from the hollow pit. [ . . . ]
The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek
Fled back unhinder'd . . . 3
And of course in both cases it simply means that one dies slowly, at home in a chair, or quickly, being run over on the road. And to add more metaphysically to these two symbolic hints, the incarnated souls, like the two on the road, are not only `white with dust from head to foot', but are indeed composed of dust. Dung and grit, sticking to the blancmange of Maddy's self-portrait, equilibrate here as the mess of incarnation, its muddy slime. Similar resonance comes with the exchange later in the play: MR SLOC UM :
May I offer you a lift, Mrs Rooney? Are you going in my
direction?
M R S R O O N E Y:
I am, Mr Slocum, we all are.
Anyone really immersed in direction is in decay, says the mythography of incarnation, the mythography of descent of the soul into the `sea of time and space'. Biography equals, as Lear says, `crawling toward death'; death is the veritable soul of time. Becoming worn out is the constitutor of time passing. This is the mystery alluded to by the myths of incarnation, which materialise the spiritual and spiritualize the material in the world of soul, which is where Beckett's characters all live. This is not realism in the accepted aesthetics of the western world, but rather oneirorealism, realism of soul and of its organ, reverie. Only mythopoetic reading, oneirocriticism,4 can readily decipher it. The nature of the tragedy is that as the body fears and prepares for death, the soul desires and prepares for life. This is concealed in the message of Death to the maiden, and in the mythographic message which that poem itself carries from Beckett's play over to the listener.
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is, up and about and simultaneously in a foreign country ± and without connection to its previous `home'. When she says it is `a lingering dissolution' not to be abroad, she means that for the soul it is not enough to hide in the upper worlds but she must explore, like Blake's Thel, what the world is really like in its alienating and yet alluring oddness:
The difficult thing to accustom oneself to in the myth of soul-descent is always this fact, that the myth's action is characteristically in cycle such that the descending soul, having been attracted to incarnation as its theatre equally of delight, education, or hardship, nevertheless carries within itself the embryonic realisation of its own inviolability, its indestructibility. Yeats spoke to the effect that the tragedy of human sexuality is the eternal virginity of the soul. Death of the body means freedom for the soul which, in its descending modus, forgot that it would ever wish to return again to the unconditioned world which it came from. A contrariety of impulses made manifest in one localised individual like Mrs Rooney can be explained only by means of a graph of soul. Otherwise all we are left with is the tame model of pessimism and existentialism, which now threatens to tire of the Beckett devotee's notice. For Beckett the fear of death is never unmixed with a welcome. M R B A RR E L L : It's nice to see you up and about again. You were laid up
there a long time.
M RS R O O N E Y: Not long enough, Mr Barrell.
[...]
M RS RO ON E Y: How long have you been master of this station now, Mr
Barrell?
M R B A R RE L L : Don't ask me, Mrs Rooney, don't ask me.
M RS R O O N E Y: You stepped into your father's shoes, I believe, when he
took them off.
Miss Fitt, the only other female character in the play, presents the same soul-journey from another point on the cycle. But it is very clear from her words that she is precisely the sort of person to whom the `mind doctor' (Jung) made reference in Maddy's anecdote about one of his patients, `a little girl, very strange and unhappy in her ways [. . .] he treated her unsuccessfully over a period of years and was finally obliged to give up the case. He could find nothing wrong with her, he said. The only thing wrong with her as far as he could see was that she was dying.' `When [the lecturer] had done with the little girl he stood there motionless for some time, quite two minutes I should say, looking down at his table. Then he suddenly raised his head and exclaimed, as if he had had a revelation, ``The trouble with her was she had never really been born!'' ' We hear of Miss Fitt in a similar state, albeit a state having lasted much longer: I suppose the truth is I am not there, Mrs Rooney, just not really there at all. I see, hear, smell, and so on, I go through the usual motions,
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158 Beckett and Eros
`Left to myself, with no-one to check me, I would soon be flown . . . home.' This last point is significant to the alchemical balance implicit in the myth of soul-descent. Like Jung's unborn girl, who had not really agreed to the fact of incarnation, Miss Fitt would sooner leave `this world' because, simply, her heart is in none of it. But the fact of being here and of having lived long enough to find that here there are people to `check' her, she is weighted with sufficient gravitational `stickiness' not to be `flown home'. Such a phrase is the language of George Russell, whose work Beckett knew. Miss Fitt's word `check' is doubly significant too, suggesting the surveillance of patriarchal authority over a timid female (far too timid to fly herself home by suicide), and also the gravitational hindrance, the weight of karmic accumulation, as the Buddhist would put it, which `checks' the natural upward convection, the flight impulse, which is the soul's capacity. In the Buddhist analysis two principles are at work in the check, the one being aspiration, the other being compassion for existing living beings, whose needs might conceivably `check' Miss Fitt's wish to exit the world for ever. And her tendency to ignore others, pointedly reproached by Maddy (`a helping hand! for five seconds! . . . slugs do it!') suggests the `check' hasn't been exerted strongly enough to evince Fitt's compassion, not at least for her. Miss Fitt and Mrs Rooney are not the opposites that they seem to be. Mrs Rooney is simply further immersed in incarnation, and further concerned, then, with the missed opportunities that haunt her, living without some of the satisfactions of incarnation. Her child's death appears to be the main grievance, but sex comes close after in her priorities. None of these interests is spoken of directly, but in result of them her innuendo is always consistent, and her unspoken thoughts are hinted at not only by her own words ± `This is worse than the Matterhorn, were you ever up the Matterhorn, Miss Fitt, great honeymoon resort.' ± but by the apparent coincidences represented by the other characters' remarks, and the play's incidents. Where Miss Fitt has no heart for the character and incident of this world, Mrs Rooney has had ± but lost ± heart for it, and so the aim of the two is really the same in the long run. Whereas one is appalled, the other is simply uninterested; but both are seized, in their own ways, of the world's `inherent lack of selfnature'. There is no denying the anguish under the bondage of life on earth which Mrs Rooney gives vent to, even though she shows all the signs of having had lusty attachment to life; but somehow it has been
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but my heart is not in it, Mrs Rooney, my heart is in none of it. Left to myself, with no-one to check me, I would soon be flown . . . home.
twisted out of shape and therefore shown up as attachment and not remained unconscious, as it is in the people Malone Dies identifies as `embedded deep in life, hoping for nothing more for themselves or for others'.5 The pain of existence, the anger towards it which Mrs Rooney shows, and the listless disinterest of Miss Fitt, is the territory of mind ± mind precisely in the sense which Beckett asks us to contemplate when he uses the word in crucial contexts, the most profound example being in Footfalls, the `poor mind' which `revolves' `it all'. In the esoteric psychology implicit in the Upanishads and in dzogchen, mind is itself the theatre or locus of division, detail, preference, aversion, clinging, hope, pain and trouble. Mrs Rooney refers to just this theatre ± What's wrong with me, what's wrong with me, never tranquil, seething out of my dirty old pelt, out of my skull, oh to be in atoms, in atoms! [frenziedly.] ATOMS! So when she rails against the pain of existence, using `it all' in the same sense as Footfalls uses it, she is knocking against the rickety doors of a western consciousness that raises Mind to dignified status whereas in reality, when the door is breached open, mind is only the fomentor of pain and confusion: If you see my poor blind Dan tell him I was on my way to meet him when it all came over me again, like a flood. Say to him, Your poor wife, She told me to tell you it all came flooding over her again and . . . And this exchange between the Rooneys gives a dismally powerful portrait of this `mind', revolving `it all': M R RO O N E Y: [narrative tone] . . . I had the compartment to myself, as
usual. At least I hope so, for I made no attempt to restrain myself. My
mind ± [normal tone] But why do we not sit down somewhere? Are we
afraid we should never rise again?
M RS R O O N E Y: Sit down on what?
M R R O O N E Y: On a bench, for example.
M RS R O O N E Y: There is no bench.
M R R O O N E Y: Then on a bank, let us sink down upon a bank.
M RS R O O N E Y: There is no bank.
M R R O O N E Y: Then we cannot. [Pause] I dream of other roads, in other
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation 159
lands. Of another home, another ± [he hesitates] ± another home.
[Pause] What was I trying to say?
M R S R O O N E Y: Something about your mind.
M R R O O N E Y: [Startled ] My mind? Are you sure? [Pause. Incredulous.]
My mind? . . . [Pause] Ah yes. [Narrative tone] Alone in my compart ment my mind began to work, as so often after office hours, on the
way home, in the train, to the lilt of the bogeys. Your season-ticket, I
said, costs you twelve pounds a year and you earn, on an average,
seven and six a day, that is to say barely enough to keep you alive and
twitching with the help of food, drink, tobacco and periodicals until
you finally reach home and fall into bed. [. . .] Business, I said ± [a cry.
Pause. Again. Normal tone.] Did I hear a cry?
MR S R OO NEY: Mrs Tully I fancy. Her poor husband is in constant pain
and beats her unmercifully.
Beckett's famous love of the consolations of mathematics as a palliative to mind's noise surfaces here again, but, as always, it does nothing to allay the lucubration which is the final, if covert, signal that only a state in which mind altogether ceases to be can be a state in which the torment of earthly life abates. The stage directions' `narrative tone' is the index of mind, just as the cries of the beaten wife snap him momentarily out of mind into the possibility of direct experience, compassion even. In the words of Ajahn Chah, `the world', like the mind, is `whatever happens to be bothering you at this present moment.'6 The world is the mind, the projection of mere attitude upon the void. For him, as for Mrs Rooney, to hasten the `end of the world' is no destructive act but actually the birth into freedom. It is this which so much Beckett commentary ± in its designation of pessimism as the works' predominant theme ± has failed to see. Another alert to the meaning of Beckett's mythography of soul is the peculiar relationship which both the Rooneys bear to spoken language. Of Mrs Rooney one could say that precisely to the degree to which she is an unpregnant and unimpregnable woman, her language becomes emphatically pregnant, there is no other description fit for such oddness of phrase as `This dust will not settle in our time', and the like. She even adverts directly to her use of language, but leaves the fact unexplained. Do you find anything . . . bizarre about my way of speaking? [Pause.] I do not mean the voice. [Pause.] No, I mean the words [Pause. More to
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation 161
Mr Rooney comments, in one of the warmest remarks he can muster, repeating back to her a phrase she has just used: `Never pause . . . safe to haven . . . Do you know, Maddy, sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language.' She replies in kind, `Yes indeed, Dan, I know full well what you mean, I often have that feeling, it is unspeakably excruciating.' He rejoins that `I confess I have it myself sometimes, when I happen to overhear what I am saying.' Hardly a surprise given that the artificial-sounding, `narrative tone' he adopts in telling his news is calculated to make us think it was contrived with some selfsurveillance. These ± the self-surveillance and the bizarre language ± betray a fundamental distance from being. Very few traditions of western literature expose the mind and its specific activities in such a dim and undignified light as Beckett's works do; but the fact is that the halting, stylised, stilted, `narrative tone' and portentous verbiage of the Rooneys is nothing other than the strewn-out detritus of humanistic culture. The high achievement of western education is shown here to be a crippling investiture, a means not whereby the human comes closer to understanding himself and his real nature but on the contrary whereby he establishes greater and greater distances. Mrs Rooney attended Jung's lecture not from need of a `lunatic specialist' but for the sake of the `troubled mind'. Implicit in this distinction, spelt out by Beckett here, is the axiom basic to Buddhist and Vedantic esotericism, that mind is itself trouble and the cause of all trouble. `MIND: This term can refer to the ordinary functioning of the mind called ``psyche'' as well as the absolute, nondual pure essence of the mind beyond the fluctuations that may affect the ordinary mind.'7 It's no coincidence either that Beckett's radio play places such emphasis equally on the dehiscence of language from being, and of the human from his and her sexual being. Not so much sexual identity is being inferred here, for that is once again the road to rigid conditioning and role-fixedness ± which is just more fodder for the troubled and habitdriven mind, ratiocinating in harmony `with the lilt of the bogeys'; not sexual identity but sexual being, simply the unencoded sexual awareness. Just as Maddy's language augments, grows almost monstrous, in proportion as her sexuality diminishes or is felt to be obsolete, so conversely Mr Rooney's language warms towards sexuality only when he himself is at a satisfactory distance from it, such distance as can be
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herself ] I use none but the simplest words, I hope, and yet I sometimes find my way of speaking very . . . bizarre.
furnished by the exigencies of a working day or, especially, by the vicarious distance of fiction. While virtually frigid in response to Mrs Rooney's asking for a kiss, and touch ± `Put your arm round me! Be nice to me!' ± he readily enthuses about the exploits he is shortly to hear her read aloud to him by the fire at home: `Perhaps Effie will commit adultery with the major.' For him the incident fact of the `female shape' is unbearable, whereas the distance conferred by representation allows him to contemplate it without `dirtying' himself. Exactly the same revulsion of male toward female is exposed in Company during the birth episode in which the narrator's father escapes into his garage and sits out the time during which labour `was in swing' in the seclusion of the cockpit of his sports-car. This male detachment is, mythographically transposed, the same fear as that felt by Shakespeare's Adonis whose hunting becomes more important than his love, and a substitute for facing the Goddess of Complete Being as she is. Mrs Rooney likewise is a face of the raging and loving Goddess, albeit presented as a slight has-been, in the manner Beckett made so popular with Happy Days, and which found some topical resonance with late fifties and early sixties British fiction and drama. It is quite inappropriate to take a realist agenda and search for clues as to what went wrong in the Rooneys' marriage, for this is not a realist narrative but a mythographic imprint of stages in the soul's mutable condition. The very phrase `it all' with which Beckett seeks to refer to the pondered life-circumstances of individuals hints that the specifics of personal history are in an important way the very contrary of what is really at issue. Mrs Rooney says the lecture by Jung `haunted her ever since' hearing it; what has haunted her is not a specific analysis of her own condition ± her `lifelong preoccupation with horses' buttocks' is a sort of fictional/diegetic decoy ± but, on the contrary, the sense that Jung's account of being born, or not, resonates with how the entire human existence is, for her and others. It ramifies out from Mrs Rooney alone to include Miss Fitt, as we have seen, and Mr Slocum, cursing `the wet Saturday afternoon of [his] conception'. We should conclude this exploration with, alas, the matter of confinement because it is so much the legacy of the post-Cartesian world picture and so potently indicated in the fabric of Beckett's myth. The first time it comes up is when Mrs Rooney is gasping for air, seemingly threatened with the danger of choking by dust. At the same time she is plagued by the `pelt', the skin which holds her together as an object, a `bale', `a big pale blur', a `blancmange'; this is the dung-world in which she is trapped, and all the attributions of her physical confinement get
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation 163
reapplied to her sense of self-identity, lost and tattered and unappreciated but still raging to be heard. The conversation with Mr Slocum, given these indications about Mrs Rooney, is positively ghostly. Start her up, I beseech you, and let us be off. This is
M R S L OC UM :
All morning she went like a dream and now she is dead. That is what you get for a good deed. [Pause. Hopefully] Perhaps if I were to choke her. [He does so, presses the starter. The engine roars. Roaring to make himself heard.] She was getting too much air! [He throttles down, grinds in his first gear, moves off, changes up in a grinding of gears.] M RS RO O N E Y: [in anguish] Mind the hen! [Scream of brakes. Squawk of hen.] Oh mother, you have squashed her, drive on, drive on! [The car accelerates. Pause.] What a death! Since the atmosphere has been so oppressed by psychological airlessness and the danger of choking on dust, the sudden use of exactly the same mythographic material all over again relating to the truck does the absolute minimum to distinguish animate from inanimate object, especially as Mr Slocum feminizes his vehicle true to custom and, shortly after `choking' her, finds himself killing a hen (which would have been strangled to death anyway, as Mrs Rooney remarks later with some relief). Mrs Rooney finds even movement a tax on the air-supply. [sound of toiling.] Why don't they have a handrail? [Panting.] Wait till I get some air. And as if the confinement of closed respiratory spaces and enclosed identity spaces in the psyche were not enough, Mr Rooney brings on ± as so many events do in this play seemingly by chance but unerringly hitting the mythopoetic mark ± the final straw of the predicament. M R R O O NE Y: No, I just sat on, saying, if this train were never to move again I should not greatly mind. Then gradually a ± how shall I say ± a growing desire to ± er you know ± welled up within me. Nervous probably. In fact now I am sure. You know, the feeling of being confined. M RS R O O N E Y: Yes yes, I have been through that. M R R O O N E Y: If we sit here much longer, I said I really do not know what I shall do. I got up and paced to and fro between the seats, like a
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M RS RO O N E Y:
awful!
164 Beckett and Eros
caged beast. That is a help sometimes.
These sardonic double meanings, which remind one so much of the same devices in Ibsen and Strindberg, expose the exact soul-language which this play is using to sketch the metaphysical position of confinement punningly alongside the painfully issueless human one of Mrs Rooney's sexual life. And with a stroke of genius Beckett, the moment Mr Rooney's laborious narrative finds a pause for breath, allows the undercurrent double-meaning of confinement which has now taken possession of Mrs Rooney to take over and henceforward define the direction of the play altogether. For while Mr Rooney's `mind' is trundling along towards an explanation of why the train stopped so unexpectedly, and hoping his wife is attending to each detail, `Say something, Maddy, Say you believe me', Mrs Rooney's soul has plummeted into the depths of the nature of true confinement, merging the confinement of the child-bed with the confinement of the soul in the gritty muck, the body, the slop on the road. She ignores her husband's discourse, having been immediately put in mind of the unborn girl in Jung's lecture and starts telling Mr Rooney about that. It is strange that the trigger of this open revelation about Jung, crucial for the whole of Beckett's work before and since, is Mr Rooney's seemingly casual remark, `You know the feeling of being confined'. Its resonance grows out of all proportion to its original occasion (which was after all simply his wish to pee suddenly). This is a play about the ways in which fulfilment is denied on many levels. Mrs Rooney's grief is humanly that of having missed sexual fulfilment, ruminating on sermon titles such as `How to be Happy though Married' and regretting the missed chance of motherhood. In this connection Mr Rooney is the most unsuitable of all spouses, imagining `the horrors of home life', the thought of `the brats, the happy little healthy little howling neighbours' brats' and bearing a grudge against youth which runs beyond his role as a character into the play's other verbal tissues: the death of the child on the train, the fact that Mr Rooney contemplates infanticide, and the final event relating to the train's delay. And the music to Death and the Maiden, which makes Mr Rooney weep for the one and only (and startling) time in the play. Birth into this world, then, in alchemical symbolism, is at one level the soul's destination and fulfilment (hence Mrs Rooney's great sorrow at not having occasioned birth), and at another level its apparent opposite, the advent of the soul's misery. The coherence of the imagery of
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M R S R O O N E Y:
soul-descent only becomes apparent if the matter is viewed from both directions of the symbolic cycle, with a mythopoetic eye. While the incarnate soul longs to escape the confinement of the body, the discarnate entity is attracted to occupying its stage of beauty and passion. There is no answer to this but to appreciate the conditions of each state equally: `material and spiritual evolution of the world are two opposite but parallel and concordant movements, upon the entire scale of being. One is explained only by the other [ . . . ] To see the universe from the material point of view or the spiritual point of view is not to consider a different object. It is to look at the world from two opposite viewpoints.'8
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Mrs Rooney at the Mouth of Creation 165
11
The silent truth (of Divine Love) cannot be dramatized and demonstrated at all, except as a creature suffering in a world where the egomanic voices of the tragic error reject it, violate it, exploit it. Ted Hughes The humanist ministrations of order and compassion ± the court room and the mental hospital ± are exposed by Beckett as scenes of humiliation and torture. One background motive for Beckett's burial of the humanist code is this disjunction between the outward function of such institutions, and their actual repressive character. Beckett illustrates in several short plays how the establishment can make a sort of excuse for hiding from the world of spirit, by diagnosing psychopathology in people whose reactions do not fit the norm of sanity. It is simply easier to ostracize them as mad people or Cassandra figures, and to cloak that dismissal as an act of compassion. The reason why it is never really clear in the later works whether the scene is a courtroom or a psychoanalysis, is that the soul-language of Beckett is occupying a perspective from which there is no distinction between these two agencies ± they are equally enforcers and perpetrators of the adamant(ine) western male ego-state, determined to suppress the demonic (dream, the shamanic encounter with the Great Goddess, similar a-logical states) and to promulgate an illusion of humanist autonomy as antidote to madness. As Paglia describes it, `It is to [man's] resentment of this daemonic undertow that we owe the grand constructions of our culture. Apollonianism, cold and absolute, is the west's sublime refusal', `a male line drawn against the dehumanizing magnitude of female nature.'1 Beckett spares 166
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Care and Punish
Care and Punish 167
Of course we do not know, any more than you, what exactly it is we are after, what sign or set of words. But since you have failed so far to let it escape you, it is not by harking on the same old themes that you are likely to succeed . . . 2 So, in Rough for Radio II, begins the typical interrogation of personality, perpetrated by Beckett's humanist panel of investigators. It varies its theme as its questioning intensifies. Someone, perhaps that is what is wanting, someone who once saw you . . . go by. I may be wrong, but try, at least, what do you stand to lose? . . . A father, a mother, a friend, a . . . Beatrice ± no, that is asking too much. Simply someone, anyone, who once saw you . . . go by. [Pause] That woman . . . what's the name? S. Maud, sir. A. That Maud, for example, perhaps you once brushed against each other. Think hard! S. He has gone off, sir. A. [. . .] Kiss him, miss, perhaps that will stir some fibre. S. Where, sir? A. In his heart, in his entrails ± or some other part. S. No, I mean kiss him where, sir? A. [Angry] Why on his stinker of a mouth, What do you suppose? [STENOGRAPHER kisses FOX. Howl from FOX.] Till it bleeds! Kiss it white! [Howl from FOX.] Suck his gullet! [Silence] S. He has fainted away, sir. In the staging of this personality analysis, strangely, we see simultaneously the two odd erotic extremes of this play. The one extreme is the special restraint indicated by the reference to Beatrice and Dante's love relationship, followed by the stated possibility that some slight hint of sexual contact, but only a slight one (`brushing up against'), might awaken the necessary memory in Fox (on top of that follows the hint that because the needed anecdote might be recalled by a sexual stimulus it might be a sexual anecdote, or the orthodox view of Freudianism that the repressed detail is a hidden sexual trauma). The other extreme is the brutally excessive application of the sexual stimulus, which is completely counterproductive in effect. Even more oddly ironic and a devastating
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no effort in exposing this situation. He turns it into a ritual/dramatic myth.
indictment of the so-called caring environment/therapy/interrogation session is that this play's male inquisitor, A (the Animator), whose social position is that of the judge, guide, therapist and condescender to the insane Fox, is cast in the role of drooling ogler, asking the stenographer for favours but giving up on the proposition proper at the last moment out of shame, self-consciousness of age, and the outward stigma of impropriety. `Oh how bewitching you look when you show your teeth! Ah were I but . . . thirty years younger.'3 Fox, the inquisitor/animator's victim, may never have received so much as a caress in his life, but the infinitely competent and widely educated Animator has had no better luck in his own pursuit of intimacy. And to make Animator's gropes toward interpretation succeed, as it were, because his own suit does not even reach the stage of a grope, he illegally interpolates a phrase into the `dicta' of Fox because he has run out of patience with the obscurity of the `dicta' he has received from him during the analysis. This illegal phrase is between two kisses; inserted at the odd point in the dicta when Fox remembers having the impression that his own brother was inside him, as though he were `pregnant' with him. The woman named Maud, whose shadowy role in Fox's reminiscence is never clearly spelt out, said she could succour the `homunculus', should he ever be cut open to release it. Could we be looking at a picture of the soror mystica, a picture which frustrates the Animator's cruder imagination to the extent that he has to attribute the sexual intercourse to Maud and Fox in order to make his story sound sensible? Anyhow, amended by force, nullifying the whole procedure of taking dicta from the patient, the text with illegal additions now reads `Have yourself opened, Maud would say, between two kisses, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive'; earlier, Fox's actual dictum read: `Me get up, me go on, what a hope, it was he, for hunger. Have yourself opened, Maud would say, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive'. What Fox is implying is the doubling of his self; he calls one of them `my brother inside me, my old twin'. In a situation where one of the selves wants to cease to live ± `fatigue, what fatigue', `me go on what a hope' ± the other does not: `it was he [who got up and went on], for hunger'. The role of the alchemical companion or soror mystica might have been to give Fox the opportunity to give birth to his soul, properly animated (there is the hidden meaning of the therapist's travestied part) by the feminine aspect of being, both in himself and in the form of another female, this time Maud. In alchemy and in any gendered mythopoetics of soul, it is the catalytic function of the female principle, the Great Goddess of Complete Being, to allow the alchemical worker to `give birth to himself'.
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168 Beckett and Eros
If this kind of investigation of an obscure play by Beckett appears beyond the pale of orthodox interpretation, suffice it to say that August Strindberg went further than writing about alchemy, he practised it himself in the Hotel Orfila in Paris for several years. Besides, few interpretations could be odder than the Rough for Radio II itself anyway, which has distinct echoes of Strindberg in it, notably the exclamation `Kiss it white! Suck his gullet!' which directly recalls the imagery of the Cook in The Ghost Sonata and other examples of the leaching or suckingdry of male energy by females. Again, such violent and contrary sexual contact as the Stenographer's with Fox contrasts with the alchemical contact of Fox's half-recalled encounter with the Maud figure. It is interesting that the use of force to extort the secret is both countererotic and counter-effective. The inner nature of Fox is, as it were, protected against abuse by being self-secret. If Fox's unrevealed story is a profound sexual memory, then the Animator and Stenographer are doing the very opposite of what's necessary to elicit it. And even if it were to be elicited, it appears that Fox does not want its consequences: `Let me out! Let me peter out in the stones!': likening himself to a stream or brook, he for some reason does not want the old twin to be out again, driving him on. This is a strange pass indeed, beyond the subtlest of analysts, and certainly beyond the ham-fisted, feebly desperate yet tyrannical attempts of the Animator. The same restraint that is hinted at in the dialogue quoted recurs in That Time, where the `faint tremors of a lying side by side' that All Strange Away remembered are evoked again. no sight of the face or any other part never turned to her nor she to you always parallel like on an axle-tree never turned to each other just blurs on the fringes of the field no touching or anything of that nature always space between if only an inch no pawing in the manner of flesh and blood no better than shades no worse if it wasn't for the vows From the evidence in the Rough for Radio, there is reason to ask what the connection is between the `one thing' that Fox is required to say and the absence of love in his life, at least the perceived absence. The idea of the `one thing' has appeared before in the The Unnamable, as the only `telling' that would enable the narrator to `go silent', and in As the Story was Told it comes up again as the confession that would allow the protagonist to be pardoned. Even if we suppose that the orthodox psychoanalytic prescription is too reductive, and a mistake applied to the virtually extorted `self-confessions' of the Beckett characters (the
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tripled meaning, personal/legal/religious, is eloquent here of the play's mythographic voice), we may nevertheless be set wondering: first, if not a sexually related hidden trauma, then some other hidden trauma is likely to be the one that is impossible to talk about, a form of `the Unmentionable', a term which, as Bataille says, covers the sacred as perfectly as it does the obscene; second, if an erotic experience is recalled, and if it has the restrained character that those few clearly recalled incidents do, then in what sense was this experience a painful one, or of such power as to imprint the psyche long into the future? Another thing for which this Rough is notable is the light it sheds on the difference and affinity between Beckett's prose and drama. In view of the recently published sketch which Beckett made in advice on a staging of From an Abandoned Work (which stands midway between prose and drama) we can perform a similar operation in reverse, for a moment dismantling the staging to obtain the precipitate instead of setting a stage up for recital of a prose piece. If we for a moment disregard the speeches of the other characters, and examine Fox's word only, we read something almost indistinguishable from the voice of the Texts for Nothing. When I had done soaping the mole, thoroughly rinsing and drying before the embers, what next only but out again in the blizzard and put him back in his chamber with his weight of grubs, at that instant his little heart was beating still I swear, ah my God, my God . . . Ah yes, that for sure, live I did, no denying, all stones all sides . . . That for sure, no further, and there gaze, all the way up, all the way down, slow gaze, age upon age, up again, down again, little lichens of my own span, living dead in the stones, and there took to the tunnels. . . . Oceans too, that too, no denying, I drew near down the tunnels, blue above, blue ahead, that for sure, and there too, no further, ways end, all ends and farewell, farewell and fall, farewell seasons, till I fare again. . . . Farewell. . . . That for sure, no denying, no further, down in Spring, up in Fall, or inverse, such summers missed, such winters. . . . Ah that for sure ± [. . .] fatigue, what fatigue, my brother inside me, my old twin, ah to be he and he ± but no, no no. [. . .] No No . . . Me get up, me go on, what a hope, it was he, for hunger. Have yourself opened, Maud would say, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive, ah but no, no no. No no . . . Let me out! Peter out in the stones! The rest of the play's text surrounds ± like mother rock around a crystal ± this extraordinary fragment of Fox's, basically doing little more than
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staging it, giving it a context which is implicit, in most respects, in Beckett's prose pieces, especially The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing. Beckett's mythographic voice, I suggest, continues unbroken in its brokenness, a recognisable tragic voice, throughout all the formal variations between genres that Beckett organises to `contain' its astonishing communications. In the case of Fox, there is little doubt that the `dicta' are directly from the level of soul, and with the obvious immersion of Fox's soul in the seasons, mineral world, earth and oceans we might envision Fox as identical with anima mundi, soul of the world. And that is precisely why the Animator and Stenographer are the least suited of all possible listeners for this communication. They are forever on the edge of understanding, but arriving too literally and too late, their external knowledge of Dante and Sterne and Mauthner not really serving to enlighten them about Fox at all. The only flicker of possibility arises with the Stenographer's mention of `a little more kindness, perhaps'; but her role in this scenario of dictatorship is limited by her gender ± her formally subordinate status in the patristic regime. What is the grand offence for which Fox, or anyone standing in his place in this archetypal encounter, has been called in to give an account? Texts for Nothing asks likewise `Whom can I have offended so grievously, in this inexplicable way, all is inexplicable, space and time, false and inexplicable, suffering and tears, and even the old convulsive cry. It's not me, it can't be me. [. . .] all I say will be false and to begin with not said by me, here I'm a ventriloquist's dummy'.4 What is the offence and where is the actual source of pardon? These questions are implicit in the action of Rough for Radio II, but come more clearly out in As the Story was Told. This piece is almost a companion to Rough for Radio II, the features in common being that a person is under interrogation, torture or therapy, it is not clear which, except that As the Story was Told calls it `ill-treatment' and Rough for Radio II calls it lack of kindness; and that a written minute of each `session' is made, the sessions ending at a precise time each day, three o'clock and six respectively. The interesting development in As the Story was Told is this: But finally I asked if I knew exactly what the man ± I would like to give his name but cannot ± what exactly was required of the man, what it was he could not or would not say. No, I did not know what the poor man was required to say, in order to be pardoned, but would have recognized it at once, yes, at a glance, if I had seen it.5
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Just as in Fox's case, in As the Story was Told no sense can be made of the minutes of the sessions. The reason for this, I suggest, is the same as that which also arises in relation to many Beckett speakers, notably those in Not I, Footfalls, and That Time. They all find that no matter what force is exerted by the questioner in pursuit of the true account, they cannot `tell how it was'. The means expected to deliver results do not deliver them. The `sessions' described in these two torture narratives are merely further concretisations of the expectation that clearly is responsible for crippling the expressiveness of these figures as much as the figures in the three short 1970s stage plays. To give an account of a matter for which the legislated valid forms of excuse ± language, single identity and matching self-history ± are not the appropriate tools, is a doomed project. And yet this project is precisely what these characters are despondently enlisted in, not only in court and in the torture chamber, but also in the therapy facility! The social coding of the psychiatric process as an illness or a debility, or as revealing some undefined inadequacy as a human being, is the unhelpful way in which nonordinary states of consciousness are judged and evaluated in western society.6 No amount of increase in the availability of therapy has done anything to alter its image in the popular imagination. As the destination of biographical time it remains conspicuously low in cultural esteem. And yet it is plainly said at the end of As the Story was Told that if the narrator had seen (or heard? or read?) what the person `was required to say in order to be pardoned', he would have instantly recognised it. He must have himself been in the state of the man enduring the session, in order to be able to recognise it, otherwise recognition would not be the right word, and he would have used instead a word such as learnt or discovered. Let the tape of Beckett's literary mythography fast-forward to 1982. `There's our catastrophe. In the bag' says the equivalent of Rough for Radio's Animator, now called Director. In this late play Catastrophe, the Fox figure, utterly humiliated, says nothing, is required to say nothing, and is expected to say nothing; according to A. McMullan, `his subjectivity is taken so little account of that a gag is considered unnecessary',7 and his situation is moved out of prison/mental institution and into theatre. He has now become the equivalent of a dancing bear. Serving as a silent comment, but deriving from the victims' verbal constitution in the other texts we have examined here, Catastrophe is the most excoriating possible judgement on the scene of all of them. We might conclude from these investigations of closely parallel plots and incidents that the thing that actually needs to be said or mediated
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between the questioner and the respondent is of such a different order from what is expected by the listeners/interrogators that it is not understood at all, dismissed as nonsense, or cannot even be heard as a confused noise. In effect it remains uncommunicated, or is by other means told past the uncomprehending diegetic listeners to the work's reader or audience. About this primal scene of ritual misunderstanding, its sessional punishment/therapy/interrogation, the teller of As the Story was Told says something interesting. `I asked what sessions and these in their turn were described, their object, duration, frequency and harrowing nature.' On presumably not being satisfied with whatever the answers were to these questions, he `lay there quite still for a time, then asked where I was while all this was going forward. In a hut, was the answer, a small hut.' Some pains are taken trying to account for why the narrator could not hear the cries of the tortured, and in this lies some clue to the mystery. Isolated in a hut, unable to hear the communications of others, this speaker brings the Beckett reader again into close proximity to, if not right inside, the Cartesian Jar, Urn, Cylinder, the container which shuts the cogitator in and the so called not-me, the world, out. But by doing so it also turns living beings into the not-self, into things shut out like everything else.8 In the end, Beckett is saying, the western self-concept, while so rhetorically ennobled by the discourse of humanism, is a barrier to compassionate action. The clue again is in Buddhist psychology, amongst whose first axioms is that compassion is possible only on radical revisioning of self-concept. If you examine reality, you will find that it is free from the three conceptions of subject, object and their connection. It is not something truly real for it is like a dream or a magical illusion. [. . .] From the state of realisation's unlimited display of conduct, on seeing the torment of foolish beings, tears flow from an overwhelming compassion. Giving them your happiness and taking on their suffering, you engage in their welfare.9 So long as the illusion of self-contained self goes on subsisting, no compassion can really occur; the risks are all of isolation, false sense of security from danger, the wish to seal off the self from further danger, and a bogus sense of the value of education and culture. It seems to me that the signs obliquely positioned in As the Story was Told are horribly subtle in their savaging of the civilisation of western humanism. Not
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only is the hut mentioned as a reason why the narrator could not hear the cries. But it is also a hut `in a grove': what other grove could be meant than the grove of the first academy? Coveted prize of civilised life, goes the general description. Grove as insulator of man from the most basic relation to his fellow man, so runs Beckett's description. And the distance alone is no explanation, it is laughably short, two hundred yards. The matter is clearly symbolic, all the more so since so many conspicuous pains are taken to try, futilely, to excuse the fact that the cries were not heard. It is a comment not only on the education system of the 20th Century West but also on the way in which suffering is represented in the news media, whereby we are forced to witness more and more episodes of suffering, and `these' are `described, their object, duration, frequency and harrowing nature' yet we are insulated more and more from them by distance ± distance of geography and of acculturation. In Stirrings Still, the theme of the cries of suffering people is taken up again, along with `strokes' that may be those of a clock or possibly of a weapon. And the very indeterminacy of those strokes goes to point up the theme which the text makes its knell, or its refrain, `the end of time, grief, and self so-called'. Life in time is life according to the clock and the whip, time and grief precisely, if we may put it like that. There is nothing extreme in moving towards the kind of interpretation of Beckett's late works that I suggest here. The Pozzo/Lucky relationship was just such another. And Didi and Gogo's helpless mixture of embarrassment, cruelty, longing and shame is similar to the distanced voice of As the Story was Told in the sense that none of these onlookers is educated to say anything helpful at a point like that, because help doesn't arise from saying. Not I's listener, as a consequence, has nothing to say at all, and although the gesture is assuredly one of `compassion' it is `helpless compassion' nevertheless. If we think for a moment about the brutal middle third of How It Is (1964), in which the processionary figures in the mud stab the one in front in order to alert that one to the presence of another, we can begin to appreciate just how useless is the question of identifying who it is who inflicts what on whom. The classic form of blame depends on a form of identity which doesn't work once the western self has been disillusioned as to its self-nature. This is the message of that absurd point reached in How It Is, and likewise the message of the strange recurring phrase `self so-called' in Stirrings Still. `Self so-called' is what creates time and grief, they are all mutually necessary to each other's illusory existence. They are three of the links in the Buddhist chain of
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dependent origination, which we recall is the one thing which has to be eliminated if the expression of actual compassion can come about and so instance the fact of enlightenment. The way this is put is deliberate: the fact of enlightenment is not something that subsists as or in a self in the ordinary sense (self posing as a substantive reality where it cannot), so it is an impossibility for someone to say `I am enlightened'. If enlightenment is what the voice of Stirrings Still is speaking in search of, it can only happen on the succession of the cry, `Oh all to end', `time and grief and self so-called'. The tag suffixed to self mentioned there by Beckett could not be a clearer indication that the vajrayana and the Beckett text are here in agreement. And once again never let it be concluded that this observation must mean that I wish to prove Beckett a Buddhist. They simply speak of self and its non-existence in the same way. For Beckett, the decisive factor in the appalling matter treated here is not who is to blame for these senseless acts of violence to dignity and to physical life, but that the damage is done at all, and that it is so easy to ignore even when culprits and perpetrators are identified (and that very exposure is, ironically, supposed to be amongst the purposes behind the interrogation which typifies the rule of law). He makes the point that those who are empowered to act against cruelty either do nothing or are themselves uncomprehendingly multiplying the cruelties; and those not empowered must nevertheless look on and wonder why it happens. Like Pinter, Beckett does not come up with a reasoned answer to this question. But an answer is given ± in the potential opened up by the mythographic world, but not locked in the terms established by the linguistic. Here is the point where I part company with those critics whose main aim besides explicating literature is to keep the approval of a critical community. I don't think Beckett was looking for allegiance to a thought-movement and in this sense I feel there is little cause to have to justify a dissent from the dogmas of the critical establishment. The power of touch as against distance is one of the mythographic keys: the glance, kiss, caress so pointedly referred to by the very figures in Beckett's texts who are most painfully isolated from the effects of touch. In the myth of the descent of the soul as well as the myth of the goddess, we are dealing with a metaphysics of intimacy hardly fathomed yet, I think, by any of the Beckett interpretive community. But to a degree it can be fathomed by the use of mythographic interpretation. Rough for Theatre II presents exactly the same scenario of relationships again; the silent subject of an enquiry, obviously being investigated because mentally disturbed or `missing', stands at a window in a sixth floor flat, while two evaluators, agents, sift through evidence of his
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existence, and, as in the Radio rough, discuss the victim-figure in baffled terms, with the officious overlay of their authoritarian role giving feeble boosts to their confidence: `allusions to a life, though not common, are not rare'. Letters from friends and acquaintances paint a sorry picture, and it is revealed that this person, C, lives on a barge and has occupied this flat only because he is looking after a cat for a month. The agents, Bertrand (A) and Morvan (B), tire of their case; they are about to leave when the cry of a bird alerts them, and they examine a long neglected cage, with a pair of finches inside, calling them `lovebirds', one alive, the other dead. `They have no seed. . . . No water', says one. The other, `And to think that is all organic waste! all that splendour!' The two prepare to leave and Bertrand finds that the nameless figure C, whom they have been investigating, is shedding tears. Again what comes through the bare obscurity of this little-known play is that while the interrogators and agents of civilised society have hardly more feeling for the man C than they do for the cat or even a piece of refuse, and expect that C will probably commit suicide by jumping from the window, the investigated misfit himself is aroused to tears by learning of the fate of the birds. It is clear enough that he has had plenty to weep about on his own account over the `lifetime' covered by these collected letters and testimonies, `that inexhaustible reservoir of sorrow'; but the immediate pang of witnessing the dead bird moves him more than the sadness of his own situation does. In this, C resembles Fox whose concern for the stray mole outweighs his personal misery. Such is the so-called madness of the dysfunctional. But according to a perspective which avoids derogating the psychiatric process, it might be the contrary of madness. While C confounds the efforts of the law and social services ± his real needs bypass them absolutely, as is hinted by Morvan's remark `How many unfortunates would be still so today if they had known in time to what extent they were so?' ± he perhaps nevertheless has his essential compassion intact although he is deemed unfit for human social life; possibly because he is in a clearer state than most people regarding his `inner void', mentioned in one of the `confidences' notes.10 This play tells the same story as all the others described here; it is a variation of the theme outlined in The Unnamable of a panel of `maniacs' passing judgement on a human whom they no more understand than they respect or dignify. Aside from Beckett, only Kafka could have devised such an extraordinary mythic concatenation of humanist values of condescension, non-comprehension, caring and incarceration. Beckett, aside from perhaps indirectly saluting Kafka's `giant mole' in the dicta of Fox, who not only finds a mole but imagines himself as one,
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does not make it remotely clear whether the location of this type of drama is a prison, therapy room, or courthouse, but in staging the essential factors of all three environments he makes a potent picture of the humanist management of subjectivity which requires such close `harmony' between caring and punishment, inquiry and interrogation, and which most crucially and tragically cannot tolerate difference, and which finally enforces its very inability to tolerate as law and common sense. Yet all the agents of this management are, like Moran, Gaber, Horn, `Basil and his gang', Animator, Director, members of the so-called ordered civilised world. It is a peculiar and characteristic form of Beckett's tragedy, a mythograph played out again and again. Beckett, in the way Hughes so tellingly says of Shakespeare, `achieved [. . .] not by philosophical, moral or religious abstraction, but by a slow, laborious transformation of himself. [. . .] Each phase of his psychic illumination produces a ``physically'' new poetic substance of steadily increasing value.'11 When we look at the Roughs, Catastrophe, As the Story was Told, and relate them to the situations of the Footfalls trilogy, where the ordinary dramatic tangle of a threesome (two persecutors and one victim) is absorbed into the void consciousness of the victim alone, we can see how they all hang together as Beckett's own tragic myth. In the words of Kathleen Raine, it is the myth of `ignorance passing judgement on knowledge'. That this myth turns on humiliation is obvious enough. But the humiliation is modulated on the cusp of the loss of love, what Krapp refers to as `the farewell to love', just as it is for May in Footfalls. If we decode the first important piece of reported evidence in the Rough for Theatre II, which in the playscript is encumbered with stage business and reported parenthesis, we read something again closely reminiscent of the Trilogy or the Texts for Nothing, but this time the monologic text is in the reported voice of the victim's wife: Questioned on this occasion (judicial separation) regarding the deterioration of our relations, all he could adduce was the five or six miscarriages which clouded (oh through no act of mine!) the early days of our union and the veto which in consequence I had finally to oppose (oh not for want of inclination!) to anything remotely resembling the work of love. But on the subject of our happiness (for it too came our way, unavoidably, and here my mind goes back to the first vows exchanged at Wootton Bassett under the bastard acacias, or again to the first fifteen minutes of our wedding night at Littlestoneon-sea, or yet again to those first long studious evenings in our nest
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From the details supplied ± and again those so pointedly omitted ± from this account, it is possible to gain a picture of the life that C had been immersed in, but just not immersed enough to satisfy the demands of incarnation. One quarter of an hour was enough for C. Not `embedded deep in life', these two characterise again the `not properly born', owing to the sense of missing the mark, the miscarriages preventing the one thing that C probably would have most feared, if the narrator of First Love is to be taken as mythographically congruent with the person C whose life this Rough puts under such characteristic scrutiny. His wife's use of the word `nest' is consequently odd, and extremely uncannily binds the recalled marriage to the image of the dead caged birds with which the play closes. It is as if the wife still has an immovable faith that a nest really is what it was, when of course it wasn't. And again mythographically eloquent, crucial indeed in showing the way in which this play revives the matter of all the others, is the fact that C could not account for his separation with anything that would be regarded by the wife as a satisfactory explanation. The longing, or anti-longing, for which there is no explanation, is always the sign of Beckett's mythographic hand. Mouth in Not I in the end could not tell `how it was, how she had lived'. In Footfalls, whoever it is who is burdened in mind by `it all' cannot tell it, but only revolve it. The teller of As the Story was Told cannot tell what the victim should have said, `in order to be pardoned', even though the fact is plainly stated that it would be recognisable if it could once be seen. `I would have recognised it at once, yes, at a glance, if I had seen it.' The untellable can perhaps be recognised if it is envisioned, `seen' rather than attemptedly told. In the lapidary verse of Kathleen Raine, which could almost act as feminine counterpart to Beckett's words: Not sorrow breaks the heart But an imagined joy So dear it cannot be But we have elsewhere known The lost estate we mourn.12
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on Commercial Road East) on the subject of our happiness not a word, Sir, not one word.
12
They make you, and you have no say in it. . . . A chain around your neck, and the whip cracking behind you. Bram Van Velde
Not I: vehement refusal to relinquish third person The ground of the dzogchen view is that the only error whatsoever is the error of thinking that the self is a subsistent entity: `Throughout a beginningless series of lifetimes, the scope of your intellect has been severely limited by conceiving of the self as truly existent and fixating on sensory objects.'1 Beckett's blatant echo of this will be confirmed by the merest glance at the play Not I, whose title alone makes obvious what the Buddhist teaching says. Like all Beckett's significant works, Not I places one in the midst of a remembered life-story, and proceeds to expose the fraudulent character of biographical narrative, humanism's supposed power to guarantee identity. Beckett's topos of the sham life, which Afar A Bird brings up so forcibly in the statement `He had a life, I didn't', is a direct dramatisation of the Buddhist proposition about self. And where the dzogchen teaching is practically unknown to the average Westerner's education, Beckett's works manage to dramatise it in a situation, whereas the contents and consequences of the teaching itself would seem to forbid any location and narrative of its meanings, since it is the statement of the insubstantiality of all meanings domiciled in the terms self, other, consciousness, environment and history. The speaker or voice named Mouth in Beckett's play enounces its past self as having tried to live in the world we ordinarily dignify with the status of reality. Its metanoia, its discovery, is that this boundedness, this localised self, or I, does not exist in anything like the way it has been 179
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Madness of the Norm
presumed to. This is the real meaning of the word failure in relation to Beckett;2 it is not a failure of nerve, not a falling-short where more courage, more energy, more resolve, more talent would have ensured success; it is on the contrary a failure of the cultural tools offered by birth in the 20th Century Western world to bring the harvest it promises and claims for its civilisation. Beckett's history of the human world is simply the history of a grand presumption, grand in the sense in which Freud uses the term referring to delusion ± a matter seeming grand and important where there is actually no grandeur and no importance that can be attached. It is in this sense that, giving offence to the humanists, Beckett buries them and stands at their grave. For Beckett, the brain, according to western ego-construction the seat of subjectivity, is the opposite of that: the brain . . . flickering away on its own . . . quick grab and on . . . nothing there . . . on to the next . . . bad as the voice . . . worse . . . as little sense . . . all that together . . . Couldn't pause a second . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop . . . or in the past . . . dragging up the past . . . flashes from all over . . . all the time the buzzing . . . dull roar . . . in the skull . . . and the beam . . . ferreting around . . . 3 The voice realizes, once its `owner' is on the brink of its own destruction, that it was trying all its life to tell something. And at the same time it realizes that the ordinary mind, the method of reasoning, is deeply out of touch ± as far out of touch as it could possibly be ± with what it was supposed to be in touch with, that is, the speaker's interior. So intent one is . . . on what one is saying . . . the whole being . . . hanging on its words the brain still . . . still sufficiently . . . oh very much so! at this stage . . . in control . . . under control . . . to question even this . . . [...] Could that be it? . . . something she had to . . . tell . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . [ . . . ] speechless all her days . . . practically speechless . . . how she survived!
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Madness of the Norm 181
That time in court . . . what had she to say for herself . . . guilty or not guilty . . . stand up woman . . . speak up woman . . . `Now this . . . something she had to tell . . . something that would tell . . . how it was . . . ' ± She speechless cannot tell, she looks for something that would tell, and this something is not I, because the I has in her case been cancelled by circumstances. The shopping incident is designed to illustrate this. practically speechless . . . all her days [ . . . ] even shopping . . . out shopping . . . busy shopping centre . . . supermart . . . just hand in the list . . . with the bag . . . old black shopping bag . . . then stand there waiting . . . any length of time . . . middle of the throng [ . . . ] till it was back in her hand [ . . . ] then pay and go . . . not as much as a goodbye . . . After rehearsing some more flashes of biographical detail, she finds none of them will pass the validity test: back in the field . . . April morning . . . face in the grass . . . nothing but the larks . . . pick it up there . . . get on with it from there . . . another few ± . . . what? . . . not that? . . . nothing to do with that? . . . nothing she could tell? . . . all right . . . nothing she could tell . . . try something else . . . think of something else . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . . not that either . . . all right . . . something else again . . . so on . . . hit on it in the end . . . think everything keep on long enough . . . then forgiven . . . back in the ± . . . what? . . . not that either? . . . nothing to do with that either? . . . nothing she could think? . . . all right . . . nothing she could tell . . . nothing she could think . . . nothing she ± Like the psychoanalyst, she traces memory after memory, trying to get to the point, and never arrives. With the words `think everything keep on long enough . . . then forgiven . . . back in the ± what? not that either?' she is probably considering saying back in the womb, but is cut off by the inner conviction that the guilt (from which, following one's explanation, one is `then forgiven') is more imposed than innate. The conclu-
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It's made clear at the play's start that the voice is trying to tell a life-story attaching to this speaker, but that there had been `nothing of any note till coming up to sixty'. Surrounded by the expectation to speak, which is humanism's landmark, this being had nevertheless not done so.
sion is that whatever it was that had been so important, it was `nothing she could tell . . . nothing she could think . . . nothing she ±' and there follows what amounts to the play's chorus-line, `what? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she!' in which it's clear that the thought of answering `I' occurs to the speaker in relation to the question who? and is instantly resisted, with NO, and replaced with SHE. In a world in which hegemonic cultural conditioning becomes attached to the first person or single individuality, it is not surprising that Mouth `vehemently' avoids using it in trying to come to the point of telling the truth about `how she had lived'. But the source of true speech is far from the acculturated I, and anyone in quest of that source must become as much a stranger to that I as the nomad to the metropolis. Vagrancy, as we suggested in Chapter 3, is measured and defined only by the domiciled. The indigence of the travelling community, for instance, is attributed from without more often than it is acknowledged from within. It is only the determined locatedness of the bourgeois, within four walls (preferably masonry) which is appalled by the vagrant's caravan, or by the tipi, and which ascribes shame to the designation `no fixed address'. Where Beckett's characters are often vagrant in that basic physical sense, they also relate the experience of one whose realm of domicile or lack of domicile extends to the psyche. Symbolically, again, psychic vagrancy, or vagrancy of identity, enjoys and suffers exactly the same judgements and conditions that accrue to the tramp or the new-age traveller. Again, in the Cartesian Box, self and location are mutually defining: who you are is where you are. Nowhere, therefore, is no-one. The `Cartesian church' declares that Not I's Mouth is a nobody, because she is nowhere. And the staging of the mouth, in total darkness, only enforces the non-located impression the speaker makes. But Beckett's a-Cartesian apprehension of this speaker offers another witness, whose gesture of `helpless compassion' is the evident contrary of the position of the humanist `judgement and analysis'.4 This figure emphatically does not offer advice, judgement, or explanation, and most compellingly refrains from telling her to `speak up, woman'. In this play, just as it was in The Unnamable, the icon of humanism for Beckett is the courtroom, in which identity, self, subjectivity are seamlessly identified first with one another and then (together) with the necessity not only to speak and give an account of oneself, but to justify one's existence in front of a panel. Who you are is what you can say for yourself, runs another of the litanies of humanism. The tragic power of Beckett's inscription is the direct undoing of this dogma. The Western
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idea of the Book of Judgement is infected with this same destiny of `being identified by being judged'; the esoteric concept of the akasha (from which the image of the Book is derived) is not invested with any of this doctrine of judgement. The result of this mismanagement of awareness, perpetrated by humanism under the guise of historical progress, is simply that the speaker exemplified in Not I is reduced to the discovery that none of these facilities for expression has anything approaching the desired effect, but rather the opposite: just the mouth . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . never ± . . . what? . . . tongue? yes . . . lips cheeks jaws tongue . . . never still a second . . . mouth on fire . . . stream of words . . . in her ear . . . not catching the half . . . not the quarter . . . no idea what she's saying . . . imagine! . . . no idea what she's saying! . . . and can't stop . . . no stopping it . . . she who but a moment before . . . but a moment . . . could not make a sound . . . no sound of any kind . . . now can't stop . . . something begging in the brain . . . begging the mouth to stop . . . Barthes and Bataille, and other inheritors of the deconstructive turn of mind, speak of the clatter of subjectivity. Beckett speaks of the buzzing in the brain, a noise unlike words and yet equated with words because the brain is supposed to be the seat of sense. Melanie McGrath's coinage `noyz, noyz, noyz'5 offers a contemporary equivalent. We might take the example of the now anachronistic perception of the liver as seat of jealousy and reflect that if Beckett's account of human consciousness is correct we might be just as far from the truth as we thought we were near it in supposing that the Cartesian Subject has anything approaching a true perception of the condition of pure consciousness. It is quite wrong when it locates consciousness in the space variously known as the brainbox, skull, chambered self, cardinal directions, identity location, the brain `in control and under control' as Mouth refers to it. The moment of metanoia for the voice here and for Beckett's audience, local and at large, is `to question even this'. We have to realise something more here: the context in which in our ordinary culture the self is forged as a judged and judging entity is the context of the male ego-state, whose agenda not only includes its fearful guarding of territory mental and physical, but also its fear in relation to the Unknown, figured as the Goddess of Complete Being, Woman, or the female, whether conceived as pure and simple or as impure and
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enigmatic. Figured as erotic or reproductive or both, she is the actual target of the will and control developed with such determination by the Adonis figure, who prefers hunting, or retreating into the refuge of technology, to recognising the Goddess in the mode in which she chooses to manifest. Feminist theory has elaborated on the incongruity of importing/imprinting this ego-state and its conditions into women's lives in a largely unmodified form: Men [ . . . ] invented culture as a defense against female nature. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilisation, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.6 It is no coincidence that the speaker in Not I is not only female but also stubbornly unabsorbent of the male logic she is supposed to have internalised; and she therefore offers humanist culture a double reproach which the Unnamable's voice did not offer so directly (`Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they glutted me with.'7). So if we take at plain face value the story offered by Not I, we view the featureless panorama of birth followed by `nothing of any note' until age 60, or 70 even, followed by the sudden discovery that the so-called normal channels, talking to oneself or others, would not avail to tell what had to be communicated somehow, `how it had been', `how she had lived'. It would be tempting to make a class-based interpretation and say that for the uneducated classes, and women, no amount of facility with words and concepts will alleviate the stress of too much work and too little respite. But if Mouth is speaking only for the enforcers and victims of `speechless toil', then she is able only because Beckett has conferred on her the voice of the educated to do so. We're returned then to the question, and perhaps trapped in it, of whether Beckett's texts are realist discourses according to the usually accepted parameters of realism, which dictate the real according to a number of conventions. If we review these to include soul factors as well as material factors, we find Beckett is a realist of soul at precisely the moment when he ceases to be a material/ social realist. And it is just this world of soul to which the Cartesian ego has no access. It is the world Ted Hughes adverts to when he says that the male ego is totally incompatible with the perspective which opens on the world of the Great Goddess,8 and announces its incompatibility by fear, reproach, guilt, paranoia, and violence.
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The old times, the old scenes, the old names; vows in love; and `something the dust said', and `a great shroud billowing in all over you'. These, the mythographic materials of That Time, are intimate indicators of the themes that link the effect of Beckett's art with vajrayana and dzogchen teaching. Just as in Not I, the ostensive dramatic event is the human's trying to say and finding that the job couldn't be done; following that, the actual dramatic conviction arrives, namely that one cannot know who one is if the equipment one's environment offers for doing so is error-prone. There is no doubt again here that humanism is the focal point, and the casualty, of Beckett's quest to expose the impossibility of self-exposition. This impossibility ± as all readers of Beckett know ± extends beyond self-justification to the region of self-expression, the pinnacle of humanist `capability'. The reason can only be that where no self subsists, no self-expression can be anything other than a chimerical apparition. The entire drama is pointed towards its own invalidation: that time is the clichaic verbal index of nostalgia, but the fabric of the reminiscences is unpicked precisely as it unfolds, unravels, disintegrates, before the watcher and hearer. It is a fabric which falls to dust as it is touched, like the mantle of a gas lantern. was that another time all that another time was there ever any other time but that time away to hell out of it all and never come back come and gone was that it something like that come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time9 To the humanist, time is precious; time is what is tabbed and indexed in an autobiography; turned over in memory or in the pages of novels; lovingly or guiltily looked on in photograph albums; gone in search of by Proust and his inheritors. To the Buddhist, time is the contrary, it flattens into unreality to the precise extent that it claims our aversive or desiring attention. It is the theatre of attachment. Beckett's is not a deconstruction of the values associated with old times and the passing of time; it is effective recognition that in reality there is nothing to deconstruct in this picture, because there was nothing there in the first place. He even comes to the extraordinary point of saying what it is that time has tried to rid us of, in our erroneous `seeing' that is actually blind. Saying this is the final and only real event in this drama, which has
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That Time: `was there ever any other'
often been seen as a light and quite sentimental look at Beckett's own past. At root it is nothing of the kind. This play is a specific rebuttal of the very idea and notion of the life-course and its humanist habitation. All the indices of the latter are there ± locale, parentage, national identity, gender-configuration, and the incendiary dogma of speech as the identifier and guarantee of the human soul. They are painfully evident just because of Beckett's minimalist isolation of them into the irreducible strands of an implied `ordinary story'. But the play's dramatic effect, its mythographic meaning in relation to the life-course and the nostalgia attending its later stages, is that `Whatever [humans] are searching for, it is not that', as Beckett said in the Lost Ones.10 So that time melds and merges into another, any other time; `was that the time', or `was it another time'? That is the play's real initiative. The many attempts made by the threefold voice of the play to localise and enunciate a memory or an event are gradually realised to be fruitless. Their purpose is simultaneously explained as a screening mechanism: just one of those things you kept making up to keep the void from pouring in on top of you the shroud or alone in the same the same scenes making it up that way to keep it going keep it out making it all up on the doorstep as you went along making yourself all up again for the millionth time forgetting it all where you were and what for The idea of ordinary reminiscence will not do, then; and `making yourself up as you go along' is hardly the way one is expected to reminisce; and while basic post-structuralist views of Beckett suggest that such a phrase is part of a game exposing the construction of identity through language, there is a deeper dimension involved at the same time: this is that the emotional pull of nostalgia, even while being believed in as a shaping force in one's identity, doesn't return even the illusion of solid identity based on history that it's supposed to. The so-called saving illusion is anything but salvific. The play records a few attempts, realises their emptiness, and then enacts its unfathomably surprising metanoia: that time in the end when you tried and couldn't by the window in the dark and the owl flown to hoot at someone else or back with a shrew to its hollow tree and not another sound hour after hour after hour not a sound when you tried and tried and couldn't any more no
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The surprise is that the void, which is the factual incidence, or incident, of the non-existence of the humanist co-ordinates, is just not the terror that everyone supposes it will be should they `succumb' and give way to the dread of non-existence. One is `little or nothing the worse' for entering into it. In Jungian language, by facing the demon directly, one finds it is not the demon one supposed. In the language of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the void in its fear-induced demonic aspect is `simply your own confused projections' ± the projection being an illusory half-materialisation of one's own fear or delusion. A modern exponent of esotericism relates it in terms very similar to Beckett's: The vast immensity falling over your roof, or the whole sky coming down into your courtyard, the chaos, the dumbfoundedness that will come to you ± something similar to this happens in samadhi. This tiny personal space of consciousness, and the whole ocean descends over it.11 This quiet eruption of immensity, the void `billowing in on top of you', is the play's main event, if one can call it that. It's very directly described by Beckett. It can't really be termed the culmination of a process of realisation, except in a relatively unhelpful way as an account of the fact that Beckett in his inscribed voice is crossing a threshold between (on the one side) an experimental deeming of ordinary personality to be true and (on the other) the witnessing of its virtuality, illusoriness, `come and gone in no time'. That phrase itself `come and gone in no time' is the very annihilation of teleology. The `song of no coming, no going'12 can by definition have no end and no beginning. In fact what is really implied by That Time is a completely opposite form of recollection from the one purported by the `realist' image of a nostalgic old man, (albeit an image narrated in modernist guise). The recollection at issue is the recollection not of any events but of the pure state of mind, not the state encumbered with the baggage of biographical time. In ordinary perception one's innate recollection of the void state ± ghZi, the natural condition of mind in dzogchen ± `does not arise. Due to this, there is stupidity, darkness, obscuration, fumbling and profound lack of vision'.13 If That Time tells a story, it tells the story of
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words left to keep it out so gave it up gave up there by the window in the dark or moonlight gave up for good and let it in and nothing the worse a great shroud billowing in all over you on top of you and little or nothing the worse little or nothing
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due to the arising of the subtle habits of attachment to this previously arisen ignorance, [. . .] events and conditions are believed to be real. Then, by grasping at objects as good and bad, and accepting and rejecting them, the objects seem to be real and so one abides with the three afflictions of stupidity, aversion and desire. Then for whatever arises as an appearance [. . .] if it seems good, there is desire. If it seems not to be good, there is aversion. And if it is held to be neither good nor not good, then there is the stupidity of dull absence of thought. [. . .] This is called the ignorance of total involvement.14 The last sentence really implies within it the entire agenda with which Beckett's age is culturally legislated, and against whose grain all his art is active. The fact that Beckett's mythographic universe will not accept the reality of a world governed by the hypnosis of positivism or the `ignorance of total involvement' is what earned Beckett the title of pessimist when his work first met a public. Only excepting the Brechtian aesthetic (which proposes yet another perspective on involvement and its alternatives), humanist aesthetics as a whole has privileged `total involvement' as the highest to which a human can hope to aspire, whether in career, religious life or personal relationship. After deconstruction and in the wake of feminist theory it is easier to see how the Buddhist picture of what we casually term real living is not so outre as it might appear. And Beckett's picture, as we can see, bears it out with the stamp of creative authenticity which is as far out of the reach of cultural imprint on the one hand as it is from theory on the other. In words that reflect the principle of the `ignorance of total involvement', Stanley Messenger offers this proposition in relation to Steiner's metaphysics in our time: Until we find some way of turning our attention onto what actually goes on in us and also in the world when we perceive something, including thinking itself, and then start to think about it, we have no way of waking up to the fact that our habitual experience of what goes on in ourselves and in the world is an illusion. [. . .] I know this is a devastating statement to make to all the people, i.e. most of us, who take for granted that everybody has at least some idea of what is real and what isn't.15
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how that obscuration, ignorance and error, when presumed to be real, solidify into the `frozen bulk' and `deadly destroying Terrors' mentioned by William Blake in the same context. According to dzogchen,
One might want to add that in one respect this sentiment is only partially shared by Beckett's method and by that of the dzogchen methods we have been comparing. Beckett does not `start to think about' the problem, because his practice is artistic not intellectual; and the dzogchen master does not do so either because `These speculations have not developed from discussions of ideas or conceptual elaboration but from the experience of looking into the mirror of the mind'.16 But the same is broadly true of all three, that they are concerned with the effective reversal of a paradigm, or rather, they are concerned with the operation of awareness from a place not limited within that paradigm. Beckett catches the transition between the ignorance of involvement and the actual nature of awareness when he uses the phrase `little or nothing the worse' when the void has engulfed the speaker of the play. The very involvement is nothing other than the fear that it will be worse, not to say deadly. The awareness comes with discovering that once it has happened it isn't. It can be compared to breathing fresh air after a confinement. This is what Schoenberg had in mind when he set to music the line `Ich atme Duft von anderen Planeten' (I breathe the air of other planets) in his first atonal work, the last movement of his Second Quartet. The void, seen by the ordinary humanist personality, is the terrifying possibility that the entirety of his life's edifice and habilitation is meaningless, and all the energy expenditure in its interests futile. The void accepted by the play's protagonist here is the fact of its not being a destruction, but a liberation from solidity, attachment, grasping, fear, desire. Insofar as these things are habitually associated with `bornness', mortality, we can harmonize Beckett's revulsion in face of the fact of birth with the dzogchen advice: Without fixing on any object keep flowing. Unborn, flowing, flowing. Unceasingly, flowing, flowing. Stay relaxed with the understanding of the lack of inherent self-nature in all things.17 If we relate the `void billowing in on top of you' with the `understanding of the lack of inherent self-nature in all things', and that the void is the event of that lack of inherent self-nature in a specific human instance, we begin to see how direct the connection is between Beckett's art and the esoteric process of the vajrayana. Particularly this is so because, according to dzogchen, `although there is much that can be studied, it does not bring one to the meaning of awareness'.18 And this explains why Beckett's plays, or a painting, or a landscape, is just as likely to
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enable contact with pure awareness as is the teaching conveyed by a vajrayana teacher. But if the basic fact about the void is not appreciated, then the meaning of the play and of the Buddhist teaching is lost and the two of them end up being viewed with the very spectacles which they were dedicated to removing from the viewer. From just this mishap arise the reproaches to Beckett and esoteric psychology for being insufficiently connected to the ordinary world, lacking in realism, and so on. In many cases Beckett is seen to belong to such a `high culture' as to be off the scale of normal appreciation, in just the same way as the core teaching of Buddhism is thought untenable by the majority of normal citizens. Both judgements arise from a cultural misunderstanding of voidness, inherited from materialism on the one hand and a Christian suspicion of non-dual perspectives on the other. Beckett's art, like dzogchen, is exciting precisely because it opens another perspective on a culture which has tired and exasperated its citizens as much as it has claimed to civilise them.
Footfalls: womb to the madhouse Western modern culture is founded upon, and then founders upon, the conviction that being able to explain one's situation is not only human, but the prerequisite for being human. Says Beckett's humanist legislator: this much is sure: the more you say the greater your chances.19 Footfalls, like the other two plays in this short trilogy, is about people who find they cannot explain, and what they do about this, or else what happens to them if they do not do anything. Does she still [. . .] speak? Yes, some nights she does, when she fancies none can hear. [Pause.] Tells how it was. [Pause.] Tries to tell how it was. [Pause.] It all. [Pause.] It all. Notice that she only speaks when she is alone. Usually one tells when there is someone to tell to. This is the humanist regime, and the root of personal psychoanalysis: tell me what is the matter with you. Here that value is turned on its head. This `she' speaks only when she fancies none can hear. Like a mad person, she talks only to herself. Only we can overhear. What we find in clarification of all three narratives given in these plays is that the classically mad are the actually aware.
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What does the humanist axiom about speech mean? It means, for one thing, that for the inarticulate, madness is often the diagnosis, and the asylum the designated space. Those without speech are without reason, so the saying goes, which reinforces the humanist tradition of selfexpression. Those with nothing to express, according to this logic, have no self, and whoever has no self has no existence in the world. In Footfalls, the nonexistence of self is plainly, unmistakably, stated. You yourself observed nothing . . . strange? Amy: No, mother, I myself did not, to put it mildly. Mrs Winter: What do you mean, Amy, to put it mildly? Amy: I mean, mother, that to say I observed nothing . . . strange is indeed to put it mildly. For I observed nothing of any kind, strange or otherwise. I saw nothing, heard nothing, of any kind. I was not there. Mrs Winter: Not there? Amy: Not there. Mrs Winter: But I heard you respond. (Pause.) How could you possibly have responded if you were not there? (Pause.) How could you possibly have said Amen if, as you claim, you were not there? (Pause.) [. . .] I heard you distinctly. This fact of the nonexistent May or Amy is surrounded in the play by other conditions which help to elucidate somewhat. Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember, old Mrs Winter, one late autumn Sunday evening, on sitting down to supper with her daughter after worship, after a few half-hearted mouthfuls laid down her knife and fork and bowed her head. What is it, Mother, said the daughter, a most strange girl, though scarcely a girl any more . . . (brokenly) . . . dreadfully . . . (Pause. Normal voice.) What is it, Mother, are you not feeling yourself? Mrs Winter asks her daughter if she didn't notice something strange at evensong, to which the daughter replies as above: `I was not there'. One wonders if the non-existence of the daughter is the very thing her mother found strange, and therefore had such difficulty getting her daughter to see, and herself to understand. The mother asks the daughter Amy, will she `never have done revolving it all in her poor mind' without stopping to realise that the answer to the question is that noone can ever have done revolving it all in their poor mind because the nature of the ordinary mind is that it is poor and wanders forever confused and unable to do the very thing its educators advertise it as being able to do. The only way to `have done' is not to be there, in the
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sense of not being present in the normalised ego-state. The poor mind, in dzogchen terms, is the wanderer in this world, believing that objects, desires and aversions, and others' opinions, are the real stuff of one's life, and their established satisfactions the fulfilment of the personality. The conversation between Mrs Winter and Amy takes exactly the form of the cross-examination type of interchange that Mouth in Not I refers to in the brusque exclamations attributed to her judges, `stand up woman!', `speak up, woman!'; and such exchanges exemplify the classic humanist self-formation/self-justification, demanded by Pozzo's injunction to Lucky, `Think, pig!' What you can say for yourself is not only what you are worth, but ultimately for the humanist, what you are. For any subjectivity not to hold to this tenet means dementia or madness. This is why the play Footfalls, its first part at least, is located in the practice of the care routine, where daughter has been looking after mother, changing the bedpan, dressing her sores, sponging her down, praying with her and for her, for a long period and has missed out on the usual development associated with leaving home after adolescence. In the second half of the play the roles are reversed in the sense that the mother is asking the daughter whether she will ever have done with it all. Earlier it was the other way around. To appreciate how far from madness is the ceasing of self in these short plays, it is vital to enter into the understanding that is free of objects and beyond limits. If one is in a posture and way of viewing which is not like that, then one automatically wanders in the confusion of not understanding one's thoughts, and this process is not recognised. In other words, `one [. . .] revolves in unclarity',20 very soon in the same position as the woman portrayed here, `revolving it all'. The pause on `It all' amounts to the play's chief sound, its music as well as its psychological theme, and invites the hearer/watcher to pause there too. It is only in the unenlightened mind that the world can revolve ceaselessly without issue and in constant predicament, `never having done'. This is a precise image of what the Buddhist metaphysic calls wandering in the confusion and obscuration (samsara) that is known in normal discourse as self and world. It all only revolves in the poor mind. In the pure mind, on the other hand, it self-liberates, dissolves: Like a master of Aikido the dzogchen meditator lets the energy of the problem be the force for its liberation. [. . .] conflict does not arise and all that manifests becomes self-liberating since there is no anxious self waiting to cause obstruction and engagement.21
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There being `no anxious self' is the event which Amy refers to as her `not being there' and which her mother finds so perplexing. The problem with the modern humanist equation is exposed with a deadly sting here. If meaning is bound, as it is, to the articulate voice, some very great crisis arrives when words dry up or the remaining words prove inadequate, or futile in use, to give a satisfactory account. Then there is nothing to think, nothing to tell, and the most that can be done, if the old paradigm is not abandoned, is to `make oneself up as one goes along', not meeting in the slightest degree the reality of one's wordless experience; or else to gabble frantically as Mouth does in the supermarket, `not knowing what one is saying'. In both cases the way to the madhouse is clearly open. Beckett's works see many of their characters into madhouses or else find them already ensconced there. But the message is that it is humanism's stage of judgement and analysis that has sent them there, not Beckett's whim or humour. Where is she? it may be asked. [Pause.] In the old home, the same where she . . . [Pause.] The same where she began. [Pause.] Where it began. [Pause.] It all began.22 Exactly the same problem is presented when the play's person, not necessarily short of words, nevertheless cannot convincingly use the first person singular. If anything this lack of confidence in locating an identity for the words uttered is from the humanist's angle an even more sinister sign of madness than being tongue-tied. `So deranged was she that she didn't know who she was any more', might run a case note for the Mouth of Not I. That description would fit many of Beckett's characters male and female. If the Buddhist account of subjectivity replaces for a moment the humanist one, the picture instantly changes and we are no longer plagued with spectres of madness. Like the voice of That Time, we can appreciate that the speechless, selfless void, `billowing in' on top of one, leaves one `nothing the worse' for it. The stigma of madness is entirely a Western wound; in the dzogchen context it is regarded very differently. A breakaway from meaning does not mean madness so much as the advent of the clear mind. Don't enter into evaluation; neither accepting nor rejecting, adopting nor discarding. And don't go following anything that occurs.23
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Madness of the Norm 193
This piece of dzogchen advice reflects Beckett's remark early in his aesthetic development: `Art does not dabble in the clear, or make clear.' We are not encouraged to indulge the `blessed rage for order'24 lest its regimen impose itself over the actuality of the occurring moment. As much as they disrupt speech and self-identity patterns, the three plays in this short trilogy, in keeping with their mythographic method of representation, also dissolve, or eliminate, location. This is also in keeping with the fact that the humanist codes gravitate and centralize themselves on subjectivity (being selfcontained as one person), location (being in a certain place, of fixed address), and being articulate (having something to say for oneself). All three plays convey the sense of being in a place but at another time, and being occupied by voices other than one's own. `My voice is in her mind', says V. of May. `She fancies she is alone.' Mouth in Not I feels `words coming' ± if not from herself, where from? And in That Time there are three voices telling the story of supposedly one locus of identity. Disrupted sense of place goes hand in hand with disrupted sense of self; this is not surprising, given that they are mutually dependent in ordinary descriptions of identity. In this sense there is a Cartesian mythograph of location as well as a mystical mythograph of non-locality. The non-location of May is given a dimension in the mythology of soul-descent, too, as happened in the case of Mrs Rooney. Beckett told an actress playing May25 that this character was based on the girl `who hadn't really been born', who we know from many sources was Jung's patient whose story had so preoccupied Beckett, and who therefore inevitably finds her place in the incarnated state something of a locational puzzle. There is no point trying to impose a realist agenda and continuing to propose that Beckett is dramatising ghosts and creating a highart simulation of a ouija board. Not bound to assume these to be voices from after death or before birth or outside time, and not persuaded that Beckett has to believe in these forms of relocation, we can nevertheless go with him to the extent of accepting that the voices of his disembodied and shifting people indisputably make awareness nonlocalised. `There is no sleep so deep I would not hear you there', says the mother of May.
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Madness of the Norm 195
These people are determinedly non-localised. The speaker of Stirrings Still, too, remarks on finding himself in several different places at once, without knowing how he got there.26 Whatever culturally established aversion we may have towards the matter of ghosts, we cannot usefully deny that Beckett is taking the ground from under empiricist feet and leaving us to sort it out as best we may. On the other hand we cannot say any more usefully that Beckett is siding with the spiritist world and trying to do a job of realist aesthetics with it. One thing we can say about the non-localising of the self in this play and in magical traditions elsewhere is that it goes some way to dissolving the solidity of identity with which contemporary awareness of the nature of mind is clouded. Dependence on fixed self-location perpetuates an illusion about identity which Beckett is determined to dislodge by means of mythograph, not philosophical argument. If we begin to suspect that the fixed boundaries of self (according to which we usually dismiss the possibility of ghosts at the same time as asserting our sane hold on the real world so-called) are not a true recognition of the actual nature of existence, then it follows that Beckett's method and its compulsive as well as offensive effect on some audiences will make sense to someone who is asking how it can have this effect. It also makes sense of the constant closeness in Beckett's works of the possibility of being mad, going mad, and having been so. The association between madness and visionary experience ± ignoring for a moment the reasons for this association ± is too obvious a cultural fact to need proving. And the fact that conversely, definitions of sanity have largely rested on conformity to the established notions of personality and identity has left any experience or narrative not conforming to these notions at risk of ridicule or else liable to the diagnosis of unsound mind or reasoning. Beckett's radical step is to ask whether the norms themselves are mad which make the demands on the human being whom they surround and largely mould. Although we do not find it directly pictured here in these plays, the persistent sense of encavernment Beckett evokes with his image of confinement in the skull is elicited here by a demonstration of the judgements passed on others through enforcing the unexamined axioms of encaverned consciousness. We might say with the vajrayana master that pure mind is unhindered, uncontained and uncontainable, like the featureless sky Beckett
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`She began to walk. (Pause.) Slip out at nightfall. (Pause.) Slip out at nightfall into the little church by the south door, always locked at that hour, and walk, up and down, up and down . . .'
was so fond of evoking. The poor mind, on the other hand, is the mind that constantly revolves, the word revolve not being idly chosen, since the wheel is the most deeply established image for the finite suffering world upon which our faulty perception binds us unrelentingly. And the exasperation of mind is precisely mirrored in the uneasy impatience of the question, `will you never have done?'. The non-eternal posing as the eternal, threatening to go on for ever, never to have done: that is the quintessence of western mind, and of the poverty of the encaverned consciousness. It is to open the cavern, to open vision of and for a new way, that Beckett so mercilessly exposes the old.
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13
At the end of pain A quite white exhaustion. Your ghost sits down To take my head in its hands. Jalal-ud'din Rumi
Cascando: opening closed worlds The play Cascando awakens the same trial scene as we have viewed in Chapters 7 and 10, but in a way that does not appear dramatic in the ordinary sense. The trial is implied almost exactly as it is in The Unnamable. There is no interrogation, only its tortured results, the frantic desire to say and be done, and the familiar splitting of the self into two selves, one of them called the Opener, the other the voice whose vent is opened, we might guess.1 In case we had forgotten, we are returned to the picture of successive incarnations or recurrences, `the ones I've finished . . . thousands and one . . . all I ever did . . . in my life . . . with my life . . . saying to myself . . . finish this one . . . it's the right one . . .' We could pause to recall that this is nothing other than what That Time calls `making yourself up as you go along for the millionth time'. Quite so. Beckett has never written about anything else as far as identifying the arch-fabricator, the ego of humanism, is concerned. But there is more in common between the plays than this alone. The voice says `it's the right one'. Why? Because he has been asked a question aggressively framed in the way that Rough for Radio II framed it. The interrogators, in other words, are looking for an answer, and it has to be the right answer, the one and only solution. `The least word let fall in 197
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Open Sky Mind
solitude and thereby in danger . . . of being no longer needed, may be it.' ± it being the one true story about `me' amongst all the thousands of linguistic edifices built up in the trilogy stories as `lies, invented to explain I forget what'. Here we as readers are not really permitted to forget, any more than is the speaker. So on this occasion, the voice desperate to be done with telling, or at least to be done by telling `the right one', tries once more to do so. The reason he has been going on so long, through stories, through repeated incarnations, has been because hitherto it was not the right one . . . couldn't rest . . . straight away another . . . but this one . . . it's different . . . I'll finish it. The real need latent within this concern with the right `one' is to distinguish the statement reluctantly made to satisfy or silence the gang of interrogators holding him to account, from something else, the inner compulsion to peel away the multiplicity of false selves from his awareness so as to be left with the pure light, the void of the Buddhist rigpa. But the very recognition of that rigpa is precisely what the interrogators would never be able to accept as the `culmination' of a valid curriculum vitae, so the teller is forever forbidding himself the very narrative which would be the end of all narratives, the end of the timebound world of self and territory. (This is the meaning of the word `outing' in a later part of the play, to which we shall refer.) As things are, the fact that the narrative of the void would be unacceptable in existential and mental health terms to the humanist inquisition, obliges the speaker to go on frantically blabbing, as Mouth does in Not I, about what is not really at issue. So the stage is set, if we can use this expression, for a final attempt to say and be done. This play manages with very few words to distil the spirit of all the earlier fiction and drama, and to foresee the later, and to do it in a very small compass. I resume . . . A long life . . . already . . . say what you like . . . a few misfortunes . . . that's enough . . . five years later . . . ten . . . Compare Not I: `nothing of any note till coming up to sixty'. It is the same story without a doubt. The character named Opener is, if you like, the act of beginning to speak, and of stopping, applied to the endlessly productive prophetic voice of Beckett's mythograph, which sees no artificial form possible to impose on its tragic outpouring, its sybilline,
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oracular continuity: `And I close' says the Opener from time to time in the play, when enough has been said to need to take a breath, or turn a page. As in so many other instances, the Opener is only there to open the audience's eye onto the tragic landscape of the already-existing mythograph of Beckett; the use of stage presences, subselves, `vice-existers' or other characters only goes to punctuate the ceaseless flowing, like tears, but words, without visible source and without explicable motive. Compare Texts for Nothing: `I weep too without interruption. It's an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. [. . .] the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth.'2 Tennyson wrote on closely similar lines, Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair Gather in the heart . . . But Beckett's Opener gives some clue as to why he is a separate character. In so doing, he illustrates exactly the difference between the captive mind and the enlightened mind. The captive mind moves toward incarceration in the prison-house, cylinder, urn, jar, closed space of self, as it does here in yet another of its variants, where outer topography merges into soulscape, a feat so often and so brilliantly achieved by Beckett:3 he goes down . . . come on . . . in his head . . . what's in his head . . . a hole . . . a shelter . . . a hollow . . . in the dunes . . . a cave . . . vague memory . . . in his head . . . of a cave . . . he goes down . . . no more trees . . . no more bank . . . he's changed . . . not enough . . . In a few sentences we shift from the coated booted wanderer (the world of the trilogy and of Company) back into the Rotunda, the enclosed world of Imagination Dead Imagine and its sibling texts. But the free mind, liberated from samsaric imprisonment in the `wealth of filthy circumstance'4 can now play the part of pure awareness, can act as Opener. It is very interesting that this can happen in the environment in which a subjectivity dissipates or disperses into more than one `bubble'; it is certain that the second bubble is closer to reality than its tortured twin, its mole-like digger in futile passion and the strife of this time-run world. The Opener, part of the same `individual',
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200 Beckett and Eros
What do I open?
They say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it's in his head.
They don't see me, they don't see what I do, they don't see what
I have, and they say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it's
in his head.
I don't protest any more, I don't say any more.
There is nothing in my head.
I don't answer any more.
I open and close.
This astonishing expansion of the subjectivity of Beckett's mythographic voice is serenely placid in manner, quite unlike the voice `opened' by the opener (whose anguished tone is very close to that of Not I's Mouth). `I don't answer any more. I open and close' echoes uncannily the answer attributed to Buddha when asked how he became enlightened. `I am not enlightened. I am just awake.' Part of the above speech could be interpolated like this: I don't protest any more, I don't say any more. [I just reveal the samsara.] There is nothing in my head. I don't answer any more. I open and close. This placidity is the mode of supreme relaxedness enounced by the Buddhist advice on meditation, which lets no-one forget that the experience of insight is supremely unknotted, open, clear, `self-liberating of itself', like the sky. Pure mind in the `form' of Opener reveals an insight into impure mind in the illusion of the opened, who is still striving in the world, like the voice much later of Stirrings Still, whose `hubbub of the mind' continues until the `one true end of time, grief, and self so-called' ± striving so much that, in the manner of the protagonist of How It Is, the only way to move on, short of the total illumination of the `self-perfected state' (dzogchen) is to cast oneself adrift in a boat. It is easy to believe that Cascando and How It Is were written at almost the same period, the similarity of the boat scenes being unmistakable. The metaphorical func-
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opens not only the vocal line of Beckett's tragic mythograph, but also its divine solution, for to a tragedy there is the pressing need of a solution, whether provided (eucatastrophe) or not (catastrophe):
Open Sky Mind 201
From one world to another, it's as though they drew together. We have not much further to go. With that it becomes a lot clearer why the voice which Opener has opened is convinced he is onto `the right one' this once, this time out of too many thousands of attempts to get the self-story right. The only way the earthbound ego can go in the direction of enlightened mind is to abandon location on the firm land of coordinates and the cardinal directions (hence the peculiar spiritual liberation in the midst of eroticism in the love scene in Krapp's boat) and like Shelley, to evince the soul in the body, enchanting it in a boat: no tiller . . . no oars . . . afloat . . . sucked out . . . then back . . . aground . . . drags free . . . out . . . I see him . . . he clings on . . . out to sea . . . heading nowhere . . . for the island . . . then no more [. . .] face in the bilge . . . he clings on . . . island gone . . . far astern . . . heading out . . . open sea . . . land gone . . . his head . . . what's in his head . . . (Cascando) So I was in my boat and gliding on the waters. I didn't have to row, the ebb was carrying me out. . . . The sea air was all about me, I had no other shelter but the land, and what does it amount to, the shelter of the land, at such a time. (The End)5 sea beneath the moon harbour-mouth after the sun the moon always light day and night little heap in the stern it's me all those I see are me all ages the current carries me out the awaited ebb I'm looking for an isle home at last drop never move again a little turn at evening to the sea-shore seawards then back drop sleep wake in the silence . . . (How It Is)6 We were on the water. Your boater had an osprey in it. I had stopped rowing. We were being gently rocked by the waves. (pause) He too was being gently rocked by the waves. (pause) Are you sure he's mine? (Eleutheria)7 We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face
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tion of the boat, casting the ego adrift from its moorings of conditioning and its landlocked home-obsession, is made abundantly clear by the comment Opener makes just before the drifting scene is narrated ±
202 Beckett and Eros
This is letting-go as far as it can possibly be taken while in a body. That's why in Cascando's version of this thematic, Opener says it is like one world meeting another. (It accomplishes in a magnificent few lines what Malone Dies `gurgles of outflow' just failed to manage at the end of its narrative.) Speaking for disegoment, the `opened' voice of the character named Woburn knows it's nearly over with the passion of pursuing or fleeing. The last clinging of the soul about to experience the gate, gate, parasamgate bodhi svaha (gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond9) is the most poignant of all. we're there . . . nearly . . . Woburn . . . hang on . . . don't let go . . . lights gone . . . of the land . . . all gone . . . nearly all . . . too far . . . too late . . . of the sky . . . those . . . if you like . . . he need only . . . turn over . . . he'd see them . . . shine on him . . . but no . . . he clings on . . . Woburn . . . he's changed . . . nearly enough ± The man on his face in the boat, trying to drift into selflessness, almost having done so but still in the body, is gently reminded as only poetic metaphor can remind: the lights of the land are all gone, and the lights of the sky are now all that's left, he need only turn over to see them, but he doesn't turn. He's changed, but not completely transformed out of the samsara state. Only `nearly enough'. He is so close to the next world now, that he would be able to see the lights of heaven, if only he were to `turn'10 but still he clings on to earth's shadow, as a mortal being must. The transformation `from one world to another' is not yet accomplished in this picture. And strangely ± again I think it justifies not being overfastidious about the allocation of dramatic separateness to each of Beckett's stage voices ± the Opener and the voice begin to use the same pronouns at just the point in this speech where the lights of above are mentioned. Earlier the imperative is used (hang on, don't let go); then suddenly, but easily, as if hardly troubling, the voice slips into the third person: `he need only turn over . . . he'd see them'. It is as though the need for the distinction between Opener and opened evaporates as the real reason for the affair begins to be revealed. They talk to each other in the end, because they are the same person. `Form is emptiness, emptiness is form', as the Heart Sutra has it. Emptiness is
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in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (Krapp's Last Tape)8
Opener, name-and-form (nama-rupa) is Woburn; but in essence ± from the point of view of rigpa, enlightened mind ± samsara and nirvana are the same, the display of appearances: `Now that you have reached the decision that samsara and nirvana are the phantasmagoria of a single intrinsic awareness, the scope of your ordinary mind has grown.'11 So in the end the separation between the dramatic voices is only artificial: `I have wasted my time speaking about them [and indeed in their voices] when I should have been speaking of me, and me alone'. Just as the problem of the two voices of the play can be solved by referring to the perspective of dzogchen, so the last mystery of the play, its oddest part, can be directly explained by reference to the myth of soul-descent. The mystery in question is the musing of Opener on `Outings', just after the section we have examined, in which Woburn is `changed . . . nearly enough' to enter the mode of the next world. Opener says: There was a time I asked myself, What is it.
There were times when I answered, It's the outing.
Two outings.
Then the return.
Where?
To the village.
To the inn.
Two outings, then at last the return, to the village, to the inn, by the
only road that leads there.
An image, like any other.
But I don't answer any more.
I open.
What's compelling about this is how the spiritual imagery of the path of return is so effortlessly laid in place, almost so casually as to pass by the unnoticing. But Beckett intends it to be noticed, by adding ± as we might sceptically do ± no, it's not a spiritual metaphor, it's `an image, like any other'. It's great poetry because it is an image like any other, put to a use unlike any other. It's so beautiful because so simple and unforced, its meaning thereby so powerfully enforced. When the voice ends by saying `I don't answer any more. I open', he implies `I don't give answers, I don't identify with self. I open', which means, there is no place, no quality, no world, no location, in the end no journey; for when the meaning of the outings is once perceived, there's no need for the prop of the imagery of the outing, to the inn. `[T]he only road that leads
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A night in a bad inn ±
But I would say
Guest in love's house;
And blessed and thrice blest
Who walk on earth's Sweet grass,
Bathe in time's stream,
And under green boughs rest ±
Too short a stay.12
Why are we directly in the world of soul here? Because the aim of using the soul's realm and language is to quit the encaverned realm with which the soul may have contact but in which it is not immured as resident; therefore it uses the familiar imagery of that residence, while bearing the imaginer of the poem and its reader already far beyond the outing and the inn. This, in Beckett and Raine, is the language of pure mysticism, and of the artistic method I have called mythography throughout this book. It's an evocation of the path of return whose effect is to take us beyond the path. `There is no path, no obtaining, no non-obtaining.'13 Cascando is, if you like, the one pronouncement with which Beckett follows up his burial of the humanist encodement of human being. The closed world of the skull/chamber/rotunda, the cartesian coordinates of the bourgeois box, the room so full of furniture that its density `defeats imagination', is exposed as it is proposed in the mythography of the early to middle Beckett, and then closed down entirely in the later Beckett, buried underground, while the witness of the process, a witnessing shared between author and audience, is using another witnessing energy different from the one that has been buried. The humanist spectacles being underground, what is there left to see with but the energy with which the eye is formed? The witness in clear-mind can say, for once not accountable to its buried inquisitors, `I open'.
From Poor Mind to Pure Mind: the Nohow On trilogy Sad and strange Are the dreams of the old, Joyless and cold
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there' is not access through image, but through direct perception. Only one road, one mind, one reality. Kathleen Raine used the same image of inn and outing with the same esoteric meaning in a poem written contemporaneously with Beckett's play:
Open Sky Mind 205
Kathleen Raine writes there of the world which Company, III Seen III Said and Worstward Ho make their own. Beckett's three short novels mark the last new direction his writing was to take. The unrelenting density of the 1960s fiction has disappeared, a more relaxed hand makes reminiscence simple again, as in Company, making a ghostly old woman come alive in a landscape as in Ill Seen Ill Said, and only in the final `novel' Worstward Ho, turning again to the Cartesian demon of the bone of the skull, and just as terrifying in its crabbed, quiet way as anything in All Strange Away. Where the 1960s short texts and plays challenged the receiver to find any relationship with their disembodied, non-localised voice and vision, the late trilogy uses the distilled, minimalist prose style in more restrained yet accessible ways. Some of the material in Company was obviously being thought about by Beckett in dramatic contexts too, since an entire passage is word for word repeated in a stage play, A piece of monologue. This confirms what I have suggested, that Beckett conceived his prose and drama not to be separate entities, and that most of his works, though apparently separate, proceed from a pre-generic voice with one central project and major and minor offshoots. In this respect Beckett's work resembles Coleridge's, with revision, abandonment and fragmentariness of works being accepted as a part of a larger process which had its own coherence. In Beckett's case no less than in Coleridge's (though through different means), that larger project was to expose a false world-picture, to counteract `the hypnosis of positivism', the spirit of the age, and to suggest that its domination would effectively result in an age without spirit. One of the discoveries made by the earlier trilogy of novels ± the discovery that precipitated the second major crisis in Beckett's writing career ± was this: it was useless to protest the hypnosis of positivism using the resources so often appropriated by it in its self-justifications. As we have seen, the valuation of speech as the guarantee of identity and human worth, having been exposed as problematic, cannot be replaced then with more profuse speech averring the contrary. Hence Beckett's move toward silence, and his policy of saying ever less. The last three novellas are Beckett's most effective courting of silence. The positivist/ humanist amalgam necessarily dissolves in silence and contemplation,
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Those chambers underground. Ghost among ghosts I range Catacombs of the mind And neither find nor seek, Nor laugh nor weep.14
but even that very circumstance can be appropriated all over again, as the Buddhist definition of the esoteric teaching cycle recognised: `one problem remains: the grasping of emptiness as such. When one grasps emptiness as existing, ``it is emptiness'', it is a concept and, by this very fact, it is not really transcendent wisdom.' In the final three novellas, there are no events. Visions are practically all that remains of the narrative. As though in salutation to a cry from Texts for Nothing ± `let there be no more talk of any creature, nor of a world to leave, nor of a world to reach, in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures, with words, with misery, misery.'15 ± circumstance is largely dispensed with, as though the purgation exercise undertaken in the 60s texts has ripened into a lyrical result. There could hardly be a story less plagued by noise than Ill Seen Ill Said; it is almost produced from silence instead of speech, and this, considering the medium at hand, prose fiction, is virtually the act of a magician. The necessity and the unfathomable effect of the changing light of morning and evening and its mysterious link with heightened human perception are pointed out in Ill Seen Ill Said and Company. It is this power of daybreak and nightfall, of the change lived through by the universe and the `mind of man' as light and shadow brighten and darken, that is increasingly overcoming the skull and its isolation of consciousness that was the preoccupation of the Beckett exploring ignorance and illusion. There is a dzogchen meditation practice which involves staring into a void conceived as being of the darkest hue of lapis lazuli that can be imagined without its shading into black.16 This absorption is just the one into which Beckett's late works ± uniquely in western literature ± enter. Dawn, morning, evening and night are the crucial times for Beckett's soul-wanderers, the only times in which inspiration is possible. The enlightenment of twilight is that it illumines without `certifying'. Here is the earthly icon of escape from the Beckett demon, from the ravenous desire for certitude where none exists. `One begins finally to see in the night,' said Beckett. `In the night which is dawn and noon and evening and night in a wide [empty] sky, [in a still land] of an unmoving earth.'17 It is highly significant that Beckett in the late period increasingly uses the term gleam in a transferred sense to mean know; this means in effect that all references to gleam as dawn, dusk and twilight have the resonance of enlightenment, `whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the mind of man', and it means also conversely that all references to true knowledge are incidents of the dawning of light. In this fluid
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equation I think Beckett has solved his lifelong quest for the true identity of the witness, the self, the uncertifiable individuality that gave him and his age such anguish and trouble. The appointment after the burial of humanism is not with the Beckettian `committee of inquiry', but with pure Light. In the last prose the storm of the word has blown itself out, as is fitting in the course of a literary lifetime that has suspected and seen the worst in relation to the deceptions of a language-based consciousness bent on delivering individuals from chaos in the way only categorisation knows how. Beckett's works, when they really speak, point to the wordless, or to the `fundamental sound' which is not really keyed to lexis for its effect and use. When the critical term `quietism' is applied to the late Beckett, it is understandable, but his work's haunting power to disturb is altogether missed by the submissive connotations of the word. Worstward Ho does more than repeat the formulae of Beckett's most powerful myth. It is remarkable for the way in which mere scraps of phrases can sum up the argument of an entire lifetime of writing. Rather than giving the impression of even a highly compressed narrative, this text acts in the manner of a series of bells, each sounding a single note, and each note redolent of the eternal myth of human solidity and dematerialisation. The scene set typifies Beckett's tragic poem of existence. Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. Dim light source unknown . . . Say only such dim light as never. On all. Say a grot in that void. A gulf. Then in that grot or gulf such dimmest light as never. Whence no knowing. No saying.18 All the ordinary indices of place and time and whence and whither are shown to be mere phantasmagoria of the void, befitting the status of common reality according to vajrayana. `Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.' The collapse of coordinates of proportion ruins space, makes a grot equal a gulf, just as according to vajrayana, there is in the world of relativity only a space of complete illusion. The nature of place, location, the ordinary meaning of home, homely and unhomely, is cancelled at one stroke. Not only the scene, but its so-called occupier:
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This occupier, his provisionality, is an iconic commentary on the vajrayana view of the human solid form ± in other words a form as far from solid as it is far from real. Of him we could say that the dzogchen advice has been heeded: `As long as we believe what other people tell us about themselves and as long as we believe in our ordinary desire to make sense out of other people's experience on the basis of our own past experience, we commit ourselves to believing in representations, to accepting presented narratives as a true account of how things are. In that way, the actual space of the potentiality of that person is closed, closed to them by the story they tell about themselves, and closed by the fact that someone else believes it.'19 There is no risk of its being believed here. Of the unreality of that individual's self-image we are convinced. In relation to its `world out there', figured as ground, Beckett is equally clear, that there is no such ground: Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. So as to say pain. Just like a Buddhist recital, Worstward Ho is explicit on the relation of earthedness ± incarnation ± to pain. If one can speak of the groundedness of the incarnated state, only then is it possible to speak of pain, since physical existence in the `three times' (past, present and future) is its cause. And like the dzogchen tradition, Beckett includes the human mind in the dereliction of personal locatedness: Say remains of mind where none to permit of pain. As far as the world is concerned, it is no more real than the self, and is made (or unmade) of the same stuff; Beckett calls it `shade' ± the illusion of solidity where there is none. Dzogchen calls this `shade-condition' simply the `nonrecognition of intrinsic awareness': The world is That narrow field. Rife with shades. . . . Shade-ridden void. That is Beckett's picture of the world as seen from the far distance of the esoterically literate viewpoint. Is this distance what Beckett meant earlier in his writing career by insisting on the notion of farness without directly explaining it, as for example here?
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That shade. Once lying. Now standing. That a body? Yes. Say that a body. Somehow standing. In the dim void.
Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke, I seem to speak, that's because he says I as if he were I, I nearly believed him, do you hear him, as if he were I, I who am far, who can't move, can't be found, but neither can he, he can only talk, if that much, perhaps it's not he, perhaps it's a multitude, one after another, what confusion, someone mentions confusion, is it a sin, all here is sin, you don't know why, you don't know whose, you don't know against whom, 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 [ . . . ] I'll try, if I can, I know it's not I, that's all I know, I say I, knowing it's not I, I am far, far, what does that mean, far, no need to be far, perhaps he's here, in my arms [ . . . ] I'm locked up, I'm in something, it's not I, that's all I know, no more about that, that is to say, make a place, a little world, it will be round, this time it will be round, it's not certain, [ . . . ] try and find out what it's like, try and guess, put someone in it, seek someone in it, and what he's like, and how he manages, it won't be I, no matter . . . '20 . . . so that I'll never stir again, dribble on here till time is done, murmuring every ten centuries, It's not me, it's not true, I'm far.21 Even then, before the Imagination Dead period, the project of thinking up the world and putting someone in it, was being evolved, and equally clearly seen to be futile. The location of ego and self is just this empty: the head said seat of all [ . . . ] The head as first said missaid. So from now. For to gain time. Time to lose. Gain time to lose. As the soul once. The world once. Another bell sounds there on the last great illusion, the soul and the world. They are all connected to the `so-said mind', and to `time, grief and self so-called'. They are all a dream in the head. It is as though Worstward Ho disposes of the matter, before Stirrings Still's final `end to time, grief and self-so-called'. Worstward Ho is the last time the nonbeliever in self can conjure even the ghost of a self. But that self, while it continues in whatever shadowy form it can find, as a `shade', still has the desire which keeps it circling the earth if not exactly rooted upon it: Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-missaid. Dint of longing lost to longing. Long vain longing. And
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Open Sky Mind 209
longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly longing still. For fainter still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing for the least of longing. Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable vain least of longing still. Longing that all go. Dim go. Void go. Longing go. Vain longing that vain longing go.22 This is the most important part of the text and possibly of Beckett's oeuvre entire. Indeed it articulates the intention stated in How It Is, `I will have no more desires', and illustrates what results from the incamination (literally, putting into a channel, onto a road) of desire, birth, onwardness, and its simultaneous illusion. `As the soul once. The world once.' World, presence, soul, the road, or `old road', are all here, and all together rendered ghosts, ready to `give up the ghost', and by doing so in another sense `be born at last,'23 born into the freedom of clear mind which acknowledges the void as it is. This clear mind is synonymous with light, as the dzogchen recitals constantly reiterate. Along with self, soul, and world, the typical Buddhist recital establishes the illusoriness of time, and with it `the road', what H. Porter Abbott called the `trope of onwardness'.24 Worstward Ho sounds its note on this subject as well. `Onceless alone the void.' can only refer to the basic non-existence of time, once the icons of illusory living have collapsed. These indices of progression established in the time-world of incarnation are specifically named by Beckett as `preying', `gnawing', `oozing', `plodding' ± these verbs are the only ones this text uses to instance the trope of onwardness, and all of them signify, as more or less animal actions, the main aspects of the chain of dependent origination, the `road' of incarnation. In Buddhist language they would be translated with terms such as craving, clinging, striving, hoping and fearing. The world and its sequential time and suffering having been done away with, the same must now happen to language, the anchor of humanist being-in-the-world. Worstward Ho has a bell for this too: Say better worse words gone when nohow on. Still dim and nohow on. All seen and nohow on. What words for what then? None for what then. No words for what when words gone. For what when nohow on. Somehow nohow on. The tandem continuity of speaking and being, the discourse of the personal biography, with which humanism dignifies its prisoners, is
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imaged in its demise here. There is no going on in either sense, ordinary living or speaking. And this is the condition Beckett has always been exposing in ritual drama as well as monologues in prose: whatever discourse do emerge in justification of self and self-concern, they are all beside the point, `not about me'. As Beckett says here ± admitting that the human being often speaks, albeit not about the real `I' ± there is No saying what it is the words it secretes say. No saying what it all is they somehow say. We might recall Not I here, and its exposure of the humanist `claptrap trap': the agenda is that one will make oneself accountable through words, but for the woman whose mouth speaks that short play, a lifetime of explaining has never truly said `how she had lived'. Thus she has caught herself in claptrap, just as in Footfalls we fail to hear what it all is the words somehow say, `revolved' in her `poor mind'. But with Worstward Ho's `No words for what when words gone', Beckett gives away a secret, that the void state is without need of sequential expression, because sequential expression belongs only to the incarnate state of being. A meditation practitioner would say exactly this about language, that when words no longer apply, there is little use trying to find words for that event. `No words for what when nohow on' illustrates accurately the dzogchen perspective of non-localising awareness, beyond language and perspective. `The [ground of being,] ground aspect of dharmakaya as buddha-nature is free of all locations, objects or agents of origination, and so is free of the limitation of origination. It is beyond there being any time at which it ceases or any agent that ceases to be, and so it is free of the limitation of cessation. . . . Further, it is empty in that it is totally pervasive and totally extensive.'25 The clear sky, the only metaphor really allowed in dzogchen, is notable for the fact that perspectival coordinates cannot be established in it. Almost as though directly operating from this void condition, Beckett cancels, with the phrase Back for somehow on. all credible reference to place, territory, trajectory, teleology. He buries all the indices of incarnation, the equipment of the `clacking ball and socket', the human skeleton. `What words for what then?' asks the fading voice. The reply rings another bell: `Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim. All so
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seen unsaid.' When all is undimmed that words had dimmed, we are in the wordless reality, unsaid, the clear undimmed light of the dzogchen View.
Lost to the world, lost to longing, lost to suffering: these are the marks of radical unworldliness in Beckett's late work, and they are hidden in his earlier works. The phrase lost to is profoundly ambiguous: lost to suffering means lost in suffering but also lost by suffering; so deeply lost in something else that not even suffering can take one out of it, and also so lost in suffering that, like the heart that is lost to a loved one, it thinks it has nothing spare for anything else. `The so said mind lost to longing', says Worstward Ho, `vainly longing that longing go'. Beckett takes this thread up again in Stirrings Still: then again faint from deep within oh how and here that missing word again it were to end where never till then.26 Strangely, longing and disgust here lose their either/or fixations of positive and negative. The adjective that would fix the valuation, for instance in how beautiful it were to end where never till then, or, how shocking it were to end where never till then, is held off, not said. All we hear is the appetitive ah, how . . . it would be. He continues, like the dzogchen metaphysician on enlightenment, to discover that he might be there already, that the sky is self-evidently blue, reality is self-evidently void: In any case whatever it might be to end and so on was he not already as he stood there all bowed down and to his ears faint from deep within again and again oh how something and so on was he not as far as he could see already there where never till then? The longing to end `where never till then' refers to finding some location where he can be sure he has not been before. We recall the voice originating the Imagination Dead texts, saying to itself, `Pick up the frowsy deathbed and drag it to a place to die in', and then enumerating a few locations only to refuse them with the expostulation `no not that again'. So it stands to reason that the last wish of this mythographer is to find a place where he had never been up until then, the moment of his coming to it. The previous part of Stirrings Still had dwelt on the oddity
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Stirrings Still
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Disappear again and reappear again at another place again. Or at the same. Nothing to show not the same. No wall toward which or from. No table back toward which or further from. In the same place as when paced from wall to wall all places as the same. Or in another. Nothing to show not another. Where never. Rise and go in the same place as ever. This is very odd. But it directly solves the mystery of the tyranny of the cartesian coordinates, the cardinal directions, with which the busy, `reason-ridden' rational consciousness of Beckett's narrators has been beleaguered throughout incarnation after incarnation in earlier works. And in the register of a spiritual language, this passage means something very similar: `buddha-nature is free of all locations, objects or agents of origination [ . . . ] Further, it is empty in that it is beyond upper or lower, cardinal or intercardinal direction, interval or time frame.'27 In other words, the reassuringness of the outer world, our sense of its reality, for example solidity, directionality, knownness, the familiar table he mentions as having seen the passing away of many of his friends, etc., all these things, when seen with the eye of light, are pure figment, equal in emptiness, illusion or not illusion, either way completely empty. And the same goes for the soul's return to the world as for the body's and mind's return to things; without real awareness of the voidness, without letting `the great shroud billow in all over you, and you none the worse' ± without this, all ordinary incarnate reality merges into a repetitive round just as meaningless and featureless as these locations, each of which could be substituted by any other. This is a powerful description of the Buddhist concept of `wandering in the circle of samsara'. Add to that wandering the `ignorance of total involvement' and you end up with the consciousness steaming away in the `soap-operatic' rage of Play, for example: `What he could have found in her when he had me.' . . . `When he came again we had it out. . . . I felt like death. [ . . . ] That meant he had gone back to her! back to that!'22 Realising the return of all such chained souls to more of the same is one of the mythographic symbols for the actual emptiness of the existence apparently so powerfully immersive and involving. Again it must be stressed that this mythograph does not require belief in any form of metempsychosis to have its effect. It is the matter of recurrence, put
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of the narrator's movement, which appears to take him from place to place without his being aware he has moved, and without there even being a sign to show the change of place:
simply, or less simply, according to tradition. The stripped-down furniture of Beckett's last prose evokes a table only to have it evanesce in the void of a true dzogchen insight, `form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form'. So it is with the so-called mind, and feet, of the psychically perambulating old man. `Patience till the one true end to time and grief and self and second self his own.' Stirrings Still, actually a fourth in the last novella series though not included in Nohow On, finishes them all off by some internal rhyming between works. The first part quotes Company's and Worstward Ho's phrase `The back roads', and the second part quotes Company's `remains of reason' and refers to Ill Seen Ill Said in saying, `he sought help in the thought of one hastening westward at sundown to obtain a better view of Venus'; in all these ways as well as its pervasive summing-up of all the previous works, Stirrings Still deserves to be called a last work. Some might see more than a resemblance to the Still texts and a slight echo of Worstward Ho's style, and actually hear a veritable authorial farewell, in this: [H]is hands. What of them was to be seen. One laid on the table and the other on the one. At rest after all they did. Lift his past head a moment to see his past hands. Then lay it back on them to rest it too. After all it did.
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14
Mind, or Brain, or Self ± we have invented to stand for our exile from meaning. Richard Grossinger The body, with its spirits, is the antenna of all perceptions, the receiving aerial for all wavelengths. But we are disconnected. . . . Our objective eye, the very strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turns into stupidity ± of the most rigid and suicidal kind. Ted Hughes There is one sense in which the entirety of this study of Beckett can be explained by one brief work: his 100-word text neither, in 1995 for the first time readily available in print in an uncorrupted form.1 Of its spontaneous origination in Berlin in 1976 in reply to a spoken question, James Knowlson reports `Beckett said there was only one theme in his life. Then he spelled out that theme'2 on a scrap of paper. To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other unheard footfalls only sound till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other then no sound then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither unspeakable home 215
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That Unheeded Neither
This tiny fragment more or less maps the mythic territory I have been outlining with reference to some better-known `canonical' late works, and its conclusive message combines in the word home the three worlds we have been reading from, the social, the sexual and the spiritual. The text's final line indicates home is the unsayable, and moreover not to be located in concepts of self or of not-self. The locus of passage, of experience, is the neither, and it takes the human `to and fro' between the supposed co-ordinates of awareness. This text is a summation of all the concern, evident throughout the novels and plays, with the spuriousness of a sayable truth. As Paglia recognised, the entire humanist edifice has relied on the establishing of control through language, and establishing borderlines within language which delimit a self in the first instance, and then protect that self from the storm of chthonian nature, the flux of the living as such, which is normally sectioned off from self as bordering on the obscene, unheimlich, the other. Or else it is recouped as a tamed version of the same, but now named as objects, mapped and `homed' as material territory, therefore in some sense ordered by the self though not existing as the self. That is the western model, in which we recognise the cult of individualism that constitutes the liberal ideal. What Beckett has been suggesting throughout his creative life, and again here with minuscule precision in this short text, is that neither `self' nor `other/unself' is a truthful expression of necessary being. Self and unself are envisaged as `two lit refuges', shady doorways that appear to offer something, temptingly ajar apparently, until you come up to them, at which point they discreetly close: `beckoned back and forth and turned away'. The text is so powerful an index of this cultural error of identity precisely because its `narrative' (micronarrative) is rooted in a discourse of home: the subliminal question remaining, can self or notself be regarded as homes for the wanderer faring between them? The answer is that the wanderer in search of refuge in that choice of alternatives will always be `turned away': neither the door of selfhood nor the door of supposed objectivity, the not-self, affords the true home or refuge that is sought. We might recall for a moment how dzogchen teaching revises and strips down the concept of Buddhist `refuge' (which is normally thought to mean belonging to a group, the sangha): the real meaning of refuge is a method of cutting through the veils of habitual response by putting the status of the enquirer into question. This is a refuge that can endure as all the cultural accumulation of this life falls away and we
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That Unheeded Neither 217
Refuge in its purest sense is a question, then; it is equivalent rather to being cast adrift than it is to being enclosed in a container (which, as we have seen, Beckett often identified as a false refuge). Refuge as question radically reforms our notion not only of home but also of identity and religious experience as well: The question `Who am I' gives me refuge from the burden of having to know who I am. And the question, `who are you?' helps to give the other refuge from the same burden, of knowing who they are, of having to justify and explain it.4 Real refuge for Beckett and the Buddhist is in the openness of question, not in the fabrication of answer. The latter is one of the great risks of the humanist enterprise of self-justification: an acute risk that the account given will be artificial because it is extorted. The esoteric methods `are used for dissolving the artifice of relying on constructed identity. Real refuge lies in freedom from artifice.'5 So in this distilled sense Buddhist refuge means taking refuge in homelessness, so that the humanist meaning of refuge (plot of land, home, castle, identity, `bolt-hole') is reversed completely: real understanding has to take place in the face of anxiety and uncertainty, because whatever we know, if it becomes established as a fact, will sooner or later betray us. Fixed knowledge is a particular view of a situation that [in truth occupies] a context that's changing in time.6 The fixed knowledge of a particular view is death, death into fixture; and studying this mythopoetic meaning of embodiment (artificial hardening of a fluid context) explains why Beckett appears to be against birth, just as the dzogchen practitioner speaks for the `unborn', using the fluxial state as an image for creative awareness. Absolutely contrary to the humanist assumption, the true home is the unsayable (which is by nature also the ungainsayable). It is `absent for good from self and other', `that unheeded neither' which is `unspeakable home'. There is much implied here; important most of all of course is that for there to be a search for home in the first place, there must have been an existing sense of wrongness, displacedness,
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move into the death process where our best ally is our own open, fearless awareness.3
homelessness. And this sense of wrongness is all the more poignant because it subsists in the midst of a culture that proffers, nurtures and valorizes all manner of home-equivalents: property, identity, name, status, and related cultural markers. Despite all these (esoterically in fact because of them), the seeker is denied refuge. The secret must be elsewhere: as The Lost Ones phrases it, `whatever it is they are searching for, it is not that.' The secret is in the unsayableness of the real, a proposition which appears, in our word-obsessed humanist regime, to be not even so much radical as virtually impossible to conceptualise, recognise or refer to at all. In a despotism of the referent ± the sayable as the viable ± the awareness which Beckett and the Buddhists use these texts to report is virtually smothered. It is only by symbolism, the isthmus of the soulworld, that its emergency can be communicated. And the tattered histories of all the Beckett characters only go to testify to the same fact, that that smothering is something general, it is endemic in the culture that, for instance, pronounces Watt `a university man' but affords him so little in the way of help in his predicament. Beckett's text neither enforces perhaps more clearly than any other of his works the mythopoetic force of the image of homelessness across all of them: the effect of this power is to recognise that anyone who does not subscribe to the normative definitions of home-as-identity, the self-as-locus-of-the-sayable, is going to be judged a psychological vagrant. That person must necessarily become familiar with the path of `no coming, no going', `thenceless, thitherless there', and live in a world in which fixed knowledge is once and forever abandoned. And if the mythographic method of reading is applied here again, we find that on the mythic plane the soul, which cannot bear the collective lie about identity, and which therefore must encounter and accept psychical vagrancy, is at that moment discovering that the actual meaning of home (as opposed to its disingenuously erected one) is perhaps where it was least expected, that is, in the void, as the `neither', in the `great shroud billowing in all over you' as That Time described it. In the language of Buddhism, when one ceases to subscribe to the collective error of perspective known as self and world, then the true nature of reality, the `clarity of emptiness', is what takes its place. It is like sleep, and even more like death, in that it offers few grasping-hooks, fewer footholds. The vertigo of enlightenment is precisely that voidance of mental and physical furniture and baggage that the addicted-to-living dare not undertake. The scheme of bourgeois rationalism is in fact mythographed by household objects, furniture, baggage, luggage, local
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roads, domicile, property, home ground. And it is symptomatic of the self-jealousy of that rationalism that it outlaws homelessness as dirt, refuse, the unwanted, the vagrant: the state of no fixed address. It is as though for the bourgeois, the illusion of permanence is always on the point of revealing its own farcical weakness, and therefore intent on covering that weakness and protecting its shored-up interests. At a deeper level, of course, and this is where Beckett's mythograph exercises its unique compulsion, the bourgeois is defined not by the markers normally associated with it ± social status, wealth, pride in selfreliance, love of comfort, and the like. It is defined solely by the fear of death. Hence come the peculiar characteristics that shape the bourgeois: the insistence on enclosing oneself, the accretion of material surroundings irrespective of their aesthetic value, the obsession with offspring and posterity achievements. These markers are evidence of the fear-ful resistance to death and dying which is characteristic of the modern world; and Beckett's exposure of this resistance offers us an insight across the threshold between the modern and the ancient world. Indeed whenever the bourgeois structures of self and identity are shaken, or dissolved by artistic, ritual, erotic, mystical or imaginative practices, at those moments the threshold to the ancient world is laid open. For the distinction between the ancient world and the modern is only superficially an historical distinction; in reality it is one of perspective. This book opened by arguing that to theatregoers and lovers of literature Beckett's works appeared such an offence, so hopelessly pessimistic, for one main reason: he had laid humanist ethics and culture to rest, and his creative eye, his witness-point, standing at this grave-side, asked the audience by default to do the same. The energy of his works is in direct proportion to their degree of offence ± in that Beckett's art must inevitably offend (and scarcely honour) the humanist perspective which it has buried. This energy originates the implicit question, `With what equipment, with what eye, having done away with that humanist eye, does Beckett witness the funeral of his own culture?' Normally the witness is occupier and representative of culture, not its undertaker. Beckett's witnessing point, not being the humanist idea of self and other and environment, is in another place, in fact not even that, but placeless, and must seek to act non-locationally and catalytically. The world of soul, mythopoetic plane, is the only place where the total emptiness of the clear light, void, rigpa of pure consciousness, can meet the world of solids, the world of being born (incarnation) in which the human says `I was a solid in the midst of other solids.'7 The incarnated soul's nameless longings, obscure dreads, desire for greater life
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That Unheeded Neither 219
than the living death of solidity, and desire alternately for the greater life following the death of the `solid flesh', all these can be expressed, find voice, only in the world of soul. This is why such emphasis has to be given to the mythopoetic plane when interpreting the art of someone like Beckett. Otherwise we find no understanding for Beckett's insistence on the uselessness of voice, name, station and habitation, and likewise no insight into the necessity to `go on' to which his creative work responds. The displacement of the humanist witness and its concomitants does not do away, nevertheless, with the power to see. This situation (together with its implications), and no other, is what this study has set out to explore. As we have seen, the mythopoetic plane is the place of encounter between the soul and its understanding, dim or clear, of sexuality. It is on this plane, in any work of art that expresses ambivalent responses to sex, that the soul inevitably expresses its predicament in terms of a relationship with the Great Goddess. There is a bipolar meaning of incarnation for body and soul. From the point of view of soul/spirit, the Goddess force is the capacity ± and offers the means ± for incarnation. From the point of view of the incarnate human being, the Goddess force is the capacity/means for staying incarnate (maintaining relationship with the planet) and procreation (so to speak, `growing' further humans). Studying the `tragic equation' in the way we have done shows that there is a connection between the male refusal of the Goddess and the prevalence of a Cartesian myth of separation between self and world. The manic pursuit of Cartesian separation, seen from the Goddess's point of view, is an exaggerated emphasis of an existing tendency of soul, and this tendency we can read in the myth-of-descent as being reluctance to enter the earthly chain (bondage and sequence), what Beckett calls `gnawing, preying, oozing, longing'. From the Goddess's point of view, which could be called the infinite compassion of Goddess-wisdom, the Apollonian project(ion) of asserting total separation and independence from Complete Being can be understood if not excused. Perhaps that is why in the mythography of soul (which describes the esoteric content of that antagonism), Adonis/Apollo, once destroyed by the vengeance of the Goddess (in which she occupies the form of a wild animal, a boar), is transformed into another manifestation of the Goddess herself, a flower, in an act of `resurrection'. Hughes writes of this transformation that it is a spiritual alchemy by which the Goddess transforms the conflicting, resistant, hostile elements of the tragic plane into the consecrated
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220 Beckett and Eros
elements of the transcendental plane ± her own plane. [I]n the rebirth on the transcendental plane, the Flower radiates the sexual passion of the boar, spiritualized, rooted in earth but consecrated and blossoming in the spirit. [. . .] Which is to say Shakespeare's opus transforms Hell into the Flower of Paradise, as Dante's did. [. . .] The whole operation is driven by the nature of the Boar (in its striving to reclaim Adonis) and the nature of the Flower, which has condensed out of the ethical spirit that always rode the Boar, and that bears the child.8 Whereas Hughes casts an eye back from Shakespeare, the subject of his study, to Dante whose work tells him the same story, it has been my aim to cast an eye forward, from Shakespeare to Beckett, and to suggest that Beckett's struggle with his culture was the same as Shakespeare's and Dante's, and that Beckett faced it using the same mythopoetic resources. Speaking of the culturally established antagonism between male and female, Hughes says of Shakespeare that while he analysed the manifestations of that frenzy within a world of suppressive (Puritan) order, he reintegrates the results of his analysis within the world of Complete Being, where the reborn god of frenzy became ± as it was Adonis's original nature to become ± a flower. The Boar that he found, in the puritan world, as the son of hell became, because of his skillful husbandry, in the world of Complete Being, a flower.9 Beckett was working within an updated, but not fundamentally changed, `suppressive order': this time the order is not strictly Puritan, rather post-Cartesian humanist; but its relationship to chthonian mystery and female energy is virtually unchanged from the time of the Puritan impulse, further identified by Nietzsche as the Apollo force.10 It is this fact that justifies the reapplication to modern literature of the model of the Goddess of Complete Being which Hughes applied to the Renaissance. For Beckett, as for Shakespeare, female energy, while rageful toward the male's postures of rejection, never cancels its own constitution as expression of love. From this point of view, the suffering of Beckett's women characters presents no anomaly to the reader. Esoterically, the frantic anti-female gestures of the Beckett heroes amount to a gesture of wounded love on the part of Complete Being itself, and that gesture finds fault with mismanaged relationship, rather than casting it in the role of an out-and-out evil. To adopt Beckett's words, we might see this gesture of the Goddess, made through Beckett's males as well as females, is indeed one `of helpless compassion'.11
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That Unheeded Neither 221
The Goddess is indissoluble from physical life, the `withness of the body'.12 In this sense as E. G. Howe and Ted Hughes say, all living beings, not only women, are the body of the Great Goddess. She applies to all, including those who deny her. That is the salient difference between the Goddess-energy and the autocratic, forbidding male intelligence, `the fanatic but irresponsibly abstract and inhuman intelligence that splits the Goddess, and condemns her sexuality', and which repulses what it cannot deal with. To all who represent this condemnation, the Goddess exists as expression of the degree to which `their alienation from her `love' corresponds to their own purely intellectual (even `theoretical') substance, to their critical absolutism.'13 In the sense that physical life is still a mystery, with a spiritual origin, the Goddess is therefore not just the representative of sense, flesh and blood, and sexuality (which is the reason she was hated by a male elite). There is more to it than this. The force of neither has another hidden systemic effect in the whole work of Beckett and the language of soul of which his writings are part. The mythopoetics of a sexual encounter (the yes or no of Venus and Adonis) implies and has a relationship with the mythopoetics of incarnation, the `decision' whether or not to actualise as human. This is the predicament of duality within the world of soul. But this duality is solved on the closely related level of the question whether Being itself is thought as dual or not. The problem of Being, for the modern west, has been indisputably a problem of alienation, the feeling (as Beckett puts it) of being locked into the skull or shut out of paradise; and ontologically the problem of being is solved by the esoteric process in which Being is discovered to be one, not dual, and therefore neither the terms spiritual nor material can be appropriate to name it. In saying `all real living is meeting' Martin Buber recognised the only duality that has any meaning is that of a relationship in which both participants recognise that their meeting is a sign that what brings them together is reality, rather than their thinking mistakenly that reality is what appears to be their separated state. This is the discovery of all the traditions of non-duality, including that of druidic thought, which was discredited by culture for precisely the same reasons as was the Goddesscult. In such a fact we can see how the two sets of variables, the mythological/gendered set and the ontological set, come to offer a mutually necessary solution. So we can say that the encounter with the Great Goddess is equivalent to the encounter with complete Being, Non-duality, and this encounter is a necessity following the collapse of the humanist system of separativity, of independent existence, of the very duality that makes the
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222 Beckett and Eros
world and physical life an appropriatable, exploitable exterior quantity. In this sense the meaning of the myth is not only sexual and spiritual in dimensions but also political; for it is by the sleight-of-hand which tries to establish duality as truth, and to instate the tragic error as the inalienable rights of man, that ecological mishaps have been licensed as humanly possible.14 If we want to track the myth into its furthest corridors, I think we can say that the revenge of the Goddess not only takes the form of a wild boar that kills its refusing beloved, but also the form of an earth whose abuse at the hands of man eventually poisons him or damages him through some other environmental `back-fire'. In mysticism, sexuality and politics, then, we can see that the offence against Complete Being ± whether seen as offence against a Goddess, or against another human being, or against the natural environment ± does not pass without reply, and is a far grosser offence than Beckett's against the humanist cultural programme by which generations have been educated into the illusion of separateness. It is no coincidence that in the mythopoetics of the Goddess, Love comes to be focused in physical life, in the mother/lover figure. The reason is that the spiritual level of the sexual image, that is, the predicament of incarnation or non-incarnation, is solved by compassion for living beings, and to all intents and purposes the living beings we most consort with are the living beings of the earth, brought there by the incidence and causation of organic life, or the reproductive faculty. The solution to the soul's problem ± its longing for freedom or for not having been born, its incarnation-reluctance, or its ambivalence ± is to pay compassionate attention to the living beings, all of which are the interexistent family of the Goddess, surrounding us. That rootedness to earth is not bondage and imprisonment in the usual sense, neither is it Cartesian enclosure in cerebral fantasies of autonomy, which proves equally disastrous to the health of the psyche, as Beckett showed. The only possible relationship to the surrounding world is love, that is why the Goddess myth works in the way it does. Since Cartesian duality shows wounds on all levels, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a relationship of hatred. Hatred is sheer non-relationship, refusal to recognise the fact of interexistence. That refusal instigates the tragic madness. It is extraordinary how the myth of the Goddess, in the hands of creative artists, can comprehend all the levels we have been discussing, and not advert to any of them exclusively. In that capacity art is uniquely inclusive.
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That Unheeded Neither 223
Chapter
1
1 Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 313. 2 Knowlson, pp. 91, 135, 277±80, 447±51; Cronin, pp. 206±7, 264±6, 437±8, 450±1. 3 Beckett, quoted in Cronin, p. 557. 4 The biographies by Knowlson (pp. 61, 79±86, 103±10, 284±91, 472±5, 647), Cronin (pp. 103±7, 124±31, 152±3, 159±63, 289±305, 502±5), and Bair (pp. 53, 58±61, 74±5, 84±7, 100±2, 274±81) interpret variously the facts known. 5 Juliet, p. 147. Steven Connor adverts to a critical marketplace of questionable integrity in relation to Beckett (Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988, pp. 185±201). 6 See, for example, Knowlson, pp. 408±11. 7 Bataille, Eroticism, 167. 8 Hughes, Winter Pollen. `The Snake in the Oak', pp. 373±465; `The Poetic Self of T. S. Eliot', pp. 268±92; `Myths, Metres, Rhythms', pp. 310±72. 9 Paglia, 1992, p. 26. 10 Paglia, pp. 37, 27, 13. 11 Knowlson, pp. 130 ff, 172, 180, 224; and Cronin, pp. 18±38, 49. 12 Bataille, op. cit. p. 138. 13 Hughes, Shakespeare, pp. 278, 349; see also `Poetry and Violence', Winter Pollen, pp. 251±67. See also E. G. Howe, The Mind of the Druid, pp. 74±5. 14 Juliet, p. 65. 15 Juliet, p. 140. 16 Beckett, 1961, quoted in Juliet, pp. 66, 150. 17 Kathleen Raine, Deserted Shore, part 67. 18 Bokar Rinpoche, pp. 36±7. 19 Dudjom Lingpa, p. 27. 20 Beckett's last original work, `What is the word', see Knowlson, pp. 700, 703; also Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 17. 21 Urthona 9, July 1998, is a special issue entitled `The Symbolic Cosmos'. See Ratnagarbha, `The Five-storeyed Palace', p. 10. 22 Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 8. 23 Beckett, For to End Yet Again, CSP1929±89, p. 245. 24 Raine, Deserted Shore, p. 76. 25 Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 372. 26 See, for example, Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis. 27 Peter Lamborn Wilson, Shower of Stars, chapters II, III, VII, VIII. 28 Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 297. 29 Shelley, Shelley's Prose, p. 185. 30 See Eigen, Psychic Deadness. 31 See Davies, Romanticism, chapter 5. 224
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Notes
32 See Andrei Plesu, `Angels: Elements for a Theory of Proximity', Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), Jahrbuch 1991/92, pp. 273±86. 33 Juliet, p. 138. 34 James Low in Low (ed), p. 161. 35 Juliet, p. 157. 36 Beckett, Stirrings Still, CSP1929±89, p. 265. 37 Raine, Deserted Shore, parts 82, 113, 112.
Chapter
2
1 Thompson, p. 62. 2 Ibid., p. 196. 3 The Verticalist Manifesto, signed by Beckett and others, is reprinted in Macmillan, p. 66; See also Kathleen Raine, `The Vertical Dimension', Temenos 13 (1992), pp. 195±212. 4 Thompson, p. 213. 5 Thompson, p. 196. 6 Hughes, Shakespeare, 105. 7 Quoted by C. Ackerley, `Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt', Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui (2): Beckett in the 1990s, eds M. Buning et al., Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1993, pp. 179±80.
8 R. M. Pirsig, Lila: An Enquiry into Morals, p. 145.
9 Beckett, Malone Dies, Trilogy, pp. 171±79; How It Is, p. 47.
10 Richard Wilhelm, quoted in E. L. Grant Watson, p. 110. 11 Dudjom Lingpa, pp. 27, 103. 12 Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 158. 13 Hughes, op. cit., pp. 214, 221, 222. 14 Shakespeare, Hamlet, II ii 312±316. 15 Quoted in conversation, Temenos 12 (1991), p. 13. 16 Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 169. 17 Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, pp. 70±74. 18 Beckett, Malone Dies, Trilogy, p. 214. 19 Esoteric psychology has a lineage traced in the west from theosophy through its western elaborations, e.g. Rudolf Steiner, P. D. Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, Maurice Nicoll. 20 Beckett, Texts for Nothing 5, CSP1929±89, p. 117. 21 ibid. 120±21. 22 Beckett, Texts for Nothing 7, CSP1929±89, p. 129. 23 Beckett, Texts for Nothing 10, CSP1929±89, p. 142. 24 Paglia, p. 8.
Chapter
3
1 Bob Dylan, `Seeing the Real You at Last', Empire Burlesque (1984), Columbia CK 40110. 2 See Heath, The Sexual Fix. Macmillan, 1980. 3 See Knowlson, pp. 257, 357; Cronin, p. 83; and Bair, pp. 329, 347, 353±5. 4 Beckett, Proust and three Dialogues, p. 81.
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Notes 225
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
On Verticalism, see Macmillan, pp. 62±75.
Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 52.
Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 45.
H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg, p. 171.
Levinas, in Kearney (ed.), Dialogues, pp. 63±66.
Ibid. Ibid. Bohm, p. 171. Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 44±5. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 367±8. Beckett, Stirrings Still, CSP1929±89, p. 265. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 324. Beckett, op. cit., p. 276. See Chapter 2, note 6. Quoted from Waldemar Januszak, The Truth about Art, broadcast on Channel 4 Television, December 1998. 20 Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 158.
Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
4
Gontarski, CSP1929±89, p. xxviii. Beckett, Malone Dies, Trilogy, p. 22. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 373. Dudjom Lingpa, p. 9.
Low in Low (ed.), p. 164.
Bokar Rinpoche, p. 36±7.
Ibid., p. 43±4.
Beckett, Stirrings Still, CSP1929±89, p. 265.
Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 127.
Beckett, Molloy, Trilogy, p. 59. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 297. Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 128. `Disabled Figures: The Residua to Stirrings Still', Pilling (ed), Cambridge Companion to Beckett, p. 173. Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 126. Paglia, p. 7. Chimed Rigdzin, in Low (ed.), p. 40. Dudjom Lingpa, p. 91. Chetsangpa, in Low (ed.), p. 56. Beckett, Words and Music, CSPL, p. 127. See p. 32. Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 126. Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 176. Thompson, p. 200. Thompson, p. 196. Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 127. Ibid, p. 126. Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 176.
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226 Notes
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
Bokar Rinpoche, p. 44±5. Hughes writes on occultism in Winter Pollen, p. 293. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 455. Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV.i.148±156. Shakespeare, Richard II, V.v.38. Bokar Rinpoche, p. 41. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture, p. 109. See also Davies, `Giving up the Ghost be born at last', in Pilling (ed.), Cambridge Companion, pp. 47±52. Dudjom Lingpa, p. 111. Raine, Deserted Shore, part 52. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 455. Wilhelm Reich, `The Stage and the Meadow', in Grossinger (ed.), p. 211.
Chapter
5
1 SchureÂ, p. 97.
2 See Paul Herman, `Integral Psychology', and Jim Denman, `Counseling Her mits, Hanged Men and Fools', Haddick (ed.), Transformation, pp. 95±102, 103±10. 3 SchureÂ, p. 330. 4 SchureÂ, p. 331. 5 SchureÂ, p. 338. 6 Beckett and others, Verticalist manifesto. See Macmillan, ch. 4. 7 Beckett, Molloy, Trilogy, p. 47. 8 Plotinus, p. 341. 9 Chetsangpa, in Low (ed.), p. 59. 10 Low, in Low (ed.), p. 161.
11 Ibid., p. 164.
12 Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 131.
13 Chetsangpa, in Low (ed.), p. 65.
14 Low, in Low (ed.), p. 139.
15 Plotinus, p. 338.
16 Raine, Deserted Shore, part 80.
17 See Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Part 1, chapter I; Part 2, chapter IX. 18 Raine, Deserted Shore, part 78. 19 Keats, letter 21 Apr 1819. 20 Plotinus, p. 340. 21 William Blake, Verse letter to Thomas Butts (1800), Complete Writings, p. 321. 22 Rumi, Mathnawi; R. A. Nicholson, Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose, London, Curzon Press, 1987, p. 155. 23 Rumi, Mathnawi, quoted in Thompson, p. 92. 24 See E. L. Grant Watson, chapter 4. 25 For example, Beckett, Rough for Radio II, CSPL, p. 115. 26 SchureÂ, p. 343. 27 Quoted in Thompson, p. 93. 28 Thompson, p. 93. 29 SchureÂ, pp. 325, 326.
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Notes 227
228 Notes 30 SchureÂ, p. 327.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
See, for example, Trungpa and Fremantle, pp. 169±227. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 106. Ibid., p. 214. The common fritillary, fritillaria meleagris, is named after a similar myth in which Meleager, the protagonist, undergoes the same fate as Adonis. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 7. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 221. See Chapter 1, Note 8. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 7. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 69. Paglia, pp. 37, 41, 45. Hughes, Shakespeare, pp. 242, 264 Hughes, Shakespeare, pp. 170, 221. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 513. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 514 (italics mine). Hughes, Shakespeare, pp. 516. See Low (ed.), p. 130. Beckett, Company, pp. 55±9, and First Love, CSP1929±89, pp. 44±5. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 221 (italics mine) Howe, p. 110. ibid. See Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Part 2, chs I, III, VIII, IX. Thompson, p. 192. Thompson, p. 194. Thompson, p. 97. Beckett, CSPL, pp. 201±7. Mondaito, p. 133. For example, Jonathan Kalb, in J. Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 137.
Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
6
7
Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 91.
Knowlson, pp. 368 ff.
Beckett, Eleutheria, pp. 5, 6.
Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 5.
Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 124.
Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 119. Spoken by the glazier.
Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 138.
Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 82.
Beckett, letter to T. McGreevy, quoted in Cronin, p. 261.
Beckett, The Unnamable Trilogy, p. 299.
Beckett quoted in Knowlson, p. 219.
See Wilson, T.A.Z., pp. 24±95.
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Chapter
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
Beckett, Eleutheria, pp. 116±7. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 365. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 361. Low, in Low (ed.), p. 144. Beckett, quoted in Cronin, p. 262. Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 147 (italics mine). Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 360. Beckett, Texts for Nothing 12, CSP1929±89, p. 149 (italics mine). Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 161. Beckett, CSPL, p. 117. For examples of Beckett's observations of animate and inanimate nature, see extracts from letters and conversation in Knowlson, pp. 207, 233, 407, 464, 551, 617; and Cronin, 453. See also Beckett, CSP1929±89, pp. 42, 49, 59, 64, 82, 84, 95±6, Trilogy, pp. 91, 138, 153, 155±6. Beckett, CSPL, p. 116. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, pp. 297±8. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 290. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 308. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, pp. 367±8. Beckett, Texts for Nothing 5, CSP1929±89, p. 120. Beckett and others, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Beckett, Texts for Nothing 3, CSP1929±89, p. 113. Beckett, Texts for Nothing 6, CSP1929±89, p. 123. Beckett, Texts for Nothing 5, CSP1929±89, pp. 120±1.
Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16
8
Shelley, `On Love', Wu (ed.), Romanticism, p. 861.
Beckett, How It Is, p. 95.
Beckett, Ping (1962), CSP1929±89, p. 151.
Beckett, Faux DeÂparts 4, CSP1929±89, p. 272.
Beckett, How It Is, p. 140.
Beckett, Molloy, Trilogy, 52.
Plotinus, p. 334.
Plotinus, p. 335.
SchureÂ, p. 341.
See Wilson, T.A.Z. and Shower of Stars. Beckett, All Strange Away (1963±4), Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), Ping (1966), Closed Space (1960s), The Lost Ones (1966±70), Lessness (1969), The North (1972), For To End Yet Again (1973±75). On the uncertain dates of some of these texts see Davies, The Ideal Real: Beckett's Fiction and Imagination, London and Toronto, 1994, pp. 153±4, and footnote. Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 170. See Sunim, pp. 40±44. See GueÂnon, The Reign of Quantity. Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 56, 59, 101. See Trungpa and Fremantle, pp. 177, 212±3.
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Notes 229
17 Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 170. 18 Beckett, Words and Music, CSPL, p. 129. Square brackets indicate editorial elisions of stage directions only. 19 Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 123. 20 Beckett, Words and Music, CSPL, p. 125. 21 Raine, Deserted Shore, parts 22, 24, 46. 22 Beckett, Company, pp. 57±9. 23 Metzner, `Uncovering the veils of Illusion' in Haddick (ed.), p. 64. 24 Sardello, p. 9.
Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
9
Beckett, All Strange Away, CSP1929±89, p. 125. Beckett, Texts for Nothing 9, CSP1929±89, p. 137. See Bair, pp. 350±2; Knowlson, pp. 351±3; Cronin, p. 359. Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 298. Gemistos Plethon, Oracles, quoted in C. Bamford, `The Dream of Gemistos Plethon', Sphinx 6 (1994), p. 64. Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 482. Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape, CSPL, p. 61. Beckett, Company, pp. 57±9 Chetsangpa, in Low (ed.), p. 57. Shelley, `To A Skylark'.
Chapter
10
1 Beckett, All That Fall, CSPL, p. 14. 2 Matthias Claudius, `Der Tod und das MaÈdchen' [Franz Schubert op 7 No. 8 (1817)], Texte deutscher Lieder ed. D. Fischer-Dieskau, Munich, dtv, 1980, p. 137.
3 Blake, The Book of Thel, Complete Writings, p. 130.
4 See P. Lamborn Wilson, Shower of Stars, pp. 87, 153.
5 Beckett, Malone Dies, Trilogy, p. 183.
6 Chah, p. 27.
7 Bokar Rinpoche, p. 88.
8 SchureÂ, p. 321.
Chapter
11
1 2 3 4 5 6
Paglia, p. 41. Beckett, Rough for Radio II, CSPL, pp. 115±24. Ibid., p. 121. Beckett, Texts for Nothing 8, CSP1929±89, p. 133. Beckett, As The Story Was Told, CSP1929±89, p. 212. See Ralph Metzner, `Uncovering the Veils of Illusion' in Haddick (ed.), pp. 61±71. 7 `Beckett as Director', in J. Pilling (ed.), op. cit, p. 204.
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230 Notes
Notes 231
Chapter
12
1 Dudjom Lingpa, p. 129. 2 For example, As no other dare fail: A tribute on Samuel Beckett's 80th birthday by his friends and admirers, London, John Calder, 1986; S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel beckett's Dramatic Texts, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985; C. Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993. 3 Beckett, Not I, CSPL, pp. 215±223.
4 F. R. Leavis, `Judgment and Analysis', Section VII of A Selection from Scrutiny,
vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 211±57.
5 Melanie McGrath, Motel Nirvana, New York, Picador, 1997, p. 47.
6 Paglia, p. 13.
7 Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 298.
8 Hughes, Shakespeare, pp. 222, 393.
9 Beckett, That Time, CSPL pp. 227±35.
10 Beckett, The Lost Ones, CSP1929±89, p. 213. 11 Osho (aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), Discourses on the Adhyatma Upanishad, Shaftesbury, Dorset and Rockport, Mass., Element, 1994, p. 266. 12 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Song of No Coming, No Going, Leeds, Interbeing Publications, 1997. 13 Chetsangpa, in Low (ed.), p. 57. 14 Ibid. 15 Stanley Messenger, `Ahriman & the matter of going off at half-cock', Newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society of Great Britain, vol. 75, 3 (1998), p. 6. 16 Low, in Low (ed.), introduction, p. xxiii. 17 Chetsangpa, in Low (ed.), p. 65. 18 Ibid. 19 Beckett, Rough for Radio II, CSPL, p. 121. 20 `Direct Indication' (anonymous text), in Low (ed.), p. 84. 21 Patrul Rinpoche, in Low (ed.), p. 96. 22 Beckett, Footfalls, CSPL, pp. 239±43. 23 `Direct Indication', in Low (ed.), p. 85. 24 Wallace Stevens, `The Idea of Order at Key West', Selected Poems, London, Faber, 1980, pp. 77±9. 25 Knowlson, p. 616, and Cronin, 220±2. 26 Beckett, CSP1929±89, p. 259±60.
Chapter
13
1 Beckett, Cascando, CSPL, pp. 137±44.
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8 See P. Davies, `Three novels and Four Nouvelles', in Pilling (ed.), op. cit., pp. 52±3. 9 Saraha, in Low (ed.), p. 130. 10 Beckett, Rough for Theatre II, CSPL, p. 82. 11 Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 482. 12 Raine, Deserted Shore, Part III.
2 Beckett, Texts for Nothing 8, CSP1929±89, p. 131. 3 Paul Davies, `Twilight and Universal Vision: Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said', Temenos 11 (1990), pp. 88±103. 4 Beckett, Molloy, Trilogy, p. 67. 5 Beckett, The End, CSP1929±89, p. 98. 6 Beckett, How It Is, p. 94. 7 Beckett, Eleutheria, pp. 58±9. 8 Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape, CSPL, p. 61. 9 Lopez, Heart Sutra, p. 20, and Sunim, p. 56. 10 Turning is a word used symbolically by esotericism, to mean metanoia or transformation. See, for example, Vincent Stuart, Changing Mind, Boston, Shambhala, 1981. 11 Dudjom Lingpa, p. 157. 12 Raine, Deserted Shore, part 44. 13 Chimed Rigdzin, in Low (ed.), p. 40. 14 Raine, Deserted Shore, part 86. 15 Beckett, Texts for Nothing 9, CSP1929±89, p. 137. 16 See Raoul Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha, London, Rider Hutchinson, 1980, Part 1 ch. 3, and pp. 80±81. 17 Quoted in Doll, pp. 16, 89. 18 Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 17. 19 Low, in Low (ed.), p. 144. 20 Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 372±3. 21 Beckett, Texts for Nothing 3, CSP1929±89, pp. 110±11. 22 Beckett, Worstward Ho, p. 36. The Grove Press edition prints `vain last of' instead of Calder's `vain least of'. 23 Beckett, The Unnamable, Trilogy, p. 363. 24 Porter Abbott, chapters 1, 3, 4. 25 Dudjom Lingpa, p. 111. 26 Beckett, Stirrings Still, CSP1929±89, p. 264. 27 Dudjom Lingpa, p. 111. 28 Beckett, Play, CSPL pp. 147±60.
Chapter
14
1 Beckett, neither (1976), first published in book form in 1995, CSP1929±89, p. 258.
2 Beckett, quoted in Knowlson, p. 631.
3 Low, in Low (ed.), p. 141.
4 Ibid., p. 144.
5 Ibid., p. 145.
6 Ibid., p. 139.
7 Beckett, Molloy, Trilogy, p. 99.
8 Hughes, Shakespeare, pp. 478, 481.
9 Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 482.
10 Nietzsche, tr. C. P. Fadiman, The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music, New York, Dover Books, 1995. 11 Beckett, Not I, CSPL p. 215.
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232 Notes
Notes 233
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12 Thompson, p. 97. 13 Hughes, Shakespeare, p. 229. 14 See Davies, Romanticism, pp. 170±4.
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Station Hill Press, 1987. Norbu, Namkhai, Dzogchen, London, Penguin, 1989. Ochs, Carol, Behind the Sex of God: Toward a New Consciousness ± Transcending Matriarchy and Patriarchy, Boston, Mass., Beacon Press, 1977. Paglia, Camille, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays, London, Penguin, 1993. Paglia, Camille, `Sex and Violence, Or Nature and Art', introduction to Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, London, Penguin, 1992. Pilling, J. Beckett Before Godot, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pilling, J (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Plotinus, tr. S. MacKenna and ed. J. Dillon, The Enneads, London, Penguin, 1991. Porter Abbott, H., Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996. Raine, Kathleen, Autobiographies, London, Skoob, 1991. Raine, Kathleen, On a Deserted Shore, London, Agenda Editions, 1995. Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: the Reimagination of Modern Life, New York, Lindisfarne Books, 1992. SchureÂ, Edouard, The Great Initiates: The Secret History of Religions, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1961. Shelley, P. B., ed. D. L. Clark, Shelley's Prose, London, Fourth Estate, 1988. Shushud, Hasan Lutfi, tr. M. Holland, The Masters of Wisdom of Central Asia (Hacegan Hanedani), Ellingstring, Coombe Springs Press, 1983. Stuckenschmidt, H. H., Schoenberg: a Biography, London, Duckworth, 1976. Sunim, Mu Soeng, Heart Sutra: Ancient Buddhist Wisdom in the Light of Quantum Reality, Cumberland, Rhode Island, Primary Point Press, 1991. Thompson, William Irwin, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London, Rider Hutchinson, 1981. Trungpa Rinpoche, Chogyam F. Fremantle, tr. and ed., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Boston, Shambhala, 1992. Wilson, Peter Lamborn, Shower of Stars: Dream and Book, New York, Autonomedia, 1996. Wilson, Peter Lamborn (a.k.a. Hakim Bey), T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone), New York, Green Anarchist Books, 1994. Wu, Duncan (ed.), Romanticism: an Anthology (1st edn), Oxford, Blackwell, 1994.
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236 Bibliography
alchemy 64, 68±9, 153±7, 162, 164±5, 168±9 angelology 17, 225n32 appropriation 42±4, 47±50, 63, 72, 83 autobiography 125±7, 185 Barfield, Owen 34±5 Barthes, Roland 183 Bataille, Georges 11, 135, 170, 183 Beckett, Samuel (works): `Dante . . Bruno.Vico . . . Joyce' 25; A Piece of Monologue 137, 205; Afar a Bird 179; All Strange Away 103, 132, 136, 139±41, 144, 169, 205; All That Fall 20, 81, 103, 144, 145; As The Story Was Told 169, 171±3, 178; Cascando 103, 197±204; Catastrophe 172, 177; Closed Space 229n11; Company 100, 137, 139, 147, 150, 162, 199, 205, 206, 214; Eh Joe 105±8, 137, 139; Eleutheria 68, 106, 111±19, 201; Faux DeÂparts, 229n4; First Love 93, 100; Footfalls 31, 123, 137, 159, 172, 177±8, 190±6, 211; For To End Yet Again 229 n11; From an Abandoned Work 131, 170; Happy Days 131, 162; How It Is 30, 80, 127, 129, 174, 200; Ill Seen Ill Said 145, 205, 206, 214; Imagination Dead Imagine 34, 199, 209, 212; Krapp's Last Tape 106, 137, 139, 143±51, 202; Lessness 229 n11; Malone Dies 30, 81, 202; Mercier and Camier 98; Molloy 13, 67, 98, 131, 144, 146; Murphy, 101; neither 215±19; Nohow On 128, 205±12, 214; Not I 42, 137, 140, 172, 174, 178, 179±84, 193, 198, 200; nouvelles 83, 93, 100, 119; Ping 128; Play 213; Proust & Three Dialogues 225n4; Rough for Radio II 118, 167±72, 177, 197; Rough for
Theatre I 104; Rough for Theatre II 137, 175±8; Stirrings Still 123, 174±5, 200, 209, 212±14; Texts for Nothing 36±7, 122±4, 144, 170±1, 177, 199, 206; That Time 137, 139, 146, 169, 172, 185±90, 193, 197, 218; The End 119, 200; The Lost Ones 63, 124, 131, 136, 218; The North 229 n11; The Unnamable 48, 64, 68, 113±14, 117, 119±22, 125, 169, 171, 176, 182, 184, 197; Trilogy 126±7, 199; Waiting for Godot 12, 174, 192; Watt 20, 81, 141, 218; Words and Music 135±139; Worstward Ho 45, 48, 205, 207±12, 214 birth 19±22, 31, 81±2, 100, 189, 210, 217, 223 Blake, William 85±6, 90±91, 188 Bohm, David 47±8 bourgeois 4, 14, 111±14, 133, 218±19 Buddhism 16, 17, 20±1, 31, 39±41, 53±64, 66±71, 116, 141±2, 146, 161, 173±4, 189±90, 200, 216±17; dharmakaya 69, 211; dzogchen 16, 20, 26, 31, 39, 53±64, 70, 81±2, 116, 159, 179, 185, 187±9, 192, 203, 206, 212; ghZi 39, 187; karma 21, 25±6, 99, 150, 158; nirvana 60; Prajnaparamita Sutra (Heart Sutra) 16, 59±60, 68, 202; refuge 216±18; rigpa 198, 203, 219; samsara 21, 41, 60, 99, 116, 150, 192, 213; sangha 216±7; Tibetan 16, 20, 46, 90, 135, 137±8, 187; vajrayana 40, 54±63, 67±69, 175, 185, 189±90, 207±8; vehicles 59; View (see also ghZi) 62, 142, 179, 212; Zen 47, 50 Cartesianism 12, 42, 48, 50, 104, 129±35, 173, 182, 213, 220±1, 223 colonialism
237
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Index
Dante 17, 167, 133±4, 221 Darwin, Charles 87±8 death 19±20, 31, 33±6, 50, 69, 82±5, 133±5, 153, 155±9, 219 Death and the Maiden (Schubert) 153, 164 deconstruction 9 dependent origination 55±58, 134 Derrida, Jacques 44, 54 descent of soul, see soul desire 209±10, 219±20 druidism 96, 101±2, 222, 224 n13; see also paganism Dylan, Bob 42 eco-criticism 222±3 Eleusinian myth 15 Eros 7, 11, 12, 22, 53, 90±2, 113±14, 135±40, 167±9, 221±3 esoteric tradition 17, 36, 39, 41, 50, 64±67, 183, 190, 206, 225 n19, 232 n10
Ibn 'Arabi 45 Identity, see subjectivity imagination 14 incarnation 6, 36, 53, 80±90, 103, 137±8, 152, 154, 156, 208, 210, 220, 222±3 individual, see subjectivity Johnson, Samuel 26 Joyce, James 25 Juliet, Charles 20 Jung, C. G. 13, 14, 20, 21, 30, 89, 102, 145, 162, 187 Kafka, Franz 176 Keats, John 84, 147, 152 Knowlson, James 215, 224 n4, 225 n3, 229 n23
feminism 94±5, 184, 188; see also gender Foucault, Michel 42, 44
Lao-Tzu 45 Levinas, Emmanuel 46±7 life principle 12±14, 19 locality, see location location 17, 49, 114, 133±4, 182, 194±5, 211, 213, 218 Lyotard, J.-F. 42, 54,
gender 66, 90±105 passim, 166, 183±4, 220±3 genre 135±9, 170±1 Gilgamesh, Epic of 103 gnosticism 18, 24 Goddess 10, 11, 12, 33, 95±101, 137, 162, 166, 183±4, 220±3 Graves, Robert 94 GueÂnon, Rene 134, 229 n14
magic 65±7, 71 Marxism 9, 37 myth 4, 9±10, 28, 73 mythographic reading 8, 23±38 passim, 124, 153, 175, 218 mythography vi, 23±5, 30±8, 84, 88, 124, 141±2, 152, 155, 175, 188, 200, 204, mythopoetics 21±2, 165, 220±3
Heath, Stephen 42 Heracleitus 24, 36 homelessness 61, 47±51, 182, 216±18 Howe, E. G. 101±2, 222 Hughes, Ted 10, 11, 28, 31±33, 64, 91±102 passim, 147, 221 humanism 22, 41, 49±52, 53, 55, 63±4, 83, 104±5, 112±14, 116±18, 131±2, 151, 161, 166, 173, 177, 179±85, 189, 190±1, 193±6, 204±5, 210±12, 216±20 hypnosis 140±2
Neoplatonism, see Platonism Nietzsche, Friedrich 232 n10 nirvana, see Buddhism occultism 65, 119, 145, 227 n29; see also esoteric oneirocriticism 18 paganism 95±6 Paglia, Camille 10, 37, 58, 68, 96, 166, 216 Paracelsus 86
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238 Index
personality, see subjectivity Pirsig, Robert M. 29±30 Platonism 15, 20, 23, 25, 65, 146 Plotinus 80±1, 84, 102, 131 positivism 41, 50, 55, 188, 205 postmodernism 42±3, 186 pre-generic voice 135±8, 170±1 psychoanalysis 7, 9, 75, 122, 140±2, 166, 169±70, 181, 190 Raine, Kathleen 15, 17, 21±22, 69, 84, 139, 178, 204 rationalism 34, 97, 213, 218±9 realism 26±9, 44±5, 95±6, 100±101, 118, 132, 162, 184, 194±5 Reich, Wilhelm 71 reincarnation 150, 213±14; see also incarnation ritual 28±9, 166, 211, 219 Rothko, Mark 130 Rumi, Jalal ud'din 86±87 Russell, George (`á'), 158 samsara, see Buddhism Saraha, song of, 58, 61 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4±5, 116±7 SchureÂ, Edouard 76±80, 87 self, see subjectivity Shakespeare 10, 12, 26, 92±6, 221; Richard II 68; The Tempest 64±71; Venus and Adonis 12, 92±3 Shelley, Percy 19, 46, 102, 127, 151, 200
soul 8, 15, 17, 19, 23±5, 28±9, 31, 80±3, 103, 134±5, 151, 152, 171; descent of, 15±22, 72±88, 152, 157, 168, 175 Strindberg 112, 114; The Ghost Sonata 169 subjectivity 16, 17, 21, 29±31, 40, 49±50, 55, 57, 116, 125±8, 172±5, 177, 182±3, 186, 193±5, 206±7, 216±19 suicide 6 Tennyson, Alfred 199 territory 47±8, 52, 61, 216 Thompson, W. Irwin 23±5, 61, 88, 103, 104 tragedy 27, 67, 84, 71, 223 Upanishads, see Vedanta Vampirism 12 Van Velde, Bram 12, 13, Vedanta 16, 46, 72, 159, 161 Verticalism 14, 24, 225 n3, 227 n6 void 16, 70, 186±9, 193, 198, 208, 211±12, 218 Yeats, W.B. 74, 83, 114, 157 Zola, Emile 26 Zen, see Buddhism
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Index 239