“All Sturm and no Drang” Beckett and Romanticism Beckett at Reading 2006
Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 18
An Annual Bilingual Review Revue Annuelle Bilingue
EDITORS: Chief Editors: Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans (The Netherlands) Editorial Board: Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, Sjef Houppermans (The Netherlands), Dirk Van Hulle (Belgium), Angela Moorjani (USA) and Danièle de Ruyter (The Netherlands) Advisory Board: Enoch Brater (USA), Mary Bryden (UK), Lance Butler (France), Keir Elam (Italy), Stan E. Gontarski (USA), Onno Kosters (The Netherlands), John Pilling (UK), Jean-Michel Rabaté (USA) and Dominique Viart (France) EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE: All editorial correspondence should be addressed to: Dr M. Buning Nicolaas Maesstraat 88 1071 RE Amsterdam The Netherlands
[email protected] Toute correspondance destinée à la rédaction doit être adressée à: Dr S. Houppermans Faculteit der Letteren Vakgroep Frans, Boîte postale 9515 2300 RA Leiden Pays Bas Subscriptions, Advertisements and Business Correspondence: Editions Rodopi B.V., Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Telephone (020) - 611.48.21, Fax (020) - 447.29.79 USA/Canada: Editions Rodopi, 295 North Michigan Avenue – Suite 1B Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA, Tel.: ++ 1 (908) 298 9071, Fax.: ++ 1 (908) 298 9075, (USA only) 1-800-225-3998
“All Sturm and no Drang” Beckett and Romanticism Beckett at Reading 2006
Edited by
Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover photo: Anonymous, Samuel Beckett The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence". ISBN: 978-90-420-2301-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Beckett and Romanticism 1. Dirk Van Hulle “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism and “the Modern Prometheus”
15
2. Paul Lawley Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett
31
3. Elizabeth Barry The Long View: Beckett, Johnson, Wordsworth and the Language of Epitaphs
47
4. Mark Nixon Beckett and Romanticism in the 1930s
61
5. Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and Anthropomorphic Insolence
77
6. Franz Michael Maier Two Versions of Nacht und Träume: What Franz Schubert Tells Us about a Favourite Song of Beckett
91
7. John Bolin The “irrational heart”: Romantic Disillusionment in Murphy and The Sorrows of Young Werther
101
8. Andrew Eastham Beckett’s Sublime Ironies: The Trilogy, Krapp’s Last Tape, and the Remainders of Romanticism 117 9. Michael Angelo Rodriguez Romantic Agony: Fancy and Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s All Strange Away
131
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Beckett at Reading 2006 10. María José Carrera “En un lugar della mancha”: Samuel Beckett’s Reading of Don Quijote in the Whoroscope Notebook
145
11. Friedhelm Rathjen Neitherways: Long Ways in Beckett’s Shorts
161
12. John Pilling From an Abandoned Work: “all the variants of the one”
173
13. Anthony Cordingley Beckett and “l’ordre naturel”: The Universal Grammar of Comment c'est/How It Is
185
14. Marion Fries-Dieckmann Beckett and the German Language: Text and Image
201
15. Rónán McDonald “What a male!”: Triangularity, Desire and Precedence in “Before Play” and Play
213
16. Sean Lawlor “Alba” and “Dortmunder”: Signposting Paradise and the Balls-aching World
227
17. David A. Hatch Samuel Beckett’s “Che Sciagura” and the Subversion of Irish Moral Convention
241
18. Paul Stewart A Rump Sexuality: The Recurrence of Defecating Horses in Beckett’s Oeuvre
257
19. Gregory Byala Murphy, Order, Chaos
271
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20. Maximilian de Gaynesford Knowing How To Go On Ending
285
21. Karine Germoni The Theatre of Le Dépeupleur
297
22. Dirk Van Hulle / Mark Nixon “Holo and unholo”: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project 313
Free Space 23. Jackie Blackman Beckett Judaizing Beckett: “a Jew from Greenland” in Paris 325 24. Russell Smith “The acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself”: Beckett, the Author-Function, and the Ethics of Enunciation 341 25. Thomas J. Cousineau Demented vs. Creative Emulation in Murphy
355
26. Sjef Houppermans Falling Down and Standing Up and Falling Down Again…
367
27. Carla Taban Molloy: de ‘jeux de mots’ aux modalités po(ï)étiques de configuration textuelle
377
28. Guillaume Gesvret Posture de la prière, écriture de la précarité (Mal vu mal dit, Cap au pire et ...que nuages...)
393
29. Anne Cousseau Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett: “Cette parole nue qui vient de la souffrance”
407
Notes on Contributors
425
7
INTRODUCTION No matter how tongue-in-cheek Beckett’s references to Romanticism sometimes are, they keep recurring with a remarkable persistence throughout his work. The “blue flower,” one of the key symbols of Romantic yearning for unreachable horizons, is already present in Beckett’s personal Sturm und Drang piece, his first published story “Assumption.” Later on, the Blaue Blume appears as the “blue bloom” in “A Wet Night,” alluding to Leopold Bloom’s activities in the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses. To what extent Romanticism plays a role in Beckett’s developing poetics and his positioning vis-à-vis his great examples Joyce and Proust is a fascinating, because difficult, question. In his essay on the latter’s work, Beckett discerns a “romantic strain in Proust,” a “retrogressive tendency,” receding from the Symbolists back towards Victor Hugo. Although the blue flower seems to have withered after its reappearance in Watt, the impossible yearning it stands for never completely disappeared, from his early notes on Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (in the Dream Notebook) to the “missing word” (Stirrings Still) “afaint afar away” (what is the word). The entry on “Romanticism” in the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett points out, with reference to Molloy: His condition is essentially that of SB himself, mockery qualified by an undercurrent of German Romanticism, in literature (Hölderlin), music (Schubert), and art (Caspar David Friedrich). Not least of this, as in the art of Jack Yeats, was the sense of isolation, the insignificant human figure in an indifferent world, far from Wordsworth’s pantheistic belief but at the heart of the Winterreise. This love is manifest more obviously in the later drama, where SB is less fearful of deciduous beauty. A good study of the Romantic impulse in SB’s writings, revealing unexpected insights into a tradition vehemently rejected but never quite denied, is currently lacking. (487) In the past few decades there have been scattered efforts to shed some light on isolated traces of, or references to, Romanticism, but it remains difficult to fathom Beckett’s ambiguous and somewhat paradoxical
Introduction
attitude toward this period in literature, music and art history. Far from being a comprehensive examination, the dossier on “Beckett and Romanticism” in the current issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui tries to give an impetus to the study of this complex theme with contributions on Beckett’s attitudes toward Romantic aesthetics in general, including notions such as the sublime, irony, failure, ruins, fragments, fancy, imagination, epitaphs, translation, unreachable horizons, the infinite, the infinitesimal and the unfinished, but also on Beckett’s reading about the Romantic period (such as Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony and Théophile Gautier’s Histoire du romantisme), his affinity with specific Romantic artists and their influence on works such as Murphy, the trilogy, Krapp’s Last Tape and All Strange Away. The second part of the current issue presents a selection of papers given at the Beckett at Reading 2006 conference in Reading (30 April – 2 May 2006), which was jointly organised by the Beckett International Foundation and the University’s School of English and American Literature. The conference marked Beckett’s centenary, an event that Beckett himself had viewed in 1981 (the year of his 75th Birthday) as something to be avoided: I dread the year now upon us and all the fuss in store for me here, as if it were my centenary. I’ll make myself scarce while it lasts, where I don’t know. Perhaps the Great Wall of China, crouch behind it till the coast is clear. (Letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 11 January 1981; RUL) Reflecting the importance of the Beckett Foundation’s Archive to scholars, the focus of the conference somewhat naturally tended to be on empirical research and manuscript studies, but this did not exclude other approaches. Indeed, the variety of essays included in this issue shows the importance and benefits of scholarly dialogue and crossfertilization between different approaches. Scholars attending the conference were also introduced to the ongoing project of establishing digital editions of Beckett’s manuscripts, and an outline of this work is presented at the end of the section. While the previous SBT/A volume (Présence de Samuel Beckett) was predominantly French, the current issue is mainly English. Its “Freespace,” however, is truly bilingual. Different forms of otherness characterize several of these contributions, opening with essays on Beckett and Judaism, and the enunciative relation between author and 10
Introduction
text (focusing on Blanchot, Foucault, and Agamben). Falling down is the central motif in two other English essays, whereas the French contributions zoom in on linguistic matters, the posture of prayer in Beckett’s works and the relationship between Charles Juliet and Samuel Beckett. The volume as a whole shows that Beckett Studies is in a better state than Murphy during its arduous journey toward publication, described by Beckett as “All Sturm and no Drang” (letter to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936; HRHRC).
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BECKETT AND ROMANTICISM
“ACCURSED CREATOR”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”
Dirk Van Hulle The Romantic period is part of what Reinhart Koselleck has called the Sattelzeit (‘saddle period’), the era that flanks the French Revolution by fifty years on either side. To investigate Beckett’s ambiguous attitude towards this period, this essay starts with the Graveyard Poets and concludes with Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” – as she called Frankenstein in the introduction to the 1831 edition. The essay investigates the relationship between “the modern Prometheus” and his “creature,” and the theme of creation as a muddy but central issue in Beckett’s works and self-translations.
The subtitle of Mary Shelley’s most famous book refers to Frankenstein as “the modern Prometheus.” The rebellious Titan who steals fire from Olympus to save mankind was the champion of the great Romantic poets, notably Byron and Percy Shelley. The idea of defying the gods has not only had an influence on Romantic poetics, but was still noticeable in post-war literature as an artistic tendency which John Barth referred to as “the romantic tradition of rebelling against Tradition” (65). This defiant aspect of the Prometheus myth can be retraced in Samuel Beckett’s works, as Angela Moorjani has shown with reference to Catastrophe, suggesting a correspondence between the Protagonist and a “defiant Prometheus” in opposition to the “Zeuslike” Director (2005, 194). The present essay focuses on another aspect of the Prometheus myth, which has its origins in the Roman version of the Prometheus legend, notably in the Metamorphoses: the Ovidian Prometheus creates human beings by mixing earth with rain. The resulting mud is what we are, according to the text of Eh Joe: “Mud thou art” (1990, 365) instead of “dust” – as in the King James version of Genesis (III.19). In Rick Cluchey’s copy of the bilingual English/German edition, in the right margin next to the line “Mud thou art” / “Dreck bist du,” Beckett’s marginalia refer to Luther’s translation: “Den[n] du bist Erde / u[nd] sollst zu Erde werden / (Luther) / Genesis III 19” (RUL MS 3626, 59).1 At the same time this
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biblical reference is also an allusion to Goethe’s line “die Erde hat mich wieder” immediately after Faust’s suicide attempt, which Beckett quoted with a twist in the Addenda to Watt: “die Merde hat mich wieder” (1981, 251). 1. “night’s young thoughts” In this down-to-earth view of humanity the origin of human creatures coincides with their final resting place, the focal point of the Graveyard Poets. In Murphy, Samuel Beckett refers to one of these poets by trivializing Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: “But now it was wintertime again, night’s young thoughts had been put back an hour” (73-74). The same pun recurs in the eighth of the Texts for Nothing, but this time in the form of a self-translation: Tout cela est libre, tout cela est tentant. Vais-je y glisser, essayer d’en faire profiter encore une fois, mes infirmités de rêve, pour qu’elles deviennent chair et tournent, en s’aggravant, autour de cette place grandiose que je confonds peut-être avec celle de la Bastille, jusqu’à être jugées dignes de l’adjacent Père-Lachaise ou, mieux, prématurément soulagées en voulant traverser, à l’heure du berger. (1991, 173) The vacancy is tempting, shall I enthrone my infirmities, give them this chance again, my dream infirmities, that they may take flesh and move, deteriorating, round and round this grandiose square which I hope I don’t confuse with the Bastille, until they are deemed worthy of the adjacent Père Lachaise or, better still, prematurely relieved trying to cross over, at the hour of night’s young thoughts. (1995, 134) The reversal of “night” and “young” is symptomatic of Beckett’s problematic attitude towards pre-Romantic and Romantic authors. He often pokes fun at them and yet he seems to be strangely attracted to (at least certain aspects of) their works. In the case of the Graveyard Poets, the attraction may be connected less with the “pleasures of melancholy” – as Thomas Warton called them – but with a more general dissatisfaction with an enlightened confidence in knowability. With regard to schoolmen and sages, Thomas Parnell already wrote in his 16
“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”
“Night-Piece on Death”: “Their books from wisdom widely stray, / Or point at best the longest way. / I’ll seek a readier path, and go / Where wisdom’s surely taught below” (qtd. in Punter and Byron, 11). David Punter and Glennis Byron summarize the Graveyard Poets’ aesthetics as an attempt to learn the secrets of life “from prolonged and absorbed meditation on its extreme limit: death” (11). Against this background Beckett’s reference to the Graveyard Poets may seem to be a reaction to Joyce’s encyclopaedic approach to literature – “in the direction of knowing more” (qtd. in Knowlson 1996, 352) – but the matter is more complex than it may appear to be. After the war, Beckett still admitted to Jake Schwartz that he had an “innate passion for knowledge, which demanded periodic satisfaction” and that secretly he even dreamed of reading through all the volumes of an encyclopaedia – after which he received a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to quench his thirst for knowledge (Bair, 493-94). But this Faustian trait is relativized in a letter to Jacoba van Velde (12 April 1958): “On m’a donné l’édition 1911 de l’Encyclopédie Britannique. 28 volumes. Trop tard.” (NAF 19794, 53). It might have been “too late” for encyclopaedic projects, but the question is whether Beckett would ever have been able to engage himself with total abandon in any encyclopaedic project, for a quarter of a century earlier he had already discovered that, in spite of this innate passion for knowledge, the accumulation of erudition and “verbal booty” was more of an obstacle than a incentive to his literary projects.2 Similarly, his allusions to Edward Young and the Graveyard Poets involve a complex combination of attraction and resistance, as H. Porter Abbott notes: “By appropriating the romantic tradition of the associative, incondite meditation, Beckett accentuates his difference” (91). Porter Abbott draws attention to the stylistic correspondences between the “vaguely iambic dying fall” in Young’s Night Thoughts and the twilight passages in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, but he immediately points out the differences as well: In the romantic tradition, the quality of being formally unreined is grounded in the confidence that the individual mind can generate, through the free exercise of its own powers, texts that would be at once beautiful and wise, coherent and deep. The very looseness of the form in this tradition was a promise of higher connectedness; its obscurity, an intimation of higher meaning. But in Beckett’s 17
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hands, the ‘looseness’ of the text augments the anxiety of relatedness and the despair of meaning. (91) The same confidence characterizes Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759): “The mind of a man of Genius is a fertile and pleasant field” (§34). Young emphasizes that unlike imitations, which are “often a sort of Manufacture,” an Original “rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius” (§43). The “man of Genius” Young had in mind was modelled after a particular image, that had already been suggested in the beginning of the eighteenth century by the Earl of Shaftesbury in his Advice to an Author (1710): “Such a poet is indeed a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove” (qtd. in Abrams 1953, 280). In the history of the so-called Genie-Zeit, the figure of Prometheus personified the defiance of authority and established poetic codes. As Jochen Schmidt illustrates in Die Geschichte des GenieGedankens, the idea of the artist as a god on earth (deus in terris), which was already prominent in the Renaissance, became more distinct when it was linked to the figure of Prometheus during the Genie-Zeit (Schmidt, 258-59). But it was Goethe who turned this simile into a programme by means of his poem “Prometheus,” which Beckett typed out (TCD MS 10971/1, 72r-v). As Mark Nixon points out (2006, 265), this excerpt is inextricably linked up with Beckett’s reading of John G. Robertson’s A History of German Literature (1902) and Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, the reading traces of which can also be found in the same notebook. In Beckett’s Books Matthew Feldman draws particular attention to the final stanza in relation to Beckett’s persistent exploration of “the creative act itself” in his postwar works (2006, 27). Both aspects of the mythical Prometheus – the defiant fire/lightbringer and the creator (referred to as Prometheus plasticator) – resonate in Beckett’s works. James Knowlson establishes a link between Beckett’s early reading of Goethe’s poem and his post-war works by pointing out that, towards the end of the 1960s, Beckett “quoted with relish in German some of the rebellious, accusatory lines of the poem” (568), echoes of which recur in Lessness. The sole upright figure which “will curse God [...] face to the open sky” (1995, 197 and 201) resembles the attitude of the creature as Prometheus moulded it, according to Ovid: whereas other creatures walked with their heads 18
“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”
facing downwards, looking at the earth, human beings were given an “upturned aspect” (trans. Kline), because Prometheus commanded them to stand upright and look towards the sky (“os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus”; Ovid, I.85-86). Apart from Prometheus’ defiance, his role as plasticator also seems to have caught Beckett’s special attention. Goethe’s Prometheus is not just one of the “rebels of the Genieperiode [who] exploited the element of Promethean defiance against vested authority, in order to attack the code of poetic rules,” as Abrams calls them; he is as ambitious as Doctor Praetorius in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) in that he is intent on creating not just a homunculus (like Faust’s assistant Wagner), but an entire species: Hier sitz ich, form Menschen Nach meinem Bilde, Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei” (Here I sit, making men / In my own image, / A race that shall be like me) (TCD MS 10971/1/72) A year after the release of Whale’s Faustian sequel of Frankenstein, Beckett read (and took extensive excerpts from) Goethe’s Faust. After that reading experience, the focus on the creative act was increasingly mixed with the image of the homunculus. The making of such a small creature recurs a few times in the trilogy.3 Beckett’s own “creatures” may be regarded as “homuncules” too, but what characterizes these literary compositions is that they are mainly occupied with decomposition. 2. “turning-point,” or: Wordsworth Ho In this context it is remarkable how Beckett, presenting his work as a composition in reverse, uses Wordsworth as a contrasting background, notably his famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” taking its origin “from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” While Wordsworth explains how “successful composition generally begins,”4 Beckett is more interested in “decomposition.” In the years immediately after the so-called revelation, Wordsworth’s famous definition is insistently distorted, for instance in “The Expelled” (“Recollecting these emotions, with the celebrated advantage of 19
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tranquillity” [Beckett 1995, 58]) and in Texts for Nothing (“what tranquillity, and know there are no more emotions in store” [125]). But it is in the trilogy that Molloy formulates the important reversal of composition into decomposition: “It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life [...] To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets” (1955-58, 25). This reversal comes close to the “tuning-point” in Krapp’s Last Tape, which only became “the vision at last” in the third typescript: “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the pier, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The turning-point vision, at last” (HRHRC 4.2, Ts. 3). Krapp’s “vision” thus turns out to be a revision. Beckett explicitly asked James Knowlson to make clear once and for all that his own “revelation” was different from “Krapp’s vision” (Knowlson, 352; 772n55). Beckett’s reformulation of his own vision contrasted his own working method with Joyce’s. In this context Beckett’s vision also indicates a “turning-point” between a Joycean “work in progress” and his own “work in regress” – not simply in the sense of doing the opposite of Joyce, but rather as a radicalisation of the idea to accommodate decomposition in one’s composition, which is already present in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “writing its own wrunes forever” (Joyce 1939, 19). Beckett’s written ruins are quite different from the “selfindulgence of Ossianic antiquarianism and the eighteenth-century taste for ruins,” which “have no attraction for him,” as John Pilling notes (1976, 136). Beckett’s writings are “wrunes” in the etymological sense of ruere, to collapse, to fall down. While the sole upright figure in Lessness may have been inspired by “Prometheus,” the text also writes its own ruins, opening with the words “Ruins true refuge” (1995, 197). In a similar way Winnie in Happy Days is decomposing in upright position. As a consequence, the “turning-point” implies a double perspective on the Prometheus myth in terms of creation and decreation, composition and decomposition, but also with regard to the relationship between creator and creature. 3. “Accursed progenitor” In 1816 Byron and Shelley were still continuing the tradition that was set in motion by the Sturm und Drang poets, such as the young Goethe, 20
“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”
regarding Prometheus as a satanic hero. In his Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe argues that the difference between (notably Milton’s) Satan and Prometheus is that the latter is more contructive: Milton’s Satan attempts to destroy God’s creation while Prometheus is a creator himself (Goethe 1991, 687). Byron, in his poem “Prometheus,” pities his hero (“Thy Godlike crime was to be kind [...] / And strengthen Man with his own mind,” 265), whereas Percy Shelley, in the “Preface” to Prometheus Unbound, sees his hero as “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends” (207). The only imaginary being resembling Prometheus, according to Shelley, is another bringer of light: Lucifer or Satan, as depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost (206-7). In A Defence of Poetry, too, he claims that “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil” (526). While Percy Shelley clearly expressed his sympathy with Promethean bringers of fire and light, Mary Shelley empathized with Adam, as the epigraph to Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus indicates: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mold me man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me? –– / Paradise Lost” (1992, 1). In Milton’s Paradise Lost, these lines are preceded by Adam’s exclamation: “O fleeting joys / Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes!” (262; Book X.741-42), which are the lines Winnie refers to in Happy Days: “What is that wonderful line? [Lips.] Oh fleeting joys – [lips] – oh something lasting woe.” [Lips. She is interrupted by disturbance from Willie. He is sitting up. She lowers lipstick and mirror […]]” (Beckett 1990, 141). Each “oh” is preceded by “lips,” prefiguring Mouth’s lips in Not I, but also stressing the importance of cosmetics in the midst of terrestrial joys and woes: the common etymology of cosmos and cosmetics is Winnie’s answer to Beckett’s quest for a “new form” which “admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else,” as Beckett told Tom Driver in the same year as the first production of Happy Days: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”5 The link with the epigraph of Frankenstein reinforces the importance of the “turning-point” in Beckett’s poetics, which seems to imply a bidirectional perspective, analogous to the difference between Percy and Mary Shelley’s respective viewpoints on Paradise Lost. Not 21
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Satan, not Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, but Frankenstein’s creature, Eve and Adam, Winnie and Willie become the focalizers. In Endgame, Hamm would prefer to undo creation, cursing his father as “Accursed progenitor!” and “Accursed fornicator!” (1990, 96) – insisting on the same “-tor” ending with an exclamation mark as in the Creature’s exclamation: “Accursed creator!” when he discovers Frankenstein’s journal: “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? [...] Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.” (126) During the important moment in Frankenstein when Victor meets the “daemon” at the sea of ice in the middle of the “tremendous,” “vast,” “sublime,” “awful,” “magnificent,” “majectic,” and “solitary grandeur of the scene” (93-94) the creature reminds Frankenstein of his duties as a father: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel” (96-97), threatening to become “the author of your own speedy ruin” (98). When the focalization shifts to the nameless daemon and he is allowed to tell his tale, Mary Shelley inserts a moment of defamiliarization by presenting the rising of the moon as if it were an unprecedented phenomenon: “I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees” (99-100). In his Defence of Poetry Percy Shelley formulated this Shklovskyan defamiliarization avant la lettre by presenting poetry as the power that “creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” and “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being” (533). It is with this unprejudiced, childlike view that the creature observes the De Laceys. Since “[a]ll things exist as they are perceived” (533) – Percy Shelley’s variation on Berkeley’s esse est percipi – the De Lacey family only exists in literary history as it is perceived by the Creature. Especially the old De Lacey thus comes across as the incarnation of kindness. This moment is referred to in Murphy as an arch scene of sentimentality: “‘All you need,’ said Wylie, ‘is a little kindness […] Miss Counihan and I are your friends.’ Cooper could not have looked more gratified if he had been Frankenstein’s daemon and Wylie De Lacey.” (Beckett 1957, 123-24) The first thing Frankenstein’s “daemon” sees through a chink in the wood is a small room that is “very bare of furniture”: “In one corner, near a small fire, sat an old 22
“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”
man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude” (104). While the De Lacey scene as a whole is ridiculed in Murphy, the more specific image of an old man with his head on his hands recurs repeatedly in Beckett’s later works, up until the penultimate text, Stirrings Still: “One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go” (Beckett 1995, 259). The old De Lacey in Frankenstein plays a mournful air on his instrument and a few lines further on the creature is overpowered by emotions, “a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced” (104). The “pain and pleasure” and powerful emotions, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads6 and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757),7 recur in Beckett’s radio play Words and Music: “by passion we are to understand a movement of the soul pursuing or fleeing real or imagined pleasure or pain pleasure or pain real or imagined pleasure or pain” (1990, 287). When a few moments later Music “Plays air,” Words is “Trying to sing, softly” of “a man / Huddled o’er the ingle” and “The face in the ashes” (291). These ashes may be seen as remnants of Prometheus’ gift to humanity, but also – since the radio plays are so extraordinarily metafictional – as embers of a Romantic poetics, expressed in Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry by means of the image of the “fading coal”: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within” (531).8 Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man refers this image when he is setting forth his aesthetic theory on the scholastic quidditas: The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure (Joyce 2000, 231) Unlike the overconfident young Dedalus’ stress on “clear radiance,” Beckett’s works seem to have more affinity with the “fading” aspect of the coal and Shelley’s subsequent description: “when composition 23
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begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (531; emphasis added). This passage contrasts sharply with the triumphant tone of the rest of the “Defence,” which celebrates poetry as “something divine” (531). Shelley sees it as “at once the centre and circumference of knowledge” with its “harmonious recurrence of sound”: “Hence the vanity of translation” (514). In the midst of this boisterous discourse, the “fading” of inspiration “on the decline” comes across as a moment of weakness in terms of rhetorical strategy. He has to admit that poetry inevitably fails to preserve the brilliance and radiance of the initial moment of inspiration. Beckett, however, focuses precisely on this “decline” and turns it into a view on composition as a form of decomposition, in which both translation and its “vanity” are crucial components. Translation played an important role in literary Romanticism, especially in Germany. Adreas Huyssen sees translation as “eine Grundstruktur romantischen Denkens” (a basic structure of romantic thought; 121). While Percy Shelley spoke of “the vanity of translation” and “the burthen of the curse of Babel” (514), August Wilhelm Schlegel regarded poetic translations as merely imperfect approximations. Because of the unreachability of the original the approximation can be referred to such a distance that it might not be worthwhile undertaking the enterprise at all.9 And yet, that is precisely the irresistible challenge of translation, the “unendliche Annäherung” (endless approximation; Huyssen, 121), which is the idea behind the Blaue Blume10 but also behind the asymptotic structure of Beckett’s late works like Worstward Ho (“leastmost in the utmost dim”), Stirrings Still (“and here a word he could not catch”), and of course “Comment dire” / “what is the word.” In spite of this close affinity, the difference between the Romantics’ and Beckett’s notion of “unendliche Annäherung” is a reversal of perspective. Whereas the Romantic Sehnsucht for the sake of Sehnsucht is a longing for the infinite, Beckett ‘strives’ after the infinitesimal. In Romanticism, Huyssen argues, translation becomes an allegory of the unreachable original (121). Beckett radicalized this idea by applying it to his own writings. By means of self-translation he turns his own works into unreachable originals. Thus, “night’s young thoughts” in Murphy differ from “night’s young thoughts” in Texts for Nothing. The former are translated into French as “les jeunes pensées 24
“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”
de la nuit avaient été reculées d’une heure” (1965, 58) and because of this recul they will (not unlike Achilles and the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox) never be able to catch up with Young’s Night Thoughts. In fact, they are only further removed from “l’heure du berger” – which is the “original” of the latter “thoughts,” translated from the French, stressing the unreachability of the original, until the infirmities “are deemed worthy of the adjacent Père Lachaise” (134). As Porter Abbott notes: “For Young, the graveyard was a place one passed through, coming out on the other side refined of one’s material being. In Beckett’s text, it seems instead a longed-for point of reentry” (92). This longed-for reentry has more affinities with the moment at the end of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor finds himself “at the entrance of the cemetery” (195) where everything is silent “except the leaves of the trees” (which Didi compares to the noise of the “dead voices” in Waiting for Godot; 1990, 58). But Victor Frankenstein is not allowed to stay, for his Creature lures him away again from the graveyard, that is, the place where its body parts were assembled. In the end, the place of the hideous progeny’s origin comes down to earth, Dreck, the “mud” or “dust thou art.” Beckett’s interest in what has so equestrianly been called the Sattelzeit is inevitably saddled with the realization that the main thing we do “à cheval” is to “give birth astride of a grave” (2003, 220). Notes 1.
I wish to thank Mark Nixon for drawing my attention to this document.
2. In his seminal introduction to the edition of the Dream Notebook, John Pilling notes that, by the end of 1931, “what had seemed to offer a way forward was beginning to reveal itself as an impediment,” referring to Beckett’s letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 November 1931, in which he writes: “I have enough ‘butin verbal’ to strangle anything I’m likely to want to say.” (qtd. in Pilling 1999, xiv). 3. Malone mentions his “want of a homuncule” and concludes: “Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say” (1955-58, 225-26). The Unnamable in his turn claims he has wasted his time “behind my mannikins” (1955-58, 306), which in the French version are called “homuncules” (1953, 32).
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Dirk Van Hulle 4. “The emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” (Wordsworth; 1802 version) 5. “What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” (Samuel Beckett to Tom F. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4, Nr. 3 (1961), 23; qtd. in Hesla, 67) 6. “What then does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure” (Wordsworth; 1802 version). 7. “Sect. VII. Of the Sublime / Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the ‘strongest emotion’ because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure” (86). 8. In the third section of Stirrings Still a sentence thus arises “from deep within.” It is significant that as soon as it surfaces, it is already “on the decline,” for the most crucial word is missing: “So on till stayed when to his ears from deep within oh how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then” (1995, 264). 9. According to Schlegel “Alle dichterischen Übersetzungen sind nur unvollkommene Annäherungen. Die Annäherung kann durch die Unnachahmlichkeit und Unerreichbarkeit des Originals in eine so weite Ferne verwiesen werden, dass man dan wohl besser tut, die Sache gar nicht zu unternehmen” (A. W. Schlegel, “Aus dem Indischen,” qtd. in Huyssen, 85). 10. Based on a folk tale about a flower that gives access to hidden treasures, the blue flower became a symbol of Romantic Sehnsucht for the infinite. To a large extent, this development is due to Novalis’ novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which the eponymous hero feels a longing, not for the
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“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” treasures, but for the flower, so that the Blaue Blume became a symbol for a second-degree Sehnsucht, a longing for longing. For Beckett’s use of the symbol in “Assumption,” “Calvary by Night,” and Watt, see Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, 63-64).
Works Cited Abbott, A. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Authograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996). Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953). Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 2004). Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: a biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978). Barth, John, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), 62-76. Beckett, Samuel, Notes on German Literature, TCD MS 10971/1, Trinity College Dublin (1934-36). –, Notes on Psychology, TCD MS 10971/8, Trinity College Dublin (1930s). –, Letters to Jacoba van Velde, NAF 19794, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (1946-80). –, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953). –, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1955-58). –, Murphy (New York: Grove P, 1957). –, Typescripts of Krapp’s Last Tape, HRHRC Samuel Beckett Box 4, Folder 2, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (1958). –, Murphy (Paris: Minuit, 1965). –, Watt (London: Calder, 1981). –, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). –, The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). –, Warten auf Godot / En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot (Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 2003). Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Penguin Classics, 1998). Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Feldman, Matthew, Beckett’s Books : A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s Interwar Notes (New York / London: Continuum: 2006). Frost, Everett, and Jane Maxwell, compilers, “Catalogues of ‘Notes Diverse[s] Holo’ and of the Samuel Beckett Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin
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Dirk Van Hulle Library,” in SBT/A 16, ed. Matthijs Engelberts, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 13-199. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1986). Hesla, David, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971). Huyssen, Andreas, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1969). Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). –, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 2000). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Koselleck, Reinhart, “Einleitung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 1. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004). Milton, John, Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). Moorjani, Angela, “Directing or In-directing Beckett: Or What Is Wrong with Catastrophe’s Director?” in SBT/A 15, “Historicising Beckett / Issues of Performance,” ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 187-99. Nixon, Mark, “‘Scraps of German’: Samuel Beckett Reading German Literature,” in SBT/A 16, “Notes Diverse[s] Holo,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 259-82. Ovid, (Publius Ovidius Naso), Metamorphoses, ed. Hugo Mangus, The Perseus Digital Library, www.perseus.tufts.edu, accessed 15 May 2007. –, The Metamorphoses, trans. A. S. Kline, 2000, www.tkline. freeserve.co.uk/ Ovhome.htm, accessed 15 May 2007. Parnell, Thomas, “Night-Piece on Death,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London: Lintot, 1722), www.litgothic.com/Texts, accessed 13 May 2007. Pilling, John, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). –, Beckett’s Dream and the “demon of notesnatching,” in Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999), vii-xxi. –, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Houndmills & New York: Palgrave, 2006). Punter, David, and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Schmidt, Jochen, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750-1945, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin Classics, 1992).
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“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” Shelley, Percy, Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed., ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002). Warton, Thomas, The Pleasures of Melancholy (London: Dodsley, 1747). Wordsworth, William, “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads, electronic scholarly edition by Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/LB, accessed 15 May 2007. Young, Edward, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” http://rpo.library. utoronto.ca/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=16, accessed 24 May 2007.
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FAILURE AND TRADITION: COLERIDGE / BECKETT
Paul Lawley Using a model of literary tradition derived from T. S. Eliot and mediated by J. L. Borges, this paper proposes a tradition of creative failure which would enable the work of Beckett to be read through that of S. T. Coleridge, and vice-versa. Two texts by Coleridge are briefly considered in this context, and the problematic of creative failure in which they are implicated is related to key claims in Beckett’s Three Dialogues. A concluding statement suggests the benefits of reading Coleridge and Beckett within the common perspective of a literary tradition, the perception of which the two writers both shape and are shaped by.
I The sea is very calm because, Hamm helpfully explains, “there are no more navigators” (Beckett 1986, 124). But once there were (“Once!”), and a particularly old one more than once told a story. It was about “how the Ancient Mariner cruelly and in contempt of the laws of hospitality killed a Sea-bird and how he was followed by many and strange Judgements: and in what manner he came back to his own Country” (Coleridge 1969, 186; 1800 text). The last of the strange judgements passed upon the old navigator1 is, if not the most colourful, certainly not the least terrible. When he implores a hermit to “shrieve” him, the “holy Man” bids him say “What manner man art thou?” and the Ancient Mariner recounts the last event of his own story: Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d With a woeful agony, Which forc’d me to begin my tale And then it left me free. Since then at an uncertain hour, Now oftimes and now fewer,
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That anguish comes and makes me tell My ghastly aventure. (544-45, lines 611-18, 1798 text) And then he begins, presumably, “There was a Ship …” (528, line 10). The final event of the Mariner’s story, the strangest of the strange judgements upon him, consists of his being compelled to tell his story of transgression and strange judgements, a story which ends with him being compelled to tell his story … – and so on. The mariner enters into “[t]he Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH” (194) of his own tale; the watersnake swallows its own tail, and the “penance of life” (208) is endlessly exacted. Of course the poem is not like this. As we all remember, it has a frame which comprehends the Mariner’s narrative, from “It is an ancyent Marinere,/And he stoppeth one of three” (528), by way of reference to the Wedding Guest’s reactions, through to “A sadder and a wiser man/He rose the morrow morn” (546). Coleridge’s monster of solitudes finally affirms the efficacy of prayer in “goodly company” (545). The frame is distinct from the narrative itself: “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” is not a recursive narrative. To read it as such is not even an understandable misreading. Yet it is a forgivable one, and to speculate that the poem might have been recursive is a stimulating critical gambit.2 Recursive narrative has, in the words of the psychoanalyst Donald P. Spence, “an uncanny feel about it” (188) which fits with this most uncanny of poems. No reader of Beckett, and no post-Beckett reader (a rather different thing), can (re)turn to the poem without perceiving the shadow of recursion that falls upon and around it.3 That shadow alerts us to the relation between transgression, expiation and narrative act which is as strongly figured in “The Ancient Mariner” as in any Beckett text. And, despite the apodictic statement in Coleridge’s 1800 Argument (“many and strange Judgements”), it is no less ambiguous in its nature. Coleridge’s notebook entry dated 30 October 1800 further suggests the intimacy of recursion in writing with both impotence and the obscure experience of obligation: “He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk suddenly before him – sate down, took the pen – & found that he knew not what to do” (Coleridge 1957, 834).
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Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett
II Coleridge and Beckett: both are writers preoccupied not just with what is narrated or uttered, but with the act of narration itself, the Scene of Utterance, and with utterance which is impossible to regulate: it is either blocked or unstoppable, impossible or irresistible, compelled or obliged. Both significantly abandoned works, and the relation of each man’s texts to the state of completion is often richly ambiguous. Failure and fragmentation are omnipresent, if not always actual. Thematically, too, ambiguous finitude is the common concern: the Nightmare Life-inDeath returns as and in “the long sonata of the dead” (Beckett 1959, 32).4 The analogies are intriguing, but they cannot in themselves be taken to constitute a significant critical relation – especially given the vast differences of creative context and philosophy which can properly be assumed between the Romantic philosopher-poet and the Modern novelist and playwright. Nor is this a matter of influence. As he was hardly less of a “library-cormorant” (Coleridge 1966, 156) than Coleridge himself, Beckett would have known the major writings at the very least.5 But neither Damned to Fame nor The Grove Companion contains a single reference to Coleridge. Instead I should draw attention to the influence of Beckett on our reading of Coleridge. In this context a famous passage by T. S. Eliot is worth revisiting. “[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it,” asserted Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). “The existing order [of monuments],” he continues, is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order […] will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. (15) Eliot’s idea of tradition is monolithic: “the form of European, of English literature” is single, canonical. The conservative emphasis on order, though it accommodates and even in some way brings about 33
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internal alteration and readjustment, nonetheless inhibits the conception of plural traditions. For a more playful treatment of the idea, one which characteristically homes in on the paradoxes involved and thereby implies plurality of perspective, we must go to Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “Kafka and His Precursors.”6 Borges describes the “Kafkaesque” features of texts by Zeno, Nan Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning, Léon Bloy and Lord Dunsany. (The motley nature of the crew itself suggests the implications for critical revaluation in this view.) He concludes: In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. […] The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (236; author’s italics) The footnoting of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” after the last of these sentences serves only to underline the difference in emphasis. Where Eliot is concerned to establish the dynamics of the canon in an attempt to accommodate creative innovation to traditional cultural values, Borges is, both more and less modestly, interested in the parameters of meaning as they are evident in the paradox of readerly reception which surrounds the Kafkaesque. As indeed it surrounds the Beckettian. We have already briefly reimagined “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” as recursive narrative. However, viewing Coleridge through a Beckettian lens is a matter not just – indeed perhaps hardly at all – of remarking formal resemblance but of situating both writers within particular traditions.7 Consider one of the most famous moments in Coleridge, the definitions of imagination – primary and secondary – and fancy in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria. This is one of the most celebrated of all instances of philosophical literary criticism, yet to encounter it in its context is disappointing. The chapter is the last in Volume I of the Biographia, so might have been expected to deliver a climactic statement. It does so, but not without affecting an extravagant posture of retreat. The first half of the chapter (“On the imagination, or esemplastic power”) is conventionally philosophical, proposing “two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity” (162). “The counteraction […] of the two 34
Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett
assumed forces” is discussed, and its results contemplated. But then the discussion breaks off with this: Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my selflove might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling. (164) The friend upon whose practical judgement, taste, sensibility, tact and feeling Coleridge relies to guard against self-love turns out to be, as any editor will note, Coleridge himself. The trusted friend records his feelings on encountering the foregoing paragraphs and assures the author “that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the Constructive Philosophy which you have promised and announced: and that I will do my best to understand it” (165). But he goes on to advise unhesitatingly that the chapter should be withdrawn from this book and reserved “for your announced treatise on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity.” The argument has been so truncated in its presentation, he says, “that what remains looks (…) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower.” “Be assured,” he warns, “if you do publish this chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, announced as an Essay on Tarwater, which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity” (166). The friend signs off (“Your affectionate, etc.”) and the author responds to his advice: In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume. (167) The definitions of primary and secondary imagination and of fancy then follow, and the chapter – the Volume – ends with the author trailing an amplified treatment of “the powers and privileges of the imagination 35
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[…] in the critical essay on the uses of the supernatural in poetry and the principles that regulate its introduction: which the reader will find prefixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner” (167). In fact the reader will not find it there – not in any of the editions. Coleridge never wrote it. Nor will the reader find at the end of the Biographia the “detailed prospectus” for the “great book on the Constructive Philosophy.” He never wrote that either. And the reader will similarly look in vain for the “treatise on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity.” It is not, of course, that Coleridge never wrote about these matters – far from it – but that the projected theological-philosophical magnum opus never emerged. It remained a project. This is Coleridge as Krapp – without the tapes and (usually) with maudlin self-pity rather than savage self-irony. There are “the aspirations […] the resolutions!” (Beckett 1986, 218) in the form of the long project lists in the Notebooks: “My Works’ […] ‘The Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem”; “On the art of prolonging Life – by getting up in a morning” (Coleridge 1957, 161, 174). And then there are the “awful occasions” of birthdays, with their inevitable reviews, “separating the grain from the husks” (Beckett 1986, 217): “… so completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. – O Sorrow & Shame! I am not worthy to live – Two and thirty years. – & this last year above all others! – I have done nothing! …” (2237, Editor’s note: “There are four leaves cut out after this one.”) The essential question about Chapter XIII, though, concerns the kind of text the Biographia is at this point. The self-interruption, the staging of an interpersonal (non-philosophical) dialogue by interjection of a fictional letter (which counsels fragmentation out of fear of the prospect of fragmentation), the explicit reference out to non-existent, though confidently projected, texts; and the mixing of all these with post-Kantian philosophical discourse: not only is the generic juxtaposition of autobiography and philosophy not muted; it is actually highlighted – and it makes an effect which is hard not to perceive as comic. (The reference to Bishop Berkeley suggests Coleridge’s awareness of this.)8 Coleridge’s writing can be situated with that of Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy), Swift (The Tale of a Tub), Diderot (Jacques le Fataliste) and Sterne (Tristram Shandy), or with that of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Kater Murr) and Carlyle (Sartor Resartus), or with that of Flaubert (Bouvard et Pécuchet) and Joyce (Ulysses). These traditions – of Learned Wit, of Romantic Irony, of Stoic Comedy (if indeed they should be thought of as separate) – are 36
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ones in which Beckett, most clearly in Watt, but not only there, takes his place.9 Indeed, he is both accommodated within them and in turn shapes our perception of them. These are texts which not only present but variously enact and even embody metatextually the comedy of exhaustibility: a task of writing is to be accomplished, whether a duty, a profession, a calling or an obligation; the task is definable, even if enormous, and the ambition is encyclopaedic. And it is possible – or so it seems. Yet the prodigies and contortions of redaction which are necessitated by the task always threaten to derail the project and themselves become its major concern. Self-defeat is perpetually impending; the limitations of the medium, including generic and even typographical conventions, are pressed upon the reader, and the results are comic. The comedy is one of incompletion, fragmentation and failure. Failure is the point. The famous definition, which is framed by the dogged apologia I have described, is this: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (167). Reviewing a translation of Rilke in 1936, Beckett spoke of that poet’s urge to “rehabilitate the Ichgott” (Beckett 1983, 66), and of “that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God” (67). It might be said of Coleridge’s definition that it is all too aware of the uninterchangeability of Coleridge and God, and that this awareness is most fully registered in the word “repetition.” Read within the context we have considered, the definition takes on a darker implication. Because the human imagination cannot achieve the definitive status of the divine utterance, it must repeat itself indefinitely. Thus, as D. F. Rauber observes of Coleridge’s formulation, “it would seem that the re-creation would necessarily be incomplete and fragmentary” (218). Imaginative utterance is the guarantee of self-identity and the implication of its failure is therefore repetition: “Since then at an uncertain hour,/Now oftimes and now fewer,/That anguish comes and makes me tell/My ghastly aventure.” The narrative position of the Ancient Mariner – his position inside a narrative, unable to extricate himself and exist otherwise – is a grim counterpart of the definition of primary imagination: he is compelled to repeat. He is, as it were, in himself a repetition.10 In its meticulous placing in relation to one another of imagination, self-identity, repetition and failure, Coleridge’s definition can be regarded as the iconic beginning of the “art of failure” which we 37
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think of as distinctive of Beckett – Beckett being the writer who in the most direct and sustained manner confronted the implications of Coleridge’s theory. In interview Beckett himself repeatedly insisted upon his paradoxical preoccupation with failure, impotence and ignorance in art as a response to the literary omnicompetence of his master Joyce.11 If this insistence feels strikingly like a repetition of Coleridge’s distinction between the finite and infinite minds (with Joyce in the role of Godlike artist, “unwitnessed witness of witnesses” [Beckett 1995, 151]),12 it is because the art of failure had always been there, nesting at the heart of a Romantic aesthetic which Coleridge propounded and, in some of his best poems, embodied. To cast Coleridge as himself a theoretical origin would seem ironic. (He is, after all, among many other things, our greatest plagiarist.) It is a move which replicates the terms of his definition, in which presence and origin (“the infinite I AM”) are posed in sharp contradistinction to the absence (“the finite mind”) which necessitates or obliges repetition. Jacques Derrida’s critique of origins through the idea of repetition should make us wary of formulating “new” traditions in this way. Derrida writes of the kind of absence formed by repetition: “It is not absence instead of presence, but a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun” (295). This is surely what Borges’ claim amounts to in “Kafka and His Precursors”: “In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist” (236). In Borges’ conception of tradition, it really is as with Beckett’s Bishop Berkeley: Esse est percipi. Kafka’s “repetition” of hitherto puzzling features in previous writing constitutes the “trace” by which we formulate “virtual” origins – “an origin by means of which nothing has begun.” Or, in Borges’ words, “every writer creates his own precursors.” We are considering the Coleridge created by Beckett. III Chapter XIII of the Biographia raises questions about Coleridge’s relation to failure. The various interruptions and extra-textual pointers have the effect of emphasising incompletion. (Rarely does one come across such a juxtaposition of strategic self-defensiveness and philosophical self-confidence.) Whether or not we read it as comic in effect, Coleridge is actively seeking the perception of fragmentarity in 38
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his readers. The effect of this is to make one feel that he needs the perception of fragmentarity – that it is as comforting as the gothic cliché of the friend’s letter: “… like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower” (166). In other words, a genuine anxiety about incompletion is turned into something recognisable and reassuring – a manufactured anxiety. (In the Gothic imagination ruins are indeed true refuge.) So it is with “Kubla Khan,” though there the case is more acute still. The poem was written in 1797-98, but published only in 1816 (the year before the Biographia), with the subtitle “A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment,” and a Preface which describes the interrupted genesis of the poem, insisting on its fragmentarity. The reflection has long been commonplace: “If Coleridge had never published his Preface, who would have thought of ‘Kubla Khan’ as a fragment?” (200), asked Humphry House in 1953. But he did, and it is difficult merely to ignore the Preface. An obvious interpretative move is to allow the Preface to dictate the thematic reading; thus the poem becomes reflexive and recapitulates the Preface (or vice-versa) in another mode. The first part (lines 1-36) describes Kubla’s pleasure dome; the second (37-54) has the poet recalling a vision he once had and speculating on the probable consequences of his reviving its music within himself. The crux of the second part, following the recollected vision of the “damsel with a dulcimer” (line 37) and her music, is located in the conditional subjunctivity of the poet’s response: Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ‘twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air (1969, 298, lines 42-46) Depending on the reading of these lines, “the whole poem can be made,” as Humphry House says, “to appear to be about the failure and frustration of the creative power […] ‘If only I could, but I can’t’” (201). House’s own rejection of such a reading is trenchant: “If this were a poem of frustration and failure, the movement would be slow and the stresses heavy. […] The metre is light and fast; the paragraph moves from delight and surprise, through enthusiasm to ecstasy; no sensitive reader can read it otherwise” (202, 201). House’s insensitive 39
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reader would be hearing the poem as the echo of the Preface, perception of the thing itself having been shaped by its belated supplement.13 His point is well made. Yet the shadow of failure, like the shadow of Kubla’s dome, is an unavoidable aspect of the poem. In the final lines, the poet’s imagined ecstasy of visionary reintegration itself engenders another split – this time between the poet and the community, “all who heard.” The shaman-poet becomes (would become) the scapegoat as his listeners segregate him, using a magic symbol which recalls ironically the “girdling” of Kubla’s dome with which the poem began: And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. (298, lines 49-54) It seems that unity and separation, wholeness and fragmentation, success and failure, stand in a dialectical relationship in this poem. The visionary utterance produces a split in that relation between poet and community which, for the Romantic poet, endows it with significance in the first place. The urge towards unity undoes itself. This dialectical movement can perhaps be seen as one imaginative response to the problem of writing a successful poem about creative failure. In the various forms of “Dejection” (1802) – whether letter or ode – Coleridge was to confront the same problem even more directly: how can one meaningfully write a poem about no longer being able to write poems? But, as the Coleridge of the Biographia recognised, this question had already surrounded “Kubla Khan,” where, conversely, success is imagined as failure. The Preface to the poem, in supplying a narrative of interrupted origins, of imperfect birth (“As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,” 297, line 18), registers this awareness and attempts to introduce what Beckett was to call, in contrasting his own work with Kafka’s, “consternation behind the form, not in the form” (Shenker, 148, my emphasis). “Kubla Khan,” he says, is From an Abandoned Work. And he calls his consternation a Person from Porlock. The Coleridge who was thus aware, and thus anxious, is the precursor of Beckett’s Three Dialogues. For it is here, uniquely, that 40
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the question of the ethics of artistic failure is explicitly confronted. That confrontation is properly acknowledged and enacted in its dialogueform. (Compare, perhaps, Coleridge and his “friend.”) Having claimed in the first dialogue (on Tal Coat) that there is nothing to express, and no power or desire to express, “together with the obligation to express” (1983, 139), in the third dialogue B[eckett] hails Bram van Velde as “the first whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act.” D[uthuit] calls this a “fantastic theory” and suggests “that the occasion of [van Velde’s] painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express.” (This is the standard recuperative move – implicit or explicit – in readings of art about artistic failure.) B. retorts: No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring him, safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke [patron saint of painters]. But let us, for once, be foolish enough not to turn tail. All have turned wisely tail, before the ultimate penury, back to the mere misery where destitute virtuous mothers may steal stale bread for their starving brats. (143) He later recapitulates the claim, refusing the recuperative effort “to make of […] this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation,” thus making it “an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation” (145). B’s refusal to turn creative poverty to account constitutes not just the ultimate argumentative impasse of Three Dialogues but a crucial moment in what I am identifying as a tradition of failure, which begins with Coleridge and Romanticism. (This is predominantly a lyric tradition, and quite distinct from the comic-discursive one in which I situated both writers earlier.) There can be no conception of what lies beyond B’s moment of refusal. (“It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories of art are correct,” 145.) In moving, in so many texts, towards a posture of van Veldian renunciation (for that is what it amounts to), Beckett’s own fiction after Watt (that is, his “French” fiction) does the only thing it can do in the absence of an imaginable beyond: it continually re-enacts the turning-point constituted by this refusal. Where Coleridge repeatedly insists, usually by means of prefatory statement, on the fragmentary status of his texts, Beckett unravels his from within even as he produces them – through 41
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aporia, destabilising repetition and self-cancelling play. “Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun” (Beckett 1995, 144). The effort towards completion and unity is simultaneously an act of self-undoing. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?” (114). We return to recursion: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (Beckett 1959, 176). IV To read Coleridge through Beckett, then, is to remark his emerging realisation of the necessity to confront the formal implications of the thematicisation of failure. And it is to recognise this creative predicament as one which is not peculiar to Coleridge, with his intense (and self-fulfilling) consciousness of his own inability to consummate projects, but one which is implicit in a major Romantic conception of creativity (which Coleridge himself promoted). Conversely, to read Beckett through Coleridge is to contemplate afresh the Art of Failure and to situate it within a Romantic tradition of creativity as implicitly problematic rather than to accept Beckett’s own account of it as an ab contrario personal reflex from Joycean literary omnicompetence. This tradition is one in which specifically artistic impotence or blockage inevitably takes on larger resonances because of the centrality of creativity to being as such. It is a tradition of loss and lament. Eliot’s “Gerontion”; Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”; Mallarmé’s (projected) Le Livre; Hofmannsthal’s “Lord Chandos Letter”; Hopkins’ late sonnets; Baudelaire’s Spleen poems; the late poems of Hölderlin;14 Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter” (which Beckett knew and echoed, and which predates Coleridge’s writing).15 I would suggest that it is the Beckett-Coleridge axis which enables us to align such very different texts – some of them acknowledging the infinite I AM, some not – so as to view them not as an anthology of creative depression or of anguished thoughts of dry brains in dry seasons, but as constituting the intensest experiences of and responses to the predicament of the finite mind in its realisation that, like the Ancient Mariner, it is doomed to a neverending spiral of repetition. Molloy’s long sonata of the dead has been playing itself out ever since the Mariner’s frame was first wrench’d.
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Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett Notes 1. In 1843 Wordsworth recalled: “some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the old navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime, and his own wanderings” (Coleridge 1997, 498). 2. Cf. Wheeler: “Since the verse text as a whole is explicitly about both the tale and the telling, it becomes itself tainted by the never-ending repetition: the telling is never finished, and, as a result, neither is the verse text. […] [I]n its unity the work of art is at the same time a fragment” (1981, 45). 3.
For a post-structuralist perspective, see Eilenberg, especially 47-53.
4. Cf. Stillinger on Coleridge’s revision: “Perhaps he kept changing his texts to show that he was not dead” (117). S. E. Gontarski asserts that “[t]he central compositional problem for Beckett is strikingly related to romantic – particularly Coleridgean – aesthetics” (16), but the matter of failure is not mentioned. 5. Bert O. States has briefly invoked the same Borges essay in connection with Beckett’s relation to St. Augustine. See States, 95, n. 4. 6. Monday 11 June 1962: “[SB] [t]ells Mary Hutchinson that he is not enjoying reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, the discussions of Fancy in which may have influenced All Strange Away begun some 2 years later” (Pilling 2006, 160). 7. For a brief description of the post-(Harold) Bloom situation of writers and their predecessors, see Smith, 1-2. 8.
On the Biographia as fragment, see Wheeler 1980, 130-31.
9. On the “Shandyesque” elements of the Biographia, see Perry, 152. For Beckett’s general relation to the eighteenth century writers mentioned, see Pilling, 141-45, and Smith, chapters 2 (27-46) and 4 (68-89). Note also B. S. Johnson in 1962: “A lot of trouble […] begins with a failure to place Samuel Beckett in his tradition: in spirit he belongs with Petronius, Rabelais, Cervantes, Nashe, Burton, and Sterne” (Knowlson, 284). For Beckett as “stoic comedian,” see Kenner, chapter 3 (“Comedian of the Impasse”), 67-107. 10. See Reed, 199 and Eilenberg, 56. Such post-structuralist readings do indeed have the effect of placing the poem within a Beckettian frame: the unnamed Mariner as The Unnamable narrator.
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11. See Shenker, 148 and Knowlson, 47. 12. On the implications for Joyce criticism of Beckett’s positioning of him, see Dettmar. 13. For the impact of its Preface on the reading of “Kubla Khan,” see Stillinger, especially 73-79. 14. Beckett on Hölderlin (quoted by Patrick Bowles): “His only successes are the points where his poems go on, falter, stammer and then admit failure, and are abandoned. At such points he was most successful” (qtd. in Haynes and Knowlson, 148, n. 14). 15. The phenomenon of the Romantic fragment is clearly relevant here. See Rauber, McFarland, and Rosen, chapter 2, 41-115. For a reading which challenges conventional accounts of this “exemplary Romantic expression,” which is (so the claim goes) “achieved by [its] inachievement” (6), see Levinson.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1959). –, “Leishmann’s Rilke Translation” and “Three Dialogues,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 66-67 and 138-45. –, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Borges, Jorge Luis, “Kafka and His Precursors,” trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 234-36. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Notebooks, Vol. 1, 1794-1804, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). –, Notebooks, Vol. 2, 1804-1808, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1961). –, Collected Letters, Vol I, 1785-1800, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1966). –, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969).
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Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett –, Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. George Watson (London, Melbourne and Toronto: Dent, 1975). –, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Derrida, Jacques, “Ellipsis,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 294-300. Dettmar, Kevin J. H., “The Joyce that Beckett Built,” in Beckett and Beyond, ed. Bruce Stewart (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1999), 78-92. Eilenberg, Susan, “Voice and Ventriloquy in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Coleridge, Keats and Shelley: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Peter Kitson (London: Macmillan, 1996), 45-73. Eliot, T. S., “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 13-22. Gontarski, S. E., The Intent of “Undoing” in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). Haynes, John (photographs) and James Knowlson (text), Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). House, Humphry, “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and Other Poems: A Casebook, ed. Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (London: Macmillan, 1973), 200-16. Kenner, Hugh, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1974). Knowlson, James and Elizabeth, eds., Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those Who Knew Him (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). Levinson, Marjorie, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill and London: U of N. Carolina P, 1986). McFarland, Thomas, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1981). Pilling, John, Samuel Beckett (London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). –, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Perry, Seamus, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999). Rauber, D. F., “The Fragment as Romantic Form,” in Modern Language Quarterly 30 (1964), 212-21. Reed, Arden, “The Mariner Rimed,” in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (London: Methuen, 1984), 168-201. Rosen, Charles, The Romantic Generation (London: Fontana P, 1999). Shenker, Israel, “An Interview with Samuel Beckett (1956),” In Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond
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Paul Lawley Federman (London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 146-49. Smith, Frederik N., Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2002). Spence, Donald P., “Narrative Recursion,” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 188-210. States, Bert O., The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1978). Stillinger, Jack, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994). Wheeler, Kathleen M., Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980). –, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1981).
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THE LONG VIEW: Beckett, Johnson, Wordsworth and the Language of Epitaphs
Elizabeth Barry This article will investigate the idiom of death and memorialization in Beckett’s work in relation to two particularly distinguished students of the epitaph, Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth, and consider how Beckett negotiates the different expectations of writing about death that each figure has bequeathed. It will examine Beckett’s exploration, following that of Wordsworth, of how far writing about the dead can borrow, imaginatively, from the ‘dispassionate’ and ‘all-equalising’ perspective of death itself, and also consider Beckett’s particularly laconic treatment of the difficulty in avoiding, as the Romantic poet put it, a certain ‘triteness’ in the summation of a life.
Beckett’s fascination with the “shape of ideas,” as well as with the subject of death, makes it inevitable that he should at some point have thought about the convergence of these concerns in the form of the epitaph (Schneider, 173). In fact, in two important works in his oeuvre – works which seem, indeed, sustained epitaphs for love or life in their entirety – characters explicitly write their own epitaphs: the early short story First Love and the later novel Malone Dies. Many other characters in Beckett’s works pass through graveyards, and imagine not only their own deaths but their funerals, memorials, and final resting places as well. The narrators of these two works in particular, however, inhabit in advance of their end the milieu of death and explore its language and its observances with a particularly keen eye. The narrator of First Love, for instance, wanders graveyards regularly, breathing in the fetid air and “culling the inscriptions” (Beckett 1995, 26). Beckett himself would do the same, as we learn from the epitaphs he noted down in the Tangiers cemetery he visited in 1974 and incorporated into brief draft poems in his Mirlitonnades sequence. Beckett’s narrator participates in a relatively common practice: there are many graveyard devotees, and epitaph anthologies
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have had periods of high vogue since the eighteenth century. Beckett is part of a more select group: those who incorporate the epitaphs that they ‘cull’ into new writing of their own. A likely influence on Beckett with respect to his contemplation of the epitaph is his cherished predecessor, Samuel Johnson, who wrote several pieces both on the epitaph in general and on those composed by his literary contemporaries. Johnson can indeed be said to have schooled Beckett in the contemplation of death itself, providing him not only with a model of writing on mortality and vanitas, but also with the dramatic spectacle of “the peevishness of decay,” in Beckett’s phrase, in the particular preoccupation with death that he and his circle displayed—something Beckett tried, and failed, to give dramatic life in his draft play Human Wishes (see Löwe, 194). Perhaps the most prominent figure in the epitaphic tradition, however, is William Wordsworth, who makes a sustained meditation on graveyards and graves in the long poem The Excursion, and establishes the tombstone as a subject of literary interest forever by writing his well-known Essays upon Epitaphs. At first glance, Wordsworth’s work may not, among all the models of writing about death, represent the most sympathetic influence on Beckett’s work – despite the compelling allusions to the poet that occasionally surface in Beckett’s work. It is surprisingly fruitful, however, to consider how far Wordsworth and Beckett find similar kinds of creative inspiration in the form of the epitaph, and what might be learned from this shared interest about how both approach the subject of death. This essay will investigate the idiom of death and memorialization in Beckett’s work in relation to these two particularly distinguished students of the epitaph in past literary history, and consider how Beckett negotiates the different expectations of writing about death that each figure has bequeathed. Much of Beckett’s First Love in fact brings Wordsworth to mind, albeit in representing a kind of parodic urban corruption of the familiar Wordsworthian scene. The narrator prefers graveyards to “beautyspots,” such as those that pepper Wordsworth’s poetry, and, further, prefers the sedate urban graveyards to that of his father, “way out” as it is “in the wilds of the country, on the side of a hill” (Beckett 1995, 27), like Wordsworth’s “graveyard in the mountains” in The Excursion. The bench on which the narrator meets Lulu resembles an urban version of those seats in yew trees where Wordsworth’s wayfarers rest in passing: “It was no doubt these trees one fine day, aripple with all their foliage, that had sown the idea of a bench, in someone’s fancy” (Beckett 1995, 48
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30). The canal is similarly presented as a drily unpoetic version of the brooks and rivers beside which the Lake poets so often seat themselves – “[t]o the fore, a few yards away, flowed the canal, if canals flow, don’t ask me” (30). Even the image of the narrator tearing up weeds in a orgy of destruction echoes in a more prosaic idiom the youth in Wordsworth’s well-known poem “Nutting” who finds himself destroying the beauties of nature in a half-unconscious frenzy. Beckett’s narrator, unlike those of Wordsworth, however, firmly sets his face against both the beauties of the landscape and its troubling sublimity. In a similarly negative relation, Beckett’s narrators seem, in their treatment of the epitaph, to align themselves deliberately with all that Wordsworth proscribes in such a composition. They favour a comic, contrivedly formal style closer to the urbane wit of the neoclassical writer than to the “general language of humanity” that should characterize an epitaph for Wordsworth (Wordsworth 1974a, II.56). In Beckett’s First Love, the narrator’s self-penned epitaph is of the variety most condemned by Wordsworth: Hereunder lies the above who up below So hourly died that he lived on till now. (Beckett 1995, 26) Malone’s self-penned epitaph in the later work takes a similar form: “Here lies a ne’er-do-well, six feet under hell” (Beckett 1994, 273). In Wordsworth’s terms, these terse compositions are guilty of making a “trifling epigrammatic point” where they should convey the “beauty and majesty of Truth.” Furthermore, in Wordsworth’s eyes heroic couplets – familiar in the neoclassical epitaph – are suitable for satire, which should represent “qualities and actions at war with each other,” and where the “page should be suitably crowded with antithetical expressions.” They are entirely inappropriate, however, for epitaphs, in which the mind should be “at peace with itself” (Wordsworth 1974a, II.80). Reading Pope’s epitaph on Mrs Corbett, Wordsworth complains further that Pope’s antithetical writing (“So firm yet soft, so strong yet so refined”) does not engage the intellect at all, a charge he might equally have laid at Beckett’s narrator’s door: “one half of the process is mechanical, words doing their own work, and one half of the line manufacturing the rest” (Wordsworth 1974, II. 80; 79). Similarly, the narrator of First Love concedes that “the second and last or rather latter 49
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line limps a little perhaps” but concludes, unlike Wordsworth, that “that is no great matter” (Beckett 1995, 96). Where Wordsworth implicitly opposes the “mechanical” form of the couplet to an utterance closer to natural speech, Beckett’s narrator evaluates his epitaph entirely in terms of its structure, using criteria that follow from the internal form of the piece rather than any thought to the sentiment it might be expressing. In both his narrators’ economical offerings, the content is also the shape: these are puns or rhymes that explode themselves in the making, that rest on the formal similarities and conventions of language. In First Love, the deceased is both “above,” his name written above these words, and “below,” in the grave; when he lived he was “up,” in the sense both of ‘upright’ and above ground, but was also “below” in the conventional formulation of heavens “above” and mortal humans “below.” These dizzying spatial attributions indicate the paradoxical separations between bodily existence (now firmly “below”), spiritual existence, perhaps now “above” in heaven, and typographic existence, named on the tombstone and so given a kind of permanent life in the “middle ground” of human society. This last kind of existence is, however, a purely formal one, a perfectly contentless description of a life that says (in saying that the subject escaped death until “now”) little more than that he lived, and then died. In his essay “On Pope’s Epitaphs,” first published in The Universal Visitor (1756), Samuel Johnson criticized Pope for writing of a brother and sister an epitaph that “contains of the brother only a general and indiscriminate character, and of the sister nothing but that she died” (Johnson 1896, V.241). Beckett’s narrators seem to want to write such an ‘anti-epitaph’ for themselves, not to demonstrate their humility in suppressing the expression of their own singularity, but to willfully refuse the reader any information at all beyond the tautologically obvious. These flippant epitaphs appear to epitomize all that Wordsworth rejects in the writing of memorial poetry, but they also raise an issue that Wordsworth highlights in his Essays upon Epitaphs, where he asks how the summation of an individual’s life can be other than trite: it is not only no fault but a primary requisite in an Epitaph that it shall contain thoughts and feelings which are in their substance common-place, and even trite. (Wordsworth 1974a, II.78) 50
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Where discrimination would seem to be necessary above all, a ‘want of discrimination’ is found. In verse that aims to make an individual life universal and intelligible to the many, however, it is perhaps inevitable that the terms it uses risk seeming over-familiar and undiscriminating. This is the dilemma faced by the Romantic poets who want to rescue from disdain and neglect what Wordsworth in this passage calls “truths whose very interest and importance have caused them to be unattended to, as things which could take care of themselves,” and Coleridge similarly described in the Biographia Literaria as truths made “impotent” by “the very circumstance of their universal admission” (1983, I.82). The charge of triteness is for Wordsworth a necessary cost attached to the duty of epitaphs to universalize, to speak, as has been said, the “general language of humanity.” For Wordsworth, an epitaph should offer a “due proportion of the common or universal feeling of humanity to sensations excited by a distinct and clear conception, conveyed to the reader’s mind, of the individual” (II.53). He is deeply critical of the more jaded view of Samuel Johnson, who ascribes the common epitaph’s lack of discrimination, in his 1756 “A Dissertation on the Epitaphs written by Pope,” to two causes. In Wordsworth’s account: First, the scantiness of the objects of human praise; and, secondly, the want of variety in the characters of men; or to use [Johnson’s] own words, ‘to the fact, that the greater part of mankind have no character at all.’ (II.56) In fact Johnson himself paraphrases Pope’s Moral Essays here (‘Most women have no characters at all’), but with his own urbane detachment extends Pope’s judgment on women to humankind in general. Wordsworth appears to miss this allusion, but correctly identifies the pose of urbane detachment in Johnson’s modification. It is Johnson’s own lack of discrimination, rather than the epitaph’s, that creates this unflattering perspective, Wordsworth argues: “the objects of admiration in human nature are not scanty, but abundant: and every man has a character of his own, to the eye that has skill to perceive it” (II.56). We are, for Wordsworth, quite able to discriminate in our judgment of the deceased individual, but “we shrink from the thought of placing their merits or defects to be weighed against each other in the nice balance of pure intellect” (II.56). The very grief that encourages us to record the 51
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memory of our loved ones prevents us from offering a discriminating character of them in this record – and that is quite as it should be. Wordsworth is particularly critical of Johnson’s levity and insouciance in treating such a solemn circumstance. For the later poet, the value of both the epitaph itself and the reflections that it provokes are in their concern with permanence and the universal. Johnson’s wit is ephemeral in comparison to the weighty and lasting discourse of moral criticism. William Hazlitt made a more penetrating point about the limitations of Johnson’s idiom, arguing that “the fault of Dr Johnson’s style is, that it reduces all things to the same artificial and unmeaning level. It destroys all shades of difference, the association between words and things” (V.102). The dilemma that both Johnson and Wordsworth face, however, is that the same can be said for death itself. Wordsworth goes on, indeed, to make this point, hinting at if not explicitly acknowledging its more troubling implications. The nature of death makes discrimination itself not only superfluous but impossible, for the deceased lie ‘in the bosom of the all-uniting and equalising receptacle of the dead’ (II.56). Death in so uniting and equalising removes the distinctions that were apparent in life: in other words, the differences that preserve the meaning of language itself. For both Johnson and Wordsworth this power to ‘equalise’ may be positive, or at least salutary, in terms of social difference, but the more anxious moments in Wordsworth’s essays suggest that it is also threatening in terms of both physical and most particularly moral discrimination. In this respect, then, epitaphic writing is trapped in the same predicament as that in which Johnson’s urbane detachment has trapped him. The writing that aims to be as far away from Johnson’s undiscriminating “generality” as possible, Wordsworth’s epitaph, in fact collapses into it, partaking of the “all-equalising” character of death. In both cases, an absolute detachment from one’s subject, a perfect equanimity, flattens difference. Beckett’s work also imagines such a perspective and the collapse that it would effect in the anthropocentric distinctions made by human reason. Like Johnson, Beckett too quotes Pope in illustration, jotting in his ‘Sottisier’ notebook the famous passage from Pope’s Essay on Man which describes this cosmic perspective: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, 52
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Atoms of systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world. (RUL MS 2901, 2r) And on first sight, it is the Augustans Pope and Johnson, with their aphoristic style, who come closer to being a model for Beckett’s idiom than the prolix William Wordsworth. Beckett is believed to have said, when questioned on his influences, “it’s Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me. And if I follow any tradition it is his” (Bair, 272). Something of Johnson’s voice might be found, for instance, at the moment in Waiting for Godot when Pozzo asks “Who are you?” Vladimir replies, simply, “We are men” (1990, 76). This is humanity sub specie aeternitatis: they are “men” only as far as to indicate an opposition to God. Similarly, when Vladimir asks how many could say that they have been ready to respond to the call for help of another, he answers his own rhetorical question: “Billions.” The characters’ pronouncements on humanity tend to make it a homogeneous entity, all “shades of difference” destroyed, rather than a precisely knowable set of differences. In Beckett’s major prose works, the link between this leveling perspective and the vantage point of death is more explicit. Beckett’s narrators feel that they may be “dead already” and adopt the equanimous perspective that this condition would bestow. The attitude of death is imagined as a serene smile: Moran in the second part of Molloy comments at one point: “Sometimes I smiled, as if I were dead already” (135). Malone felt himself to be “beyond the grave” more strongly six months ago, but the experience of feeling “the sands running out” also occasions this sphinx-like smile: “Had it been foretold to me that one day I should feel myself living as I do today, I should have smiled” (184). He refuses to lend drama to his death, anticipating his removal from mortal concerns by maintaining an absolute equity of perspective: “I will not weigh upon the balance any more, one way or the other. I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there” (179). Neither will he animate his going: “I shall not watch myself die, that would spoil everything. Have I watched myself live? Have I ever complained? Then why rejoice now? I am content but not to the point of clapping my hands” (180). The Unnamable too scorns excess, whether emotional or rhetorical, urging himself to “be urbane, a credit to the art and code of dying, while the others cackle” (316). He indeed manages a consummate urbanity later in the novel in remarking: 53
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“I think I’ll soon be dead, I hope I find it a change” (400). There is no discriminating, even between life and death, from this “neutral” perspective. The news that Prometheus was finally rescued similarly leaves the Unnamable “cold as camphour,” as inert as a mummified body, suggesting that there is not the least stir of feeling towards this miscreant who “obliged humanity” (305). Literature might at best hope to be, as one of Beckett’s stories entitles itself, a “calmative,” a bromide to counter the relentless “earnestness” (181) that Malone forswears, the hunger for showy self-expression that seems to Beckett’s world-weary protagonists to be the burdensome tenor of post-Romantic art. Beckett’s protagonists seem arch in their cultivation of such deathly indifference, but there is something more than a pose in this position. To contemplate death, one must partake of it. Like Yeats, Beckett professed to the aim of maintaining a “cold eye” (Knowlson, 252) in his writing, and also like Yeats, who made this his epitaph, the indifference of death enters into this attitude. In his Essays upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth proposes a different kind of language to his predecessors, and he, unlike Beckett and Johnson, appears to put the dramatic at the heart of his creative response to death. He remarks that in fact “epitaphs […] often personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tomb-stone” (II.60). Looking more closely at this process, however, he is again forced to concede the proximity between death and detachment. The creative exercise offered to the writer of the epitaph is a similar one to the one Beckett undertakes: that of putting him or herself beyond the grave. Wordsworth writes: The departed Mortal is introduced telling you himself that his pains are gone; that a state of rest is come; and he conjures you to weep for him no longer. He admonishes with the voice of one experienced in the vanity of those affections which are confined to earthly objects, and gives a verdict like a superior Being, performing the office of a judge, who has no temptations to mislead him, and whose decision cannot but be dispassionate. This is death disarmed of its sting, and affliction unsubstantialized. (II.60) In fact, this dramatic exercise turns out to be an exercise in suppressing the dramatic in favour of the “dispassionate.” Indeed, Wordsworth advises his putative epitaph-writer that impersonating the living 54
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mourners, rather than the deceased, might afford scope for “greater variety” and – with unintentional humour – a more “solid basis” for their fictions. Wordsworth’s engagement with this perspective brings him closer to both Johnson before him and Beckett after than might be at first evident in his fervently-written Essays. Imagining the perspective of the dead lends the capacity to be “dispassionate” and to “unsubstantialize” grief, as the voice conjures the unsubstantiated spectre of the dead man, “midway between what he was on earth walking about with his living frailties, and what he may be presumed to be as a Spirit” (II.58). It is not pathos that Wordsworth pursues in exploring the possibilities of writing about death, but death’s absolute indifference to earthly “affections.” He writes of the grave a few lines earlier in the same essay: a grave is a tranquillising object; resignation in course of time springs up from it as naturally as the wild flowers, besprinkling the turf with which it may be covered […]. The very form and substance of the monument […], and the appearance of the letters, testifying to what a slow and laborious hand they must have been engraven, might seem to reproach the author who had given way upon this occasion to transports of mind, or to quick turns of conflicting passion; though the same might constitute the life and beauty of a funeral oration or elegiac poem. (II.58) The epitaph-writer might “personate the dead” too in dispassion and “resignation”: one is compelled to be slow and contemplative, rather than passionate, by this imaginative exercise in writing in stone. There is a slippage in this passage between contemplating the gravestone in order to use it as an example for one’s own writing, and inhabiting the grave itself and availing oneself of the “dispassionate” and undoubtedly “tranquil” condition that it offers. We are reminded irresistibly of Wordsworth’s own prescription for poetry in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, which counsels the same quality of tranquillity in its composition: poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity 55
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gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. (1974b, 85) Just as resignation “in course of time springs up” from the tranquillity of the grave as “naturally as the wild flowers,” an emotion is “gradually produced” by contemplating in tranquillity an earlier instance of that emotion. Beckett amplifies this link between the leisure of contemplation and the final ‘rest’ of death in an irreverent allusion to Wordsworth’s famous words in his novel Molloy: “It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life” (1994, 25). The equanimity needed to contemplate one’s past feelings comes only with proximity to death. Ironically, however, there is attendant on this situation a process of “decomposition” that both echoes and undermines Wordsworth’s “composition” in the original text. Wordsworth’s original notion involved a privileging of individual feeling, an expectation that one will gain insight into one’s own feelings over time, and a belief in the creative uses of past experience as a basis for art. These principles are dismantled in Beckett’s text. The self does not have the capacity to reconstruct its past, let alone understand and draw lessons from it. In the next line of the French original of Beckett’s novel, there is an apposite pun: “Décomposer c’est vivre aussi, je le sais, je le sais, ne me fatiguez pas, mais on n’y est pas toujours tout entier” (1953, 39; my italics).1 The French idiom recalls the English “to be all there,” both expressions which suggest that there is an association in colloquial speech between cognitive failure and physical inadequacy. The Unnamable, with similar concerns, defers a development of the narrative until “time is not so short, and the mind more composed” (358). But this will never happen. In Beckett’s world, time is always short, and the mind will only lose integrity in the future. Nonetheless it is emphatically for Wordsworth the “close connection with the bodily remains of the deceased” (II.53, Wordsworth’s italics) that give the language of the epitaph such power and significance. He too draws out the tension between the decomposition of the corpse and the “composition” of the mind of the deceased that the epitaph must indicate:
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The composition and quality of the mind of a virtuous man, contemplated by the side of the grave where his body is mouldering, ought to appear, and be felt, as something midway between what he was on earth walking about with his living frailties, and what he may be presumed to be as a Spirit in heaven. There are at least three levels on which Wordsworth’s pun is working here, however subtly it is drawn. There is not only the antithesis between composition and the “mouldering” corpse, and the pun juxtaposing the “composing” of the epitaph and the “composition and quality” of the mind that it animates, but also the idea of composure in tone or attitude: writing composedly just as the spirit of the deceased, never so serene in life with its attendant “frailties,” lies in composure in his grave. Beckett’s allusion to the “tranquillity of decomposition” then not only echoes the famous “Preface” but also unwittingly recalls this passage from the Essays. Wordsworth chooses to emphasize one argument about the epitaph in this respect, and in so doing address this problem of reference head on. He suggests in his first Essay that an epitaph receives assistance from the physical presence of the tombstone where it is – the hope is – indelibly engraved, as well as from the proximity to the actual bodily remains of the deceased. This physical rootedness speaks to Wordsworth as the seats and monuments and natural landmarks in his poetry do of a sense of place that bestows permanence, whatever the future condition of the individual’s “mouldering body.” The proximity to the deceased gives the epitaph authority: the guarantee of truth for these enduring words is their decaying counterpart in the grave. Moreover, words that are slowly “engraven” borrow something of the stone’s durability, a quality that other language does not have. Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, articulates the other side of the same coin. He identifies in the epitaph the accidental nature of this connection between language and object. The words of an epitaph are incomplete without the additional information provided by their location. Rather than attaining permanence, the epitaph for him is characterized by the opposite quality. For Johnson, the epitaph-writer is “a poet whose verses wander over the earth, and leave their subject behind them, and who is forced, like an unskilful painter, to make his purpose known by adventitious help” (Johnson, V.241). The words of an epitaph have nothing inherent that attaches them to the world, and have to use “adventitious” deictic means – the “Here lies” and “now” 57
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customary on epitaphs – to point at their object. It is a shortcoming for Johnson that such a writer makes such flagrant use of the physical location of his words, while for Wordsworth it is a happy openness of text to place, an organic relationship between flighty words and permanent nature that is not usually possible. Beckett’s narrators also worry about the proximity of their words to their final resting place. The narrator of First Love comments: There is little chance unfortunately of [his epitaph’s] ever being reared above the skull that conceived it, unless the State takes up the matter. But to be unearthed I must first be found and I greatly fear those gentlemen will have as much trouble finding me dead as alive. So I hasten to record it here and now, while there is yet time. (1995, 26) A self-penned epitaph should maintain an even more natural relationship to the dead, who will truly speak from the grave in it. Rather than being literalized by its connection with the grave, however, the narrator’s “unearthed” is in fact unsubstantialized, in Wordsworth’s term, to mean simply “found”: he will never be located, whether above ground or below, and is destined to remain anonymous. Likewise, ironically, however hastily he sets about recording them, his written words are recorded in a “here and now” that will never be rediscovered or pinpointed. The writer is as unlocatable in time as in space, these blank categories upon which the anonymous written word (with no organic relationship to their creator) can have no purchase. Just as Clov in Beckett’s play Endgame wants to set down the “last things in their last place,” Beckett’s narrators want to establish their last habitation. Moran passes the town graveyard and contemplates the plot he has bought and his “simple Latin cross, white” (1994, 135). He even wants to locate himself prematurely by means of this cross, wishing “to have my name put on it, with the here lies and the date of my birth” (135). He goes on: ‘then all it would have wanted was the date of my death. They would not let me’. Similarly, the voice of the ninth Text for Nothing “patrols” the gates of the graveyard hoping that one day he might have a body to “get there with” (138-39). A permanent attachment to place is as important to these characters as to the speakers in Wordsworth’s poems – but far more elusive. Malone has comparable anxieties about the durability of his “last words” in time. He resolves that writing is at least preferable to speech 58
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in this respect: “I wonder what my last words will be, written, the others do not endure, but vanish, into thin air” (1994, 250). It is an irony that he is thrown back for any hope of permanence on a form of language – the written word – from which the subject is necessarily absent. Beckett is poking fun here at the convention of “last words,” suggesting that those that are widely known are always prepared in advance of the subject’s actual death, with an eye to posterity and “endurance,” rather than being charged with the drama of the event of death itself. It also underlines, however, the arbitrariness of any expression that claims to enclose the living, changing subject in a fixed form of words – and suggests, in the chilling corollary to this insight, that those who have “vanished” from life have done so irrevocably and completely, however many reams of words have been spoken or written of them. Wordworth, as well as Johnson, then, offers Beckett a model for writing about the “ubiquity and indifference” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 28) of death. Johnson may have suggested that a deathly tone may not necessarily be grave, but Beckett finds in Wordsworth something more profound about the fruitful relationship between composition and decomposition. Both of the earlier writers voice similar anxieties to Beckett over the “adventitious” link between words and things, between enduring language and fleeting life. Beckett’s narrators situate themselves in between these men’s positions, however: they long for the reassurance Wordsworth finds in the physical coincidence of epitaph and corpse, but fear the “wandering” fate of Johnson’s epitaph. Beckett’s laconic fictional epitaphs may have satisfied neither man’s expectations of the genre, however different these were, but his more sustained writing about death would have spoken to both of them in its discrimination as well as in its dispassion, and treats the charged anticipation of death as well as the cold indifference beyond it. Notes 1. In the English version: “To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets” (Beckett 1994, 25).
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Elizabeth Barry Works Cited Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett (London: Vintage, 1990). Beckett, Samuel, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953). –, “Sottisier” Notebook, RUL MS 2901, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1990). –, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1994). –, The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). Hazlitt, William, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998). Johnson, Samuel, “On Pope’s Epitaphs,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. Arthur Waugh, 6 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1896), V.231-249. Knowlson, James and Elizabeth, eds., Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). Löwe, N. F., “Sam’s Love for Sam: Samuel Beckett, Dr Johnson and Human Wishes,” SBT/A 8, “Poetry and Other Prose / Poésies et autres proses,” ed. M. Engelberts, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 189-203. McMillan, Douglas and Martha Fehsenfeld, eds., Beckett in the Theatre (London: Calder, 1988). Mills-Courts, Karen, Poetry as Epitaph: Representation and Poetic Language (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1990). Schneider, Alan, “Working with Beckett,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Wordsworth, William, The Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1974a). –, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W.J.B. Owen (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974b).
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BECKETT AND ROMANTICISM IN THE 1930s Mark Nixon This essay surveys Beckett’s response to Romantic literature and painting in the 1930s. It examines the way he dismissed its sentimentality and elaborate style but was attracted to a particular strand of Romanticism that portrayed a melancholic sensibility.
In a letter of 29 January 1935 to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett announced that he had written a “new short story,” and had sent it to the publisher Lovat Dickinson (letter to MacGreevy [hereafter TM], 29 January 1935). The story, “Lightning Calculation,” which ultimately became a part of Murphy, was the first piece of creative writing Beckett had done since A Case in a Thousand, completed in May 1934. Indeed, 1934 was a year in which his thinking revolved around the aesthetic implications of writing rather than the practical process of composition. Beckett published several critical pieces and reviews during this year, and also read extensively, as several notebooks (especially those on philosophy, psychology and the history of German Literature) now at Trinity College show. Beckett’s theoretical preoccupations of the time are reflected in “Lightning Calculation,” which in many ways reads like an aesthetic statement. It is for example the first text to draw on the visual arts in more than just a referential way. Indeed, the story must have been begun shortly after what was undoubtedly Beckett’s most profound engagement with the visual arts in general, and the painter Cézanne in particular, up until that time. Beckett had already alluded to Cézanne in Dream of Fair to Middling Women as being “very strong on architectonics,” although his knowledge of Cézanne’s work at this time appears to have been rather negligible (178). Two remarkable letters written to MacGreevy in September 1934, however, reveal a far more searching encounter with Cézanne’s work, which had a critical impact on Beckett’s developing poetics. Discussing the painting Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1905-06) in London’s Tate Gallery, Beckett argued that whereas the “anthropomorphized” reality as portrayed by Dutch
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painting had become insufficient, “Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever” (TM, 8 September 1934). Beckett’s criticism of anthropomorphism in the Cézanne letters is rooted in its “itch to animise,” the investment of landscape with human qualities: “What I feel in Cézanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa and Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid” (TM, 8 September 1934). Beckett’s terms of reference here invoke the trajectory from a romantic, or rather pre-romantic to a ‘modern’ view of the world. Both Salvator Rosa (1615-73) and Jacob van Ruysdael (c.1628-82) are considered proto-Romantics in that their late paintings reveal a romantic sensibility in the use of mood, motifs and perspective, and Ruysdael in particular inspired many Romantic landscapists. That Beckett viewed Cézanne as the painter who overcame Romantic painting is evident from a letter written in 1937, in which he stated that Constable’s “nature is really infected with ‘spirit,’ ultimately as humanised + romantic as Turner’s was + Claude’s was not + Cézanne’s was not” (TM, 14 August 1937). The debate between a romantic and a modern approach to landscape (and the problematic object-subject relationship) lies at the heart of various critical pronouncements made by Beckett during 1934. It thus appears in his attack in “Recent Irish Poetry” on the “Victorian Gael,” where Sir Samuel Ferguson and Standish O’Grady are dismissed as an “Irish Romantic Arnim-Brentano combination,” with a reference to Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806-08) compounding the “Ossianic” mixture (Beckett 1983, 70 and 77). The condemnation of the “cut-anddried sanctity and loveliness” of the Irish “antiquarians” is located in their refusal to admit ‘self-perception’ as a theme, in that their writing merely strives to “land the practitioner into the correct scenery, where the self is either most happily obliterated or else so improved and enlarged that it can be mistaken for part of the décor” (71).1 This essentially rephrases Beckett’s belief that in Romantic writing, as well as painting, “the landscape shelters or threatens or serves or destroys” (TM, 14 August 1937). Beckett’s concern with the relationship between self and other, the individual and landscape, forms a central focus of “Lightning Calculation” (RUL MS 2902). The short typescript describes the movements of one Quigley, who is writing a book entitled The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Campendonck. Quigley’s undertaking is not 62
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without its problems, as he is both troubled by the fact that he cannot remember the “name of Hobbema’s celebrated avenue” and because the “golden Cuyp sky which he now evoked, in order to make sure that it contained the flight of birds so important to his thesis, did not present itself with sufficient detail to set his mind at ease.”2 Quigley only manages to find some kind of resolution to these problems when he stops off at the Lyons teahouse on the way to the National Gallery. In a scene that reappears in Murphy, Quigley devotes considerable energy to calculating the various ways in which he can eat his five assorted biscuits. As a consequence, “Quigley began to be engrossed by the biscuits, and therefore no longer troubled by Hobbema and his avenue and Cuyp and his birds.” The entire episode can be seen as a fictional manifestation of Beckett’s aesthetic concerns as imparted to MacGreevy in the September 1934 letters. Ultimately, in the eating of the biscuits, Quigley is favouring mathematics, or Cézanne’s “architectonics,” over Dutch “landscapability,” which reflects Beckett’s own dismissal of “Cuyp’s cows as irrelevant” in a letter to MacGreevy (TM, 8 September 1934). Nevertheless, as John Pilling rightly argues, Murphy is not a book “strong on architectonics” (1997, 133). In part this is because, in “Lightning Calculation,” Quigley finds it difficult to write his book “without reneging on his infatuation with the work of Hercules Seg[h]ers.” Although not a formalistic artist either, the Dutch artist Seghers is equally not an “animising” painter. Indeed, as Beckett noted in February 1937 when he inspected two coloured engravings in the Print Room of the Zwinger Gallery in Dresden, Seghers was a “[v]ery modern talent” (“German Diaries” [hereafter GD], 9 February 1937).3 Hercules Seghers (1580/90?-1633/8?) was an innovative and experimental artist, few of whose paintings survive today. Seghers, by all accounts a drunken, destitute and unappreciated artist, represents the very kind of unhappy creative spirit to whom Beckett tended to be attracted. Influenced by one of Beckett’s favourite painters, Adam Elsheimer, Seghers’s work often depicts wild and fantastic mountainous scenes, with jagged cliffs and desolate valleys invoking at once an emotional intensity as well as a haunting, melancholy quiet. Seghers’s etchings, which Beckett admired in Dresden, are particularly ahead of their time, as he experimented with different coloured inks and often printed on dyed or coloured paper. A further diary entry on Seghers clarifies Beckett’s perception of Seghers’s modernity: “Two Hercules Seghers […] both flat landscapes with view of Rhenen, one 63
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formerly given to Van Goyen, but the tone is already much more piercing, + less stylised than V.G.’s” (GD, 2 January 1937). Importantly, in September 1934 Beckett had defined Van Goyen as one of the painters who “anthropomorphized landscape” (TM, 8 September 1934). Dismissive of the sentimental expression of anthropomorphism, yet unable to achieve the cold “architectonics” of Cézanne, Beckett ultimately sought a middle ground that the innovative yet emotionally intense Seghers could supply. The key to Seghers’s modern approach, according to Beckett, lies in the fact that he is both less ‘stylised’ and less ‘sentimental’ than his contemporaries. The two terms act as yardsticks in Beckett’s evaluation of literature and painting in the 1930s, and fundamentally determine his like or dislike of artists. Already in his lecture on Gide at Trinity College he had condemned the Naturalists and Romantics as being “artificial” and lacking “authentic complexity” (Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC 60, 3 and 5). Beckett thus favoured the “integrity of incoherence” in both Gide and Stendhal over the “patient fabricated order or Rom[antics] and Natsts. [Naturalists]” (37 and 9). Following Gide, Beckett thought that the Romantics evaded the complexity of reality by adopting the “démon d’analogie” (39), a notion he rephrased in his 1934 review “Schwabenstreich” as “the theory of Correspondances, that trusty standby of all the Romantics from Hoffmann to Proust” (1983, 62). The point is also made in “Fingal,” where Belacqua feels he “must be getting old and tired […] when I find the nature outside me compensating for the nature inside me, like JeanJacques [Rousseau] sprawling in a bed of saxifrages” (1973, 31). Beckett’s attitude towards Romanticism in the 1930s was not one of simple dismissal. To be sure, a sweeping glance through Beckett’s writing of the 1930s would appear to confirm that he did not think much of Romantic writers and artists. In accordance with what Dream calls the “tag and the ready-made” (47), the names of poets and fragments of their work are liberally scattered throughout the early prose and poetry, and more often than not take the form of humorous misquotation. One among numerous examples of this is Beckett’s use of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” in both Dream and Murphy, the latter text including the revision of the Romantic poet’s line “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” to “Since Heaven lay around you as a bedwetter” (1993, 122).4 On the whole the Romantic poets are condemned for their stylised, affected writing and, in particular, their sentimentality. In all of Beckett’s early work the word ‘sentimental’ is 64
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used as an index of something to be negated, as in the passage in Dream where the Smerry leaves for Hamburg, and Belacqua is left mourning her departure: “certain aspects of her abode in his heart […] made themselves felt from time to time in the form of a sentimental eructation that was far from being agreeable” (109). The subsequent reference to Belacqua’s “infrequent jolt of sentimental heartburn” (109) highlights Beckett’s general distaste for the word ‘heart,’ which resurfaces again and again in connection with exaggerated sentimentality, usually in connection with Romantic writers. Thus in a May 1931 letter to MacGreevy he draws attention to “a few shocking lines here and there” (TM, 29 May 1931) in Goethe, quoting from Die Leiden des Jungen Werther: “Was ich weiss kann jeder wissen, / mein Herz hab’ ich allein. !! (What I know everybody can know, / my heart is mine alone.)” (Beckett’s emphasis; my translation). Dismissing this excessively sentimental strand of German Romanticism, Beckett would again mock the “blabby word” Herz by incorporating a line from Gretchen’s song at the spinning-wheel from Goethe’s Faust in Dream: “Mein Ruh ist hin mein Herz ist schwer ich finde Sie nimmer und nimmer mehr” (My peace is fled, / My heart is sore; / I shall find it never, / Ah! nevermore) (59).5 The wealth of allusions to and fragments from Romantic writers in the early work is taken, as so often with Beckett, from secondary rather than primary sources. Thus Beckett for example read Théophile Gautier’s Histoire du romantisme, from which he took three notes in his Dream Notebook (items 1000-02). He also took extensive notes on German Romantic thinkers from Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy (TCD MS 10967), on German Romantic writers and their texts from J.G. Robertson’s History of German Literature in Spring 1934 (TCD MS 10971/1), and, to a lesser degree, on their English counterparts from the revised 1933 edition of Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s A History of English Literature (TCD MS 10970). From these books Beckett largely copied out biographical and bibliographical details, but he did at times take more extended notes, such as the excerpt from a footnote in Cazamian’s discussion of the Romantic Period: All that Romantic writers imagine and feel is accompanied by a shade of wonder, because they see those emotions and those images rise within themselves with a surprising spontaneousness, and because all such imaginings, in spite of their novelty, bring 65
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with them a disturbing impression of an intimacy of old date. Romanticism is as a whole, in this respect, a phenomenon of collective ‘paramnesia’, the reviviscence of a subconscious personality. (TCD MS 10970, 38r; Legouis and Cazamian, 1030, n.1) The two strands of Cazamian’s discussion noted here – spontaneous imagination and the importance of memory – are drawn from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, and are restated (as Philip LaubachKiani has pointed out) by Beckett in his essay Proust. Beckett thus locates Proust’s “romantic strain” in his “substitution of affectivity for intelligence” and “the importance of memory in inspiration” (80 and 82). Moreover, Wordsworth’s statement that “[p]oetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is echoed by Beckett’s belief that – in terms of his own poetic output – only those poems stemming from a “spontaneous combustion of the spirit” were worth anything (TM, 18 October [1932]). Curiously, Beckett re-enacted a Romantic compositional experience during his visit to Germany in 1936/37. Whilst visiting the Ohlsdorf graveyard on the outskirts of Hamburg, Beckett appears to have been simultaneously receptive to spontaneous inspiration as well as to the specific creative stimulus injected by memory. Walking through the cemetery, “alive with graves,” Beckett “thought a poem would be there”: “the noise of my steps in the leaves reminds me of something, but can’t find what” (GD, 25 October 1936). Yet the Romantic “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” was not forthcoming: “I feel nothing.” Beckett’s diary entry, however, captures the mood of the cemetery: Strange banners on the newly earthed. One bedraggled crape fillet all on its own. Yellow leaves + red berries. Young poplars of incredible delicacy, almost bare of leaves, sheathed in their branches. Dull golden larches + glaucus pines. Heather on graves (but in bunches), roses […] One Liebespaar [loving couple]. Fish in pond being fed. Swans. A [erasure] small old man sidles determinedly into a nook, [erasure] behind a yew hedge, facing a piece d’eau, [erasure] with the air of a regular weekend mourner, a Leidtragender Trostsuchend [erasure] und findender [sufferer/bereaved seeking and finding consolation]. 66
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The large number of erasures show Beckett’s earnest attempt to describe the cemetery, perhaps hoping that he would be able to write a poem at a later point, drawing as it were on Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility.” Yet if Beckett admitted a romantic sensibility into his private diary (“How I ADORE solitude”; GD, 31 December 1936), in his texts such descriptive material is usually filtered through a rather mocking attitude. Thus for example Beckett extensively parodies a Romantic style of writing in the unpublished short story “Echo’s Bones,” in which the narrative frequently traces an embellished, adorned discourse. On being asked what he sees from Lord Gall’s tree-house, Belacqua says “Timberlike trees in great profusion […] brushwood in abundance and diadems of lakes” (15). Despite being told to “Cut out the style” by Gall, Romantic passages continue to appear in the story, as in the description of “a cataclasm of boughs and a moonlit pandemonium of autumn tints” (18). This exuberant style reaches its apotheosis when towards the end of the story, Belacqua is sitting (like a Graveyard Poet?) on his tomb stone: What with the moon shining, the sea tossing in her sleep and sighing, and the mountains observing their Attic vigil in the background, he found it difficult to decide offhand whether the scene was of the kind that is called romantic or whether it should not with more justice be termed classical. Both elements were present, of that there could be no question. Perhaps classicoromantic would be the fairest diagnosis. A classico-romantic scene. Personally, he felt calm and wistful. A classico-romantic corpse. (19) Leaving aside the use of stereotypical Romantic (and Greek) metaphors and analogies, the terms of this passage are taken from Mario Praz’s La Carne, La Morte e Il Diabolo (The Romantic Agony), notes from which Beckett took in the Dream Notebook. As the title of the book indicates, The Romantic Agony is essentially a study of decadence, and thus concentrates on the darker strands of Romanticism – the satanic hero, deathly beauty, the beauty of death, decadent sexuality – all the while hovering between the ecstatic (Blake) and the depraved (de Sade). As he did with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Beckett mainly used the 67
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book to furnish Dream and texts written shortly thereafter with literary and biographical curiosities. Yet Beckett was also aware of the larger movement behind Praz’s study, and used terms and ideas from the introductory chapter to flesh out his parody of Romantic writing. Thus Belacqua’s indecision over the precise nature of the evening mood – classical or romantic – draws on Praz’s statement (not copied into the Dream notebook) on the opening page of his study that “L’epiteto romantico e l’antitesi classico-romantico sono approssimazioni da lungo tempo entrate nell’uso” (The epithet ‘romantic’ and the antithetical terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ are approximate labels which have long been in use (Praz 1930, 1; Praz 1951, 1)). And the word “wistful” is used by Praz as an example – together with the German “Sehnsucht” – as an expression of a Romantic “state of mind which cannot be described” (Praz 1951, 14). Perhaps more importantly, Praz’s book illuminated what Beckett in his essay on Proust called the “gangrene of Romanticism” (80).6 Somewhat misleadingly, Beckett implies that the phrase derives from J.-K. Huysmans’s A rebours, but whereas this book does talk about the “decomposition of the French language,” and the way it goes “a little greener every century” (200), it is in En ménage that Huysmans refers to the fact that “nous n'étions pas gangrenés par le romantisme.” The degeneration of the lofty ideals and aspirations of the Romantics clearly appealed to Beckett, whose early landscapes are literally infused with ‘gangrene.’ Thus the colours yellow and green are frequently employed to signpost a process of decomposition, as in the poem “Enueg I” with its image of the “blotches of doomed yellow in the pit of the Liffey” and the “slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of sewer” (1977, 12). In Murphy romanticised moments are undercut with that same sense of the organic, the “wild evening” is “green and yellow seen in a puddle” (128). Similarly, as Murphy awakens in the park after night had fallen, surrounded by “less Wordsworthy” sheep, he “bared his eyes to the moon, he forced back the lids with his fingers, the yellow oozed under them into his skull, a belch came wet and foul from the green old days” (62). Yet if Beckett turned away from the Romantics’ use of landscape and nature – as Malone says, “but to hell with all this fucking scenery” (1994, 279) – he was not against the Romantic sensibility. Throughout the 1930s, Beckett’s cultural awareness was shaped by his attraction to the melancholy strain inherent in Romanticism, or those qualities encapsulated by the German word Schwermut. Thus it was clearly not 68
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the Romantic hero that interested Beckett, but the solitary turning his back on the world, or being shorn by the world. As I have shown elsewhere, Beckett was in particular attracted to a melancholy strand of German Romanticism, the co-ordinates of which he traced from Schopenhauer, Schubert, Goethe (tellingly, as a poet, not as a playwright), Grillparzer, Heine to Hölderlin and Georg Trakl.7 Beckett had of course already expressed sentiments that set him alongside this tradition in Proust: here “art is the apotheosis of solitude” (64), and suffering “the main condition of the artistic experience” (28). Indeed, the entire essay is founded upon a matrix of pessimism filtered through Schopenhauer. Beckett was highly conscious of where he was taking his reading of Proust. Even before he had started writing the essay (late August 1930), an entry dated 15 July 1930 in George Reavey’s diary, presumably made after the two friends had met, illustrates this: “Sam. Beckett – Proust + Pessimism.”8 It was at around this time that Beckett first read Schopenhauer: An intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted – is worth the examination of one who is interested in Leopardi and Proust rather than in Carducci and Barrès. (TM, undated [25? July 1930]) Attentive to “the darkest passages in Schopenhauer” (Beckett 1992, 62), Beckett introduced this aesthetic of unhappiness into Proust. And having defined his interest in Leopardi by way of Schopenhauer’s “unhappiness,” the Italian artisan de ses malheurs was engaged to further enrich the essay’s pessimistic flavour.9 The importance of Leopardi to early Beckett is exemplified by his attachment to the poem “A se stesso” (To Himself).10 A single unlined sheet of paper survives on which Beckett had copied out the poem, which includes lines which expressed feelings apparently close to Beckett’s temperament: Omai disprezza Te, la natura, il brutto Poter che, nascoso, a commun danno impera, E l’infinita vanità del tutto. (Now despise Yourself, nature, the sinister 69
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Power that, secretly, commands our common ruin, And the infinite vanity of everything.) (TCD MS 10971/9) If we turn to French Romantic writers, it is again those whose writing is tinged with a melancholy air that Beckett read, admired and “borrowed” material from, rather than the more grandiose, elaborate writers. Thus it is not Hugo but de Musset who appears throughout the early works. Although familiar with de Musset’s poems (“La Nuit de mai” and “Souvenirs” seemingly favourites, despite being caricatured in Dream), it was probably his reading of Praz’s The Romantic Agony that alerted him to The Confessions of a Child of a Century. Beckett read the book in 1931, when he jotted down some entries from the book in his Dream notebook (items 255-57 and 263-67). The references to de Musset in the Dream notebook interrupt the notes taken from Praz at precisely the point at which they are discussed in The Romantic Agony, where the influence of de Sade on de Musset is explored. And, as in the case of Goethe, Beckett was interested in the personal rather than the public writings of another (proto-)Romantic writer, the “celebrated poet Rousseau” (1992, 97), declaring – on the basis of his reading of the “the madness + the distortion” in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker (TM, 5 December 1932) – Rousseau to be an “authentically tragic figure” (TM, undated [16 September 1934]). Another such tragic figure is of course John Keats, apart from the German poets of the period the most important Romantic figure in Beckett’s creative development. It is surely no exaggeration to say that Beckett was fascinated by writers and artists who died young, as Keats did, at 25. In his notes on English literary history, for example, Beckett transcribed the title of a poem by Henry Kirke White – “Oft in sorrow, oft in woe” – before noting that White’s early death at 21 made him a “[s]ymbol for Romantics of the poet” (TCD MS 10970, 39r).11 Having read him as a schoolboy, Keats remained a point of reference throughout Beckett’s life, and his admiration for the “Ode to a Nightingale” is evident from the fact that quotations from and references to the poem appear in a large number of texts. In particular, Beckett used and adapted the line “To take into the air my quiet breath” as well as Keats’s play on the rhyme between ‘death’ and ‘breath’ (lines 52-54 of the poem) in every major publication of the 1930s.12 Tellingly, despite its similar reference to “quiet breathing,” Beckett used Keats’s more positive poem “Endymion” in Molloy, as Molloy, 70
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substituting ‘life’ for ‘thing,’ quotes the line “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” (1995, 198) For Beckett, Keats and his writing embodied precisely those elements of Romanticism that he most admired. As he explained in a letter to MacGreevy: I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats - squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips + rubbing his hands, ‘counting the last oozings, hours by hours.’ I like him the best of them all, because he doesn’t beat his fists on the table. I like that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green sickness. And weariness: ‘Take into the air my quiet breath.’ (TM, undated [6 April 1930]) Beckett’s statement ties together several main aesthetic concerns that would preoccupy him throughout the decade. First of all, Beckett finds in the Keats of ‘To Autumn’ an analogue to the ‘gangrenous’ element’ of Romanticism, the “oozing” and the “thick soft damp green sickness.” But more importantly, Beckett is here locating a quietist attitude in Keats, one which he would seek out and find in numerous other writers in the following years, from Thomas à Kempis via Grillparzer to Geulincx. He is thus favouring the languid, reticent, resigned poet over the exuberant visionary, the figure who – like Dante’s Belacqua crouching or Walther von der Vogelweide sitting on his stone – abandons the trope of onwardness, of going up.13 It is a kind of recognition that the Romantic Sehnsucht – Beckett had already used the word in Dream (80) – the longing for love or immortality or spiritual transcendence will always remain unfulfilled. The result is a kind of melancholy anguish, as Goethe expressed in a line from “Mignon’s Song” (in Wilhelm Meister) which Beckett copied into his “Sottisier” notebook (RUL MS 2901): “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide” (Only he who has experienced yearning knows how I suffer; RUL MS 2901, 15r). Furthermore, Beckett’s own aesthetic concerns with the threshold between expression and silence, knowledge and incompetence found a parallel with a similar Romantic concern. Thus Mario Praz in the Romantic Agony points to the fact that in scorning “concrete expression,” Romantic writers celebrate the “magic of the ineffable,” and goes on to quote Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (Praz 1951, 15). 71
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As Anne Atik tells us, Beckett was also familiar with Keats’s idea of “negative capability,” designating (as he expressed in a letter to his brothers dated 21 December 1817) “a man […] capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”; a line that sums up Beckett aesthetic movement over the course of the 1930s (Atik, 71; Keats 1974, 55). Beckett’s specific evaluation of Romanticism in general and Keats in particular can also be traced through his comments on Dutch and Romantic painting during his trip to Germany in 1936/37. The quietist attitude he detected in Keats, as expressed in his letter to MacGreevy, finds expression in his comments on Philips Wouwermann, whose “lyrical” landscapes he admired, the “solitary riders + resting scenes” (GD, 5 February 1937). As in his response to Romantic literature, Beckett was aware of the “frontier of sentiment + sentimentality’ (GD, 6 December 1936). Even in Munch’s more contemporary painting he discerned “feeling inclined to be overstated into the sentimental” (GD, 20 January 1937). On the whole he thought that German Romantic painters were hopelessly mired in sentimentality, and in his diary notes how he regarded their work “with loathing” (GD, 21 October 1936). The one German painter exempted from this dismissal was Kaspar David Friedrich. His comments on Zwei Männer den Mond betrachtend (Two Men Observing the Moon, 1819), an acknowledged visual influence on Waiting for Godot, are strikingly similar to his reading of Keats: “Pleasant predilection for 2 tiny languid men in his landscapes, as in the little moon landscape, that is the only kind of romantic still tolerable, the bémolisé [the minor key]” (GD, 14 February 1937).14 Beckett’s sympathy with this quiet melancholy was closely connected with his growing emphasis on the unsaid, the implied, rather than exultant, overemphasised expression. Almost amounting to an aesthetic credo, Beckett repeatedly and in various guises made the distinction, as in his comments on modern German painters, preferring the “stillness + the unsaid of [Willem] Grimm + [Karl] Ballmer” (GD, 26 November 1936) as opposed to Bargheer’s “enormous competence” (GD, 26 November 1936) and Schmidt-Rottluff’s “programmatic monumentalism” (GD, 19 December 1936).15 Beckett’s attraction to melancholy Romanticism stayed with him all his life – he was fond of quoting Keats in the last months of his life. In Malone Dies, fragments of Romanticism resurface in the description of “such a night as Kaspar David Friedrich loved, tempestuous and bright” when “[t]hat name comes back to me, those names” (1994, 72
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198). There follows a passage in which Beckett in quick succession references many of the poems he had already drawn upon in his work of the 1930s: The clouds scud, tattered by the wind, across a limpid ground. If I had the patience to wait I would see the moon [Shelley, “To the Moon”]. But I have not. Now that I have looked I hear the wind. [Shelley. “Ode to the West Wind”] I close my eyes and it mingles with my breath [Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”]. Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond the tumult there is a great calm [Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads], and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again. (1994, 198) Whether he wanted to or not, Beckett’s own temperament opened his work up to Romantic influences. As he stated after a walk on the outskirts of Hamburg: “Feel most happily melancholy” (GD, 7 November 1936). Notes 1. Such an enlargement of the self Beckett detected in Rilke’s “Ichgott,” the “prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God” (1983, 66). Cf. also Beckett’s note on Schelling’s statement that “Nature is the ego in process of becoming,” taken from Windelband’s A History of Philosophy; TCD MS 10967, 247r. 2. Beckett is alluding to Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689) in London’s National Gallery. The Cuyp mentioned here could be any one from a number held in London, as many of Cuyp’s landscapes have both a golden sky and the flight of birds. 3. Cf. also Beckett’s comment following a visit to the National Gallery in London, where he “saw a lot in the Segers that I had not seen before” (TM, 8 October 1935). 4. Throughout his life Beckett made jokes based on Wordsworth’s daffodils, as when he talks to Arland Ussher about the “bull let loose among the cows in Eisenstein’s General Line, a reference which I confess only occurs to me this moment, in the calm light of March winds caught up like sleeping daffodils”; letter to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936 (HRHRC). Cf. also his note
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Mark Nixon to Judith Douw (Schmidt) that it was the “most wretched Spring within memory of daffodils”; letter of 27 April 1965 (Syracuse). 5. The Faust line is from Part 1, ll.3374-77; English translation taken from: Faust, trans. by Albert G. Latham, 116. 6. Cf. also Beckett’s letter of 12 May 1938 to Arland Ussher, in which he quotes Herriot’s “obsolete vitamins of romanticism.” 7.
See my “‘Scraps of German.’”
8. George Reavey, diary entry for 15 July 1930 (HRHRC). Beckett told MacGreevy that he was struggling to start writing in a letter dated 25 August 1930, but completed the essay on 17 September 1930. 9. The Watt notebooks contain a further reference to the “unhappy writer” Leopardi, in Notebook 1, 31r (HRHRC). In a 1958 letter to A.J. Leventhal, Beckett confirmed that “Leopardi was a strong influence when I was young (his pessimism, not his patriotism!)”; letter to A.J. Leventhal, 21 April 1958 (HRHRC). The epigraph to the first edition of Proust was taken from Leopardi, but removed from subsequent editions. 10.
The poem is cited in Dream (62).
11. When taking biographical details and dates on writers and painters in his notebooks, Beckett tended to append an exclamation mark beside artists who died young. 12. Cf. Dream (107), “Dante and the Lobster” (1973, 22), Murphy (86, 128), Watt (31). Note also how Beckett admired Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied,” in which the song of the birds is ended. 13. Presumably alluding to Keats’s sickness, Beckett refers in Proust to “the terrible panic-stricken stasis of Keats” (90). 14. Cf. Knowlson (2002, 78) for a discussion of the ‘bémolisé’ Beckett detected in Friedrich. Note that Friedrich’s paintings did not always fulfil the criteria of the ‘minor key.’ Beckett described the painting Kreuz im Gebirge (1807-08) as appealing to the “very dregs of aesthesia” (GD, 14 February 1937). 15. In his 1938 review “Intercessions” Beckett similarly detected in Devlin’s poems “the extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said” (1983, 94).
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Beckett and Romanticism in the 1930s Works Cited Atik, Anne, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2001). Barry, Elizabeth: “‘Take into the air my quiet breath’: Samuel Beckett and English Romanticism,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 10.1&2 (Fall 2000/Spring 2001), 207-21. Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965). –, More Pricks than Kicks (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973). –, Watt (London: Calder, 1976). –, Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove P, 1977). –, Disjecta; Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983). –, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Blackcat P, 1992). –, Murphy (London: Calder, 1993). –, The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder 1994). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. Stan Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). –, “Echo’s Bones,” Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Leventhal Collection. –, “Lightning Calculation” [typescript], RUL MS 2902, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, “German Diaries 1936/37,” Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Letters to A.J. Leventhal, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. –, Letters to Arland Ussher, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. –, Letters to Thomas MacGreevy, TCD MS 10402, Trinity College Dublin Library. –, Notes on Philosophy, TCD MS 10967, Trinity College Dublin. –, Notes on English Literary History, TCD MS 10970, Trinity College Dublin. –, ‘Sottisier’ notebook, RUL MS 2901, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Typescript of Leopardi’s “A se stesso,” TCD MS 10971/9, Trinity College Dublin. –, Watt notebooks, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Burrows, Rachel, Lecture Notes, TCD MIC 60, Trinity College Dublin. Gautier, Théophile, Histoire de romantisme (Paris: Fasquelle, 1927). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, trans. Albert G. Latham (London: Dent, 1926). Hölderlin, Friedrich, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1967).
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Mark Nixon Huysmans, J.-K., Against Nature ( London: Penguin, 1959). –, En ménage (Geneva: Droz, 2005). Keats, John, Selected Poems, ed. Edmund Blunden (London: Collins, 1955). –, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Pack (New York: Signet, 1974). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). –, “Beckett in the Musée Condé 1934,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 11.1 (2002), 73-83. Laubach-Kiani, Philip: “‘I close my eyes and try and imagine them’: Romantic Discourse Formations in Krapp’s Last Tape,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 13.2 (Spring 2004), 125-36. Legouis, Emile, and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, rev. ed. (London: Dent, 1933). Nixon, Mark, “‘Scraps of German’: Beckett reading German Literature,” in SBTA 16, “Notes diverse[s] holo,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 259-282. Pilling, John, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). –, ed., Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999). Praz, Mario, La Carne, La Morte e Il Diabolo (Milan: Soc. Editrice ‘La Cultura,’ 1930). –, The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed. (London : Oxford UP, 1951).
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SAMUEL BECKETT AND ANTHROPOMORPHIC INSOLENCE
Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett’s writings display a contradictory attitude to Romanticism, their incipient lyricism ruthlessly constrained and the “impulse to animise” rejected in favour of a view of nature as atomistic, mineral and organic. Beckett’s distrust of the dictum that “man is the measure of all things” leads in Watt to a sustained critique of the anthropomorphic impulse and of any epistemology (including Romanticism) that thus asserts the self. I then critique, from the perspective of Watt, two Romantic tenets: “mythical fancy” and the transcendental impulse. The essay concludes where it begins, with Beckett’s ambiguous attraction to a tradition he rejected, this constituting his experience of the romantic agony.
Immediately after the impossible paradigm of Mr Knott’s footwear (200-01), Samuel Beckett’s most austere and least obviously romantic novel features a curiously lyrical passage in which someone (Watt? Sam? an omniscient narrator? Beckett?) reflects on the passing of time and youth: To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something. To pause, towards the close of one’s three hour day, and consider: the darkening ease, the brightening trouble; the pleasure pleasure because it was, the pain pain because it shall be; the glad acts grown proud, the proud acts growing stubborn; the panting the trembling towards a being gone, a being to come; and the true true no longer, and the false true not yet. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous. Then the gnashing ends, or it goes on, and one is in the pit, in the hollow, the longing for longing gone, the horror of horror, and one is in the hollow, at
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the foot of all the hills at last, the ways down, the ways up, and free, free at last, for an instant free at last, nothing at last. (Beckett 1959, 201-02) This paragraph, a relatively late addition to Watt, entered the last draft (NB4, 157)1 as a quasi-independent prose-poem. It forms an interlude before the description of Mr Knott in his nightshirt and the “strange and unseasonable costume” that he adopts at indifferent times of the year, “as though he were unaware of the weather” (202). The narrator then asks: “Does he seek to know again, what is cold, what is heat?” This is rejected as “an anthropomorphic insolence of short duration” (202), only to be replaced by a more lasting one: the speculation that Mr Knott, needing nothing, yet needs a witness to his not needing, “And so he needed to be witnessed” (203). The phrase “anthropomorphic insolence” (202) reflects the dictum of Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things,” as interpreted by Wilhelm Windelband with respect to a wider argument: that the Protagorean theory of knowledge, as embraced by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and as endorsed by the teachings of Christianity with respect to the immortal soul, has created a philosophical and religious hegemony with such success that we as its heirs some two thousand years later are largely unaware of the degree to which it has infiltrated our every perception. The frustrated impulse towards romantic sentiment or lyricism is a frequent trope in Beckett’s writings.2 The phrase, “perhaps something,” echoes Watt’s “But was not that something” (148), when he sees himself, little, poor, as now littler, poorer; but wakes to find on rising, on descending, Erskine gone and a strange man, Arthur, in the kitchen. Watt does not know when this was, but it happens when the yew is dark green, on a morning soft and white, to the sound of bells, “of chapel bells, of church bells” (149). The sense of a world awakening to Easter (Faust, Parsifal, or the gold and white and blue dawning that ends Part I of Watt) is in poignant contrast to Watt’s isolation. Watt arrived at the house of Mr Knott (30) on an evening when the moon was an unpleasant yellow colour;3 but he leaves it on a night of unusual splendour (222). As he moves through hortulan beauties, flowers and grasses brush against him in a way that is not unpleasant, and a “pendulous umbel” lapping against his hat gives him “peculiar satisfaction.” The moon and stars pour down on Watt a light “so strong, so pure, so steady and so white”; but Watt’s reaction is disgust. This is the “candida luna,” or white moon, of Leopardi’s “Canto notturno di un 78
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pastore errante dell’asia,” in which the beauty of the moonlight reveals finally a scene of nothing (Obscure Locks #222.6). Something of this is captured in the Addenda of Watt (249), in a haunting passage that goes back to the sense of Nothingness (the sky above, the waste below) of Quin’s first awareness. As early drafts make clear, this, the primal scene of the novel, is indebted to Leopardi’s poem, which invokes the littleness of the human spirit against the immensity of the desert and the waste.4 Molloy reacts more passionately to the moon, in a kind of romantic agony.5 Ruled by emotion, he refuses to admit feeling. His anger often rises to lyricism, only to be undercut by “Pah!” or an invective; till he is “restored” to the state of his old ataraxy (Beckett 2006, II.37). Yet the pull of the moon is sometimes too strong; emotion prevails, is recollected, but must be rejected so that the tranquillity of decomposition (the mockery of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is manifest) might be restored in the “anguish of return” (38). His condition is essentially that of most of Beckett’s protagonists, with the overt rejection of Romanticism (“this business of the moon,” 36) countered by an equal and opposite impulse towards subjectivity and lyricism. A like contradiction is manifest in Beckett’s attraction to the art of Jack B. Yeats and Caspar David Friedrich, to the poetry of Hölderlin and Leopardi, and the music of Schubert, each of these artists portraying the insignificance, the isolation of the human figure in an indifferent world. In my 2005 article, “Inorganic Form: Samuel Beckett’s Nature,” I surveyed the wider issues of Beckett and Romanticism, beginning with his purgatorial sense of the self as trapped between the rock and the light, of a consciousness denied the metamorphosis it seeks and so condemned to return to the “mineral” from which it somehow arose, as in Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” I argued that Beckett rejected “the impulse towards anthropomorphism” (Ackerley 2005, 83) by evoking Cézanne to define landscape (and hence nature) as ultimately unintelligible, and by making alienation, the very absence of rapport between himself and nature, his working principle. I cited two letters from Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy (8 and 16 September 1934),6 where Beckett rejects the “animising mode” and expresses the sense of landscape as totally indifferent to man, as atomistic, mineral and inorganic. I showed that despite Beckett’s distrust of nature and “the gangrene of Romanticism” (Beckett 2006, IV.547), a sentiment indebted to J-K Huysmann’s A rebours (1884; 79
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usually translated as “Against Nature”), he retained a contradictory attraction towards the romantic, and especially the German Romantik, even as he refused to validate it (Ackerley 2005, 88). I then explored the implications of that contradiction with reference to the range of Beckett’s writings, from the Werther-like sorrows of “Assumption” (1929) to the lyrical beauty of Nacht und Träume (1982) and the haunting echoes of Schubert’s Winterreise in What Where (1983). At the heart of that essay lies a theme I wish to explore further, and with explicit reference to Watt. Beckett’s rejection of the animising impulse, I argue, is earthed in Wilhelm Windelband’s challenge to received ideas of man’s place within the natural order. As Windelband notes (73), Greek ethics began with a problem which paralleled that of physics, the relationship between the unchanging order of things (ousis) and the world of change (genesis). He comments on our allegiance to the higher (unchanging) order of things, and to an anthropomorphic principle that has shaped the natural world so intricately that most of Western history and philosophy has simply taken it for granted. Beckett accepted Windelband’s thesis that the crucial divide in Greek thought is not, as commonly assumed, that between Aristotelian materialism and Platonic Idealism, but rather that between both these schools, which accepted the immortality of the soul, and the Atomists (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius), who proclaimed its dissolution at death (the fate of Murphy’s ashes is a huge Democritan guffaw). The triumph of Christianity, Windelband indicates, ensured the success of the former school and the virtual eclipse of the latter. Beckett’s distrust of anthropomorphism (as of Romanticism) has its roots in precisely this aspect of Atomist thought (Ackerley 2005, 99). His rejection of the “itch to animise” and of any teleological conception of the natural order affirms instead a sense of nature as utterly incommensurate with human expression. Windelband insists, with respect to the relationship between the unchanging order of things and the world of change, on the primary importance of one question: “What is the abiding ground of all such change?” (32). Mr Knott, it seems, abides; his servants come and go; Watt interrogates this question. The pre-Socratics did not have one answer. Heraclitus asserted the primacy of flux and change; but Parmenides the unchanging nature of The One. Windelband comments (50): “The Becoming of Heraclitus produces no Being, as the Being of Parmenides produces no Becoming.” Here is one source of the gouffre interdit à nos sondes (Beckett 2006, IV.522) that became for Beckett a 80
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supreme metaphor of alienation: the gulf between the finite and the infinite; the subject and the object; Lazarus and Dives (the preterit and the saved); the circle and the square; the rational and the absurd; ourselves and Godot; the self and the world; and – Watt and Knott. If Beckett’s thought has any certainties, these surely relate to the sense, however tautological, that this impasse is impassable. Yet the mainstream of Greek thought is concerned with trying to cross that gulf. Pythagoras affirmed mathematical truths as exemplifying the unchanging, the permanent in the midst of occurrence; and this affirmation led directly to the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Socrates’s sense of the underlying laws of nature (physis) and Plato’s teleological view of order differ significantly from Aristotle’s conception of nature as “the connected system of all living things regarded as a unity” (Windelband, 146); but each, and this is Windelband’s insistent point, shares the conviction first uttered by Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things. This dictum is usually flourished as a generalised anthropomorphic principle, but Windelband defines its precise sense, in terms of what is meant to “know” rather than to “perceive.” The one thing of lasting value that later philosophers took from the preSocratics, he says, is Protagoras’s theory of knowledge. Protagoras distinguished in a remarkably pre-Kantian way between two kinds of knowing: that of perception to a changing actuality (phenomena); and that of thought to a reality absolute and abiding (Windelband, 104-06). He asserted the subjectivity and hence fallibility of all perception (this he termed “obscure knowledge”), as opposed to the universal nature of that which is known by thought (not as thing-in-itself, but as Idea). Beckett’s sense of the disjunction between subject and object derives (at least in part) from this theory of knowledge, as mediated by Windelband who stresses its continuities with Kant. The breakdown of rapport between the self and the world, a vital concern of all Beckett’s criticism and writing, stands in contradiction (philosophically speaking) to the principles of pantheism, neo-Platonism or German idealism that underpin the Romantic enterprise, insofar as these assume a bond between the self and what Emerson (for instance) called the Oversoul. Beckett’s philosophical notebooks, compiled in the early 1930s, reflect how much of his understanding of western philosophy derives from Windelband.7 Although he read Kant and Schopenhauer extensively in their own words and in other editions, Beckett’s sense of the Enlightenment and of German idealism (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling 81
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and Schleiermacher) seems to have been shaped primarily by Windelband.8 Specifically, Beckett seems to have accepted the paradigm implicit in Windelband of the striking parallel between the Greek and the German philosophical movements, with the consequent distrust, with respect to the latter as a mirror of the earlier, of natural religion, optimism, nature as the basis of both religious and moral feeling, of any philosophy controlled by anthropological interest (Windelband 489-90), or that affirmed a natural feeling for the good as for the beautiful, a fusion of the ethical and the aesthetic (Windelband, 509-10). In the same way, therefore, that he had rejected the ancient Greek teleological conception of nature, Beckett would instinctively distrust (whatever his attraction to it) any eighteenth and nineteenth century affirmation of “the Stoic-Platonic doctrine in its Christiantheistic transformation” (Windelband, 503). This is, of course, a sweeping generalisation; but consider Windelband’s discussion of “mythical fancy” (119) and his argument that what is rationally necessary must be conceived of as recollection. This colours the Romantic notion of anamnesis, or the myth of the preexistent soul in terms of birth as a forgetting: that before earthly life our souls have beheld the forms of reality in the incorporeal world; the perception of similar things calls remembrance back to those forms forgotten in the corporeal earthly life; and from this awakens the philosophical impulse, the love of the Ideas by which the soul is raised to its true reality. Beckett’s rejection of the entire post-Socratean tradition, which fed into neo-Platonism and so into German idealism and Romanticism, made such speculation specious. I consider this sense of mythical fancy with respect to the tale (or myth) in Watt of the famished dog. The rationalist basis of the Platonic doctrine of knowledge and its allegiance to an immaterial reality, Windelband argues (116-18), arise directly from Protagoras’s theory of knowledge; whereas Democritus held that the only thing that could be known, if but obscurely and partially, was the evidence of perception. Beckett was intrigued by this, particularly as it affected the post-Romantic understanding of nature and of God. As one who preferred goats to sheep, his distrust of the impulse towards anthropomorphism, of landscape “promoted” to the emotions of the hiker,9 reflects precisely this aspect of Atomist thought: a rejection of the line of inquiry from Socrates and Plato to Cartesian rationalism, in favour of the neglected and largely rejected atomistic tradition associated with Democritus. This alternative tradition asserted 82
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the primacy of the particular over the idea; and so underpins Beckett’s sense of demented particularity, his rejection of “the anthropomorphism of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos” for the “straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths” that constituted all that he could know, or as he formulated it in the German Diaries (notebook 4, 15 January 1937): “I say the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery and venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the last form of animism” (qtd. in Knowlson, 244). The sense of purposiveness (of nature as ordered, teleological, or with an end) led, Windelband contends (182), to the reasoned conviction that the earth and the heaven and all that is in them are arranged for man; a conviction ratified by Genesis, where man is given dominion over the beast of the field and the fowls of the air. This is a supreme anthropomorphic insolence. Windelband notes in defence of Epicurus (182) that the teleological view leads to “anthropological excrescences”; an example may be found in the drafts of Watt (Obscure Locks #57.4), in the bond between Arsene and his Indian Runner Duck. Arsene could say: “Go! And the duck went, and Come! And the duck came, and Do this! And the duck did that. So extraordinary is the effect of God’s image.” It is reassuring to know that man (made in God’s image) has dominion over the duck. Matthew Feldman’s recent study of Beckett’s philosophical notebooks sums up the issue: “Protagorean relativism, according to which things are for every individual as they appear to him”; this constitutes “phenomenalism in so far as it teaches knowledge of the phenomenon limited to the individual and the moment: it is scepticism in so far as it rejects all knowledge that transcends that.” (Feldman, 37) My argument, reduced to its fundamental sounds, is that in Watt Beckett uses this distinction to interrogate Windelband’s thesis of Being and Becoming, and to explore the consequences of Watt’s attempt to cross the gulf, the divide between genesis and ousis (phenomenon and transcendence). This finds frequent expression in Watt, but most curiously in Arsene’s sunlit epiphany. The blatant anthropomorphism of the dictum that man is the measure of all things, then, in its broader form, is an insolence. Watt rejects it when he tries to distinguish, with respect to the Galls father and son, between the statements “nothing had happened” and “a thing that was nothing had happened” (76). He tries to elicit something from 83
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this, and concludes: “For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of a man, even our anthropologists have realised that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite” (77). Thus it can be said of God only that he has no qualities known to man, that “no name names him,” and that “we can predicate of God only what he is not” (Windelband, 237; 290). Such thinking fails to deter Molloy: “What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not” (Beckett 2006, II.35). The more precise definition of the Protagorean dictum, in terms of an obscure perception of a constantly changing phenomenal world, also remains problematic, as Watt’s experience with the pot (Pot) proves. Looking at a pot, or thinking of a pot, Watt says in vain: “Pot, pot” (81): “Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that i[t] was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted.” Watt is troubled by the relationship between the form and/or idea of the Pot, as opposed to the particularity of the pot itself: “And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt” (81). Watt’s inability to understand the nature of a pot and his failure to be comforted by a pillow of old words reflects the complex relationship between knowledge and perception. He seems to be seeking the semantic succour that derives from the desire that things will consent to be named, with their time-honoured names (84). This is a curiously pre-lapsarian view of language in which word and referent are one; and when it breaks down confusion ensues. Such “fragility of the outer meaning” (73) has a bad effect on Watt, who because of his “peculiar character” is obliged to inquire into what things mean, “oh not into what they really meant, his character was not so peculiar as all that, but into what they might be induced to mean” (75). Watt confuses langue and parole (which Saussure had kept rigorously apart), and despite his attempt to try on names, as a woman hats (83), his pot will not become a Pot. Watt’s ancient error, the wish to know, frustrates his attempts to cross this semantic and perceptual gulf. 84
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Another way to express the loss of semantic rapport is, in Watt’s words, a “loss of species” (85); that is, the loss of the form or Ideal needed to reify the existence of the particular, to make the ideal real. Windelband comments (140): “The universal is real or actual only in the particular; the particular is only because in it the universal realises itself.” He continues (142-43): “the species exists only insofar as it realises itself in individual things as their truly existing essence and the individual thing exists only as the species comes to its phenomenological manifestation in it.” Thus, loss of species constitutes a loss of Being. The argument curiously anticipates How It Is, where this phrase, “loss of species,” is reiterated as the unnamed protagonist tries in vain to avoid the conclusion that he is the “sole elect,” of necessity individual. Beckett was briefly content with Windelband’s solution to the Proustian equation: “at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real” (Beckett 2006, IV.544). This, some might say, is perhaps something; but by the time Beckett wrote Watt such Proustian assurance had broken down, largely because of his reading of Fritz Mauthner, who contended that there can be no thought without words, that words in themselves are inane, verba inania, lacking substance or sense, and so our thoughts are inane, never “obviating the void” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 359). This leads to nominalist irony of the kind that Beckett had identified in the German Letter of 1937; Watt in these terms is an inane comedy. Beckett had copied out Mauthner’s attack on “Anthropomorphismus” (TCD MS 10971/5, 1; Mauthner, II.474), underlining: “Der mittelalterliche Nominalismus ist der erste Versuch der wirklichen Selbstzersetzung des metaphorischen Denkens” (The nominalism of the Middle Ages in the first attempt at a genuine self-destruction of metaphorical thinking; II.474). The passage concludes: “Das lezte Wort des Denkens kann nur die negative Tat sein, die Selbstzersetzung des Anthropomorphismus, die Einsicht in die profonde Weisheit des Vico: homo no intelligendo fit omnia” (The last word of thought can only be the negative act, the self-destruction of anthropomorphism, the insight into the profound wisdom of Vico: not everything is intelligible to man; TCD MS 10971/5, 4; Mauthner, II.479). This opens the way to an “inane” comedy, a rejoicing in the irrational, as Moran with his bees: “Here is something I can study all my life and never understand” (2006, II.163). Or it may lead to tragedy, as in the self-destruction of Watt. 85
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One of Windelband’s major themes is the growth of science out of “mythical fancy” (119), from the curious fictions that societies have evolved to “explain” phenomena. That fancy can be seen in the suggestions of Mr Knott as a sun-god: rising sometimes late and sometimes early; seen at the eastern window in the morning and at the western window in the evening; disappearing behind and emerging from bushes as if they were clouds; and “rising” from sleep to vigil and “setting” from vigil to sleep (Beckett 1959, 86). This is an accepted myth, but the tale of the famished dog (the inversion of ‘God’ is automatic) demonstrates neatly the inception of a new mythical fancy. Empirically speaking, Watt’s instructions (91) are simple: he is to give the food left over from Mr Knott’s meals to “the dog” (91). Since (the text informs us) there is no dog in the house, “it was necessary” that a dog from outside should call there. However, such a dog requires an “establishment” in order to be; and before many pages are turned there comes into being a series of dogs and the entire Lynch family, generated by a chain of contingency that stretches to the beginning of time and embraces all extension; a process explicable only by the complementary myth of pre-established harmony. The “necessity” is purely verbal, nominalist; yet the definite article, the deictic pronoun ‘this’, the indicative mood of ‘was’ and the proper noun ‘Kate’ soon testify to the dog’s tangible existence: “The name of this dog was Kate” (112); and her eating from the dish with two dwarves standing by is substantive. Compare “in certain waters certain fish”: “But do such fish exist? Yes, such fish exist, now” (120). Again, the reification is verbal; but like the hrönir of Borges’s Tlön such idealist constructs add provinces to being, even as their existence is purely nominalist. My earlier commentary cynically concluded, “In like manner, perhaps, have countless human societies reified their nominalist ‘gods’.”10 For all his admiration of Proust and Joyce, Beckett distrusted the Proustian moment and the Joycean epiphany, those Modernist and secular manifestations of mystical intimations, of Wordsworth’s mysterious “spots of time,” in which the quotidian is apparently illuminated by the timeless. Moments of involuntary memory for Proust redeem the past, and the epiphany for Joyce affirms the destiny of the artist as priest of the imagination: A Portrait of the Artist recounts the forging of the aesthetic of the romantic young Stephen Dedalus in the smithy of his soul, until his “mettle” attains the classical temper. Yet we are “frequently reminded of this romantic strain in Proust” (Beckett 2006, IV.547); and Joyce’s most celebrated epiphany, Gabriel Conroy’s 86
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experience at the end of “The Dead,” retains elements of the romantic in such phrases as “His soul swooned slowly” and images of the snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling.” Beckett’s “A Wet Night” parodies both the Proustian salon of Le Temps retrouvé and the end of “The Dead” (rain falling on the mountains and the plains, and notably on the Central Bog);11 and in so doing offers a critique of the epiphanic moment, though less of the experience than of its meaning. At the end of “A Wet Night” (and at the end of Dream of Fair to middling Women), Belacqua is invited into the Casa Alba to share with his Ideal Lady the fire and a bottle; but the very real belly-ache that troubles him on the way home undercuts any easy romanticism. Even so, in an aesthetically complex way, but one deliberately and ironically distanced from Proust and Joyce, the ideal has been made real, and a curiously muted joy arises, despite the rain. The more cynical test of this process is Arsene’s experience (4245), as he sits on the step, in the yard, looking at the light, on the wall.12 Something suddenly happens, “Something slipped” (42); with the effect that his “personal system” (43) is so distended that the distinction between what is inside it and what is outside it is not easy to draw. This is precisely the moment of Joycean epiphany, in which the dichotomy of subject and object is momentarily overcome; and it leaves Arsene perplexed: “But in what did the change consist? What was changed, and how?” (44). Arsene defines his sense of the moment as “existence off the ladder,” as outside time; but the experience is, ironically, temporary: even if he has somehow climbed to the place where all the ladders end (as in Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’), he is now back where he was, as he was, in the rag and bone shop of ordinary existence. Yet something remains: in his opinion it was not an illusion (“that presence without, that presence within”), though he is buggered if he can understand how it could have been anything else (45). The experience, in Proustian terms, is both ideal and real, but Arsene (like Beckett) refuses to give it any transcendental validation. The reader is offered a similar experience later in the novel: the frog song (137-38) acts as a parable of periodicity, but one that may say more about the anthropomorphic attribution of value to symmetry than about the phenomena observed. As Arsene might say, to conclude from this that the universe is harmonious would, I think, be rash. As I suggest in Obscure Locks (138): “The frog song illustrates, in a ruthless reductio, the machinery of the Joycean epiphany or Proustian moment, but one terrifying difference between Beckett on the one hand, and Joyce and 87
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Proust on the other, is the refusal to attribute transcendental value to such synchronicity.” Such sentiments in Beckett reflect the tempering of a romantic sensibility into a modernist (perhaps, a post-modernist) temperament. This is an impossibly large theme, but Beckett in his critique of anthropomorphism and mythical fancy, and in his refusal to validate the transcendental, may be responding to Windelband’s sense of the Romantik in terms of the impulse towards the unity of Reason and Nature (603), which, he argues, can become complete only in religion: “It is the highest task that has ever been set philosophy, to comprehend the world as a development of those principles or determinations which form the content of the divine mind” (611). From the perspective of the twenty-first century and after decades of incessant assaults on the coherence of self, let alone that of the divine mind, this seems somewhat quixotic: Romanticism as the last ditch of the anthropomorphic, and the brave battle of German idealists such as Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schelling and Fichte (and, in the English tradition, Coleridge) to affirm the neo-Platonic as an enterprise inevitably doomed. Yet, as Windelband argues at the end of his History of Philosophy, in a section called “The Metaphysics of the Irrational” (615-22) and from which Beckett took extensive notes (TCD MS 1097, 251r-54), the dialectic of history wills that the “System of Reason” shall be changed into its opposite (615), and the transmutation of God into the world must again become a problem (616). Windelband notes (620) that the Irrational came to full development in Schopenhauer with the removal of the religious element; and that his pessimism, thus grounded metaphysically, finally expresses the absolute unreason of the objectless will. Beckett’s intellectual sympathies found their substrate here, but his isolated human figures, caught between the rock and the light, try in vain to resolve the contradictory impulses in the endless surge, the systole-diastole of Being and Becoming. And Mr Knott abides, if not as an anthropomorphic insolence, as still an impossible impasse. Notes 1. For convenience, references to notebooks and manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, the University of Texas at Austin, are cited from Obscure Locks (Ackerley 2005), hereafter cited as Obscure Locks, with references to the entry (matching the text of Watt) rather than the page – here
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Samuel Beckett and Anthropomorphic Insolence #201.1 (174). The final text of the passage cited adds a colon after “consider” and changes “grasshoppers” to “cicadas,” but is otherwise identical to the notebook. 2. For a similar effect, compare the paragraph beginning, “Whispering it told…” (Beckett 1959, 234), a prose-poem also inserted late (NB6, 79; 81) into previously extant text (Obscure Locks #234.2). 3. Murphy comes to, or from, in Hyde Park to find night fallen, a full moon risen and the sheep “less Wordsworthy” than before. His response is decidedly anti-romantic: he bares his eyes to the moon, forces back the lids with his fingers to let the yellow ooze into his skull, belches, spits, and hastens back to Celia (Beckett 2006, I.65). 4. Obscure Locks, Addendum #22 (211-12); citing the first Watt notebook (69-79) and early typescript (61), where the Leopardi reference is explicit. 5. I discuss Molloy’s condition (the echo of Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, is inescapable) in the entry on “Romanticism” in Ackerley and Gontarski 486-87; and in my essay, “Inorganic Form: Samuel Beckett’s Nature” (Ackerley 2005, 91). 6. These letters and Beckett’s rejection of “landscapability” are discussed by James Knowlson (196-97). 7. See, in particular, TCD MS 10967, the 266 double-pages of which derive almost entirely from Windelband, Beckett copying out long passages verbatim, presumably in the attempt to commit to memory their essentials. See Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell, “Catalogue of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin” (67-89), as a guide to this invaluable material. 8. This may account for his virtual ignoring of Coleridge, the most important theoretician of English Romanticism, but one whose thought is equally ignored by Windelband (see, however, 663-65). 9. Beckett to MacGreevy (8 September 1934); as recorded in Knowlson, 196. 10. Obscure Locks #91.5; like Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, I would now delete the craven ‘perhaps’.
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Chris Ackerley 11. Samuel Beckett, “A Wet Night,” in More Pricks than Kicks (Beckett 2006, IV.137). The “Central Bog” is the Bog of Allen in “the dark central plain” of the final paragraph of “The Dead.” 12. The “wall” is also the “petit pan du mur jaune” of Vermeer’s View of Delft, which Proust’s writer Bergotte drags himself from his deathbed to see again; Belacqua in “Yellow,” before he is wheeled to his fatal operation, sees sunlight on “the grand old yella wall outside” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 658).
Works Cited Ackerley, C. J., “Inorganic Form: Samuel Beckett’s Nature,” in AUMLA 104 (November 2005), 79-102. –, Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt. (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005). –, and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 2004). Beckett, Samuel, Watt (New York: Grove P, 1959 [1953]). –, Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster, 4 vols. (New York: Grove P, 2006). Feldman, Matthew, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s Interwar Notes (London: Continuum, 2006). Frost, Everett, and Jane Maxwell, “Catalogue of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin,” in SBT/A 16, “Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 20-199. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Mauthner, Fritz, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 Bände (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1923). Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed., rev. (London: Oxford UP, 1951 [1933]). Windelband, Wilhelm, A History of Philosophy, with special reference to the formation and development of its problems and conceptions [1893], trans. James H. Tufts, 1901; 2nd ed. rev. & enlarged (London: Macmillan, 1914).
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TWO VERSIONS OF NACHT UND TRÄUME: What Franz Schubert Tells Us about a Favourite Song of Beckett
Franz Michael Maier The printed version of Franz Schubert’s song Nacht und Träume shows two main improvements over the draft. The aesthetic principles that become visible in a comparison of the two versions of the song surprisingly are not at all unfamiliar to Beckett scholars. Hence, the link between Beckett and Schubert can be established on a philological basis.
In recent years, Beckett’s television play Nacht und Träume has gained considerable attention. On the one hand, interest is due to the iconography present in this television play, making it an example of the “Images of Beckett” (Knowlson). Graley Herren has identified allusions to the Garden of Gethsemane as depicted in several paintings Beckett appreciated; Therese Fischer-Seidel has pointed out the theological motif of “manus Dei.” On the other hand, interest in Nacht und Träume stems from the television medium. In this work “the eyes take over,” as Gaby Hartel puts it, not only in the sense of recognizable pictorial models to follow and allusions to iconographic symbols, but also in the sense of an openness towards interpretation beyond explicit terminological identification. Beckett demonstrates the close relationship of his art to romantic thought through both his reference to religious motifs and his use of the romantic topoi of “Unsagbarkeit” (transcending human speech) and “Bedeutsamkeit” (meaningfulness). In this text, I should like to comment on the question of “Beckett and Romanticism” by considering the music in Nacht und Träume. Although it has often been observed that the title Nacht und Träume is in fact a quotation from a romantic song, the music itself has not found much interest. It is true, of course, that when watching Nacht und Träume, one must strain the ears even to hear it. The title Nacht und Träume is both that of a poem by Matthäus von Collin (1779-1824) and of a song by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) who combined verses of this
Franz Michael Maier
and of another poem by Collin, Nachtfeyer.1 The song does not figure in the canon of famous Schubert songs and remains almost unknown; Matthäus von Collin’s poems are today all but forgotten. Actually, the seven bars of melody featured in Beckett’s play are of sophisticated formal quality; sophisticated also is the way Beckett adopted the melody in his play, at first hummed in its entirety (bars 21-27 of Schubert’s song) and then featuring its last, synthetic part (bars 25-27) repeated with the words sung. I have analyzed these seven bars elsewhere (Maier 1996); here I should like to give further arguments for Beckett’s interest in Schubert’s song. To interpret this song, I will make use of a hint on its intrinsic qualities supplied by Schubert himself. He had revised this song prior to its printing in 1825, and these revisions reveal the compositional ideas and aesthetic concepts behind it.2 An examination of Schubert’s musical text may bring us to a better understanding of what Beckett may have heard in this song. The significant part of the revision concerns only two places: firstly Schubert added two half bars; secondly he reduced the ambitus of the melody. These laconic changes render the intention of the composer perfectly lucid: adding additional time for a harmonic change gives acoustical presence to what the words (only) say whereas melodic unification underscores the dense thread of subjective experience. Before comparing the two musical versions, let us turn to the text by Matthäus von Collin. This initial study will help to identify the poetic situations where musical variations took place. The poem Nacht und Träume appears as follows in Schubert’s Lied:
1 2 3 4 5 ||: 6 7 8 ||:
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Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder; Nieder wallen auch die Träume, Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume, Durch der Menschen stille Brust. Die belauschen sie mit Lust; :|| Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht: Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder! :|| (Holy night, sinking down among us; Dreams too waft down, As moon beams traverse space And the breasts of sleeping humans. To these [dreams] they listen gladly;
a b b c c d d a
Two Versions of Nacht und Träume
Entreating when the day awakens: Return, oh holy night, Hallowed dreams, return!) (trans. Angela Moorjani) In the first version of the composition, lines 4 and 5 are set to music by bars 12-17. As they are closely connected by the rhyme (Brust / Lust), Schubert, at the end of line 4, gives only as much rest to the voice as is needed to gain the first beats of bars 15 and 16 for the important words be-láuschen and Lúst. All the same, harmonically he inserts a change of the tonal situation, moving from B major in bar 14 to G major in bar 15. Both events, the beginning of line 5 and the change of harmony, occur simultaneously at the beginning of bar 15.
Fig. 1: first version of Schubert’s Nacht und Träume 93
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In the printed version however (appearing together with Die junge Nonne as op. 43 in 1825), Schubert inserted two half bars. In this manner he introduced a separate first beat at the point of the harmonic change. Figure 2 illustrates how the harmonic change makes its entrance in bar 15 of the printed, revised version of Schubert’s song, while the text restarts no earlier than in bar 16.
Fig. 2: printed version of Schubert’s Nacht und Träume 94
Two Versions of Nacht und Träume
Schubert followed here a general rule that is well known – to Beckett scholars. They know that Beckett never wanted words and movements to coincide on stage: “One unusual aspect of Beckett’s directing was his insistence that action and speech should be separated as much as possible” (Knowlson, 115). A simple reason for this can be found here: things that happen simultaneously must compete for the attention of the spectator or the listener. In other words: they lose some portion of their meaningfulness. When Beckett in his Nacht und Träume first has the the melody hummed and then the words sung, he observes the rule he and Schubert share. By his procedure, Schubert adds value not only to the harmonic change but also to the words of Collin’s poem. Most scholarly articles dealing with Nacht und Träume seem to concur with Edith Fournier’s judgement on Collin’s poem, saying “Les paroles de ce poème banal ne sont pour Schubert que prétexte à la mélodie; de même, c’est pour la beauté de la musique que Samuel Beckett adopte quelques mesures de ce Lied comme élément musical de cette œuvre.” (The words of this banal poem for Schubert are a mere excuse for his melody; similarly, it is for the beauty of the melody that Samuel Beckett adopts some bars of this song as musical element of this work; Fournier in Beckett 1992, 50). Curiously, little attention has been paid to the strange wording in line 5 of the poem. “Die belauschen sie mit Lust” – this is not at all the way one usually describes the process of dreaming. That the sleepers are literally said to “listen” to their dreams must not be interpreted as a mere result of poor lyric capacity. It is not by ignorance or by lack of better lyrics but by appreciation of Collin’s poem that Schubert inserts an additional bar (two half bars) to make this strange statement of the poem neatly audible. A clue to this appreciation exists in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Schopenhauer, whose Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung appeared in 1819, distinguished dreams that are engendered by the physiology of the dreamer and do not enlarge his knowledge of the outer world (Hallucinationen) from dreams that are perceptions of a special kind (Wahrträume). The latter provide additional objective knowledge to the dreaming subject. Schopenhauer traced this concept to Aristotle’s De somno et vigilia, concluding: “Dies alles beweist, daß der Traum eine ganz eigenthümliche Funktion unseres Gehirns und durchaus verschieden ist von der bloßen Einbildungskraft und ihrer Rumination.” (All these [reflections] prove 95
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that the dream is a very peculiar part and result of our brain and that it is completely different from our power of imagination and its merely reproductive work; 231). Schopenhauer helps us to understand that Nacht und Träume describes a state of vision and activity, not a state of passivity and rest. Schubert’s revisions document that Collin’s text was to him much more than a prétexte. Again, it is not without reference to Collin’s text that Beckett shows a scene of vision in his television play Nacht und Träume. The “Holde Träume” that are invoked at the beginning of the play are not conceived as pleasant subjective hallucinations: indeed they appear with all the objectivity and dignity of Biblical images. Let us now look at the second change Schubert made in the printed version of his song. Schubert repeats line 5 of the poem (as shown above by the signs ||: and :||). In the first version of his song, Schubert set the repetition of the words to a literary or mechanical repetition of the melody which he transposed up a fourth. As figure 1 shows, “Die belauschen sie mit Lust” in bars 15 and 16 is sung on the notes of a broken G major chord: b’-g’-b’-d’’-(e’’); the repetition is sung on the notes of a broken C major chord: e’’-c’’-e’’-g’’-(d’’). In the printed version, Schubert changed the last two notes of bar 17: instead of e’’g’’, the melody now has g’-e’’ (see bar 18 of figure 2). As the repetition of line 8 goes with melodic change already in the first version, this change raises the first repetition to the level of the second. This small two-note change is an improvement. One can explain it as the intention to avoid the high g’’ which exceeds the ambitus of the melody and adds difficulty for the performer without adding any beauty (beyond the symmetry of a literal repetition). The change also has an aesthetic value, as it gives special value to the musical note e’’. This note is subject to quite a series of changes in musical meaning: - In bar 12 it makes its first appearance as the forth step in the scale of B major. - In bars 17 to 19 of figure 2 it is the third of the of C major chord, - In bar 20 it is part of the diminished chord a# c# e g. - In bars 22 and 25 it is the fourth note of the B major scale again. In all these cases, the e’’ is followed by a step downward: - to d’’ (toggling between C major and G major in bars 17 to 19), - to d’’ and c#’’ (in bar 20, leaving the diminished chord unresolved), - to d#’’ (in bar 21; this chromatic note replaces the e’’, resolving the diminished chord into D# major), 96
Two Versions of Nacht und Träume
- to d#’’ again (in bar 23; e’’ at the end of bar 22 is the seventh of F# major), - to d#’’ (in bar 25, as part of the scale of B major). One easily sees that e’’ is the ever-recurring start and reference point for subtle harmonic changes that take place as the music accompanies the process of dreaming. In all instances shown, the e’’ appears on a strong downbeat in the bar and carries an important syllable: Ménschen, Lúst, be-láuschen, rú-fen, hól-de – in the latter case, the e’’ is not on a downbeat. More importantly, the e” anticipates the downbeat as an embellishing unanticipated note (the seventh of the dominant seventh chord). The final appearance of e’’ in bar 25 carries the first syllable of the word Träu-me and unifies all these processes. Compared to the intensification of the ever-repeated sound e’’, the melodic formula e’’-c’’-e’’-g’’-d’’ of the first version was somewhat pale. Its literal repetition may be compared to looking at the shape of two similar geometrical figures. The onlooker remarks their resemblance and is pleased by their symmetry – but this pleasure is experienced from a distance and has little emotional meaning. On the contrary, Schubert’s genial change of two notes underscores the advantage of a slightly modified repetition over mechanical reiteration, demonstrating the intensity produced by modifications unified through commonality. By means of these modifications, Schubert reveals what the dreamers are experiencing and what they consciously enjoy. The difference Schubert introduces into his melody can be interpreted as the musical realization of an aesthetic dictum: only the difference the eye of the subject adds to a state of vision turns the latter into a state of perception that belongs to an individual human subject – a romantic idea that is expressed most poignantly in Novalis’s Blüthenstaub (1798), nr. 22. In this second change as well, we see a peculiarity of Schubert’s song that is not foreign to Beckett’s formal ideas. Beckett’s play is formally built of two parts that are only slightly different. The difference is brought about by the camera zoom that, in the seconda volta, replaces the juxtaposition of dreamer and dreamt self by the identity of the dreamer and his inner self. This zoom is Beckett’s way of combining repetition and modification, in order to intensify the action and to diminish the distance between action and onlooker. It may appear somewhat arbitrary to bring into close relation a repetitive structure based on the difference of ‘no zoom’ vs. ‘zoom’ in 97
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the visual field with a series of repetitions and modifications of a tonal situation. But we must not forget that the zoom procedure as a means of intensification is not restricted to Nacht und Träume. In Ghost Trio (first televised 1977) we also find this kind of zoom, of looking closer at the protagonist – here also closely (and most sophisticatedly) connected to a sequence of musical situations. In this much longer and more elaborate piece we find three aspects of zooming: rapprochement in a spatial sense; in a sense of temporal coordination; and finally of relational proximity. All three combine to an increase of affinity which proceeds from the sense of diminishing a local distance to the sense of sharing a common time and situation.3 It is an echo of these procedures that we find in the humming and singing of Nacht und Träume. We have drawn attention to a concept of repetition common to Schubert and Beckett. It is characterized by an aspect of modification as opposed to a mechanical doubling or ‘da capo.’ It must not be overlooked that this same concept of repetition is present in the relation between Beckett and Schubert. In Beckett’s play the bars of Schubert’s song are hummed and sung without the original accompaniment by the piano. So, what we find in Beckett’s Nacht und Träume is not a factual performance of a part of Schubert’s song, but the indication of a very special relation. Once again we find a difference that, as Novalis puts it in his Blüthenstaub, shows us the presence of an individual human subject. As the humming and singing is an utterance very close to the subject, this means of difference is at the very same moment an indicator of distance overcome. This is another romantic motive in Beckett that should not be overlooked. Schelling explained it as “die nahe Verwandtschaft des Gehörsinns überhaupt und der Musik und der Rede insbesondere mit dem Selbstbewußtseyn” (The close relation of the auditory sense in general and of music and speech in particular with the self-consciousness of the subject; 491). The close relation between Beckett and Schubert does not only consist in a preference for a peculiar favourite piece of art, but in an affinity to the processes Schubert as an artist employed to bring about his work. Notes 1. Cf. Matthäus Edlen von Collin’s nachgelassene Gedichte, ausgewählt und mit einem biographischen Vorworte begleitet von Joseph von Hammer,
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Two Versions of Nacht und Träume Zweytes Bändchen, Wien: Gerold 1827, 134 (Nacht und Träume) and 149 (Nachtfeyer). 2. Cf. Nacht und Träume. Gedicht von Matthäus v. Collin. Für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte componirt von Franz Schubert, Op. 43, Nr. 2, in Franz Schubert. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, ed. by the International Schubert-Society, series IV: Lieder, vols. 2a und 2b, ed. by Walther Dürr, Kassel: Bärenreiter 1975, vol. 2a, 184-86 (op. 43, 2) and vol. 2b, 267f. (‘first version’). 3. A discussion of these different kinds of rapprochement in Ghost Trio can be found in Maier 2006, 279-84.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Quad et Trio du Fantôme, ... que nuages ..., Nacht und Träume, traduit de l’anglais par Edith Fournier, suivi de L’Épuisé par Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Collin, Matthäus Edler von, Nachgelassene Gedichte, ausgewählt und mit einem biographischen Vorworte begleitet von Joseph von Hammer, Zweytes Bändchen (Wien: Gerold 1827). Fischer-Seidel, Therese, “Samuel Becketts Abschied: Nacht und Träume und das deutsche Fernsehen,” in Der unbekannte Beckett: Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur, ed. Therese Fischer-Seidel and Marion FriesDieckmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2005), 319-58. Fournier, Edith, note du traducteur, in Beckett, 50. Hartel, Gaby, “...the eyes take over...” Samuel Becketts Weg zum gesagten Bild (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004). Herren, Graley, “Nacht und Träume as Beckett’s Agony in the Garden,” in JOBS 11.1 (2001), 54-70. Knowlson, James, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). Maier, Franz Michael, “Nacht und Träume: Schubert, Beckett und das Fernsehen,” in Acta Musicologica 68 (1996), 167-86. –, Becketts Melodien: Die Musik und die Idee des Zusammenhangs bei Schopenhauer, Proust und Beckett (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2006). Novalis, Blüthenstaub, in Athenaeum, Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Friedrich Schlegel, Ersten Bandes Erstes Stück (Berlin 1798), 70-106 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Philosophie der Kunst (1802/03), in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. V (Stuttgart, 1859). Schopenhauer, Arthur, Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt, Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische
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Franz Michael Maier Schriften, vol. I (1851), loc. cit.: idem, Werke in fünf Bänden. Nach den Ausgaben letzter Hand ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, vol. IV (Zürich: Haffmans, 1988), 225-310. Schubert, Franz, Nacht und Träume, op. 43, Nr. 2 in: Franz Schubert. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, ed. by the International Schubert-Society, series IV: Lieder, vols. 2a und 2b, ed. by Walther Dürr (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1975), vol. 2a, 184-86 (op. 43, 2) and vol. 2b, 267f. (‘first version’).
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THE “IRRATIONAL HEART”: Romantic Disillusionment in Murphy and The Sorrows of Young Werther
John Bolin Beckett’s personal and critical writings in the early 1930s evidence a dismissive attitude toward Goethe’s Werther and other German Romantic figures such as Rilke. Murphy (1935-1936), however, suggests that, far from simply rejecting Werther, by the mid 30s Beckett found the novel useful as a paradigm which he could at once satirize and pursue. This essay attempts to sketch a pattern of correspondence between these two works, indicating Murphy’s affiliation with a tradition of “romantic disillusionment.”1 While often read as a novel of ideas, Murphy thus reveals a significant relationship to a romantic legacy of irrational desire. It is suggested a recognition of this debt helps make sense of a fundamental negativity at the end of the novel which has not been fully appreciated.
Beckett’s comments to MacGreevy in 1931 when he was still largely ignorant of Goethe (whom he then dismissed as the “intoxicated dentist”) suggest an ironic reserve concerning Werther (TCD 10402, 29 May 1931). His admission to knowing only “a few shocking lines [of Goethe] here + there” is illustrated with a quotation from Werther in which Beckett focuses his sardonic attention on the word Herz [heart]: Was ich weiss kann jeder wissen, mein Herz hab’ ich allein. !! (The things I know, anyone can know, but my heart is mine alone.) (Goethe 1989, 86) Beckett went on to criticize Herz to MacGreevy as a “blabby word,” a judgment which, as Mark Nixon has pointed out, resonates with Beckett’s satiric treatment of the Smeraldina’s Teutonic effusions concerning her own Herz in Dream (Nixon, 72). Beckett’s ability to quote these lines, however, especially from the work of a writer of
John Bolin
whom, in 1931, he claimed to have little direct knowledge, reveals a certain interest, and perhaps one which Beckett was then unwilling to admit openly.2 Beckett’s comments to MacGreevy in 1931 become more interesting if we compare his critical take on Werther with his unflattering reading of another German Romantic, Rilke, in 1934, two years before Murphy’s completion. Beckett criticizes a “breathless petulance” in Rilke’s poetry which results in the “overstatement of the solitude which [Rilke] cannot make his element.” Like Werther, Rilke “cannot hold his emotion” and “indulges his sense of incommensurability in the crassest of antitheses: ‘I move among the human vegetables.... But my horizon’s full of fantasy.’” Beckett speaks of Rilke’s failure to, as he puts it, “learn […] the fantasy investing ‘human vegetables,’” a knowledge which would “postpone the disillusion of horizons” and a certain “petrifi[cation]” of “the mystic heart.” Rilke’s verse evidences “a turmoil of self-deception and naif discontent” which “gains nothing in dignity from that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God” (2001, 66, 67). Beckett’s dismissiveness toward Rilke and other “German writers” is revealing, not only in relation to Werther, but also with regard to the novel he began a year later (2001, 67).3 Indeed, while clearly distancing himself from such naive romanticism in his correspondence and critical/theoretical writing, Beckett’s antagonism anticipates a more complex, satiric involvement with similar themes in his subsequent novel. For is not Beckett’s own protagonist, like his Rilke and Werther, profoundly guilty of an “overstatement of the solitude which he cannot make his element”? Surely Murphy’s belief that, for him, there is “nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world” (1993a, 101) indulges his sense of incommensurability, as well as his naive discontent, through the crassest of antitheses – the most obvious of which involves a fantasy excluding what Beckett himself termed human “clockwork cabbages” (1993b, 120). Does not the epigram to Murphy’s section six (culled from Spinoza’s dictum regarding the selfsufficient love God bears himself) suggest a romantic “faith” which allows for the interchangeability of Murphy and God, consummated in Murphy’s belief that, though once an adherent of astrology, “he was the prior system” (1993a, 104)? Surely Murphy’s quietistic retreat into the little world “where he could love himself” suggests an involvement 102
The “irrational heart”
with a “mystic heart” and a romantic solipsism compellingly similar to that which Beckett derided in his 1931 letter (1993a, 8; 2001, 66). Beckett’s comments on Rilke and Werther, and their relation to the broader subject of romantic fantasy, seem to belie a more complex relationship than his initial disparagements indicate. Beckett’s knowledge of Goethe increased dramatically in the years following his comments to MacGreevy. He took down passages on Werther in his study of Dichtung und Wahrheit in 1935 which anticipate themes explored in Murphy. One such passage concerns the romantic valuation of inner experience so crucial to Goethe’s novel: “Jener Vorsatz, meine innere Natur nach ihren Eigenheiten gewähren, und die äußere nach ihren Eigenschaften auf mich einfließen zu lassen, trieb mich an das wunderliche Element, in welchem Werther ersonnen und geschrieben ist.” (TCD MSS 10971/1) (The resolution to preserve my internal nature according to its peculiarities, and to let external nature influence me according to its qualities, impelled me to the strange element in which ‘Werther’ is designed and written; Goethe 1971, XII.165). The following sentence continues: “Ich suchte mich innerlich von allem Fremden zu entbinden” (Goethe 1985, XII.575). (I endeavored to free myself inwardly from all that was foreign to me; Goethe 1971, XII.165). It is possible Beckett read or reread Werther during his intensive study of Goethe in 1934-36, although there is no evidence of this. He was certainly familiar enough with the novel to take Werther’s conception of an inner realm divided from the world seriously, however: the same quotation Beckett cited to MacGreevy reappears in Beckett’s philosophy notes on Heraclitus next to a passage stating that in “dreams, in opinion, each has his own world; knowing is common to all” (TCD MSS10967/25).4 As the following suggests, along with other targets of satire during the Dream period (Hölderlin for example), Beckett’s early dismissal of Werther, and more broadly, the romantic currents of thought embodied by such a figure, gave way to a serious, though qualified, engagement.5
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“This imprisoned soul”: Werther as a Novel of Romantic Disillusionment Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis. (Where you are worth nothing there you should want nothing.) (1993a, 101) The most obvious correlation between Werther and Murphy lies in a fundamental tension at the center of both novels between the inner world of the protagonist – the realm of absolute value – and an exterior world of valueless convention. As Beckett’s second suggested point of departure for Murphy indicates, this divergence is not simply a question of value, or in Lukács’s terms, an ethical question, but one of desire – a desire for freedom at the cost of a nihilating rejection of the real. As we shall see, it is in the relationship between desire and negation that any such romantic struggle between two worlds may give way to a Beckettian “principle of disintegration” which threatens to erase what Lukács terms that “sign of essential difference” dividing the valued from the valueless, freedom from slavery, or the real from nothing (2001, 82; Lukács, 29). If questions of value are at stake in Goethe’s novel, they are nowhere more evident than in the area Beckett singled out for particular irony in his 1931 letter: Werther’s heart. The “unquiet” nature of this heart represents a naive romanticism which Beckett’s own novel at once satirizes and pursues: the irrational valuation of the self’s inner experience at the expense of all else (a tendency suggested in Werther’s name, Wert meaning “value”). Werther’s hope that a romantic self-sufficiency in nature and solitude6 will provide an experience of consolation and freedom comes at the cost of negating a world which is seen as purely valueless: the realm of convention, reason and causality. Anticipating Schopenhauer’s vision of the ultimate nullity of human striving, Werther sees life as a dream or a “raree show” of human marionettes whose efforts “serve no purpose but to prolong [a] wretched existence” (Goethe 1989, 30). In contrast to the “trickery” of the affairs of the world, Werther accepts what Lukács terms a “tendency [...] towards passivity” in turning toward a “purely interior reality” which is nevertheless “complete in itself” (Lukács, 112). “I withdraw into myself,” Werther claims, “and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of actuality” (Goethe 1989, 31). The only experience of value is thus a 104
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paradoxical freedom within confinement, a plenum out of an act of universal negation. Like Murphy, Werther longs to retreat into a “dark” in which “confined as he may be, he nonetheless […] preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge that he can quit this prison whenever he wishes” (31). That freedom may only exist in a notional world, involved with a desire which remains dark to Werther himself, however, is the first suggestion that such freedom may present its own complications, not least of which being its relationship to actuality – a problem manifest in Werther’s encounter with Lotte. Lotte’s dance presents Werther with a vision of what Martin Swales has described as the same “ontological wholeness” he hopes for in his rhapsodic solitude (Swales, 134). It is thus an encounter which forces Werther to recognize the failure of his vision of self-sufficiency and freedom at the moment of its keenest realization: Lotte replaces nature as Werther’s “beloved,” forcing him to abandon what he now realizes are “tiresome abstractions” for a physical and independent other who nevertheless remains identified with the freedom and unity sought from the world within. Leaving Lotte for the first time, Werther begins his separation from the sense of meaning he once found in solitude and nature: “I took my leave of her [...] and since then the sun and moon and stars can go about their business as they please, but as for me […] the whole world is as nothing to me” (43). Werther’s encounter with Lotte reveals paradoxes within the simplistic binarism of inner/outer, self-sufficiency/dependence, All/nothing which underlie his desire to evade the valueless. His realization that Lotte remains unattainably other reveals the insufficiency of the little world, now no longer a liberating “heavenly fantasy,” but what Swales terms a “fragmented and fragmenting selfawareness” threatened by the void from which it once seemed secure (Swales, 134). To escape this process of disintegration, Werther accepts a position in the world of protocol that he rejected, hoping to recover the “paradise […] in [his] own heart” in distancing himself from Lotte (27). His naive romanticism, however, cannot accommodate compromise. As Lukács claims of any such trajectory of romantic disillusionment, “the outside world and the interiority are too heterogeneous to be simultaneously affirmed [...]. The only way left is to deny them both” (119). What follows is an experience of encompassing nullity. Worse now than the valueless striving of the world of convention, nature 105
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assumes the terrifying aspect of Schopenhauer’s blind, hostile force even as the heart itself becomes a site of void. The loss of Werther’s sense of freedom and being at home in the world are simultaneous: nature and the soul are both sources of emptiness and suffering. Did it really have to be like this? – that the source of man’s contentment becomes the source of his misery? My heart’s immense and ardent feeling for living Nature, which overwhelmed me with so great a joy and made the world about me a very Paradise, has now become an unbearable torment (65) Once feeling “the glorious forms of infinite Creation mov[ing] in [his] soul, giving it life” Werther now encounters a vision of the “corrosive power that lies concealed in the natural universe” (65, 66). In fact, Werther’s experience of this inverted nature is a partial revelation of the romantic self-deception Beckett criticized in Rilke: the solipsism which aligns the self with the Absolute reveals a failed attempt at selfsufficiency and now opens on an experience of “terrible void” (96). “Once we are lost to ourselves,” Werther laments, “everything else is lost to us” (67). That being “lost,” however, has paradoxically shadowed Werther’s conception of freedom from the beginning intimates the true irrationality of his desire. Just as Lotte’s dance suggests an extreme form of unconsciousness, even negation, of the external, Werther’s attempt to make himself a “home” in the isolation of Wahlheim is predicated on the sensation of being “lost in the vastness of infinity” (31, 105).7 Yet how could Werther appreciate such an experience of unconsciousness and the infinite but through its opposite: a recognition of limiting self-perception which would be the abnegation of freedom – being “halted and returned to his cold, dull consciousness at the very moment he was longing to be lost” (105)? More troubling still: how could such an experience permit Werther’s naive hope that he can return from this realm at will (31)? Goethe suggests the impossibility of such freedom in Werther’s encounter with his mad double. Echoing Werther’s experience of the little world, the madman’s sense of being “thoroughly in [his] element, contented and cheerful” indeed provides him with that inner confinement and unconsciousness of the world so long sought by the romantic protagonist, yet in an ironic fashion: the only such time in the 106
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man’s life was when he was “out of his wits,” “kept [...] in chains in a madhouse,” “totally unaware of a thing” (102, 103). Being fulfilled in the sense Werther has desired seems only possible “before [one] has yet attained his reason, or after he has lost it again,” a realization which compounds the irony of the fact that there remains a hope of nostos for the madman, yet for Werther there is now only a barren wandering. Unable to “lift the curtain and step behind it” into freedom, Werther finds only a “vindication of inactivity” and a longing for nothingness: “that dreadful moment when my entire self trembles on the edge of being and not-being, and […] all about me disintegrates, and the world goes to its doom with me” (113, 111, 99-100). “a critique of pure love”: Murphy’s Wertherism Nothing is more real than nothing. (Beckett 1994, 193) Beckett’s resistance, as he put it, to “taking [Murphy] too seriously” guards against any straightforward claim of correspondence between Werther’s claustrophobic monologue and Beckett’s explicitly ironic narration (2001, 102). Murphy’s satirized romanticism nevertheless bears a compelling resemblance to the disillusion of horizons pioneered in Goethe’s early novel. As in Werther, the relation between irrational desire and the negative initiates what Beckett once described as a principle of disintegration whose ultimate outcome would be a “breakdown of the subject”: “mind and world” – those two realms at war in the novel of romantic disillusionment – “come asunder in irreparable dissociation” (2001, 82). In a mode as deeply indebted to a tradition of comic realism as to that of romantic disillusionment, Murphy seems to have accepted Werther’s vindication of inactivity as his point of (non)departure. Like Werther, Murphy perceives a valueless world whose adequate expression is taken from the realm of commerce, a “mercantile gehenna” governed by “the frenzied justification of life as an end to means” (1993a, 42). This is the world of superficial surface, driven by a principle of desire which serves as the banal opposite to Murphy’s own.8 Murphy and Neary’s conversation in the first chapter sets up these two irreconcilable models of desire which circulate throughout the work. Neary’s rational, Pythagorean vision of life as “figure and ground” suggests a parody of the desire articulated in Beckett’s Proust. 107
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Eschewing the “pathological […] sobriety” of Proust’s vision, Neary nevertheless appropriates his romantic pursuit of the inaccessible (1999, 82).9 This quantum of wantum is figured in the circle which connects Neary to Miss Dwyer, and later Miss Counihan, without ever providing him with the “short circuit” of “love requited” (1993a, 7). In opposition to Neary’s rational universe, Murphy’s attempt to exist “as if he were out of it” surely evidences what Beckett described as a romantic “scepticism before causality” (1999, 81). Life, for Murphy, also suggests a particularly Wertherian Sehnsucht: “But a wandering to find home” (1993a, 6). And as for Werther, such a homecoming necessarily involves the romantic protagonist’s value of values: “absolute freedom” (1993a, 66). For many commentators, this freedom has suggested a purely intellectual solipsism. Indeed, analyses of section six, where a justification of the expression Murphy’s mind is attempted, form the crux of most critical responses to date. It is significant, however, that this section opens with a comic appropriation of Spinoza’s dictum regarding God’s self-sufficiency in the love he bears himself, an allimportant Amor which intimates that the crucial “dissonance” in the novel does not concern a Cartesian division between the mind and body, but, as the first chapter puts it, the “opposites in Murphy’s heart” (1993a, 8). Indeed, the most important thing about Murphy, from Murphy’s perspective at least, may be what Suk terms his “Intense Love nature.” While “prominent,” like Werther’s, it is one which resists operation in the terms of the world without, a truth that Neary is the first to acknowledge distinguishes Murphy from himself (1993a, 22).10 Murphy’s is thus an “irrational heart” in several senses. Satirizing Werther’s breathless claims to a singularly unquiet heart, Murphy’s organ threatens to seize one moment and explode the next (1993a, 6). More importantly, however, the irrationality of Murphy’s heart corresponds to his paradoxical desires. While Murphy’s love has as its sole object Murphy se ipsum, this self remains divided, the first clue that, as with Werther, Murphy’s amour de soi will involve an irreconcilable conflict between the inner and outer worlds, between self-sufficiency and the need for the other. As with Goethe’s protagonist, this inner conflict is evident in the need for a female other: Murphy’s desire for Celia. Celia complicates the fundamental division which Murphy attempts to maintain between himself and the big world, not only by forcing him into the “mercantile gehenna,” but by virtue of her identity: as a prostitute Celia figures a 108
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direct involvement with the realm of materiality and quid pro quo which remains attractive to Murphy in spite of himself.11 As Lotte’s identity complicates Werther’s conception of self-sufficiency through her alignment with his inner realm of value (nevertheless remaining external and other), so Celia does with Murphy: Celia suggests the heavens (caelum), the antithesis to the world of commerce which Murphy identifies with his inner destiny. Like Werther’s nature, however, this is a system whose reliance on Murphy himself becomes all too clear. Just as Lotte’s dance figures a certain “wholeness” which for Werther hitherto existed only in nature/the world within, Celia’s fateful meeting with Murphy while he is consulting the heavens suggests the ultimate collapse of his belief that his mind “excluded nothing that it did not itself contain,” even incorporating “the universe inside it” (1993a, 63). It is not simply Murphy’s distinction between the big and little worlds, or the self and the other which prove impossible to maintain, however; his experience of freedom involves a further complication between value and valuelessness. Inverting the romantic longing for infinity, Murphy seeks “the best of himself” in an encounter with Nothing, a conjunction of presence and absence which suggests the real as well as the experience of supreme value (44). That any such landscape of freedom, however, could remain “mercifully free of figure” in the same moment that Murphy encounters “only Murphy himself, improved out of all knowledge” suggests its ultimate irrationality as well as its intersection with Werther’s own (138; 62). As with Werther, such a non-encounter threatens to erase any sign of essential difference between incommensurabilities, placing the realms of the valued and the valueless alike under a principle of nullity and disintegration. The paradoxes within Murphy’s desire eventually bring about his literal disintegration in Chapter 11, although it is in Chapter 9 (which opens with Malraux’s “Il est difficile a celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens”) that Murphy’s failure to find a home becomes acute. Murphy’s final round at the MMM appropriately begins with a gesture toward Keats’s own disappointed Sehnsucht in Ode to a Nightingale. Murphy’s “heavy heart” as he completes his fateful round recalls the poet’s account of romantic longing (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense”) in the face of “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” of a world “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow” – a line which Murphy invests with renewed significance 109
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(Keats, 236). Murphy’s separation from the microcosmopolitans is a situation in which “the cackle of a nightingale would have been most welcome, to explode his spirit toward its nightingaleless night” (1993a, 134). Predictably, however, there is to be no such romantic succour: “But the season seemed over” (134). As with Werther’s sense of the void in Lotte’s absence, the gulf between Murphy and the desired other becomes “all, ALL, ALL” (1993a, 134). This other, however, is no longer Celia, the inmates, or in an uncomplicated way, Murphy himself, but a figure who exacerbates the contradictions between the internal and the external, self and the other, value and valuelessness that constitute Murphy’s desire: Murphy’s own mad double, Mr. Endon. Murphy is drawn to Endon not only from a Wertherian envy of the freedom he seems to possess, but because of Murphy’s paradoxical need for a perceiver within his experience of Nothing: an experience, by definition, of no longer being perceived – “the absence of […] percipi” (138). In the same way, Endon problematizes the very distinction which has hitherto made such freedom possible – that fundamental division between the big and little worlds. Like Werther, Murphy is, for the first time, “a humble and envious outsider” gazing into “a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that [he] felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain” (105). To make things worse, the antithesis inside/outside becomes impossible to maintain in light of the fact that, for Murphy, Endon’s identity (endon being Greek for “within”) problematizes the division between the self and the other. Murphy thus finds he loves Endon with the same love he bears himself: “a love of the purest possible kind, exempt from the big world’s precocious ejaculations of thought, word and deed” (104). For the first time, however, this Amor fails to provide Murphy with the short-circuit of love requited. Keats’s romantic longing to “leave the world unseen” (Keats, 258) finds ironic realization in Murphy’s final encounter with Endon when, to his despair, Murphy remains “a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen” (1993a, 140), a revelation painfully concomitant with Murphy’s own failure to become immune to “seeing anything but himself” (1993a, 140). In a dependence reminiscent of that suffered by Rousseau’s social man, Murphy finds he needs the perception of others, if only to indulge the hope “against his better judgment that his feeling for Mr. Endon was in some small degree reciprocated” (135). As with Werther’s encounter with the madman, Murphy’s non-encounter with Endon renders his conception of freedom and self-sufficiency impossible to maintain. For Endon’s 110
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state appears, to Murphy at least, to be an absence of percipi so extreme that it is not only the perception of the external other which Endon evades, but self-consciousness itself. Endon, like Werther’s madman, is only free in the moment when such freedom is by definition unrealizable, the moment when he remains “himself unseen by him” (140). This is a threshold which Murphy and Werther cannot cross. Murphy’s exit, “abandoned” under a starless sky, recalls Keats’s sense of solitude and failure in the silence following the nightingale’s song: the disintegration of Murphy’s romantic fantasy ironically returns him, in Keats’s phrase, “to [his] sole self” (Keats, 238). Unable to remain in the world within or to return to the world which they have denied,12 Werther and Murphy are confronted with a reality which has fallen under the shadow of nullity and disintegration – a reality whose relation to the void no longer masquerades as one of value: “Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing” (1993a, 130). Moreso than its protagonist, Murphy is, to quote Miss Counihan, “Unromantic to the last” in its pursuit and satire of romantic irrationality (147). Unlike Werther, which premises the artwork as consolation, or À la recherche du temps perdu (in which Marcel discovers “the meaning of death [...] and the utility of pain” through the triumph of the aesthetic) (1999, 78), Murphy does not assert a system of value, accepting what Lukács terms the “danger” inherent in such romantic disillusionment. Although tempered by its fundamentally ironic tone throughout, Murphy’s ending gives way to a rising “pessimism” (Lukács, 119). The opening lines of Chapter 13 recall Celia’s earlier walk in the park (Chapter 8), during which she noticed a child flying a tandem kite. Like the tug and barge, the tandem is a figure for harmony amidst dissonance, sailing serenely while the others are “writhing and plunging” (88). Beckett hints, however, that such a symbol of innocent freedom cannot endure: the tandem is flown against a background of gathering storm. The kite returns in the final chapter, now prone to the same fate which threatened the others. “She watched the tandem coming shakily down from the turmoil, the child running forward to break its fall, his trouble when he failed, his absorbed kneeling over the damage” (158). By this point, Celia has accepted a disillusionment which the child, his destroyed kite a small version of the drama figured 111
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in her own thwarted desire for Murphy, now learns: “He did not sing as he departed, nor did she hail him” (158). The child, his frail kite, the attempt to soar, and the inevitable coming down recall another moment of romantic disillusionment: the end of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” translated by Beckett in 1932. The drunken boat’s “broken […] heart,” the pond, and the image of a child with his paper ship anticipate the images of the barge and the kite in Murphy, just as Rimbaud’s poem concerns the hope of release from a world of commerce and a voyage undertaken in a state “Blanker than the brain of a child” (1977, 105, 95). Kelly, freeing his line into the unseen, Murphy pursuing the Nothing, or Celia’s experience in Murphy’s chair of “things and people [being] untwisted and scattered” recall the drunken boat’s own attempt to be delivered from the “trivial” world of quid pro quo (1993a, 86): I felt the towline of the boatmen slacken …………………………………………. Then, delivered from my straining boatmen, From the trivial racket of trivial crews and from The freights of Flemish grain and English cotton, I made my own course down the passive rivers (1977, 93) Yet making his own course does not allow the boat to remain “free in a fume of purple spray,” nor does one who has “pierced the skies” experience an unqualified Novalisian “poet’s rapture,” but a “broken […] heart,” “torment” and the Wertherian desire to “split from stem to stern and founder” (1977, 93, 103, 105). The boat’s wild career, like Murphy’s disintegration and Kelly’s “wild rush of line” into the unseen seem “without recoil or stop,” yet terminate in similar visions of exclusion and disillusionment: the boat’s exile from Europe’s waters, and the “All out” which closes Beckett’s novel. The boat’s cries of “none” and “no more” underscore its failure to return to solitude and freedom. I want none of Europe’s waters unless it be The cold black puddle where a child, full of sadness, Squatting, looses a boat as frail As a moth into the fragrant evening. 112
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Steeped in the languors of the swell, I may Absorb no more the wake of the cotton-freighters, Nor breast the arrogant oriflammes and banners, Nor swim beneath the leer of the pontoons. (1977, 105) Beckett’s novel has explored the irrational heart, but it is the “tired heart” – the disillusioned heart – on which it ends its “critique of pure love” (1993a, 60). Looking heavenward at a sky which seems to grow “more and more remote,” Celia realizes the distance between herself and “home”: “that unction of soft sunless light on her eyes that was all she remembered of Ireland” (157). Pushing Kelly’s chair13 up the narrow path out of the park, Celia then shuts her eyes, an action which ironically recalls the moment she began to understand Murphy’s withdrawal into the little world in a passage reminiscent of Keats’s rapturous silence in Ode to a Nightingale: “The silence not of vacuum but of plenum, not of breath taken, but of quiet air. The sky. She closed her eyes and was in her mind with Murphy” (1993a, 86). Any such attempt to remain with the beloved in an inner plenum, however, is here met by the cry of the rangers. Beckett sets Sehnsucht against “the teeth of the wind” – the force which effects the “bringing down” of any such struggling skyward: The levers were the tired heart. She closed her eyes. All out. (1993a, 158). Notes 1. I take the term “romantic disillusionment” from Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, from which I have drawn key aspects of my reading. 2. Beckett had possibly already read Werther in 1931; he had certainly read about Goethe’s novel and its broader connection to German Romanticism in his study of John G. Robertson’s history of German literature, most likely conducted in the Spring of 1934 (Mark Nixon, personal communication). 3. The only other author Beckett names in this vein is another romantic, Klopstock. That Beckett might have been thinking of Werther in connection with the “childishness” of such German writers is suggested by the fact that Beckett later (derisively) recorded Werther’s admiration for Klopstock in the Whoroscope notebook. Again, Beckett’s dismissive gestures cannot be taken
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John Bolin completely at face value, as he was interested enough in the romantic poet to visit the Klopstockhaus and spend a winter afternoon looking for Klopstock’s grave in the Ohlsdorf cemetery during his 1936 visit to Germany (Pilling, 61). 4. The Whoroscope notebook indicates Beckett read or re-read Werther in the summer of 1937 (in French), although this is a year too late to coincide with the writing of Murphy (August 1935 - June 1936) (John Pilling, personal communication). Beckett was still thinking of Werther when writing to Alan Schneider in 1958 concerning Endgame: “Faces red and white probably like Werther’s green coat” (10/1/1958 in Harmon, 29). Werther’s coat, which is actually blue, had perhaps become fused in Beckett’s mind with the green coats which his own characters, including Murphy, often wear. I thank Mark Nixon for his kind help concerning Beckett’s interest in Goethe, as well as his assistance with an earlier draft of this essay; I am indebted to Nixon’s research for much of the above information. I also thank Chris Ackerley and John Pilling for their assistance with the above. Any errors that remain are purely my own. 5. It is necessary to point out that the ‘serious’ in Beckett’s novels is inextricable from the bathetic and the satiric. In this essay I do not attempt to limn this relation in its true complexity. 6. Werther in fact conceives of “Nature” as the expression or mirror of his own solitary soul. 7. Lotte dances “as if there were nothing else, as if she had not a single other thought or sensation [...] and [...], everything else ceases to exist for her” (40). Wahlheim, which literally means “chosen home,” is not the only place in which Werther raises his problematic conception of freedom. Upon his literal homecoming to the town of S., he again claims that true freedom necessitates being “lost in the contemplation of an invisible distance” (105). 8. It could be argued that Murphy stands (or sits) at the end of a line of romantic protagonists ranging from Werther to Marcel for whom a world of convention which is “entirely devoid of meaning” suggests a tendency “towards passivity” (Lukács, 113). Murphy certainly fulfils to the most extreme extent a romanticism in which “a character’s profession loses all importance from the point of view of his inner destiny” (Lukács, 113). 9.
Neary offers Miss Counihan cattleyas as Swann does with Odette.
10. Murphy’s love is idealistic in nature: “rarely suspicioning the Nasty, with inclinations to Purity. When Sensuality rules there is danger of Fits” (1993a, 22). “For whatever reason you cannot love in my way,” Neary tells Murphy,
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The “irrational heart” “and believe me there is no other, for that same reason, whatever it may be, your heart is as it is” (1993a, 8). 11. “The part of him that he hated craved for Celia, the part that he loved shriveled up at the thought of her” (1993a, 8). 12. Both protagonists make an effort to step back from the seemingly ineluctable circumstances that lead them to their deaths. Werther attempts to realize that “nothing is more dangerous than solitude” in accepting employment under the ambassador (73), while Murphy fails to recall and return to Celia and the “music” as he lies naked on the grass at the MMM. 13. Kelly’s chair no longer recalls Murphy’s Wertherian indulgence, but is now the support for “a ghastly lamentable figure” anticipating Hamm in Endgame (1993a, 158).
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove P, 1977). –, “Notes on Philosophy,” TCD MS 10967, Beckett Manuscript Collection, Trinity College Library, Dublin. –, “Notes on German Literature,” TCD MS 10971/1, Beckett Manuscript Collection, Trinity College Library, Dublin. –, Letters to Thomas MacGreevy, TCD MS 10402, Beckett Manuscript Collection, Trinity College Library, Dublin. –, Murphy (London: Calder P, 1993a). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder P, 1993b). –, The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1994). –, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 2001). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (London: Sidgwick and Jackson Ltd., 1971). –, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1985). –, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 1989). Keats, John, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (New York: Modern Library, 2001).
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John Bolin Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin P, 1971). Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Becket and Alan Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998). Nixon, Mark, “‘what a tourist I must have been’: The German Diaries of Samuel Beckett” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 2005). Pilling, John, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Swales, Martin, “Goethe’s Prose Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
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BECKETT’S SUBLIME IRONIES: The Trilogy, Krapp’s Last Tape, and the Remainders of Romanticism
Andrew Eastham This essay theorizes the status of Romantic irony in Beckett’s work according to its relationship with the sublime, which takes three different forms. First, in the “German Letter,” irony is conceived of as the way to the sublime. I argue that a diagnostic account of this process emerges in Trilogy, where Romantic irony is framed as the symptom of a moribund condition. Finally, I suggest that in Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett works to ironize the rhetoric of Romanticism, whilst the Romantic irony of his narrators is constituted by an aspiration to repeat an irrecoverable sublime encounter.
The concept of irony which developed in the culture of German Romanticism has had a profound legacy in theoretical treatments of literary subjectivity, and Beckett’s example often appears as a belated after-image of the Romantic encounter with literature and its origins. In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot reads German Romanticism as the moment where “Literature […] suddenly becomes conscious of itself” (1993, 354), but in such a manner that it is condemned to interrogate its own emptiness: echoing Beckett’s “literature of the unword,” he posits the Romantic literary subject as “pure consciousness without content, a pure speech that can say nothing” (356). It was the fragmentary reflections of Friedrich von Schlegel that provided a form for Romantic subjectivity to explore such absences. As the primary theorist of Romantic irony, his critical fragments collected in the Lyceum and the Athenauem in the late 1790s promoted a concept of irony as the basis of literary freedom: “Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Schlegel, 247); it is “informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery” (148). For Schlegel, Romantic irony performed a sublime detachment greater than any rhetorical ironies. In his essay “On Incomprehensibility” he catalogues the varieties of literary irony to frame a demand: “What gods will rescue us from all
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these ironies? The only solution is to find an irony that might be able to swallow up all those big and little ironies and leave no trace of them at all” (267). Schlegel searches for a sublime irony, a behemoth of negation that will render even his own irony obsolete, and it is this paradoxical demand that constitutes the affinities between Romantic theory and Beckett’s practice. When the narrator of The Unnameable pledges his allegiance against understanding – “Dear Incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end” (Beckett 1981, 298) – we might read an echo of Schlegel’s credo. The narrators of Beckett’s Trilogy clearly exemplify the position of Romantic irony in certain essential respects; reducing the body to a grotesque caricature, refusing identification with expressive appearance and, particularly in Malone’s case, assuming a position of manipulative play, the continual pledge to “Live and Invent” (79). Whilst it is worth heeding Jennifer Jeffers’ argument that The Unnameable “simply refuses to be rendered the exemplar of the reductive paradigm of a traditional concept of irony” (Jeffers, 48), this refusal is a complex position which might be regarded as the refinement of Romantic irony itself. The lure of the negative is not easy to escape, and if irony constitutes a manner of negative framing, the Trilogy frames such negations in the context of a Romantic condition – a strain towards transcendence which is revealed most dramatically in Malone’s scene at the window, “on such a night as Caspar David Friedrich loved” (182). This is the moment in the Trilogy where the remainders of Romanticism are most clearly resuscitated, where the apparently playful narrator takes on the earnest rhetoric of the Romantic sublime. My contention in this paper is that the position of ironic detachment assumed by Beckett’s fictional narrators is consistently related to a corresponding movement towards the sublime; the ironic negations they perform are the progenitors and the shadow of a sublime encounter. Romantic irony and the sublime share the condition of being a default appearance of the infinite within the horizon of representation; they appear as the limits of representation are experienced. The difference is that whereas romantic irony posits this infinity as a quality of the subject, the sublime effects a temporary breakdown in the subject’s capacity for representation. This moment of breakdown is central to Kant’s account of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment, but the initial moment of trauma and loss leads to a sense of infinite inwardness.1 For Kant the sublime is induced by the experience of an 118
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overwhelming natural force (the dynamic sublime) or by the breakdown of our capacity to represent a vast object (the mathematical sublime). The result is a move beyond the limits of the sensuous realm: “the sublime, in the strictest sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form,” it resides “only in our mind, in so far as we become conscious of our superiority over nature within” (Kant, 114). Although this superiority induces delight, this is of a purely negative kind, constituted by the sacrifice of any empirical enjoyment. It is this logic of an infinite gain through sacrifice that constitutes the affinity between the sublime and Romantic irony. For Schlegel, irony is “the freest of all liberties, for it enables us to rise above our own selves” (Schlegel, 108), but this elevated aspiration demands that the ironist continually cast off his own empirical substance. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue that this notion of irony was directly informed by Kant’s critical philosophy, which exacerbated the disjunction between the artist as subject and the work, to the extent that the subject of Romanticism was constituted as an evacuated substance: All that remains of the subject is the “I” as an “empty form” […] that “accompanies my representations.” […] As is well known, the Kantian “cogito” is empty. One must set out from this problematic of the subject unrepresentable to itself […] in order to understand what romanticism will receive, not as a bequest but as its ‘own’ most difficult and perhaps insoluble question. (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, 30) In this reading I shall argue that this “insoluble question” of Romantic subjectivity is fundamental to three of Beckett’s texts. It is approached in different ways by the sublime rhetoric of the “German Letter” of 1937, the narrative method of the Trilogy, and the formal innovations of Krapp’s Last Tape. In all of these works, Beckett stages Romantic subjectivity according to a series of relationships between irony and the sublime. 1. Irony as the way to the sublime In the “German Letter” of 1937, the young Beckett instituted a concept of irony as the basis of a negative method: “On the way to this literature of the unword […] some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage” (Beckett 1983, 173). Beckett’s irony is “a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words,” 119
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but the rejection of the word leads the way to a sublime music. His concept of irony motivates the most explicitly Romantic gesture of his critical work, as he traces a path from Beethoven to the abyss: Is there any reason why the terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? (172) It is perhaps this intoxicated rhetoric that motivated Beckett’s later disavowal of his own statement as “German bilge” (qtd. in Beckett 1983, 170), but the conjunction of silence, abyss and sublime music was not unusual in the Symbolist and post-Romantic discourses that were still prevalent in Beckett’s youth. A surprising parallel can be found in Georg Lukács’ extraordinary youthful mediation on German Romanticism, Soul and Form (1910): This is the most profound meaning of form: to lead to a great moment of silence […] there is only one path leading to the abyss from any place. A question, with life all around it; a silence, a rustling, a noise, a music, a universal singing all round it: that is form. (Lukács, 114) This appears in a volume in which Lukács develops a wide-ranging critique of Romantic irony which targets Schlegel and Novalis as well as two of Beckett’s precursors, Kierkegaard and Sterne. In his critical dialogue on Romantic irony, “Richness, Chaos and Form,” Lukács’ mouthpiece “Joachim” rejects Sterne for his “violent dissonances of material” (145). In the “German Letter” Beckett validates precisely the form of dissonant practice that Lukács rejects: “In the dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All” (172). Beckett and Lukács present totally divergent positions on the means of art which mask a parallel concept of its end. This unusual convergence is possible because Beckett values irony as a stage on the way rather than as a final aesthetic principle, suggesting Kierkegaard’s assertion at 120
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the end of The Concept of Irony that “Irony as the negative is the way; it is not the truth but the way” (327). In Beckett’s early thought, irony is posited as a way to the sublime, but as a practice that will ultimately be surpassed: a contingent structural device which serves a higher duty. In the Trilogy this relationship between irony and the sublime is reconfigured in important ways, and the rhetoric of vertigo and abyss is given a gothic context. The ironic detachment of the narrators and their occasional striving towards sublimity are critically informed by the narrative’s deathward trajectory. If death is the continually deferred promise of freedom in the Trilogy, irony and the sublime are its emissaries. It is through this encounter with death, I shall argue, that the Trilogy develops a critical and diagnostic framing of the condition of Romantic irony whilst exploring its limits. In Malone Dies the dying narrator expresses his own ironic condition as an ecstatic movement: “What I sought […] was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness” (179). This suggests how his narrative irony might pass into a condition of continuous dissolve, but it is in the final novel of the Trilogy that Beckett’s narrator states his own Romantic irony as a sublime aspiration. The ironic imagination has its own peculiar seduction, that its state of detachment and freedom is a privileged position of knowledge, but the narrator of The Unnameable frames his own ironic negations within the conditions of this lure: “Not to have been a dupe, that will have been my best possession, my best deed, to have been a dupe, wishing I wasn’t, thinking I wasn’t, knowing I was, not being a dupe of not being a dupe” (288). This principled refusal comes with an almost Wildean assertion of urbanity: if Molloy protests at one point that he is “far from being an aesthete, or an artist” (47), the Unnameable states his own coda as an artful self-fashioning which resists grotesque expression according to the law of death: “No cries, above all no cries, be urbane, a credit to the art and code of dying, while the others cackle” (288). In this statement Beckett’s narrator mimics the terms of Schlegel’s Critical Fragment (42), which insists that above all else the ironist should maintain an essential urbanity: Of course, there is also a rhetorical species of irony which, sparingly used, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics; but compared to the sublime urbanity of the Socratic muse, it is like
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the pomp of the most splendid oration set over against the noble style of ancient tragedy. (Schlegel, 148; my italics) Once again, the sublimity of the ironist is distinguished from the merely rhetorical form of irony. The ironist’s urbanity is constituted by a detachment from all performative traces, a denial of the obligation to manifest comparable to the insouciant but portentous refusals of Melville’s Bartleby – “I would prefer not to” in its absolute form. The urbanity of The Unnameable reaches a sublime condition because it is performed against the limits of the decaying body, and this points to another central aspect of German Romanticism. When Beckett supplements the Schlegelian ironic coda with an advocacy of the art and code of dying he points to the death-bound subjectivity of Novalis, the shadow figure within the Schlegel brothers’ utopian community who suggested untimely truths about Romantic subjectivity. Once again Lukács’ Soul and Form provides an uncanny echo of Beckett’s rhetoric of Romanticism, as the account of Novalis appears to intimate the code of The Unnameable: “Everything the Romantics wanted to conquer sufficed for no more than a beautiful death. Their life philosophy was one of death: their art of living, an art of dying” (Lukács, 54). If Beckett continues the work of Schlegel’s irony he does so by situating it within the condition of Novalis’ romantic yearning for death, a condition which David Farrell Krell has described as thaumaturgic idealism. It is through its engagement with this condition that the Trilogy suggests a critique of Romanticism that is in many ways comparable to that developed by Lukács. Its narrators show an acute consciousness that their own irony, so frequently turned against the grotesque body and the follies of the living, appears to be constituted precisely by their moribund condition.2 Contemplating his graveyard plot, Moran notes: “Sometimes I smiled, as if I were dead already” (124). Malone recognises that his own irony is a paradoxically earnest position: “gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent” (179). If the banal pun suggests how Malone’s position of detachment and play might be a response to the proximity of the grave, this suggests a broader diagnostic. In spite of his professions of rapturous vertigo, Malone is censorious about his own process of self-doubling, expressing the desire for a more stable form of detachment that would halt his endless self-duplication. Reflecting on the multiplicity of his personae, he laments: “How little one is at one with oneself […] I who 122
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prided myself as being a sensible man, cold as crystal and as free from spurious depth” (104; my italics). Malone condemns his own selfdoubling as a spurious claim to profundity, and this is not the only instance where the Beckettian narrator appears to adopt a censorious position against irony. Molloy uses precisely the same terms as he wanders through the “little side streets” of the town, not as a prince rejoicing in his incognito, but with a troubled sense of the incapacity of the man in the crowd to guess at his position of altitude and detachment: Was there one among them to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain, as of hawsers about to snap? It’s possible. Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my own poisons I struggled against them, safely bound. (21; my italics) This diagnostically identifies irony – the distance between “I” and “him I seemed to be” – as an illusory striving towards “spurious deeps.” The subsequent articulation of Molloy’s moribund condition constitutes something like a phenomenology of the ironic unhappy consciousness. In the garden of Lousse, Molloy imagines the borders between himself and the “deeps and wildernesses” as a death urn, “that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved” (46). Far from being a text which recuperates the force of Romantic irony, Molloy appears to offer a critique of irony as a state of entombment. If Beckett is offering a diagnostic account of Romantic irony here, it is in a number of ways comparable to the ethical critique offered by Hegel in the introduction to his Aesthetics. Hegel rejected the Romantic ironists for positing the subject as the source of infinite possibility; an ultimately negative aspiration which was “the source of yearning and a morbid beautiful soul” (Hegel, 67).3 In maintaining an essentially manipulative ego, the ironist reduced all objective phenomena to the status of lifeless objects: The virtuosity of an ironic artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature [wesenloses Geschöpf], to which the 123
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creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound. (Hegel, 66) The ironist treats other people as “wesenloses Geschöpf” – bodiless shadows or beings without substance – but Hegel’s critique contains a more gothic suggestion which resonates with the moribund condition of Beckett’s narrators: in treating the world as a theatre of shadows the ironist himself lapses into the same shadow realm, becoming a dead creature in a sealed jar, ever more substanceless as irony takes hold. We can see an equivalent movement from substance to shadow accelerating throughout Beckett’s Trilogy and reaching its apogee in the later stages of The Unnameable, where the association between irony and death is taken to its limit. Having announced his fidelity to the “art and code of dying,” the Unnameable moves towards a profound doubt about his own ‘substantiality’ (315). The ‘urbane’ performance of the narrator is increasingly threatened by proliferating moments of breakdown: “everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m in all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me” (355). This abyssal moment suggests the process described in the “German Letter,” where irony dismembers language as a way to the sublime, but the complex diagnostics of the Trilogy allow us to read the relationship between irony and the sublime in two ways: in one reading, these moments emerge as a compensation for the narrator’s detachment, a contrary movement of vertigo, “the letting go, the fall” (179), when the strain of “hawsers about to snap” (21) is dissipated. But we might equally read these moments as the ultimate product of Romantic irony in its search for subjective infinity – a sublime irony exploring its limits. If the way to sublime irony appears to culminate in the final phase of The Unnameable, the discourse of disintegration has already been instigated in the “great dismemberings” of Molloy’s night: “The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides” (102). The same discourse recurs again in Malone Dies, on “such a night as Kaspar David Friedrich loved, tempestuous and bright” (182), when Malone strains to frame the limitless sublimity of the night sky: “Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly” (182). What is distinct about this moment is that the radical dissolution of the subject in language is framed according to the identification with Friedrich, 124
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explicitly framing the discourse of disintegration within the legacy of Romanticism. Malone’s experience obeys the Kantian model of the sublime, where the subject strains towards the impossible framing of an immense object, but his experience of breakdown gives way to a compensatory moment; “beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference” (182). Malone, the most caustically ironic of Beckett’s narrators, ultimately retreats to a moment of oral completion with his pillow, but the traces of the Romantic encounter remain as he concludes his account with a Sturm und Drang rhetoric of transcendence: “Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good” (183). The rhetoric of transcendence is allowed to stand unchallenged here, but the complexity of this moment, and the ways in which its discourse is echoed throughout the three novels, suggests how the remainders of Romanticism are integral to the process of the Trilogy as a whole. If on the one hand the sublime seems to offer a symptomatic relief of the narrator’s ironic detachment, Malone’s striving for the sublime can also be read as the constitutive basis of his Romantic irony – the striving towards “spurious deeps” that both Molloy and Malone consider to be their curse. In this sense, Friedrich’s Romantic night is the primal scene of the literary subject – the experience of transcendence that generates the ironist’s persistent striving towards detachment. The Romantic irony which the narrator of the Unnameable names as “the art and code of dying” is a continuous attempt to perform or memorialise this original experience of freedom in the sublime encounter, where “everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes” (355). It is these moments in the Trilogy which reanimate the rhetorical remainder of the Romantic sublime, just as the narrator’s ironic performance contains the remainders of the Schlegelian ideal of a sublime urbanity. Even if this urbane performance is precisely what the process of the Trilogy undermines, Romantic irony is nevertheless the underlying condition of its ongoing project, the basis of the word’s turn against itself. 2. Sublime Krapp and “German bilge” Beckett’s exploration of the unhappy consciousness of Romantic irony is extended further in Krapp’s Last Tape, where a new relationship between irony and the sublime emerges. Krapp’s Last Tape turns irony against precisely the kind of sublime rhetoric that Beckett had resuscitated in the “German Letter” and the Trilogy. In Beckett’s first use of the staged dramatic monologue, the problematics of irony and 125
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subjectivity are intrinsic to the use of recorded voice, and the narrative is determined by a trinity of sublime promises; the recollected moment on the lake, the silence of the uninhabited night announced by the 39 year old Krapp, and the immanence of old Krapp’s possible death in his motionless staring at the end of play. The Romantic sublime emerges most clearly in the 39 year old Krapp’s account of “that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind” (Beckett 1986, 220). This progresses towards a sturm und drang rhetoric of terror, illumination and sublimity: “great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propellor,” as the sublime moment induces the recognition of genius: “my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire.” Conceptually the movement here obeys the triadic pattern of the Kantian dynamic sublime: from an overwhelming encounter with natural force, to a moment of dissolution, to a recuperation of the powers of reason. Yet the form of mechanical reproduction parodically frames Krapp-39’s voice as the excess of Romantic youth. What Beckett is staging here is the surpassing or disavowal of Romanticism in advanced age, and to this extent we might draw a parallel with his own gesture of disavowal towards the “German Letter.” It is tempting to suggest that Krapp is ironizing his own youthful self as “German bilge,” since it appears to be the rhetoric of the sublime which embarrasses or angers the older Krapp more than any of his earlier statements. For Steven Connor, the effect of Krapp’s recollection of his earlier selves on the tape recorder is “to reveal clearly his ironic non-coincidence with himself” (Connor, 128). Yet whilst Connor is surely right to ascribe an ironic effect to the technology of reproduction here, old Krapp’s banana-faced vacuity immediately belies the idea that he is experiencing a critical selfdoubling; the irony of this moment is not a subjective quality attributable to old Krapp.4 The absence of ironic consciousness in the actor on stage has an important function here, sharpening the distinction between the older Krapp and the young voice, which is precisely that of irony – the performance of self-knowledge as Bildung. In contrast to old Krapp, the “rather pompous” voice of Krapp-39 can be seen as the type of the Romantic ironist, driving his own process of aesthetic education by continually casting off his former selves: “Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp” (Beckett 1986, 218). Even the younger Krapp is reported as exhibiting the ironic disavowal, “Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks God that it’s over. [Pause.] False ring there” 126
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(218). As Gontarski observes, “Krapp-69 sneers at Krapp-39, who in turn laughs at young Krapp. At each stage Krapp sees the fool he was, not the fool he is” (Gontarski, 59). But what is particularly interesting about this series of disavowals is that it is precisely the younger Krapp’s disavowal of the even younger Krapp that Krapp-39 wishes to disavow. As in Schlegel’s essay “On Incomprehensibility,” the Romantic ironist seeks a sublime irony which will devour its progenitors, the smaller ironies from which it emerged. In a broader sense, the ironic gesture of negation which Krapp-39 compulsively performs can be read as an imitation of his sublime moment on the jetty, where his past life is framed and surpassed by “the vision at last,” eradicating his former life in the “dissolution of storm and night.” Just as Malone’s Caspar David Friedrich moment is the primal scene of the narrative subject in the Trilogy, an inflated discourse of sublimity underpins Krapp-39’s aspiration to ironic urbanity. So the process of Krapp’s Last Tape is to mutually expose Krapp’s sublime rhetoric and his ironic negations as twin aspects of a Romantic condition. Yet if this continues the diagnostic representation of Romantic irony and sublimity that Beckett had inaugurated in the Trilogy, the critical framing of Krapp-39 has the effect of making the fragile sublimity of the play’s ending all the more exposed. As Krapp strains to encounter his lover’s eyes on the lake, the egotistical sublime is doubly challenged, by the moment of recollection, and by the older Krapp’s “motionless staring.” The remainder of Romanticism is integral to the play’s ending, as the 39 year old Krapp’s final Romantic statement, “Not with the fire in me now” (Beckett 1986, 223), recalls “the light of the understanding and the fire.” But the dramatic irony which undermines this statement frames the question of Romantic subjectivity in a most disturbing way: against the fire of Romantic subjectivity the old Krapp’s gaze suggests an infinite sense of lost possibility, which is exacerbated by Krapp-39’s hymn to the night: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” We might say that Beckett reinstates a sublime silence here – the silence of the unword – in order to ironize Romantic irony itself; a new form of negative sublime displaces Krapp-39’s Romantic subjectivity. Yet the running of the tape replaces the silence of midnight with a contentless medium of representation – a machinery without manifestation – and the suggestion that the machinery will run down. At this point the figure of old Krapp on stage seems to be evacuated of all conscious knowledge and ironic control. No longer 127
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reducible to the successive self-negations that his younger voices perform, his silent listening suggests a different kind of attention. In this respect Krapp’s ending suggests a move away from the sublime irony of the Trilogy’s narrators, but it also bears out Malone’s profession of an unknowing attention to the formless: “it was not long before I found myself alone, in the dark. That is why I gave up trying to play and took myself for ever shapelessness and speechlessness, incurious wondering, darkness, long stumbling with outstretched arms” (166). Notes 1. Nicoletta Piredu makes a distinction between this recuperative movement in Romanticism and the ‘radical negativity’ of Beckett’s late prose (Piredu 1992). For another interesting approach to the Beckettian sublime see Smith (2004). Myskja’s 2002 study focuses on Kant and Molloy. 2. In this respect Blanchot’s reading of the Trilogy is particularly suggestive. Blanchot suggests that Malone’s ironic voice is continually undermined by the overwhelming immanence of death in the narrative (Blanchot 1986). According to this reading we might say that death has the capacity to ironize irony; it is both the constitutive basis and limit of irony’s force in the text. 3. For a sustained reflection on Hegel’s critique of the ‘beautiful soul’ in relation to Beckett, see Milne (1985). 4. In his important early essay on “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” (1920), Walter Benjamin makes a distinction between Schlegel’s concept of irony as “the expression of a pure subjectivism” (Benjamin 1996, 162), and the “ironization of form” (163), which is most successfully achieved in drama.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979). –, “German Letter of 1937,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983). –, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, volume one (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 2000).
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Beckett’s Sublime Ironies Blanchot, Maurice, “Where Now? Who Now?,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. Samuel Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1986), 131-39. –, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993). Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Gontarski, Samuel E., The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). Hegel, G.W.F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975). Jeffers, Jennifer, “Beyond Irony: The Unnameable’s Appropriation of its Critics in a Humorous Reading of the Text,” in The Journal of Narrative Technique 25.1 (Winter 1995), 47-66. Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1952). Kierkegaard, Soren, The Concept of Irony: with continual reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1989). Krell, David Farrell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998). Lukács, Georg, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin P, 1974.) Milne, Drew, “The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett,” in Diacritics 32.1 (Spring 2002), 63-82. Myskja, Bjørn K., The Sublime in Kant and Beckett (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002). Nancy, Jean-Luc and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (New York: State U of New York P, 1988). Piredu, Nicoletta, “Sublime Supplements: Beckett and the ‘Fizzling Out’ of Meaning,” in Studies in Short Fiction 29.3 (Summer 1992), 303-14. Schlegel, Friedrich, ‘Lucinde’ and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971). Smith, Russell, “Beckett’s Endlessness: Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime,” in SBT/A 14, “After Beckett/D’après Beckett,” eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans, Bruno Clément (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 405-20.
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ROMANTIC AGONY: Fancy and Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s All Strange Away
Michael Angelo Rodriguez In All Strange Away, Samuel Beckett contributes to a discussion regarding an important Romantic distinction between Fancy and Imagination, suggesting that no matter how much Fancy, particularly its passive aspect, predominates in this text, the dynamic function of Imagination is never absent. Contrary to popular scholarly consensus, therefore, a close examination of All Strange Away reveals a dynamic text that demonstrates the Romantic aspects of Beckett’s own creative process, thereby aligning him more with the German and English Romantics than with the so-called post-modernists.
For John Keats, who knew perhaps better than any other English Romantic poet the nihilistic shadow of the imagination, one can potentially seize and participate in the dynamism of nature through “a greeting of the spirit” in which one is not isolated and solipsistic but integrated and engaged. Although there are intimations of immortality in Samuel Beckett’s All Strange Away, no such “greeting of the spirit” ultimately occurs, for the love that was for Schelling, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley the securest bond between self and other is conspicuously lacking in this text. All Strange Away, indeed, is a kind of Keatsian “Ode to Psyche” in which the imagination becomes its own self-mirroring subject. With All Strange Away and the texts that it engenders, in fact, we come to the heart of Beckett’s self-conscious investigations into the nature and function of the Romantic imagination. In his previous works, and in Watt specifically, Beckett had rather dispassionately critiqued materialism, thereby implying, as he had through his support of the “Poetry is Vertical” manifesto in 1932, his penchant for “the organic rhythm of the vision” in which “the creative act occurs” (transition no. 21, 148). All Strange Away, however, establishes new territory. It is with this truly bizarre text, and the cycle to which it belongs, that Beckett critiques Fancy at the level of narrative itself, and in this regard, Beckett pushes the logic of Romanticism to
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unimaginable extremes, revealing not a merely nihilistic text but a vibrant one that helps establish his place in a long tradition of Romantic aesthetics. Paul Davies argues in The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination that “Although all Beckett’s novels are works of imagination, none before All Strange Away comes near to making imagination into the protagonist of a myth” (137). In his essay “The Pornographic Imagination in All Strange Away,” Graham Fraser likewise notes that All Strange Away “is a reflexive assessment of the imagining narrator’s own imagination. The box or rotunda is a projection of the narrator’s own skull, a displacement of his own imaginative space, which he can use to explore the dynamics of his own imagination. Thus the climate and goings-on within the rotunda illustrate [...] the imaginative aesthetics which inform their very narration” (515-16). The self-reflexive nature of the text seems clear enough, but most critics have seized upon this aspect of the text as evidence for Beckett’s anti-Romantic sensibility. In his classic study of the story in Frescoes of the Skull, for instance, John Pilling analyzes the ways in which Beckett’s conception of the imaginative process manifests itself in All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine, but Pilling concludes that Beckett’s use of Fancy in All Strange Away renders him at odds with the Romantics: [The protagonist’s] interest in measurement is not a simple matter of scientific accuracy; here it is somehow bound up with the exercise of the imaginative faculty. Beckett hereabouts resuscitates the category of Fancy which the great Romantic poets considered decidedly inferior to Imagination, reminding us implicitly that he is a good deal less interested in the Sublime than they were. (Knowlson and Pilling, 138) A closer look at Coleridge’s theory of imaginative life, however, reveals slightly more complex implications regarding the various levels of the artist’s creative process. Although Coleridge does famously distinguish in the Biographia Literaria between Fancy, whose product is “fixities and definites” through the vehicle of mere metaphor (I, 305), and Imagination, whose product is the re-creation of a new unity (I, 304), his conception of how these two processes work – and we should remind ourselves here that his conception is rendered even more problematic since he divided imagination into two more subcategories – 132
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illuminates the subtleties of Beckett’s own creative process to a striking degree. Coleridge, in fact, founds his theory upon the function of Polarity, which he works out with scientific overtones and mystical undertones in one of his notebooks: Polarity is not a Composite Force, or vis tertia constituted by the moments of two counteragents. It is 1 manifested in 2, not 1 + 1 = 2. [...] The polar forces are the two forms, in which a one [sic] Power works in the same act and instant. Thus, it is not the Power, Attraction and the Power Repulsion at once tugging and tugging like two sturdy Wrestlers that compose the Magnet; but The Magnetic Power working at once positively and negatively. Attraction and Repulsion are the two Forces of the one magnetic Power. (Egerton ms. 2801, f. 128; qtd. in Barfield 203) It is within this context of Polarity that Coleridge’s distinction (which he would be quick to remind us is not necessarily synonymous with separation) between Fancy and Imagination resides. When, therefore, Wordsworth objected in his Preface of 1815 to what he considered to be Coleridge’s definition of Fancy as the “aggregative and associative power” – insisting that “to aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the imagination as to the fancy” – Coleridge responded appropriately in the Biographia by implying that Wordsworth’s conception of imagination, based merely on a reductive conception of polarity, was significantly less comprehensive and mysterious than his own: I reply, that if by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. W[ordsworth] means the same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the co-presence of fancy with imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. (I, 294)
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Coleridge most succinctly expresses his complex theory of Polarity when he concludes in Table Talk that “Genius must have talent as its compliment and implement, just as, in like manner, imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower” (I, 426). Coleridge puts his theory to practice in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in which Coleridge sees both Fancy and Imagination at work, and in his reading of Wordsworth’s own poetry where the co-presence or fusion of Fancy with Imagination is so often present through what he calls, in Theory of Life, the principle of “unity in multeity” (1951, 575). The problem is when Fancy predominates, when it is not allied to the higher function and “living Power” of the imagination, that it strikes Death by mistaking clear images for distinct conceptions. If, as Pilling writes about All Strange Away, the protagonist’s “interest in measurement [i.e., Fancy] is [...] somehow bound up with [Coleridge’s word for this is “fused”] the exercise of the imaginative faculty,” then Coleridge’s theory suggests that Beckett resuscitates the categories of Fancy and Imagination and, in fact, reminds us of his keen interest in the nature and function of the Sublime. Instead of simply eulogizing the death of the Romantic imagination, therefore, the “imagination as it has been traditionally espoused in poetry,” as Paul Davies astutely suggests, is “subjected to the severest possible review” in the Rotunda texts (137). “The result,” argues Davies, “is a renewed interest in an imagination which has actually proved impossible to regard as dead” (137-38). All Strange Away, which is obsessive and uneasy, does ultimately strike Death. We may perhaps clarify the reasons for this death knell by returning to Coleridge, who further distinguishes in the Biographia between active and passive Fancy, both of which he apparently links to memory. Fancy is “always the ape, and too often the adulterer and counterfeit of our memory” (II, 235), and passive Fancy, like “ordinary memory,” “must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association” (I, 305). It is, Coleridge states, “the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory” that “supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials” (I, 104). The “empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE” (I, 305), distinguishes active fancy from “delirium,” which it would otherwise become. In his book on What Coleridge Thought, Owen Barfield helps us parse Coleridge’s important distinction: 134
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This linking of [fancy] with memory indicates fancy’s playing a part in the genesis of consciousness at an altogether earlier stage than literature could be concerned with. Besides “playing with” the fixities and definites that are given to it, fancy has evidently taken a hand in producing them—in rendering them the very fixities they are. And, especially in [Coleridge’s] references to this stage, the pejorative vocabulary (dead, mechanical, artificial, ape, adulterator) strongly suggests, no longer a natural degree within the one ascending series that manifests the seminal principle of mind or intelligence, but an almost hostile interference with it from a source outside itself. [...] In the first place, then, fancy has its proper and beneficent place in the genesis of consciousness as a whole and, particularly, in the conversion of perceptions into memories. But it is easily debased. In its debased form it is, as passive fancy, more or less identical with precisely those characteristics of human perception, which it is the function of imagination (by modifying perception) to overcome [...] The mind is in thrall to the lethargy of custom, when it feeds solely on images which itself has taken no active part in producing. But there is more to it than this. For the debasement of active fancy carries this process further. Where the mind deliberately chooses to feed only upon such images, there you have the debasement of active fancy [...] at which Coleridge never tired of pointing his warning finger. (86-87) This passage helps clarify not only Coleridge’s theory but also the predicament in All Strange Away, a text in which the speaker, like a vulture with its carrion, receives and voyeuristically feeds on repetitive images that it has taken little if any active part in producing, as the constant phrase “that again” implies. The connection to Beckett’s “The Vulture” may not be unapt. The ravenous eye in that poem of 1935, a poem that takes its inspiration (as Beckett himself noted) from the first stanza of Goethe’s poem “Harzreise im Winter,” preys on images that have become carrion (Harvey, 112-13). Unlike the speaker of Goethe’s poem, who is optimistic about turning the external world into digestible food for the creative act, the speaker of Beckett’s poem is “mocked by a tissue that may not serve / till hunger earth and sky be offal” (1977, 9), the implication being that this eye of prey is scared off, like any vulture would be, by the least sign of life, for “tissue” signals life, just 135
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as “offal” signals death. The living tissue (the potentially dynamic image, perhaps) mocks the speaker, in other words, because it is autonomous and beyond the speaker’s ability to control or devour it. Beckett echoes the theme of this poem in “Text 1” where the already indeterminate narrator’s subjectivity literally splits in two, thus forcing him to see himself with a vulture’s eye of prey: “Eye ravening patient in the haggard vulture face, perhaps it’s carrion time. I’m up there and I’m down here, under my gaze, foundered, eyes closed” (1995, 102). In “The Vulture,” the external world becomes wholly internalized – the vulture is “dragging his hunger through the sky / of my skull shell of sky and earth” – but the speaker of “Text 1” pushes this theme even further and becomes his own prey under his own ravening gaze, a skull within a skull. This is the self-devouring gaze, the repetitive redoubling of vision that spins out of control in pieces like All Strange Away and Ping. The repetitive nature of the images, in fact, suggests a debasement of active Fancy and, for Graham Fraser, a pornographic imagination: “All Strange Away is not a failure because it is pornographic, but rather it fails pornographically, reverting to the nonculminating energies of Fanciful repetition in conjunction with the pornographic conventions of fragmentation, a (minimal) eroticism, and the voyeuristic gaze” (528). Coleridge may have pointed his warning finger at such debasement, but Beckett was likewise aware of its dangers. The setting of All Strange Away, if “setting” is the word, is sparse. An indeterminate narrator seems to be experiencing a slow decline of inner vision, for all that remains after a “lifetime of seeing” (170) is the skeletal structure, the carrion, of what may once have been a vibrant imaging faculty. The narrator first imagines a cube, “Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there” (169), and then he imagines “someone in it, that again” (169). It is not clear why the narrator feels compelled to imagine so wearily, or why he feels compelled to imagine at all, but there is clearly a compulsion to imagine on, however feebly. After imagining the figure in various mechanical postures, the narrator further reduces the size of the cube, presumably to make “All that most clear” (172), that is, to sharpen the image: “Tighten it round him, three foot square, five high, no stool, no sitting, no kneeling, no lying, just room to stand and revolve” (170-71). Just when the narrator thinks he has fixed the image, however, it fades into oblivion without a trace: “he’s not here” (170). The phrase “all white when light at full” (170) highlights the nothingness into which 136
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the figure vanishes, and it anticipates Ping, a text that Beckett was to translate into English two years later. In the later text, everything is awash with white: “Bare white body fixed white on white invisible” (193). As in All Strange Away, an utterly indeterminate narrator in Ping struggles to imagine sounds, colors, images, only to find that an autonomous imagination is actually preying upon him, for the reader learns that the narrator himself is being “sewn together” from the first: “All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn” (193). The imagination’s own existence is itself being imagined, perhaps within the fiction-making sphere of the reader’s own dark mind. As Ackerley and Gontarski note about this bizarre text, “The reader focuses not only on a figure in a closed space, but on another figure and a narrator imagining them. There is not just the psychologically complex image of a self imagining itself, but a self imagining itself imagining itself, often suspecting that it, too, is being imagined” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 438-39). Such imaginative impasses, the inevitable result of what Keats famously dubbed the “egotistical sublime,” are latent within Romantic aesthetics, and they infect All Strange Away and Ping with a kind of imaginative paralysis from which those texts never fully recover. We may even locate a precedent for the shadow side of the imagination as far back as 1744, the year in which Mark Akenside first published The Pleasures of the Imagination, a poem that influenced many key Romantic theorists, including Friedrich Schelling, William Hazlitt, and Coleridge himself. In this poem, Akenside, much in the tradition of Longinus, acknowledges the inescapability of “frenzy” in the creative process, using the image of a “dark abyss” to designate the power that “Pours out her births unknown” (III, ii, 383-91). In his essay “On Dreams,” which he originally published in The Plain Speaker in 1826, Hazlitt connects Akenside’s “dark abyss” with the nocturnal sphere: “We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb in taken off from our passions, and our imagination wanders at will. [...] in sleep we reveal the secret to ourselves” (XII, 23). Later in The Plain Speaker, in a decadent essay entitled “On the Pleasure of Hating,” Hazlitt analyzes why “there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind [that] takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction” (XII, 128). The imagination, as every Romantic knew all too well, has its desert places, too. 137
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The narrator of All Strange Away is acutely aware of Akenside’s “dark abyss” as well as what Hazlitt identifies as imaginative perversion. Apparently bored with the static image of a figure with “jointed segments variously disposed” (172), the narrator of Beckett’s story begins to conjure the image of a fly, only to obliterate it immediately: “Imagination dead imagine to lodge a second in that glare a dying common house or dying window fly, then fall the five feet to the dust and die or die and fall. No, no image, no fly here, no life or dying here but his, a speck of dirt” (172). The next set of images, of Emma and Emmo, are projected onto the walls and become exceptionally difficult to paraphrase as the images surrealistically flow into one another, thus producing “No real image but say like red no grey say like something grey and when again squeeze firm down five seconds say faint hiss then silence then back loose two seconds and say faint pop and so arrive though no true image [...]” (178). Curiously, at one point “Memories of past felicity [...] of a lying side by side” rise to the surface of the narrator’s consciousness, but he dismisses them with a phrase that recurs throughout the text: “look at this closer later” (179). Shortly thereafter, he further subverts his memories of past felicity: “No memories of felicity save with faint ripple of sorrow of a lying side by side and of misfortune none, look closer later” (180). The narrative becomes infernal until nightmarish images inundate the imaginative domain and produce a conclusion that is straight out of Francisco de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: “Within apart from fancy dead and with faint sorrow faint memory of a lying side by side and in sleep demons not yet imagined all dark unappeasable turmoil no sound and so exhaled only for the moment with faint sound” (181). At this point, as Ruby Cohn writes, “fancy is unquotedly and uncapitalizedly murmured dead, and the long final sentence is its strange sighing requiem” (289). It is important to stress, however, that no matter how much Fancy, and particularly its passive aspect, predominates in All Strange Away, the dynamic function of the imagination is never absent. At the beginning of the text, the narrator asserts that he will “drag it,” the vague pronoun presumably referring to the imagination, “to a place to die in” (169), but the text obviously does not end there; it begins there. The verb “drag” reminds us of the gerund “dragging” that opens “The Vulture,” thus highlighting the narrator’s “hunger” for the image to be dead on arrival, to be mere carrion. This text endures, however, and is in fact a mysterious, bizarre product of the creative imagination, 138
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indeterminate and autonomous though this imagination is, that in turn generates further texts in an organic process of development and refinement. Imagination Dead Imagination, after all, grows directly out of the imaginative shards of All Strange Away, its legitimate parent piece. In these compelling imaginative creations, the imagination, which becomes the protagonist of the Closed Space novels, is itself put to the test, what Davies calls a “trial” (137), and despite the predominance of Fancy, the mere fact of these texts’ dogged existence “frustrates what was originally a plan to prove that imagination is dead and gone” (Davies, 146). With All Strange Away and its offspring, therefore, Beckett continues to demonstrate the corrupt nature of Fancy – particularly when it is unallied, as in the characters of Murphy and Watt, to what Coleridge in the Biographia calls the “living Power” of imagination (I, 304). “What prevents the miracle,” as the Unnamable remarks in a rare moment of clarity, “is the spirit of method to which I have perhaps been a little too addicted” (344). “Text 9” from Texts for Nothing is another case in point. The rationalism of the text, as Pilling observes, “threatens to throttle the flow of the prose” (54), which, as the speaker affirms, is “mechanical” (136). Paradoxically, however, the speaker is “dead and getting born” (138) precisely because he imagines “a way out” through re-imagining the myths of Dante: “There’s a way out there, there’s a way out somewhere, the rest would come, the other words, sooner or later, and the power to get there, and the way to get there, and pass out, and see the beauties of the skies, and see the stars again” (140). The “power to get there,” as the speaker intimates in the last clause, is in imaginative journeys, in this case of epic proportion, for his desire to “see the stars again,” a clear reference to the ascent of the soul after its dark night at the conclusion of Dante’s Inferno, suggests sublime and imaginative possibilities that are never absent in Beckett’s Purgatorial world of flux and vitality. The absurd calculations in Part III of How It Is – the speaker relates that “we are regulated” and that “it’s mathematical” (112) – are similar, but again, the “imagination is not, of course, as ‘spent’ as the speaker would have us believe; if it were truly exhausted, there would be no ‘formulation’ whatever, ‘present’ or otherwise” (Pilling, 75). At the conclusion of How It Is, to be sure, there is actually a merging of narrator and narrated, an acknowledgement on the speaker’s part that the voice is “mine yes not another’s” (160), as opposed to the initial evasion, which is a variant of the theme of Not I, to describe it as “in me not mine” (9). 139
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There is no such merging in All Strange Away, but the hope of such a union, as the narrator suggests, “might well be imagined” (176). In fact, the narrator’s attempt in All Strange Away to render all strange away – “So little by little all strange [is being taken] away” (178) – to render the text fixed, dry, hard, and “most clear” (172) is a veritable demonstration of the bareness of T.E. Hulme’s neo-classical clarion call in “Romanticism and Classicism” for an “accurate, precise and a definite description” that “has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions” (68). The speaker exemplifies the “definite description” in the recurring geometrical descriptions of the figure and the rotunda: Call floor angles deasil a, b, c and d and ceiling likewise e, f, g, and h, say Jolly at b and Draeger at d, lean him for rest with feet at a and head at g, in dark and light, eyes glaring, murmuring, He’s not here, no sound, Fancy is his only hope. (171) Throughout the Biographia, Coleridge defines Fancy as “the aggregative and associative power” (I, 293), an idea that is clearly indebted to William Duff’s own definition of Fancy in his Essay on Original Genius (1767). The speaker of All Strange Away consistently attempts to aggregate or combine only what it has received, a hallmark of Fancy according to Coleridge. The speaker – “mathematically speaking” (176) – consistently combines memories but rarely fuses them to form new wholes: “Mother mother, Mother in heaven, Mother of God, God in heaven, combinations with Christ and Jesus, other proper names in great numbers say of loved ones for the most part and cherished haunts” (175). The speaker echoes these aggregates later in the text: All gone now and never been never stilled never voiced all black when 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 all combinations, loved ones and places, philosophers and all mere cries [...] (180-81) Again, though, one of the paradoxes of All Strange Away is that all strange is never fully away, that although Fancy does predominate, 140
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there are frequent attempts to imagine and shape dynamic scenes into existence: “Imagine lifetimes, gems, evenings with Emma and the flights by night [...]” (171). Even the central paradox of the text, to imagine the death of imagination, never dissipates precisely because the imagined death supplants the death itself; the death of imagination is the imagined scene. There is, if anything, a movement in the text toward the dissipation of Fancy, for it is Fancy, at least its passive or mechanical aspect, that is on the wane in the final sentence: “[...] at faint memory of a lying side by side and fancy murmured dead” (181). Beckett’s linking of memory with Fancy here highlights the mechanical function of the latter, for as we have seen, Coleridge theorizes that passive Fancy, like “ordinary memory,” “must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.” Significantly, the source text of both All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine is “Faux Départs,” a work in four sections (three in French and one in English) that was originally published in Kursbuch in June of 1965. This text represents Beckett’s attempt in the early 1960s to reshape yet again the remains of an aborted longer piece of fiction, a work tentatively titled Fancy Dying, the recurring leitmotif in All Strange Away and the note on which it ends. So although a solipsistic rotunda largely overshadows the consciousness in All Strange Away despite its yearning for the “flow or ebb” (174) of imaginative coalescence or a greeting of the spirit, Beckett’s polar logic, like Coleridge’s, ensures a dynamic text that actualizes the active and passive nature of Beckett’s own creative process. Such is the dialectical movement of soul-making, a movement that the great Romantics – Novalis, Blake, Shelley, and Keats not least among them – considered vital to the possibility and experience of life itself. Works Cited Ackerley, C.J. and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove P, 2004). Akenside, Mark, The Pleasures of the Imagination and Other Poems (New York: Bartow, 1819). Barfield, Owen, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1971). Beckett, Samuel, How It Is (New York: Grove P, 1970). –, Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove P, 1977).
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Michael Angelo Rodriguez –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1983). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2001). Coleridge, S.T., Selected Poetry and Prose of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Donald Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951). –, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983). –, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, in The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn, XIV. 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990). Davies, Paul, The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994). Fraser, Graham, “The Pornographic Imagination in All Strange Away,” in Modern Fiction Studies 41 (Fall-Winter 1995), 515-30. Harvey, Lawrence E., Samuel Beckett Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). Hazlitt, William, The Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930-34). Hulme, T.E., The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994). Knowlson, James and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 1980). “Poetry Is Vertical,” in transition no. 21 (1932), 148-49.
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BECKETT AT READING 2006
“EN UN LUGAR DELLA MANCHA”: Samuel Beckett’s Reading of Don Quijote in the Whoroscope Notebook
María José Carrera This article deals with Beckett’s reading of Cervantes’s Don Quijote in the 1930s. Sixteen notes that he took in the Whoroscope Notebook (MS 3000 of the Beckett Collection at Reading University), proceeding from the title of Cervantes’s novel to chapter 18 of the Second Part, reveal that Beckett’s attention focuses on a surprisingly small number of things for such a complex text. With three languages at play – English, French and Spanish – Beckett’s manuscript entries betray his close dependence on Ferdinand de Brotonne’s French translation of Cervantes’s work (a mediating source which is not acknowledged in the notebook).
Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook (MS 3000 of the Beckett Collection at Reading University) is a treasure chest into which the aspiring writer poured snatches of knowledge that he acquired in his extensive readings over a number of years after he resigned from his post as lecturer of French at Trinity College Dublin in January 1932.1 Folios 69 and 70 of the manuscript notebook display sixteen entries that Beckett took during his reading of Cervantes’s Don Quijote and which confirm an acquaintance with the Spanish masterpiece on Beckett’s part that, in his published works, finds its most explicit expression in his 1946 essay on the van Velde brothers, “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon.” This is Beckett’s only foray into Spanish literature in either of the two private reading notebooks that he kept in the 1930s, so we may legitimately wonder who or what led Beckett to Cervantes’s novel. We cannot take into account, for this purpose, his acquaintance with Walter Starkie – Beckett’s lecturer in Italian at TCD and translator of Don Quijote into English in 1957 – given the low esteem in which he held him professionally.2 Musical adaptations of Don Quijote may have played their part. In an entry for 20 November 1936, Beckett’s German diaries bear witness
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to his appreciation of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Quixote. He shows interest in the triumph of the world of the mind over the world of the body in this piece (Pilling 2006, 62), and compares it favourably to Heldenleben by the same composer.3 He was also familiar with Manuel de Falla, author of the chamber opera El retablo de Maese Pedro (1923) – an adaptation to stage and music of two episodes of Don Quijote and a milestone in the musical recreations of Cervantes’s novel. There is no evidence that he knew this piece, but we know that on 13 July 1934 he saw in London Falla’s ballet The ThreeCornered Hat, and also that Falla was the subject of conversation between Beckett and the Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna four years later (Pilling 2006, 75). But the most likely source of influence are the eighteenth-century English novelists that he read intently in London in 1934-35, when James Knowlson places Beckett’s reading of Don Quijote. Fielding and Smollett figure prominently in the Whoroscope Notebook, and may have easily driven Beckett to Don Quijote, the ur-novel behind Joseph Andrews and – together with Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715-35) – Tom Jones. In this respect, it is revealing to read on f. 3 of the manuscript notebook Beckett’s claim that, in writing Murphy, he wants to invert the picaresque novel, explicitly contrasting Gil Blas and his own planned character, at that stage called X.4 The dedicated attention which Don Quijote receives in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook – sixteen quotations, summaries and glosses from the very title of the novel to chapter 18 of the Second Part, spanning over ff. 69 and 70 in a continuous block – brings this set of entries more in line with those of the Dream Notebook where Beckett favoured this kind of uninterrupted reading. There is nothing in the earlier notebook, however, like the precision with which ten of these notes are identified. With only three minor self-corrections and one crossing-out, the whole set is neatly laid-out – with the usual horizontal line separating each entry – and quite legible. If you are acquainted with Spanish, French and English, that is. For we find three languages at play in these notes: a small group of four quote the original Spanish with an English gloss or translation; the rest are French or English translations, or English summaries of the original; but most are a mixture of all these.5 In the same period in which we find Beckett teaching himself some Spanish it should come as no surprise if, as it seems, he had the Spanish original to hand at the initial stage.6 But it seems evident that he used a French version 146
Samuel Beckett’s Reading of Don Quijote in the Whoroscope Notebook
throughout which, although not identified in the notebook, can be identified as being the Histoire de Don Quijote de la Manche, Frédéric Pascal de Brotonne’s French translation, first published in 1837. We will see how some of the entries clearly justify this claim. The notebook entries can be distributed into five thematic blocks, which show Beckett’s surprisingly small range of interests for such a complex novel. Don Quixote’s many appellations and his physical misfortunes attract him, as do the names of Sancho’s family’s members or the squire’s physical appearance; intricate allusions to painting, erudite references and odd turns of phrase complete the picture. With some notes generating other notes, a peculiar approach to the Spanish masterpiece on Beckett’s part can be discerned. The Hidalgo We never get a chance to see Beckett spelling the Spanish knight’s full name – he is always referred to as “D. Q.” or “Don Q.” – but, paradoxically, the writer’s main focus of interest in this character falls on the different appellations that he receives, as well as on his physical misfortunes. In this regard, the first entry in the series strikes a note that persists throughout. In it, Beckett notes down two words in the title of Cervantes’s novel belonging to that part commonly omitted when we refer to the novel as Don Quijote, Ingenioso hidalgo (Don Q. Title)7 (f. 69r) The two words identify the protagonist as an ‘ingenious knight,’ and Beckett here quotes the Spanish original which at the time he must have had close by. However, given his strong dependence on De Brotonne’s translation further down, we can assume that his attention to the knight’s title has been called by the translator’s preface, where the Frenchman comments on his having omitted the word ingenioso in the title on account of the numerous shades of meaning it has (Histoire de Don Quijote de la Manche [hereafter H.D.Q.], v-vi). The two appellations that Beckett notes down in the fifth and fourteenth notes, which are almost identical in structure, reveal his attraction to the defeats inflicted on the knight by animals, as well as to the petty victories that Quijote wins over them:
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D. Q. dubbed “de la triste figure” by S. P after his loss of teeth with sheep (I. 19). (f. 69v) The unfortunate sheep that Don Quijote attacks in chapter 18 of the First Part, thinking that they are an army transformed into sheep by enchantment, must be the same that Chris Ackerley has in mind when he writes that the image of the sheep in Beckett’s Murphy may have been culled from Don Quijote (2004, 111). Indeed, Rosie Dew’s unsuccessful attempts to feed her lettuce to the ecstatic sheep in Hyde Park and her sad return home (59-60), or the failed attempts by the nameless protagonist of The End to milk a cow, prove as humiliating a defeat of human by bovid as this, the knight’s seventh failed adventure that results in his becoming “el Caballero de la Triste Figura” (“de la Triste Figure” in Beckett’s French source). D.Q. changes name to Knight of the Lions after encounter with lions (II. 17) (f. 70r) Exultant after winning one of his few victories – admittedly, over a “phlegmatic,” yawning lion – Quijote expresses his desire to participate in the tradition of knights errant changing their names at will, and bestows on himself a new name, “el Caballero de los Leones.” Equally unsatisfied with the first name given to the woman he falls for, Beckett’s nameless protagonist in the short story First Love, written in 1946, changes it at will for a more suitable one: “I’m sick and tired of this name Lulu, I’ll give her another, more like her, Anna for example” (34-35). And this is the same protagonist that has just recollected a lion that was carved on the grave of a wild animal collector for whom “death must have had […] the countenance of a lion” (27). This does not imply that Beckett had Cervantes in mind when he wrote those lines – the biographical evocation of his visit to the Ohlsdorf cemetery in October 1936 is well-known – but the double coincidence should not be ignored either. We can stretch the parallelisms further and see Beckett’s own “Caballero del Verde Gabán” – Quijote’s companion in this and succeeding adventures – roaming endlessly up and down his prose texts. A green overcoat is the signature outfit of most of Beckett’s vagrants and has received numerous interpretations, none of which, to 148
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our knowledge, sends readers to Cervantes. If we do not have evidence to support this link with the green gaban, at least we cannot deny Beckett’s acquaintance with such a garment. Thus his last two entries from Don Quijote reveal a careful reading of chapter 18 of the Second Part, which deals with the hidalgo’s visit to the house of the Knight of the Green Coat. With the second last note in the series we close our first group of entries. D.Q.’s kidney-disease: “Il ceignit sa bonne épée, suspendue à un baudrier de loup marin, car on croit qu’il avait été longtemps malade des reins (II. 18) (f. 70r) In this, one of the two long notes in French that corroborate that the text Beckett is handling is De Brotonne’s, his object of interest is clearly Quijote’s kidney-disease. His life-long interest in physical affliction is evident here, as indeed it is in the numerous quotations from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy that we find in the Whoroscope Notebook. Beckett’s characters suffer from all types of diseases, but there is one whose urinary problems seem to reveal him as suffering from Quijote’s ailment: it is Vladimir, in Waiting for Godot, who shares other Quixotic traits that Frederick A. Busi, unfamiliar with the notes we are examining, has identified in the only article that has come to our attention where some Cervantine influence is traced in a Beckett text.8 The Squire The notes focusing on Quijote’s squire repeat the same pattern that we have seen in the entries focusing on the knight: the names of Sancho and his family are noted down – in a single entry in this case – and then a physical peculiarity of the character is brought to the fore. Sancho’s wife married to Teresa (maiden-name Cascajo); father of a son of 15 (Sanchico) (f. 69v)
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& of a nubile daughter (Marie, Sancha, Sanchica, Marica). (f. 70r) Beckett’s summary of Sancho’s family’s names is the eleventh of the sixteen notes. Unidentified as it is, the entry was no doubt taken by Beckett while reading chapter 5 of the Second Part. In this chapter Sancho’s wife puts on display all the variety of pet-names that Beckett sums up in these five lines when, in a passionate discourse, she admonishes her husband not to forget his family once he becomes governor of the island that Quijote has promised him. Sanchica’s nubility (“she could do with a husband,” as Teresa puts it) and a discussion of Teresa’s maiden name are also there.9 Beckett’s attraction to this family group, their names and naming may have left its mark on another of his postwar texts: in the very Cervantine Mercier and Camier, a novel dealing with two men described as “the long hank with the beard” and “the little fat one” (48) on a journey to nowhere, harassed by a “long line of maleficent beings” (13), just like Sancho and Quijote, we find a female character whose name happens to be Teresa (50-54). Sancho Panza long-legged (I. 9) (f. 69v) Beckett notices Sancho’s long legs as painted on the cover of an Arab manuscript, underneath which is written his alternative name, Sancho Zancas. His emphasis of this feature may have been provoked by his surprise at reading that Cervantes’s “little fat one” has long legs, and also by De Brotonne’s calling attention to this lesser-known appellation with a footnote explanation of the meaning of zanca. Writers and Painters The words ‘painted’ and ‘manuscript’ that we have used in the previous paragaph to summarize the context behind that note, point to what is an interesting undercurrent in Beckett’s Cervantine quotations: it consists of an association of painting and metafiction which forces us to bring into this new sub-heading two notes that we have already included in the first two sections. Painting (in the last note analysed, Sancho’s image on the cover of the Arab manuscript) was very much on Beckett’s mind when the 150
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notebook was being compiled, to the extent that in 1936/37 he spent six months in Germany visiting galleries and meeting artists. As for metafiction, with the perspective given to us by our knowledge of Beckett’s works, it is gratifying to see Beckett’s attention being caught by the ninth chapter of the First Part of Don Quijote, in which the metafictional nature of the novel is first put to the fore. In this chapter Cide Hamete Benengeli is introduced as the Arab author of what remains of the novel, itself just a translation of Benengeli’s manuscript by one Spanish-speaking Moor. Beckett favours this layering of authorial voices in his prose to an extent that few authors have paralleled. He also knows that Beckett’s suggested stage adaptations of his prose texts almost invariably involve a manuscript appearing and being read with difficulty on stage. A similar instance of metafiction and painting being brought together lurked beneath Beckett’s entry on Don Quijote and the sheep (“D. Q. dubbed ‘de la triste figure’ by S. P. / after his loss of teeth with sheep (I. 19)”). Don Quijote is so happy with his being called “el Caballero de la Triste Figura” by Sancho that he announces that he will have a very sad figure ‘painted’ on his shield; this, after stating that such a well-chosen appellation must have been put in Sancho’s mouth by the wise man who will ‘write’ the story of his heroic deeds (El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha [hereafter D. Q.], 191). In that entry we see Beckett timidly underlining Sancho’s name as if he meant to throw the limelight on him; we cannot help but smile at the idea of Sancho being put in the same predicament as Beckett’s prose characters, who repeat over and over “who says this, saying it’s me.” The climax of this linking of painting and metafiction occurs in the tenth entry: Orbaneja, peintre d’Ulbeda, qui, à cette demande: Que peignez-vous? répondait “Ce qui sortira de mon pinceau.” Par exemple, c’était un coq si mal représenté qu’il était besoin d’écrire au-dessous, en lettres gothiques : “ceci est un coq.” (II.3) (f. 69v) This long quotation provides us with the definite proof that the French text Beckett is using throughout is De Brotonne’s translation.10 He 151
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probably did not read much beyond chapter 18, if we take his notes as a reference. If he had, he would have been glad to find out that Cervantes repeats exactly the same story about the painter Orbaneja in chapter 71, at a key moment in the novel when the two protagonists are returning defeated to their village, and to exactly the same purpose: criticizing bad writers (D. Q., 1120). For that is the use to which Quijote puts these words about Orbaneja, whose paintings required a written explanation to be deciphered: like this mad painter, Quijote says, the author of the book relating his own adventures11 just wrote “salga lo que saliere” (whatever it might turn out) (D. Q., 602) so that his own history will also require a commentary to make it intelligible. We need not insist on how appealing this metafictional level must have been to a young Beckett who would later write about writers writing and commenting on their writing. But in this particular instance, it is the image of the painter painting whatever came out of his paintbrush that will explicitly reappear in a Beckett text written a decade later: his first published work in French, the essay on the van Velde brothers entitled “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon” (1945/1946). That his interpretation of Cervantes’s words contradicts Quijote’s critical stance towards the painter from Úbeda – Orbaneja’s words are used by Beckett to celebrate art above reality – is also part of this process of appropriation. The van Velde brothers know well the reasons behind the paintings they make, Beckett says, but they need not disclose them, like Cervantes’s painter: “Ils me font penser à ce peintre de Cervantès qui, à la demande ‘Que peignez-vous?’, répondait: ‘Ce qui sortira de mon pinceau’” (1983, 131). Erudition Five entries reveal, in different ways, that Beckett the academic is always on duty: Chap 1: En un lugar della Mancha ... (Argamasilla) (f. 69r) In this and other instances, Beckett is as attentive to the main body of the text as to the footnotes that accompany it. The information that Beckett adds in brackets pointing out that Argamasilla is the place of La Mancha that the narrator will not recollect, clearly indicates that he was working with an annotated edition, whether his Spanish version or 152
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De Brotonne’s.12 In the Frenchman’s first of many footnotes we read: “Il est aujourd’hui reconnu que ce village de la Manche […] est Argamasilla d’Alba. Il avait été détenu prisonnier dans ce lieu” (H.D.Q., 8). No doubt Beckett must have been aware of the iconic status of the opening words of Don Quijote in the context of Spanish literature, which did not prevent his Italian imposing itself in his spelling of de la. beaver-balls image (I. 21) (f. 69v) This note sends us to a chapter that narrates one of the few adventures in which Don Quijote succeeds: the winning of the helmet of Mambrino, or rather the basin which a barber is using to protect his new hat from the rain but has to leave behind when he is scared by the ghostly Don Quijote. Beckett notices the knight’s ensuing indirect quotation of the fable of the beaver and his testicles: when the beaver realizes that he cannot outrun the dogs that chase him, he bites off his testicles, as they are meant to have healing powers and are what he is hunted for. The beaver’s testicles with which Quijote is comparing the helmet are not mentioned in Cervantes’s text as they are in his most probable source, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), or in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, from which Beckett noted down an entry in his Dream Notebook and which he quotes almost verbatim in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy,13 or indeed in this, the seventh of Beckett’s notes from Don Quijote. Unfortunately, Beckett’s entry does not seem to notice the helmet which Quijote insists on wearing, thus disencouraging the otherwise appealing comparison that Busi establishes between that magical helmet and Lucky’s hat in Waiting for Godot, in the above-mentioned article (880). EROSTRATE – Set fire to temple of Diana, 1 of 7 wonders, in order to be remembered – or ERATOSTRATE – did this the same night that Alexander the Great was born (f. 70r) 153
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In chapter 8 of the Second Part, Sancho discourses on whether historians will treat him well in their writings, which reminds Quijote of a series of historical figures who went to all kinds of extremes to be remembered, Erostratus being one of them. As well as summarizing in English Quijote’s words about this classical figure, Beckett has gone to Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary for further information,14 thus displaying in this note the same interest in classical figures which is omnipresent in the rest of the Whoroscope Notebook. And he goes on to make a new entry with the common noun derived from this proper name, as if the new text which the notes make up was beginning to have a life of its own, generating its own notes: ER(AT)OSTRATISM (f. 70r) The longing for immortality, this is a Johnsonian ‘hard word’ like many others that fill the pages of Beckett’s Notebook. Swim like Pez-Nicolas (famous diver of late Cinquecento). II.18 (f. 70r) In his description of the virtues that must adorn a knight errant, Quijote says that he must be able to swim like “el peje Nicolás, o Nicolao” (D. Q., 711), a legendary amphibious figure from Sicily who swam between this island and the continent. Beckett places this figure in the late cinquecento, as his annotated edition indicates in the opening words of a rather long footnote: “Pez Nicolas (le poisson Nicolas), fameux plongeur de la fin du XVe siècle, naturel de Catane” (H.D.Q. II, 129). Turns of Phrase Across the Languages duelos y quebrantos (deuils et débris) Saturday Ordinary (f. 69r) We are still in the opening lines of chapter 1 and Beckett is already using three languages in the same note to explain the Spanish original. Annotated editions tend to explain the medieval origin of this Castilian 154
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dish made up of animals’ remains that did not break the Saturday fast. The literal French translation that Beckett provides is as obscure as the original Spanish phrase; and yet, the metaphorical image of someone eating ‘sorrows and broken remains’ every Saturday must have appealed to him enormously. In a hurry to do what no other could do for him (f. 69v) Cervantes’s colloquial phrasing for Sancho’s desire to defecate is what attracts Beckett here. This unidentified English translation of a line in chapter 20 of the First Part reveals the mediation of the French text: ‘In a hurry,’ absent from the Spanish original, translates De Brotonne’s “pressé de faire…” (H.D.Q., 145). enamorado hastá los higados (liver) (I. 26) (f. 69v) This is Sancho’s colloquial description of Don Quijote’s sublime feelings for his Dulcinea: he is ‘in love up to the liver,’ that is, ‘deeply in love.’ Beckett quotes the complete Spanish expression, but the spelling and meaning of the word hígados give him some trouble, to the extent that he must translate it into English to remember more easily an image that must have struck him as a weird association of liver and love. This note confirms Beckett’s inclination to note down phrases related to body parts. Long legs, balls, liver, and kidneys: four entries that would form a sub-group within the larger set. But it is with the quotation that comes next in the row that this entry holds a closer relationship. cf. (or distinguish) usque ad Aras, i.e. up to the Altar – but no further [f. 69v] The opening words of this note, ‘confer [compare] or distinguish,’ make us aware of the fact that we have mentioned already – that these entries can be seen as forming a text of their own – but, more 155
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importantly, that this new text seems to condition Beckett’s reading of Cervantes’s novel, or at least condition the parts he will focus on. We are in chapter 33 now, seven down from the previous entry, and Beckett sets his eyes on a Latin phrase that provides him with a contrast that he seems to relish between ‘up to / usque’ the altar, and the previous ‘up to / hasta’ the liver. Beckett follows De Brotonne in appending the translation of the Latin phrase, which is absent in the original Spanish, but contributes his own tagtail ‘but no further,’ which emphasizes the meaning of the Latin, and which is absent in both the original and the French version. With the usual break of a horizontal line, Beckett separates his last quotation from Don Quijote from a short series of notes from Pascal’s Pensées, themselves followed by other notes from Spinoza, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, etc. The remaining fifty-six chapters of the Spanish novel have not left a trace in the notebook. But the sixteen notes that we have reviewed have given us a taste of how a writer’s love for words and their crossings between different languages were there from his earliest formative years. They have also confirmed that a writer like Cervantes may deserve more attention as a forerunner of Beckett’s work than he has actually received. I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from the Whoroscope notebook. Notes 1. In a recent article, John Pilling affirms that while many of the entries in the notebook cluster around the years 1935 and 1936, a number of notes on Céline, Mauthner, Sartre and Kant must have been taken in late 1937 or early 1938 (2004, 39-44). Previously, Frederick N. Smith had fixed 1932 and 1937 as the notebook’s terminal dates (65-67). Pilling in 1992, Bryden, Garforth & Mills in 1998 and Ackerley & Gontarski in 2004 have provided useful introductions to the contents of this most complex text where, among other things, thirty-four notes in preparation for Murphy co-exist with a number of items for interpolation in that same novel and a list of publishers that have rejected it, as well as a “list of books sent home” during Beckett’s stay in Germany in 1936/37, epigrams and puns in many languages, notes on figures from classical mythology, musical scores, entries on physics, astronomy and philosophy, quotations fom Dante, Robert Burton, Cervantes, etc. 2. “Beckett never rated Starkie and felt that he learnt nothing worthwhile from him” (Knowlson, 52).
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Samuel Beckett’s Reading of Don Quijote in the Whoroscope Notebook 3. “Strauss’s Don Quixote so good that I have difficulty connecting it with Heldenleben. The Triumph of the Quixote, one might say” (Pilling 1999, 141). 4. “The picaresque inverted. Gil Blas is realized in his encounters & receives his mission from them. X is realized by his failure to encounter & his progress depends on this failure being sustained” (RUL MS 3000, f. 3r; Beckett’s emphasis). 5. This game of languages recurs in the general context of the notebook: in the space of three small pages, we find the Cervantes entries preceded by some notes from Dante’s Inferno in Italian and followed by Pascal’s Pensées in French. 6. John Pilling places the first failed attempt in June 1933, and a more sustained one three months later, when he toyed with the idea of visiting Spain. In a letter to MacGreevy of 10 October 1935, he still wonders whether he should go to Spain (2006, 43, 44, 54). His knowledge of the language also helped him to make a living in the difficult postwar years when he reluctantly accepted a UNESCO commission to translate a collection of Mexican poetry into English. 7. Beckett’s notes, preceded by the folio number in which they can be found, are here transcribed with underlining where Beckett underlines, crossing out of Beckett’s deletions and bold letters for Beckett’s selfcorrections. 8. “Vladimir […] seems to suffer from some obscure malady affecting his pubic area. It may simply be some urinary ailment affecting the kidneys. Don Quixote also suffered from kidney problems” (Busi, 879). 9. The compound name Mari Sancha in the Spanish original becomes Marie Sancha in De Brotonne’s translation, which Beckett transcribes as two different names, Marie and Sancha. He also supplies in his note the original Teresa instead of the Frenchman’s Thérèse. 10. There is a minor difference to the French original: the Spanish Úbeda reads Ubéde in De Brotonne’s translation, Ulbeda in Beckett’s entry. 11. Part One of Don Quijote was already in circulation and had received some criticism about the insertion of “The Novel of the Curious Impertinent.” 12. Cervantine tradition has maintained that Argamasilla de Alba was the knight’s place of origin, until December 2004, when a group of scholars from
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Works Cited Ackerley, Chris J., Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004a [1998]). –, and Stan E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove P, 2004b). Beckett, Samuel, Whoroscope Notebook, RUL MS 3000, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Murphy (London: Picador, 1973 [1938]). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983). –, Mercier and Camier (London: Picador, 1988 [1974]). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing/Riverrun P, 1992). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills, eds., Beckett at Reading: Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading (Reading: Whiteknights P, 1998). Busi, Frederick A., “Waiting for Godot: A Modern Don Quixote?,” in Hispania 57 (Dec. 1974), 876-85. Cervantes, Miguel de, Histoire de Don Quijote de la Manche, traduite sur le texte original et d'après les traductions comparées de Oudin et Rosset, Filleau de Saint-Martin, Florian, Bouchon-Dubournial et Delaunay par F. de Brotonne (Paris: Lefèvre, 1837). –, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Planeta, 1980).
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Samuel Beckett’s Reading of Don Quijote in the Whoroscope Notebook Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Lemprière, John, Bibliotheca Classica; or, A Classical Dictionary, containing a copious account of all the proper names mentioned in ancient authors (London: Thomas Tegg & son, 1838 [1788]). Pilling, John, “From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), 1-20. –, ed., Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999). –, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook,” in Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 13.2 (2004), 39-48. –, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Smith, Frederick N., “Dating the Whoroscope Notebook,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 3.1 (1993), 65-69.
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NEITHERWAYS: Long Ways in Beckett’s Shorts
Friedhelm Rathjen Whenever Beckett used a certain word, he did so quite consciously, and if he used it again in another text we can be fairly sure that the repetition is intentional and serves a purpose. At least in Beckett’s later works this is even true with respect to rather inconspicuous and unsuspicious words such as “way,” “always” and “away.” A close examination of the appearance of these words in some highly condensed and concentrated later texts shows that the lexeme ‘way’ usually occurs in clusters which establish a meaning significantly different from what is associated with these terms in everyday usage.
This paper grew out of a close reading of “neither” (Rathjen 2006), the short text Beckett wrote for Morton Feldman in 1976. “neither” can be seen as a developed and modified derivative of a poem in French Beckett wrote nearly thirty years earlier; his English translation of that poem begins with the line “my way is in the sand flowing,” and the second of two stanzas reads thus: my peace is there in the receding mist when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds and live the space of a door that opens and shuts (2002, 67) Both the “way” and the “door” reappear in “neither,” although here the relation between both is quite different – the one “door” has become two, and the “way” now is located between those doors. Let me for clearness’ sake quote the complete text, with a view of concentrating on the lexemes ‘way’ and ‘heed’:
Friedhelm Rathjen
to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow 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 home1 Obviously the term “unheeded” in section 9 refers back to the word “heedless” in section 5; if, however, we connect “that unheeded neither” to “heedless of the way,” it seems that “the way” and “that […] neither” are identical. By calling “that […] neither” an “unspeakable home” the textual voice affirms that the term “neither” designates a location; this location is not a fixed but rather a shifting place – a way. If the text’s motion in section 2 is described as being performed “by way of neither” we should take the word “way” quite literally again: the way evoked by the text is a “way of neither.” In sections 3 and 4 the textual voice is twice “turned away” from the doors; this process of being ‘turned a-way’ really means what it says: being constantly kept on the way. The way is endless and permanent. The “way of neither” evoked here is the way of Beckett’s art: a way of constant renewal by way of constant repetition. Being on this way means constantly moving without ever changing locations; the location where Beckett’s texts are performed is a place of movement on the spot, a place where you constantly follow a way without ever getting away. This Beckettian way is endless – perhaps not in space but definitely in time, and this means that it is always there. The word 162
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‘always’ does not appear on the surface of Beckett’s text “neither,” but implicitly a concept of ‘alwaysness’ is also present. Alwaysness is endlessness, as Beckett emphasises in That Time by using the phrase “always winter then endless winter” (1986, 393).2 Beckett’s texts often deal with the process of ending but seldom or never with an actual end. People who criticize Beckett’s works because of their apparent hopelessness tend to miss this fundamental difference: as long as things are in the process of ending they have not yet ended (and perhaps never will). Beckett’s endgames therefore tend to be endless games – ‘alwaysgames,’ so to speak. Beckett’s ways (those endless ‘ways of neither’) are ways which may perhaps lead to something (maybe even an end) but never actually reach this something, be it an end or not. Usually Beckett’s ways are not defined by aims, goals or destinations but rather by initiations – Beckett’s ways tend to be ‘ways away from’ rather than ‘ways to.’ The classic ‘way away from’ is the ‘way out’ which occasionally figures in Beckett’s texts, but only as a vague hope and never as a reality. In The Lost Ones “by insensible degrees the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been” (1995, 207). In “Long Observation of the Ray,” a text Beckett worked on in 1975 and 1976 but never completed, the textual voice hopes for a device “Which once found and set in action would afford way out and/or in. Assuming for no avowable reason search to be afoot. Search for such a thing. Search for anything” (ii). Furthermore, “If of way in and/or out no trace has yet appeared some perhaps may yet to some eye to come if any” (iv, deleted). Beckett’s characters usually try to retain their hopes with the help of a very subtle trick: they increase or at least preserve the chances that a way out exists by decreasing the chances that this way out can be found or reached. The longer Beckett’s ways are the longer some hope remains that perhaps these ways turn into ways out.3 Therefore these ways gradually turn into endless ways on which Beckett’s characters or textual voices march away in order to always keep going. “Way,” “away,” “always” – these are the three main and most frequent words which embed the lexeme ‘way’ in Beckett’s texts. Given the fact that Samuel Beckett always wrote with outmost attention to detail and that if he used or repeated a certain word he did so quite consciously and with a certain purpose in mind, we should assume that even rather inconspicuous and unsuspicious words such as ‘way,’ ‘always’ and ‘away’ in Beckett’s highly condensed and concentrated texts from his late period are able to establish a meaning significantly 163
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different from what is associated with these terms in everyday usage. Let’s have a look at the shortest of all Beckett texts, a one-line poem he wrote for the magazine Orange Export Ltd. in 1981: “away dream all away” (2001, 157). A surface reading would surely take “dream” as a verb and interpret the text as an invocation to dream everything away. It is also possible, however, to read “dream” as a noun, and if in addition to this we admit that “away” may include a half-hidden ‘way,’ the poem unfurls a wide range of possible meanings: ‘away-dream – all away’; ‘a way – dream all – a way’; ‘a way – dream – all a way’; even ‘a way-dream – all a way’ etc. Of course this is an extreme case; surely not each and every use of the terms ‘away’ and ‘always’ in Beckett’s texts is as ambivalent as this one. At least whenever these terms and the noun ‘way’ appear in close vicinity, however, ‘away’ and ‘always’ get loaded with an additional meaning which cannot be ignored. Often in Beckett’s later texts the lexeme ‘way’ and its derivatives occur in clusters. A survey limited to Beckett’s works originally written in English after 1965 yields the following results: we find all three words “way,” “always” and “away” in Eh Joe, Not I, That Time, “Heard in the Dark 1,” Company and Worstward Ho (with an additional “halfway” in “Heard in the Dark 1” and Company, and a “highway” and the plural form “ways” in Company, too); both “way” and “away” occur in “As the story was told” (which also has a “doorway”), “Sounds,” “neither,” “Long Observation of the Ray” and A Piece of Monologue; “way” plus “always” can be found in “Still” (which also has “midways”), Footfalls, … but the clouds …, “The Voice” (which includes an additional “wayfarer”), “The Way” (which also has “midway,” “one-way,” “crossways” and the plural form “ways”) and Stirrings Still; both “always” and “away” are present in “Still 3.” Apart from “away dream all away,” there are only three texts where we find just one of the terms in question here: in Ohio Impromptu Beckett uses “away” only, and only once; in What Where he again uses “away,” but four times; in the four-line poem “Go where never before” we find “always” twice. Limitations of space prevent me from discussing each and every usage of the terms in question; instead, I’d like to concentrate on a few chosen cases where we find variations of the ‘way’ lexeme in very close vicinity. In “As the story was told,” we come across “a small hut in a grove some hundred yards away, a distance even the loudest cry could not carry, but must die on the way” (1995, 255). Here “the way” clearly refers back to the adjective “away,” both terms designating both 164
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a distance and the possibility or impossibility of bridging this distance in one way or other.4 The adjective “away” recurs on the next page when the textual voice sees “a hand” appearing “in the doorway” and holding out “a sheet of writing. I took and read it, then tore it in four and put the pieces in the waiting hand to take away” (256). This is one of several instances in Beckett’s work where an enforced act of producing text is described with the help of the word “away”: either an unwilling ‘confessor’ is ‘taken away’ against his will (like in What where: “Take him away and give him the works until he confesses” (1986, 473, 475)) or what has been ‘confessed’ is ‘taken away’ from the ‘confessor’ like in the passage quoted from “As the story was told.” Contrary to customary usage, the term ‘away’ seems to designate not the end of something but rather something (speech, for example) being made durable. The act of ‘awaying’ at least in some of Beckett’s texts seems to be an act of making utterance permanent. This is not as bizarre or obscure as it might appear. Admittedly in everyday usage the term ‘always’ refers to a concept of duration and the term ‘away’ to a concept of termination, which nearly turns these words into contraries. This is not valid for all uses, however. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘away’ originally meant: “On (his or one’s) way; onward, on, along. Hence used also with come, as still in north. Eng. and Sc., where ‘Come away’ = ‘come along, come on,’ without reference to place left” (“away” lemma, I.1). Derived from this archaic sense is a modern sense of ‘away’ still in use: “Onward in time, on, continuously, constantly; with idea of continuance of action and progress; e.g. to work away = to go on working” (II.7). Beckett frequently uses ‘away’ in this sense of continuity, as when Joe in Eh Joe is told to “squeeze away” (1986, 365), when Mouth in Not I talks about “the brain … raving away on its own” (380) and “flickering away” (381, 382) while the woman is “waiting to be led away” (381), or when in That Time voices and forms from the past are not only “drowsing away” but also “muttering away” and “drooling away” (393). If we bear this sense of continuity in mind, other appearances of the term ‘away’ in Beckett’s texts lose their apparent unambiguousness. Let’s take Ohio Impromptu, for example, where it is said of a reader: “So from time to time unheralded he would appear to read the sad tale through again and the long night away” (447). Does this mean that the night is made to disappear, or does it mean that the night is stretched continuously?5 Shortly after, first there is “no sound of reawakening” (447), and then there is the “sound of 165
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reawakening” (448). Keen ears will be able to hear both a ‘way’ and an ‘away’ in “reawakening,” but what, then, does ‘re-away’ mean? So it appears that both termination and duration can be involved in the process of ‘awaying.’ ‘Awayness’ can be a permanent state, so to speak. ‘Alwaysness’ by comparison seems to be a more straightforward concept, but if we look at Beckett’s use of the term ‘always’ this is not so clear either. It seems that ‘alwaysness’ can have its beginning and its end, or at least that ‘alwaysness’ can be conceived as once having begun and once having to end. In the poem “Go where never before” there is this seemingly contradictory line: “No sooner there than there always” (2002, 46), meaning that alwaysness has just begun.6 Here it also seems that alwaysness is a place where you can ‘go’ although having been there “never before”; if you want to go somewhere, however, you usually use or take a ‘way.’ We must conclude that there are ways which lead to alwaysness, and that at the same time these ways can be ways into awayness. If we bear this in mind, Beckett’s texts enfold meanings which reach far beyond the surface level. This is especially true for the short drama That Time where on just eight pages of text “always” appears eleven times, “away” eight times and “way” six times in different senses. At one point of the text voice A conjures up a scene from Beckett’s early years: none ever came but the child on the stone among the giant nettles with the light coming in where the wall had crumbled away poring on his book well on into the night some moods the moonlight and they all out on the roads looking for him or making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself being together that way where none ever came Then voice C takes over: “always winter then endless winter year after year as if it couldn’t end” (1986, 393). This last phrase “always winter then endless winter” – a variation of the earlier “always winter then always raining” (388, 392) – stresses again that alwaysness equals endlessness, but even more significant is Beckett’s use of “away” in “the wall had crumbled away” and of “way” in “being together that way.” The boy here is at rest in what seems to be Barrington’s tower, while his people are looking for him “on the roads.” Literally speaking, these people outside are ‘on the way,’ while the tower as the place “where none ever came” seems to be a locality where no ways lead to – 166
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out of the way, so to speak. Beckett, however, avoids the lexeme ‘way’ when speaking of the world outside while repeatedly using it in quite different senses when speaking of the durable, motionless and unmoving world inside the tower. Beckett’s ‘way’ is not a path or road which leads from some place to another; Beckett’s ‘way’ instead is a place or realm of unceasing or constantly repeated ‘alwaysness.’ About the same time when writing That Time Beckett composed the French prose text “Pour finir encore.” When translating this piece into English as “For to end yet again” he took advantage of the fact that quite different French terms like se détacher, ouvrir la marche, toujours and parcours can be transferred into variants of the ‘way’ lexeme. At one point the English version speaks of “a fragment” which “comes away from mother ruin” (1995, 245), thus reminding us of “the wall” that “had crumbled away” in That Time, and on the next page all three variants of the ‘way’ lexeme appear in close vicinity: Sepulchral skull is this then its last state all set for always litter and dwarfs ruins and little body grey cloudless sky glutted dust verge upon verge hell air not a breath? And dream of a way in a space with neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away? (246) The “Sepulchral skull” here seems to be a reduced and abstracted version of the tower in That Time, and again the “way in a space” conceptualised here does not lead from somewhere to somewhere but remains a realm apart from anything else. It surely is not coincidental that in this context Beckett uses the phrase “neither here nor there,” thus anticipating the text “neither” written shortly afterwards. Another text Beckett was working on at that time is the unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray,” where again he stresses that the Beckettian way is not a way out but rather a way of restlessly staying the same: “Scarcely at rest or at most a matter of seconds later when away to the next and thence in the same way” (iii).7 In still another unpublished text from this period, “The Voice,” Beckett even introduces a “wayfarer out since dawn plodding forward in the failing light through the gloaming” (2) in order to create what could be labelled the unchanging changeability of walking a way. First it is said that the sounds of the “boots meeting the ground one after the other” are the “sole sounds for they change from one tread to the next,” but after the wayfarer “listens 167
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to each one and adds it in his mind to the ever increasing sum of those that went before” (2-3) we finally have to accept that the change of sound “from one tread to the next” does not really make a difference: “Always the same flat tone” (3-4). It seems that in “The Voice” the Beckettian ‘way’ forms the rhythm to which the ‘voice’ subjoins a melody, thus walking and talking adding up to a closed audio-world. A passage right from the centre of Company has been published separately as “Heard in the Dark 1,” and in this passage again all three main variants of the ‘way’ lexeme appear in close vicinity: You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself there as described making ready to strike out and away across the expanse of light. You hear again the click of the door pulled gently to and the silence before the steps can start. Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placentae. You take the course you always take which is a beeline for the gap or ragged point in the quickset that forms the western fringe. (1995, 247) As in “neither,” here a “door” comes into play, although this time the textual voice is situated not “between two […] doors” but between just one door and a gap; at the end “Heard in the Dark 1” will stop “Halfway across the pasture on your beeline to the gap” (249). The way trodden is marked by an endless continuity again, for the steps “number each day the same. Average day in day out the same. The way being always the same” (248). Two lines later, however, we read: Your father’s shade is not with you any more. It fell out long ago. You do not hear your footfalls any more. Unhearing unseeing you go your way. Day after day. The same way. As if there were no other any more. For you there is no other any more. (248) Strictly speaking, these lines are self-contradictory, for if something is “not […] any more” what it was or like it was, it seems wrong to say that this something is “always the same.” If Beckett nonetheless does say so, we must conclude that sameness can change – a way which is always the same may still alter or even die away. 168
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This surprising fact that a way’s alwaysness can end and that its unchangeability can change is confirmed by a short two-part text Beckett wrote in 1981, entitled “The Way.” Beckett here describes a path running up and down a hill in the shape of the figure 8 (or the infinity symbol): The way wound up from foot to top and thence another way. On back down. The ways crossed midway more and less. A little more and less than midway up and down. The ways were one-way. No retracing the way up back down nor back up the way down. Neither in whole from top or foot nor in part from on the way. The one way back was on and on was always back. […] Gait down as up same plod always. […] So from foot and top to crossways could the seconds have been numbered then height known and depth. […] Thorns hemmed the way. The ways. Same mist always. […] Forth and back across a barren same winding oneway way. […] Through emptiness the beaten ways as fixed as if enclosed. […] By accurately describing this 8-shaped way, Beckett shows that “on” can at the same time mean “back,” that a singular “way” can be identical with plural “ways,” that a “one-way way” can lead “Forth and back” and meet itself at a “crossways” – and that progression does not necessarily mean progress, that a way can be walked endlessly without ever leading anywhere. The text “The Way” is the grand finale but not the end of Beckett’s ways. The lexeme ‘way’ re-appears – if less frequently than before – in Beckett’s works from the 1980s. In the first part of Stirrings Still, someone is “Seen always from behind whithersoever he went” apparently “seeking the way out. A way out. To the roads. The back roads” (1995, 260). In the second part of Stirrings Still, this concrete “way out” is turned into an abstract “in the way” (262) and “some way” (263) in the sense of a mode or manner; in the third part the lexeme ‘way’ is completely absent, everything is “stayed,” and the character is looking for a “missing word” and has “no danger or hope as the case might be of his ever getting out” (264) – it seems that finally all ways have ended. The last appearance of the lexeme ‘way’ in Beckett’s oeuvre can be found in “what is the word” (the English translation of the original French “Comment dire”) where there is a last glimpse “afaint afar away over there what –” (2002, 115). Several readers 169
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(myself included) have independent of each other here heard an echo of the last sentence of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (628), which is an incomplete sentence running into the novel’s very first line again (Carey, 91). Finnegans Wake, therefore, never ends for good but always starts anew. Joyce’s cyclic novel is an extremely eloquent and detailed version of the rather bare and reduced neitherways in Beckett’s later works, those ways without beginning or end which seemingly never change, ways in progression without progress. Beckett’s most refined versions of this way date from the 1970s, when he experimented with abstract forms of sense perception and utterance. I believe that at least in Beckett’s works of the 70s there is an extremely important triad formed by the eye, the voice and the way – or in other words, by seeing, saying and walking. I’d like to connect this triad to another, much more basic triad which elsewhere I have tried to show being at work in Beckett’s oeuvre as a whole and particularly in his two prose trilogies, namely the triad of perception, expression and imagination (1995, 43-146). Perception and expression surely form one of Beckett’s characteristic dualities; usually Beckett’s voices and characters are trapped in binary structures, even more so if the respective duality includes identical opposites which often figure in Beckett’s works (Rathjen 1994, 105-08; 2001, 95-96; 2005, 144-48). The “two lit refuges” in the text “neither” can be conceived as such. If for Beckett’s textual voices there is no way out of these binary structures, however, what is left is a way in between. This is the way which does not lead anywhere and which does not change anything but which when being walked is a way to get away from utter hopelessness. As long as Beckett’s characters are in motion, even if this is a motion in a closed place or womb-tomb enclosure and even if the walkers walk on the spot, they are able at least temporarily to transport themselves elsewhere – in their imagination. Even if there is no way out they may thus get away; even if there is an overwhelming alwaysness it is not impossible to look for neitherways. Artistic neitherways are what Beckett himself is always looking for. In the face of the strong binary structures to be found in his works Beckett is constantly striving to go beyond two given poles or modes or directions and to expand binary into triple structures by some kind of movement or motion. In other words: he is always trying to find new ways, ways away from the acceptance of limitations. 170
Neitherways Notes 1. As far as I can see, all available ‘official’ printings of “neither” are corrupt in one way or other, so here I use a version based on the one printed in S. E. Gontarski’s edition of Beckett’s Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, but modified in the light of other versions. In the first section, Gontarski has “from inner to outershadow” (258) which, however, seems justified by neither interior nor manuscript evidence. 2. The phrase “always winter” already occurs three times in Not I (382); … but the clouds … includes the phrase “always night” (421). In both works it is implied that the winter / the night will never end. 3. A “Way out through the grey rift in dark” (1986, 429) is also hoped for in A Piece of Monologue where the lexeme ‘way’ is present mainly in the word “away,” occurring five times. 4. See also a similar passage in “Sounds,” a preliminary version of “Still”: “air […] too still for even the lightest leaf to carry the brief way here and not die the sound not die on the brief way the wave not die away” (1995, 267). 5. A comparably complicated case can be found in Worstward Ho where – after the word “Away” has been used three times in the temporal sense of ‘gone’ – we read: “Stare away to child and worsen same” (44). 6. The concept of an alwaysness that comes with time is also implied in a passage in Company and “Heard in the Dark 1”: “You are no more tired now than you always were. Not because of age. You are no older now than you always were. And yet you halt as never before” (1980, 51; 1995, 248). 7. In a later version Beckett deletes the word “away” from this passage: “Scarcely at rest on any given blank or at most some seconds later when this leap to another and thence in the same way to yet another. As well on the same of those countless hemispheres as among its antipodes” (iv).
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, “Long Observation of the Ray,” RUL MS 2909, i-vi, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library (1977). –, “The Voice,” RUL MS 2910, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library (1977).
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Friedhelm Rathjen –, “Pour finir encore,” in Um abermals zu enden und anderes Durchgefallenes: Prosadichtungen in drei Sprachen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 130-36. –, Company (London: Calder, 1980). –, Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1983). –, “The Way,” typescript III, in facsimile in No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Material Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collections of the Humanities Research Center, ed. Carlton Lake (Austin: Humanities Research Center, 1984), 173. –, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). –, Dikter, trans. and ed. Magnus Hedlund (Viborg: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2001). –, Poems 1930-1989 (London: Calder, 2002). Carey, Phyllis, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Searchers,” in In Principle, Beckett is Joyce, ed. Friedhelm Rathjen (Edinburgh: Split Pea P, 1994), 83-97. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., reproduced micrographically (London: BCA, 1994). Rathjen, Friedhelm, “Maximal Joyce is a State of Beckett: Joyce, Beckett, and Bruno’s Coincidentia Oppositorum,” in In Principle, Beckett is Joyce, ed. Friedhelm Rathjen (Edinburgh: Split Pea P, 1994), 99-112; rpt. in The Abiko Quarterly with James Joyce Finnegans Wake Studies 18 (1998), 11-23. –, Beckett zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1995). –, “The Magic Triangle: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Arno Schmidt,” in SBT/A 11, “Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Samuel Beckett: Fin sans fin en l’an 2000,” ed. Angela Moorjani, Carola Veit (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2001), 92-99. –, “In Principle, Beckett is Joyce (and Schmidt is Schmidt),” in Dritte Wege: Kontexte für Arno Schmidt und James Joyce (Scheeßel: Edition ReJoyce, 2005), 137-51. –, “Distanzierende Annäherung: Von Versuchen, Samuel Becketts ‘neither’ zu setzen und zu übersetzen,” in Halbe Sachen: Wolfenbütteler Übersetzergespräche IV-V: Erlanger Übersetzerwerkstatt I-II, ed. Olaf Kutzmutz, Adrian La Salvia (Wolfenbüttel: Bundesakademie für kulturelle Bildung, 2006), 360-373.
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FROM AN ABANDONED WORK: “all the variants of the one”
John Pilling This essay describes the differences between the original manuscript of From an Abandoned Work and the published versions of the text (from which the subtitle of the essay is of course taken). It offers a number of possible reasons for the text’s ‘abandonment’ (in more than one sense of the word), and some contexts which, with the help of letters to friends, provide a more accurate dating of the text than has previously been attempted.
In response to queries about one of Beckett’s oddest ‘odds’ – From an Abandoned Work, first published in book form by Faber and Faber in 1958 – the writer told his bibliographers (Raymond Federman and John Fletcher) that the text had been abandoned because “[t]here was just no more to be said” (28). In the late 1960s, some fifteen years on from the time of composition (given as 1954-55, Beckett’s own best guess at a date), matters could not be taken further; and in the critical literature on From an Abandoned Work – what little there is – scholars have assumed that the Faber version (collected in No’s Knife) embodied all the text that there ever had been, or with such few omissions as could be observed between the 1958 printing and the first appearance of the text in the Trinity News magazine for 7 June 1956.1 (It was this Trinity News version which was reprinted, a year or so later, in the third Evergreen Review of 1957.) It was on this basis that Beckett’s somewhat lacklustre title could be seen as something of a misnomer, since there was apparently no surviving manuscript (other than the March 1958 transcription Beckett made for Jake Schwartz, now at the HRHRC, Austin, Texas), and it could only be assumed that there never was a longer text from which From an Abandoned Work had emerged,2 although of course it could be said that Beckett’s remark actually describes only the abandonment, and not the terms and conditions of the abandonment. The first indication that Beckett’s title was not in fact inaccurate came in a Sotheby’s auction catalogue3 in a description of a notebook
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(inscribed “For Tara MacGowran”), which was in due course withdrawn from sale after the bidding had stopped at £80,000.4 All that the brief catalogue description stated, however, was that the part of the notebook containing a manuscript version of From an Abandoned Work showed variants from the published text, and that in manuscript the text was longer.5 Beckett’s “There was just no more to be said” was not in essence affected by this catalogue entry, since the remark could still apply to the actual point at which the text had been abandoned (of which more anon). At the same time it was evident that there must initially have been – always supposing the notebook version to have been the original manuscript – more to be said, as Beckett either could not have been expected to remember, or in the event was unable to remember, or perhaps had no wish to remember. How much more was said/written only the notebook would show. The notebook was in due course sold to the Rare Books section of the Ohio State University, Columbus. It is square ruled, 173 mm x 220 mm, and shows that From an Abandoned Work, at this point without a title, occupied 26 pages with about 1,000 lines of manuscript, or roughly 8,000 words. Collation of the notebook with the 1958 text reveals that roughly 550 lines of manuscript, a little more than half (amounting to just over 4,000 words), were excised. (In A Beckett Canon [214] Ruby Cohn calculates that the published text preserves about two-thirds of the manuscript.) Even a rough-and-ready calculation in round figures shows, somewhat surprisingly, that the text we know of as From an Abandoned Work was at one time about twice as long, such that it could have been included in the ‘Residua’ section of No’s Knife, rather than on its own just before the later residua,6 although of course, isolated as it is, it looks even more ‘abandoned.’ These bare facts are important indicators that Beckett did not simply, as might be supposed, open a vein and write until inspiration gave out, even if inspiration finally did give out. (There was of course already some evidence, from the variants between the Trinity News version and the Faber text, that Beckett had taken care to improve matters of phrasing, and to control what he wished to include and exclude, but of course no-one without access to the manuscript version could have guessed how much had been removed. Beckett had complained to his friend H. O. White about the ‘blue pencils’ of the TCD students, but had obviously exercised some blue pencils of his own.) The text was obviously not abandoned before Beckett had worked hard on it, presumably with a view to extending it, even if the 174
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evidence suggests that his main concern was excision. This is dramatically illustrated by the last two pages of the manuscript, where there are more than sixty lines of holograph after the point (“my body doing its best without me”) where, in the event, Beckett chose to end From an Abandoned Work, as published (1967, 149). The published text effectively ‘preserves,’ as it were, the supplement which it omits by way of the phrase “just went on” immediately previous to this! This extra material testifies to Beckett’s commitment to continuance of a text not obviously going anywhere, as its narrator effectively admits (“I have never in my life been on my way anywhere”; 139). But the impulse to abandon the text is perhaps latent in the manuscript narrator saying “it’s a miracle how I’ve survived so long,” only some five lines before stopping altogether, together with an earlier admission (found shortly after the published text’s endpoint) to the effect that “I gave up trying at fifteen, but not living.” This excised ‘coda’ in the manuscript – if coda it can be called – typifies Beckett’s treatment of his raw material throughout. Whilst some omissions (of a word or two, or of a phrase) were apparently conditioned by rhythmical considerations – giving rise to a text much valued by actors for its rhythms7 – Beckett’s tendency was to remove large portions of text wholesale. More than fifty lines are removed from the third and fourth pages of the manuscript; more than forty from pages four and five; more than a hundred and fifty from pages eleven to fourteen; and more than eighty from pages eighteen and nineteen. These four large blocks of text account for more than half of all the excised material, and the material in each, though various, can be characterized as either motivational and indicative of character, or potentially useful as background, or (in the case of the last of the four) wryly addressing “the problems of literary composition” in what was obviously begun in the hope that it would be a much longer work than it became, comprising “two probably more or less equal parts, for the sake of symmetry” (OSU MS, [19]). In Beckett’s ‘trilogy’ it is Molloy who admits to “a mania for symmetry” (1959, 84), and of course Molloy is the only one of Beckett’s prose fictions to be divided into “two […] more or less equal parts.” It seems probable that the threat of reprising Molloy prompted Beckett to jettison this section; and in fact the spectre of Molloy also looms behind each of the other three largescale omissions. The first of these focuses on “how I killed [my mother]”8 the second deals with the need to “keep going” in spite of recurrent “stopping” (and also with money matters); and the third 175
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situates the narrator in a “den or lair, in the woods” remembering (or imagining) strange sounds, but even more preoccupied by picturing his mother in bed (“torturing her poor brain as to what had become of me”) and himself – having routinely engaged in coming and going without regard for her – “motionless in bed, so that my mother would not know whether I was in or out” (OSU MS, 18-19). The third of these instances – with perhaps a faint trace of Malone Dies to set alongside the much stronger echoes of Molloy – must, one supposes, be heavily autobiographical in origin, given Beckett’s behaviour at Cooldrinagh leading up to his leaving Ireland for good, as described in the biographies by Deirdre Bair and James Knowlson (Bair, 230ff; Knowlson, 223ff). In large part it was the excision of these four substantial blocks of text that made the published From an Abandoned Work the oddly disjunctive fiction it is. Its “hysterico-obsessional structure,”9 which seems at once to invite and discourage psychoanalytic interpretation, derives directly from the severe pruning applied to sections of text gravitating uncomfortably close to Molloy, but also – apparently – generating extreme discomfort in Beckett himself as he “sigh[s] out a lamentable tale of things / done long ago and done ill.”10 Beckett’s need not to repeat himself, combined with his inability to do other than torment himself about the past (“the being over”; 1967, 147), obviously made for an intractable compositional double-bind from which he could not escape, and from which he could not summon up sufficient energy to continue. There was, it would seem, a doubly regressive influence inhibiting the onward impulse of From an Abandoned Work: Beckett’s relatively recent success with Molloy (which the Tara MacGowran notebook shows him trying to translate into English), and his abject failure to live in harmony with his mother (who died on 25 August 1950, four months to the day before Beckett began the Texts for Nothing). These regressive aspects are disconcertingly echoed in the notebook, where Beckett, having apparently decided which was to be the front and which was to be the back, and having written (amongst other things) an early version of Fin de partie, turned it round for From an Abandoned Work, so that the latter appears upside down and as if written backwards.11 ‘Abandoned’ as it had to be, it subsequently became something of a text ‘for nothing.’ The Faber printing of 1958, in limp covers and with a garish illustration (mercifully left uncredited), left it in the kind of limbo from which not even No’s Knife could rescue it, since No’s Knife seems to have been actually designed to ‘abandon’ 176
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it for a third time. Yet Beckett retained a fondness for From an Abandoned Work (uniquely among his faux départs), much as he did for the Echo’s Bones poems, which twenty years earlier also kept alive a lost but creatively retrievable past. He listened avidly, in spite of atmospheric interference, to Patrick Magee’s radio broadcast of the text on the Third Programme of the BBC on 14 December 1957, prior to Faber publishing the text (Knowlson, 440 and 443-44), and MacGowran Speaking Beckett made for Claddagh Records in 1966, contains the whole of the published text, making it easily the longest single track on the LP. It was in early 1965 that Beckett considered the ways in which the text might actually be staged, and offered advice, in a letter of 13 January 1965, to Sean O’Casey’s daughter, Siobhan, who produced a performance of it at UCSB, the University of California at Santa Barbara, on 25 February 1965 (Bair, 578-79 and 715), and at a time when Beckett was, as he long continued to be, against ‘cross-overs.’ But the text has continued to attract actors. Three years before Beckett’s death, in 1986, Barry McGovern chose to emulate his great predecessors Magee and MacGowran with a third rendition of From an Abandoned Work for The Abbey Reads Beckett. Beckett was by then struggling to complete Stirrings Still, but he must have been heartened to think that a text abandoned more than thirty years earlier and for the most part underestimated in the interim, still had some life left in it, and something to be said for it. Moreover, it had someone extremely wellequipped to say it, and – even if Beckett had forgotten where the manuscript version was – somewhere an indelible trace of what had once been said.12 As Phil Baker has recently suggested “[t]he text dramatises the angry perplexity of a split subject reading his own psychic text […] and failing to make any sense of himself” (17). In actual fact only someone acquainted with the notebook version could know how far the published text embodies, and at the same time conceals, the literal truth in this connection. Appendix: Contexts for From an Abandoned Work Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 14 December 1953 quotes in German from Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Part 2, section 7 “Ottilie’s Journal”: “No-one wanders unpunished among palm-trees, and your feelings are sure to change where elephants and tigers are at home”), with Beckett adapting the first part of the quotation to the reading (and more particularly the writing) of L’Innommable. In the manuscript 177
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‘summary’ (later incorporated into the third page of text of the Trinity News and Evergreen Review versions, although omitted from the version published in 1958 and reprinted in No’s Knife) SB writes that this is a story of “how I killed my mother, I suppose for having brought me into the world, and of how I wandered there unpunished, in a quite different country […].” Letter to Jérôme Lindon of 20 January 1954 distinguishes between recent faux départs (some at least of which must have been what we know as Fizzles or Foirades) and the Textes pour rien, describing one currently under way. Letter to Pamela Mitchell of 6 April 1954 telling her that at Ussy recently he reverted to writing in English, “to pass the time.” This is almost certainly a defining date for From an Abandoned Work; there is no other known, or surviving, original work written originally in English between Watt and All That Fall. The phrase “awful English this” appears in all three published texts, ‘added’ from the rejectamenta of the manuscript. Beckett was (co-)translating Molloy, with Patrick Bowles in Paris, between July and November 1953, and revising their joint translation of parts 1 and 2 on his own between June (Dublin) and October (Ussy) 1954. The “finishing daubs” of “about the 10th re-reading” were applied at Ussy in late December 1954. Letter to Donald McWhinnie of 11 December 1957, written after hearing Patrick Magee’s Molloy extract on 10 December, saying that he was “waiting for [From an Abandoned Work, broadcast as ‘The Meditation’ on 14 December] with acute curiosity.” In the event Beckett found this second broadcast the weaker of the two; it “seemed a little rushed and telescoped at times and perhaps slightly overquerulous” (letter of 23 December). Comparable passages Foirades/Fizzles – “He is barehead”: …that first instant beyond which nothing, when he was already old, that is to say near to death, and knew, though unable to recall having lived, what life and death are… (1995, 227) …a sound of fall so muted…that it was perhaps his fancy… (228) 178
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cf. From an Abandoned Work …all is mental, figments… (1995, 158) …all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long, tiresome business I always found. (158) With so much life gone from knowledge how know when all began… (162) Falls I had had in plenty… (162) Foirades/Fizzles – “Horn came always” …I was now beginning, then if you prefer, to get out of bed again. (229) What ruined me at bottom was athletics. (230) […in my mirrors and looking-glasses so long put away. I’ll let myself be seen before I’m done.] (229) cf. From an Abandoned Work [OSU ms.; later excised] …I was motionless in bed, so that my mother would not know whether I was in or out and perhaps lie tossing and fretting all night thinking I was lost… The best thing I found was to start running…I must have been one of the very fastest runners the world has ever seen… (157) [Textes pour rien VI; written April 1951 at Ussy: …I must have been twelve, because of the glass, a round shaving-glass, doublefaced, faithful and magnifying…the mirror remained, my father went but the mirror remained, in which he had so greatly changed…] (124) Foirades/Fizzles – “Afar a Bird” …hugging the hedges, between road and ditch… (232) 179
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…confusion of memory and lament, of loved ones and impossible youth, clutching the stick in the middle…a life of my own I tried, in vain… (233) …he’ll confuse his mother with whores, his father with a roadman named Balfe… (233) cf. From an Abandoned Work …in this way I have gone through great thickets… (156) …when not mentioned my stick is in my hand, as I go along. (161) The third day was the look I got from the roadman…the look I got from Balfe, I went in terror of him as a child. (163) Foirades/Fizzles – “I gave up before birth” …I won’t go on about worms, about bones and dust… (234) …perhaps he’ll drown, he always wanted to drown… (235) cf. From an Abandoned Work A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought. (160) …even the sea in some moods, and been carried out of my course, or driven back, in order not to drown… (156) Foirades/Fizzles – “Old Earth” Old earth, …it was me…it will be me, it will be us, it was never us. (238) Happiness, what happiness… (238)
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cf. From an Abandoned Work I whinge [the CSP text (1995) reads: “I weep …”] for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine. (160) Molloy (1947) In part one the incident with the charcoal-burner (1959, 84), Molloy says: “I always had a mania for symmetry.” Beckett worked, with and without Patrick Bowles, on the translation into English of part 1 of Molloy from July 1953 onwards, and on part 2 through 1954, finishing in late December 1954. cf. From an Abandoned Work OSU ms., [19]: “…my mother’s end will be the central event of this work and divide it as it were in two parts, a first part leading up to my mother’s end, and a second leading away from it, and to my own end, two probably more or less equal parts, for the sake of symmetry.” Earlier, on p. [9], in discussing his poetical efforts, the narrator has spoken of his attempt to create a “flawless symmetry.” I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from unpublished material. Notes
1. In the letter to Professor H. O. White of 2 July [1956] Beckett complains of “being improved behind my back” by “well brought up young blue pencils” introducing “their unspeakable paragraphs and varsity punctuation” (TCD). 2. Cf. the questionnaire appendix to Barry Smith’s 1978 University of East Anglia Ph.D (“Texts for nothing: a thesis”), in which Beckett says as much. 3.
“English Literature and History,” 25 July 1995, p. 126.
4. As reported in Irish Times 29 July 1995 (24); the Times of 12 July 1995, anticipated that the notebook would fetch “about £100,000”; the Times
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John Pilling Literary Supplement of 4 August 1995 (32) said “it is expected to sell for as much as £150,000.” The Sotheby’s catalogue gives ‘£120,000-£150,000.’ 5. The catalogue description reads “longer than and with variants from the published text,” and continues: “27 pages, in black ink, written first on consecutive versos and rectos, then on rectos only with corrections and doodles on facing versos.” In fact the last 17 of 26 pages, written on rectos, are preceded by one written on the verso; a portion of a twenty-seventh page, separated from the beginning of the text as published (“Up bright and early that day”) contains a passage, written transverse, on the subject of “how I killed my mother,” later incorporated into the third and fourth pages of the manuscript. 6. Beckett, No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose 1947-1966, London: Calder and Boyars, 1967, [137]-149, from which subsequent citations are taken. The Calder Six Residua of 1978 does, however, include From an Abandoned Work. The first American printing of the text in book form was as one of the ‘shorts’ in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove P, 1974). 7. Interviewed in the Guardian, 30 December, 1964, Jack MacGowran speaks of the text’s “beautiful inner rhythms” (7). Cf. Dominique Rabaté on “alternance” (44). 8. In the published text the only relic of this comes relatively late on with the questions “Did I kill my father?” and “Did I ever kill anyone?” (144). 9. Cf. Michel Bernard’s essay, as well as Carla Locatelli’s emphasis on “ossessività” and the “modo ossessivo” (48, 52). 10. I take this quotation from the Whoroscope notebook (RUL MS 3000, [100]); Beckett took it from John Ford’s Lover’s Melancholy. 11. Cf. Dominique Rabaté, who describes From an Abandoned Work (D’un ouvrage abandonnée) as “un récit régressif” (46); and Peter J. Murphy on the “condition of perpetual regression” (475). 12.
CF. Locatelli on the “oralità” of the text (65).
Works Cited Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978). Baker, Phil, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
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From an Abandoned Work: “all the variants of the one” Beckett, Samuel, Whoroscope Notebook, RUL MS 3000, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 14 December 1953, TCD MS 10402/190, Trinity College Dublin Library. –, Letter to Jérôme Lindon of 20 January 1954, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Letter to Pamela Mitchell of 6 April 1954, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, From an Abandoned Work, in Trinity News, 7 June 1956, 4. –, Letter to Professor H. M. O. White, 2 July [1956], TCD MS 4644/3777/14, Trinity College Dublin Library. –, From an Abandoned Work, in Evergreen Review I.3 (1957), 83-91. –, Letters to Donald McWhinnie of 11 and 23 December 1957, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, From an Abandoned Work (London: Faber, 1958). –, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1959). –, No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose 1947-1966 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967). –, First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove P, 1974). –, “Tara MacGowran” Notebook, OSU MS, Rare Books section, Library, Ohio State U, Columbus. –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Bernard, Michel, “The Hysterico-Obsessional Structure of From an Abandoned Work,” trans. Thomas Cousineau, in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 4.1, (Autumn 1994), 93-107. Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001). Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1970). Irish Times, 29 July 1995. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Locatelli, Carla, La Disdetta della parola: l’ermeneutica del silenzio nella prose inglese di Samuel Beckett (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1984). McGowran, Jack, Interviewed in the Guardian, 30 December 1964, 7. Murphy, Peter J., “Narrative Strategies in From an Abandoned Work,” in English Studies in Canada, 8.4 (December 1982), 465-82. Pilling, John, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006). Rabaté, Dominique, “Chemin faisant,” in Littérature 65 (1987). Smith, Barry, “Texts for nothing: a thesis,” Ph.D. thesis, University of East Anglia, 1978. Sotheby Auction Catalogue, “English Literature and History,” 25 July 1995. Times, 12 July 1995. Times Literary Supplement, 4 August 1995.
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BECKETT AND “L’ORDRE NATUREL”: The Universal Grammar of Comment c'est/How It Is
Anthony Cordingley A foundational myth of the clarity and precision of French prose, the theory of French word order “l’ordre naturel” grew out of Aristotelian grammars and sought its justification in Cartesian metaphysics, epistemology and physiology. Ironically, Beckett’s “narrator/narrated” of Comment c’est/How It Is uses a tattered syntax to insist that his discourse is a recitation in “the natural order” (l’ordre naturel) of the voice in his head, “the other above in the light” (l’autre dans la lumière). The aspirations of the “I” below to imitate his mysterious “ancient voice” interlace with the text’s allusions to Enlightenment philosophy of mind and language, producing its unique, albeit debilitated, “geometric method.”
ça se voyait merde pour la grammaire (Manuscript “ms” of Comment c’est; Beckett 2001, 355)
“je cite dans l’ordre naturel,” “I quote in the natural order.” When time and again the narrator/narrated1 of Comment c’est/How It Is repeats and varies this phrase he is recalling an intellectual history stretching from the Latin ordo naturalis to l’ordre naturel of French and the lesser known English natural order. The narrator/narrated’s “natural order,” and its temporal corollary, “before Pim with Pim after Pim,” evokes orders Aristotelian, Middle Age Christian, Dantesque and Miltonian. Beckett’s irony is always polyvalent, yet the foregrounding of syntax in the fragmented language of Comment c’est/How It Is directs attention to a linguistic condition. ‘Speaking’ in his rudimentary syntax, the narrator/narrated evokes a tradition in the philosophy of language which once postulated the analytic precision of word order and its correspondence with the ‘pure’ operations of the mind. Enlightenment Rationalism understood the relationships between man, the soul, the world and God as reflected in, and in some instances mediated by, the organisation of language. Categories of grammar, syntax and the
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rhetorical deployment of words were each laden with philosophical consequences. In discourses about language in France, this polemic centred on the supposed ordre naturel of French word order. After sketching the Rationalist architecture of Comment c’est/How It Is, this discourse will be located within that of the narrator/narrated. To this end the “Philosophy Notes” which Beckett made between mid-1932 and mid-1934 are an invaluable source for his knowledge of continental Enlightenment thought.2 There is a purported dualism at the core of the novel: the articulating “I” claims to be nothing more than the mouthpiece of “the other above in the light” (l’autre dans la lumière), whose discourse enters his “ancient voice” (voix ancienne), as the voice of memory. The “I” struggles to repeat his memory, snatching images of his “ancienne” life, interspersed with learned allusions and literary echoes. Yet, in the underworld of mud, a scene of torture is imagined. The “I” is alone but expects to meet a character named Pim, whom he will torture. Pim will eventually leave, and the “I” knows that he will then be tortured by Bom, who approaches him from behind, as Pim had been ‘discovered.’ During their journeys each “soul” (43) must travel with a sack. A parody of a parable, each sack contains tins of fish which offer the physical and spiritual nutrition for life’s voyage. Not until very late in the novel is the logical flaw discovered, “very pretty but not right something wrong something quite wrong” (141): if Pim leaves his sack to the “I,” then he must go forth without a sack, and the divine and preestablished order of souls and sacks is out of kilter. As in Leibniz’s Monadology, “it’s regulated thus we’re regulated thus” (143). The narrator/narrated launches into a trenchant mathematical proof to rectify the error in his system in the fashion of a Cartesian Rationalist – in the “Philosophy Notes” Beckett underlined Descartes’ “proofs of existence of God” (TCD MS 10967/183r). The first solution proposed is simply to multiply the figures and sacks ahead of Pim: “as long as I with Pim the other with Bem a hundred thousand prone glued two by two” (145). Yet a straight line with limits won’t solve the problem of the figure at the head of the procession getting his sack of spiritual provisions, “something wrong there,” and a new “solution” is proposed: the “closed curve” (151). For some 54 paragraphs a circular form is tested until it too is found to be unsatisfactory because he who started out at number one will be deprived of his victim when he reaches his original position. Just as God’s grace is expressed in a harmonious ratio of sacks to souls, there 186
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can never be disequilibrium in the balance of torturers and victims: between fifty million or four, “not a single one among us be wronged” (161). The “justice” ordained from above demands that there never be an imbalance between evil and sacrifice. This theological position is expressed mathematically: “we do not revolve / that is above in the light where their space is measured here the straight line” (159). Yet this new line is without beginning or ending, “neither head nor tail” (161), it is infinite. The realm of geometric and measurable truths accords with the perfect language of Descartes’ immaterial mind, “that is above in the light,” while the infinity of extension in the world below is consistent with Cartesian corpuscular theory as recorded by Beckett in the “Philosophy Notes”: “Bodies are parts of space, limitations of the universal extension. Elements of corporeal world corpuscles, realiter indivisible, mathematically infinitely divisible. Thus, for Descartes, impossibility of empty space and infinitude of corporeal world” (TCD MS 10967/187v). Beckett allows this strain of Cartesianism to exist alongside the novel’s allusions to Democritus’ atomism – whose “infinite waste”3 is alluded to in the “slime” (19, 61, 103, 281) and “primeval mud” (9) which sustains consciousness (albeit contradicting infinite divisibility in positing the material reality of the void and indivisible atoms). As dispersing Democritean atoms in the “infinite waste,” or as infinitely divisible corpuscles, the “I” is deprived of its transcendent cogito: “no one here knows himself it’s the place without knowledge whence no doubt it’s peerlessness” (159). Garin Dowd has convincingly demonstrated Leibniz’s influence on Worm, the “monade nue” of The Unnamable (Dowd 1-28), who anticipates the larval states of Comment c’est/How It Is. This naked monad inhabits the lowest level of the divine hierarchy and is a being on the cusp of consciousness and reason. This goes some way to explaining the linguistic condition of Comment c’est/How It Is, where the “I” below attempts to mirror the discourse of the one above, the perfect and supreme Monad.4 Yet the imperfect sense of hearing/memory of the one below results in a speech “ill-said ill heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured” (3). On occasions there is a poetic resonance, organic beauty and a vivacity of images which is otherwise deprived from the narrator/narrated’s speech: we are on the veranda smothered in verbena the scented sun dapples the red tiles yes I assure you (15) 187
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The purported perfection of this listening is registered in that “yes I assure you,” while “veranda” and “verbena” echo the mimetic claim of the “mutterings verbatim” (107) elsewhere, that which implies a perfect recitation of the voice above and the “ancient voice” of memory. The synaesthesia of “scented sun dapples” infuses the language with a rare warmth, and the presence of the mother in “smother” and the pun on son/“sun” together form a frame of reference – though an apparently oppressive one – to a different natural order of cycles outside the languid procession through the mud and the mathematical series which otherwise preoccupy the discourse. Yet even this nature remains dependent upon linguistic puns, effects and shades cast from the foliage of words. At other times, a stock of phatic repetitions sustain the narrative – that which Beckett refers to as “phrases chevilles et charnières” (padding or hinge phrases) (202) in manuscript notes collected in the genetic edition of Comment c’est. Such phrases include the likes of “voice once without quaqua on all sides,” “my life last state last version,” “left leg right leg push pull.” The half born reason of the “monade nue” is also found in such imperfect “formulations” as: Bom to the abandoned not me Bom you Bom we Bom but me Bom you Pim I to the abandoned not me Pim you Pim we Pim but me Bom you Pim something very wrong there (147) This confusion of pronouns occurs during the attempted proof to restore the pre-established harmony of sacks and souls. As abstract a denomination as his own cogitoless “I,” these names refer to conceptual bodies invented in order to accurately account for the relationship of this being to its world and deity. The present “formulation” becomes part of an attempt to replicate the perfection of the “justice” ordained from the “other above in the light” through a language of philosophical verifiability. This project echoes historical efforts at construing a philosophical language. Indebted to Windelband’s A History of Philosophy (397), Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes” record how Leibniz “was seriously of the opinion that philosophical controversies would come to an end when a philosophy could appear in as clear and certain a form as a mathematical calculation (De Scientia Universali seu Calculo Philosophico: 1684)” (TCD MS 10967/184v). Beckett’s interest was piqued by the comic value of the anecdotes of two such attempts, which 188
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Windelband relegates to footnotes in this chapter on the “Problem of Method.” In the first instance, Beckett summarises: Importance of geometrical method in Spinoza, and its psychogenetic justification, this is its material (as distinct from formal) application. The order of ideas is conceived as identical with order of things (Cf. Tschirnhausen’s assertion that a complete definition of laughter would raise a laugh!). (TCD MS 10967/184v) What has been attributed to Beckett’s use of Fritz Mauthner or set theory in Watt may share its roots in Beckett’s appreciation here of “The order of ideas is conceived as identical with order of things.” Thus Beckett raises his laugh when the series of grammatical possibilities of how to take out a dog’s dinner becomes itself a dog’s dinner. Beckett continues, “Revival of syllogism in connection with geometrical method (Jung, Weigel, Christian Wolff, Puffendorf),” which prompts his citation of Windelband’s footnote containing Leibniz’s poking fun at this view, “where he proves ‘more geometrical’ in 60 propositions and demonstrations that Count Palatine of Neuburg must be chosen King of the Poles!” (TCD MS 10967/184v). Copying out Windelband’s phrase “geometrical method” (397), Beckett changes it to “more geometrical,” echoing Windelband’s description of Spinoza’s “more geometrico” (396; geometric order/manner) from the page before. In Comment c’est/How It Is proper names appear to occupy a position in a geometric series (... Bem Bom Pim Pam Prim Krim Kram Skom Skum ...), their sequence seeking a model of consistent and precise exposition in language: “whence preparatives sudden series subject object subject object” (9). Yet their logical premise is rather spurious, “m at the end and one syllable the rest indifferent” (139), again inverting Sam’s ‘natural order’ ma-, and in part three the terms are variously refigured in the hope of finding a “solution” to the problem of sacks and souls (the delimited straight line, the “closed curve,” the infinite straight line). In the section of the novel which Beckett extracted and reworked as a short prose piece, L’image, the pseudo-rhetoric of geometry organises the very action of building the image/memory/narrative. The discourse aspires to the status of a memory of “my life above in the light,” a scene in which the narrator/narrated is walking hand in hand with a girlfriend, climbing a mountain: 189
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we let go our hands and turn about I dextrogyre she sinistro she transfers the leash to her left hand and I the same instant to my right [...] the empty hands mingle the arms swing the dog has not moved feet splayed one hundred and thirty degrees fatuous half-smile to posterior horizon again about turn introrse at ninety degrees fleeting face to face transfer of things mingling of arms stillness of dog (35) again about turn introrse fleeting face to face transfer of things swinging of arms silent relishing of sea and isles pivoting as one [...] heads back front as though on an axle (37) my darling girl I bite she swallows my darling boy she bites I swallow (39) Peppered amongst this mechanistic exposition are terms of a quasiscientific register (“dextrogyre,” “sinistro,” “one hundred and thirty degrees,” “posterior horizon” etcetera) which betray the “I”’s desire for his discourse to move with clearness and precision (Beckett’s “more geometric”). The process continued in Beckett’s own listening to his ancient voice: when translating Comment c’est into How It Is such a straightforward French phrase such as “demi-tour vers l’intérieur” (34) is rendered with the perfectly arcane “about turn introrse.” This scene of the ‘lovers’ began with the “I” alone, his tongue in the mud taking mouthfuls of the malleable stuff, moving it about this mouth, letting it shape his words and help fashion a ‘memory’ of the world on high. Without a line of communication to the immaterial mind, or supreme monad, the “I” uses his resources to imitate its perfection. The gradual intensification of the “geometric method” in this scene is amusing in the way comparable with Leibniz’s joke proceeding syllogistically through its 60 propositions. Making a cameo in this ‘memory’ is the Jansenist and Occasionalist, Père Malebranche, who casts his shadow over the couple and the girl’s dog. Faithful to Beckett’s understanding of Male190
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branche’s Occasionalism and Geulincx’s “two clocks theory,” demonstrated in the “Philosophy Notes” (TCD MS 10967/189) and notes to Geulincx (332-33),5 the movements of the couple and the dog are synchronised despite the absence of physical causation between them. The episode turns burlesque when in front of the Rationalist priest, the dog tries to lick its penis but cannot, which occasions the comment “but we on the contrary” (37). Like most jokes in Beckett there is a serious side and Malebranche’s appearance reminds us of his tirades in De La Recherche de la vérité against the passions in language. Malebranche riles against Montaigne’s style because he believes it to be imbued with abuses of imagination which are designed to captivate readers at the expense of logical thinking; like Seneca, Montaigne persuades without recourse to reason (Malebranche, Book II, Part III). Beckett’s scene is one of adolescent sexuality yet his analytic sieve attempts (unsuccessfully) to filter almost all emotion from the language. Climbing the summit may have afforded a view of a stupendous sublime or even the infinite I AM, but once it is reached, the logic is simply reversed and the figures descend the mountain as if in rewind. While Malebranche represents both a purely Rationalist attitude to mind and memory, Blaise Pascal, who was intimately involved with the Jansenists of Port Royal, produced a Rationalism where the passions were accorded their place. Knowlson informs that Pascal’s Pensées was an enduring interest throughout Beckett’s adult life, Beckett even naming Pascal amongst his select group of “old chestnuts” (653). In the “Philosophy Notes” Beckett registers the “geometric method” as a “lever” for Pascal’s mysticism (TCD MS 10967/184r). Pascal criticised the assumption that an innate, rational language was superior to a language rooted in lived experience. In Le discours sur les passions de l’amour Pascal established what he considered to be two important dimensions to language. First, there is l’esprit géométrique and second, the l’esprit de finesse, two spirits which in turn correspond with the geometric mind and the mind of finesse. Within the “spirit” or “mind” of “finesse” the delimitation of thought extends no further than psychological intuitions. In contrast, the geometric spirit follows rigidly established principles and thus assumes the form of a rational mode of thought. In the Pensées, the geometric mind is found to be incapable of grasping the multiplicity of lived experience (96). Furthermore, in L’Art de persuader Pascal contrasts logical proof with a mode of thought symbolised by the heart and determined by effect. While Pascal’s 191
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fideism sets him apart from Descartes, he distinguishes l’esprit from le cœur (mind from heart) in a way analogous to Descartes’ dichotomy of l’esprit and matière (mind and matter) (Ricken 30-32). Antoine Arnauld, referred to in Beckett’s “Whoroscope,” greatly admired Pascal’s innovation of “l’esprit de finesse,” a fact which inflamed Malebranche in the Recherche. Arnauld nevertheless intensified the Cartesian method of solving philosophical problems with analytic rigour in La Logique ou, L'Art de penser (Port Royal Logic) of 1662. Windelband comments, and Beckett summarises in the “Philosophy Notes”: Positive beginnings towards transformation of Cartesian method into Euclidean line of proof are found in Port-Royal logic and in logical treatises of Geulincx; but system of Spinoza the first to perfect this methodical schematism. (TCD MS 10967/184v) The “Philosophy Notes” suggest a connection between Spinoza’s thinking and the burgeoning series found in Comment c’est/How It Is and Watt, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Yet Beckett traced how “Descartes’ disciples confused his mathematical philosophy with Euclidean rigidity of demonstration and elaborated its monistic methodology into an ars demonstrandi” (TCD MS 10967/184v). Beckett follows Windelband in tracing through Lull, Bruno (an old interest of Beckett’s via Joyce) and Hobbes, the idea of the “Lingua Adamica” (philosophy in general algebraical formulae),” which culminates in “Leibniz's search for the characteristica universalis & a method of philosophical calculus” (TCD MS 10967/185r). In this section, Windelband explains how this impetus was shared by numerous thinkers of universal grammar in the seventeenth century (Becker, Dalgarn, Kircher and Wilkins): Finally, the thought of expressing the fundamental metaphysical conceptions, and likewise the logical operations of their combination after the manner of the mathematical sign-language by definite characters, seemed to offer the possibility of writing a philosophical investigation in general fomulæ, and by this means raising it beyond the capability of being expressed in a definite language – an effort toward a universally scientific language, a 192
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“Lingua Adamica,” which likewise appeared at the time of Leibniz in numerous supporters. (Windelband 397-98) There is no suggestion that Beckett was personally attracted to what Windelband terms “these strange endeavours” (398), yet they did appeal to his imagination. In Comment c’est/How It Is, when the narrator/narrated repeats over and again “je cite dans l’ordre naturel” (I quote in the natural order), or “je le dis comme je l’entends dans l’ordre naturel” (I say it as I hear it in the natural order), he is evoking a theory of universal grammar which also “seemed to offer the possibility of writing a philosophical investigation in general fomulæ,” that is, he claims to be speaking in “l’ordre naturel” of French syntax.6 “L’ordre naturel” refers to the order of subject-verb-object in French; in the context of grammatical relations it was a relatively common expression in Beckett’s time and it remains so today. However, the justification for the naturalness of this order grew out of seventeenth century Rationalist philosophy of mind. Its argument most basically states that discourse is the image of thought, and that if thought operates according to the logic of reason, then discourse will itself offer a picture of the mind, and illustrate the laws of reason. The theory is implicated in the complex polemics surrounding the Latin ordo naturalis, which has a long history. Essentially, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the reorganisation of ancient texts by scholars such as Roger Bacon, Johannes de Balbis and the Modist school of grammarians was executed through the application of Aristotelian logic. Isolated on the page was the maximum number of words playing a syntactical role within the sentence consistent with minimizing graphic ambiguity. The analytic order imposed upon the classical norms of ancient rhetorical prose was known as the ordo naturalis. Hyperbaton, or departure from ordinary word order, defined only vaguely by the ancients, was linked by Insular grammarians to a violation of this “natural order” and of the boundaries of word grouping or sectiones within sentences (Saenger 44-47; Thurot 341-50). The ordo artificialis or ordo artificiosus reflected the desire to find harmony in language and beauty in style; it was an ‘artistic’ divergence from the ordo naturalis (Lausberg 213-14). While Latin had an innate flexibility of word order, the logical order of the ordo naturalis was fixed in a syntax following the subjectverb-object order. The coincidence of this order with the most common of syntactical expressions in French allowed for the birth of a French 193
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theory of l’ordre naturel. With a nationalistic pretext the argument was used by moderns against ancients, but in the process it found its philosophical justification in Cartesian metaphysics, epistemology and physiology (Ricken, 9-25). From Maupas to Grillet, the seventeenth century produced a group of authors willing to advance the regard of the French language by linking it with the expression of this natural order. In the case of Vaugelas, categories of style usually associated with the ordo artificialis were redefined such that clarity of expression, defined as a correct arrangement of words, became “un des plus grand secret du style” (215). Logical order was thus the indispensable condition of the “clarté du langage que la Langue Française affecte sur toutes les langues du monde” (235). This rather astonishing claim of the superiority of French over all of the world’s languages was soon to receive more complex grounding in Rationalist theorisation. Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot’s Grammaire générale et raisonnée (Port Royal Grammar) is a seminal text in this justification; it sparked debate in the “Querelle des Anciens et Modernes,” after which “l’expression ordre naturel était donc plus que la réminiscence d’une hypothèse scolastique, venue à propos pour faire l’apologie de la langue nationale” (Ricken, 17). L’ordre naturel continued to be one of the most discussed linguistic themes in French philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the likes of Fontenelle, Voltaire, Du Bos, Du Marsais, Condillac, Diderot, d’Alembert and Rousseau each weighing into the debate. By the end of the seventeenth century dictionaries and grammars legitimised the popularity of the contention that French was the language of clarity, logic and precision, while the legacy of these ideas persisted in less obvious ways through discourses about French into Beckett’s day (Meschonnic, 1991; 1999). In rhythm and effect, the language of Comment c’est/How It Is is poetic, yet the “I” in the mud avows his discourse (or rather is made to avow it) to be the simple repetition of the “other above” and his “ancient voice.” Their altered transmission reflects his ill-hearing and ill-saying and not a conscious ordo artificialis: here then part one how it was before Pim we follow I quote the natural order more or less my life last state last version what remains bits and scraps I hear it my life natural order more or less I learn it I quote a given moment long past vast stretch of time on
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from there that moment and following not all a selection natural order vast tracts of time (3) In Comment c’est this sequence proceeds as “je cite l’ordre [...] dans l’ordre [...] l’ordre naturel” (2): temporal relations are reducible to a syntactical order. Indeed down below there is no light, darkness loses its relationship to light becoming an “impenetrable dark” (9): the “I” is cut off from the light above and all ‘natural’ cycles. Hence the foregrounding of syntax when with the ‘natural light’ of his own reason, an analytic order of language, the “I” below strives hopelessly to reach the discourse of the one above. Arnauld’s Port Royal Logic offered a less Rationalist account of mind and body than many post-Cartesians who, like Malebranche, extenuated Descartes’ philosophical categories, further dividing mind from body. Yet Beckett’s noting the Logic’s “Euclidean line of proof” refers to its prescription for how to translate Rationalist principles in practical life situations. The dogged logic of the narrator/narrated in Comment c’est/How It Is follows such a trajectory, and in an article of 1976 Frederick Smith detects parallels between Watt’s behaviour and the absurdity of the Logic’s prescriptions for rational everyday living. Smith admits that he has no direct evidence of Beckett reading the Port-Royal Logic, despite confirming that two editions of the original French (Lyon, 1671, and Amsterdam, 1685) and the second edition of Bayne’s English translation were on the shelves at Trinity College Dublin when Beckett was there (100). Arnauld’s Logic is, Smith argues, “the missing link” (100) between Beckett’s street-level comedy in Watt and the abstracted prose of seventeenth century philosophy and logic. Watt is a twentieth century anti-logic: “Watt is the caricature of Arnauld’s practical Cartesian and Beckett’s novel a handbook on how not to approach life” (101). In this context it may not only be Watt’s thinking, but his language which displays evidence of this Cartesian send-up. Like the narrator/narrated, he is prone to ungrammaticality and inversion (hyperbaton), yet this becomes literal in the extreme when Watt actually speaks his sentences in reverse, letter by letter. The tendency of Hibernian English to syntactic inversion sharpened Beckett’s ear to exactly this feature of language: on the 1st of December 1959, during the composition of Comment c’est, he wrote to Barbara Bray of his decision to adapt Robert Pinget’s La Manivelle into Irish English and not “decent English” because the task was impossible 195
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“without the help of Irish rhythms and inversions” (TCD MS 10948/1/60r). Beckett’s citation of the Port-Royal Logic and Geulincx in the same phrase of the “Philosophy Notes” does not prove that Beckett was familiar with the Logic. However, Beckett certainly did follow up an interest in Geulincx. Beckett’s first encounters with Geulincx and the Cartesians were through his friend from the Ecole Normale, and philosophical advisor, Jean Beaufret. Beckett wrote to MacGreevy that Beaufret “comes and talks abstractions every second day and déniche [unearths] books for me in the library” (Knowlson, 219). Beckett was intrigued enough by Geulincx to sit in the Long Room of the Trinity College Library in 1936 submerged in the Ethica, making copious notes before turning to Geulincx’s Questiones Quodlibeticae and Metaphyscia (see Uhlmann’s introduction to Beckett’s notes in Geulincx, 307). The fact that Beckett had followed up references to read Leibniz, Spinoza and Malebranche (Knowlson, 174; 219; and 334), after familiarising himself with their ideas in his philosophical survey (witnessed in the “Philosophy Notes”) demonstrates that Beckett was not only grounding himself in the philosophy of the period, but that he was deeply interested in it. The Jansenists are mentioned in the “Philosophy Notes” (TCD MS 10967/189r) and in Rachel Burrows’ notes to Beckett’s TCD MS lectures of 1931 (TCD MS MIC 60); their lived asceticism and learning would surely have appealed to Beckett’s sensibility, and he was clearly devoted to Pascal and Racine. There is a good chance that Beckett at least acquainted himself with the ideas and methodology of the Port Royal Logic; it was a seminal text of the period and one of the most popular books of philosophy in its day. Its philosophical system offered the skeleton upon which the Port Royal Grammar could lay its claim to the inherently logical order of French syntax, l’ordre naturel, and hence fix its grammar as universal. Yet, for Beckett to have had an understanding of the intersection between seventeenth century French philosophy of language and Rationalist ideas of the mind he need not have read Arnauld’s Logic and Grammar, for he could have gained an appreciation of the history of l’ordre naturel from many other sources than here discussed. The interdependence of categories of mind and language in seventeenth-century philosophy is manifested in certain allusions in Comment c’est/How It Is, those which amplify the rhetoric of the novel’s “geometric method.” This method shapes the desperate attempts of the “I” to organise his ‘thought,’ even infusing his diction 196
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with an aspiration towards the clarity and precision supposed to exist “above in the light.” Yet the “I” is estranged from its rational mind and condemned to its ill saying “de bribes,” “in bits and scraps.” The fallout from this striving is Beckett’s highly experimental poetic, an echo chamber of fundamental sounds and rhythms. This ‘order’ refuses to deliver from on high a classically balanced French sentence, as “ancient” as those of Molloy, or as syntactically regular as its “last state last version” in the early drafts of Comment c’est. Towards the end of his sustained reading of Enlightenment thought, Beckett wrote in the April-May 1938 edition of transition, “Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear” (289). I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from unpublished material. Notes 1. In a letter to Hugh Kenner, Beckett specified the voice to be not that of the narrator, but the “narrator/narrated” (Kenner, 94). 2. Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes” were taken from Archibald Alexander’s 1907 A Short History of Philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband’s 1902 edition of A History of Western Philosophy and John Burnet’s 1914 Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato. Notes on the Enlightenment period are drawn exclusively from Windelband. These notes became available in 2002 and are housed in the archives of Trinity College Dublin, and are described and introduced in their catalogue, Notes Diverse Holo (67-89). My quotations from the “Philosophy Notes” cite the TCD MS manuscript number (TCD MS 10967) followed by the page number (recto or verso). My initial research was facilitated by Matthew Feldman’s transcriptions from sections of the “Philosophy Notes,” and I sincerely thank Dr Feldman for generously making them available to me. It should be remembered that the archive does, however, offer a deficient picture of Beckett’s reading, knowledge and indeed note taking – the thick Descartes notebook to which Lawrence Harvey refers (34) is, for instance, lost. 3. This term is drawn from Robert Burton’s chapter “Democritus [Junior] to the Reader” in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1). Beckett’s close reading of this chapter is revealed in Beckett’s Dream Notebook. 4. P.J. Murphy believes the “I” below to exercise a certain liberation over the author-God through a poetic editing of that voice (62-75). Without denying the existence of a poetic in the text, I do not attribute it to the “I” below. My
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Anthony Cordingley reading ultimately diverges from Murphy’s through a different understanding of the novel’s conclusion; see my “Psychoanalytic Refuse in Beckett’s Comment c’est/How It Is.” 5. Beckett’s notes to Geulincx’s Ethics, also housed in the archives of the TCD MS library, have been recently translated into English and published together with the first English translation of the Ethics. 6. The irony of the claim is contained in its expression: “je le dis comme je l’entends” is anything but subject-verb-object.
Works Cited Ackerley, C. J., and S.E. Gontarski, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2006). Arnauld, Antoine and Claude Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660) (Menston: Scolar, 1967). –, and Pierre Nicole, La Logique, ou L’Art de penser (La Logique de PortRoyal) (1662) ed. P. Clair and F. Girbal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). Beckett, Samuel, “Denis Devlin,” transition, no. 27 (April-May 1938), 289. –, “On Murphy,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984), 113. –, Comment c’est, How It Is and / et L’image: A critical-genetic edition / Une édition critico-génétique, ed. Edouard Magessa O’Reilly (New York: Routledge, 2001). –, Letters to Barbara Bray, TCD MS 10948, Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Dublin Library. –, “Philosophy Notes,” TCD MS 10967, Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Dublin Library. Burrows, Rachel, “Notes to Samuel Beckett’s 1931 lectures on Gide and Racine,” TCD MIC 60, Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Dublin Library. Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. 1, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989). Cordingley, Anthony, “Psychoanalytic Refuse in Beckett’s Comment c’est/How It Is,” in The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal, ed. Caroline Hamilton et al. (Manchester: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Dowd, Garin, “Mud as Plane of Immanence in How It Is,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, 8.2 (1999), 1-28. Engelberts, Matthijs and Everett Frost, eds., SBT/A 16, “Notes diverse[s] holo; Catalogues of Beckett’s reading notes and other manuscripts at Trinity
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Beckett and “l’ordre naturel” College Dublin, with supporting essays” (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). Geulincx, Arnauld, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, trans. Martin Wilson, ed. Han Van Ruler, Anthony Uhlmann and Martin Wilson (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2006). Harvey, Lawrence, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). Kenner, Hugh, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Lausberg, Heinrich, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Annemiek Jansen, Matthew T. Bliss, David E. Orton., ed. David E.Orton & R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Malebranche, Nicolas, De la recherche de la vérité, ed. Geneviève RodisLewis. Vol. III. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1946-65). Meschonnic, Henri, Des mots et des mondes: dictionnaires, encyclopédies, grammaires, nomenclatures (Paris: Hatier, 1991). –, La langue française: Essai sur une clarté obscure (Paris: Hachette, 1997). Murphy, P.J., Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990). Pascal, Blaise, Œuvres, ed. Léon Brunschvicg and Pierre Boutroux, XVIII vols (Paris: Hachette, 1908-1925). Ricken, Ulrich, Grammaire et philosophie au siècle des lumières: Controverses sur l’ordre naturel et la clarté du français (Villeneuved’Ascq: Publications de l’Université de Lille III, 1978). Saenger, Paul, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). Smith, Frederick N, “Beckett and the Port- Royal Logic,” in Journal of Modern Literature 5.1 (1976), 99-108. Thurot, Charles, Notices et extraits des divers manuscrits latins pour servir à l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen âge, Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1964). Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, Remarques sur la langue françoise (1649), ed. A. Chassang, 2 Vols (Paris: Hachette, 1911). Windelband, Wilhelm, A History of Western Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts (London: Macmillan, 1893, 1910).
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BECKETT AND THE GERMAN LANGUAGE: Text and Image
Marion Fries-Dieckmann The significance of German, which is Beckett’s third language, is an as yet unconsidered issue in Beckett research. This article aims at illustrating Beckett’s affinities to German and his strong influence on the German translations of his works. I would like to argue that this is above all due to the transparency of the German lexicon. This becomes evident from Beckett’s own productions in Germany. Serving two levels of images – the images evoked by language and the images presented on stage – he deliberately plays text and image off against each other. Thus German holds a key position in his work.
As early as in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce,” Beckett admired the German language for its vividness, distinguishing it from his mother tongue. English “is abstracted to death. Take the word ‘doubt’: it gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, of static irresolution. Whereas the German ‘Zweifel’ does [...]” (1929, 15). Apart from its etymological root ‘zwei’ which means ‘two,’ it is also supported by the word’s syntactic structure of two syllables, Zwei-fel. I would like to argue that it is precisely this graphic nature of German that fascinated Beckett about the language and led him to master it as a second foreign language apart from French.1 From the fifties on, an important part of his work consisted of cooperating in the German translations of his work prepared by Elmar Tophoven. At the Schiller Theater in Berlin and the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart Beckett had the opportunity to direct them himself on stage and on screen. In his plays in particular, there are two pictorial levels at work: the concrete one on stage and the imaginative one evoked by language in the spectator’s mind. Beckett’s double role of director and author/translator in Germany thus leads to a negotiation of text and image. The first step in this paper will be a discussion of text and image or narrative and performance in drama in general and in Beckett’s work in particular. The prominence of image and imagery in his work has
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lately been of increasing importance in Beckett research. This is the background for a discussion of the so-called ‘transparency’ of the German lexicon from a linguistic point of view. Finally, this phenomenon will be illustrated with examples from the plays. They will show that the German language holds a key position in Beckett’s works and his poetics. Keir Elam is right in saying that in modern drama the relationship between text and image is “a complex dialectic rather than a matter of automatic reciprocal confirmation” (78). However, he confines himself to vaguely mentioning “contradiction” or “tension” between linguistic reference and kinesic signals. Manfred Pfister suggests a more applicable matrix of possible relationships of text and image which he calls identity, complementarity and discrepancy (44ff.). In classical drama, the text tends to be the primary means of expression, whereas the image serves to mirror what is presented verbally. Text and image are designed to be ‘identical.’ This synthesis, however, has no longer been solely valid since the early modern age. Each category tends to complement rather than reflect what is negotiated in the other one, and this goes for realistic drama in particular. The complementarity of text and image leads to an increase of expressivity. In the drama of the 20th century, text and image finally break apart. They work against each other deliberately, thus making perception difficult for the spectator. In Beckett’s plays the full matrix of relationships is at work. In Happy Days for instance, the identicalness of Haupttext and Nebentext (of text spoken and of the action as indicated in the stage directions) is astonishing: “[She takes up mirror.] I take up this little glass, shiver it on a stone – [does so] – I throw it away – [does so far behind her]” (1990, 154). This identicalness leads to an isolation of what unfolds on stage: a woman staging herself, as there is nothing else she could possibly do. What is far more common is complementarity of narrative and performance, the traditional relationship an audience is most used to. When Hamm fails to describe the world, it is Clov’s turn to say: “What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. [He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards Hamm.] Corpsed” (1990, 106). Thus the movement indicated in the stage direction leads to Clov’s final comment. The most striking and most innovative relationship in Beckett’s drama is discrepancy of text and image. This is evident from the famous end of both acts of Waiting for Godot, when Didi asks: “Well? Shall we go?” and Gogo affirms this proposal by replying “Yes, let’s go,” while the 202
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stage direction says “[They do not move]” (1990, 88). This discrepancy underlines the play’s topic: Didi and Gogo cannot act teleologically, they are sentenced to endless waiting. This characteristic of Beckett’s plays has widely been observed in terms of “dislocation” (Gontarski 1985, 175), “discrepancy” (Garner, 370), or “dissociation” (McMullan, 10f.). But it is not the clear-cut discrepancy as in the end of Waiting for Godot that is emblematic of all of the dramatic work. Rather, the fixed relationship of text and image is blurred, whereby text and image become identical and different at the same time. This ambiguity goes for Beckett’s later drama in particular. In A Piece of Monologue, the spectator is not sure whether what is narrated is related to what he sees on stage. Take the lamp on stage: is it the same the speaker talks of? In his narrative it keeps going out and is subsequently relit by him. On stage, however, the faint light of the lamp remains constant throughout the play. But the audience is deceived: the stage direction says “Thirty seconds before the end of speech lamplight begins to fail” (1990, 425). So on the one hand text and image seem to be identical, but on the other hand they remain different. The coexistence of those two levels of expression is what seemed to fascinate Beckett about drama in general.² In the last decade, the discovery of Beckett’s “German Diaries” and his love of painting has given rise to a wide interest in the pictorial quality of Beckett’s work.3 There are mainly two different lines of research: one pursuing a motif-orientated interest in singular paintings, the other looking into a constant structural pattern of pictorial procedures in Beckett’s works. The second line of research is particularly important here. The art historian Gaby Hartel shows that the more unreliable language becomes for Beckett, the more meaning shifts to pictorial means. This suggests a kind of painting with words, the same phrasing Lois Oppenheim uses in her book on Beckett’s dialogue with art. Both scholars concentrate on Beckett’s prose work. They agree that Beckett, having come to a dead end in his efforts to get beyond language,4 finds a way out by an – what Hartel calls – iconic use of language (13), a “plasticity of writing” (Oppenheim, 8). The images Beckett evokes in the readership’s mind are most often misleading and ambiguous. This is even more the case in drama, where there are two levels of images; the images evoked by language itself, and the images presented on stage. This is the core of the relation of text and image in Beckett’s drama: he plays both levels off against each other. 203
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For this venture the German language proved to be extremely suitable for Beckett. In 1931 he worked on a translation of Rimbaud’s poems Illuminations. In the poem “Barbare” he struggled with the leitmotif “douceurs” which the lyrical I repeatedly calls on. Finally, Beckett came up with a solution: “Mozart,” because “Zart in German had connotations of sweetness, and Mozart, for him, was sweet” (Bair, 124). Of course, it is more of a tongue-in-cheek solution; nevertheless, it shows Beckett’s attitude towards German: stripping down words into morphemes and thereby showing their very first etymological meaning. In comparison with English and French, the German lexicon tends to display meaning more openly and directly due to its historical development. As a result of the Norman conquest in 1066, English, which has its roots in the Germanic language just as German, was heavily influenced by French. In humanism, this French influence smoothed the way for an invasion of technical terms of Latin and Greek origin. As French is comparatively close to Latin, these words moved into English and settled down much more easily than in German. In most cases, these are single words which are not embedded in word fields. This phenomenon is called “dissociation.” Many words of dissociated languages are therefore ‘antisocial.’ Due to the expansion of the Roman Empire, French also belongs to the mainly dissociated langugages. In contrast to this, the German lexicon remained ‘socialized’ to a certain degree, as it was just marginally filtered by Latin and Greek. This is what linguists call consociation or a consociated language. So to a wide extent the German lexicon seems to be etymologically linked and relatively motivated. That means that in general the meaning of an item can quite easily be derived from the meaning of individual morphemes and the word formation pattern. From a linguistic point-of-view, this is called “transparency” of the lexicon (Leisi/Mair 1999, 52ff.). Beckett’s work and his notebooks clearly show that he was fascinated by the composition of German words and their etymology. His first prose works of the early 1930s are teeming with German compounds. An example from Dream of Fair to Middling Women would be “Augenblick” (1992, 74), which is the German word for ‘instant’ or ‘moment.’ It consists of two lexical morphemes: ‘Auge’ which means ‘eye’ and ‘Blick,’ which nowadays means ‘glance’ but in its etymology leads back to ‘flash.’ Thus “Augenblick” describes the interval between two blinks. It is no surprise that Beckett, who was very much concerned with perception in his works, would be fascinated 204
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by the graphic nature of this word. In the notebooks accompanying his travels through Germany in 1936/37 he also frequently noted down unfamiliar words which apparently struck him because of this quality, such as “wortkarg” (RUL MS 5006), the corresponding term for ‘taciturn’ which literally means ‘word-meagre’; or “Trübsinn” (RUL MS 5006, 47),5 a term for ‘gloom’ which literally means ‘dull-sense.’ A good example in all three languages relevant here is “Wortschatz.” The corresponding term in English and French would be ‘vocabulary’/’vocabulaire.’ They both derive from the Latin word ‘vocabulum’ for ‘expression.’ The German language provides two words for this: ‘Vokabular’ which is regarded as a foreign word and ‘Wortschatz,’ the native Germanic word. It consists of ‘Wort’ which means ‘word’ and ‘Schatz’ which means ‘treasure.’ This image must have appealed to the writer Beckett. In a notebook of 1934 he reflects on his methods of learning German by using the very language itself. He is clearly fascinated by compounds including ‘Wort-’: “So oft ich eine deutsche Unterhaltung führen will, werde ich meiner Wortarmut gewahr. Daher ist es klar, dass für mich das wichtigste ist, meinen Wortschatz zu vergrößern” (RUL MS 5002, 11; my emphasis). Analogous to the “treasure of words” he tries to achieve, he complains about his “Wortarmut,” ‘Armut’ meaning ‘lack’ or ‘poverty.’ This is clearly not an independent lexem of German but a Beckettian neologism. The use of both expressions show that Beckett clearly recognizes the mechanisms of compounding in German and that he is very much drawn to the pictorial quality of individual morphemes. Belacqua seems to express Beckett’s view in this case: “Scraps of German played in his mind in the silence that ensued; grand, old, plastic words” (191). A consociated language like German holds a plasticity and concreteness unknown to dissociated languages. Beckett’s fascination with German and its transparency is linked to his view of language in general. He mistrusts the unity of the signified and the signifier, and this should be even more the case for “transparent” signifiers. Any attempt to reproduce perception mimetically is doomed to failure. Beckett thwarts any mimesis between language and the world, and he does so by an inversion of the argument: just because German ‘seems’ to be closer to the signified, he uses it in particular to counteract the image on stage. Thus the audience undergoes a subtle de-automation of perception. In the early plays, Beckett mainly uses this phenomenon of transparency with a comical effect. In the second act of Waiting for 205
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Godot, the two tramps feel surrounded and Vladimir tells Estragon: “Your only hope left is to disappear.” When Estragon asks him where to disappear, the reply is: “Behind the tree” (1976, 182f.). In the German version, Didi’s advice to disappear (or “disparaître” in French) is rendered as “dich dünne machen,” which means exactly the same semantically. However, the German translation uses a figurative idiom, and in a literal sense “dich dünne machen” means ‘to make yourself thin.’ In view of Giacometti’s extremely meagre tree for the performance at the Odeon Theatre in Paris in 1961, which has influenced performances of Godot ever since, this is a very striking complementarity of text and image, as Gogo’s hiding is not successful at all. Often there is a more subtle use of images at work. In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp listens to his old self, reflecting on the past year: “a year of profound gloom” (1990, 220). In German, “gloom” is translated as “Schwermut” (1995, 161) which is fully eqivalent in its semantic core. But ‘Schwermut’ is a compound of ‘schwer’ and ‘Mut,’ ‘schwer’ meaning ‘heavy’ or ‘hard,’ and ‘-mut’ something like ‘disposition.’ In this sense, the text strongly supports the stage image: Krapp moves around with difficulty, and he sits hunched up over the tape recorder, pressed down by his past as if it were a heavy burden. In Beckett’s French translation, La dernière bande, there is simply an allusion to darkness: “une année on ne peut plus noire” (1960, 22). There is another instant of complementarity of text and image in Footfalls. Voice directs the spectator: “Watch how feat she wheels” (1990, 401). In view of the very first version of Footfalls where Beckett has this sentence as “Watch with what grace she wheels” (RUL MS 1552/1), it is quite clear that the final description “feat” is a resonance of the bodily feet May feels compulsed to hear. In addition, the speech rhythm of the sentence corresponds to the walking rhythm on stage: “Watch how feat she wheels.” The first German translation for ‘feat’ is ‘geschickt’ (1986, 57), meaning ‘dexterously.’ In Berlin then Beckett changes the script to ‘gewandt’: “Wie gewandt sie kehrtmacht” (1978, 69). It is a synonym of ‘geschickt,’ but at the same time it is the past participle of ‘wenden,’ which means ‘to turn.’ So the text itself again evokes what is shown on stage.6 References to the protagonist’s bodily disposition are frequent in Beckett’s plays. In Not I Mouth hastily remarks “whole body like gone ... just the mouth ... like maddened” (1978, 24). In German, this is “der ganze Körper wie weg ... bloß der Mund ... wie verrückt“ (1978, 25). 206
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The focus is on “bloß” and “verrückt.” “Bloß” not only means ‘just’ or ‘merely,’ it is also an adjective meaning ‘bare.’ Indeed, the mouth is bared on stage, it is the only part of the speaker’s body to be seen. In the same way, Beckett makes use of the etymology of “verrückt.” It is fully equivalent to “maddened.” In the literal sense, however, it also means ‘disarranged’ in space. Indeed that is what the spectator perceives on stage: a mouth disarranged and isolated from its body. But on the other hand, in her steady stream of words, Mouth is very much concerned with her body and her senses. Whereas the stage image very cleary shows this isolation, the text supports and contradicts it simultaneously. So there is both complementarity and discrepancy of text and image in this case. Obviously, Beckett could not transport this to his later French translation which otherwise proves to be highly influenced by the German version.7 It simply says: “tout le corps comme en allé ... rien que la bouche ... comme folle” (1978, 37). This correlation of text and image can also be seen in Footfalls. Woman’s Voice replies to her own rhetorical question whether May still sleeps at night: “Yes, some nights she does, in snatches [...]” (1990, 403). The French is even shorter: “Oui, certaines nuits, un petit somme” (1978, 80). In the first German translation, this way of sleeping “in snatches” is translated into German with the idiom “ab und zu,” meaning ‘now and then.’ Semantically, it is an idiom of time; etymologically, however, it is an idiom of space like “on and off” in English. When Beckett directed Footfalls in Berlin in 1976, he emphasized this double meaning even more. Thus, “ab und zu” was changed to “hin und wieder” which denotes just a slightly higher frequency of sleeping (Gontarski 1999, 319). Most importantly, though, “hin und wieder” hints much more transparently to the walking on stage: ‘Hin und her’ in German literally means ‘to and fro,’ and in choosing “hin und wieder” for the semantics of ‘now and then,’ Beckett succeeds in combining space and time, “wieder” also meaning ‘again.’ So there is a rich resonance of this description in German: the over and over repeated ritual of walking in space as a means to break its eternal continuity in time. This is also reflected by its double occurrence in the German text: “Ja, manchmal nachts schläft sie, hin und wieder. Hin und wieder.” The audience however feels that an end to walking is highly improbable. So text and image once more differ and match at the same time. This is even more interesting in view of what Beckett’s assistant in Berlin, Walter Asmus, reports one day before rehearsals started: Beckett told the actors that the walking up and down was the central 207
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image and his basic conception of the play. More importantly, the text was “only built up around this picture” (337). I am not sure if it is ‘only’ built up around the stage image, however. I would rather argue that Beckett’s plays achieve their spectacular effect by a changing interplay of text and image in particular. In Ohio Impromptu, the central sentence in the Reader’s narration is “With never a word exchanged, they grew to be as one.” This is also hinted at in the stage directions. They say about Reader and Listener: “[As alike in appearance as possible]” (1990, 425). Still, two distinct figures sit at the table on stage. What is even more disconcerting is that there is just one black hat at the centre of the table. So the congruence of text and image in the spectator’s perception is blurred. The French translation heads in the same direction, as the comparison is rendered as “comme un seul” (1986b, 65). It is even more the case in the German translation. It says: “Ohne je ein Wort zu wechseln, wurden sie gleichsam eins” (1986, 445). The comparison is of particular significance: “gleichsam eins.” ‘Gleichsam’ is a perfect (if more elaborate) equivalent to the adverb ‘as,’ consisting of the stem ‘gleich’ (which means ‘as’) and the suffix ‘-sam.’ At the same time, however, ‘gleich’ also means ‘alike’ in its form as an adjective. So the action described is doubly reflected in the German phrase, by ‘gleichsam’ and by ‘eins,’ which is the numeral ‘one.’ Thus, the central issue of Ohio Impromptu, that of identity and difference of the text read and the dramatic scene witnessed by the audience (O’Gorman 1988, 110) is additionally negotiated and even complicated on the text level of the German translation. Independently of the language in which Beckett’s plays are written or staged, there is a confusing relationship of text and image at work. This relationship is carried to extremes in the German translations. To a wide extent they seem to be appropriated into German, what Lawrence Venuti (1995) calls domestication (as opposed to foreignization). In fact, hoewever, in many cases this turns out to be a deliberate literal meaning. It aims at calling into mind the pictorial nature of phrases and expressions. This is what Beckett deliberately sets against the stage image. Therefore the German translations can be seen as a very special continuation of Beckett’s poetics. For him, there is just as little ground for believing in expression as such as for relying on the pictorial quality of language. So of course German is not at all closer to the “dahinterliegende Nichts,” the nothingness behind the signifier which Beckett calls up in his “German Letter” of 1937 (1983, 52). Interest208
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ingly enough, he deconstructs German on a level of morphology and lexicology, thereby making words function in a new way. This is above all evident from the plays in German and staged in Germany, as the images evoked by language collide with the image shown on stage. In this sense, the German language holds a key position in Beckett’s works. Notes 1. I have dealt elsewhere with Beckett’s methods of learning German (2005). 2. It is widely known that Beckett started off as a playwright in the late forties because of the claustrophobia of his last novel L’Innommable. He felt like creating “for a smaller space, one in which I had some control of where people stood or moved [...]” (Brater, 4). During rehearsals of Endspiel in Berlin in 1967 he underlined the significance of the stage image by comparing writing drama to playing chess (Haerdter, 91). 3. Occasionally, it has been dealt with before. Cf. Judith Dearlove, Christa E. Johannes, Manfred Smuda, James Acheson. 4. Interestingly enough, Beckett writes his most programmatic piece of work in German: the ‘German Letter’ to Axel Kaun in 1937. 5. I would like to thank the Beckett Estate and the Beckett International Foundation for permission to quote from unpublished material stored in the Beckett Collection of Reading University Library (RUL). 6. The French version renders the movement as a more mechanized process with no subject and verb: “Avec quel chic le demi-tour!” (1978, 79). 7. Tophoven reports that he and Beckett had difficulties in rendering “sudden flash” into German (1988, 37). They gladly accepted Klaus Birkenhauer’s proposal who was Beckett’s first German biographer. It was: “plötzlich klar” as ellipsis of “plötzlich wurde mir alles klar” (suddenly it all became clear to me). A couple of months later, when Beckett had finished his French translation, Tophoven asked him out of curiosity how he had rendered this phrase in French. Beckett seemed to have been embarrassed, admitting that is was “brusque illumination.” Apparently, he compensated for the much longer phrase by using the historical present instead of past tense.
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Marion Fries-Dieckmann Works Cited Acheson, James, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice (New York: MacMillan, 1997). Asmus, Walter D., “Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P 1986), 335-49. Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Harcourt Brace, 1978). Beckett, Samuel, “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 3-22. –, Notebook of 1934, RUL MS 5002, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Notebook of 1936, RUL MS 5006, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, La dernière bande (Paris: Minuit, 1960). –, Manuscript of Footfalls, RUL MS 1552/1, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. –, Warten auf Godot/En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976). –, Stücke und Bruchstücke. Englische und französische Originalfassungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). –, “German Letter of 1937,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 5154. –, Werke, Bd. I – V (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986a). –, Catastrophe et autres dramaticules (Paris: Minuit, 1986b). Brater, Enoch, “Introduction: The Origins of a Dramatic Style,” in Beckett at 80 – Beckett in Context (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 3-10. Dearlove, Judith, Accomodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Non-Relational Art (Durham/N.C.: Duke UP, 1982). Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London & New York: Methuen, 1983). Fries-Dieckmann, Marion, “Beckett lernt Deutsch: The Exercise Books,” in Der unbekannte Beckett: Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur, ed. Therese Fischer-Seidel and Marion Fries-Dieckmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 208-23. Garner, Stanton B., “Visual Field in Samuel Beckett’s Late Plays,” in Comparative Drama 21 (1987/88), 349-73. Gontarski, S.E., The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). Gontarski, S.E., The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV (New York: Grove P, 1999).
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Beckett and the German Language: Text and Image Haerdter, Michael, “Samuel Beckett inszeniert das Endspiel: Bericht von den Proben der Berliner Inszenierung 1967,” in Materialien zu Becketts Endspiel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 36-111. Hartel, Gabriele, “... the eyes take over ...”: Samuel Becketts Weg zum ‘gesagten Bild’ (Trier: WVT, 2004). Johannes, Christa E., Relationships Between Some Abstract Expressionist Painting and Samuel Beckett’s Writing (Diss., University of Athens, Georgia, 1974). Leisi, Ernst, and Christian Mair, Das heutige Englisch: Wesenszüge und Probleme (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999). O’Gorman, Kathleen, “The Speech Act in Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu,” in ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works, ed. Robin J. Davis, Lance St. J. Butler (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 108-19. Oppenheim, Lois, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000). McMullan, Anna, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (New York/London: Routledge, 1993). Pfister, Manfred, The Theory And Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). Smuda, Manfred, “Kunst im Kopf – Becketts späte Prosa und das Imaginäre,” in Samuel Beckett, ed. Hartmut Engelhardt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1984), 211-35. Tophoven, Elmar, “Dreiunddreißig Jahre Vergegenwärtigung Beckettscher Werke,“ in Beckett und die Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. Martin Brunkhorst, Gerd Rohmann, Konrad Schoell (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988), 26-40. Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
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“WHAT A MALE!”: Triangularity, Desire and Precedence in “Before Play” and Play
Rónán McDonald This essay examines the erotic triangle and Girardian ideas of ‘mimetic desire’ in Play and in a short, seemingly abandoned, draft held in the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, dubbed in Beckett’s hand, “Before Play” (clearly a precursor to the later version). It examines the various, often conflicting modes of triangularity and considers discourses of class and gender in both plays. It specifically considers why Beckett decided to abandon the onewoman/two-men triangle of “Before Play” for the one-man/two-women triangle of all the later drafts.
In married life three is company and two none. (Oscar Wilde)
The concept of ‘mimetic desire’ is associated with René Girard, one of the most well-known theorists of the erotic triangle. In his early work Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961), Girard challenges the notion that desire is autonomous, a linear relationship between the subject who desires and the object that is desired. He asserts, instead, the existence of a ‘mediator,’ a third party who demonstrates the desire that the subject then goes on to imitate. People may assume the privileged independence of their own aspirations and ambitions, but the supposed autonomy of desire is illusory. We don’t originate our own desires, we mimic the desires of others. Mediators can come from stories and books, such as Don Quixote’s efforts to live up to the codes of chivalric romances or Emma Bovary’s yearning for the sensual life of the romantic heroines in her novel-reading. These examples involve ‘external’ mediators – there is imitation, but no conflict of interest. When the gap between the desirer and his model is close enough for
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rivalry, namely when the subject and mediator desire the same object, Girard calls it ‘internal’ mediation. This is the basis of the love triangle. The rival in love does not simply intrude in the desire of the lover for the beloved, but is powerfully formative of that desire. The idea that desire in general thrives on obstacles and withers with satiation is a familiar one. Schopenhauer is perhaps the most prominent philosophical influence on Beckett to have elaborated a pessimistic version. However, while theories of the insatiability and hence the vanity of human desire are commonplace in Beckett criticism, the particular case of the love triangle has been less often considered. That the third party in the love triangle might be a stimulus for love, precisely because she or he is an obstacle, resonates with the wider credo that desire in general is enflamed by being thwarted. Even as early as Proust, Beckett recognises that sexual desire needs an impediment to persist, that love “can only co-exist with a state of dissatisfaction, whether born of jealousy or its predecessor – desire” (55). Murphy experiments playfully with the idea, providing us not with a triangle but with a hexagon: Of such was Neary’s love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a FlightLieutenant Ellman, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs West of Passage, who loved Neary. (7) The notion that love needs an obstacle is a venerable one. Sigmund Freud in a 1912 essay writes “It can easily be shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido” (256). Or, as Yeats more simply puts it, “love / Will hardly seem worth thinking of / To passionate women if it seem / Certain” (105). In Play, when love comes to seem uncertain, marital eroticism is given an immediate and sudden boost; desire, no longer resting in dormant certainty, shudders into life. On first hearing the news of her husband’s infidelity, W1 has just this reaction: “I confess my first feeling was one of wonderment. What a male!” (149). M becomes instantly more desirable to W1 when there is a rival for his affections, notwithstanding the anger and jealousy she also shows. 214
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For all the disdainful words that pass between the rivals in an erotic triangle they have enough in common to desire the same lover. This leads to a mutual fascination. For Girard, the rivals do not simply get in each other’s way, theirs is as intense and potent a bond as that which links either of them to the beloved. Jealousy is a sign of this bond, mixed with rivalry and regard. Girard claims of the jealous person, Comme toutes les victimes de la médiation interne, celui-ci se persuade aisément que son désir est spontané, c’est-à-dire qu’il s’enracine dans l’objet et dans cet objet seulement. Le jaloux soutient toujours, pars conséquent, que son désir a précédé l’intervention du médiateur. Il nous présente celui-ci comme un intrus, un fâcheux, un terzo incommode qui vient interrompre un délicieux tête-à-tête. La jalousie se ramènerait donc à l’irritation que nous éprouvons tous lorsqu’un de nos désirs est accidentellement contrarié. La véritable jalousie est infiniment plus riche et plus complexe que cela. Elle comporte toujours un élément de fascination à l’égard du rival insolent. (20-21) W1’s visits to W2 – first to scream, then to gloat – indicate the element of fascination, even of dependence. The two women, as we shall see, have an intense preoccupation with each other and are continually brought into alignment through a range of textual devices and dramatic techniques. Another important way in which both Play and “Before Play” reflect the notion of mimetic desire is the investment both plays have in social class and status. Play has a distinctly Home-Counties English, class-ridden atmosphere, where characters have butlers, take holidays in the Riviera or “our darling Grand Canary” (150) and languish in morning rooms. A resonance is established between social and sexual rivalry, as when W1 comments, “She had means, I fancy, though she lived like a pig” (155). For Girard snobbery and status-awareness are profoundly subject to the mediations of mimetic desire: “La structure triangulaire n’est pas moins apparente dans le snobisme mondain que dans l’amour-jalousie. Le snob, lui aussi, est un imitateur. Il copie servilement l’être dont il envie la naissance, la fortune ou le chic […]. Le snob n’ose pas se fier à son jugement personnel, il ne désire que les objets désirés par autrui” (31). Just as Play caricatures a familiar 215
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domain of middle class infidelity, it also plays around with clichéd representations of social one-upmanship and petty material stratification. A resonance is clearly established between the two modes of bourgeois competitiveness and status anxiety. Social hierarchy is even more fundamental a concern in “Before Play,” not just in terms of class but also in recognisable notions of competitive masculinity. As so often with Beckett’s early drafts, this text is less abstract and ambiguous, more set in the ‘real world’ than the finished product it would eventually become. Therefore the investment in social class is more overt and specialised than in Play, though also jaded and cliché-ridden. The characters in “Before Play” are more caricatured and easily distinguishable but, crucially, the love triangle here is not between a man and two women but between a woman and two men. The male-female-male adulterous triangle draws on a specific discourse of male hierarchy and rivalry which, while Beckett experiments with its comic and dramatic potential here, the later play abandons. The erotic triangle is a highly gendered construct, a dimension which Girard tends to eschew in his account of its imitative mechanisms. In his model, mediation and mimesis occurs regardless of the gender of the love objects. He has been criticised for this abstraction by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who argues that the gendered aspects of the erotic triangle are tremendously tied up with deployments of power. “Girard’s reading,” she says, presents itself as one whose symmetry is undisturbed by such differences as gender; although the triangles that most shape his view tend, in the European tradition, to involve bonds of ‘rivalry’ between males ‘over’ a woman, in his view any relation of rivalry is structured by the same play of emulation and identification, whether the entities occupying the corners of the triangle be heroes, heroines, gods, books or whatever. (23) Sedgwick argues that ignoring the male/female dichotomy fails to represent the asymmetry of power relations that fuel triangular desire (22). She introduces the concept of male homosocial desire, with which she examines the structure of men’s relations with other men. For Sedgwick, the interactivity of sexuality, power relations and gender asymmetry structures male homosocial bonds, by which she means a self-consciously gender-exclusive bonding that can range from the 216
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homosexual to the homophobic. The point is that the male-female-male triangle is tremendously permeated by gendered power relations, such that the closeness between the two rivals often has a power-mediated intimacy which is not the case in the female-male-female triangle. This may be one of the reasons why male-female-male adultery narratives so often generate homo-erotic overtures between the two competing men, as if by sharing the same woman they gain carnal knowledge of each other by proxy. One might cite as dramatic examples within Beckett’s own sphere of affinity James Joyce’s Exiles (1918) and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1976), though examples are legion in narratives of the adulterous woman. It may have been to escape this trope that Beckett chose to abandon the two men, one woman model. While it is true that, as James Knowlson observes, the “only too familiar relationship” of a man, his wife and his mistress has long formed “the staple diet of much domestic drama or light comedy” (112), it is also the case that choosing this gender arrangement, as opposed to the one originally conceived, effects an escape from a heavy weight of literary precedent. The arrangement in Play may evoke the clichés of popular melodrama, but it is the male rivalry of “Before Play” that is vastly more common in the history of canonical literature from the Medieval figure of the cuckold to the nineteenth-century novels of adultery like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Fontane’s Effi Briest (the latter alluded to in Krapp’s Last Tape and All That Fall). In speculating why Beckett abandoned the idea of a male-female-male love triangle, Maurice Blackman simply suggests that “Beckett had probably decided that there was better comic potential in the bitchiness of two jealous females; perhaps also his parodic intentions were better served by being able to use the ‘other woman’ trope” (93). This is surely too brisk a judgement, under-estimating as it does the ‘push’ factors away from the male rivalry, the weight of homo-social precedence that Beckett may have been trying to avoid. Furthermore, if Beckett deploys the stereotype of the ‘other woman,’ it is not simply to exploit and confirm it, but rather to disorientate and subvert it through exaggeration and anomaly. The tired and farcical role-playing of the three characters reveals the emptiness of their histrionics; if the play deploys a familiar trope it places it in such an unlikely context that it defamiliarizes and destabilizes it. Beckett derives the comedy here not from reinforcing a sexist stereotype, but precisely by revealing its banality and performativity. 217
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The draft we have of “Before Play” is too short to see how the relationships between the three characters might have developed and how the homosocial theme might have been handled had Beckett pursued this line of approach. We can say, however, that there is already a far greater sense of scapegoating aimed at the adulteress in this play compared to the adulterer in the later play. The light here that goads the speakers into utterance comes from three fixed spotlights (the idea of a single spot operating as a kind of interrogator doesn’t come until the seventh draft of the later play) and of the three characters only Nickie (the woman) complains about it as a violation, only she expresses her desire to go back into the dark. This reinforces the sense that she is penetrated by the light, that it violates her in a sexual way. Her attitude towards the light is reflected in the attitude that both men take towards her, scapegoating her for their misfortunes and vilifying her in physical terms. If, in a sense, M in Play gains in social prestige as a result of his adultery (“What a male!”), the role of adulteress lacks any of the glamour of virility or potency that the unfaithful male accrues. The adulteress, unlike the adulterer, is associated with shame, wantonness and the violation of social taboos. She is far more of a threat to the social order and this is one of the reasons why she has been such an obsessive source of literary interest. “Before Play” is steeped in literary associations exclusive to the betrayed husband. To begin with, Syke, the husband of Nickie, bears some resemblances to the recognisable literary tradition of the cuckold. (It is significant that this word, like the concepts of virility and potency, does not traditionally transfer genders.) The playlet we have is pervaded by caricature. Conk, Syke’s rival, is a parody of the man-about-town, whereas Syke belongs to a comically deployed stereotype of roast-beef-and-pudding Englishness. He speaks of his education at Oxford colleges and his military service, presumably during the second world war: Syke: Jesus . . . Brasenose . . . you know . . . one of those kips . . . simple soul . . . beef mostly . . . but not all … no . . . some grey . . . All Souls . . . God knows . . . you know . . . usual thing . . . reading . . . reading . . . midnight oil . . . all that . . . normal . . . yes I suppose so . . . nothing abnormal . . . not really . . . open air . . . bird lover . . . ringing pipits . . . healthy appetites . . . beer . . . women . . . moderation . . . keep in form . . . usual thing . . . then on . . . on from there . . . pro patria . . . Horace . . . charmed life . . . 218
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down in flames . . . usual show . . . permanent limp . . . then on . . . on from there . . . poultry . . . His investment in being a simple soul, in his “healthy appetites” contrasts with a rather effete interest in bird-watching. His patriotism (“pro patria”) and valour make him a manly airforce pilot but the resultant limp after being shot down is a permanent reminder (à la Lord Chatterley) of lost virility. He speaks laboriously, as indeed M in Play sometimes does, both because of the pressure of the light but also in imitation of a taciturn old military officer. At the same time, it indicates a lack of verbal eloquence and a stammering inertia that is reflected in his life decision to go to Scotland to run a chicken farm: Syke: usual stuff . . . grand life . . . no regrets . . . no desires . . . not really . . . odd spree . . . keep in form . . . hobby wagtails . . . then this bitch . . . wonder where she’s now . . . lying with some poor bastard . . . I suppose so . . . fornicating in a bath . . . under water . . . before breakfast . . . never liked it . . . not really . . . my sweet love . . . my one love . . . my – That he did not like “fornicating in a bath before breakfast” reinforces our sense of a distracted, domesticated and passionless man, though the thought of his wife engaging in the same activity with another inspires, in typically mimetic fashion, his rapturous “my sweet love . . . my one love . . ..” The three figures on stage are in three white boxes and form a highly contrasting triptych, unlike the faces of Play, “so lost to age and aspect as to almost seem part of urns” (147). The three faces in the earlier drafts are so differentiated as to exceed caricature and enter cartoon. Syke is “bald, florid, plump with a very long 18” absolutely horizontal blonde moustache.” Conk is his opposite: “Blue-pale, sleek black hair, long profoundly drooping black moustache,” Nickie, the scarlet woman, is red-headed with “milky complexion, full red lips, green earrings.” While Syke is diffident, lame and retreating, Conk is urbane, sophisticated, accomplished, arrogant, and wealthy. He is a grotesque parody of the playboy or man-about-town and a person of no small self-regard: Conk: All that a man could wish to have I had, rank, looks, health, brains, charm, wit, French, humour, good humour, private means, 219
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a place in town, two outside, one inland, the other not – and with all that the power to please. Women I won unwooed weekly, men jostled for the title to call me Conk, children and animals flocked to me on sight, Pharaoh’s chicken has guzzled from my hand. All then went tolerably, no complaints, until the day I met that carrothaired slut. Pharaoh’s chicken, or the Egyptian Vulture, feeds mainly on carrion, a significant image for a man who preys on the wives of others. Bird imagery is deployed repeatedly and variously in this early draft, a motif which is more submerged in the published play but which nonetheless endures in W2’s description of the light as “pecking” (152) and W1’s mention of “our darling Grand Canary” (150). Nickie is the greatest victim of the three but part of the reason for her scapegoating by the two men is precisely her power over them. In a fragment full of heavy symbolism, this power is twice indicated, in phallic terms, by her putting a key in a door (Syke, we might notice, is an anagram of the word ‘keys’, while Nickie’s name has it as a second syllable). Unlike the later play, where the narrative section joins the triangle when the relationships are already underway, “Before Play” describes the moment when each man falls for Nickie. In both cases, significantly, the moment is accompanied by the death or toppling of a bird. She meets Syke at an auction where, ornithologically obsessive as ever, he is gazing at a stuffed owl. “I heard the thud of the hammer and the word. . . Gone! (Pause) Under this sign our bliss was born.” Conk’s realisation of love is related at the end of the draft. He is driving Nickie home and she commands him to stop the car: Conk: In a few moments she was back, with something in her hands. I switched on the roof light and saw it was a bird. A sparrow, she told me later, when it died. She put it down between her breasts and held it there from the outside, I mean she didn’t put her hand down with it. What are your plans for that? I said. She turned and looked at me. (Pause.) Was it then I was – fleshed? (Pause.) In the end I put out the light and drove on. We stood together at the foot of the steps. The street lamps went out. She asked me to take the key from her bag and put it in her hand, then hang the bag on her arm.
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Taking the key from Conk looks very like a symbolic castration. This is when he falls for her, when he looses his erstwhile self-assurance and the effortless fascination he exerts on both women and men and becomes, instead, beholden to her. This is the power she gains over him, that will lead him to excoriate her as a “carrot-haired slut.” He has ceased to be a demi-god and become instead a vulnerable man (“Was it then I was − fleshed”). What then of the wounded sparrow? Rosemary Pountney is surely right in suggesting that the sparrow here recalls the abandoned birdlover, Syke, just as the bird’s injury paralles Syke’s war wound. “Nestling the wounded sparrow in her breast both marks Nickie’s divided allegiance and, paradoxically, is the cause of Conk’s subjugation to her” (89). So again, the spark of Conk’s desire is mimetic, inspired by the nurturing of the bird which symbolises his predecessor. Imitative desire, à la Girard, blends itself to rivalry. Mimetic desire also underlies the relationships in Play itself. In early drafts of Play, like in “Before Play,” three separate spotlights are used. The idea of having a single mobile spot, “swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required” (158) is usually considered by critics as a way of emphasising the interrogative function of the light, the idea that it is a tormenting inquisitor, almost a character in its own right. Another function of a single light, however, might be to emphasise the triangular relationships. A single light, creating the impression of fleeting, luminary protractor, identifies the shifting triangularity of the relationships in a way that three fixed spots would not. The stage direction that when the three characters speak together at once a single spot should divide into three, creates a similar impression in that it creates a visual of effect of three triangles. Structurally the play deploys the tripartite model in numerous interconnected modes. The stage itself is like a sculpted triptych. The three types of speech – which Beckett labelled Chorus (when all three speak together at the start of their story), Narration (the story of the love triangle) and Meditation (the pained reflection on the role of the lights itself) – form an auditory equivalent. One way of understanding the erotic triangle is to see the third party as getting in-between the two figures in the relationship, the third person in the marriage. This, on the most obvious level, is what W2, the “other woman” does in the marriage of M and W1. The apex, from this point of view, is a point of intrusion. However, as we turn the triangle around on its axis, we can also see that this is what WI does to the relationship of M and WII. She 221
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intrudes, most literally as she turns up at W2’s house, into the love affair between M and his mistress. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, M ‘intrudes’ into the relationship between W 1 and W2: he is the reason they are in contact, but also the point of opposition between them, the principle of their antagonism. The first nine utterances of the ‘narrative’ section, reproduce this structure. These speeches, in three groups of three, run W1, W2, M; W2, W1, M; W2, M, W1. But another way of viewing the apex of the triangle is not as getting between the other two corners but rather as bringing them together, allowing or enabling a cohesion between the two. Fascination with the rival intensifies passion, à la Girard; rivalry and antipathy, the effort to exclude that other, brings the two remaining parties closer together. Though she has won her husband back, W1 still feels the need to invoke her rival. It is as if the third party, for all the threat she poses, is a glue which keeps the marriage together. The impediment W2 poses paradoxically keeps W1’s desire alive, rather than allowing it to run dormant through satiation. This may be why W1 brings up her rival as she lies in bed with her husband: M: At home all heart to heart, new leaf and bygones bygones. I ran into your ex-doxy, she said one night, on the pillow, you’re well out of that. Rather uncalled for, I thought. I am indeed, sweetheart, I said, I am indeed. God what vermin women. Thanks to you, angel, I said. (151) In its conflict between what M says to W1 and what he thinks to himself, this speech articulates over-lapping triangles, one based on cooperation, the other on conflict. The apex of the triangle keeps the other two corners apart, but it also keeps them together. W1 wants to deploy W2 here as a scapegoat whose vilification will bring her closer to her husband (“I am indeed, sweetheart”). In this case W2, occupying the apex, acts as unifier between M and W1. But W1’s efforts backfire and instead make her husband think of an alternative triangle, one in which W1 has come between himself and W2. In this triangle W1, occupying the apex, acts as the divider. Hence the irony in that final sentence: “Thanks to you angel, I said.” M is reminded that W1 has disrupted his relationship with W2, a realisation that pushes him back towards the latter. So, again, the other party (in this case W1), is simultaneously the 222
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impediment and the incentive for the relationship between M and W2, just as W2 has been the impediment and the unifier between M and W1. The desires of W2 and W1 for the same man reciprocally reinforce and strengthen each other, leaving that element of threat and incomplete fulfilment that allows eroticism to endure. This mutuality between the two women creates, in its turn, strong bonds of rivalry and fascination. This connection creates another triangle – perhaps the most fundamental one – with the two women at the base and M at the apex. This is, precisely, the vivid image that M conjures during the meditation, when he fantasises of how the three might have spent time together in a dinghy, “A little dinghy, on the river, I resting on my oars, they lolling on air-pillows in the stern” (156). It is the presence of the oars, here, which makes the analogy with the geometric shape so striking, as if an actual triangle has been shaped. Of course, more obviously, the very shape of the stage layout, with M between the two women, evokes this triangle too.1 The first movement of the fixed spot, at the start of the narrative section, goes immediately from W1 to W2 as they are the first to speak as individuals. So the light forms an immediate triangle with the two women at the base and the man in the centre. That WI’s desire for M is based on a possible imitation of W2’s is reinforced not only by her initial response to M’s revelation of his affair to which I have already referred – “What a male!” – but also by the fact that this response is sandwiched between two speeches by W2 so the swivelling light reinforces the link not between W1 and the object of her mimetic desire, but rather between W1 and W2. There are many moments in the play which reinforce the dramaturgical connectedness between the two women. W1 threatens to kill both herself and W2, but not M. “[H]e stinks of bitch” (148) screams W1 to W2, rather bitchily (changed from “he stinks of you” in an early draft.) They share not just a sexual partner but also his echoed words of deceptive reassurance. Underneath these words, lurks those misogynistic thoughts – “God what vermin women” (151) – that also brings the two women into closer alignment. As already suggested, one of the reasons that Beckett jettisoned the idea of continuing with the man-woman-man triangle of “Before Play” could have been that this misogyny seems more balanced, less bullying, in a context where there are two women and one man. Elsewhere in the meditation, M alludes to shared interests and similarities between the two women “Perhaps they meet, and sit, over a cup of that green tea they both so loved, without 223
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milk or sugar not even a squeeze of lemon” [my emphasis] (154); “Perhaps they have become friends,” he ponders, “Perhaps sorrow has brought them together” (153). Even though we can see that M’s fantasies of a friendship between the two women are mistaken, there are nonetheless many signs of posthumous rapprochement as each in the trio imagines the other two together and feels pity for them. The lessening of distinction and differentiation that occurs as the play reaches its end gives a sense of the three coming together as they build up for a return to the Chorus. The characters now reveal vulnerability and perplexity as they seek to articulate their current situation, in contrast to the swagger they displayed in the narrative section. This increase in ambiguity, this levelling, has been anticipated in the initial stage directions towards tonelessness and indistinction of voice and aspect. It is, of course, very far from the caricatured love triangle of “Before Play.” The play itself went through ten drafts before Beckett successfully achieved the ambiguity of tone and musicality of structure of the finished version. The male-female-male triangle of his first foray comes too freighted with literary precedent. And the efforts at symmetry and balance are therefore much harder to achieve. The homosocial mechanisms whereby the woman is scapegoated for the social disruption of the adultery shadow even the short text that exists. The misogyny of Conk and Syke makes Nickie seem more of a victim than them, an impression reinforced by the vocal torment the shining spotlight causes her. The misogynistic remarks of M, by contrast, are softened by his minority status; and blunted also by the vilification that the two women heap on each other. There is a sort of reciprocity here that better facilitates the move towards musical shape and the spare, spectral dramatic situation that so effectively contrasts with the clichéridden banality of the adultery the three speakers describe. I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from unpublished material. Notes 1. A plan for a play in a Not I notebook in Trinity College Dublin (TCD MS 4664), written just after the completion of Play, reinforces the reading of the two women as the base of the triangle with the man at the apex. In this plan the two women (B and C) sit upstage centre and the man (A) downstage right.
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Triangularity, Desire and Precedence in “Before Play” and Play There are three chairs forming a triangle on-stage that unifies the women and separates the man.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, “Before Play,” RUL MS 1227/7/16/6, Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. −, Murphy (London: Calder, 1963). −, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965). –, Play, in The Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). Blackman, Maurice, “The Shaping of a Beckett Text: Play,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (1985), 87-107. Freud, Sigmund, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works [The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 7] (London: Penguin, 1991), 243-60. Girard, René, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961). Knowlson, James and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979). Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). Pountney, Rosemary, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956-76: From All That Fall to Footfalls with Commentaries on the Latest Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988). Yeats, W.B., “Never Give All Heart,” in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992).
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“ALBA” AND “DORTMUNDER”: Signposting Paradise and the Balls-aching World
Sean Lawlor “Alba” and “Dortmunder” were “written above an abscess and not out of a cavity, a statement and not a description of heat in the spirit to compensate for pus in the spirit.” (Beckett to MacGreevy, 18 October 1932) This paper explores the nature of this abscess and the way in which Beckett constructs his statements by linking obscured allusions to create a coherent and convincing hinterland for the poems.
I admit Beatrice” he said kindly “and the brothel, Beatrice after the brothel or the brothel after Beatrice, but not Beatrice in the brothel, or rather, not Beatrice and me in bed in the brothel.” (Beckett 1992, 102)
Much of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (hereafter Dream) is a picaresque account of the “incoherent reality of the individual” (Dream, 101) which for Belacqua arises from his difficulty in reconciling love and sex, and which, for a Cartesian, might arise from the “exceptional relation” in man’s nature which, as Beckett noted, “consists in the inner union, metaphysically incomprehensible, of two heterogeneous substances, mind and body” (TCD MS 10967, 305). This Cartesian duality of “the conscious and the spatial” (ibid.) derives from Aristotle’s discussion of the relation between the body and soul in De Anima, with which Beckett was familiar from his reading of Dante’s De Monarchia (91-92). While Aristotle and Descartes acknowledge the “inner union” of these heterogeneous substances, Beckett, by reimagining them as Beatrice, Dante’s muse and mentor (ideal and spiritual), and a maison publique (real and corporeal), creates the dilemma of incompatibility from which much of the humour in Dream arises. This dilemma is addressed more seriously in the poems “Alba” and “Dortmunder.” “Alba” explores a transcendent love which seems to
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promise paradise, “Dortmunder” an earthier commercial transaction. The distinction is underscored by “Alba’s” insistent use of the second person of invocation and by the way it transforms the real Ethna MacCarthy into the idealised Beatrice, whereas “Dortmunder” seems to describe an actual encounter with a prostitute, invested with the seductive charms of Circe, objectified in the third person. Both poems share a similar structure. “Alba” is divided on the page into three sections: anticipation; some sort of consummation (musically denoted); a transformative disappointment. “Dortmunder” echoes this structure, although the divisions are not formally marked. Following “Alba,” as it does in Echo’s Bones, “Dortmunder” is an example of the brothel after Beatrice, one of the possible solutions for the incoherence of reality because it avoids the “simultaneity of incoherence” that the coalescence of love and sex would represent.1 Both poems also draw much of their power from allusions, advertised by the iconic use of proper names – Dante in “Alba,” Homer, Habbukuk and Schopenhauer in “Dortmunder” – but also obscured by the way they are woven into the fabric of the poems, to create a strange, “eirenic” language (Wheatley, 171) which is absolutely convincing but teasingly unclear. In this paper, I shall explore how these quotations and allusions, whether goods declared or segrette cose (Inferno III, 21 and “Enueg I,” line 4) provide a kind of ‘back-story’ which locates the loves described in Beatrice’s heavenly abode or in the brothel. In “Alba,” the first two words justify the title. It is an alba or dawn song and it is precisely located in time, just as it will come to occupy a specific location in space. The second person (optative or subjunctive) of invocation gives it a peculiar hieratic quality. John Pilling’s note on “loci that shall never be co-ordinate” in The Dream Companion also applies here: “The use of ‘shall’ where ‘will’ might have been more usual indicates a determination to achieve the ‘impossible’ end imagined, and also introduces a kind of biblical authority.” (45) before morning you shall be here and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries and the branded moon beyond the white plane of music that you shall establish here before morning (Beckett 2002, 17) 228
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Although we know that Ethna MacCarthy is the inspiration for the Alba, the second line associates the addressee with Beatrice as she and Dante pass into the sphere of the moon (Paradiso II), and the vision of the Logos, as the mystery of human and divine nature united in a single essence, is anticipated. (The actual vision of the Logos2 is reserved for the final canto, after Dante has passed through all the strata of the heavenly spheres and has had all the mysteries explained to him by Beatrice.) Granted these Dantean antecedents, the “white plane of music” is very likely an allusion to the music of the spheres which is first heard by Dante in Canto I of the Paradiso. The Pythagorean origins of the music of the spheres is explained in the ScartazziniVandelli edition’s notes on these lines, which as Daniela Caselli has shown, was familiar to Beckett (Caselli 2001, 1-20). The Paradiso, the most austere and intellectual of the three cantiche contains some of the Commedia’s most sensuous imagery and this is subverted by Beckett to fashion an extraordinary hymn of sexual expectation. Repetition, assonance and consonance, prominent features of this poem, are used in the first section to contribute to this incantatory ambience. The opening and closing lines of the section are quasi-palindromic, stating time, person, place, then restating person, place, time. They call to mind Schopenhauer’s manifestation of the Will in accordance with the three forms of space, time and causality (Ackerley and Gontarski, 511). A great deal of Dantean baggage, then, is bundled into the opening section of “Alba” but the tone is so assured that, to borrow a phrase from Parodi’s commentary on Canto II of the Paradiso, Beckett, like Dante, achieves a “sense of religious solemnity and vastness without bound” (Sinclair, 45). This is under-scored by the use of ellipsis which produces an insistence on being, at one and the same time, ‘here’ and ‘beyond.’ grave suave singing silk stoop to the black firmament of areca rain on the bamboo flower of smoke alley of willows (Beckett 2002, 17) At first sight, the second section might seem to be a development of the word music of the first, but with the sounds less tethered to any easily derived sense. However, the discovery of Beckett’s source for these three gnomic lines, Louis Laloy’s La Musique Chinoise (Lawlor, 10), helps us to understand the passage as a synaesthetic account of an 229
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interlude played on a Chinese lute or K’in (qin). The first of the Laloy entries in the Dream Notebook (Pilling 1999, DN 491)3 is on the Pythagorean scale, and Laloy muses on how this may have been introduced into China from ancient Greece, so that it is not too fanciful to hear this music of the K’in as a chamber version of Dante’s music of the spheres. Five entries later in the Dream Notebook we see the middle section of the poem taking shape: (k’în) The Chinese lute the grave suave singing silk rain on the bamboos, firmament from the cloud of black areca, and the swallow’s nest. (DN 498) flower of smoke, iah! alley of willows (DN 499) The construction of the central section of “Alba” from these two entries in the Dream Notebook, which derive from four or five separate passages in Laloy, is of interest in itself. In the finished poem, the introduction of the grammatically challenging verb ‘stoop,’ which has already occurred as ‘stooping’ in “The Vulture” where ‘swooping’ might have been expected, is even more so. The strings might be thought to stoop because Laloy writes of the case being “flat below like the earth, and curved above like the sky.” However, ‘stoop’ also reads like an imperative, a word of invocation, addressed to Beatrice in the cielo de la luna, a position from which she might well stoop to the firmament. After this musical interlude, we experience, in the third section, what Winnie will one day characterise as the “sadness after song” (1963a, 42). We return to Canto III of the Paradiso (faithfulness marred by Inconstancy). The Beatrice figure of the poem’s opening is now associated with Piccarda Donati and the Empress Constance, women who had taken religious vows but were forced into marriage. In this sense, they may be said to have “stooped with fingers of compassion / to endorse the dust.” who though you stoop with fingers of compassion to endorse the dust shall not add to your bounty 230
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whose beauty shall be a sheet before me a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems so that there is no sun and no unveiling and no host only I and then the sheet and bulk dead (2002, 17) By its reversion to second person address, the final section returns us to the incantatory territory of the opening, but it also picks up the subjectless verb of the second section and makes it flesh by the synecdochal ‘fingers’ of compassion. The distance between the heavenly body and the earthly poet is emphasised and it is this which seems to lead to second thoughts and the failure of transcendence. The resonance of this section is enhanced by its reference to the gospel of St John (8.6) where, when asked to condemn the woman taken in adultery, Jesus writes in the dust. (Ackerley 1999, 56) ‘Bounty’ and ‘beauty’ are finely balanced, like pity and piety in the pun which so exercises Belacqua in “Dante and the Lobster.” They are the terms used by Forese Donati, when Dante meets him in Purgatory, to describe his sister, Piccarda (whom Belacqua is “impatient to get on to” in the short story). Presumably the only bounty which cannot be increased is the goodness of a being already perfected in heaven. This perfectedness makes the beauty of the beloved (whether she is actually present or not) so overwhelming that it is a ‘sheet’ before him, a barrier which impedes communion. “[N]o sun and no unveiling” again echoes the third canto, which opens with a rhapsody on Beatrice as “[t]hat sun which first warmed my breast with love.” The unveiling picks up on the sheet before him, but also refers us to Constance who when made to marry did not inwardly renounce the nun’s veil she had assumed. Because this is an alba, “no sun” means no dawn, and no end to what has become a dark night of the soul. Because there is no sun, the saints and angels of Paradise who herald the appearance of the Logos are absent. Cary, from whose translation of the Commedia Beckett took extensive notes, uses the word host to translate Dante’s term milizia. The sheet of Alba’s beauty and the veil of Constance’s goodness are assimilated to the sheet and bulk dead, an industrial trope (sheet and bulk metal), that to my ear echoes T. S. Eliot’s reworking of Dante’s lament (Inferno III 55-7) in The Waste Land: 231
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A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many, (Eliot, lines 62-63) But “Alba” does not exist solely on this exalted plane. At the beginning of the third canto of the Paradiso, Narcissus makes an appearance, and Narcissism, in the sense of masturbation,4 is the running base which underscores the Dantean descant, nowhere more urgently than in the opening line of the middle section. “Fingers of compassion,” then, translates, with vulgar eloquence, the “chiroplatonism” of Dream. But these are her fingers, not his. If this is onanism, is it seul or, as the syntax would seem to imply, à deux? Will she not add to her bounty because she is prepared to go thus far and no further? Does she stoop, literally, and lower herself, metaphorically, to stir his Narcissistic dust with her Echo’s bone? Beckett as “the only poet,” like Dante on first seeing Piccarda, mistakes the real for the ideal. As Dante points out, this is the opposite of the mistake made by Narcissus. I quote Beckett’s translation of the lines from the Dream Notebook: “I saw the eager faces and in me was reversed the error that lit a fire of love between the man and the pool” (DN 1097). The sheet before the poet, then, is like the thin barrier of water which keeps Narcissus apart from his beloved image; Beckett translates Ovid’s exigua prohibemus aqua (Metamorphoses III, 1450) as “an exiguous water prohibits” in the Dream Notebook (DN 1113). But unlike the unreal, ideal beauty of Narcissus’s reflected image, the beauty of the beloved here is a statement of itself and not a reflection of the poet’s syzygetic aspirations,5 and so the vision constructed from this “tempest of emblems” collapses. The succession of “no”’s cancels in turn Beatrice (no sun), the Logos (no host) and all strata and mysteries (no unveiling). And so, the poet ends up alone, but on this reading with a sheet, stained, perhaps, by “a fraudulent system of Platonic manualisation, chiroplatonism” which, to adapt a sentence from Dream, has postulated the spiritual intercourse to prove the physical encounter. If “stoop” took us back to “The Vulture,” which opens the collection, bulk leads us to “Dortmunder,” where it seems a cognate of ‘null’ and ‘hulk.’ The ‘I’ that ends with the “bulk dead” in “Alba” more or less begins ‘null’ in “Dortmunder.” ‘Null’ is the condition in Dream of the whore in the brothel, “the usual over” (40): “[…] – nullity. Whore or parade of whores” (41). In “Dortmunder,” however, it is the 232
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poet who is null, the whore a “royal hulk,” or considerable physical presence, before the encounter. In the magic the Homer dusk past the red spire of sanctuary I null she royal hulk hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K’in music of the bawd. (2002, 18) The opening sentence sets the scene with a range of exotic props animated by the poet’s hastening to the brothel. In “Alba,” by contrast, a passive poet anticipates the arrival of the beloved. The imagined action of “Alba” is located in the canti of the moon, while in “Dortmunder” it is situated more prosaically in Kassel (Harvey, 77). The allusions to Homer, Habbukuk and Schopenhauer stretch the poem over time while the oriental note of the K’in, which provides a notable point of contact between the two poems, extends it in space. Kassel, 1932 is left behind. As in “Alba,” the opening sentence of “Dortmunder” is incantatory; like a magic spell it uses alliteration and assonance as if to make the charm effective (Segal, 61). The phrase “Homer dusk,” which derives from Bérard’s “l’heure où l’ombre emplit toutes les rues,” (“[t]he hour when darkness filled the streets,” DN, 715)6 is a particularly resonant one for Beckett. Variant forms occur in Dream (28, 54, 174), in More Pricks than Kicks (55) as well as in Beckett’s correspondence to MacGreevy (18/10/1932 and 21/11/1932). Lawrence Harvey thinks that Homer’s presence is mainly atmospheric: “dusk is a magic time, a time when the mauve light that Homer writes of fills the evenings like a liquid” (Harvey, 74). However, the association of dusk with a mauve light, is Harvey’s (or perhaps Eliot’s in The Waste Land7), rather than Homer’s or Beckett’s. The association is not to be found either in the Iliad or in the Odyssey, where the word for dusk is infrequently used. “Rosy-fingered dawn,” by contrast, is one of the most familiar Homeric personifications. Although Beckett may have read the whole of Bérard’s Odysée with pleasure (Knowlson 1996, 139), it is only on the Circe episode that he actually takes notes (DN 710-717). While magic is a characteristic of commerce between gods (or goddesses) and men in Homer, in Circe’s case it is especially potent. As Charles Segal puts it:
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Homer […] recognized the connection between the magical “enchantment” of herbs and drugs and the magical “charm” or thelxis of love. Circe, enchantress of many drugs (Κίρκη πολυφάρµακος; Od. 10.276), is also the poem’s most successful and most dangerous practitioner of erotic seduction. Her thelxis is simultaneously magical and erotic. (62) Joyce, who was also an admirer of Bérard (Ellmann 1959, 421; Ellmann 1975, 334),8 famously appropriated Circe for the role of brothelkeeper. In the (1920/21) Linati Schema/Gorman-Gilbert Plan for Ulysses, Joyce’s elaborations for the Nighttown or Circe episode include: “scene: the brothel; Hour; Art: magic; Colour: violet; Symbol: whore; Technic: hallucination” (Ellmann 1972, chart between 188 and 189). All of these features can be found in “Dortmunder.” The association then of the Homer hour more specifically with Circe not only elaborates the magical element (absent in “A Wet Night,” but present in Dream), but also pays oblique homage to Ulysses and may help to explain why the bawd’s lamp is not the customary red. The red spire of sanctuary not only helps locate the action in Germany but also borrows the hue of the lamp more usually associated with prostitution, while the violet of this bawd’s lamp picks up the penitential tone of the sanctuary, which the poet eschews, and her own royal past. The thin K’in music again introduces the idea of music as a soubriquet for sex, a common trope in Beckett’s writing in the early 1930s (cf. Celia and music in Murphy). The strangeness of the use of the word ‘null’ suggests more than the usual connotations of invalid, insignificant or non-existent which attach to the word. The nullity of “Dortmunder” is integral to the poet and to the poem. It owes something equally to the concept of “free nill” which Beckett derived from St Thomas à Kempis (Pilling 1999, 141; DN 1004) and to Schopenhauer’s explanation of the possibility of escape from the domination of the will: “when some inward cause or ‘inward disposition’ lifts us suddenly out of the stream of willing” (254-55). On the one hand, the atmosphere of enchantment abolishes the necessity of free-will, responsible for the fall of angels and men; on the other, as Schopenhauer would have it, “the situation is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives” (255). For Schopenhauer, 234
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and for Beckett too, at this point in the poem “the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of our desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us.” This inward disposition, this nullity is “the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still” (255). The assertive vowels (“null” and “hulk”) and missing verbs of the third line create a still centre for the first section of the poem around which the borrowed epithets, rich colours and exotic music coalesce as ideas and not as motives. The inward disposition of the poet (null) fortified no doubt by the magic spell of the Homer dusk protects him from the Circean enchantments of the bawd, while allowing him like Odysseus, inoculated by Hermes’ gift of Moly, to enjoy her physical charms. She stands before me in the bright stall sustaining the jade splinters the scarred signaculum of purity quiet the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east shall resolve the long night phrase. (Beckett 2002, 18) The convoluted second sentence of “Dortmunder” brings the poet and the bawd together to parallel the middle section of “Alba” by playing with music as a metaphor for the act of love. The bright stall picks up the religious connotations of sanctuary, while the jade splinters are, to my mind, the continuing sounds of the K’in, Laloy’s “les pierres du K’in” (Laloy, 61), noted down by Beckett in the memorable phrase “Confucius juggling with the liu-liù on cubes of jade” (DN, 496). The signaculum too owes its appearance to a note taken by Beckett from an unknown Thomistic source where the hymen is said to be “signaculum virginis” (DN, 434), its scarring indicating the battering it has taken, its silence contrasting with the bawd’s continuing music making. Sustaining and resolving maintain the musical metaphor as does the description of dawn as the “plagal east,” again a musical term, borrowed from Beck’s La Musique des Troubadours (Beck, 77) and noted by Beckett (DN, 503). However, the notion that the resolution will be plagal hints that the eventual outcome will be unsatisfactory. 235
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Beck explains that the modern ear is confused when a composition does not finish on the tonic (Beck, 77). Sibilance is the dominant sound in this section of the poem, as it is in the central section of “Alba,” replaying the “suave singing silken strings” and subtly reasserting the K’inship of the two poems, while also nodding back to the red spire of sanctuary of “Dortmunder”’s opening section, and so, perhaps, asserting a different version of sanctuary, which, as in Dream, concerns the ‘inner man’. The ‘u’’s of sustaining, signaculum and purity continue the vowel pattern of the opening section while the tribute to the bawd’s eyes marks a break from these continuities and draws attention to the reality of the girl with whom the poet is sharing this musical moment. The heavy stress of the long vowels slows the rhythm of this section so that it is a largo to the opening section’s allegro. The final section of the poem is replete with images of closure: a scroll folded, a dead philosopher and music stilled as the bawd puts her lute away: Then, as a scroll folded, and the glory of her dissolution enlarged in me, Habbukuk, mard of all sinners. Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd puts her lute away. (2002, 18) The third, verbless sentence describes in apocalyptic terms what will happen “then” when the long, night phrase is finally resolved. The folded scroll, like so many of the details in this poem, owes its appearance to Beckett’s reading, in this case, St Augustine’s Confessions (13.15) where the idea of glory enlarged is also to be found. Habbukuk is a suitable prophet to lend his name to this biblical echolalia because, “mard of all sinners,” he shits himself as he witnesses God’s vengeance9: “I have heard and my bowels were troubled” (Douay Rheims version of the Bible). The work of love over, to coin a phrase Beckett borrowed from Bérard, the bawd puts her lute away and Schopenhauer dies. Schopenhauer’s justification of unhappiness emerges as a theme in the first of three paragraphs on Schopenhauer in Beckett’s philosophy notebooks: 236
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Irrationalism comes to full development in Schopenhauer by removal of religious element. With him the Urgrund and Urzufall became the will-to-live and TII (Thing-In-Itself). Whereas this activity directed solely towards itself is with Fichte the autonomy of ethical self-determination and with Schlegel (pfui!), the ironical play of fancy, with dear Arthur it is the absolute unreason of objectless will. Creating itself alone and perpetually it is the never satisfied, the unhappy will; and since world is nothing but selfrevelation (objectivation) of the will, it must be a balls aching world. (TCD MS 10967/252.1) It seems to me that the magic created in the Homer dusk is twofold: the poet’s state of mind – “[t]he will become […] free from itself when it can represent to itself in thought its objectivation without ulterior purpose” (TCD MS 10967/253) – and the condition of music – “as direct an objectification and copy of the will as the world itself” (Schopenhauer, 333). When the music stops, the world created by the application of Schopenhauer comes to an end – “The world is my idea,” after all, as Schopenhauer declares at the beginning of The World as Will and Idea – and “dear Arthur” is replaced by Aristotle (omne animal post coitum triste est – “every animal is sad after sex”). The quotation from Augustine and the reminiscence of Habbukuk shift the perspective from the mythical-philosophical world of Homer and Schopenhauer to a Judeo-Christian terrain in which sex is sinful and the wages of sin, paid in this case not by the poet but by the philosopher, is death. So that the penultimate line of the poem reworks the old joke usually told about Nietzsche: “‘God is dead’ – Schopenhauer. ‘Schopenhauer is dead’ – God.” Thus, the inner disposition of nullity is abolished. “Dortmunder,” like “Alba” is a poem of expectation and disappointment. In “Dortmunder,” we take our leave at the point of the poet’s enlargement. In “Alba,” on the other hand, we follow the full sequence of the encounter so that “dead bulk” conveys detumescence, enlargement spent. The dissipation of the paradisal vision in “Alba” leaves the poet among the “sheet and bulk dead” and “dead” has the last word. In “Dortmunder,” where a “null” disposition has preserved the poet from emotional involvement, although Schopenhauer is dead, life goes on and the bawd puts her lute away. A well-known anecdote tells how Schopenhauer, annoyed with an elderly seamstress, pushed her 237
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downstairs. She went to court and obtained compensation of 15 thalers to be paid quarterly by him throughout her lifetime. The balance of the final two phrases in “Dortmunder” is reminiscent of a phrase Schopenhauer noted in his account book when the seamstress died: “Obit anus, abit onus” (the old woman is dead, the burden is lifted). The Beatrice and the brothel dilemma is clearly one that exercised the young Beckett. “Alba” and “Dortmunder” address the dilemma with a commendable concision which I hope I have not compromised by uprooting the allusions and quotations so masterfully and surreptitiously worked into these poems, so that, by now, they may be shrieking like mandrakes in your ears. Beckett often characterised his writing at this time as sanies, pus or even turds, as though they were the material product of a physical necessity. Indeed, he famously described “Alba” and “Dortmunder” as “written above an abscess and not out of a cavity, a statement and not a description of heat in the spirit to compensate for pus in the spirit” (letter to Tom MacGreevy, 8/10/1932). For a “dirty low-church P(rotestant),” as he describes himself later in the same letter, these poems certainly have “the sincerity of a pendu’s emission of semen.” I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from unpublished material. Notes 1. “There is no such thing” said Belacqua wildly “as a simultaneity of incoherence, there is no such thing as love in a thalamus” (Beckett 1992, 102). The thalamus is that part of the brain which relays sensory data to the cerebral cortex. The word derives from the Greek for bedroom. No doubt Beckett intends the pun. 2. By Grimm’s law (or something like it) Dante and the Logos become Dante and the lobster in the short story of that name. The same material, drawn from the Paradiso, is worked over in different ways in “Alba,” Dream and in “Dante and the Lobster” (1970, 9). 3.
Further references to the Dream Notebook are cited as ‘DN number.’
4. The Dream Notebook (DN, 440) traces “onanistic manoeuvres” (from Pierre Garnier Onanisme seul et à deux sous toutes ses formes et leurs conséquences, 10th edition, 1895?, 27) to “narcissistic manoeuvres” in Dream
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“Alba” and “Dortmunder”: Signposting Paradise and the Balls-aching World (39). DN 462 lists synonyms for masturbation from Garnier, including “chiromania” which becomes “chiroplatonism” in Dream (43). 5. The sonnet in Dream concludes: “Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright, / Conjoined in the One and in the Infinite!” Syzygy is the conjunction of two bodies in astronomy. 6. This phrase is an Homeric epithet or stock phrase which occurs in prescribed situations matching the Homeric metre. The line occurs a number of times (e.g. Bk II 388, Bk III 487 and 497, as well as Bk XI 12, where Beckett found it). Variants occur to suit the metre. 7. Cf. “[…] the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea […]” (lines 220-21) Although Eliot is quoting Sappho, the sailor home from the sea recalls Odysseus and is, to that extent, Homeric. 8. In fact Beckett came to read Bérard because Joyce asked Beckett to get a copy for him and Beckett also bought one for himself: “I sent the Bérard & got it for myself. Haven’t leant against it so far” (Letter to MacGreevy, ?Dec 1930). Cf. also: “I have done nothing at all except booze my heart quiet and gallop through Bérard’s Odyssey. He certainly makes it easy to read. And I really recovered something of the old childish absorbtion [sic] with which I read Treasure Island and Oliver Twist and many others” (?29/9/1931). 9. The same pleasant Oirish pronunciation of merde occurs at the beginning of Dream when the tail of the horse drawing Findlater’s van “arches for a gush of mard. Ah… .” Habbukuk also puts in an appearance in some editions of Watt where his main role seems to be to supply a rhyme for “rubber duck.”
Works Cited Ackerley, C. J., “Samuel Beckett and the Bible: A Guide,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 9.1 (1999), 53-125. Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 2004). Beck, Jean., La Musique des Troubadours (Paris: Henri Laurens Editeur, 1910?). Beckett, Samuel, Letters to Thomas MacGreevy, TCD MS 10402, Trinity College Dublin Library (1929 seq). –, “Dante Notes,” TCD MSS 10963/4-5, Trinity College Dublin Library (1930?).
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Sean Lawlor –, “Notes on Philosophy,” TCD MS 10967, Trinity College Dublin Library (1930s). –, Happy Days (London: Faber and Faber, 1963a). –, Murphy (London: Calder, 1963b). –, More Pricks Than Kicks (London, Calder & Boyars, 1970). –, Dream of Fair to middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat, 1992). –, Poems, 1930-1989 (London, Calder, 2002). Caselli, Daniela, “The Florentina Edition in the Ignoble Salani Collection: a Textual Companion,” in Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 9.2. (1999), 1-20. Dante, Monarchy, trans. Nicholl and Hardie (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954). –, The Divine Comedy, ed. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). –, The Vision: or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, trans. Cary (London: Bell & Daldy, 1869). Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). Ellmann, Richard, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). –, Selected Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). Harvey, Lawrence, Samuel Beckett Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Laloy, Louis, La Musique Chinoise (Paris: Henri Laurens Editeur, 1910?). Lawlor, Sean, “Louis Laloy’s La Musique Chinoise,” in The Beckett Circle 20.1 (Spring 1998), 10-11. Pilling, John, Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999). –, A Companion to Dream of Fair to middling Women (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea, trans. Haldane (London and Manchester: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1909). Segal, Charles, “Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry,” in Reading Sappho – Contemporary Approaches, ed. E. Green (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996), 58-75. Wheatley, David, Occasions of Wordshed: Studies in the Poetry of Samuel Beckett, Trinity College Dublin Ph. D. thesis, 1999.
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SAMUEL BECKETT’S “CHE SCIAGURA” AND THE SUBVERSION OF IRISH MORAL CONVENTION
David A. Hatch In “Che Sciagura” Beckett uses the subversive attributes of dialogue to point out inconsistencies in the conservative political position regarding birth control in the developing Irish Free State. This largely overlooked, lesser known text not only positions Beckett in relation to issues current in Ireland at the time, but reveals his early use of the subversive aspect of dialogue, and provides insight into the more sophisticated subversion he develops subsequently in works such as “Three Dialogues” with George Duthuit.
If you show that this country, Southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North. You will create an impassable barrier between South and North, and you will pass more and more Catholic laws […]. You will not get the North if you impose on the minority what the minority consider to be oppressive legislation. Senator W. B. Yeats 5 Seanad Debates, 435-36 11 June 1925
Article 8 of the 1922 Constitution of the new Irish Free State ostensibly maintains the separation of church and state where it reads: “Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen, and no law may be made directly or indirectly to endow any religion, or prohibit or restrict the free exercise thereof.” In reality, however, the document also enables the privileged access of the Catholic majority to the type of legislation Yeats warns about in the above passage. Article 44, for example, asserts that, “the State recognizes the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” As the new
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republic struggled to define itself and consolidate its power during its first decade, laws relating to contraception were one of the areas where such influence surfaced. The official church position of birth control during this period was reiterated by Pius XI, in his Casti Connubii encyclical on Christian Marriage of 1930, in which he stresses the “unnatural” character of contraception: “since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.” In the Free State, the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929, established a censorship board (staffed by one Protestant, three Catholic laymen and one Catholic priest as chairman), and forbade the writing or publication of matter which “advocates or might reasonably be supposed to advocate the unnatural prevention of conception.” This connection of censorship to the ban on the import of contraceptives suggests, as Noel Whitty has observed, that “public ignorance was seen as the best basis for maintaining public morality” (854). The tone of the debate, in which the minister of justice states that the majority view on contraception “is perfectly clear and definite” and that they would not allow the “free discussion of this question,” illustrates the degree to which censorship and the ban are connected.1 In “Che Sciagura,” Samuel Beckett responds both to what he views as a hypocritical legal and moral position regarding contraception and the thought-control machinations of the oppressive regime that attempts to maintain it. The one-page dialogue represents a somewhat unique politically themed entry in an oeuvre that is often thought of as apolitical or, as John Harrington notes in The Irish Beckett, “entirely ulterior to local contexts” (21). The text, which Federman and Fletcher observe was “inspired by the embargo on the import of contraceptives into the Republic of Ireland”(3), appeared in the 14 November 1929 issue of T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, the weekly undergraduate newspaper published at Trinity College. This work is one of Beckett’s earliest critical pieces, yet the dialogue form he uses provides him with a sophisticated amount of critical flexibility and anonymity; he is able to address issues that are sensitive politically and morally, and which would potentially have been declared obscene by his audience. In the work, Beckett communicates the necessity for subterfuge, provides clues for how this heavily coded subject can be safely discussed, and presents a series of propositions that deal with specific birth control practices. As drama “Che Sciagura” is amusing and suggestive, but 242
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from a critical perspective the work is so heavily coded that it largely fails as criticism if one is not familiar with the issue at hand. Ruby Cohn observes, for example, that the text “is so opaquely learned that no one thought to censor it from a student newspaper” (Cohn 1973, 11). An explanation for this level of opacity is suggested by Bertolt Brecht in his short essay entitled “Writing the Truth, Five Difficulties”: Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.2 (133) In his discussion of the cunning necessary to spread truth effectively and without censure he suggests that one must write “up” or “down” to reach the selected audience. “It is indeed the case that the high literary level of a given statement can afford it protection,” he writes. “Often, however, it also arouses suspicion. In such case it may be necessary to lower it deliberately” (143). The choice of the dialogue form for “Che Sciagura” suggests it is written “up” to reach the cognoscienti. Beckett’s use of the dialogue form and coded phrases in “Che Sciagura” indicates that he understands both the necessity and use of such cunning to communicate to an audience. In her study of the philosophical dialogue tradition, Mary Margaret McCabe offers insight into this general phenomenon when she argues that Plato’s dialogic form inspires a measure of distrust in his audience because of the neatness of the arguments: Plato can write vivid and compelling accounts of the verbal engagements between Socrates (usually) and various interlocutors. And his brilliance may work, after all, to Plato’s disadvantage; for the success of the dialogue form threatens the success of his arguments. Sometimes Plato’s readers feel he must be cheating, just because he does it so well. (3)
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As a part of this aspect of her study, McCabe compares Plato’s formal brilliance to “the ‘clumping’ style of George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous” (2). She intimates that Berkeley provokes less suspicion of deceit because his dialogues are less successful formally. One recalls Beckett’s warning at the beginning of “Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” that, “the danger is in the neatness of identifications” (19). But assuming that McCabe’s ratio of formal brilliance to dialectic success is transferable, Beckett seems to capitalize on the clumpiness of dialogue in “Che Sciagura.” Members of the author's immediate circle at Trinity may have understood the formal games being played in the text, but these subtle notions are lost on more general audience. Philosophical dialogue is a peculiar vehicle for criticism; it presents engaging arguments, but it is also deceptive and indistinct almost to the point of incoherence. In a discussion of Plato’s use of the form, Michael Stokes argues that perspective philosophical dialogue is, rhetorically, a “very inefficient method of communication” because the verbal exchange by which it presents information becomes a “vehicle of ambivalence” (27). Yet he also suggests that this ambivalence is a benefit and that it allows for a certain rhetorical flexibility. When Plato makes assertions in his dialogues, he explains, it is possible to suppose that Plato intended his readers to just pause and think. Possibly at every question of Socrates we were meant to step back and wonder whether the embodied proposition is being implicitly communicated or denied [...]. It is at times difficult, on this hypothesis, to know what Plato intends us to think, and how. The protreptic and educational value of the dialogues may be high, but their communicative value low. (27) This ambiguity, Stokes admits, often seems unsatisfactory as criticism; he asserts that, “the treatise is, on the face of it, a better vehicle for the communication of views than the dialogue” (25). Yet he argues that the choice to use dialogue is important and intentional, that the form does not result from some kind of “historical accident” (27). When form is considered critics usually dismiss the dialogue as incidental to the existence of what Mark Moes labels a “proto-essay.” Those who subscribe to this notion believe that the dialogue form is not essential to the purpose of the author, but that it disguises a more 244
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conventional argumentative structure. Moes argues that such an approach is based upon the assumption that the author’s purpose is, to construct valid arguments yielding true conclusions about matters of philosophic import, and to articulate rigorous methods, either for defining necessary and sufficient conditions for the possession of properties and the truth of theses, or for acquiring a technical grasp of any subject matter. (1-2) Moes admits that critical dialogue inspires distrust in critics – that it initiates the search for a mask to be stripped away – for it seems improbable that, as Plato writes, a “serious man will ever think of writing about serious matters for the general public so as to make them prey to envy and perplexity” (1). Victorino Tejera argues that historical context is vital for interpretation of this type of philosophical dialogue, that in Plato, for instance “the dialogical approach relates Plato’s works in a verifiable way to the concerns and crises of his time” (144). Waugh dismisses the notion that philosophy is timeless, “that ‘any rational being’ could understand its meaning, or that this meaning is independent somehow of the cultural and interpretive community in which it was written.” She agrees that Plato’s dialogues “provide us with a picture of the cultural and interpretive community for whom he is writing” (42). At times, however, this community reacted violently to philosophical criticism: Socrates was executed, Anaxagoras and Protagoras were exiled, and the writings of the latter burned publicly. Plato came into conflict with the established order as soon as his philosophy, to use the words of David Fortunoff, “entered into analysis of the human world” (61). Thus, following the execution of Socrates, Fortunoff asserts, Plato “wittingly and stunningly developed and exhibited the literary-philosophical genre of dialogical drama as a multipurpose ‘instrument’ to meet crucial political as well as intellectual requirements” (62). Fortunoff argues that, for Plato, dialogue circumvents official scrutiny both from the state, the “reactionary, repressive, and paranoid Athenian powerstructure that has already politically repressed the intellectual activities of the historical Socrates by execution,” and also from proponents of other philosophical ideals, specifically, from the “amoral, radical, relativist morality and politics of the Sophists” (62). He contends that the dramatic aspects and allusiveness of dialogues 245
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had the salutary effect of rendering all philosophical, ethical, and political assertions contingent upon the doings of the dialogues’ dramatis personae. This was a subversive activity in that it enabled statements to be progressively ramified within the context of Plato’s Socrates, the philosopher-doer, and his interlocutors, as well as within the exhibitive judgments of Plato. This allowed for a broadening of the range of meanings for dialogical assertions because the significations resulting from the synthesis of assertions and actions are accretive, presenting themselves for repeated ramification. (65) Because Plato makes his reader aware both of the fictional and innocuous natures of the dialogue by means of temporal inconsistency, allusion, and humor, he could Fortunoff observes, “flirt with potentially subversive, or even seditious connotations while figures in the dramas could continue to act with impunity with regard to the political context outside the drama” (65). Readers who apprehend the allusions in the text would understand the criticism being tendered, but others would be distracted or mollified by the dramatic elements. Plato may have been added to the list of the proscribed, Fortunoff adds, “had he not already found a dialogical vehicle through which to alert the cognoscienti of Socrates’s dialectical inquiries, while remaining just ambiguous enough to leave his adversaries in doubt” (72). Understanding of these evasive, defensive measures is vital to interpreting Beckett's dialogue, since a more direct discussion would likely have been rejected ideologically and surely censored officially. In his discussion of Irish moral tradition, Tom Inglis argues that during this period “the level of censorship, both formal and informal, was such that even the mildest suggestion of or allusion to sexual transgression encountered a rhetoric of shock, horror, and outrage” (27). This level of social control limited the type and amount of challenges to censorship and import laws. For, as Inglis observes, “Despite the church’s monopoly, we should be able to find challenges and resistances to its teachings and rules about sex. But resistances to power are mostly irregular, spontaneous, and solitary. It is only when these resistances become integrated and codified that they can form the basis of a revolution” (12). The complexity and relative ambiguity of “Che Sciagura” results from the need to protect the author and communicate his ideas to the cognoscienti without attracting official attention. In 246
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addition, the fact that the dialogue appeared in a student newspaper at Trinity is significant not only because of the institution’s Protestant affiliation, but also because a student publication would have been taken less seriously. Inglis observes, for example, that censorship efforts were so successful that “there was no systematic disorder or reversal of rules, no transgression of regulations, and no plunge into anomie,” and that the only possible example where any of these characteristics appeared was “student ragweeks” (23-24). In Beckett's dialogue, the title “Che Sciagura” refers to the exclamation of the eunuch upon encountering the naked and helpless young countess at the end of chapter eleven in Voltaire’s Candide: “O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!” (53).3 The work consists of an introduction, in which Beckett communicates the necessity for subterfuge and outlines the heavily coded subject, followed by a series of propositions that deal with specific birth control practices. The first speaker begins by asserting that birth control occurs in Ireland, and intimates that due to the embargo, the methods utilized are unorthodox. “Frequently.” “In this country?” “Strictly speaking – never in this country.” “Permit to protest against the double-barreled qualification. Am I to reduce the coefficient of spatial, or that of qualitative elasticity?” “You will excuse my disability to apprehend inaccurate scientific illustration.” “I understand you to have implied the danger of conceptual noncongruence.” Initially, both speakers are confused by the other’s coded comments: the second speaker rejects the “double-barreled qualification” that birth control can occur and not occur at the same time; and the first speaker protests against his counterpart’s attempt to differentiate the process into “the coefficient of spatial” birth control – lack of sexual contact – and “qualitative elasticity,” which refers to interdiction via condoms. The latter reminds his associate that precautions such as his “inaccurate scientific illustrations” are necessary due to the danger of “conceptual non-congruence.” With this phrase Beckett puns on the idea of blocking conception and on the idea of possessing opinions that conflict with the dominant ideology. Having established their code, they begin to 247
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communicate with one another (and Beckett with the reader) when the first speaker asserts that he anticipates the possibility of his partner’s response to “terminological stimuli” – coded phrases – that will implant “cerebral reactions” like a nucleolus inside a nucleus. They then proceed to discuss the “mode and sphere of activity,” or, in other words, the method of birth control and the sexual activities about which they intend to debate. The second speaker – who for convenience I will label the “inquisitor” – invites his fellow to outline the boundaries of the discussion when he states, “I propose at once the elemental limits.” His counterpart – the “respondent” – answers with the following illustration: “Abstract the Antrim Road, Carrickarede Island, and the B. & I. boat threading the eye of the Liffey on Saturday night.” “And you will allow coincidence?” “Absolute coincidence.” “Mode, then.” “Mode.” With this invitation to “abstract” the listed geographical features the respondent suggests a mental image of vaginal intercourse: the island is a small protrusion near Ballintoy on the extreme northeast coast of Ireland; the road follows the curved coast from this area to the Dublin inlet, through which the boat penetrates to enter the Liffey. This could refer to smuggling activities that historically centered on this area. But the coincidence to which the speakers refer is also the similarity between this description and female genitalia – clitoris, vulva, and vagina, respectively – through which the “boat” carries its germinal passengers. The description of the boat and her illicit cargo also refers to the smuggling of contraceptives that inevitably developed after the ban was enacted. This notion that the “sphere of activity” to be discussed involves vaginal intercourse is reinforced by Beckett’s use of the phrase “elemental limits,” which refers to Stephen Dedalus’s pun on the words “elemental” and “genital” in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this passage Dedalus refers to the alleged sighting of “our very illustrious sister H. P. B.’s elemental” or the ghost of the Theosophist guru Madame Blavatsky, and mocks: “you naughtn’t to look, missus, so you naughtn’t when a lady’s showing off her elemental” (152). 248
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Following the first exchange in “Che Sciagura,” the inquisitor presents a series of proposals in which he alludes to various “modes” of birth control and asks his associate to comment on the legitimacy of these practices. “I propose the uncompromising attitude as advocated by the Catholic Truth Society.” “Though unfamiliar with the publications of that body, I understand that the bulk of their pronouncements is of a purely negative nature.” “Maximal negation is minimal affirmation.” “I have considered it expedient to reject their unexpressed clockwisdom.” The Catholic Truth Society was founded in 1868 in order to evangelize and spread the Catholic faith. Their “uncompromising attitude” to which the speaker refers is a complete rejection of birth control in any form. The problematic result of this stance, the other participant suggests, is the use by Catholics of the rhythm method – abstinence during ovulation – which here is labeled “unexpressed clock-wisdom.” Beckett’s examination of the arguments attached to specific contraceptive practices in this section of the dialogue seems unusually specific, since a more general denunciation of government policy might well have served. His articulation of these various practices reflects, however, the theory and practice of proscribed and permitted sexual acts in Ireland and Catholicism as a whole during this time period, and better illustrates what he views as inconsistencies in these doctrines, specifically where they inform public policy. The use of the rhythm method, for example, was considered acceptable during this era, if somewhat begrudgingly so. A Vatican commentary of June 16, 1880, for example, asserts that spouses using the method “are not to be disturbed, and a confessor may, though cautiously, insinuate the opinion in question to those spouses whom he has vainly tried with other reasons to lead from the detestable crime of onanism’” (Noonan, 441).4 Beckett seems to have been aware of this rhetoric and the use of these terms, for having denounced his associate’s somewhat conventional rhythm method proposal in the dialogues, the inquisitor presents masturbation as an alternative. 249
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“I propose the sophisticated, amoral, and specifically bi-pedal mode, as depreciated by that organ.” “We are not concerned with abstract concepts. I am afflicted with an extreme form of the disfaction complex. I extend my apprehensions to a variety of objects.” The “sophisticated, amoral” label refers to the Theosophical Society, some members of which were famous for their strict chastity, and specifically to the infamous “Leadbeater Affair” when a leader in the London branch of this organization wrote a letter to the thirteen year old son of a Chicago theosophist, in which he advised the boy to masturbate twice weekly “as a preventative against unchastity” (Mullin 88). The respondent in Beckett’s dialogue rejects this option as well, for he is preoccupied with “disfaction” – unmaking or the prevention of insemination – instead of with “abstract concepts” associated with autoeroticism (the “bi-pedal” or two-feet alone mode), which he views as separate from the issue of birth control. His comment that his concerns extend “to a variety of objects” reinforces the above reference to masturbation; it alludes to Madame Blavatsky’s use of such objects for self pleasure, specifically to her admission that “I could never have connection with any man because I am lacking something and the place is filled up with some crooked cucumber” (Neff, 187-88). The inquisitor persists, however, and suggests that the spiritual aspects of theosophy would allow the individual to transcend the need for physical sexual gratification. “I propose the illusory compromise as practiced exclusively in the Gaeltacht.” “Shall a crust-crumbling victim of tetanus express the eating of bread?” “He shall express the desire.” “Empirical investigation has nothing to do with the psychology of gesture.” “You deny its modality?” “It is an independent activity.” With this proposition the inquisitor connects Theosophy to the more conservative, more traditionally Gaelic counties of Ireland – the Gaeltacht – and thus suggests that this is an issue particular to this region. The respondent argues that the “illusory compromise” is 250
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untenable because, like the hungry victim of tetanus, or “lock-jaw” he describes, one who is unable to participate in an activity cannot express the sensations connected with it. His opponent counters with the assertion that the expression of the desire for withheld sexual union provides more satisfaction than the act itself, and thus offers a suitable form of birth control. W. B. Yeats, a devotee of Theosophy and celebrant of Irish nationalism, celebrated the spiritual growth that the Theosophists believed resulted from this sexual denial in his 1903 poem “Baile and Aillinn.” Their love was never drowned in care Of this or that thing nor grew cold Because their bodies had grown old. Being forbid to marry on earth They blossomed to immortal birth. (359) In “Scylla and Charybdis” Joyce mocks the alleged spiritual benefits of this abstinence with Buck Mulligan’s parody of Yeats, in which he quips: “Being afraid to marry on earth / They masturbated for all they were worth” (176). Beckett does not mock these beliefs, but through these roundabout references he nonetheless dismisses this activity when the respondent contends that this spiritual investigation has nothing to do with “the psychology of gesture,” or mode of birth control, but that it is an “independent activity.” The interpretation of masturbation as independent of this argument is consistent with the doctrinal debates of the period. Norman St. John-Stevas observes, for example, that in a decree of 1944, the Vatican reaffirmed that “the giving and receiving of seed” is the primary purpose of coitus. “Unless it is this,” he writes, “then neither its conceptual nor relational ends are achieved, and it becomes an onanistic act of self-love, ontologically distinct from true coitus” (448). This discussion suggests that in the eyes of church administration, autoeroticism is a separate issue. The doctrinal literature articulates sinfulness of specific sex practices and outlines a gradient of sinfulness. In his study of the history of contraception and Catholicism, John T. Noonan asserts that dorsal intercourse, for example, is not attacked as “sinful” in the official literature, because it did not preclude procreation” (163). He compares the opinions from various 6th-10th century sources about the penance attached to intentional homicide, abortion, contraception by potion, 251
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coitus interruptus, anal intercourse, oral intercourse, and dorsal intercourse. The latter most often carries a penance of 40 days (3 years if a customary practice), compared with 7 years penance for a cleric who commits intentional homicide, 2-10 years for coitus interruptus, 15 days-10 years for anal intercourse, and 3 years to life for oral intercourse (164). In the early 20th century, abortion and the use of artificial contraceptives are clearly proscribed in Catholic doctrine, but policies about other practices are less concrete. One such practice, amplexis reservatus or uncompleted copulation, Noon observes, was disputed even into the 1950s but was often accepted as a last resort, “as a lesser evil,” which confessors might recommend “to spouses practicing contraception, if the spouses know from experience that ejaculation will not occur” (448). Copula dimidiate or partial penetration of the vagina with insemination was also disputed, but in 1922 the Vatican agreed that a confessor “should not be rebuked for recommending the method to one he had vainly tried to turn from contraception” (Noonan, 450). Perhaps as a reflection of these debates, in the dialogues the inquisitor struggles to understand his colleague’s adamant rejection of these various methods of dealing with the “mode and sphere” of “elemental limits.” The respondent contends that his friend is blind to the fact that any method of interdiction, whether by mode or sphere of activity, qualifies as birth control and should be viewed as equally acceptable or abominable. The inquisitor continues, “I hesitate to propose the quandru . . .” “You should have done so before.” “Do I touch you so?” “I mean you are an untidy analyst.” “Then I confess I cannot see the force of your reservation.” “You admit its application in space?” “Yes.” “But not in mode?” “I cannot see it.” “Can you not see that the most extreme and passionate form of any act whatsoever, more than actual participation, is an energetic, vehement, and self-conscious abstention?” Through these commentators, Beckett argues that the embargo on objects of contraception is hypocritical; that in comparison to the use of 252
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condoms, the regulation of one’s passions by means of “clockwisdom,” the substitution of masturbation for copulation, or the search for spirituality through celibacy constitute “the most extreme and passionate” forms of birth control. In addition to the embargo itself, with the final passage in the dialogue Beckett denounces the oppressive air, duplicity, and selfserving compromise he observes in the government and community as a whole. “Now it would give me great pleasure, for instance, to see that abstention neatly decomposed.” “Step in here. She has her ear on me.” “Who?” “O, the permanent Weib.” “You mean your wife?” “Già” “How pale and beautiful and sad.” “A stupid creature. Come on, now.” Tom Inglis argues that the ideal of womanhood in the early years of the Irish Republic was a silent, passive emulation of Mary, the virgin mother. He relates, as an example, how in 1932, Eamon de Valera “eulogized the quiet, modest, self-sacrificing role played by Margaret Pearse. Like the Virgin Mary, she too had to hold the bodies of her dead revolutionary sons Padriac and William, who had sacrificed their lives for Ireland, Gaelic culture, and Gaelic tradition” (20). Beckett’s description of the wife above as “pale, beautiful, and sad” invokes a similar image. In this passage, however, Beckett also compares the censoring state to an eavesdropping wife; a stupid, permanently ensconced Hausfrau who is so simple that the use of the German weib for wife is enough coding to hide from her the fact that the speakers are aware she is listening. Beckett’s use of the Italian expression già (‘already’), moreover, suggests that the state is a spy for or tool of the Vatican, a connection reinforced by the concern voiced during the development of the Free State that due to the overwhelming Catholic majority, “Home Rule meant Rome Rule.” Because of this heavily coded language, “Che Sciagura” seems to have been created by an “untidy analyst,” that is, the text largely fails as criticism if one is not familiar with the issue at hand. Apparently the Editorial Subcommittee at Trinity appreciated the danger of discussing 253
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this topic openly; they note that the dialogue “was extremely clever,” but observe with some relief that the text is “‘fortunately’ a trifle obscure for those who do not know their Joyce and their Voltaire” (T.C.D.: A College Miscellany, 6 March 1930, 137; my emphasis). Notes 1. Whitty notes that in 1979, section 12 of the Health Act deleted the words “unnatural prevention of conception” so that a discussion of contraception could occur in books and periodicals in Ireland. 2. This essay appeared in German in the Paris journal Unsere Zeit 8;3 (April 1935), 23-34. It was reprinted in English in Twice A Year, Tenth Anniversary Issue (New York 1948). 3. “Oh the disaster of being without balls!” Beckett refers to the entire phrase by means of the title and the pseudonym “D.E.S.C.” (“d’essere senza coglioni”) with which he signs the text. 4. The term “onanism,” a reference to Genesis 38 in which Onan “spilled his seed upon the ground” is interpreted variously, both as a sinful sexual practice (masturbation or contraception of some kind) and as a neglect of his familial duties to the wife and progeny of his dead relatives.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, “Che Sciagura,” in TCD: A College Miscellany 36 (14 Nov. 1929), 42. –, “Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984), 19-33. Brecht, Bertolt, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” in Galileo (NY: Grove P, 1966), 132-153. Cohn, Ruby, Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973). –, “Forword,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984), 7-16. Esslin, Martin, “Introduction,” in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), ix-xvi. Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970). Fortunoff, David, “Plato’s Dialogues as Subversive Activity,” in Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Gerald A. Press
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Beckett’s “Che Sciagura” and the Subversion of Irish Moral Convention (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 1993), 60-75. Harrington, John, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991). Inglis, Tom, “Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland,” in Eire-Ireland 40.3&4 (Fall/Winter 2005), 9-37. Joyce, James, Ulysses (New York: Vintage International, 1990 [1922]). McCabe, Mary Margaret, Plato and His Predecessors: The Dramatization of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). Moes, Mark, Plato’s Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul, (New York: P. Lang, 2000). Mullin, Katherine, “Typhoid Turnips and Crooked Cucumbers: Theosophy in Ulysses,” in Modernism/Modernity 8.1 (2001), 77-97. Neff, Mary K, Personal Memoirs of H. P. Blavatsky (Illinois: Wharton, 1971). Noonan, John T., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986). Stokes, M. C., Plato’s Socratic Conversations: Drama and Dialectic in Three Dialogues (London: Athlone P, 1986). Tejera, Victorino, Plato’s Dialogues One by One: A Dialogical Interpretation, (Lanham: UP of America, 1999). Voltaire, Candide or Optimism, trans. John Butt (New York: Penguin Books, 1947). Waugh, Joanne, “Socrates and the Character of Platonic Dialogue,” in Who Speaks for Plato?: Studies in Platonic Anonymity, ed. Gerald A. Press, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 39-52. Whitty, Noel, “Law and the Regulation of Reproduction in Ireland: 19221992,” U of Toronto Law Journal, 43.4 (1993), 851-88. Yeats, William Butler, “Baille and Aillinn,” in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).
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A RUMP SEXUALITY: The Recurrence of Defecating Horses in Beckett’s Oeuvre
Paul Stewart Through the examination of the recurrent sexualised image of horses’ posteriors in the act of defecation in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, The Unnamable, and All That Fall this paper outlines a nexus of concepts clustering around this apparently aberrant sexual stimulus. Using Freud’s case history of Little Hans and the suggested relationship between defecation and childbirth as an analogue, the paper argues that the image reveals not a horror at sexuality per se within Beckett’s works, but a horror at reproductive sexuality which finds its fullest expression in the sterile world of All That Fall.
For a writer more normally associated with the denigration and dismemberment of the body, it is worthwhile remembering how much sex there is in Beckett: from the apparent, but not complete, horror of sexuality which Belacqua exclaims, through to the eternal triangle of Play; from Murphy’s perhaps unwanted desire for Celia through to How It Is with its sadistic parody of penetration and inscription, sexuality, in often strange or remnant forms, persists within the works. Indeed, Beckett’s novelistic career begins within, and might be said to grow from, adolescent sexuality. The first chapter of Dream of Fair to Middling Women charts the modes of Belacqua’s sexual awakening, modes which include the first of Beckett’s defecating horses: Behold Belacqua an overfed child pedalling, faster and faster, his mouth ajar and his nostrils dilated, down a frieze of hawthorn after Findlater’s van, faster and faster till he cruise alongside of the hoss, the black fat wet rump of the hoss. Whiphim up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo. Stiffly, like a perturbation of feathers, the tail arches for a gush of mard. Ah…! (1)
Paul Stewart
Before dealing with the defecating horse as sexual stimulus, this passage will also serve to illustrate the nature of the critical discourse as regards the sexual elements within Beckett. As Bel cycles past the hawthorn, two modes of sexuality meet: the literary and the physical. The hawthorn, as John Pilling in A Companion to Dream of Fair to Middling Women has pointed out, alludes to the young Marcel of Swann’s Way, entranced by the hawthorn on the altar. The vision of this hawthorn is not itself innocent of sexual undertones. Marcel, in order to process the beauty of the flowers, transforms them into the image of a young girl. In a recurrence of the connection, the first encounter with Gilberte, in which Marcel wishes to “reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body” (168) at which his gaze is directed, is also presaged by a return of the hawthorn motif (164-68). Whilst this might be a slight point, a more thorough critical privileging of the mind over the body can be glimpsed through this, the first reference to a bicycle in Beckett’s works. The bicycle is an integral part of the sexual experience of the adolescent Bel. It offers immediate physical stimulation as the motion of the legs rising and falling provides the necessary friction elsewhere offered by sliding down ropes in the gymnasium. Of course, bikes in Beckett have come in for some critical scrutiny, yet a sexualised perspective on these apparently Cartesian machines has not formed part of that inquiry. Molloy’s regard for his bike occasions one of the few quasi-romantic apostrophes in Beckett’s work: “Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation” (16). Why is Molloy so attached to his bike? We are accustomed to seeing the bicycle as a Cartesian mind/body amalgam, a “product of the pure intelligence,” as Hugh Kenner, in Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, puts it, in which “the mind [is] set on survival, mastery, and the contemplation of immutable relativities […], the body [is] a reduction to uncluttered terms of the quintessential machine,” and without which the “Cartesian man […] is a mere intelligence fastened to a dying animal” (124). No doubt due to the verve of Kenner’s arguments, the bicycle as a symbol of the intellect’s independence from the demands of the accursed body has become a mainstay of critical reactions. However, whilst the bicycle might be a product of the pure intelligence one cannot then go on to assert, as Kenner does, that now the pure intelligence “dominates it in function” (123). Whilst the cerebral may pertain here, the critical manoeuvre is to emphasise that aspect at the cost of a sexualised perspective, which stubbornly asserts that the body is a crucial factor of Molloy’s love of his bike. Firstly, the 258
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one thing to remain of the bicycle is the horn; a horn, moreover, described in sexually charged terms. To blow it, was, for Molloy “a real pleasure, almost a vice” and he goes further to declare that “if I were obliged to record, in a roll of honour, those activities which in my interminable existence have given me only a mild pain in the balls, the blowing of a rubber horn – toot – would figure among the first” (16). The masturbatory undertones of Molloy’s fixation on the horn over and above his supposed love of his bike need not be underlined. Certainly, once the prism of sexuality has been inserted, a pattern far from Cartesian dualism emerges.1 As Molloy derives pleasure from his bike, so Moran from his autocycle. When considering which form of transportation to use for his pursuit of Molloy, Moran gives in to “the fatal pleasure principle” (99) and chooses the autocycle; this pleasure might not be free of the pleasure of feeling a throbbing machine between one’s thighs. To complete this foray into the sexuality of bikes, one need only consider the sad fate of Mercier and Camier’s bicycle: Of it there remains, said Mercier, securely chained to the railing, as much as may reasonably remain, after a week’s incessant rain, of a bicycle relieved of both the wheels, the saddle, the bell and the carrier. And the tail-light. (85) Janet Menzies, in her article “Beckett’s Bicycles,” chooses to gloss this passage as an occasion for the interrogation of bike qua bike, stating: “All this leads to a much closer examination of the bicycle: what is its most important feature, what is it that makes a bicycle a bicycle?” (101). She notes that the bicycle pump mysteriously remains, but the pump does not feature in her thinking: her focus is the cerebral appreciation of, and the intellectual discourse surrounding, the bicycle. But the pump does remain. Just as Molloy’s bike is reduced to the phallic horn, so Mercier and Camier’s bike is reduced to the phallic remainder that is the pump, reminiscent of the “demented hydraulic” (Beckett 1992, 41) of Belacqua’s sexual appetite. Reacting in part against the cerebral discourse of Janet Menzies, Jake Kennedy, in his article “Modernist (Im)mobilities: Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett and the Avant-Garde Bike,” gestures towards a sexualised reading of the bike in “Fingal.” Belacqua, out for a romantic clinch with Winnie, finds a bicycle near the Portrane 259
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Lunatic Asylum. He is strangely drawn, in a manner which Janet Menzies finds “faintly disturbing” (99). Kennedy suggests that what disturbs Menzies is the erotic suggestiveness of the bicycle: “Belacqua’s interest in the bicycle is described in relation to his desire: he could, on no account, ‘resist’ a bicycle. In this way, too, the bicycle is the clear, if wry substitution of or for Winnie and, indeed, the scene mimics the encounter just previously in which the lovers had been lying on the grass.” This observation is not pursued by Kennedy, but, if one were to do so, an interesting paradigm emerges: Bel (quite literally) flees from a “proper” sexuality – he flees from Winnie – in favour of a solitary, bike-led sexuality. The question remains: why? Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus also suggest what might be at stake in the question of the sexualised bike, although they do so in the form of a tantalising question. They note the proximity of Molloy’s rhapsodies on his bike to his less than rhapsodic account of his birth. The text of Molloy reads: What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into this world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit. (16) The question that Deleuze and Guattari put is: “what relationship does the bicycle-horn machine have with the mother-anus machine?” (2) In a manner, that question will be answered by addressing the horse’s-arseexcrement machine. Once again John Pilling provides a valuable, if slightly misleading, hint in his annotations to Dream. He writes in connection to the defecating horse of the novel that: “A fascination with horses excreting is the neurosis of ‘little Hans’ in Freud’s classic study” (18). This comment is valuable in that it correctly offers little Hans as an analogue to, if not a direct allusive source for, Bel’s fascination with horses’ posteriors. It is misleading in that little Hans’s neurosis is not quite a “fascination with horses excreting,” rather in the case of little Hans a phobia concerning horses (especially getting bitten by one, or one falling whilst pulling a bus or heavily loaded cart) is accompanied by a fascination for and repulsion by defecation. Pilling’s characterisation of the little Hans case might be slightly misleading, yet 260
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the case certainly provides striking and troubling parallels with Bel’s adolescent excitement. Less than 5 years old, Hans’s initial neurotic symptom was his phobia of horses which was so extreme as to make him house-bound. Under the analysis of his father, conducted in consultation with Freud, the following case history was revealed. The fear of being bitten by a horse was found to be more of a fear of the horse falling and possibly dying. Freud summarised the result of the analysis thus far: Behind the fear to which Hans gave first expression, the fear of a horse biting him, we had discovered a more deeply seated fear, the fear of horses falling down; and both kinds of horses […] had been shown to represent his father, who was going to punish him for the evil wishes he was nourishing against him. (1983, 283) At this stage scatological concerns come to the fore as Hans started to show disgust at things which reminded him of excretion, amongst which was the colour black. Freud again takes up the story: [his father] recognized that there was an analogy between a heavily loaded cart and a body load of faeces, between the way in which a cart drives trough a gateway and the way in which the faeces leave the body … (284) Properly deciphered through analysis, the loaded carts were symbolic of his mother’s pregnancy (his sister had been born some 18 months previously) leading to one of the more famous of Freud’s theories of infant sexuality, namely the theory of anal birth, which, according to Freud, was an inevitable consequence of a gap in physical knowledge, for “the boy would be bound to approach the subject of childbirth by way of the excretory complex” (264). The horses of which Hans was so scared are, of course, over determinant: on one hand, they represent the father whom the child wishes to replace in order to have children with his own mother; on the other, they are representations of the childhood theory of procreation as anal birth, and so connected with the mother, for: “when a heavy or heavily loaded horse fell down he can have seen in it only one thing – a childbirth (ein Niederkommen). Thus the falling horse was not only his father dying but also his mother in childbirth” 261
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(286). Freud states this theory in his essay of 1908 “On Sexual Theories of Children”: Their ignorance of the vagina also makes it possible for the children to believe in the second of their sexual theories. If the baby grows in the mother’s body and is then removed from it, this can only happen along the one possible pathway – the anal aperture. The baby must be evacuated like a piece of excrement, like a stool… (1977, 198; Freud’s emphasis) One further strand needs to be added. In one phase of the analysis, little Hans admitted to a wish to beat horses. He is reported as saying: “It doesn’t do the horses any harm when they’re beaten. […] Once I did it really. Once I had the whip, and whipped the horse, and it fell down and made a row with its feet” (1983, 239). This Freud took to be an obscure sadistic desire for the mother. The parallels with the sequence in Dream are striking. First, the horse is pulling a delivery van for Findlater’s grocery store. Second, the sadistic whipping of the horse is emphasised, as is the colour black. Finally, excreta form an integral part to the experience. It would appear that Beckett is very closely following the story of little Hans, or at least activating the key representational factors of the boy’s case history. To add to this case, one should note that as Bel is described as “overfed,” so little Hans, who had trouble with constipation, was seen by a doctor who was “of the opinion he was overfed, which was in fact the case […]” (Freud 1983, 217). However alike the Freudian and Beckettian texts seem to be, one crucial element in Bel’s excitement is nonetheless absent from the little Hans case study. The climactic moment for Bel is the horse raising its tail and defecating. In the Hans case, the faecal focus is parallel to, and then merges with, the neurosis he experiences and a defecating horse as such does not feature in that neurosis. The importance of this difference cannot be over-stressed, for it is precisely the same action, or the possibility of such an action, which the Unnamable as the billy-in-the-bowl hopes might mean the possibility of an orgasm: “With a yo heave ho, concentrating with all my might on a horse’s rump, at the moment when the tail rises, who knows, I might not go altogether empty-handed away” (335). What Bel and the Unnamable both gain over little Hans is a dual image. The defecating horse is at once an erotic image of penetration 262
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and, following Freud somewhat, an image of evacuation, or a shitting birth. In the first case, the faeces of the horse act as a representation of the penis entering into the vagina. In its appearance, the anus of a horse is reminiscent of the vagina, allowing for both the images of penetration and evacuation to work. To support this empirical observation, one need only consider the equine terms which are applied to some of the fair and middling women. The Frica, for example, is said to have a “mouth [which] champs an invisible bit” (Beckett 1992, 179). The Frica’s mother had “curvetted smartly” as a “young mare,” and the Frica herself is described as an ambling foal who whinnies after Belacqua. (180) The Smeraldina-Rima is “a generous mare neighing after a great horse, caterwauling after a great stallion” (23). This other side of the equine sexual equation, the stallion, is a repeated image of the sexually active male, from which Bel carefully distinguishes himself in conversation with the Mandarin. (100) Throughout the book, equine imagery is allied with heterosexual sexuality, and, as Bel recommends to the Mandarin “Get thee to a stud” (101), it is also allied with sexual reproduction. Yet for both Bel and the Unnamable, the symbolic penetration of the horse’s anus is the occasion for the possibility of auto-erotic satisfaction. Rather than the image acting as a signpost towards reproductive intercourse, it is a means of retaining sexuality whilst avoiding reproductive intercourse. Belacqua does not shun sexuality altogether, for whilst he recoils from intercourse with the Smeraldina, he persists in masturbating; a safe, non-reproductive expression of sexuality, and the sterile nature of the defecating horse as sexual stimulus is again in evidence in The Unnamable. Whilst the Unnamable hopes that something can be “wrung” from his penis through “manstuprating” he explicitly states that whatever might occur will be “fruitless,” that is, there might be no emission at all, or if there is any emission he can rest safely in the knowledge that it will be issueless. This is reinforced by his speculations over his own fertility: “Does this mean they did not geld me? I could have sworn they had gelt me. But perhaps I am getting mixed up with other scrota” (335). To geld: to castrate, from the Old Norse for barren, and of course a gelding is a castrated animal, especially a male horse. If the Unnamable were not gelded the only result of his erotic imaginings of the defecating horse would be the production of waste matter in the form of semen. The second half of the defecating horse image suggests a basis for the horror at the thought of reproductive sexuality. The child’s theory of anal birth, as set out by Freud, here comes into play, albeit with some 263
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twists of Beckett’s own making. Freud posited that the belief in anal birth arises from the child’s ignorance of female physiology. A similar ignorance, leading to comic confusions, is at play within Beckett’s work, especially within the trilogy. Molloy, for example, is ignorant of female physiology: “She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bung hole I had always imagined, but a slit” (56). This could account for his apparent belief in his own birth through his mother’s “hole in her arse” in accordance with Freud, but might also explain his confusion as to what intercourse actually entails: I went in from behind. It was the only position she could bear because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes. (57) Of course, Molloy then goes on to wonder if Ruth or Edith was in fact a man, which brings a homosexual element into the equation which, unfortunately, would be the subject of an entirely different argument. But for the present purposes a number of aspects should be noted. First, throughout the whole discussion of sex with Ruth or Edith the issue of reproduction is never once mentioned. Second, the confusion over orifices and genders increases the possibility of non-reproductive sex. Most importantly, Molloy’s ignorance allows for the plausibility of anal birth. Returning to the defecating horse, a rather complex series of associations becomes apparent. The symbolic penetration of the horse’s anus offers a doubly safe expression of sexuality: first, the stimulus is auto-erotic; second, the confusion of anus and vagina offers the safe possibility of anal sex. In addition to this, the Freudian possibility of anal birth creates an analogy between procreation and defecation which is itself suggestive of why reproductive sex is best avoided; not only does birth entail one’s first taste of the shit, but one is born as shit. Little Hans’s case again here becomes apposite. His infantile theory of reproduction posits that all babies are essentially little shits, or, in his terms “lumfs”: “all babies were lumfs and were born like lumfs,” as Freud comments (1983, 285). For Freud, this association is a positive one, for the child is close enough in time to the phase in his or her life 264
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when defecation was a source of pleasure. In the case of Hans, “[t]his child was still not so distant from his constitutional coprophilic inclinations. There was nothing degraded about coming into the world like a heap of faeces, which had not yet been condemned by feelings of disgust” (1977, 197). Indeed for Hans, the memory evoked by seeing his little sister being changed was one of the combined pleasures of defecation and being looked after, and he hopes in turn to be able to repeat these pleasures, both in the form of giving birth himself (pleasurable inasmuch as it is the same as excreting) and thereafter looking after his own children. As Freud puts it: He was able to imagine the act of giving birth as a pleasurable one by relating it to his own first feelings of pleasure in passing a stool; and he was thus able to find a double motive for wishing to have children of his own: the pleasure of giving birth to them and the pleasure (the compensatory pleasure, as it were) of looking after them. (1977, 290) For Freud, particularly in the case of Hans, the anal birth is coprophilic in nature, and this coprophilia leads to a desire to take part in reproductive sexuality, in this case – with an overlay of Oedipal desire – reproductive sexuality with one’s mother. For Freud, the faecal waste is an incentive to procreation. In Beckett, the opposite would appear to be the case. Molloy’s “first taste of the shit” is not an incentive to further the species; it is only a matter of utter regret, and his mother is only to be thanked in so far as “she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers” (16). Here, the foetus and the child that is Molloy are both waste material to be flushed away and both waste material which do not recommend repetition. Thus, Molloy credits his mother for not having another child, and Molloy takes something like proud satisfaction in at least being the “last of [his] foul brood” (16). The image of the defecating horse in both Dream and The Unnamable, coupled with the cloacal theory of birth as seen in Molloy, suggest a thorough turning aside from reproductive sexuality, not, as one might have thought, through the horror of being shackled to an accursed body, and not through a horror of all forms of sexuality – masturbation remains as a conceivable, if fruitless, option – but 265
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precisely through a horror at the thought of reproduction itself, at the thought of the perpetuation of the species. In these terms, one can answer Deleuze and Guattari’s question: “what relationship does the bicycle-horn machine have with the mother-anus machine?” Faced with the disgusting fact of one’s own birth, and of reproductive sexuality in general, the blowing of one’s horn provides a safe, impotent remnant of sexuality; better the bicycle-horn machine than the mother-anus machine. This cluster of associations surrounding defecating horses finds its fullest, if somewhat more opaque, expression in All That Fall, a play which is expressly concerned with the end of the possibility of reproduction. Despite Maddy Rooney’s lifelong obsession with horses’ buttocks, upon which the “mind” doctor can shed no light, there is no actual mention of a defecating horse within the radio-play. There is, however, and perhaps even more appropriately, a defecating hinny. All the elements which marked the defecating horse of Dream are again present within All That Fall: the hinny defecates, of course; the pseudosadistic beating of the animal is also present; and, arguably, Maddy gains some sort of excitement, possibly of a sexual nature, from seeing the hinny beaten. One new element, however, is the identification of Maddy with the poor beast: “Well!” She says, “If someone was to do that for me I should not dally. […] How she gazes at me, to be sure, with her moist clag-tormented eyes” (Beckett 1990, 173). This identification between Maddy and the hinny (which is the off-spring of a female donkey and a male horse) does alter the dynamics of the image, but that alteration is dependent on the change in gender, for Maddy looking at a defecating hinny cannot be the same as the adolescent Bel looking at a defecating horse. However, the result of the image – the denial of reproductive sexuality – remains unaltered. The hinny is a sterile hybrid. Through its defecation it may suggest birth, but actual birth is an impossibility. Maddy knows this, even if she asks Dan for confirmation: “Hinnies procreate. [Silence] You know, hinnies, or jinnies, aren’t they barren or sterile, or whatever it is?” (197) The hinny isn’t the only barren female in the play; Maddy herself is long past the menopause and is now childless, her daughter Minnie having died at some unspecified age, and, in a form of double-safety reminiscent of that at work for Bel and the Unnamable, had Minnie been alive, she would have been entering into her menopause. Sterility haunts the play. Could this be the motive 266
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for Maddy’s identification with the hinny? A recognition of a common, inevitable childlessness, evoked and replaced by that wasteful bringing forth from the body – shitting? The shit, one might suggest, is all that Maddy and the hinny can bring into the world. If there is a regret on Maddy’s part for now being barren, one should not assume that she necessarily continues to wish for the continuation of the species. In the context of the defecating hinny, Maddy doesn’t make any objection to the defecation itself, but does react strongly to the dung it produces: “Dung? What would we want with dung at our time of life?” (173) It is an odd response unless one considers the properties of dung as fertiliser. The waste – and here seems to be Beckett’s new insight into the image which first caught his attention in Dream – is not safely waste; even dung holds forth the possibility of regeneration, of making fertile. It is this possibility, that the waste itself might foster further life, that provokes Maddy’s seemingly exaggerated reaction. The fear is the same as Hamm’s in Endgame where life might start again from a crab louse, or a rat, and it is the same fear which provokes Dan, as many have suggested, to push the small child – a potential procreator – under the wheels of the train. Maddy Rooney, punished perhaps not so much for having been born but for desiring to give birth, says that Jesus entered Jerusalem on a hinny and claims: “That must mean something” (197).2 It could mean many things. Like the hinny, Jesus is a hybrid with a divine father and a human mother; like the hinny he was condemned to childlessness; or is it that, ultimately, like the hinny, Jesus, and all the hope for all that fall which he offers, is sterile. When Maddy and Dan are shaken by laughter by the biblical phrase “The Lord holdeth up all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down” it might be that they laugh because such has not been their experience. But might they not also be mocking the Lord who will not let the fallen remain fallen, who will not let humanity end as it should end, in sterility. Beckett was, of course, childless; a fact which one might interpret as a desire to save at least one being from the suffering inevitable to life. Something of a different order might be proposed. The image of the defecating horse, bizarre and amusing in its details, might lead one to suspect that a more far-reaching desire might be at work within the plays and novels; the desire for the end of all reproduction save the literary; a desire for the purely sterile, one might say Beckettian anal birth, as opposed to the continuation of humanity. If this is possible, then it would call for a realignment of where our sympathies should lie, 267
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for it would mean not condemning but applauding Hamm in his condemnation of all humanity, and it would mean that we should applaud Dan Rooney’s appalling act and reassess it not as a killing but as a far-sighted and necessary culling. Notes 1. C. J. Ackerley rightly asserts in conversation that the inclusion of the horn allows for Wagnerian overtones at the end of Molloy’s narrative. The genetic evidence supports this. However, once the horn is inserted into the text, and once the possibilities of its presence are explored by Beckett, a Wagnerian resonance does not preclude those of a different nature, such as the sexualised reading here offered. 2. Cf. Mary Bryden (109), where she points out the Greek for hinny, “ginnos,” is not to be found in the original Biblical accounts of the entry into Jerusalem. If it is Maddy’s own mistake, this only further personalises the issue.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Mercier and Camier (London: Picador, 1988). –, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (Dublin: Black Cat P, 1992). –, More Pricks Than Kicks (London: Calder, 1993). –, The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994). Bryden, Mary, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Palgrave, 1998). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone P, 1984). Freud Sigmund, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, Penguin Freud Library Vol. 7. trans James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977). –, Case Histories I: “Dora” and “Little Hans,” Penguin Freud Library Vol. 8, trans. Alix and James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1983). Kenner, Hugh, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: John Calder, 1962). Kennedy, Jake, “Modernist (Im)mobilities: Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett and the Avant-Garde Bike,” in Tout-fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies On-Line Journal (2005), www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid= 4331&keyword, accessed 21st Feb. 2006.
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A Rump Sexuality: The Recurrence of Defecating Horses in Beckett’s Oeuvre Menzies, Janet, “Beckett’s Bicycles,” in The Journal of Beckett Studies 6 (1980), 97-105. Pilling, John, A Companion to Dream of Fair to middling Women (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004). Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time Vol 1 Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996).
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MURPHY, ORDER, CHAOS
Gregory Byala This essay argues that the figure of chaos that emerges at the end of Murphy is a cosmological manifestation of Beckett’s desire to undo the moment of creation. As such, it situates the novel alongside a series of cosmological texts, such as Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in order to trace Beckett’s assault on the moment of inception.
At certain periods whatever had happened happens again, there being nothing absolutely new. (Porphyry on Pythagoras)
1. Chaos and the Mess Although several critics have noted the role that chaos plays in Murphy, there is no critical consensus as to what constitutes its essence. What is common to several readings that deal with it as a formal or thematic principle is their invocation of Beckett’s comments, made to Tom F. Driver, about the irrationality of human experience: What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (qtd. in Hesla, 6-7)1 Granting that Beckett’s remarks to Driver constitute an aesthetic program (“the task of the artist now”), it does not follow necessarily
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that the chaos Beckett describes in 1961 is the chaos that he promotes in Murphy (1936). Readings that equate Murphy’s chaos with the type of irrationality that Beckett articulates in the interview – and which therefore interpret the novel as an attempt to accommodate or subsume chaos beneath the category of form – fail to perceive the extent to which chaos is imagined as a liberating alternative to the habitual world of the novel. Murphy’s chaos is an escape from the problem of “the nothing new,” or the condition of a universe governed by the immutable laws of physics and rationality. It is a solution, if only an imperfect one, to the constraints of both the universe of fact and the universe of mind. In distinction to eternal recurrence, chaos is perceived as a condition of endless enumeration. The central problem of Murphy is the crisis of commencement, both the novel’s own and that of its titular subject. The essence of that crisis is not simply that it ushers into being a self that must now endure the pains and trials of a life it did not ask for, but rather the violence of recapitulation that is embedded in every attempt to cease. The word “recapitulation,” which is used in this context to describe the threat of circularity that hovers over the novel, is Beckett’s own. It appears in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy in which Beckett bemoans the deficiencies of the work: Very early, when the mortuary and Round Pond scenes were in my mind as the necessary end, I saw the difficulty and danger of so much following on Murphy’s own ‘end’. There seemed two ways out. One was to let the death have its head in a frank climax and the rest be definitely epilogue […] the other, which I chose, and tried to act on, was to keep the death subdued and go on as coolly and finish as briefly as possible. […] A rapturous recapitulation of his experience following its ‘end’ would seem to me exactly the sort of promotion that I want to avoid: and an ironical one is I hope superfluous. I find the mistake in the mortuary scene, which I meant to make more rapid but which got out of hand in the dialogue. Perhaps it is saved from anticlimax by presence of M. all through. I felt myself he was liable to recur in his grotesque person until he was literally one with the dust. And if the reader feels something similar it is what I want. The last section is just the length and speed I hoped, but the actual end doesn’t satisfy me very well. (Beckett 1984a, 102) 272
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Most of Beckett’s disapproval targets various manifestations of ending, including Murphy’s own, which can only be spoken of in quotation marks, and the novel’s “actual end,” which Beckett finds unsatisfying. Beckett disparages Murphy’s potential reemergence as a “sort of promotion.” In the language of chess, “promotion” occurs when a pawn has reached the eighth rank (its “end”) and is subsequently transformed into a queen. Beckett defends against this particular threat, which would see Murphy recalled into action and forced to relive the events of his life, by consigning him ultimately to “the dust.” Two specific moments from Genesis are recalled in this assertion. The first is an allusion to the myth of Adamic creation (with its union of clay and breath), and the second an echo of Genesis 3:19 which speaks of man’s death as a return into the material state of his own creation: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” If the failure to conclude properly (as Beckett identifies it) is located in the mortuary scene, it is partly because the mortuary is the site in which the possibility of return seems most likely to assert itself. During the autopsy performed on his body, Celia identifies Murphy by means of his birthmark. The coroner remarks on the beautiful symmetry this imperfection lends to Murphy’s life: “How beautiful in a way […] birthmark deathmark, I mean, rounding off the life somehow, don’t you think, full circle” (Beckett 1957, 267). The word “circle” (which is set against the phrase “rounding off”) is used earlier in this scene to differentiate those who have known Murphy casually from those who have known him well. Into one camp are placed those who were mere acquaintances, the other being reserved for those who were members of his “inner circle” (264). The problem of all circular structures in Beckett, such as Murphy’s stars or the shape of his life, is that they go “round and round and round and round and round” (Beckett 1972, 45). The perfection of Murphy’s life is therefore a statement of its indissolubility, of the degree to which it is susceptible, as all lives in Beckett are susceptible, to eternal recurrence. The world of the novel is another circular structure that suffers from the terror of continuation. It is inescapable, both from the perspective of Murphy, struggling to be free of its demands, and from the perspective of its own possible developments. The pressure that it exerts upon its characters is eternal. Apart from the minor reconfigurations that attend their entanglements, there is no real change 273
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that comes to them. With the exception of Murphy, Cooper, and the old boy upstairs, all of the characters are exactly the same at the end of the novel as they were at the beginning. Celia returns to prostitution, Mr. Kelly to his kite, Neary, Wylie and Ms. Counihan to Dublin, where ostensibly the comedy of their geometrical affair continues to develop. The world of the novel does not appear from the perspective of its beginning or its end; it appears instead from the perspective of its long, unchanging middle. Presumably it was created, and possibly it will end; but those two points (its genesis and its destruction) remain purely conjectural. Although chaos can be seen simply as the absence of order, as an expression of the failure of the novel’s characters to come into meaningful relations with one another, it is likewise a cosmological principle. Hesiod places it in the beginning: “First came the Chasm […]. Out of the Chasm came Erebos and dark Night, and from Night in turn came Bright Air and Day, whom she bore in shared intimacy with Erebos” (Hesiod, 6).2 In The Metamorphoses, Ovid gives a more detailed description, picturing it as “a rough, unordered mass of things, nothing at all save lifeless bulk and warring seeds of ill-matched elements heaped in one” (Ovid, 3). Chaos is an originary state, both in the sense that it predates the material world of objects and in the sense that it is the very thing out of which the material world emerges. What distinguishes Murphy from other cosmological texts, from Hesiod’s Theogony or Plato’s Timaeus, is that the novel is not interested in delineating the origins of the world; rather, it desires to undo creation by absorbing itself back into the primal state of nothingness, into the state of un-being that precedes the moment of fiat, or God’s injunction that there be light. As a portion of his character, Murphy is continually compelled to classify. Included among his “innumerable classifications of experience” is his division of jokes into those “that had once been good” and those “that had never been good.” The narrative voice condemns this principle of differentiation on the basis of the following paradox: “What but an imperfect sense of humour could have made such a mess of chaos” (64). Two of the central terms from the interview with Driver are brought together here, chaos and the mess, with the understanding that chaos, the undifferentiated, is preferred over the limitation that order, habit, and distinction provide. This argument against differentiation is an indictment of Genesis, or the moment in which God divided one thing from another, darkness from light, the 274
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heavens from the earth. The joke that Murphy eventually tells about the barmaid and the stout porter who bit her concludes with an allusion to Tintoretto: “Then the nip, and Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way” (140). Tintoretto’s painting depicts Hera coddling the infant Heracles; in the act of suckling, he bites her breast, unleashing a small stream of milk that creates the band of stars. In the allusion to this painting, Murphy’s imperfect sense of humor is affirmed a cosmological principle. The mess that it makes of chaos is the formation of a new and arbitrary world of distinctions. The cosmological and creative implications of Murphy’s compulsion to classify are given full expression in a line that borrows from the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the pun” (65).3 Murphy is continually out of place in the world he inhabits. This is both a fact of his constitution and the result of his disposition towards the requirements that both life and living place upon him. From the outset, we learn that his relation to his surroundings is adversarial: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton” (3). Though he desires to find a place outside of the monotonous rotation of the heavens, Murphy cannot extricate himself fully. Freedom is merely an illusion that he clings to in defense against the quotidian (“as though he were free”). His domicile is a “mew,” indicating the degree to which he has substituted one prison for another – the larger prison of the world for the smaller prison of his room. Murphy attempts his relocation, his sitting out, literally through his chair, which enables him to recline, to rock, and to be released. The nature of this release is that it develops Murphy into a separate world, a world unto himself. The failure of this freedom, however, is that it cannot be sustained. Murphy cannot persist as a planetary system of his own, unaffected by the gravitational charm of other bodies, such as Celia, the heavenly. He is called repeatedly into the literal and figurative world of commerce, in which the demands of life are issued and where they can be fulfilled. There are two distinct places in which Murphy glimpses absolute freedom. The first is the innermost region of his mind, which is described as “a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms” (112). The “tumult of non-Newtonian motion” that Murphy enjoys in this region is both reminiscent of Ovid’s description of chaos and precursor to the chaotic state that he achieves at the novel’s close. The second glimpse occurs at the conclusion of his chess match with Mr. Endon. Following his surrender, Murphy obtains what 275
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the novel refers to as “the rare postnatal treat” of the unperceived (246). Although both of these moments release Murphy from the world, and release him precisely because they situate him in the time before creation, Murphy’s full release only occurs after his death. Following his cremation, his ashes are inadvertently scattered across the floor of a London pub, an act which annuls his “will” completely. There he enters chaos fully, which is a state in which the mind, body and soul are released from the temptation of habit and the eternal recurrence of the created universe: “By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit” (275). 2. Eros and the Novel As George Steiner has noted, Greek creation myths are inherently erotic. “If the Hebraic reading of creation is a rhetoric,” he writes, “that of ancient Greek cosmogonies is ‘an erotic’” (Steiner, 35). The exact place of Eros in the realm of creation remains a matter of debate. In Hesiod, he is among the first of the gods to emerge from Chaos, preceded only by Gaia and Uranus, whose erotic union seems to suggest that his presence in the universe is already latent. He is described in the Theogony as “the most handsome of immortal gods, dissolver of flesh, who overcomes the reason and purpose in the breast of gods and all men” (6). In Dionysian myths, Eros is labeled “protagonus,” the first born. Although later versions portray him as cherubic, oftentimes mischievous in his willful application of desire, earlier versions establish him as a giver of life. In the economics of desire and begetting, it is Eros who shapes the materials of the world into new beginnings; it is Eros who brings together opposing forces and draws from them a series of new creations. Murphy’s escape from the mechanistic world must therefore take place beneath the shadow of a looming erotic entanglement. His retreat into chaos must entail a retreat from love, initially from Ms. Counihan, then from Celia, and lastly from himself. The occasions of his physical union with Celia occur at regular intervals, “serenade, nocturne, albada,” and in so doing inscribe a book of hours that celebrates and affirms their perpetual coming into being. Chaos, the pre-originary state, is pre-coital, not post. It predates the arrival of erotic love and the arrival of the cosmos that Eros conjures. The retreat from Eros is not a movement towards death. It is not a yearning for Thanatos, but a 276
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yearning for nothingness, for a time before beginning, which death itself cannot provide. For whatever reason, in the world that Beckett imagines and creates, death is not an ending, but a new beginning, not a moment of complete closure but recommencement. Murphy’s own death constitutes a refusal to be held captive by the habit of lovemaking and its cosmological implications. It occurs at the moment in which he refuses to return to Brewery Road and to Celia and to the settled life of love and habit that is available to him there. D. H. Lawrence’s affirmations of the life force would appear, superficially, to have little in common with Beckett. However, Beckett’s thinking in Murphy comes quite close to Lawrence's view of both the creative element of sex and the degree to which it is related to the problems of the mechanistic world. Lawrence’s ideas about sex are contained in both his fictional and non-fictional works. One of his simplest statements comes from his essay “Pornography and Obscenity,” where he argues that all sexual episodes, regardless of their outcome, are creative acts. Heterosexual and homosexual activities alike are acts of creation, he maintains, even when they lead only to the type of death that is metaphor for the fulfillment of pleasure. For Lawrence, the sexual act is a means of overcoming the limitations that the modern world imposes on the body, a way of transcending the mechanistic through the reunion of the principles of Love (man) and Law (woman). In Beckett, the physical relation of characters holds no such significance. Most often, the sexual act is reduced to its most elemental form. It lacks any transcendent quality that could establish it as the basis for a religion of apocalypse and rebirth. What they share in common, however, Beckett and Lawrence, on the subject of Eros, is their sense of its essentially life-giving character. Each would concede to Freud’s definition of Eros as “the preserver of all things” (Freud, 52).4 While for Lawrence this ability to preserve is positive, for Beckett it is not. The compulsion towards Eros is merely one of the many temptations that the body faces in its struggle to be free from desire. In Murphy, this struggle is not limited to the body alone, but has application equally to the world of the mind. Freud describes the narcissistic condition as one in which “a whole individual […] retains his libido in his ego and pays none of it out in object-cathexes” (50). While Murphy’s physical life is replete with “object-cathexes,” his mental life is purely self-centered. He is both the subject and object of his own love. For Oscar Wilde, narcissism was the only sustainable form of love. As his Lord Goring admits, “To love oneself is the 277
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beginning of a life-long romance” (Wilde, 87). Beckett would readily agree with this position, but with the caveat that life is made intolerably and inescapably long by Wildean self-interest. When he retreats into his mind, Murphy cannot escape the torment of being because the kind of universe that he makes of himself there, a self-contemplating monad whose central emotion is love, does not permit ending. The extent to which desire is disruptive is illustrated in Neary’s definition of the love-object. He describes it as the “the single, brilliant, organized, compact blotch in the tumult of heterogeneous stimulation” (6). Elsewhere it is described as the “figure” that stands out against the ground (5) and elsewhere still as the “morsel of chaos” (48). In each case, the object of desire is seen as a point distilled from the natural disarray of experience. Of the various words that Neary uses to describe it, “organized” is the most damning from the standpoint of Murphy’s longing for variety and his wish to evade the limitations of routine. His attitude of disgust becomes evident in the aftermath of his surrender to Mr. Endon’s Fabian tactic of chess-playing: “But little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant swallow-tail of Mr. Endon’s arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure” (245). With the blurring of Murphy’s vision, the world is no longer divided between foreground and background. It consists instead of a single, undifferentiated mass in which all things are equally worthless. In this state, Murphy succeeds in seeing the nothingness that he longs to enter, that he conceives of in the third region of his mind, and that Geulincx’s philosophy of resignation (ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis) provides. What he discerns likewise is that entrance into the nothingness is not achieved through perception, but the absence of being perceived. It is achieved through the elimination of the object of desire before which the subject must continue to exist. When it is placed beside the novel, the central terms of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle can be mapped onto Murphy. The unavoidable experience of the “nothing new” relates to the “compulsion to repeat” that forms the basis of Freud’s theory of neurosis. The patient, having suffered some elementary trauma, is condemned to reenactment. In Freud, the trauma is usually an early erotic episode; in Beckett, it is birth. In both cases, the root of all the patient’s subsequent troubles is located in the past, at a point of origin that must be reached and subsequently overcome (in Freud through digging, in Beckett 278
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through regression). The pleasure principle, which Freud understands as a psychic retreat from the disconcerting, recalls Beckett’s theory of habit. As Freud interprets it, the subconscious draw us towards pleasure as a means of keeping “the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or to keep it constant” (9). It is a defense against the mind’s tendency to feel or suffer too deeply. Habit performs the same function. It is, as Vladimir describes it, a “great deadener” (Beckett 1954, 58), which suggests in Freud’s terms a kind of repression whereby the trauma of living (the trauma of having been born) is momentarily nullified. Pure being in Beckett is intolerable because it carries with it the knowledge of our misfortunes.5 Freud’s study is interested primarily in exceptions to the logic of pleasure, in moments, for example, in which the reality principle asserts its dominance, or the idea of pleasure is deferred. He is interested in occasions in which the will to pleasure is overcome by a greater impulse or instinct. In the archeology of the mind and its safeguards, these instincts are “primitive.” Freud describes them as “conservative,” meaning that they are regressive, tending always to an earlier stage. The death principle, in Freud’s theory, does not lead towards development, but away; it leads to an earlier stage of existence, the stage of materiality before life was brought into being. The “most universal endeavor of all living substance,” Freud argues, is “to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (62). Murphy’s desire for unbeginning is similarly conservative. It gestures towards a primary condition that precedes the unfortunate translation of material form into animated being. At the close of the novel, his body, mind and soul are returned to a state of pure materiality, a state of inanimate being that precedes, rather than postdates, his moment of initiation. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer expresses his own version of the death-instinct. The primordial version of Schopenhauer’s will masks itself beneath a variety of justifications, such as love, progress, and identity. These justifications permit the terror of life to go on by drawing us into erotic unions that perpetuate the race: “That eager or even ardent longing, directed to a particular woman, is therefore an immediate pledge of the indestructibility of the kernel of our true nature, and of its continued existence in the species” (Schopenhauer, 559). The only relief from the misery of existence is the denial of will, which constitutes at its core a denial of life. “[T]hrough this denial,” Schopenhauer asserts, “the individual tears itself away from the stem of the species, and gives up that existence in it” (560). 279
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The similarity between Freud and Schopenhauer is one that Freud readily acknowledged. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he admits that his own version of the instinct towards self-cancellation resembles the suppression of the will-to-live that Schopenhauer advocates: “We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For him death is the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life,’ while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to life” (49-50). Schopenhauer maintains that the defeat of will can take place under three categories: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the ascetic. Beckett argues for a similar suspension of will. In his monograph on Proust, for example, he cites “the wisdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi, the wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Following these remarks, Beckett records the following lines from Leopardi: “In noi di cari inganni/ no che la speme, il desiderio è spento” (Beckett 1965, 18). Desire is a central term for Schopenhauer, one that he likewise takes from the tradition of Eastern philosophy. It expresses a yearning that leads ultimately to distress, either because the desired object is not attained, or because its attainment is merely superficial. In order to be free of the will-to-live, Murphy must escape both “the stem of the species,” which Schopenhauer invokes, and the sidereal world that condemns him to endless revolution. He must escape in essence both manifestations of Celia, the heavenly and earthly, which complicate his quest for peace. 3. Chaos at Last oh to be in atoms, in atoms! (Beckett 1984b, 17) Murphy’s first encounter with chaos is an abortive one. It occurs during his first night at the M.M.M., and constitutes a parodic version of Descartes’ stay in his “stove-heated” room. Unable to come out in his mind, Murphy falls asleep in his garret, the radiator (switched on) pulled as close to his bed as possible. He awakes in the thickness of the fug and descends to the water closet to stem the flow of gas: On his way back he examined the foot of the ladder. It was only lightly screwed down, Ticklepenny could rectify it. He undressed to the regulation shirt, stuck the candle by its own tallow to the 280
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floor at the head of the bed, got in and tried to come out in his mind. But his body was still too busy with fatigue. And the etymology of gas? Could it be the same word as chaos? Hardly. Chaos was yawn. But then cretin was Christian. Chaos would do, it might not be right but it was pleasant, for him henceforward gas would be chaos, and chaos gas. It could make you yawn, warm, laugh, cry, cease to suffer, live a little longer, die a little sooner. What could it not do? Gas. Could it turn a neurotic into a psychotic? No. Only God could do that. Let there be heaven in the midst of the waters, let it divide the waters from the waters. The Chaos and Waters Facilities Act. The Chaos, Light and Coke Co. Hell. Heaven. Helen. Celia. (175-76) In his stupor, Murphy’s mind moves from the etymology of gas to the figure of Celia. Between these points, it passes through God’s creation of the world, the formation of heaven and hell, and the figure of Helen. Celia follows logically on Helen because she is the destruction of Murphy as Helen was the destruction of Troy. It is on her account that he departs from Brewery Road and on her account that he eventually enters the “superfine chaos” of the universe. Murphy’s rehearsal of Genesis (“Let there be heaven in the midst of the waters”) underwrites his concern for the process of generation that sustains all of Beckett’s work. What is liberating about chaos, from the perspective of one who is struggling to avoid both desire and routine, is that it does not require desire or the mind to generate its shapes. They are produced at random and without end by the force of motion. It is moreover a force that does not devolve into Newton’s closed-system, into the cycle of sin and retribution, of pain and palliation, but rises instead into the purity of the Democritean naught, into the purity of Murphy’s deepest zone of mind elevated to the status of the universe itself.6 Murphy’s passage into chaos secures for him a permanent period of “abandonment” (Beckett 1965, 22). This phrase occurs in the monograph on Proust, and is employed to describe the occasions in which habit is destroyed and the mind awakened to the realities of human nature. Murphy is no longer at the mercy of the contending circles that control his movement: the system of heavenly bodies, the rotundity of his mind, the naevus of his entrance and departure. In the absence of their designs, Murphy is free in the limited sense that he is surrendered to freedom. Absolute freedom, even if it can be imagined, 281
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or imagined at least as the unimaginable (as it was for Kant), is not entertained in the novel. Freedom remains the freedom to submit. It is an act of compromise. What changes ultimately is the object to which one genuflects. Habit is subsumed by chaos, as Murphy pledges himself at the novel’s close to the will of the universal mess, to the province of eternal motion, to eternal mindlessness. He becomes nothing in the process of nothingness – in the process that precedes his exit and his entry and that precedes likewise the moment of creation itself. Notes 1. Apart from David Hesla’s The Shape of Chaos, another work that deals with the concept of chaos in Beckett is J. E. Dearlove’s Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s non-relational art. While Hesla maintains that all of Beckett’s work is an attempt “to include the formlessness of chaos within the structure of art” (7), Dearlove argues that Beckett develops, in the face of chaos, an art in which there is no relation between the artist, his subject, and his work. 2. Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods, which includes incidents of castration and infanticide, was most likely adopted from earlier Hittite and Babylonian creation myths, such as the Enûma Eliš. Other relevant creation myths include the Book of Genesis and the Rig Veda. 3. Beckett’s parody of the Gospel of John is likewise an assault on the validity of creation itself. In his letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett speaks of Joyce’s art as “an apotheosis of the word,” and distinguishes it from the kind of literature that he wishes to produce, what he calls a “literature of the unword” (Beckett 1984, 172-73). The latter can be seen as anti-creationist in the sense that the chief attribute of Beckett’s art is failure, and likewise in the sense that Beckett’s assault on the word, or Logos, is an assault on the divine moment of self-splintering that divides the father into the son. 4. Freud’s investigation of the sex-instinct leads ultimately to a cosmological source. Towards the close of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he recalls Plato’s Symposium and the myth of gender that is contained therein: “What I have in mind is, of course, the theory which Plato put in the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with the most important of its variations in relation to its object” (69).
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Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Waiting For Godot (New York: Grove P, 1954).
–, Murphy (New York: Grove P, 1957). –, Three Novels (New York: Grove P, 1958). –, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder P, 1965). –, More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove P, 1972). –, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984a).
–, All That Fall, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove P, 1984b). Hesiod, Theogony, trans. M.L. West (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988). Hesla, David, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1971). Freud, Sigmund, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth P, 1955). Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk. I-VIII, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Volume II (New York: Dover, 1958). Steiner, George, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001). Wilde, Oscar, An Ideal Husband, ed. Russell Jackson (New York: Norton, 1993).
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KNOWING HOW TO GO ON ENDING
Maximilian de Gaynesford This paper is about the difficulties of going on and of making an end as these themes emerge from Beckett’s “The Expelled.” It shows how our reading of the story can inform and be informed by Wittgenstein’s investigations into rule-following. It argues that the story does considerably more than provide raw material for philosophy. (a) It reflects philosophically on various issues; (b) offers philosophical motivation to reflect on those issues; and (c) enters into the philosophical condition of profound self-reflection, being partly about the conditions of its own possibility.
Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about. (Wittgenstein, PI §203)1
In his early essay “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce,” Beckett noted that aspects of Vico have their “reverberations” in Joyce’s Work In Progress “without, however, receiving the faintest explicit illustration” (20). His point is clear: our reading of one can be informed by reflection on the other without appeal to influences on the writing. Our reading of Beckett can be illuminated in this way. There are profound structural, linguistic and philosophical parallels with the work of Wittgenstein. These create a critical and reflective space in which their writings reverberate independently of questions of influence.2 The title of this paper names one such common complex of themes: the difficulties of going on and of making an end, the intricate struggles involved in knowing how to accomplish either, the effort required to negotiate the desires and fears in settling for either. The paper itself focuses on one example of this complex. Reading Beckett’s nouvelle “L’Expulsé” (“The Expelled”) can inform and be informed by reading Wittgenstein’s investigations into following rules (PI §§143-242).
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1. “I always loved arithmetic it has paid me back in full” (How It Is, 37) “The Expelled” is about how the central character, “I,” deals with a succession of falls by trying to count the various movements involved, from the cataclysmic birth-like descent which initiates proceedings, to the tragic-comic tumbles which follow like after-shocks. The story is unique in Beckett’s work. There are many mathematical allusions in Beckett’s writing.3 Indeed, there are many counting games.4 Some are connected with knowing how to go on in a merely insulated sense: they are about knowing how to proceed with a certain arithmetical series. Some explore this knowledge in a more exposed sense: being able to proceed with an arithmetical series may be necessary if one is to be able to go on living. “The Expelled” is unique because it is the first text to use this particular kind of mathematical device (the counting game) to explore this particular difficulty (going on).5 And it is the last to depend on this device alone for achieving this purpose.6 The device and the difficulty are announced and given their first iterations at the opening of the story, which is its generative crux. Our own point of entry can be the lament: “I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter” (Beckett 1967, 9). Why should knowing where to begin or end matter if all one needs to know is how to go on? Wittgenstein offers illumination here. And counting games are precisely his way of making the point: “Let us imagine the following example: A writes series of numbers down; B watches him and tries to find a law for the sequence of numbers. If he succeeds he exclaims: ‘Now I can go on!’ ” (PI § 151). The point is that B begins to be able to follow A once he discovers a law for the sequence of numbers. And in this beginning is both the going-on (it is observance of this law which enables him to continue) and the end (it is ignorance of this law, e.g. a forgetting of it, which would force him to stop). In other words, when to begin and end matters to going on because continuity implies limits. Knowing what would constitute going on in some practice is knowing what would constitute beginning it or ending it. Knowing how to go on in some practice implies knowing how it might be initiated, how it might be terminated. These points are quite general, as we appreciate if we follow Wittgenstein’s own advice: “ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, ‘Now I know how to go on,’ when, 286
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that is, the formula has occurred to me?” (PI § 154). This formula can occur to us in relation to anything that counts as a practice, or an obligation, or a relationship. Knowing how to keep up writing a journal or jogging, for example, means being aware of what keeps prompting one to engage in these practices (thus linking one to the initial cause) and what keeps tempting one to stop (thus linking one to its possible termination). Knowing how to keep a promise or honour a debt means being aware of what incurred these obligations (i.e. the beginning) and what would fulfil them (i.e. the end). Knowing how to sustain a partnership in business or marriage means being aware of what binds one in this relationship (i.e. the beginning) and what would loose one (i.e. the end). What this indicates is that ordinary life consists of forms which depend on our “knowing how to go on,” in specific ways, according to context and circumstance. Each implies certain limits and limitations: a beginning and end, for example. Hence the difficulty of engaging in forms of living is the difficulty of going-on, which is, in part, the difficulty of beginning and ending. And the problem of knowing how to go on is the difficulty of knowing how to begin, how to end. Solving for any one must solve for the other two. Hence they are deducible one from another (unlike the three numbers in the head of the “I” at the beginning of “The Expelled”; 9). These internal relations are precisely figured and configured by the counting-games in the story. The “I” begins just as he goes on and just as he ends, whether by accident or design, with a fall. Or rather, the “I” begins mid-fall, keeping faith with Dante, whose “I” begins Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. He is already falling when the story opens, taking three whole paragraphs to come to rest, in the gutter. More precisely still, the story opens with the “I” caught in the midst of two falls, simultaneously enacted, one mental and the other physical. It is the mental fall, the falling-foul of a dilemma, the tumble in the narrator’s reasoning powers, which is given priority, being registered first. If falling has a spiritual ring (the Fall of Satan, of Adam and Eve), a mental fall is especially damning. It is a collapse of that very faculty whose possession by human beings was fondly supposed by Descartes and others to draw us most closely to the divine image and form. By contrast, news of the physical fall is given out comically and late, in the third paragraph. The coming to rest is mental as well as physical, with the timing again so ordered as to give precedence where it is due: “I had time, before coming to rest in the gutter, to conclude 287
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this piece of reasoning” (10). This confluence of mental and physical processes at their moment of coming to rest is satisfying, like the two wings of a bird enfolded on landing. But nothing else in this story will ever be quite so gratifying. So in this sense too, it is a false start, untrue to what unfolds. This original fall is succeeded by several others. Each gives rise to a moment of free reflection before the “I” surrenders himself to his compulsion to “go-on.” And the “I” is sustained throughout each fall, each going-on, by counting-games. Falling down the steps and coming to rest in the gutter, the “I” pauses to reflect on his “glaring” hat and the father who gave it to him, whose design was probably to humiliate (11). Then he gets up and sets off. After counting “a good twenty steps,” he falls again, so as “to avoid crushing a child” (15). He pauses to reflect that he would gladly have crushed the child but for fear of “reprisals.” Shortly afterwards, he sets off, and, as inexorably, falls a third time— shades of the Via Dolorosa. On this occasion, he brings a sixteen-stone old lady down. This time he is caused to pause, and by a policeman: “‘If you can’t bloody well get about like everyone else,’ he said, ‘you’d do better to stay at home.’ It was exactly my feeling. And that he should attribute to me a home was no small satisfaction” (16). A short time later, and the “I” finds a solution to his equilibrium problem. He engages a cab (17). Further falls are prevented for the moment by this surrender. It is, again, a surrender that is both physical (consenting to being moved about by the horse-drawn carriage means that he does not move himself and hence his body escapes falls) and mental (consenting to being directed by the cabman from one advertised lodging to another and finally to his own home means that he makes no decisions, and hence his mind falls foul of no more dilemmas). The “I” does go on in one sense, however, seemingly under compulsion, and in the only way left to him. He goes on counting. First, dividing the small sum his father left him by his life to come. Then counting lodgings advertised. Then counting lodgings visited. Eventually this is not enough and the “I” grows desperate for selflocomotion: “No reason for this to end or go on. Then let it end, I said” (23). A moment of freedom, a regaining of choice. Except the limited option makes a mockery of it – for the only end he can choose is, of course, to go on. He frees himself of the solicitude that prevents him from falling by making his escape, headfirst through a window. This is his last fall, onto grass this time. As he disappears from our hearing, he 288
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is going on inexorably in the direction of the rising sun, “the quicker to come into the light” (25). 2. “Extraordinary how mathematics helps you to know yourself” (Molloy, 30) Like Beckett, Wittgenstein chooses walking as the paradigm exercise of one’s ability to go on: “We do say ‘Now I can go on, I mean I know the formula,’ as we say ‘I can walk, I mean I have time’; but also ‘I can walk, I mean I am already strong enough’; or ‘I can walk, as far as the state of my legs is concerned,’ that is, when we are contrasting this condition for walking with others” (PI § 183). The passage attends to the fact that we can learn a good deal about what “going on” consists in, in any particular case, by asking what it is that might limit one’s going on in that case – e.g. whether it is one’s own inabilities or disabilities that prevent one, or conversely one’s own ability to stop going on; whether it does not reflect one’s abilities at all but merely a lack of opportunity. Beckett’s “I” is similarly interested in the way limits can be variously informative about himself and his goings-on. Some limitations speak of himself in relation to the power of others. The policeman orders him out of the road. This is an obstruction, a withdrawal of the opportunity to exercise his abilities. More intimate are the limitations which speak of his own powers. Some speak of the failure of such powers, the intimacy masked by a joking Biblical reference: “first I raised my eyes to the sky, whence cometh our help, where there are no roads, where you wander freely, as in a desert, and where nothing obstructs your vision, wherever you turn your eyes, but the limits of vision itself” (13). Other limitations speak of the success of his own powers. When he loses patience with the cabman’s solicitude and escapes, for example. On this occasion, he has the ability to prevent himself continuing. By employing this self-regulating mechanism, he sets his own limits to going on. Beckett’s characters do not often achieve such mastery over their condition and the conditions of their existence, though their wit often serves to hide their servitude. And Wittgenstein recognized such selfmastery as being remarkably significant, as well as hard-won. In philosophy, for example, he identified “the real discovery” with whatever enables one to “break off when I want to” (PI § 133). One such moment of self-regulation, an exercise of the “I”’s ability to stop going on, occurs in the opening passage. Stuck with the fact that he 289
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cannot find the counting-rule in his mind, he gives himself a complicated peremptory order: “you must not think of certain things […] or rather you must think of them […] for a while, a good while, every day several times a day, until they sink forever in the mud. That’s an order” (9). The original French is more explicit: one must think of the relevant things “jusqu’à ce que la boue les recouvre, d’une couche infranchissable” – i.e. until they become part of an impenetrable stratum, part of bedrock (“L’Expulsé,” 12). If one’s thinking has reached bedrock, of course, one has to stop. So one’s order gains retrospective legitimation. This is what makes the order complicated; it seems like bootstrapping, being justified by a move that only it can justify. Wittgenstein resorts to the same self-regulative device when faced with a similar problem. Stuck with the fact that he cannot find an ultimate justification for following any rule in the way he does, he exercises his ability to stop looking by giving himself a peremptory order: to say at a certain point “This is simply what I do” and to treat this as “bedrock.” Again, at bedrock, one has exhausted the possibilities of thought and one must stop – as Wittgenstein puts it, “my spade is turned” (PI § 217). Again, the treatment is complicated; it seems like bootstrapping, being justified by a move that only it can justify. This is related to a deeper worry: how is it possible to give oneself an order anyway? Isn’t it as impossible as paying oneself a debt? A second and related paradox is brought out by noting the close connections between following rules and obeying orders. We are trained in both, we react to both in similar ways (PI §206). Knowing how to go on – in our practices, obligations, relationships etc – requires mastering appropriate sets of rules. But that means following them – being directed by them, justified and corrected by them. So mastering rules is a matter of being mastered by them. Wittgenstein imagines a conversation in which the point is made more strongly still: “But am I not compelled, then, to go on the way I do in a chain of inferences?” – Compelled? After all I can presumably go as I choose! – “But if you want to remain in accord with the rules you must go this way” (1983, §113). The anxieties induced here culminate in Beckett’s description of Mr Nidder, the “I”’s lawyer, charged with passing on to him what his father has left, and who chooses to carry out that obligation in an arbitrary way which asserts his own authority: “He played with a cylindrical ruler, you could have felled an ox with it” (18). As in the 290
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opening paragraphs, there is the connection of falling with sticks, with felling, with being beaten.7 Here the beating stick is also a ruler, a counting implement, connecting up with the moral mathematics anxieties. And as a ruler, the stick is also connected with the ability to follow rules, to be mastered or ruled by them, and hence to the connections between rule-following and the ability to go on. Finally, the ruler is explicitly cylindrical; hence following it means going in circles, with the attendant sense: i.e. going nowhere. 3. “Living souls, you will see how alike they are” (“The Expelled,” 25) Earlier, we found that ordinary forms of living consist of practices, obligations, relationships etc which depend on our “knowing how to go on,” in specific ways, according to context and circumstance. And the difficulty was that knowing how to go on implies knowing how to begin and end. But we cannot know how to begin and end a practice without knowing what constitutes it; i.e. without knowing what it is to go on. So – where to begin? Recall the narrator in Dream of Fair to Middling Women trying to define Belacqua’s being as a succession of terms: “They tail off vaguely at both ends and the intervals of their series are demented” (124-25). De-minded, literally – the mindlessness of those who have, or have had, minds. Now we can draw further conclusions. Knowing how to begin, go on and end depends on mastering appropriate sets of rules. And the difficulty is that mastering such sets paradoxically implies being mastered by them. This is because mastering the rules means knowing how to follow them, and we do not know how to follow them unless we know how our behaviour is to be directed, justified and corrected by them. Nested within these two paradoxes is a third. We know that knowing how to go on implies knowing where to begin and end, and that it also implies knowing how to follow rules. The problem is that knowing how to follow rules implies knowing there is no determinable beginning or end. There is no moment at which continuing behaviour counts as having begun mastery of the rule. There is no point at which the rule runs out while behaviour continues. Now philosophy itself is a practice, of course. Hence it is as wholly undermined by these paradoxes as any other practice. And since it is philosophy itself which is pointing this out, it is philosophy which is doing the undermining. Hence there is a kind of philosophical suicide in operation here. 291
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If this were all “The Expelled” has to show, it would merely offer a useful and amusing illustration of arguments concerning human living which are properly developed by other philosophers, e.g. Wittgenstein. This would be false. First, as I have illustrated, the story is itself an exercise in philosophical reflection on the role of rules in human living. It thinks seriously and systematically about the issues. It is not simply raw material for philosophy or some superior form of ornamentation. Second, some of the deepest philosophical considerations Beckett puts forward are not raised by Wittgenstein. They are philosophical precisely because they motivate our interest and concern in the issues. For example, perhaps the deepest connection with Wittgenstein is given by the focus of Beckett’s attention. It is not the inanimate object: the staircase and its number of stairs. Nor is it the abstract methodology of counting. It is the human practices in the context of which and in relation to which these inanimate objects and methods of counting gain their significance as such. i.e. as the “I” says, the number of steps is not what is important to him; what is important is getting the practice right, setting it on some foundation, securing it. But why? Wittgenstein does not trouble himself with the question, but reading Beckett enables us to begin addressing it: i.e. Beckett clearly situates the need for bedrock here within his “I”’s need to rescue what remains to him on being expelled, ejected. As a character remarks in “Heard in the Dark 2,” “simple sums you find a help […] in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort” (250-51). What the “I” is thinking about is how to go on, not what has happened, and his calculations are his immediate technique or frame for grappling with that problem – they are not an incidental distraction, a “comfort,” but central to the business. And the two paradoxes Beckett is interested in are perhaps that much deeper than Wittgenstein’s. That one cannot live without engaging in something that counts as sets of practices, obligations, relationships etc, hence without knowing how to go on; but at some points that knowledge becomes unsupportable (in the various senses of that word). That one cannot know how to go on without recognizing the fact that there is no limit to going on; but one cannot live with recognizing the fact that there is no determinate limit to going on. Third, “The Expelled” engages in the philosophical condition itself, that condition of radical self-reflection, of reflection on the conditions of its own possibility, which the “I” describes as a Dantean torment, a punishment that exquisitely matches the character-flaws 292
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which justified it: “I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself” (11). The “I” presents his story in such a way that it becomes the very problem being reflected on: that philosophical suicide by which practitioners saw off the branch on which they sit by exposing the nested paradoxes which condition it and every other practice. For example, the first paragraph is about how the “I” does not know the right way to count the steps, he does not even know whether there is a right way. Yet these reasonings are evacuated in their delivery by the remarks “the figure has gone from my mind” and “I mean that none of the three figures is with me anymore” (9). For if the figure was once there, there must be a right way to count the steps and he must know this; indeed, he must have known which way that is; so all he lacks is knowledge he once had (i.e. the actual figure so obtained). And this reasoning is then wholly subverted in its turn at the beginning of the next paragraph: “After all it is not the number of steps that matters” (10). It is tempting to describe the trick thus: that what is given with one hand is taken with the other. But the trick is more radical: it gives with one hand and then denies that there could be something to give or a hand to give it with. There are many other instances of this linguistic suicide in the story. For example, the advice to think of things because otherwise one will think of them (9). Or the passing remark “I did not know where to begin nor where to end. I arrived therefore […]” (9). But it is the reason for their existence which is important. By including such paradoxes and causing such stultification, the story becomes what it is about, i.e. the paradoxes of going on and the stultification they cause. Hence the story enters into the philosophical condition of radical self-reflection. Beckett had already described the stultification that results. In “running his head” against the “famous teaser” of the moon’s spots in Dante’s Paradiso, the Belacqua of “Dante and the Lobster” becomes “so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward” (9-10). But this anxiety has hardened by the time “The Expelled” was written: “We may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift” (15). And the response that will soon just seem characteristic is now in place: without regard to what contents the heart, it is by reasoning that the “I” goes on, cannot help but go on, cannot help but choose to go on.
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Maximilian de Gaynesford Notes 1. All references in this form are to Wittgenstein (1958). I adopt the usual practice of citing this text by “paragraph” number. 2. Beckett told John Fletcher in 1961 that he had only read “the works of Wittgenstein” in the last two years (58-59). The phrase strikes me as an odd one to use at that date, i.e. before the various editions of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass appeared, before the publication of anything that might resemble his oeuvre, as opposed to its highlights, the Tractatus and the Investigations. So if the phrase, or something very like it (it may merely be an attempt to recapture the essence of what Beckett had to say), is Beckett’s own, it suggests that he was, even in 1961, and wittingly or not, separating himself from claims to any very close knowledge of Wittgenstein. 3. E.g. his famous likening of the difficulties in interpreting Proust to “an equation that is never simple” (Beckett 1965, 11); Neary’s faulty invocation of Pythagorean geometry to describe Miss Dwyer in Murphy (5; he calls her “My tetrakyt” instead of “tetraktys”); Watt’s various attempts to understand the essence of Mr Knott by registering the various series of permutations to which the possible combinations of each of his attributes give rise (1953, 203-09); the frogs in Watt, each interval in their croaking being the sum of the two preceding (136-38); Hamm in Endgame being concerned about whether his chair is in the exact centre of the room, a mathematically possible but spatially impossible position since this point can have no extension (24). Many of these are (wittingly or not) failures, as Ackerley and Gontarski explain (347-58). 4. E.g. Murphy calculating his gain by having half-finished cups of tea refilled (1957, 83-84), or the number of ways his five biscuits can be arranged in order of edibility (96); the problem of bringing a dog and its food together in Watt, when each of four basic solutions is met with n+1 objections (94-97); Moran in Molloy calculating dinner-money for his son, “a series of menus asymptotically approaching nutritional zero” (1955, 149); Mahood in The Unnamable failing to reach the rotunda at the centre of an enclosure when governing each of his movements by appeal to an incremental calculus (31721). 5. The counting-game device is not used in the flanking stories “La Fin,” “Premier Amour” or “Le Calmant” and where it is used in the preceding mathematically-inclined texts (e.g. Murphy; Watt), it is not used to investigate “going on.” Indeed, the very step-counting problem which launches “The Expelled” is found in texts which were written earlier, such as Watt (1953, 83) and later, such as All That Fall (1984, 29-30), but without serving this particular purpose.
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Works Cited Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 2004). Beckett, Samuel, Watt (New York: Grove P, 1953). –, Molloy, trans. Paul Bowles in collaboration with Samuel Beckett, in Three Novels (New York: Grove P, 1955), 7-176. –, The Unnamable, in Three Novels (New York: Grove P, 1955), 291-414. –, Murphy (New York: Grove P, 1957). –, “L’Expulsé,” in Nouvelles et Textes Pour Rien (Paris: Minuit, 1958), 11-37. –, How It Is (New York: Grove P, 1964). –, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). –, Proust (London: John Calder, 1965). –, “The Expelled,” trans. Richard Seaver in collaboration with Samuel Beckett, in Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove P, 1967), 9-25. –, “Dante and the Lobster,” in More Pricks than Kicks (New York: Grove P, 1972), 9-22. –, “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove P, 1984), 19-33. –, All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 1984), 12-39. –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London: John Calder, 1993). –, “Heard in the Dark 2,” in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995), 250-52. Fletcher, John, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).
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THE THEATRE OF LE DEPEUPLEUR
Karine Germoni From the 1960s onwards, Beckett played more and more with generic borders. Thus Le Dépeupleur, although written in prose between 1965 and 1970, can be regarded as theatre. Le Dépeupleur is as much a space in which to see as a space to be seen, offered to the reader’s internal eye by a speaker who can not be located with certainty. He uses the “abode” as a theatre, imagining the “abode,” its space and laws as a director and trying to keep himself aloof from the “bodies.” The study of the drafts of Le Dépeupleur offers confirmation of the text’s theatricality.
Beckett’s theatre is that of a novelist for whom dramatic writing first appeared as a means “to escape the Trilogy’s horrible prose.” According to Ludovic Janvier, the theatre allowed Beckett to have a rest from the novel: “In fact representing offers a relief” (Janvier, 46; my translation). Janvier reveals that when Beckett talked about theatrical space, he often quoted these famous verses from Lucrece’s De Natura Rerum, in which the philosopher praises the wise Epicurean’s serenity at the opening of the second book: Suave mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem (It is agreeable, when on the vast sea the wind stirs the waves, to be, from the earth, the spectator of other people’s hard times) (Janvier, 46; my translation) Janvier comments on the Epicurean’s situation as follows: “and as for the situation I am referring to, it can be translated by: ‘One is comfortably seated in an armchair while the storm is breaking out over there. And it is as pleasant for the one seated as for the one who has provoked the storm, to see it from afar. On the contrary, in a novel one is the eye of the storm.’ […] I think pity is on the side of the theatre whereas the novel is absolutely pitiless” (Janvier, 46).
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This separation between the theatre and prose is relevant only for Beckett’s earlier dramatic pieces, from Waiting for Godot to Happy Days and Play when the theatre appears as a way of getting rid of the first person. However, it does not seem to apply to plays such as Not I or That Time in which the one seated “in an armchair” feels thrust into the eye of the storm. Thus the distance produced by a detached theatrical point of view fades away in Beckett’s plays, when at the same time he introduces it in his prose which evidences the fact that Beckett played more and more with generic borders from the 1960s onwards. And so Le Dépeupleur, whose literary genre can not be clearly determined at first sight, has to be regarded as theatre. And it is because this text, published in 1970 by the Editions de Minuit at the end of five excruciating years, is essentially theatrical in character that its English version, The Lost Ones, was staged in 1975 by the Mabou Mines Company, directed by Lee Breuer and performed by David Warrilow; then again, in 1978, with Pierre Tabard directing Serge Merlin in Le Dépeupleur. Le Dépeupleur is as much a space in which to see as a space to be seen. In the cylinder, it is mainly through their eyes that the bodies are looking for their lost ones or the mythical way out. The representation of those bodies driven by their “passion” (14) for searching, except for the vanquished who have closed their eyes, is offered to the reader’s internal eye by a speaker who can not be located with certainty and whose cold detachment conjures up the image of Lucrece’s wise Epicurean. He uses the “abode” as a theatre in which he carries out his experiments, imagining the “abode,” its space and laws, as a director would. The study of the drafts of Le Dépeupleur, held at the Washington University Library of Saint Louis (with copies in the Beckett Collection in Reading),1 offers confirmation of all aspects of the text’s theatricality. Moreover, all the work carried out behind the scenes shows that the author does his best to keep some distance between himself and his creation in order to escape the “eye of the storm” of the writing process. But keeping aloof is not an easy task: the experience of the speaker of Le Dépeupleur, both the puppet and the textual figure of the author, exemplifies this difficulty. Etymologically speaking, the theatron is the place where one watches, where looking prevails. This is the case of the “abode” of Le Dépeupleur in which the bodies are the first spectators since they keep looking at one another. In the arena or spying from the niches, “None 298
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look[ing] within himself where none can be […] each [is] searching for its lost one” (Beckett 1995a, 211). The second draft shows that this enigmatic “dépeupleur” – whose name is taken from Lamartine’s famous verse “Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé!” (“L’Isolement”) – is, from RUL MS 1536/2 to RUL MS 1536/5,2 “l’être de rêve,” (the dream being), the only one without whom the searcher feels empty. As the eyes play the main role in the search, they are the criterion that enables us to differentiate between the various families of bodies: the searchers, the sedentary and the vanquished. The vanquished go on moving simply with their eyes “cast down or closed,” “stray unseeing through the throng” or “crawl blindly in the tunnels in search of nothing (Beckett 1995a, 211).” The primacy of the eyes is corroborated by the fact that the expression “les vaincus sont sujets à des brusques retours d’agitation” in RUL MS 1536/10 became “Ils sont sujets toujours à de brusques retours de fièvre oculaire” in RUL MS 1536/9 and in the published version. It is also the reason why the sedentary, despite their immobility, are considered to be active searchers “devouring with their eyes / in heads dead still / each body as it passes by” (211). The bodies are both spectators and actors; the abode is both a stage and the place where the audience is sitting. Moreover, the circularity of the ground reminds us of circular stages in experimental theatres such as the Living Theatre of Julian Beck. Eventually, the last state of the cylinder as the end of a representation will take place when all the eyes are closed; then dark will “descend” (223). Of course the main characteristic of the theatre of Le Dépeupleur is that its scene, described for an “observer” or a “visitor,” can only be seen in and through the discourse of a speaker that can either be inside or outside the cylinder. On this account, Beckett remains deliberately unclear. Due to several changes in the drafts, the speaker’s exteriorisation has increased and thus, his detachment. At the end of the equivalent of the ninth section, RUL MS 1536/4 clearly testifies to the fact that the speaker was looking down upon the bodies: “Ce qui donne d’en haut l’impression de deux grandes roues ou plutôt jantes en sens contraire tournant autour d’une stagnation d’agitations;” but from RUL MS 1536/5 onwards, this evidence is erased because the present tense becomes a conditional present: “ce qui donnerait.”3 This change exteriorises the subject of the utterance. The clinical, objective and cold style which makes the discourse of the speaker sound like a legal or scientific text, the barrenness of the 299
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text which is due to the minimalism of its punctuation and the dry tone, also give the impression that the speaker wants to remain aloof, to feel no compassion for the “little people.” Furthermore, throughout the genesis of the piece Beckett erased expressions which are filled with too much pathos. My point can be illustrated by an extract from the second draft: “Sans autre force qui l’en déloge l’infortuné quitte alors sa place et part à la recherche d’une échelle libre etc.” The word “l’infortuné” becomes “le quidam” in the fourth draft, so that the pathetic tone is neutralized. Further down in the second draft, the expression “l’infortuné intéressé” becomes in the third one, “l’intéressé.” In the third draft, the prolepsis referring to the potential encounter of two bodies in the same tunnel also disappears and becomes: “Cette situation terrible fera l’objet plus loin d’une description particulièrement émouvante” (1970, 7). Furthermore, in the published version it is said that “le terme ‘vaincus’ […] a en effet un petit côté pathétique désagréable” (35). As a consequence, the speaker appears like Lucrece’s wise Epicurean, who in all serenity watches the wind stirring waves and men roaming, searching at random for the road to life. The speaker watches the spectacle of the “two storms” (Beckett 1995a, 216) of the light and the temperature. Of course he mainly observes the bodies wandering or transporting the ladders “eddywise” (210). It is worth remarking that the second draft starts mentioning the research as a wandering: “Etablir un espace où réunis à demeure les corps pour la plupart puissent errer à la recherche les uns des autres ou par simple besoin de mouvement.” The analogy with the wise Epicurean seems to be further evidenced by this extract of the ninth draft, suppressed in the last one. It concerns the vanquished frozen in the middle of the arena: “Ce qui convenablement éclairé et vu d’en haut d’un œil humain ferait par moments l’effet de rochers au milieu d’une eau agitée” (my emphasis). Then the comparison is modified to become more general thanks to the use of the plural: “pourrait rappeler par moments certains spectacles naturels.” And finally, Beckett switches from the plural to the singular: “certain spectacle naturel,” which this time refers to one specific natural spectacle and probably to the one found in the second book of the De natura rerum.4 It is noteworthy that till RUL MS 1536/5 the mythical “way out” of the cylinder only leads to the “sky.” It is possible that Beckett has added the earth as an imaginary destination, because the earth, as in Lucrece, appears as a quiet place in opposition to the restless abode. The apparent serenity of the speaker also contrasts with 300
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the agitation of the bodies and consequently makes the reader wonder whether the speaker is human. Could the speaker be this “thinking being coldly intent on all [the] data and evidences” (Beckett 1995a, 214) concerning the effect of the red-yellow light on the bodies’ eyes? This speaker is in “the secret of the gods” (207) since he or it can perceive what is insensible in the cylinder. For example, the speaker is able to count the vanquished whereas they are indistinguishable “to the eye of flesh from the still unrelenting” (211). And so the scene is not only fictional but also mental and remains so even when the text is brought onto a real stage. In the following excerpt of RUL MS 1526/2 even the bodies were “imaginaires,” imaginary to each other: “Le mouvement. Des traits uniquement vus et mal dans l’imagination. Une grand myopie. Ces corps ne sont donc pas lumineux.” This explains the following commentary in the same draft where the chimerical aspect of the search of the lost one is also underlined: “Singulière aberration dans un tel lieu et dans de telles conditions que de vouloir trouver un seul être du temps des songes entrevu une seule fois en songe.” There is no way of differentiating between the vanquished, as previously stated, and the still unrelenting Besides, it is said that “[l]e fond du cylindre comporte trois zones distinctes aux frontières précises mentales ou imaginaires puisque invisibles à l’œil de chair” (Beckett 1970, 38). The use of both “mental” and “imaginary” is not redundant but it creates an emphasis: the image of the cylinder and of its inhabitants is only perceptible for “la vue de l’esprit” (11) according to the expression found in the first section. What is demanded therefore is a mind which, before being that of the reader, is that of the speaker who, like a demiurge, imagines and builds the world of Le Dépeupleur as a theatre where experiments are carried out. The first three sentences of the first section are similar to the arid statements of a mathematical problem or of an experimental project that a demiurge would try to solve. It was even more striking in the second draft which began by this injunction: “Etablir un espace.” The speaker then logically established the geometrical characteristics of the “abode.” The arbitrary nature of the measures was made obvious by the use of “par exemple” and “par conséquent” in the following example: “un cylindre régulier surbaissé ayant 50 mètres de périmètre par exemple et par conséquent quinze de hauteur environ pour l’harmonie” (my emphasis). In the published text, at the beginning of the third section, the speaker seems to set the problem anew although it is done 301
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in different terms: “Intérieur d’un cylindre etc.” That is also the case for the second and the tenth sections: although they begin nearly in the same way – “Un corps par mètre carré de surface utile soit deux cents corps chiffre rond” – they subsequently evolve differently. The speaker cannot control the world of the cylinder. Its end can only be imagined or conjectured. The project never dries up, because the last state of the cylinder and its inhabitants is the ultimate consequence of the “notion” “qui veut tant qu’elle dure qu’ici tout se meure mais d’une mort si graduelle et si fluctuante qu’elle échapperait même à un visiteur” (Beckett 1970, 16). The bodies will be stilled “in cold darkness” if the notion “is maintained.” But what happens if not? The speaker can only assume, as in the end of the fourth section, that “they are darkward bound” (Beckett 1995a, 207). Thus the text reaches an end with no final stop. The reader remains, just like Clov in Endgame, on the treshold of the ‘unthinkable’ end. Furthermore, the end of each section could be the end of the text. This creates suspense and thus a kind of dramatic tension. Just as the world of Le Dépeupleur is a world in progress, the text is a work in progress. The present tense – which at first seems to be used to describe habits – can rather be considered as the time of creation, out of time, at the level of conceptualisation. In the published text, the hypothesis “if this notion is maintained” is repeated five times, although the reader is not always able to clearly identify to what this “notion” refers.5 The drafts, however, allow us to do so. From the second to the sixth draft, this “notion” appears as “la notion venue” or “née” “au paragraphe 9” ou “à l’article 9,”6 the paragraph nine being the equivalent of the second in the published text. The past participles “venue” ou “née” illustrate that Le Dépeupleur was both a world and a work in progress. For example, in the ninth draft, the following passage about the climber also gave the impression of a work in progress, as if the speaker was imagining the laws of the “abode” as the text was unfolding: “Peut-il s’en aller à ce moment-là? Oui. Est-ce obligatoire? Non. A ce moment-là il est de nouveau libre de partir quoique rien ne l’y oblige.” Beckett immediately erases those two questions and answers. At the same time, those elements giving the feel of a scientific demonstration were suppressed. For instance, at the end of the second draft, the extract dedicated to the impossibility of finding a way out because of the lack of solidarity, ended with the following explanation: “Ces raisonnements n’ont pas toute la pertinence qu’ils auront plus loin 302
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quand sera définie plus nettement qu’elle n’a été aux paragraphes 3 et 9 la nature de l’idéal en question et de la poursuite à laquelle il pousse tous ceux que la fixité n’a pas encore gagnés. Voilà pour ce zénith inviolable où se cache pour les amateurs de mythe une issue vers le ciel. Il ne méritait pas un paragraphe à part.” This paragraph, which is the equivalent of the fifth section, is maintained, but without the autocritical judgement which disappears in the fifth draft. In the published version, all the metatextual elements7 as well as many critical judgements were erased. As for the search for the lost one, it is no longer considered as an “aberration” as it was the case until the fifth draft. Even the autocritical judgements, which were still present in the last two drafts, were cut. No doubt those changes were made to intensify the feeling of indifference of the speaker. And perhaps it was a means for Beckett to keep aloof from his own creation in order to become its indifferent spectator. As all these all too evident traces of a work in progress are removed, the “abode” appears as a space that already existed before the beginning of the fiction, as if the speaker was trying to disguise the fact that the “abode” is progressively being created. All those deletions modify the very nature of the text, which becomes more and more theatrical, moving away from demonstration and towards “monstration,” which goes hand in hand with a withdrawal of the speaker because, to repeat Janvier’s comment, “representing offers a relief.” And as a consequence, it is no wonder that Beckett simultaneously suppressed comments, judgements and the pathetic vocabulary. It is as if the “abode” could not become a spectacle without the withdrawal of the speaker – the same happens in a theatrical text where the author must disappear behind his characters. In that respect, the changes made between the ninth and the tenth draft in the excerpt about to the copulation of the bodies are particularly telling: “Il est pathétique alors de voir les ébats se prolonger douloureux et sans espoir” is revised to “Le spectacle est curieux alors des ébats qui se prolongent douloureux et sans espoir” (my emphasis). While “pathétique” is changed to “curieux,” the word “spectacle” appears. And yet an intense sense of suffering comes from the little people, as far as their souls, their skin and their eyes are concerned. It is all the more perceptible as it is observed from a distance. As the textual genesis goes on, the writing moves more and more outward. It is as though the writer of the prose texts gave way to the 303
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playwright whose first task is to visualize and place things in space. Indeed the speaker acts right from the beginning of Le Dépeupleur as a director. While making the statements of the experimental project to be solved, the speaker sets the decor where the action is going to take place. Of course “action” must not be taken in its traditional sense: in the same way as waiting is the action in Waiting for Godot, searching is the action in Le Dépeupleur. Space is presented in theatrical terms. For instance, the word “accessoires” (Beckett 1970, 20; “properties,” Beckett 1995a, 208) is used to refer to the ladders. As a director would care about light and movement, the speaker takes as much care with the quality of the light, with the floor and with the walls as well as with the laws concerning the way the bodies move, go on searching or queue for the ladders. As a consequence, the writing of Le Dépeupleur cannot but remind us of scenic indications: as in Act without words I and Act without words II, only speechless movements are made to be seen. The use of infinitives used as imperatives – of verbal bases in The Lost Ones – also contribute to giving a scenic appearance to the text. Nouns are also used to present the different physical characteristics of the “abode” to be dealt with. The definite articles of “Lumière,” “Température,” “Niches” or “Echelles” progressively disappear in the drafts so that those nouns look like self-orders. Up until the eighth draft, the first section was divided into different paragraphs, each presenting one of those themes. All those injunctions echo the scenic indications given by M, the director in Catastrophe in 1982, to A, his assistant. This scenic writing also appears in texts written at around the same period as Le Dépeupleur: in Bing, Sans, All Strange Away or in the fourth Faux Départ – published with the three other Faux Départs in June 1965 in the German review Kursbuch – in which self-orders can also be found: Imagine light. Imagine light (Beckett 1995c, 273). Ruby Cohn comments: “The narrator commands himself to imagine light […]. The prose is so elliptical that I am tempted to read it as Beckett’s self-commands, anxious to follow his imagination into uncharted ways” (Cohn 2004, 285). It is interesting to note that in spring 1964 Beckett had to replace the often absent Jean-Marie Serreau 304
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as the director of Comédie. As Cohn remarks: “Although Beckett received no credit in the theatre program, Paris rehearsals of Play marked the beginning of his career as a director” (281). Just as there is no possible other scenic image than that imagined by the tyrannical director of Catastrophe, in whom some critics have recognized Beckett himself as a director, there is no other way for the writer but to follow the images commanded by his tyrannical imagination from the inside as stated in Le Monde et le pantalon. The drafts often offer examples of what can be considered as “selfcommands,” attempts to drag out these “mystérieuses poussées vers l’image.” In the case of Le Dépeupleur, it took Beckett five years to drag them out. Not surprisingly, those “self-commands” can be found in the manuscripts themselves. RUL MS 1536/10 for instance begins with a series of self-instructions, which look like a self-imposed program for the writer to follow: Refaire arêne-piste niches-tunnels I. Motifs pour y monter or else: Reprise séjour Les amours. Les colères. problème respiration. The numerous deletions or crossings-out show that Beckett periodically reaches dead ends from which he has to escape. This is especially true in the second draft where large sections are deleted, giving the feeling of a creative chaos illustrating the “intractable difficulties” to which Beckett refers in the first draft. And thus the drafts show how Beckett tries to keep aloof from the storm of writing. Most of the time, Beckett uses notebooks: such is the case for the second, the fourth and the seventh (RUL MS 1536/6) drafts; the ninth one (RUL MS 1536/10) shares the same notebook as the inconclusive eighth draft. The left page enables Beckett to keep a distance from his writing. There he draws doodles, writes the corrections or additions of some passages that he then incorporates in the following draft or directly on the right page, deleting the former version. The left page is also the place where he asks himself questions, 305
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to which the published text provides answers, or not. For example, at the end of the ninth draft, we find this question: “Veut-on être trouvé ou seulement trouver?” The fiction itself suggests the answer is “trouver,” since the “passion” – with both its active and passive meaning, that of loving and of being submitted to – of searching prevails. As a consequence, a dialogue between Beckett and Beckett is created, the dialogue remaining behind the scenes of the published text. Besides, the last section, which never appears in the drafts, was only written in 1970. Of course this attempt to remain aloof sometimes fails because the author cannot help making comments on his work. For instance, in the second draft, on the page facing the eighth one, Beckett wrote in the top left hand corner: “Tous cherchent ‘dépeupleurs’!” What do the inverted commas mean? That Beckett has finally found the exact term he was searching? Not at all. The word “dépeupleur” appears right from the very beginning of the draft, as early as in the second sentence. In this case, do they show that Beckett takes into account that the word is a neologism coined thanks to a borrowing from Lamartine’s poem? This is also unlikely as the quotation marks would not have have been kept in the published text. To my mind, they enable Beckett to mock the very search of the “dépeupleur” by keeping this word at a distance. Moreover, the exclamation mark allows him to point out that the chimerical search for an “être de rêve” is an “aberration.” However, this search for the “dépeupleur,” for a loved one, remains at the heart of the text as in other Beckettian texts, where it takes other forms as in Enough or How It Is. This movement of come-and-go between the creator and his creation, this tension between wanting to keep aloof and its partial failure are the true actions of Le Dépeupleur on the scene of the speaker’s discourse. Indeed, the speaker has difficulties in only being the insensible spectator of the “little people” and to put things “mildly” (Beckett 1995a, 213). John Pilling has underlined that these expressions were all the more numerous as the text was unfolding (156-167). Here and there, a few words or expressions full of compassion escape from the mouth of the speaker, for instance “de tels tout petits” (Beckett 1970, 27), or “le bambin” (54). From time to time, the speaker passes some comments or judgements without being able to prevent them. For example, as far as the disturbing slowness of the vibration of the temperature compared to that of the light is concerned, he does not conclude in a very credible way: “Tout est donc pour le mieux” (37). Sometimes the speaker completely loses control of his speech, which 306
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becomes mad (like Lucky’s) with a very complex syntax, particularly in sections 10 and 12 – would the speaker be another kind of ‘lost one’? Thus the rhythm and the tone of the text are all but flat despite its apparent uniformity: they change from one section to the other and even within the same section. The reader could presume the stylistic differences are ascribable to different speakers. That is what Antoinette Weber-Caflisch demonstrates in Chacun son dépeupleur. But we should rather think there is only one speaker who splits into several ones as in The Unnammable for example (see Abbott 1977). And it is this splitting again that we find in David Warrilow’s performance as described by Ruby Cohn, who calls it a “back-and-forth movement between detached, quasi-clinical demonstration of the cylinder world with its centimetre-high inhabitants and passionate involvement in the destiny of equals” (1980, 225-26). For example, he “speaks in rare tenderness of the vanquished woman who is called the North” (228). And, as Jonathan Kalb remarks: “Warrilow behaves less and less like a lecturer and more and more like a character in his story” (137). For example, “At the dark cylinder wall, Warrilow stands up tall to counterpoise the alternative theories about an exit from the cylinder. Undercutting his involvement, Mabou Mines actors, planted in the audience, burst out laughing at these preposterous assumptions. Mastering his passion, Warrilow returns to demonstration” (Cohn 1980, 227). This mocking laugh fits the spirit of the text and the Beckettian irony which springs out of the naivety of the speaker. The expression “Tout est donc pour le mieux” (Beckett 1970, 37), for instance or, on the contrary, “dans ce vieux séjour tout n’est donc pas encore tout à fait pour le mieux” (53) obviously echoes Candide: Voltaire, before Beckett, could be ironic through the naivety of his protagonists. Of course, the first butt of Beckett’s irony is Beckett himself. With his textual figure, he mocks his deep-rooted tendency to romanticism and compassion for his fellow men. Irony is also perceptible in the use of the often comical pastiche of the rational style. Despite its rules and laws which are often said to be “natural,” and the transfer from “the tunnel to the ceiling” is said to have “logic on its side,” the world of the “abode” remains rather strange. And despite of its logical links, its seemingly rational way of reasoning, the speaker’s speech is all but logical, and full of dysfunctions. Far from being hidden, those dysfunctions glaringly appear in the text as if to be shown on purpose. The speaker sounds like an actor improvising or having lost his text: 307
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Ce n’est donc que pendant sept secondes à peine sur les huit que dure l’aller-retour que les corps sont soumis au régime maximum de réchauffement et de refroidissement ce qui donne tout de même moyennant une addition ou encore mieux une division un total d’entre douze et treize ans de répit par siècle dans ce domaine. (Beckett 1970, 37) If Le Dépeupleur presents the failure of a rational discourse, it is certainly because no rational speech is possible where demonstration is not available. The search for an ideal that “chacun s’est vu imposer du dedans,” according to the expression found in RUL MS 1536/2 (instead of “the ideal preying on one and all,” Beckett 1995a, 207), is empirical and cannot be summed up by an equation, whether this ideal be “l’être de rêve” or that of the artist. It is all the more true in the real world, as is suggested by the following sentence: “Car seul le cylindre offre des certitudes et au-dehors rien que mystère” (Beckett 1970, 38). The laws of the real or external world seem to be even more complex than the laws of fiction. The attempt to have an objective speech is bound to fail just as the attempt to keep aloof from one’s own creation – and one’s fellow men. Not surprisingly Mabou Mines designer Thom Cathcart had “the decisively brilliant idea of seating the live theatre audience in a rubber cylinder environment” (Cohn 1980, 224). Strangely enough the spectators themselves look like the bodies. This come-and-go between detachment and identification, between the stage and the audience, is central in the Occidental theatre as Aristotle has shown in his Poetics. It is also the case in Le Dépeupleur. Nevertheless, the failure of this detachment is only too apparent. For paradoxically, identification and recognition, the ultimate goal of the search, are easier to achieve at a distance, which becomes clear from the following extract from RUL MS 1536/10: Du sol à cause de la presse le regard butte sur le tout proche. Dans l’arène notamment seuls peuvent se voir les corps qui se frôlent. Ce ne sont jamais longtemps les mêmes. Les niches satisfont le besoin de recul et de vue générale même imparfaite. Suivi d’en haut dans ses allées et venues dans l’ignorance de qui l’épie un corps peut se trahir qui à bout portant ne le ferait pas. Ce n’est pas ici le détail qui parle. Certains retours au sol précipités n’ont pas d’autre cause que l’illusion d’avoir trouvé (my emphasis) 308
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This excerpt answers the question asked by Beckett at the end of the draft: “Veut-on être trouvé ou seulement trouver?” That is the question, already clearly asked in Comment c’est: “trouver quelqu’un que quelqu’un vous trouve enfin vivre ensemble collés ensemble s’aimer un peu aimer un peu sans être aimé être aimé un peu sans pouvoir aimer répondre à ça laisser vague dans l’ombre” (Beckett 1961, 117). The answer of Le Dépeupleur seems to be: “Quoiqu’[on] cherch[e] ce n’est pas ça” (Beckett 1970, 32). Unfortunately, the theatre of Le Dépeupleur entails no catharsis. But it produces another effect on the reader. The reflection on the self and of the self can only take place in the internal eye. This is what is shown by the fizzle “Se voir” written in 1968-1969. In this “[c]losed place,” the arena and the bodies remind us of those of Le Dépeupleur. Despite the French title, no self is visible: “There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing” (Beckett 1995b, 236); yet the concentric circle of ditch and track also mirror the human eye, which thus “se voit.” The imaginary and mental theatre of Le Dépeupleur enables the reader to see himself through the bodies in a far more efficient way than if the bodies were concretely embodied on an external stage; last but not least, it enables Beckett to be found … without being seen. I am grateful to The Estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to cite from unpublished material. Notes 1. Pascale Sardin-Damestoy in the appendix of her book Samuel Beckett autotraducteur ou l’art de l’ “empêchement” reorders the drafts this way: MS 1536/4, MS 1536/7, MS 1536/5, MS 1536/6. My own research on the drafts confirms this chronological order because there are numerous similarities between MS 1536/4 and MS 1536/7. 2. For a description of the drafts, see Beckett at Reading, 148-53. We reorder the drafts this way: MS 1536/1, MS 1536/2, MS 1536/3, MS 1536/4, MS 1536/7, MS 1536/5, MS 1536/6, MS 1536/8, MS 1536/10, MS 1536/9. 3.
RUL MS 1536/7 stops before this passage.
4. Another hypothesis is that this “natural spectacle” refers to the Romantic Poets; in any case, it does not negate the former one.
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Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter, “A Grammar for being elsewhere,” in Journal of Modern Literature, 6.1 (February 1977), 39-46. Beckett, Samuel, Comment c’est (Paris: Minuit, 1961). –, Le Dépeupleur (Paris: Minuit, 1970). –, Se Voir in Pour finir encore et autres foirades (Paris: Minuit, 1976). –, Le Monde et le pantalon (Paris: Minuit, 1989). –, The Lost Ones, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995a). –, Closed Place, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995b). –, Faux Départs, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995c). –, Beckett at Reading, Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at The University of Reading, ed. M. Bryden, J. Garforth and P. Mills (Reading: Whiteknights P, 1998). –, Le Dépeupleur, RUL MSS 1536/1-10, The Beckett International Foundation, Reading U Library. Cohn, Ruby, Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980). –, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2004). Janvier, Ludovic, “Roman/théâtre,” in Revue d’Esthétique (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1990 [1986]), 45-56. Kalb, Jonathan, Beckett in performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Knowlson, James and John Pilling, Frescoes of the skull: The later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 1979). Lucrèce, De Natura Rerum, t.I, livres I-III, ed. Alfred Ernout (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984-85).
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The Theatre of Le Dépeupleur Sardin-Damestoy Pascale, Samuel Beckett autotraducteur ou l’art de l’ «empêchement » ( Artois Presses Université, 2002 ).
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“HOLO AND UNHOLO”: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon The following short piece aims to introduce ongoing work on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, a prototype of which was presented at the Beckett at Reading 2006 conference. An overview of the benefits and some of the key (technical) features of the genetic electronic manuscript editions will be preceded by a short examination of Beckett’s own attitude towards his manuscripts.1
In 1967, Beckett’s friend, the author Kay Boyle, asked him to contribute a book review to a journal. Beckett replied by stating that “I never do book reviewing. I can’t write about writing.”2 This statement does not come as a surprise – Beckett was, after all, an author who was extremely reticent about commenting on his own writing, never mind anybody else’s, and had not reviewed a book since the 1930s. Beckett was also reluctant to comment on the writing of friends, telling the young Irish writer Aidan Higgins for example that “I could not help you from beyond help to beyond help,” before offering as a word of advice “Despair young and never look back. In the National Library, Gallery or elsewhere.”3 Yet even if Beckett did not write about writing, as he told Kay Boyle, his texts are, as we know, very often about writing. From the early poem “Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin,” with its self-conscious references to the “clumsy artistry” and of being “ashamed of presuming to arrange words,” right through to the final text, “Comment dire,” Beckett insistently wrote about the act of writing. Texts such as Malone Dies or How It Is stage the struggle of composition, with all the additions and deletions, revisions and variations inherent in the writing process. Furthermore, Beckett’s work frequently alludes to the material evidence of the writing process, the avant-textes or drafts as well as the notes that existed prior to a final version. Thus Dream of Fair to Middling Women alludes to the Dream notebook when the narrator
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wonders (unable to remember a quote by Goethe) “did I do well to leave my notes at home” (72). The post-war texts similar signpost Beckett’s continued reliance on notebooks kept during the 1930s. How It Is thus refers to “dear scraps recorded somewhere” (28), and All Strange Away explicitly alludes to the philosophy notes we now know as MS 10967 (held at Trinity College Library in Dublin) by referring to “ancient Greek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period” (1995, 175).4 Several texts also self-consciously highlight the fact that they are but one textual stage that happens to have found some kind of (arbitrary) conclusion. Watt is of course the prime example here, with its frequent references to the “hiatus in MS” and the inclusion of draft material in the form of the “Addenda.” The later work similarly adopts a textual status somewhere between draft and final version, with titles such as From an Abandoned Work indicating that, in effect, these texts were an attempt at expressing the inexpressible, which would have to be followed by other attempts. But what was Beckett’s attitude toward his own manuscripts? Where did he stand in the divide epitomised by T. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry, between Eliot’s belief that the origins of a piece of work were irrelevant to its understanding, and Valéry who held that there was nothing more beautiful than a manuscript draft? Beckett’s position can partly be illuminated by his correspondence with manuscript dealers and early critics of his work. Initially he seems to have thought that his draft material was, materially and creatively, of little value or interest. As a consequence, he “bestowed (the word is not too strong)”5 a lot of manuscripts to the dealer Jake Schwartz in the late 1950s and early 1960s, unaware or unconcerned about the fact that the latter was making a considerable profit.6 However, Beckett’s attitude to Schwartz, whom he called “The Great Extractor,” did change in December 1962, when he told the dealer that he would not send further manuscripts, as he was “keeping [them] against the rainy day when they won’t be worth anything.” This statement is somewhat misleading, as he had, a year earlier in 1961, entered into an informal agreement with the rare books and manuscript dealer Henry Wenning. It was Wenning who alerted Beckett to the true value of his manuscripts, and to the fact that Schwartz had been paying him only a small part of what they were really worth. Beckett seems to have implicitly trusted Wenning when it came to business transactions (their letters are marked by friendship), and Wenning repaid this trust by being honest about his 314
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intentions and offering fair prices on manuscripts.7 Realising the true material worth of his manuscripts – evident in his expression of amazement (in a letter of 1963) at the “astonishing sum obtained for MSS” – Beckett increasingly used the gift or the sale of manuscripts to financially support friends. At the same time, Beckett’s manuscript material was also finding its way into university libraries via literary critics, who convinced him of the ‘academic’ value of drafts. In the 1950s and 1960s Beckett was (relatively) helpful to academics writing about his work, resigning himself to the fact that his work invited, as he thought Joyce’s did, “such herrdoktoring.”8 These critics (in particular John Fletcher, Lawrence Harvey and Ruby Cohn) were instrumental in bringing Beckett’s unpublished work to light – invariably there came a point when they were unable to curb their curiosity about abandoned draft material, and although Beckett was consistently dismissive about such inédits (“my accumulated rubbish”9), he would sooner or later send them along. Thus for example Ruby Cohn received the first draft of and all the notes toward the abandoned play on Samuel Johnson, Human Wishes, in 1966. Beckett at this time was happy for her to discuss and critically comment on such manuscript evidence, but stated clearly that he did not want the material to be made available to public inspection.10 Within the space of a few years, however, Beckett’s attitude relaxed, and although he remained characteristically dismissive of his drafts, as he frequently was of the final texts, he not only remained unopposed but actually began to aid such material reaching the public domain. It is worth remembering, in this context, that for example the Beckett International Foundation’s extensive archive in Reading simply would not exist had Beckett (as well as his friends, admirers and critics) not donated a large amount of manuscript material.11 Indeed, the 1971 Reading Exhibition, which formed the basis for the Archive and was organised by James Knowlson, represented a kind of watershed in Beckett’s attitude with regard to manuscripts being incorporated into University library collections. By 1973 the situation had become one where Beckett could tell Cohn that he had “dug up a lot of old stuff for Reading, Knowlson calling to-day to cart it away.”12 An interest in Beckett’s manuscripts was thus in many ways inscribed into the study of his work from a very early point, and scholars beside Ruby Cohn began to research the material that increasingly found its way into public library collections. Much of this manuscript research was conducted with an elucidation of the final, 315
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published text firmly in mind, although some studies also discussed Beckett’s process of composition – Rosemary Pountney’s Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956-1976 and Stan Gontarski’s study of Beckett’s Intent of Undoing in the dramatic works are two important examples. Beckett was in fact supportive of such studies in the genesis of his texts. When John Fletcher in 1966 suggested including (in the 1970 bibliography co-edited with Raymond Federman) a section entitled “Studies in Variants,” which would concentrate on “L’Expulsé” and “La Fin,” Beckett responded Ok for variants idea. But I could let you have I think more interesting material. For example there are 9 or 10 versions (not all conserved) of the very short new text I have given to Lindon and translated for Calder (in French PING, in English BING). I could let you have one or two preliminary + the final. Atrocious stuff of course.13 Beckett’s comments here show his awareness of the fact that it is precisely the loose and dead ends of the compositional process which are of ‘interest’ to scholars. This becomes clear in a letter written to Henry Wenning about the genesis of the playlet Come and Go, in which he states that “the MS will amuse you: about 25 pages to arrive at that!”14 The study of what Beckett termed his “MS fumbling and blundering” has informed the work of scholars working in a wide range of approaches.15 Yet as in the case of Beckett’s correspondence, accessibility to and publication of manuscript material has limped behind the large numbers of books depending on it. There are notable exceptions – John Pilling’s edition of the Dream notebook for example, or the facsimile editions of Beckett’s theatre production notebooks edited by Jim Knowlson, Stan Gontarski and Dougald McMillan. But the large proportion of Beckett’s notebooks and drafts are not available either in transcription or facsimile. It is with envy that Beckett scholars look to Joyce Studies, for example, which can draw on the extensive James Joyce Archive, the facsimile edition of Joyce’s manuscripts published in 1978, and current projects such as the one publishing the complete transcription of the Finnegans Wake Notebooks held at Buffalo, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout (Brepols, 2001-). 316
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The only comparable enterprise in Beckett Studies is the series of Variorum Editions of Bilingual Works edited by Charles Krance, which was approved by Beckett himself, and which has now been re-launched with a new publisher (Brepols) after lying dormant for several years. In 1996, the editorial board of the series stated that it was “not yet convinced of the overall desirability of electronic editions” (Krance 1996, xiii). In the intervening ten years, however, technological developments have led to a situation whereby electronic editions of texts and manuscripts can offer ways to present material that is just not possible in print, and can thus form a complementary component to print publications. Beyond aiding in the preservation of manuscripts, digital editions not only further accessibility but offer a large number of ways of presenting manuscripts. An environment can thus be created that combines visualisation by way of facsimiles in the form of colour scans, fully searchable transcriptions, links to source texts, and so on. In 2003, work began on an electronic manuscript edition of four works by Beckett, covering different types of text: Stirrings Still, Comment dire, Not I, the Mirlitonnades, and finally the Dream Notebook. This prototype will be available as an in-house electronic edition to scholars visiting the Beckett Archive. The manuscript edition itself is based on the earlier electronic genetic edition of Beckett’s Stirrings Still / Soubresauts, edited by Dirk Van Hulle with technical assistance from Vincent Neyt, which will also be the next volume published, in print format with CD-ROM, in the revamped Series of genetic editions of Samuel Beckett’s bilingual works. In what follows, some of the key features of the digital manuscript edition will be discussed, in order to open up the project for discussion so that in time Beckett’s manuscript material, “holo and unholo,” can be made accessible to scholars. The description is structured according to the edition’s digital architecture, starting from the main menu. The Documents can be rearranged according to Chronology or Language: Documents
Chronology
Language
The various draft versions as well as the published versions (both English and French) can be compared, and longer passages that did not make it into the published version can be viewed separately: Compare versions
Abandoned sections
Reading texts 317
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In addition to these different views a set of tools may be of help to facilitate research: Genetic map
Tools
Search
The main aim of the edition is to facilitate access to the manuscript material. Under Documents the user finds the Catalogue numbers Linear transcriptions Topographic transcriptions, and Digital facsimiles (scans) The Catalogue numbers are followed by a brief description of the documents. Each manuscript number is clickable and linked to the corresponding transcript. In the Linear transcriptions all pages are accompanied by a clickable thumbnail, which leads directly to the corresponding Digital facsimile, so as to enable the user to check the transcriptions against the scans. In addition, the Topographic transcriptions may be useful to decipher the facsimile. It is possible to zoom in on a facsimile by means of a ‘magnifying glass,’ and if the handwriting becomes extremely hard to decipher, the magnifying glass can be turned into a transcription tool. While the topographic transcription is a static image of the position of passages and additions on the page, the linear transcription is more dynamic, because it is encoded in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). This encoding contains metadata, indicating for instance information on the writing tools or the place of an addition (supra- or infralinear, top, bottom, left or right margin). By applying the Tools option to these encoded transcriptions, the user can visualize them in different ways: 1. The default visualization shows all the cancellations, additions, etc. Intimidating diacritical signs are reduced to a minimum: cancellations are indicated with strike-through; additions in colour. 2. Another tool visualizes the First layer, i.e., the text underneath the cancellations and without additions. 3. The user can also visualize the Top layer, i.e., the undeleted parts of the draft. It should be emphasized that the First layer and Top layer options are artificial visualisations. In some cases this 318
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option may give a misleading impression; the ‘top layer’ does not constitute a separate version, and it is certainly not the intention to present it as such. The First layer and Top layer options are merely meant as a tool to facilitate the reading of the manuscripts. 4. A more detailed visualization explicitly mentions the place of an addition. 5. Another visualization mentions the writing tools Beckett used for cancellations and additions. If the genesis of a work is rather complex, a Genetic map may be useful. The numbers in this genetic ‘stemma’ are clickable and lead directly to the transcriptions. Apart from this survey, the Search engine facilitates more detailed examinations. Although the catalogue numbers generally reflect the Chronology of versions, some documents (notably copybooks such as the “Super Conquérant” notebook, RUL MS 2934) contain more than one version of a particular passage. The versions in these documents are not successive, since Beckett made alternate use of his notebooks and loose sheets of paper. Hence the necessity sometimes to indicate the difference between the chronological order of documents and the chronological order of versions. Some passages (especially in the early manuscripts) did not make it into the published text. Nonetheless, there may be several versions of these sections, so that they should be comparable too. If these Abandoned sections make up a considerable part of the avant-texte then they are presented under a separate menu item. If the user wishes to concentrate only on those sections that did make it into the final text, s/he can choose the option Compare versions. A major problem with genetic editing is to find a way to compare one particular passage in one version with the corresponding passage in another one. For research purposes it may be necessary to compare different versions of a particular paragraph, or even a single segment or sentence. Therefore, a numbering system applied to several hierarchical levels in the XML encoding enables the user to compare versions of three sizes of textual units: large, medium, small, i.e., the section, the paragraph, the sentence. For instance, if a researcher wishes to study the development of the first sentence in the fourth paragraph of Stirrings Still, all its successive versions can be arranged in vertical juxtaposition. From this list any version can be compared with any other. By choosing for instance the first occurrence of this sentence in the drafts and comparing it to a later one, the user can view them 319
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separately and see the textual evolution of this one sentence as an example of Beckett’s general tendency to cut whatever seemed unnecessary: To his ears too throughout this afterlife a clock afar striking the hours and half hours. (version 1; RUL MS 2935/1/4) A clock afar struck the hours and half hours. (version 13; RUL MS 2935/3/13) Sometimes, switching from French to English or vice versa was a solution for Beckett to find a way out of a compositional dead-end. Therefore, separate approaches are provided to focus on Language. The texts can be arranged or rearranged per language. But a simple indication of the language may not be sufficient for a thorough genetic investigation, because some French versions are originally written in French, whereas other ones are translations from English into French. A separate option therefore shows ‘genetic’ translations in parallel (with passages Beckett already started translating when the text was not finished yet). The default page shows both the French and English reading texts in parallel. Variants between the English and the French can be highlighted by means of the Translation variants option among the Tools. Traditionally the term ‘variants’ applies to either variation between copies of ancient or medieval documents by scribes, or between different editions of the same work. When dealing with modern texts, a distinction can be made between these Transmissional variants and Genetic variants (or compositional variants). For the textual apparatus the so-called parallel segmentation method, suggested by the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) proves to be useful for transmissional variants. To facilitate the comparison between different versions the genetic variants are tagged in the XML encoding. They are tagged in two directions, so that both variants vis à vis the preceding version (in italics) and variants vis à vis the base text (in bold) can be highlighted. For instance in the example quoted above: To his ears too throughout this afterlife a clock afar striking the hours and half hours. 320
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The variants are not separated from the syntactic context, so that the interplay between invention and repetition, the dialectics of variants and invariants become visible. This way the edition enables the readers to study the dynamics of the writing process. We wish to emphasize that this is a collaborative project. Whenever a researcher using the in-house edition spots a mistake in the transcription, discovers a new element, has another reading or suggests a different chronological order of the manuscripts, all comments and suggestions are more than welcome. More information can be found on the website of the Beckett International Foundation (www.beckettfoundation.org.uk) and on the Beckett Endpage (www.ua.ac.be/beckett).
Notes 1. The title of the paper is taken from a letter written by Beckett to Jake Schwartz, 8 December 1960; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin [hereafter cited as HRHRC]. 2.
Letter to Kay Boyle, 7 November 1967; HRHRC.
3.
Letter to Aidan Higgins, 1 September 1951; HRHRC.
4. Cf. also Beckett’s response to a query by Alan Schneider regarding the “Old Greek” in Endgame: “I can’t find my notes on the pre-Socratics” (Harmon, 23). 5.
Letter to John Kobler, 31 March 1969; HRHRC.
6. Beckett’s letters to Jake Schwartz from the period 1957 to 1962 are at HRHRC. 7. The majority of Beckett’s letters to Henry Wenning are at Washington Library, St. Louis. In more than one letter Beckett states that he feels Wenning’s terms of purchase are “generous.” It is remarkable to think that Beckett promised manuscript notebooks to Wenning whilst still using them in the composition translation process. 8. Beckett used the term “herrdoktoring,” having read Hugh Kenner’s “dementedly over-explicative” Dublin’s Joyce, in a letter to Mary Manning Howe of 13 August 1958; HRHRC. 9.
Letter to Jake Schwartz, 13 January 1957; HRHRC.
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Letter to John Fletcher, 20 September 1966; HRHRC.
14.
Letter to Henry Wenning, 21 January 1965; HRHRC.
15.
Letter to Henry Wenning, 29 March 1965; HRHRC.
Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, How It Is (London: John Calder, 1977). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat P, 1992). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). Gontarski, S. E., The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). Harmon, Maurice, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998). Krance, Charles, “Introduction,” Mal vu mal dit / Ill Seen Ill Said: A Bilingual, Evolutionary, and Synoptic Variorum Edition, ed. Charles Krance (New York and London: Garland, 1996). Poutney, Rosemary, Theatre of Shadows: Beckett’s Drama 1956-1976 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988).
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FREE SPACE
BECKETT JUDAIZING BECKETT: “a Jew from Greenland” in Paris
Jackie Blackman
Through a biographical and thematic examination of Beckett’s experience of Jews, Judaism and anti-Semitism in Dublin, Germany, and France, this paper will provide new information pertinent to an understanding of Beckett’s postwar ethical and aesthetic approach. I will argue that the subtle yet discernible traces of Judaic suffering and otherness which can be found in Beckett’s early plays demonstrate a unique form of hypersensitivity, which, in the aftermath of the catastrophe, can be seen to embody a timely and appropriate response to the problematics of Judaic mimesis.1
Leave your own country, your kin, and your father’s house, and go to a country which I will show you. (Genesis 12.1)
The recent 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (2005), combined with the opening of the Shoah Memorial in Paris (2005), has brought forth new information and encouraged remembrance of the plight of Jews in France during the Nazi occupation. The posthumous publication of personal interviews with Samuel Beckett in Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (2006) can be said to clarify, to some degree, his emotional response to such matters. While fully acknowledging that it is of no great use to limit the interpretation of an artistic work to an examination of its genesis or the life of its author, I still propose that a consideration of certain oblique passages in Beckett’s work, which point to his, arguably, unique knowledge of Jews, anti-Semitism, and Nazi brutality, when placed within a context of après-guerre Paris, can be useful to current Beckett scholarship. Such an exploration can complement, for example, Anna McMullan’s suggestion that the Beckett centenary “may be a moot time
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to reflect not only on specific cultural traces, including Irish references and memories, in Beckett’s work, but on its refusal to posit a unitary cultural identity or location” (432). I argue that the quality and intent of Beckett’s resistance to such specificities is consistent with the notion of “Resistant Philosopher,” described in the work of Alain Badiou, and is appropriate to, in the case of this paper, stereotypes and idealised homelands encompassed in Beckett’s treatment of the Jewish other. In Metapolitics Badiou describes the “Resistant Philosopher” whose “personal and political silence on [his] action was the measure of [a] simultaneously radical and intimate, violent and reserved, necessary and exceptional action” (1). Barbara Bray, Beckett’s close friend of many years, explained to me in a personal interview that even though Beckett displayed no active interest in politics, “he couldn’t help being affected by what was happening around him […]. He had a finely-tuned mind which got straight to the point of everything […]. Everything was a huge aesthetic experience” (Bray 2005). In Maddy’s words in All That Fall Beckett himself alerts us to the deceptiveness of silence: “Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on” (23). This said, the early French texts (1946-49), a number of which will be referred to in this paper, offer a perceptible, if fragmented, impression of wartime and post-war Paris. Beckett’s essentially dislocated characters, while not limited to the specific cultural or contextual trappings of a traumatised France, or more specifically its persecuted Jews, clearly inhabit and reflect a world reverberating with the historic implications of the recent catastrophe.2 In these early experimental and innovative works, written in the immediate aftermath of the war, Beckett’s aesthetic of “Resistance” can be seen as an engaged response, albeit one which is, in Beckett’s own terms (noted by Lawrence Harvey), “revolted” rather than “revolting” (qtd. in Knowlson 2006, 137), and as a personal, ethical aesthetic that was shaped in some profound way by Beckett’s unique exposure to pre-war, wartime, and post-war issues of anti-Semitism and the extermination of the Jews. After the war Beckett, who had joined the Resistance in 1941 in response to France’s mistreatment of the Jews, was awarded the Croix de Guerre by order of the Provisional French Republic, and was thus free from any need to defend his wartime record. From 1946, Beckett, back in Paris and now writing predominantly in French, was more 326
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concerned with emotional loss, physical survival, and surmounting the impossibility of artistic expression than with engaging in conventional political or intellectual activity. When discussing this time with Gabriel d’Aubarède in 1961, Beckett said: “I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel” (217). Beckett’s “Jewish” Relatives The story of Beckett’s Jewish cultural education probably began as early as September 1915 when he started at Earlsfort House, a primary school which was situated across the road from Dublin’s most prestigious synagogue on Adelaide Road. Earlsfort House was a multidenominational school that accepted Jewish boys, such as those from the Solomons family (Knowlson 1996, 53). There was already a separate connection between the Solomons and the Becketts through the friendship of Estella, the daughter of Maurice and Rosa Solomons, founders of the synagogue, and Cissy, the younger sister of Beckett’s father. The young women had met through their studies at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. The intimacy of their relationship is reflected in Estella’s signature on Cissy’s marriage certificate (3 September 1908) and Cissy’s naming her first child Sarah Estella (1910). During Beckett’s student years (at the predominantly Protestant Trinity College), he became close friends with a number of Jewish people such as A.J. (Con) Leventhal, and Alfred Péron. Nevertheless, Beckett’s most intimate contact with Jewish culture before the war was undoubtedly through his aunt Cissy’s husband, an Irish-Jewish artdealer, William “Boss” Sinclair, who had been brought up as an orthodox Jew by his grandparents.3 The conservative Protestant Beckett family naturally frowned upon their son’s close relationship with his bohemian half-Jewish relatives; intermarriage was not a common feature of Irish society at that time. Beckett told Knowlson: “My aunt Cissie […] married a Jew […]. I know that Cissie’s association with Boss was looked on with some disapproval by the family. Snobbish you know – again because he was Jewish and a naughty chap, the family wouldn’t have anything to do with him” (2006, 66). However, regardless of negative family attitudes, Beckett continued his relationship with the Sinclairs unabated. This rebellious association proved to be pivotal in a number of ways. It started with Beckett’s formative romantic relationship with their eldest daughter 327
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Peggy, who had come for a visit to Dublin from Germany in July 1928. Beckett subsequently visited the Sinclair family, who had moved to Kassel in Germany, six times between 1928-32, and there, through Boss’s tutelage, learned much about Germany, modern German art, Judaism and the acceptance of cultural difference. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932) the “Jewish” (103) “Mandarin” (Beckett’s fictionalised Boss Sinclair) lectures Belacqua thus: “In a most high and noble way of my own” said the Mandarin “not your way. Neither better nor worse. Just not your way. I know you” he said “a penny maneen of a low-down low-church Protestant high-brow, cocking up your old testament snout at what you can’t have.” (100) This argument for tolerance of different “ways” stands in total contrast to the reality of what Beckett saw as the effects of growing Nazi antiSemitism on the Sinclairs and Jews in general in Germany at the time. Deirdre Sinclair, Peggy’s younger sister, says that before they left Germany in mid 1933 for Ireland, such matters were openly discussed in the family home. One day Deirdre witnessed “a Rabbi being herded down the road. His hair was cut off.” She took refuge in a nearby Jewish department store, where, she remembers, people were being photographed by the Brown Shirts as they entered the shop. “My father saw the writing on the wall of course. That’s why we came back [to Ireland]” (Sinclair, 2006). (Deirdre added that her parent’s dire financial situation was an equally significant feature of their return to Ireland.) The following image in Beckett’s post-war novella “The Expelled” (1946), evokes the rabbi’s pre-war political status: “[a policeman] pointed out to me that the sidewalk was for everyone, as if it was quite obvious that I could not be assimilated to that category” (2000a, 38; emphasis added). Yet, in October 1936, undeterred by the worsening situation for Jews, and armed with introductions from Boss and others, Beckett, on his own, made a six-month visit to Germany to view art. It ‘appears’ that while Beckett was aware of the restrictions being placed on Jews at that time he perhaps did not as yet realise the full implications nor did he ‘actively’ oppose anti-Semitism.4 However, a new turn of events in Beckett’s personal life was to change this perspective. 328
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Beckett arrived home from Germany at the beginning of April 1937 and saw Boss Sinclair before he died on May 4. Persuaded by the dying Boss, Beckett agreed to act as a witness in a libel case which Boss and his twin brother Harry were bringing against Oliver St John Gogarty, the Dublin surgeon, senator, and poet. Gogarty included offensive anti-Semitic references to the Sinclairs in his autobiographical work As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937). On May 11, a week after Boss died, Harry issued a “plenary originating summons” claiming damages (Knowlson 1996, 672). Beckett informed MacGreevey of the trial in a letter sent from his home in Foxrock (5 June 1937 [misdated 1936]): The hearing for the injunction was on yesterday […]. It does not seem to matter much whether we win this round or not. The hearing proper with jury will not be before October. God knows where I shall be then. I suppose I must come back for it wherever I am. It’s going to be a very dirty fight and I wish I wasn’t in it. It won’t do me any good, in spite of AJL’s [Leventhal’s] appreciation of its publicity value. But even if there was a way out I wouldn’t take it. Beckett, regardless of personal or professional hazards, became involved with issues of “Irish” anti-Semitism. Dermot Keogh in Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland provides a context for this kind of antiSemitism, an example of which can be found in an earlier article written by Gogarty for Arthur Griffith’s paper, Sinn Féin (1906): [The Jew] has no money because he lives in a poor country: but he knows how to suck the best out of it. The blood in him is wormy and fattens on decay. True son of his father, he extracts a thousand percent. He can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear […] I can smell a Jew, though, and in Ireland there’s something rotten. (qtd. in Keogh, 56) According to Keogh, such writing inspired a reaction in “James Joyce, who created in Leopold Bloom one of the strongest and most enduring refutations of anti-Semitism in western culture” (56). Arguably the inspiration for Beckett’s shocking allusion to anti-Semitism in Premier amour (written 1946) came from a similar source: “A parsnip! she cried, as if I had asked her for a dish of sucking Jew” (2000a, 83). Con 329
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Leventhal recollects a possible example of Gogarty’s more flippant form of anti-Semitism: “it might well have been Gogarty who was responsible for the rustic on the bus who pointed to the Grange [where Stella Solomons and Seamus O’Sullivan held ‘at homes’ attended by Beckett] and explained to the passers-by that the man who lived there was a jewman by the name of Seamus O’Solomon” (qtd. in Miller, 12). This story highlights the facetious “Jewishing” (W. J. McCormack’s term) of Dublin literary characters such as Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of the Dublin Magazine, who were connected through marriage to Jews. Joyce, Leventhal and Beckett were well versed in this particular brand of racist Dublin wit. W. J. McCormack, in Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics, reveals a somewhat similar “Jewishing” of Beckett (the “poet” in the following quotation), in what McCormack calls, “a progress report” on the Sinclair v Gogarty libel case, contained in a personal letter from W.B.Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (May 1937): In his book [Gogarty] has called a certain man a ‘chicken butcher’ meaning that he makes love to the immature. The informant, the man who swears that he recognised the victim [,] is a racketeer of a Dublin poet or imatative [sic] poet of the new school. He hates us all – his review of the Anthology was so violent the Irish Times refused to publish it. He & the ‘chicken butcher’ are Jews. (qtd. in 2005, 10) Later, during the full court proceedings (November 1937), which were followed daily by the press, “the defence council asked Beckett whether he would describe himself as Christian, Jew or atheist, to which Beckett replied: ‘none of the three’” (qtd. in Knowlson 1996, 258). As it transpired, Beckett’s initial fears were well founded; he was thoroughly and publicly humiliated. Beckett, who had lived intermittently between Paris, London and Dublin, now settled in France for good. McCormack in From Burke to Beckett suggests that “[…] Beckett’s engagement with the public events of his lifetime [have] been repeatedly prompted by his loyalty to Jewish friends” (241). This actuality became increasingly apparent after the outbreak of World War II. Nazi Brutality: “slavery, stultification and organised murder” The story of Beckett’s wartime existence in France (Beckett’s friendship with Alfred Péron; membership of the “Gloria” Resistance 330
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cell; Péron’s death at Mauthausen; Beckett and his companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil’s escape to rural Roussillon in the “free zone,” where they hid out with the Jewish refugee Henri Hayden; as well as Beckett’s contribution to the establishment of the Irish Red Cross Hospital at Saint-Lô) has been well documented by his biographers. Beckett, in a recently published interview (from 1986) clarifies his motivation for joining the Resistance: “Alfred Péron was the one who got me involved in the ‘Gloria’ Resistance group. It was at the time when they were rounding up the Jews […] and gathering them […] ready to send them off to extermination camps” (qtd. in Knowlson 2006, 79). In August 1942, Péron had been arrested and imprisoned with other members of the “Gloria” cell. He was then transferred to KL Mauthausen and died of exhaustion on 1 May 1945, before repatriation (Livre-Mémorial, 1155). Beckett would have become aware of the specific details of Péron’s suffering through word of mouth and written testimonies of survivors. One such account, written by George Loustaunau-Lacau, which describes Péron’s pitiful attempts to stay alive in the days before liberation, is particularly harrowing. Beckett probably would have been shown this by Péron’s widow (Knowlson 1996, 344). Rosette Lamont, who finds depictions of the “Wandering Jew” in Waiting for Godot, interviewed Beckett in 1983 and asked him pointedly if his use of certain images in Godot and The Trilogy, or his exchange of the Jewish name Levi [sic] for the “vaguely universal name” Estragon in Godot, related to any kind of political response to the evidence which she had seen on display in Auschwitz. Lamont says: “Beckett did not answer me directly, but he began to talk about his close friend Alfred Péron” (37). Richard Ellmann has observed: “Fortyodd years after the event, [Beckett] can still mourn the killing of Jewish friends by Nazis as if it had happened yesterday. That Estragon in Waiting for Godot was originally called Lévy suggests some of the emotional origins of the play – though indeed the play’s final form still embodies them” (1986, 10). As alluded to by Ellmann, Beckett, while writing Waiting for Godot, made a sudden decision to replace Lévy with Estragon in the second act. Records tell us that 1528 people, Jewish deportees from France, who were born with the name of Lévy (or Levi), perished in the Nazi camps. Before this catastrophe Lévy was the most common Jewish name in the country. (The next most common name was Cohen 331
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– approximately 500 victims.) Beckett’s idea to use the generic Jewish name Lévy for a character in Godot is perhaps in keeping with the use of generic Irish names in his preceding novels, Murphy, Molloy and Malone Dies. (It is possible that Beckett’s pivotal erasure of the generic Jew in Godot is connected to the theme of unnamability in L’Innommable,5 a book begun two months after he had finished Godot.) With the erasure of Lévy, Beckett removed any opportunity for Jewish stereotyping – the kind so vital to traditional anti-Semitic, and arguably, its opposite, philo-Semitic writing.6 Yet, by replacing Lévy, a symbol for contemporary Jewish suffering, with Estragon, the name of “a bitter herb” (Lamont 36), Beckett inscribed Godot with additional cultural significance. Lamont noted Estragon’s relationship to the bitter herb wormwood and its biblical connection with the Apocalypse as well as ritual connotations in terms of the “bitter herbs [which] must be tasted by Jews in the course of the ritual Passover meal” (36). However, she neglected to explain the pertinent significance of this ritual – the bitter herbs are eaten to remind us of the suffering of the Jewish people as they followed Moses out of Egypt to the Promised Land. In Godot (written soon after the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948) Beckett created Lévy/Estragon, a character who, like Moses, is in search of the Promised Land. Con Leventhal, Beckett’s friend and former active Zionist, whom Joyce had affectionately named “Levy Blumenthal” (Ellmann 1983, 527) had written a ten-page article for The Bell (June 1945), “What it means to be a Jew” in which he discusses his orthodox Jewish background, his dual loyalty to his country of birth (Ireland) and Israel, and the negative, as well as positive aspects of being a Jew. (It is likely that Beckett, who was resident in Dublin at the time of publication would have read Leventhal’s article, the release of which had been delayed because of war-time Irish censorship laws which suppressed all such ‘disturbing’ material.) At the end of Leventhal’s unique historical insight into the world of Irish Jewry, he answered his own question, “what […] does it mean to be a Jew?” with a number of what he calls “carpings,” such as: “That you are a parasite but may not be your own host in the land of your fathers or anywhere else. That you are accused of being different and ostracised if you assimilate.” On a more religious note, he added that the “Jew” has not only a “consciousness of the duty imposed by the acceptance from Moses at Sinai of a great heritage of religion and ethics” but also an “unshakable belief that Israel still has a mission to the world, that it will bring peace” (215). 332
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In Godot, Beckett’s Lévy, now renamed Estragon, fantasises about such peace: “I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy” (4). Arguably, by leaving the palimpsestic traces of Judaic allusion within the tragi-comic routines of his post-war drama (and fiction), Beckett not only developed new and innovative ways of incorporating “refreshing alternations of history prophecy and latest news” (1996b, 141) but also effected a renowned Beckettian post-Holocaust aesthetic. Undeniably, post-war Beckett appeared to have a special understanding of what Heine knew and Leventhal quoted in 1945: “Judaism is not a religion, it is a misfortune” (207). Beckett Judaizing Beckett In 1969, the Nobel Prize committee, in its citation, declared Beckett’s writings of the period (1945-49) as not about the war itself, about life at the front, or in the French Resistance movement (in which Beckett took an active part), but about what happened afterwards, when peace came and the curtain was rent from the unholiest of unholies to reveal the terrifying spectacle of the lengths to which man can go in inhuman degradation – whether ordered or driven by himself – and how much of such degradation man can survive. Beckett’s first full-length play, Eleutheria (written in 1947, published posthumously in 1995, but never performed), which one assumes was not available to the committee for review, appears compatible with this appraisal. In Eleutheria, M Krap’s rumination on the universal story of approaching death evokes the powerlessness of the unsuspecting victim of Nazi brutality within absurd Biblical and contemporary contexts. Krap knows his “freedom” is diminishing: “Soon I shan’t be allowed to open my mouth. And to think that I counted on talking bullshit until I was at death’s door. […] Yes I understand that now, now that it’s too late. Nimis sero, imber serotinus” (20). Imber serotinus, or “late rain,” a phrase which comes from Deuteronomous in the Vulgate Latin Bible, relates to God’s power to perform timely miracles for those who obey his commandments. This oblique Latin reference to the Jews of the Old Testament questions the bountiful nature of God within the micro and 333
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macro logic of the contemporary human/animal “slaughterhouse.” Krap continues: “Peace is peculiar to slaves […]. I am the cow who arrives at the gate of the slaughterhouse and only then understands all the absurdity of the pastures. She would have done better to think about it earlier, there in the soft tall grass. Never mind. She still has the courtyard to cross. Nobody can take that away from her” (20). Later in the play references to bourgeois blindness and concentration camp physicality are juxtaposed. In the Krap drawing room, Mlle Skunk “points to a thin strip of barbed wire fixed under the edge of the table” and asks: “What’s this barbed wire for?” MME PIOUK: Barbed wire? MLLE SKUNK: (touching it) It’s got spikes! Look! Mme Piouk stands up and leans over the table. MME PIOUK: How it is that I hadn’t noticed it? DR PIOUK: My wife is not very sensitive to the macrocosm. M. KRAP: But she reacted to the light. DR PIOUK: That’s because she really suffered from it. (20) Beckett was aware that the majority of Parisians did not react to what was happening under their noses when, as he told Knowlson “they [the Parisian police] were rounding up the Jews, including all their children […] ready to send them to extermination camps” (qtd. in Knowlson 2006, 79). Dionys Mascolo, one time lover of Marguerite Duras, a Resistance member who did react during the war, and witnessed firsthand the immediate post-liberation conditions at Dachau, has described himself as being “permanently Judaized” as a result of becoming, really informed […] of what had happened to the Jews – of, that is, their systematic extermination. We [members of the Resistance] were enemies of Nazi Germany. Jewish children […] were not enemies. There was a difference there that has to be called metaphysical. And it is our shame not to have understood it sooner. That’s why we identified with their fate. We identified with it somewhat pretentiously, but at the same time not pretentiously. It seemed to us that being Jewish guaranteed the Jews against a certain stupidity in which we were steeped, against a certain mindlessness. They, because of anti-Semitism, were 334
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advised of what the real world contained of the inhuman, whereas we were not alive to this. Stupidity, we may have perceived the stupidity in the world, but not the inhumanity, not the inhuman hatred. (qtd. in Dobbels, 218) I suggest that Beckett’s early drama shows a similar response to the inhuman treatment of the Jews in France. In Eleutheria, Beckett labels himself, the author, through the voice of “Spectator” in the following way: SPECTATOR: […] Actually, who wrote this rubbish? (programme) Beckett (he says Béké) Samuel Béké, Béké, he must be a cross between a Jew from Greenland and a peasant from the Auvergne. (136) In identifying himself between two such negative categories, un juif groenlandais and Auvergnat (original French version), Beckett/Béquet not only engages in humorous self-deprecation but also appears to identify with some kind of exilic no-man’s land, situated between the anti-Semitic prejudices of Irish and French cultures. On yet another level Beckett indicates, like Jacques Derrida in Questions au judaïsme, “that the more one dislocates one’s self identity, the more one says ‘my own identity consists in not being identical to myself, in being a foreigner, the non-coinciding with the self,’ etc. the more Jewish one is!” (qtd. in Cixous, 83). In Eleutheria Beckett/Béquet identifies with the “strange originary otherness that one never ceases to carry within oneself, at the very core of one’s relation to oneself” (Benbassa and Attias, 2) typified in the genealogy of the Jews. Beckett’s self-alignment with a “peasant from the Auvergne” is no less significant than with a “Jew from Greenland.” Auvergnat represents an affinity with a different kind of stereotypical “other” – the comical uneducated rural figure in France (also the butt of much literary humour and prejudice), and could simply be a declaration of Beckett’s new non-intellectual aesthetic. However, it is worth noting that, in 1947, the “peasant from the Auvergne” had earned a new status; his region had been a major centre for the Resistance. This time was also a period of problematic cultural memory for those who, for various reasons, had survived the war, but more especially perhaps, for those 335
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French, already alluded to, who had facilitated the round-ups of the Jews, if we remember that “of the 75,721 Jews deported from France, 97% had died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz” (Laquer, 475). In “The End” (written 1946)7 Beckett’s socialist/communist haranguer who has “a nice face […] a little on the red side” (2000a, 26) points out, to anyone who will listen, “it never enters your head […] that your charity is a crime, an incentive to slavery, stultification and organised murder” (23). This passage evokes the results of wartime collaboration within ironic reference to a somewhat self-righteous if unconvincing après-guerre politics, and arguably, was intended to confront public culpability in France at the time. Anthony Uhlmann in Beckett and Poststructuralism similarly suggests that Beckett’s use of the term “Youdi” (the offensive French slang word for ‘Jew’) as the source of Moran’s fear in the novel Molloy might have had an effect on “French readers who still would have had the unbelievable revelations of the Holocaust ringing in their ears” (48). Beckett’s juxtaposition of Irish Jew and French peasant in Eleutheria, or more specifically his use of the derogatory term “Jew from Greenland,” could have had a parallel effect on Irish audiences, had it ever been performed. “Greenland” could be a close cousin to “green isle” from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, a novel often termed as the forerunner to Eleutheria. Beckett’s sarcastic romantic image of rural Ireland in Dream, the site of Beckett’s love experience with Smeraldina or “little emerald” (Peggy Sinclair), is transformed into an icy place of both real and poetic alienation in Eleutheria. In his 1934 review of “Recent Irish Poetry,” to which Yeats was probably referring in the letter to Wellesley, Beckett sees the “space that intervenes between the artist and the world of objects” usefully described as a “no-man’s land, Hellespont or vacuum” depending on whether the artist “happens to be resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed,” “Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’” he wrote “is a notable statement of this kind” (70). “Greenland,” arguably, becomes Beckett’s rejection of the idealised Ireland of the “Revival,” and the dictates of “antiquarian” (70) poets such as Gogarty and Yeats. Beckett said of his dramatic project: “I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space” (qtd. in Knowlson 1996, 427). “Jew from Greenland” not only appears as an emotional space in which Beckett, the post-war dramatist resides, but could also personify Ireland’s unsympathetic wartime policy in terms of Jewish refugees. In 336
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Damned to Fame Knowlson proposed that Beckett had joined the Resistance on 1 Sept 1941 largely in response to the arrest of James Joyce’s amanuensis Paul Léon on 21 August (279). Beckett, it seems, was not alone in feeling the need to act in some way – an appeal was made by the Society of Swiss Writers (October 1941) to the Irish government to ensure the rescue of Léon, owing to his connection with Joyce. Shamefully, this petition was rebuffed by Foreign Affairs on the grounds that he was not an Irish national and that an intervention on its part might damage “good” Irish-German relations (Keogh, 164). I suggest that in 1947, when Eleutheria was written, “Greenland,” the poetic space that could accommodate the anti-Semitic prejudices of Irish poets such as Yeats and Gogarty, became symbolic of a no-man’s land which refuses the Jewish other. Official Irish wartime correspondence on immigration policy for Jews stated: Our practice has been to discourage any substantial increase in the Jewish population. They do not assimilate with our own people but remain a sort of colony of a worldwide Jewish community. This makes them a political irritant in the body politic and has led to disastrous results from time to time in other countries. (qtd. in Keogh, 161) To conclude, I propose that Beckett, in accord with his slippery approach to memory, history, culture, and religion, registers the revelations of the camps through oblique identification with Jewish otherness, irregular references to anti-Semitism, and the erasure of the Jewish stereotype. And that Beckett’s exemplary post-Holocaust aesthetic, came into being, in large part, because of his well-informed and highly sophisticated awareness of the problematics of Judaic mimesis. Beckett, through his committed engagement with Jewish issues, proved what Theodor W. Adorno (1966) finally came to acknowledge (in relation to Endgame): “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems” (86).
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Jackie Blackman Notes 1. This paper, which draws on material from my forthcoming doctoral thesis “Decoding Samuel Beckett’s Irish-Jewish Other,” was originally presented at “Beckett at 100: Looking Back/Looking Forward,” Trinity College Dublin, April 2006 (also in a somewhat lesser form at “Liminal Identities,” University College Dublin, 2005), and has since benefited greatly from the wise counsel of Anna McMullan, Steve Wilmer, Linda Ben Zvi, and Angela Moorjani. The “problematics of Judaic mimesis” refers to the particular ethical problem of the representation of Jewish matters in the wake of Nazi brutality, and takes into account the recently proven impossibility of retaining any kind of artistic control under the rule of a totalitarian regime. For example the making of the 1940s Nazi propaganda film, The Jew Süss (based on a 1925 historical novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, which was originally intended to condemn anti-Semitism, and also a 1934 film version which satirised Nazi anti-Semitism) had shown how philo-Semitic literature could so easily be appropriated for evil purposes. This paradigm, in addition to the post-war issue of how to expose and remember the unprecedented dehumanization and suffering of the concentration camp universe, created a sobering artistic challenge for Beckett and his contemporaries. 2. Both Anthony Cronin and Barbara Bray, when describing Beckett’s attitude to the Holocaust, said that he thought it was “beyond” anything that had gone before. See Cronin and Bray (2006). 3. Boss Sinclair’s mother was Jewish and his father was not. The Sinclairs did not have the means to look after their twin babies, so they handed William (Boss) and Harry over to the maternal Jewish grandparents. Echoes of this orthodox upbringing were carried into Boss’s marriage with Cissy. Although the Sinclairs did not keep kosher, with Boss perhaps avoiding certain religious issues by being a vegetarian, the household nevertheless practiced the Jewish dietary law which forbids the simultaneous consumption of milk and meat. (See Sinclair.) 4. For complementary material on Beckett and German Fascism (before the war), see the excellent work of James Knowlson (1996), James McNaughton and Mark Nixon. 5. Ruby Cohn has noted that Beckett’s French title L’Innommable can also mean “unspeakably vile” (185).
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Beckett Judaizing Beckett 6. Such as in Jean Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: “Here is a Jew seated on his doorstep in the rue de Rosier. I recognise him immediately as a Jew: he has a black and curly beard, a slightly hooked nose, protruding ears” (63). 7. In December of 1945, when Beckett finally returned to Paris to resume his writing career, Sartre had just published issues 2 and 3 (November and December) of Les Temps modernes. These issues contained the articles “Vie d’un Juif,” “Portrait de l’antisémite” (which was the introductory chapter to his book Réflexions sur la question juive [1946], translated as Anti-Semite and Jew [1948]) and “Vie d’un bourgeois français, magistrat israélite.” It is said that Sartre, in these articles, was responding to both the recent revelations of the Nuremburg Trials and to the pressure of his Jewish friends. The July issue of Les Temps modernes (1946), which contained Beckett’s first piece of post-war fiction, the story “Suite” (a section of “The End”) also carried an eleven-page article on the subject of the Nuremburg Trials.
Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). d’Aubarède, Gabriel, “Interview with Beckett,” trans. Christopher Waters, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 215-17. Badiou, Alan, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2005). Benbassa, Esther, and Jean-Christophe Attias, The Jew and the Other, trans. G.M.Goshgarian (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004). Bray, Barbara, Personal interview, Oct. 2005. –, Conversation with the author, 2 June 2006. Beckett, Samuel, Letter to Thomas MacGreevey, 5 June 1937 [misdated 1936], TCD MS 10402, Trinity College Dublin Library. –, Molloy (New York: Grove P, 1955). –, Premier amour (Paris: Minuit, 1970). –, All That Fall (London: Faber, 1975). –, “Recent Irish Poetry,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983). –, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder, 1993). –, Eleutheria (Paris: Minuit, 1995). –, Eleutheria, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Faber, 1996a). –, How It Is (London: Calder, 1996b). –, First Love and Other Novellas (London: Penguin, 2000a). –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 2000b). Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbour: U of Michigan P, 2005).
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Jackie Blackman Cixous, Helene, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (New York: Columbia UP, 2004). Cronin, Anthony, Conversation with the author, Paris, 1 June 2006. Dobbels, Daniel, ed., On Robert Antelme’s “The Human Race”: Essays and Commentary, trans. Jeffrey Haight (Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2003). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce (New York: Oxford UP, 1983). –, Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1986. Keogh, Dermot, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork UP, 1998). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). –, Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). Lamont, Rosette, “Samuel Beckett’s Wandering Jew,” in Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1990), 35–53. Laquer, Walter, ed., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (Yale: Yale UP, 2001). Leventhal, A. J., “What It Means to Be a Jew,” in The Bell 10.3 (June 1945), 207-16. Le Livre-Mémorial: Des déportés de France arrêtes par mesure de répression et dans certains cas par mesure de persecution 1940–5 (Paris: Tirésias, 2004). Loustaunau-Lacau, Georges, Chiens maudits: souvenirs d’un rescapé des bagnes hitlériens (Paris: Réseau Alliance, 1945). McMullan, Anna, “Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Liminal Subjects and the Politics of Perception,” in Princeton University Library Chronicle 68.1 (2006), 450-64. McNaughton, James, “Beckett, German Fascism, and History: The Futility of Protest,” in SBT/A 15, “Historicising Beckett / Issues of Performance,” ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 101-15. McCormack, W.J., From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork UP, 1994). –, Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics (London: Pimlico, 2005). Miller, Liam, ed., Retrospect: The Work of Seamus O’Sullivan 1879-1958 and Estella F. Solomons 1882-1968 (Dublin: Dolmen P, 1973). Nixon, Mark, “‘Scraps of German’: Samuel Beckett Reading German Literature,” in SBT/A 16, “Notes diverse[s] holo,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 259- 82. Nobel Prize citation. http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1969/press.html accessed 24 June 2005. Sartre, Jean Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1995). Sinclair, Deirdre, Conversation with the author, 24 Apr. 2006. Uhlmann, Anthony, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999).
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“THE ACUTE AND INCREASING ANXIETY OF THE RELATION ITSELF”: Beckett, the Author-Function, and the Ethics of Enunciation Russell Smith It is widely agreed that Beckett’s writing radically destabilizes the enunciation of linguistic subjectivity through the problematic status of the pronoun ‘I’ in his work. This is often read as an implicit critique of the ‘author-function.’ In this paper I examine four different formulations of the enunciative relation between author and text – by Beckett himself, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben – and argue that Beckett’s impossible “obligation to express” corresponds most closely to the theory of testimony outlined by Agamben, in which the shame experienced through an incapacity to speak responds to a post-war historical crisis of enunciation.1
Introduction In this paper I wish to consider once again a topic that has already received a great deal of attention in Beckett criticism: what we might call the ethical status of the pronoun ‘I’ in Samuel Beckett’s work. It is by now a common observation that Beckett’s writing relentlessly questions the traditional notion of enunciation as the expression of an interiorized subjectivity, in particular through its verbal play with shifters, those pronouns and adverbs such as ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘this,’ and ‘now,’ whose meaning lies solely in their deictic reference to the act of enunciation in which they are spoken. As Emile Benveniste puts it, “I cannot be defined except in terms of ‘locution’” (218). Poststructuralist literary theory has therefore drawn attention to the gap, or écart, that separates the sujet de l’énonciation (the speaking subject; the enunciating ‘I’) and the sujet de l’énoncé (the subject of the statement; the enunciated ‘I’). And it is in this gap that Beckett’s speakers attempt to situate themselves, often by means of a denial of the articulation between the speaker and the pronoun ‘I,’ even in the moment of its articulation: “I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me” (Beckett 1958, 3). However, while it is clear that Beckett’s writing
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questions the nature of enunciation, what is more problematic, it seems, is the ethical significance attributed to this questioning. In Beckett criticism, the problem has often taken the form of the question posed at the start of Maurice Blanchot’s review of L’Innommable: “Who speaks in Samuel Beckett’s books?” (23). It is a common theme in poststructuralist Beckett criticism that the deictic indeterminacy of Beckett’s prose – the unanswerability of the question “who speaks?” – constitutes, not only a questioning of enunciation, but by extension of the author-function (see Trezise, 105-07, Critchley, 172-74). According to this argument, the shiftiness of Beckett’s shifters undermines the traditional role of the author as origin and guarantee of a text’s meaning, by preventing the identification of a coherent authorial position behind the text. In other words, Beckett’s writing is seen as both radically anti-expressive and subversively anti-authorial. Here I wish to question this understanding of enunciation in Beckett’s work, according to which an apparent indifference to the question “who speaks?” would constitute an anti-authorial ethics of desubjectification, of writing as ‘exteriority.’ Instead, through a reading of Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of enunciation in Remnants of Auschwitz, I wish to argue that Beckett’s writing is authorial, and that the ethical force of his questioning of enunciation consists in its recognition of a double movement of both subjectification and desubjectification, in which the articulation between the speaker and his utterance is simultaneously disavowed and unavoidable. In particular, I wish to suggest that Beckett’s analysis of an impossible “obligation to express” may be related to a historical crisis of enunciation associated with the aftermath of the Second World War. Agamben’s ethical figure of shame suggests a situation in which the impossibility of speech becomes a means of bearing witness to the existence of those whom suffering and horror has reduced to speechlessness; a means, as Beckett put it, of leaving “a stain upon the silence” (qtd. in Bair, 681). This argument proceeds in four parts, each corresponding to a different formulation of the problem of enunciation and the ethics of speech: that of Beckett himself, in the Three Dialogues of 1949; that of Maurice Blanchot in his 1953 review of L’Innommable; that of Michel Foucault in his discussions of the author-function in “What Is an Author?” and “The Order of Discourse;” and that of Giorgio Agamben, in his account of the ethics of enunciation in Remnants of Auschwitz. 342
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Beckett In the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Beckett will famously characterize the artist’s “ferocious dilemma of expression” (110) as the situation of having “nothing to express [...] together with the obligation to express” (103).2 And he will claim (after a fortnight’s thought) to have discovered, in the work of Bram van Velde, an art that is genuinely “inexpressive” (120): for Beckett, Van Velde is “the first [artist] whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act” (121). He is “the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation” between the artist and his occasion, between “the representer and the representee” (125). But it would be wrong to see in Beckett’s praise of Van Velde’s inexpressiveness an invocation of an ‘impersonal’ art. Beckett does not question the need for an author, nor the need for a work, but merely the possibility of an expressive relation between them. Instead, for Beckett what should concern the artist is “the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all it excludes” (124). What is interesting here, from an ethical perspective, is its invidious conjuncture of obligation and impossibility: B. – The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint. D. – Why is he obliged to paint? B. – I don’t know. (119) When Beckett states, in a later interview, “to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now” (Driver, 219), we might speculate that the mess in question is, among other things, the exhaustion of representation, and the form to be found an art that is (to quote Duthuit presumably quoting Beckett) “authentically fruitless, incapable of any image whatsoever” (113). To put this fruitlessness on a platter, to make art’s inadequacy or invalidity the subject of an adequate, valid statement, would be ultimately to return us 343
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to the domain of the feasible. It is not something that can be represented, but that must be enacted; and it must be enacted not through a dissolution of either of the terms of this ferocious dilemma, but through the authorial assumption of an impossible obligation to speak. Blanchot Maurice Blanchot begins his review of L’Innommable with the question “Who speaks in Samuel Beckett’s books?” (23) He suggests that a “reassuring convention” allows us to answer “Samuel Beckett,” but in doing so, we are only “trying to reassure ourselves with a name” (25), whereas “The Unnamable is precisely experience experienced under the threat of impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a vacuum, passing through he who hears it” (25). Thus, according to an oftenquoted passage: Who then is speaking? Is it the ‘author’? But to whom can such a term refer since anyhow he who writes is no longer Beckett but the urge that sweeps him out of himself, turns him into a nameless being, the Unnamable, a being without being who can neither live nor die, stop nor start, who is in the vacant site where speaks the redundancy of idle words under the ill-fitting cloak of a porous, agonising I? (25) Blanchot’s model of Beckettian enunciation as exteriority, echoed in various ways in post-structuralist readings of Beckett such as those of Thomas Trezise or Simon Critchley, is problematic for several reasons. First, Blanchot constructs as his foil a naïve mode of reading that would conflate the deictic ‘I’ in a literary text with the text’s author. The Unnamable is hardly the first novel to feature a first-person narrator, and literary criticism has traditionally had no trouble recognizing the gap that separates the narrating subject and the author. Thus, when we read in The Unnamable, “All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone” (21), no one imagines for a moment that this is Samuel Beckett finally speaking in his own right. To be sure, Beckett here reduces the écart between narrator and author to its extreme point, but the distinction still holds. 344
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Secondly, Blanchot’s invocation of the impersonality and namelessness of the voice that speaks in Beckett’s texts is, paradoxically, an attribution of authorial intention, albeit an intention dedicated to its own undoing. It is of course pure speculation that Beckett’s writing is the product of an “urge that sweeps him out of himself,” and little different from the biographical speculations of traditional authorial criticism. Thirdly, Blanchot’s ventriloquistic model of enunciation is perhaps persuasive because it is directly derived from the text of The Unnamable itself, where the voice repeatedly invokes just such a notion: “I shall transmit the words as received, by the ear, or roared through a trumpet into the arsehole, in all their purity, and in the same order, as far as possible” (86). But this is not the only model of enunciation in The Unnamable, which in fact offers a staggering variety of enunciative acts, many of them, significantly, associated with the institutional contexts of the schoolroom and the courtroom. Thus the speaker describes the text he must speak as a lesson: “the same old lesson, the one I once knew by heart and would not say” (24); and later as a pensum, a recitation imposed as punishment: “if I have a pensum to perform it is because I could not say my lesson” (31). So too, the speaker’s text is characterised by various juridical terms, as a “statement” (19), a “perjury” (58), a “verbatim report of the proceedings” (115), a “confession” (175) and an “indictment” (175). In each of these cases, enunciation is characterised as something other than speech “passing through he who hears it,” or the product of an “urge that sweeps him out of himself.” To summarize, Blanchot’s is a fundamentally desubjectified model of enunciation: the voices that speak in Beckett’s novels are an outpouring of language in its exteriority, reaching “the point where language ceases to speak, but is” (Blanchot, 28). But is it really possible to have speech – that is, an utterance; parole not langue – without a speaker? If so, what are the ethical consequences of this? The problem of Blanchot’s model, it seems, is that writing is ultimately dissociated from the agency of a speaker, and therefore from enunciation as such. If no one is speaking, then The Unnamable’s formula “It’s not I speaking” (161) ceases to be a paradox; if there is an occasion but no artist, a representee but no representer, then there can be no “ferocious dilemma of expression.”
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Foucault Although Michel Foucault never wrote at length on Beckett’s work, it is extraordinary that, in the two pivotal essays where he considers the author-function – “What Is an Author?” and “The Order of Discourse” – on both occasions he quotes from Beckett’s work, as if Beckett poses in a particularly stark manner the problem of enunciation and the author-function. At the beginning of “What Is an Author?” Foucault seems to invoke the Blanchotian model: For the time being, I wish to restrict myself to the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside it and precedes it. Beckett supplies a direction: ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.’ In an indifference such as this we must recognise one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing. (115-16) As we have seen, this position is curious because it appears to reproduce, albeit in a negative mode, a naïve, ‘intentionalist’ model of the author-function: in seeming to characterize it as a deictic function of the text (“the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside it and precedes it”); in implicitly conflating the enunciative mode of the narrator with that of the author (indifference to who speaks); and in extrapolating this authorial attitude as a “fundamental ethical principle of contemporary writing.” Foucault outlines more explicitly this “ethical principle” of writing as exteriority: the writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’; it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we recognise it in its exterior deployment. [...] It is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears. (116) In other words, the ethical significance of avant-garde writing would lie in its willed dissolution of the linguistic structures of 346
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subjectivity, its abdication of authorial mastery in an attempt to let language speak in its true anonymity. However, Foucault’s purpose here is not to endorse this account of the death of the author. Quite the contrary, the ultimate direction of Foucault’s essay is to argue that the author-function has less to do with the deictic markers of a text, and more to do with how a text comes to bear a person’s name, be collected in a named oeuvre, and interpreted in terms of the textual and psychobiographical unity that this process both assumes as an a priori, and endlessly seeks to reconstitute as an absent origin. In particular, the post-structuralist theorisation of writing as écriture, while displacing the author as a privileged source of textual meaning, has “merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change” (118) by granting a “primordial status” to writing, whereby the author is preserved in the form of a “transcendental anonymity” (120): precisely the “nameless being” discovered in Beckett’s writing. Foucault’s critique centres on the key post-structuralist notion (hitherto central to Foucault’s own work) of writing as inherently subversive of the structures of both subjectivity and knowledge. “What Is an Author?” is an inchoate, as yet implicit rejection of the “repressive hypothesis” of the author-function, according to which the figure of the author works simply to repress a primordial and unruly textuality. Instead, Foucault’s thinking hereafter will concern the productive nature of discursive power, where an examination of the authorfunction becomes a means of broaching the broader question of “under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse?” (137). In these terms, the literary text ceases to be a source of potentially subversive significations, and is reduced to the status of an archival document that would enable a tracing of the discursive boundaries of the sayable and unsayable. Nevertheless, in his next major essay, “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault continues to equivocate with the notion of writing as exteriority. In his opening he quotes a passage from The Unnamable, expressing a desire to evade the “obligation to express” by lending his voice to a discourse already in progress: I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I should only have needed to join in, to continue the sentence it had started and lodge myself, without really being noticed, in its interstices. (51) 347
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Foucault’s point is, of course, that this is impossible: no enunciative subterfuge, no trick of the pronouns, can entirely evade the pre-emptive force of the author-function. Indeed, he goes on to make explicit the degree to which any modern writer must consciously work within these enunciative constraints: I believe that – at least since a certain epoch – the individual who sets out to write a text on the horizon of which a possible oeuvre is prowling, takes upon himself the function of the author: what he writes and what he does not write, what he sketches out, even by way of provisional drafts, as an outline of the oeuvre, and what he lets fall by way of commonplace remarks – this whole play of differences is prescribed by the author-function, as he receives it from his epoch, or as he modifies it in his turn. (59) While Foucault’s model of enunciation concedes the author some degree of agency to “modify” the author-function in his turn, in essence it is powerfully pre-emptive, replacing the transcendental a priori of writing as exteriority with the historical a priori of the author-function. Whereas Blanchot emphasises the desubjectification of the authorial subject, turning him into a transcendental anonymity, Foucault’s theory of statements, outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge, insists on the subjectification or discursive production of the authorial subject. In terms of Beckett’s “ferocious dilemma of expression,” for Blanchot the artist cannot speak because he has disappeared into the anonymity of his occasion; for Foucault the artist cannot speak because he is merely a product of his occasion. In each case the écart that separates the subject and its utterance is not merely widened, it is sundered, and the ethical dimension of enunciation, its “obligation to express,” is elided. Agamben The question of authorship, and the relation between the speaker and the act of enunciation, is taken up by Giorgio Agamben in his discussion of testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz. The central figure in Agamben’s analysis is the Muselmann, a word used in the Auschwitz concentration camp to refer to those whose suffering and exhaustion had brought them to “the extreme threshold between life and death” (47) where they had lost the power of speech and the capacity to 348
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respond to their experience. Primo Levi, in his memoir The Drowned and the Saved, argues that only the Muselmann could be a “complete witness” of the camp, but the Muselmann cannot speak (84). This is what Agamben calls Levi’s paradox: “how can the true witness be the one who by definition cannot bear witness?” (Agamben, 82). Agamben develops an account of testimony that turns on the question of enunciation, and in particular, on the relation between the survivors like Levi who bear witness to life in the camps, and the Muselmänner who cannot speak. For Agamben, as for Blanchot and Foucault, enunciation, exemplified in the formula ‘I speak,’ is a “paradoxical act” (116). On a purely semantic (rather than pragmatic) level, the pronoun ‘I’ is essentially anonymous, since by definition it refers to no individual in particular, but at the same time can refer to any individual who pronounces the word ‘I.’ Both no-one and everyone, ‘I’ is neither quite purely linguistic (since its meaning derives from an extra-linguistic context), nor is it quite flesh and blood (since a living being cannot be present in language, can only be ‘re-presented’). Instead, the ‘I’ denotes the “pure event” (117) of enunciation itself, the conjunction of living being and empty pronoun in the meaningless fact of having spoken. As Agamben puts it, “This can also be expressed by saying that the one who speaks is not the individual, but language” (117). At first sight this appears simply to echo the theme of language as exteriority. However, Agamben’s concern here is to reconcile this familiar theme with the possibility of ethical speech, and specifically, with the possibility of bearing witness, a form of enunciation that intuitively requires an embodied presence and the enunciation of an ‘I.’ Agamben’s question thus turns on the ethics of testimony, and the “impossibility of speaking” that confronts the witness: What happens to the living individual when he occupies the ‘vacant place’ of the subject, when he enters into a process of enunciation? [...] What does it mean to be subject to desubjectification? How can a subject give an account of its own ruin? (140) To answer this question, Agamben turns to a concept central to ethical philosophy: shame. He draws on the definition outlined by Levinas, who considers shame not in the moral terms of guilt and innocence, but 349
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in ontological terms: as the inescapability of one’s own self-presence. The shame of nudity, for example, is not a matter of guilt or innocence, but arises when “the unrestrainable impulse to flee from oneself is confronted by an equally certain impossibility of evasion” (Agamben, 105). In Levinas’s definition: What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself. [...] [Shame] reveals not our nothingness but rather the totality of our existence. (Levinas, 65) For Agamben, this experience of shame is a double movement of subjectification and desubjectification: It is as if our consciousness collapsed and, seeking to flee in all directions, were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its own defacement. [...] This double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame. (106) For Agamben this double movement is characteristic of subjectivity as such: “subjectivity constitutively has the form of subjectification and desubjectification; this is why it is, at bottom, shame” (112). And this double movement also characterizes enunciation, the appearance of subjectivity in language: “the passage from language to discourse appears as a paradoxical act that simultaneously implies both subjectification and desubjectification” (116). Thus flesh-and-blood individuals must desubjectify themselves in order to identify with the pure shifter ‘I,’ which is “absolutely without any substantiality and content other than its mere reference to the event of discourse” (116). But having desubjectified themselves in this way, speakers find themselves subjected to discourse, where their words are no longer their own, where whatever they say or do not say is entirely overwhelmed by the materiality of language, where they gain access “not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking [...] always already anticipated by a glossolalic potentiality over which [they have] neither control nor mastery” (116). This impossibility of speaking recalls the “ferocious dilemma of expression” 350
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that confronts the artist: “It is therefore not surprising that in the face of this intimate extraneousness implicit in the act of speech, poets experience something like responsibility and shame” (117). For Agamben, it is this shared “impossibility of speaking” that unites the Muselmann and the survivors who bear witness; for the Muselmänner, their experiences have deprived them of the capacity to bear witness; and for the survivors, the fact that they have escaped the fate of the Muselmann means they cannot be true witnesses and they therefore essentially have “nothing to say.” For Agamben the possibility of testimony depends on this incapacity to speak. To explicate this relation, Agamben turns to the etymology of the term ‘author,’ arguing that the original sense of the Latin auctor was as a kind of sponsor, a person who gives legal authority to the incomplete act of a minor, or person otherwise incapable of a legally valid act (148). For Agamben, then, testimony depends on this sense of “authorship” as sponsorship of an incomplete act of speaking: But if the survivor bears witness for the Muselmann [...] then, according to the legal principle by which the acts of the delegated are imputed to the delegant, it is in some way the Muselmann who bears witness. [...] Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking [...] enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness. (120) Thus, in Agamben’s account, “authorship” characterises this complex act of enunciation, in which the one who speaks and the one who cannot speak are united in this doubled figure of shame: “The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak” (158, emphasis in original). Conclusion The value of Agamben’s model of enunciation lies in its insistence on the double movement of subjectification and desubjectification. Where Blanchot elevates the author into a transcendental anonymity, a willed dissolution of subjectivity in the exteriority of language, and where 351
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Foucault reduces the author to a hollow construction of discourse, a phantom of the archive, Agamben’s linking of enunciation with shame preserves the concern with embodiment that is such a persistent theme in Beckett’s writing. The speech of Beckett’s characters is always chained to the embodied voice, a body that is often mutilated or deformed, but never dematerialized, never able to celebrate the blissful dissolution of the subject in the anonymity of a murmur. That is why the modality of enunciation in Beckett is not one of indifference, but of shame. We are now perhaps in a better position to consider the problem that Beckett addresses in The Unnamable. For does not Agamben’s figure of shame precisely invoke the “incoercible absence of relation” that is shared by the witness and the Muselmann, by the voice of The Unnamable and its unnumerable pronouns, proxies and “vice-existers” (37)? Clearly I do not wish to claim that the “unqualifiable murmur” that speaks in The Unnamable is in some way the voice of the Muselmann. So too, though The Unnamable is full of references to prisons and slaughterhouses, testimonies and witnesses, it would be wrong to read these as references, even on a symbolic level, to actual historical events, since this would return us to the paradigm of representation that Beckett is so much at pains to distance himself from. Instead, The Unnamable may be read as a text stubbornly dedicated to an examination of the failure of representation and the shame of speaking. In Beckett’s writing the ferocious dilemma of expression is never resolved in favour of either the representer or the representee; instead, the task of enunciation is always taken up anew in terms of “the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself.” In this, it confronts a historical crisis of enunciation, one that is exemplified in Primo Levi’s discussion in The Truce of Hurbinek, the nickname given to a nameless, speechless child who appears among the deportees after the liberation of Auschwitz. Over the last few days of his life, Hurbinek stubbornly pronounces a word – “something like ‘mass-klo,’ ‘matisklo’” (198) – which the others cannot make out: “In the following days everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek’s word remained secret” (198). As in the case of Hurbinek and the word ‘mass-klo’ or ‘matisklo,’ it is never just language that speaks, but always someone – perhaps nameless, perhaps speechless, perhaps even dead – but always someone. It is not through a submission to the exteriority of language, 352
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but through a submission to the shame of speaking, that the author takes on the “ferocious dilemma of expression.” That is why writing is always an authorial act, an act whose ethical force lies in neither decision nor compulsion but in the act of enunciation itself, in which are indissolubly mingled the febrile speech of the living and the authority of the dead: I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from it. (Beckett 1958, 36) Notes 1. I would like to thank the respondents from the Samuel Beckett Working Group session at Trinity College, Dublin on 8 April 2006, and especially Angela Moorjani, Linda Ben-Zvi and Jonathan Kalb, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2. In my discussion of the Three Dialogues I rely on the convention, albeit unwarranted, that B. and D. may be taken to stand for Beckett and Duthuit, respectively.
Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990). Beckett, Samuel, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1958). –, “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1965), 95-126. Benveniste, Emile, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FA: U of Miami P, 1971). Blanchot, Maurice, “Where Now? Who Now?,” in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Molloy’,‘Malone Dies’, ‘The Unnamable’, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 23-29. Critchley, Simon, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997).
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Russell Smith Driver, Tom, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 217-223. Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bochard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977), 113-38. –, “The Order of Discourse,” trans. Ian McLeod, in Untying the Text: A Post Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 48-78. –, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2004). Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1989). –, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Wolf (London: Abacus, 2004). Levinas, Emmanuel, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bargo (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003). Trezise, Thomas, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).
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DEMENTED VS. CREATIVE EMULATION IN MURPHY
Thomas J. Cousineau Beckett’s notes for Murphy in his Whoroscope Notebook, especially his distinction between a force and a guide, allow us to see in Murphy’s subservience to a succession of “forces,” culminating in his tragicomic effort to emulate Mr. Endon’s psychosis, a degraded image of Beckett’s own creative emulation of Dante and James Joyce, who serve as his principal literary guides in this novel. Beckett’s highly original adaptation of the models bequeathed to him by these predecessors include his pervasive use of chiasmic patterns in Murphy and his echoing of the story of Icarus in the narration of Murphy’s own doomed flight.
Samuel Beckett’s original model for Murphy, as recorded in his Whoroscope Notebook, took the form of two abstract figures: “H,” which designated a horoscope, and “X,” which later became Murphy. Describing “H” as “a corpus of motives” and “X” as having no motives, Beckett then made the intriguing observation that, although “H” is “any old oracle to begin with,” he later becomes “No longer a guide to be consulted but a force to be obeyed” (Ackerley, 22). Beckett’s distinction between a guide and a force suggests the possibility that we should locate the generative tension of the novel, not in the more usually invoked Cartesian mind-body dualism, but in the contrast between the force that ultimately leads Murphy to his demented and self-destructive identification with Mr. Endon, and the various literary guides, especially Dante and James Joyce, whom Beckett himself freely “consults” as he pursues his own, highly original emulation of their work. Three episodes of Murphy involve encounters that are presided over by a “force,” beginning with Suk, continuing with the Clinch brothers, and concluding with Mr. Endon, that Murphy, despite occasional misgivings, willingly obeys. The disaster that awaits him at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat will be prepared, during the conversation in which Ticklepenny proposes that he work as an orderly
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in an insane asylum, by his “being stunned by the sudden clash between two hitherto distinct motifs in Suk’s delineations, that of lunatic in paragraph two and that of custodian in paragraph seven” (87). Shortly thereafter, the narrator underlines the determining role of Suk in supplying the motiveless Murphy with a motive that he can embrace unthinkingly when he tells us, in words that nearly replicate his previous assertion, “But what made Murphy really confident was the sudden syzygy in Suk’s delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven” (93). His work at the Mercyseat requires that Murphy submit to a variety of regulations whose underlying rationale is, to recall Beckett’s characterization of “X,” that he has no motives. Bim, one of the Clinch twins, admonishes him accordingly: “He would never lose sight of the fact that he was a creature without initiative. He had no competence to register facts on his own account. There were no facts in the M.M.M. except those sanctioned by the doctor […] He would never on any account neglect to keep his mouth shut” (159). The culminating phase of this descent into the realm of pure motivelessness occurs, of course, when Murphy meets Mr. Endon, in whom he finds the ultimate embodiment of an “H” that he can obey without reservation. Although he believes that he cannot tolerate being subordinated to any system but his own (183), Murphy readily succumbs to the “corpus of motives” with which Mr. Endon supplies him. As many critics have noted, the chess game that Murphy plays with Mr. Endon is an exercise in automatic emulation; although he plays white, Murphy quickly surrenders the initiative to Mr. Endon, whose moves he mimics. Neil Taylor and Bryan Loughrey, who have examined the chess match closely, conclude that, in spite of the slavish emulation exhibited by Murphy’s style of play, the outcome of the match actually has a positive significance. According to the authors, Murphy has succeeded, not so much in mimicking Mr. Endon’s moves, as in gaining access to his mental freedom. After granting the possibility that Murphy surrenders because he has recognized his abject dependency on Mr. Endon, the authors argue that, to the contrary, “it is also possible that Murphy surrenders after move 43 because he suddenly sees how Endon’s mind works after all, and momentarily gains access to its freedom, purity, and beauty” (87). They then conclude by crediting Murphy with having been “briefly in mystic communion” (88) with Endon’s mind. This observation contains an intriguing half-truth. I believe, however, it would be more accurate to locate the “mystic 356
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communion” in Beckett’s encounter with his literary models, of which Murphy’s meeting with Mr. Endon is merely an ironic and degraded version. At least two aspects of Murphy allow us to observe Beckett “consulting” with his literary guides: first, his use of chiasmic patterning to organize the disparate episodes of his novel and, second, his recounting of Murphy’s ill-fated journey to the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in such a way as to recall the “mad flight” that led to Icarus’s drowning, a classical legend that Dante had already adapted to his own epic purposes in Inferno 26, followed centuries later by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The story of Icarus is especially appropriate as a subtext for Murphy because it too involves the distinction between a guide (in the form of Daedalus) and a force (in the form of the attraction, at once irresistible and destructive, of the sun). Dante’s use of number symbolism and chiasmic patterning throughout the Divine Comedy is well known: his 3-line stanzas are echoed by the division of the comedy itself into 3 canticles, each of which is composed of 33 stanzas. The addition of a prologue to the Inferno creates a total of 100 cantos, which, for Dante is the perfect number. The sequence of episodes within cantos is also highly organized. In Canto 2, for example, Dante has Virgil interrupt Beatrice’s discourse in a way that, although not essential to the forward narrative movement, creates a chiasmic structure consisting of 7 episodes: 1. Dante hesitates to undertake his journey into Hell; 2. Virgil tells Dante of Beatrice’s intercession on his behalf; 3. Virgil begins quoting Beatrice’s words to him; 4. Virgil then interrupts Beatrice to ask her reason for entering Hell (she has already explained this to him); 5. Virgil continues quoting Beatrice’s words to him; 6. Virgil explains to Dante that he has come at Beatrice’s urging (he has already explained this to him); 7. Dante describes the liberating effect of Beatrice’s words on him. As Dante scholar Charles Singleton has discovered, the entirety of the Divine Comedy itself pivots on a similarly chiasmic patterning. Virgil’s exposition of freewill and Love in the central canto of Dante’s 357
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poem (Purgatorio 17) is framed by exactly 50 terzines equally divided between the final 25 of Canto 16 and the initial 25 of Canto 18. Singleton continues: The number 25, thus arrived at and clearly divisible in this balance of terzine on either side of center, will prove to be not without significance as we proceed in our consideration of patterns at the center, if we remember to follow an established practice and add the numbers that make it up. The number 25, in this sense, displays a number 7, the sum of its two digits, equally balanced on either side of the central Canto. And we may now add to this the fact that the central verse of Canto xvii of the Purgatorio, and thus the central verse of the entire Commedia, bears the number 70. (2-3) This leads Singleton to the startling discovery that “here, then, are framing canto numbers (151) whose sum is 7, here are framing terzine (25 to either side) the sum of whose number is 7, and here finally at the exact center of the poem is a verse whose number is 70, the sum of which is 7!” (6). Singleton concludes with a series of questions whose relevance to Murphy is apparent: “But why would he [Dante] ever count and list the verses of one hundred cantos in this way? And are we to think that the poet expected his poem to find a reader, or readers, with that kind of curiosity? And if he did not expect this, why would he bother to construct such a pattern of numbers at the center of his structure, as we now see that he did?” (9). To be sure, Dante’s practice throughout the Divine Comedy marks him as a descendant of the Pythagoreans, who attached sacred significance to numbers, as well as of St. Augustine, who later Christianized number symbolism. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s adaptation of Dante’s numerical patterning arguably begins with the opening sentence of the novel, which reads: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo” (3). Although it is unpunctuated and thus “enjambed,” this opening sentence divides naturally into 3 distinct subjects: time, moocow, and little boy. Subsequent paragraphs, each of which is divided into 3 even more clearly marked units (usually individual sentences), repeat this tripartite structure. Working in a way that 358
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resembles Dante’s poetic practice, Joyce modulates his triadic form from paragraph to paragraph, creating both variety within a fixed pattern and also creating an interlocking effect that reminds us of the “open” quality of the terza-rima stanza. Throughout the novel itself, echoes of Dante’s chiasmic patterning likewise abound. One technique that Joyce uses repeatedly is the arranging of narrative elements in groups of 5 in such a way that the pivotal third element is markedly different from the other 4, which are themselves so arranged that the even numbered ones match with each other as do the odd-numbered ones. Thus, of the 5 chapters in A Portrait, the central chapter, which recounts the hell-fire sermon, is flanked by chapters 1 and 5, which culminate in Stephen’s relationship with a paternal figure (the rector and the “old artificer,” respectively) and by chapters 2 and 4, in which fathers are replaced by women (the prostitute and the bird-girl, respectively). To take just one further example: we know that the last episode that Joyce inserted into A Portrait, after the manuscript was otherwise completed, is the one in which Stephen writes the villanelle, an episode that could have been put into a variety of places. Joyce’s decision to place it in the pivotal third phase of chapter 5 creates a neatly mirroring relationship with chapter 1, in which this middle position is occupied by a scene (the Christmas dinner) whose placement is likewise determined by considerations, not of chronology, but of symmetry. Gerry Dukes tells us that, when he and Hugh Kenner visited Beckett in August 1989, “There was much smoking by all of us – Beckett was back on his favourite cigarillos – and talk of numerological patterns in his and in Joyce’s writing” (136). Evidence of Beckett’s interest in such patterning may be observed as early as the opening lines of Murphy, which, like those of A Portrait, are arranged as prose equivalents of terzines that mimic Dante’s stanzaic form without violating the norms of realistic fiction: “The sun shone, having not alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.” (1) In Beckett’s rendition, the syntax of the two opening sentences contributes to the effect of repetition and difference: in both sentences, the second line of the “terzine” is in the from of a grammatically subordinate element (a participial phrase in the first, a modifying clause in the second) while the first and third lines combine to express the main idea of each sentence. Similar patterns of “parallel thirds” (195) proliferate throughout the novel. In the second paragraph, to take just one 359
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example, the ABA pattern of terza rima is present in the initial letters of the 3 repeated words in the street cry “Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo!” (2). To these we may add such later examples the 3/2/3 distribution of syllables in the name of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, and in the phases of Murphy and Celia’s love-making: “serenade, nocturne, albada” (74); a variant of this distribution occurs in the threefold repetition of a two-syllable word in the phrase “music, Music, MUSIC” (252). Murphy’s manner of dividing his 5 biscuits into 3 groups (a first consisting of the anonymous biscuit that he always eats first, a second consisting of three biscuits that he eats in a variable order, and a third consisting of the ginger biscuit that he always eats last) produces, in its turn, an ABA configuration composed of fixed/variable/fixed. Beckett’s fondness for chiasmic patterning may likewise be noted in the narrator’s description of Mr. Quigley as “a well-to-do ne’er-do-well” (17) and in Murphy’s declaration to Celia, “Providence will provide” (21). The novel itself is replete with examples, including Murphy’s 2 fixed and 3 variable biscuits, of configurations in which the numbers 2 and 3 play a central role. The distribution of syllables in Celia Kelly’s given name and surname, as well as those of her paternal grandfather, Mr. Willoughby Kelly, and perhaps even including Murphy’s designation as the “seedy solipsist.” Other examples include the 3 colors (rather than the expected 2?) of the linoleum that covers the floor of the room the Celia finds in Brewery Road as well as Murphy’s division of himself into two parts (mind and body) and the narrator’s description (271) of the final disposition of his tripartite mind, body, and soul. There is, likewise, evidence that Beckett may have been attentive to numerical patterning in the concluding paragraphs of his novel. The second to last paragraph contains 2 sentences, the next to last 10, and the last just 1 sentence, giving us a total of 13 sentences distributed among 3 paragraphs. 13 reappears as the number of chapters in Murphy, which form a chiasmic pattern with chapter 7 at its center: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 360
Murphy in his rocking chair; Celia visits Mr. Kelly; “Force” exerted on Murphy by Suk; Subplot involving minor characters; Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (employment offered); Murphy leaves his body;
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7. Subplot involving minor characters; 8. Butler commits suicide; 9. Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (Murphy enters); 10. Subplot involving minor characters; 11. “Force” exerted on Murphy by Mr. Endon; 12. Celia in company of minor characters identifies Murphy’s corpse; 13. Mr. Kelly in his wheel chair. Analogies between the practice of his major precursors and the patterns that Beckett creates here, including the symmetry that he forms at the center of the novel by foregrounding the subplot in chapters 4, 7, 10 (leaving three chapters symmetrically arranged on either side as well as 7 central chapters that are arranged 3-1-3), are so numerous that it is difficult to choose from among them. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the fact that Dante, as Singleton has pointed out, also places the number 7 at the center of the Divine Comedy. To these we may add Beckett’s marked predilection for organizing episodes within many chapters so as to produce a chiasmic pattern. Chapter 1, which begins with Murphy in his rocking chair, continues by recounting Murphy’s “apprenticeship” to Neary, and then returns to Murphy in his rocking chair, is clearly organized according to an ABA pattern, which is then replicated in eight other chapters (2-4, 913). The four remaining chapters (5-8) tend to arrange themselves into five-part divisions. Of these, chapter 8 appears to be the most symmetrically organized: The sequence of five episodes (“news of the butler’s suicide,” “Murphy and Celia together,” “Celia and Miss Carridge discuss the butler,” “Mr. Kelly and Celia together,” “Celia moves into the butler’s room”) creates an ABABA pattern. Such patterns as these contribute a firmly constructed armature to a novel whose concatenation of events and sundry details is, at the same time, highly random and disjointed. They also create throughout the novel a submerged conversation between Beckett and the principal precursors whose trademark structuring devices return in his own work. Turning now to Beckett’s adaptation of the Icarus story as it had been passed on to him by Dante and Joyce, it may be well, first, to recall Dante’s use of allusions to wings in Inferno 26 to establish Icarus as his model for Ulysses. In the opening terzine he “praises” Florence, “Beating your wings on land and on the sea” (l. 2). He then implicitly 361
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contrasts Icarus’s and Ulysses’ catastrophic journeys with Elijah’s entry into heaven “Like a small cloud ascending” (l. 41). The most celebrated of these allusions occurs when Ulysses boasts that he and his men “made wings of our oars” (120). Soon thereafter, Dante recasts Icarus’s fall into the sea in the form of the sinking of Ulysses’ ship by a whirlwind (ll. 130-6). James Joyce guaranteed that the importance of the Icarus story as background of A Portrait would immediately become a critical commonplace by placing a fragment from Ovid’s retelling, “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes” (Metamorphoses, VIII, 188), on the title page of his novel and by naming his protagonist Stephen Dedalus. References to winged creatures return in the figure of the “hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea” (183) “and the girl “changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird” (185) who together reveal his artistic vocation to Stephen. Joyce may also have intended a submerged allusion to the fate of Icarus in the exclamation of Stephen’s classmate, who is cavorting nearby with friends, “O, cripes, I’m drownded” (183). The novel concludes, of course, with Stephen’s celebrated call to the mythological figure of Daedalus: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” (276). In Murphy, Beckett offers, in his turn, a creative repetition of the Icarus story in a way that alludes along the way to Dante’s and Joyce’s use of this legend as a subtext. Hints of a connection with the story of Icarus include Mr. Kelly fixing “his eagle eye on a kite” (280) as well as his “flying” to the pond in which he nearly drowns, to which we may add the allusion to “[t]he sail of his kite” (114). In the French translation, Beckett adds such phrases as “sur les ailes de son amour” (42), and “Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid’ (191) and, on two occasions, has the little boy who is flying two kites “chante comme un oiseau” (112). He also humanizes the kites in the French translation by adding the detail that they arrive “sains et saufs” (112), an expression that may strictly be applied only to human beings. Already in the English version, Beckett had referred to these kites as forming a metaphorical, and perhaps a mythological, “tandem” (152). The narrator’s concluding reference to “the sagging soar of line” (280) may or may not be Beckett’s clever way of alluding to both the oars of a boat and the fall to which Icarus’s soaring flight leads him. Several details that are gathered together in the novel’s final pages combine, however, to convey both nautical and mythological implications that cannot avoid notice. These begin with the possible 362
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evocation of the wind that sinks Ulysses’s ship in mention of “the wind tearing the awning of the cloud to tatters,” the description of a young child “running forward to break its fall” [of a kite], and the odd use of the word “winch” (281) to designate the device used to haul in the kite. On the last page of Murphy, Mr. Kelly’s near-drowning is framed by such details as the line of his kite that “jerked upward in a wild whirl,” a bystander who helps Celia “get him aboard” his wheelchair, and the concluding detail of “The yachting-cap [that] clung like a clam to the skull” (282), which point to the “syzygy” that Beckett has arranged between Murphy and his classical prototypes. While Ulysses is never directly named in Murphy, the novel does contain an allusion to a Pythagorean named Hippasos who, according to Neary, “Drowned in a puddle […] for having divulged the incommensurability of side and diagonal” (47). Ackerley tells us that the historical Hippasos drowned at sea after revealing Pythagorean mysteries to non-initiates and that his death “was seen as divine retribution” (71), details that clearly imply his association in Murphy with both Icarus and Ulysses. Murphy’s rocking chair, like Mr. Kelly’s, can be plausibly seen as a transformation of the ship that carries Ulysses to his doom (Murphy falls out of his and Mr. Kelly’s takes him to his near-drowning). References to Murphy as a modern Narcissus, “drawn to Mr. Endon like Narcissus to his fountain” (186), parallel both Icarus’s drowning and the capsizing of Ulysses ship by a waterspout, a connection that Beckett seems likewise to have in mind when his narrator describes Murphy in his rocking chair as having the look “of a very inexperienced diver about to enter the water” (28). My hypothesis that Murphy’s quest for freedom is shadowed throughout the novel by the similarly catastrophic journeys of Icarus and Ulysses may cast some useful light on the peculiar circumstances of Murphy’s death, which occurs when someone confuses the chain to a toilet in the M.M.M. and the gas jet connected to the heater that Murphy had installed in his garret, thus provoking an explosion. The conjunction of water (the toilet) and fire (the gas heater) that produces Murphy’s death (a detail whose implausibility has long been recognized) is then repeated in the equally unlikely detail of Murphy’s last will and testament, in which he requests that his body “be burnt and placed in a paper bag” and that his ashes be flushed down a toilet in the Abbey Theatre (269). A similar conjunction of fire and water occurs, of course, in the stories of Icarus and Ulysses. The heat of the sun melts the wings that 363
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Icarus’s father Daedalus had fashioned from feathers and wax, thus provoking his fall into the sea. In the case of Ulysses, the sequence of elements is reversed: he drowns when a storm capsizes his ship and, in Dante’s account of his fate, spends eternity enclosed in a flame. We will never know, to be sure, whether or not Beckett intended this particular “syzygy.” It does, however, provide an intriguing conclusion to his account of a failed journey whose monitory lesson about the fate of unfettered human desire revives, as Dante and Joyce had done before him, one of the oldest and most poignant of classical legends. The chess game that Murphy plays with Mr. Endon expresses his desire to submit to Mr. Endon’s “force” and to see himself reflected in his mentor’s psychosis, perhaps, even, to acquire it for himself. The novel itself, however, is a creative alternative to this debilitating form of emulation. In the first place, Beckett “submits” to the work of his predecessors in a way that preserves his independence and originality. Second, we as his readers are called upon, in our turn, to “play” Murphy with him. In so doing, we pursue leads, hunches, and guesses that recreate, in ways that are always open to rethinking and revision, the process that had led him, in the first instance, to transform his sources into disguised reenactments. Interpreting Murphy thus involves a virtual, as well as an open-ended, “consultation” with Beckett, his precursors, and, to be sure, other readers of the novel, who will either confirm or challenge our discoveries. Our recognizing the speculative and tentative quality of these discoveries will prevent us from assuming that we are merely replicating “moves” that Beckett had transparently and unequivocally preceded us in making. In this way, our experience while reading Murphy, like Beckett’s while writing it, will be far different from Murphy’s while playing chess with Mr. Endon. Works Cited Ackerley, Chris, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (New York: Grove P, 1957). –, Murphy (Paris: Minuit, 1965). Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994). Dukes, Gerry, Samuel Beckett (Woodstock: The Overlook P, 2001).
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Demented vs. Creative Emulation in Murphy Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1964). Singleton, Charles, “The Poet’s Number at the Center,” in Modern Language Notes 1 (1965), 1-10. Taylor, Neil, and Bryan Loughrey, “Murphy’s Surrender to Symmetry,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 11-12 (1989), 79-90.
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FALLING DOWN AND STANDING UP AND FALLING DOWN AGAIN…
Sjef Houppermans The fall is omnipresent in Beckett’s work: most directly and materially in the characters’ repeated tumbles and decline, but also as a reiterated motif with philosophical and metaphysical implications, besides manifesting itself throughout in textual breaches and the rhythmic cadences of Beckett’s language. In this article I explore Beckett’s challenge to verticality in a number of his prose, poetry, and theatre pieces, with particular emphasis on Krapp’s Last Tape.
Some years ago I attended a performance of Waiting for Godot by the Dutch Theater Company Dood Paard (Dead Horse).1 The many chairs that had been piled on the stage would periodically collapse and tumble down on Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, nearly burying them under their weight. Again and again, on finally getting back on their feet, the foursome faced the long task of rearranging the chairs. They never sat on those chairs by the way. I find this catastrophic tumble and powerlessness to disentangle oneself significant for Beckett’s vision. Such stage actions recall the smashing and bumping gags of slapstick cinema; they exploit theatrical space by offering us a dramatic view of the precarious horizontality of human life: the always renewed urge to fall countered by the Sisyphus-like pensum of getting up only to fall again. The day will come when the need to be upright spent, we remain lying on our backs as in Company: this is the eternal day of rest under a tombstone (evoking the French tomber ‘to fall’). But for the time being, the fall may result in exaltation or exhilaration. It can be a ‘transport,’ a luminous vertigo. Beckett has fixed the exact image of this ‘transport’ in his description of the night of sound and fury in 1945 when he first knew that his esthetic universe would and should be one of failure and lessness.2 This moment of glory combines the two extremes: reaching heaven by falling into hell, a ‘Luciferian’ sense of glory, a rising to the height of ecstasy by experiencing the loss of an ideal.
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The fall may bring on sensations of weightlessness to allow a weighed-down body to surpass its limitations. In sinking down at the seaside, Molloy exemplifies the jubilatory fall for a long line of figures to follow. In the text a figurative jubilation corresponds to such moments of ‘transport,’ a metaphorical breach of syntactic and metonymical continuity, a lightening moment of truth that meteorlike hollows out the textual ground.3 We find such a fall in Company, which is said to be Beckett’s most autobiographical text. In Company, the motif of the fall encompasses death and birth, the latter compared to the fall of a drop that trickles onto a stone (34), while referring as well to the distances that come in between. For the little boy, it begins with the startling experience he has on his walk with his mother in the Irish countryside. When he sees how the sun disappears and reemerges following the folds of the landscape he asks her what to think about the distance to the sky, and she gives him a “cutting retort” pushing his hand away. (8). The fall is here linked to distances, first of all the distance from the mother, whose seeming lack of affection results in deep-seated feelings of loneliness. This being cut off provokes an obsessive movement of fort-da, of coming and going, fleeing and returning, a to-and-fro associated in Company to some key episodes of falling. Observing his mother in the kitchen, the little boy is alone in the garden and then: “You climb to near the top of a great fir. You sit a little listening to all the sounds. Then throw yourself off. The great boughs break your fall. The needles. You lie a little with your face to the ground. Then climb the tree again. Your mother answers Mrs Coote again saying, He has been a very naughty boy” (14-15). The final figure of the old man lying on his back waiting for company is the most reduced version of this tension of distance from the mother. He whispers, “Aha! The crawl. Does he hear the crawl? The fall? What an addition to company were he but to hear the crawl. The fall” (34). This fallen position is the principal setting, as the other episodes are rememberings – analepses, a falling back on the past – grafted onto this gisant. Psychoanalysis identifies a site for the fall, locating its impact on a crypt within the ego where acts of mourning for objects of desire others and the Other (with a Lacanian capital), and the self – find their hallucinatory hiding place.4 The crypt can be externalized psychotically as a tomb in which Beckett’s many old men – Molloy, Malone, the Unnamable, Krapp, for instance – want to come to rest. The fall is the desire to go back to non-existence, beyond the will to live, descending 368
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into the womb-grave in the Nirvana night that could be seen as going beyond the Freudian pleasure principle. The fall expresses the desire to end and the necessary postponing of this longing, the inversion of the ‘normal’ movement of desire by way of its negative spin (“worstward”). In an asymptotic gesture, this movement goes on forever. The fall is also a musical notion, the ‘cadence’ of music, of language, of texts, that is, a falling inflection, a point of rest that ruptures the flux of words or irrupts in a caesura that cuts into the story line to open it for ‘the other scene.’ Such incisions are the Lacanian points de capiton, the blanks in respiration, the voids in reasoning, on the way to that silence the protagonist craves. Such measured cadences to which we know Beckett paid great attention can signify a slow decay aspiring to a final term. On the other hand, surprising leaps in the text, jumping and plunging from abyss to abyss, make us lose the thread that would confirm identity and stability. We plunge into undifferentiated waters in the manner of a waterfall cascading from one level to the next or even in the manner of an irresistible cataract sweeping down everything in a total free fall. Such is the maelstrom effect we experience in reading The Unnamable out loud or in listening to Not I. It comes as no surprise that Beckett would favour the musical term cascando for both the title of a poem of 1936 and a radio play of 1963: cascando – like calando – evokes a drooping, a dieing away of volume and tempo, a fading at the end of a piece. “Cascando,” the poem, consists of three parts of uneven length, with the words about life and love’s avatars gliding from level to level, evoking a plummeting sensation along the way: love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words The third and final part contains only four words: “unless they love you,” with all the fatality of lessness that attaches to them. In Cascando, a radio play for voice and music, the Opener appears to modulate the Voice to effect a coincidence (a falling together) of chords in alternation with the music, which can only be performed cascando. In the Dutch version of 1992, the music is played by a contrabass yearning in a profound and rasping sound that parallels the Voice’s breathing.5 The Voice’s staccato rhythms echo in turn the 369
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character Woburn’s footsteps as he stumbles and falls, first with his “face in the mud,” then his “face in the sand,” and finally, his “face . . . in the stones” (345, 347). Wanting to bring his story about Woburn to an end, the Voice too is forced to go on cascando, but never concluding in the familiar Beckett way. When the Opener mentions that the days in May are long, we are reminded of the name of Beckett’s mother as it relates to cascando, calando, a falling away, as in aphanisis, the fading of desire, but never totally, as Voice’s last words are, “we’re there . . . nearly . . . just a few more . . . don’t let go . . . Woburn . . . he clings on . . . come on . . . come on – ” (351). A similar scenario can be detected in “For to End Yet Again” (“Fizzle 8,” translating the 1975 foirade “Pour finir encore”), a text that provides glimpses of “the last expelled amidst his ruins,” first standing “stark erect,” then toppling over like a statue. At the same time fragments that break away from his refuge, or “mother ruin,” fall in slow motion into the dust (245). A murmur appears to suggest to the fallen body: “after the lifelong stand fall fall never fear no fear of your rising again” (246). But the fizzle’s final words put such an ending in doubt: “who knows yet another end […] of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be” (246). Here we are situated at the heart of a falling away where identity disappears in a never-ending collapse. And that brings us to the earlier radio play, the 1957 All That Fall, for which Maddy Rooney provides a plot summary by lamenting in the French version that “tout m’est retombé dessus, comme une cataracte” (18), which in the English reads less graphically, “all came over me again, like a flood” (162). The plodding footsteps of the characters, repeatedly heard in the play, evoke the destiny of the fall, a horizon whose distant lines of disappearance correspond to a long stretch of footfalls, as again in Company: “The foot falls unbidden in midstep or next” (26). Horizontal and vertical lines thus cross each other in a movement of tenacious progression and vertical falls. It is this tone of fatality that pervades All That Fall and leads to the final revelation of what had been kept secret: the little child’s fall out of the train under its wheels. There may be another secret: could the little ball that the blind Dan Rooney let fall have belonged to the little child? What really happened remains an enigma. Yet what we see in the play is each subject endlessly repeating an irreducible fall, so that the Biblical phrase, “The Lord upholdeth all that fall” is met with wild laughter by the Rooneys, as he appears to have fallen down on his job. 370
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If falling gives Beckett’s texts their rhythmic cadences, it also links his writing to the Western cultural tradition: the Biblical Fall, that fault of faults, which he mocks as traditionally imagined, while reasserting its cruel permanency; the falls of the Beckettian anti-heroes repeating Christ’s staggering under the Cross, but performed as a purely mimetic act without hope of salvation; Oedipus stumbling on his wounded feet; King Lear roaming around the heath; and words falling from above, orders and messages, anonymous rules descending from a distant sky to fall at the creature’s feet, as in Act without Words 1, punishing or dictating. In Beckett’s prose fiction, the motif of the fall appears early: who can forget Murphy’s cutting into the rhythmic to and fro of his rockingchair, as he topples nose to the ground? Or Watt’s tumbles on the way to and from Knott’s house? Or the first expelled’s fall, as the door to his home slams behind him? And the growing instability of Mercier and Camier: “Their progress was now no better than a totter […]. Soon falls began to enter into play, now Camier accompanying Mercier (in his fall), now the reverse, and now the two collapsing simultaneously, as one man, without preconcertation and in perfect interindependency” (463). Still, it is especially the theater that provides the material stage for presenting falls in all their intensity. In Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, for example, the movements of some of the characters and the lack of mobility of others point to a collapse, a caving in, or a dropping down. Gogo and Didi lack stability, and along with Pozzo and Lucky, they stumble and collapse in a heap. The limping Clov too is in need of equilibrium; Hamm clutches his armchair, while Nagg and Nell are pushed down to the bottom of their garbage cans. Winnie is buried in a tomb of sand (‘tomb,’ as we know, is derived from ‘funerary mound’). But let us turn now to Krapp’s Last Tape. The banana sequence with which the play begins is troubling in many ways: partly because the banana evokes too obviously a sexual organ and a scatological object, and partly because the near-pratfall brought on by a slip on the peel is difficult to perform well. Pat Magee, the actor who created the role, appeared to have gotten the business with the banana right (see Knowlson, 410). If the fall is a tragic punishment for all hubris of triumphant consciousness, it also provokes, as here in Krapp, the kind of laughter that has its roots in the unconscious where sadistic pleasures hide. It is the fall of the clown and his puzzled and unknowing slipping, 371
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grinning, winking, and falling again. In addition, however, the banana functions as a wayward supplement that can be put anywhere – in a drawer, in a coat pocket, on the floor – and suggests Krapp’s own detachability and wandering between his tapes and his bottles in the cubbyhole. A polymorphous perversion takes the place of castration, with the theater well suited to stage the ironic and kaleidoscopic versatility of these positions. Krapp’s Last Tape presents us with a circular movement where time, space, and personage are all under the seal of a phantasmagorical presence. The play circles from void to void via a series of tapes that are embedded one in the other, and whose discourse is strangely repetitive, as the same passages recur, and the same actions come around again and again. The unified and upright subject vanishes in this repetitive rhythm, suggesting a dream sequence, where one falls endlessly into a dark hole. The major events related in the tapes are affected by this ritual setting, taking on an air of destiny. Fate descends on Krapp in three key moments. The first is the death of his mother, the moment of moments, causing the mature Krapp to fall back on his childhood, throwing a little ball to manage some distance.6 Like the “husks” in the tavern (balle in French), there is always a supplement, a useless object, a bit of ‘crap’ that is put aside, in a cynical gesture, just beyond reach, as desire wants it to be. Bits of ‘husk’ are flung far and wide in this textual dissemination. Listening to his account of his mother’s death thirty years earlier, the older Krapp lingers on the word ‘viduity,’ ‘widowhood,’ evoking emptiness and the craving for non-existence and disengagement. His delight in discovering the vidua-bird with its “black plumage of male” may be associated with his own volatility (225). A compensation for the grief his mother’s death causes him can be glimpsed in the meeting with the beloved and their excursion on the lake. A falling together is exchanged for the falling apart, as limits disappear in the fluidity of the water, abolishing the menace of durable ties: “We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side” (227). A dynamic unconscious coincides here with desire. A displaced detail, such as the scratch on the girl’s thigh, figuratively opening onto the ‘other scene,’ may be pointing to this dimension. The third moment that counts for Krapp is his ecstatic vision on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, where, confronting fire and foam, he experiences a kind of deluge washing over him, bringing about in the 372
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dark depth of this maelstrom his “dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire” (226). In referring to a 1958 double-bill in London of Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame, Beckett wrote to Jacoba van Velde, his Dutch translator and friend: “Nicely sad and sentimental; it will be like the little heart of an artichoke served before the tripes and excrement of Hamm and Clov” (qtd. in Knowlson, 399). Krapp’s artistic failure and his falling apart and falling away from women he loved account for the play’s melancholic tone, as Krapp embracing his reels and recorder, continues his circular wandering in time and space, coming back finally to the amniotic waters of refuge and lust. With his broken and croaking voice, Krapp cracks open and falls to pieces, but at the same time he finds an opening to the world of dreams of women: the woman in green, Bianca, and Effie Briest he yearns to follow to the Baltic where Fontane made her dwell in overwhelming melancholy. In this manner space rejoins time in its defiance of chronology but not of duration, as we experience its frequencies, intensities, rhythms, and cadences. This kind of extratemporality, which brings to mind Proustian ecstasies and anticipates the reminiscences to emerge in Company, is characterized far more by its cadences than by the narrative line. In parallel fashion, the wandering in far-off regions of time and space always bring us back to the stage as if to a virtual location: “Table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness” (221). To these stage directions, Krapp adds, “With all this darkness round me I feel less alone” (223). This darkness refers to the inner theater where expressionistic lighting determines the contours and opens onto the ‘other scene’ of the unconscious. This space is theatrical by nature: a ceremony, a celebration, a drama of cruelty and sacrifice, but softened here as if enveloped in a veil of irony. Thus Krapp smashes his spools and ledger to the floor before beginning his listening beyond hope. Softly desperate, Krapp can nevertheless retrace desire as it falls on you like a coup de foudre (thunderbolt). Krapp’s stage body astonishes by the extraordinary shoes he wears: “Surprising pair of dirty white boots, size ten at least, very narrow and pointed” (221). Such footwear, which is bound to trip up its wearer, uncannily mirrors the extravagance that characterizes desire, such as Krapp’s. We see or hear Krapp’s body live its pleasures and pains before us on the stage, displaying a whole series of bodily activities and gestures: eating, drinking, sweating, seeking, stumbling, 373
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staggering, nearly falling, bending, unbending, rubbing his hands, talking, listening, singing, laughing, cursing, switching on and off, winding, rewinding, reading, staring, closing his eyes, brooding, smiling, murmuring, coughing, groaning, sweeping objects to the ground. Automatisms and repetitions characterize these gestures, as his voice hums the old melody and the same images haunt his mind. And his body merging with the tape recorder turns into a “machine désirante,” a ‘machine of desire’ of the kind that Gilles Deleuze has championed. Krapp’s body movements in the direction of its prosthesis and his way of looking at objects around him are closely intertwined. Bending over the tape recorder, as if about to fall into the machinery, and embracing the spools to get his ear as close to the voice he hears are movements that alternate with his gaze, this blank stare that signifies in its way a certain absence of the subject and introduces a lethal rigidity. But Krapp’s gaze designates more than blankness and narcissistic selfreflection. The Beckettian gaze introduces a dynamic understanding in three movements for what psychoanalysis proposes as a rather rigid structure (such as the importance Lacan, for instance, attaches to the gaze). The three major moments are (as previously mentioned): the view of the blind going down that hides the mother after her dying; the accepted obscurity in the visionary night (descending into the abyss); and the eyes of the beloved. What Beckett shows is how this uncanny gaze, this meeting with the unnamable, permits the return of desire: “you have to go on” separating the grain from the husks, accepting creative darkness and discovering moments of pure intensity where personal splits and rifts are suspended: “I asked her to look at me and 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” (227). Here the fall becomes en-trance. Krapp’s final position recapitulates the moments of suspension that punctuate the text like so many cadences: “Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence” (230). It is like the Protagonist’s last look in Catastrophe akin to pure music. One year before writing Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett composed the text we know as From an Abandoned Work. The long sentence that ends this fiction without ending (as it was abandoned) could have been uttered by Krapp, that other fallen and abandoned being: “Harsh things these great ferns, […] take the skin off your legs through your trousers, and then the holes they hide, break your leg if you’re not careful, awful English 374
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this, fall and vanish from view, you could lie there for weeks and no one hear you, I often thought of that up in the mountains, no, that is a foolish thing to say, just went on, my body doing its best without me” (164). Anthropology teaches us that the patterning of all human imagery is derived from the conflict between the horizontal and the vertical dimensions; the fall then, as I have tried to show, corresponds to the loss of human potentiality. And this loss of what gives the subject its spine takes place in the very materiality of Beckett’s text where classical rhetoric implodes and paratactic constructions hammer their obsessive rhythms.7 Notes 1. “Dood Paard” (“Dead Horse”) is the title of a poem by the famous Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg (1905-1962), in which he portrays the horrors of the battlefield and a feeling of disruption that the company seeks to actualize on the stage. 2. In Krapp’s Last Tape the episode is situated at Dún Laoghaire, but Beckett mentioned to James Knowlson that his own vision took place in his mother’s room (Knowlson, 319). See also Lawley on the “rapture of vertigo” in relation to Beckett’s turning point. 3. This notion is introduced in Rosolato who speaks of “l’oscillation métonymico-metaphorique” (passim). 4. I am thinking in particular of Abraham and Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. It is introduced as follows: “Central to their approach is a general theory of psychic concealment, a poetics of hiding. Whether in a clinical setting or a literary text, they search out the unspeakable secret as a symptom of devastating trauma revealed only in linguistic or behavioral encodings. Their view of trauma provides the linchpin for new psychic and linguistic structures such as the ‘transgenerational phantom,’ an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant, and the intra-psychic secret or ‘crypt,’ which entombs an unspeakable but consummated desire. Throughout, Abraham and Torok seek to restore communication with those intimate recesses of the mind which are, for one reason or another, denied expression.” 5. This production of Cascando was directed by Martine Ketelbutters and broadcast by the Flemish Radio Service BRT 3 on 3 March, 1992.
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Sjef Houppermans 6. Krapp could also be taken to fall back on the pre-oedipal stage with its oral and anal pleasures: the play’s cracophilia suggests coprophilia; cf. Campbell, 1997. 7. For a more detailed treatment of the motives that are central in this article, see my book in French: Samuel Beckett et Compagnie.
Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, Anasémies (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976). –, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994). Beckett, Samuel, Tous ceux qui tombent (Paris: Minuit, 1957). –, “Cascando,” in Collected Poems in English and French (London: Calder, 1977). –, Company/Compagnie: Bilingual Variorum Edition, ed. Charles Krance (New York: Garland, 1993). –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove P, 1995). –, Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster, 4 vols. (New York: Grove P, 2006). Campbell, Julie, “The Semantic Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape,” in SBT/A 6, “Crossroads and Borderlines,” ed. Marius Buning, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 63-72. Houppermans, Sjef, Samuel Beckett et Compagnie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996). Lawley, Paul, “‘The Rapture of Vertigo’: Beckett’s Turning-Point,” in Modern Language Review 95.1 (2000), 28-40. Rand, Nicholas T., “Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,” in Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994), 1-22. Rosolato, Guy, Essais sur le symbolique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
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MOLLOY: DE ‘JEUX DE MOTS’ AUX MODALITÉS PO(Ï)ÉTIQUES DE CONFIGURATION TEXTUELLE
Carla Taban This contribution tackles anew the matter of Beckettian “language games.”1 Through a close analysis of what is ostensibly a pun in the French Molloy, the critic questions the idea that its first and foremost function is to serve as a diverting or linguistic de-familiarising device. Rather, she suggests, the supposed pun is a mechanism to both generate and differentiate multiple contextual meanings, and to structure the text. The article proposes that only an integrative approach, taking into account the immediate and extended intratextual environment within which Beckettian “word plays” are embedded, can accurately recognise their workings and roles.
Il est vrai qu’avec beaucoup de patience on finissait par s’entendre, mais s’entendre à quel sujet je vous le demande, et pour quel résultat. (Beckett 1982, 66)
Le “renouvellement” (Sherzer, 42) ou la “réanimation” (Fitch, 158) des clichés est un type de ‘jeu de mots’ que les critiques de Molloy considèrent emblématique parmi les modalités de manipulation du langage par les narrateurs, voire par l’auteur lui-même. Jean-Jacques Mayoux va même jusqu’à affirmer que pour Beckett, à l’encontre de Joyce, la formule toute faite, le cliché, et non pas le mot isolé, représentent l’unité linguistique de prédilection sur laquelle s’exerce la fonction poétique: Chaque écrivain a son unité de langage et se reconnaît à l’usage qu’il en fait. Chez Joyce, c’est le mot, avec les prodigieuses triturations qu’il lui fait subir dans Finnegans Wake. Chez Beckett, c’est le groupe de mots, la formule. (270)
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Parmi les “formules” diversement “triturées” de Molloy, la transformation de l’idiotisme “des vertes et des pas mûres” en “les verts et les pas mûrs” a été remarquée par au moins deux chercheurs. JeanneSarah de Larquier pose qu’un des multiples procédés à travers lesquels le narrateur de Molloy-1 signale sa présence, en qualité de scripteur, dans le texte est aussi le changement de genre de la locution en discussion: [T]he narrator might also modify an idiomatic expression and bring the reader’s attention to its literal meaning by simply changing it to its masculine form: “les verts et les pas mûrs” instead of “des vertes et des pas mûres.” (51) Brian T. Fitch identifie lui aussi ce cliché modifié dans Molloy et le commente ainsi: Parfois, ce qui se joue c’est le décalage entre le sens populaire d’une expression, relevant du langage parlé, et son sens littéral: “Je n’ai jamais eu de tendresse à revendre exactement, mais j’en avais eu quand même ma petite quote-part, quand j’étais petit, et c’est aux VIEILLARDS qu’elle allait, de préférence. […] Maintenant ILS ME FONT CHIER, les POURRISSANTS, au même titre que les VERTS et les PAS MÛRS.” (131) Dans les deux cas, les critiques s’accordent à dire que le ‘jeu de mots’ qui porte sur l’expression idiomatique “(en dire, en entendre, en voir) des vertes et des pas mûres” contribue à la littéralisation de celle-ci. L’élargissement de l’environnement intra-textuel restreint dans lequel cet exemple est cité, détermine Fitch à inscrire le processus de littéralisation qui s’y rattache dans une série de processus similaires qui semble inclure aussi les “vieillards,” “ils me font chier” et les “pourrissants” (puisque ces mots sont signalés eux-mêmes, par des majuscules, dans la citation). En élargissant encore plus le contexte immédiat2 d’apparition de cette locution par défaut et en regardant de plus près la dynamique signifiante qui l’inscrit dans son environnement restreint et étendu, on constate que le terme “littéralisation” ne réussit pas vraiment à rendre compte des mécanismes de génération, différenciation et multiplication 378
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de sens qui accompagnent la transformation par changement de genre de ce cliché, ni du rôle que celui-ci joue dans la configuration du texte. Dans cette forêt je fis naturellement un certain nombre de rencontres, où n’en fait-on pas, mais sans gravité. Je rencontrai notamment un charbonnier. J’aurais pu l’aimer, je crois, si j’avais eu soixante-dix ans de moins. Mais ce n’est pas sûr. Car alors lui aussi aurait été moins vieux d’autant, oh pas tout à fait d’autant, mais de beaucoup. Je n’ai jamais eu de tendresse à revendre exactement, mais j’en avais eu quand même ma petite quote-part, quand j’étais petit, et c’est aux vieillards qu’elle allait, de préférence. Et je crois même que j’eus le temps d’en aimer un ou deux, oh pas d’un véritable amour bien sûr, aucun rapport avec la vieille, j’ai encore oublié son nom, Rose, non, enfin vous voyez qui je veux dire, mais quand même, comment dire, tendrement, comme les promis à une meilleure terre. Ah j’étais précoce, étant petit, et grand je le suis resté. Maintenant ils me font chier, les pourrissants, au même titre que les verts et les pas mûrs. Il se précipita sur moi et me supplia de partager sa hutte, croyez-moi si vous voulez. (Beckett 1982, 112-13; nous soulignons) Ce contexte restreint fait voir que l’affirmation selon laquelle le changement de genre féminin --> masculin (des deux adjectifs à valeur nominale qui composent le cliché “des vertes et des pas mûres,” pour engendrer “les verts et les pas mûrs”) rend ce cliché littéral n’est pas tout à fait appropriée. On parle probablement de “sens littéral” pour marquer la distinction sémantique entre “(en dire, en entendre, en voir) des vertes et des pas mûres” qui signifie ‘(dire, entendre, voir) des choses très choquantes, incongrues, excessives’ (Chantreau et Rey, 1158) et “les verts et les pas mûrs” qui s’applique, dans cet extrait de Molloy, non à des choses inanimées et abstraites, mais à des animés humains. Le changement de genre est alors accompagné dans “les verts et les pas mûrs” d’un changement sémique: /INANIMÉ/ /ABSTRAIT/ --> /ANIMÉ/ /HUMAIN/. La question qui surgit à ce moment-ci est de savoir dans quelle mesure l’appellation des /ANIMÉS/ /HUMAINS/ “les verts et les pas mûrs” est littérale. De toute évidence, cette mesure n’est pas absolue, dans ce sens qu’il s’agit ici d’un emploi métaphorique obscurci qui n’est plus reconnu comme tel en raison de 379
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son long et fréquent usage. Le processus métaphorique par lequel “les verts et les pas mûrs” arrive à désigner, dans ce fragment, des /ANIMÉS/ /HUMAINS/ repose sur le transfert des termes “vert” et “pas mûr” du domaine source végétal au domaine cible humain. Ce transfert fonctionne simultanément comme une opération de différenciation de sens, puisque la nouvelle expression se laisse actualiser, dans l’environnement intra-textuel restreint où elle est inscrite, de manière polysémique: en tant que ‘les jeunes gens immatures’ (ou ‘les enfants’), ‘les gens matures’ et ‘les vieillards robustes’ (‘en bonne santé’ ou ‘bien portants’). Regardons de plus près comment ces trois acceptions de la locution par défaut “les verts et les pas mûrs” sont contextuellement différenciées. Dans le domaine source (le règne végétal) “les verts et les pas mûrs” est une façon de dire redondante et renforçante quand “vert” est synonyme de “pas mûr” et que les deux adjectifs décrivent une plante ou, surtout, un fruit qui n’a pas encore atteint la maturation et dont la couleur est en effet verte. Le rapport synonymique entre “vert” et “pas mûr” est de nature métonymique, dans la mesure où de la couleur du fruit ou de la plante on conjecture, par contiguïté, son immaturité. Le transfert métaphorique de “vert” et de son synonyme “pas mûr” du domaine source végétal au domaine cible humain est assuré par les sèmes communs /ANIMÉ/ et /IMMATURE/. Dans le domaine cible, “les verts et les pas mûrs” parvient ainsi à signifier ‘les jeunes gens immatures’/‘les enfants,’ signification actualisable, dans le passage cité de Molloy, grâce à la présence, ellemême redondante, de “quand j’étais petit” et “étant petit.” Cette actualisation contribue au renversement du sens global de l’extrait, qui affirme la “tendresse” que le narrateur éprouve envers les “vieillards” quand il “[est] petit”: vieux lui-même, le narrateur n’aime plus “tendrement” non seulement les “vieillards” (“les pourrissants”), qui le “font chier,” mais il est ennuyé en égale mesure par “les verts et les pas mûrs,” c’est-à-dire, dans cette actualisation particulière de l’expression, par ‘les jeunes gens immatures’/‘les enfants.’ Si la signification de départ ‘Le narrateur enfant aime tendrement les vieillards’ n’est que partiellement niée par le fait que ‘Le narrateur vieux hait les vieillards’ (puisque seuls le sujet et le verbe sont ici antonymiques par rapport au sujet et au verbe de départ, le complément direct restant identique), cette signification est complètement renversée par ‘Le narrateur vieux hait les enfants’ (où tous les trois éléments de la situation de départ sont remplacés par leurs opposés). 380
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Tout comme la présence contextuelle de “quand j’étais petit” et “étant petit” permet la réalisation du sens métaphorique global et redondant de l’expression “les verts et les pas mûrs,” la coprésence, dans le même environnement intra-textuel restreint, de “précoce” et de “les pourrissants” mène – par le transfert, dans le domaine cible humain, d’autres acceptions des termes appartenant au domaine source végétal de cette expression – à la scission de son unité synonymique. “Précoce,” à l’instar de “vert” et de “pas mûr,” est une métaphore végétale obscurcie qui repose sur un type de transfert analogue entre domaine source et domaine cible: désignant d’abord une plante ou un fruit qui est mûr avant le temps, le mot finit par s’appliquer aux personnes de jeune âge dont le développement (physique ou intellectuel) est prématuré ou très rapide. La présence contextuelle de “précoce” altère la synonymie presque parfaite de “vert” et de “pas mûr,” de sorte que “vert” est actualisable, dans le domaine source humain, non plus seulement en tant qu’‘immature,’ voire ‘enfant,’ mais aussi en tant que son antonyme, à savoir ‘mature’ ou, pour le dire avec une locution, ‘dans la fleur de l’âge.’ “Les pourrissants,” à leur tour une métaphore végétale ‘morte’ quand le mot est appliqué aux humains, contribuent à l’inscription, dans cet extrait, d’encore une valeur signifiante de “vert” (valeur qui n’est ni synonyme, ni antonyme, de celle de “pas mûr,” mais qui est déduite, par métonymie, de celle de “vert”-‘mature,’ à savoir ‘robuste,’ ‘en bonne santé,’ ‘bien portant’). Sous l’influence de l’opposition avec “les pourrissants,” “les verts” arrivent ainsi à désigner, à côté des ‘jeunes gens immatures’ et des ‘gens matures dans la fleur de l’âge,’ les ‘vieillards encore robustes (en bonne santé ou bien portants).’ La réalisation de cette dernière acception du cliché par défaut est soutenue aussi par l’“étonnante vieillesse, encore verte par endroits” dont le narrateur parle, à son propre égard, une page plus tôt (Beckett 1982, 111). Tandis que l’actualisation synonymique, voire redondante, de “les verts et les pas mûrs” mène au renversement total du sens global de ce passage (la situation de départ ‘Le narrateur enfant aime tendrement les vieillards’ devenant ‘Le narrateur vieux hait les enfants’), l’actualisation antonymique ou simplement différenciatrice de sens de “les verts” et “les pas mûrs” relativise les situations de départ et d’arrivée par la modalisation de leurs sujets et objets directs respectifs. Parler, dans ces conditions, du “sens littéral” de la locution modifiée est doublement problématique: d’abord, l’expression “les verts et les pas 381
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mûrs” n’a pas un seul sens dans ce fragment, mais plusieurs, en fonction des rapports signifiants qui s’établissent, grâce au contexte restreint, entre les éléments qui la composent; ensuite, ces sens ne sont pas littéraux, mais représentent des métaphores obscurcies qui reposent sur le transfert conceptuel et lexical entre un domaine source végétal et un domaine cible humain. Les multiples acceptions contextuelles de “les verts et les pas mûrs” sont générées par la mise en place d’un réseau métaphorique d’origine végétale dont les nœuds sont constitués par “les verts,” “les pas mûrs,” “précoce” et “les pourrissants” et dont les rayons sont représentés par les relations sémantiques (synonymiques, antonymiques, métonymiques), morphologiques (il s’agit dans chaque cas soit d’adjectifs, soit d’adjectifs nominalisés) et syntaxiques (la locution conjonctive de coordination “au même titre que” qui lie “les verts et les pas mûrs” aux “pourrissants”) qui s’établissent entre eux. L’axe sémantique au long duquel s’organise ce réseau – au même titre que cet extrait dans son ensemble – est celui de l’âge. Le développement de cet axe grâce à un champ lexico-sémantique végétal est conforme au cadre général de signification établi, dès le début du passage, par la “forêt.” Un autre nœud du réseau métaphorique végétal identifié est le nom propre “Rose.” Le nom “rose” désigne littéralement une fleur ou l’arbuste qui la porte et son usage en tant que nom propre est d’emblée métaphorique. Dans cet extrait, “Rose” se réfère à celle vers laquelle se dirige le “véritable amour” du narrateur, figure qu’il appelle ailleurs dans le texte tantôt Ruth, tantôt Edith (Beckett 1982, 75-78). En dépit de sa mention métadiscursivement frappée de rejet (“la vieille, j’ai encore oublié son nom, Rose, non, enfin vous voyez qui je veux dire”), “Rose” est un noyau essentiel à la structuration de ces quelques lignes. Parmi les éléments du réseau métaphorique végétal, “Rose” entretient un rapport privilégié avec “les verts et les pas mûrs,” puisque l’association de “Rose” avec “les verts” relève d’un nouveau réseau sémantique, celui des couleurs. Ce réseau ne se limite pas à “Rose” et aux “verts,” mais englobe aussi les couleurs dont le narrateur parle, une dizaine de lignes avant de mentionner sa rencontre avec le charbonnier, lorsqu’il décrit son avancement à travers la forêt: Dire que je trébuchais dans d’impénétrables ténèbres, non, je ne peux pas. Je trébuchais, mais les ténèbres n’étaient pas impénétrables. Car il régnait une sorte d’ombre bleue, plus que 382
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suffisante à mes besoins visuels. Je m’étonnais que cette ombre ne fut verte, plutôt que bleue, mais je la voyais bleue et elle l’était peut-être. Le rouge du soleil, se mêlant au vert des feuilles, donnait un résultat bleu, c’est ainsi que je raisonnais.3 (Beckett 1982, 112; nous soulignons) Ce réseau chromatique – qui joue, tout comme le réseau métaphorique végétal, un rôle textuellement configurateur dans cet extrait – est important parce qu’il contribue à l’actualisation du cliché “(en dire, en entendre, en voir) des vertes et des pas mûres” avec son sens global ‘(dire, entendre, voir) des choses très choquantes, incongrues, excessives,’ par le biais d’une locution synonyme: “(en dire, en entendre, en voir) de toutes les couleurs” (Chantreau et Rey, 1158).4 Alors, la transformation morpho-sémantique qui engendre le cliché modifié, étant doublée, dans ce passage, par d’autres modalités po(ï)étiques, ne mène pas à l’annulation du sens global de la locution de départ, mais contribue pratiquement à sa décomposition et recomposition. Ce qui finit par être mis en évidence ainsi, ce sont des mécanismes de génération, différenciation et multiplication de significations qui représentent pratiquement autant de mécanismes de configuration textuelle. Rapportée à l’axe de l’âge, “Rose” est une figure hybride (tout comme les enfants précoces ou les vieillards verts), car le nom – qui évoque une de ces jeunes filles métaphoriquement “roses” ou, comme dirait Proust, “en fleur” – est attribué ici à “la vieille” décrépite Ruth/Edith. La rétraction immédiate du nom “Rose,” accolé (possiblement aussi par l’allitération entre “Rose” et “Ruth”) à “la vieille,” peut être expliquée d’au moins deux façons: d’une part, par le défaut partiel de mémoire du narrateur (il ne se rappelle pas le nom de “la vieille,” mais il se rappelle pour sûr que ce nom n’est pas “Rose”), d’autre part, par l’incompatibilité sémantique entre le signifié “la vieille” et l’usage métaphorique personnifié du mot “rose.” “Rose” joue un rôle essentiel dans l’actualisation du cliché transformé (“les verts et les pas mûrs”) avec le sens du cliché original (“des vertes et des pas mûres”) d’une autre manière encore. “Rose” contribue à la relativisation/modalisation du sens global de cet extrait (relativisation qui ne porte pas, comme dans le cas des autres nœuds du réseau métaphorique végétal, sur le sujet et l’objet d’une phrase telle que ‘Le narrateur enfant aime tendrement les vieillards,’ mais sur son verbe même), dans la mesure où le “véritable amour” – que le narrateur 383
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rattache à “Rose” et qui devrait servir à la définition, par antinomie, de sa “tendresse” envers les “vieillards” lorsqu’il était “petit” – se révèle en effet ne pas être antinomique.5 Je n’ai jamais eu de tendresse à revendre exactement, mais j’en avais eu quand même ma petite quote-part, quand j’étais petit, et c’est aux vieillards qu’elle allait, de préférence. Et je crois même que j’eus le temps d’en aimer un ou deux, oh pas d’un véritable amour bien sûr, aucun rapport avec la vieille, j’ai encore oublié son nom, Rose, non, enfin vous voyez qui je veux dire, mais quand même, comment dire, tendrement, comme les promis à une meilleure terre. (Beckett 1982, 112-13; nous soulignons) La “tendresse” “tendrement” orientée ici vers les “vieillards” et opposée au “véritable amour” assure le contact direct de ce fragment avec le passage qui raconte l’histoire de Ruth/Edith, passage où la “tendresse” n’est plus opposée au “véritable amour,” mais est utilisée précisément comme l’élément spécifique qui aide à définir celui-ci audelà de tout “doute”: Nos rapports n’étaient pas sans tendresse, elle me coupait d’une main tremblotante les ongles des pieds et moi je lui frottais la croupe avec du baume Bengué. Notre idylle fut de courte durée. Pauvre Edith, je hâtai sa fin peut-être. Enfin ce fut elle qui prit les devants, dans le terrain vague, en passant sa main sur ma braguette. Plus précisément, moi j’étais courbé sur un tas d’ordures, espérant y trouver de quoi me dégoûter d’avoir faim, et elle, m’abordant par derrière, passa sa canne entre mes jambes et entreprit d’en flatter mes parties. Elle me donnait de l’argent après chaque partie, à moi qui aurais accepté de connaître l’amour, et de l’approfondir, à titre bénévole. Ce n’était pas une femme pratique. J’aurais préféré il me semble un orifice moins sec et moins large, cela m’aurait donné une plus haute idée de l’amour je crois. Enfin. Entre pouce et index on est autrement mieux. Mais l’amour n’a sans doute cure de pareilles contingences. Et ce n’est point peutêtre lorsqu’on est bien, mais lorsque son membre affolé cherche une paroi où se frotter, et l’onction d’un peu de muqueuse, et n’en rencontrant point ne bat pas en retraite, et conserve sa tuméfaction, c’est alors que naît le véritable amour et qu’il s’envole, haut au384
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dessus des questions de basse pointure. Et lorsqu’on y ajoute un peu de pédicure et de massage, n’ayant rien directement à voir avec l’extase proprement dite, alors j’ai l’impression que plus aucun doute n’est permis, à ce sujet. (Beckett 1982, 76-77; nous soulignons) La juxtaposition de deux extraits cités – juxtaposition qui repose non pas sur la simple identité d’un thème (‘le véritable amour et la tendresse’) qu’on y développe différemment, voire antinomiquement (‘la tendresse fait l’amour véritable’ versus ‘la tendresse n’a rien à faire avec l’amour véritable’), mais aussi sur l’identité formelle des unités lexicales “tendresse” et “véritable amour” que les deux fragments différencient sémantiquement – met sans doute en évidence le fait que le narrateur se contredit: il a quand même eu “de la tendresse à revendre” (littéralement, puisqu’il reçoit de l’argent d’Edith/Ruth “après chaque partie”) même à “la vieille,” et non seulement “aux vieillards,” et même quand il n’était pas “petit.” Néanmoins, cette contradiction n’est pas tout d’abord importante parce qu’elle se constitue dans une de nombreuses occasions qui prouvent le manque de fiabilité du narrateur; elle importe surtout parce qu’elle montre que “Rose” est une figure hybride non seulement du point de vue de l’axe de l’âge, mais aussi du point de vue de l’axe du genre. (Le narrateur n’a eu “de tendresse à revendre” qu’aux “vieillards.” Il en a éprouvé cependant envers “Rose.” D’où il résulte que le statut de “vieille” de “Rose” est contaminé par celui de “vieillard.”) Cette hybridité du genre de “Rose” est consistante avec la possible transformation de genre féminin --> masculin de la figure de Ruth/Edith, possibilité explicitement formulée et assez longuement développée par le narrateur lui-même (Beckett, 76-78). Ce qu’il convient de remarquer du point de vue de la présente étude, c’est que la transformation/l’hybridation du genre sexuel de “Rose” est inscrite dans le texte par des moyens qui aident à la mettre en rapport direct avec le changement de genre grammatical qui préside à la transformation du cliché “des vertes et des pas mûres” en “les verts et les pas mûrs.” La modification de ce cliché particulier, de cette manière particulière, à cet endroit particulier du texte, n’est pas un simple ‘jeu de mots.’ Ou bien, c’est un ‘jeu de mots,’ mais un jeu dont la portée n’est pas le seul cliché de départ, mais la configuration d’au moins deux passages textuels parallèles. Les modalités po(ï)étiques qui opèrent au niveau de la locution modifiée sont implicitement 385
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métadiscursives sur deux plans. D’une part, elles illustrent et, partant, problématisent la question de la constitution linguistico-textuelle du sens: Qu’est ce que “les verts et les pas mûrs” signifie dans ce passage et comment ces significations y sont-elles mises en place? D’autre part, elles mettent en évidence et problématisent des principes configurateurs du texte: Pourquoi parle-t-on de “verts et [de] pas mûrs” dans cet extrait? Pourquoi y appelle-t-on Ruth/Edith “Rose?” A l’intérieur de la configuration po(ï)étique qu’est Molloy, la transformation de “des vertes et des pas mûres” en “les verts et les pas mûrs” est motivée non pas sémantiquement, mais sémiotiquement: les deux côtés du signe – son aspect formel et son aspect conceptuel – sont exploités simultanément de telle manière à l’intégrer multiplement dans le tissu textuel. Et dans ce complexe travail de texturation, le sens du cliché de départ, ‘(dire, entendre, voir) des choses très choquantes, incongrues, excessives,’ n’est pas éludé en faveur d’un sens littéral, mais actualisé aussi bien à travers la mise en texte d’un réseau sémantique des couleurs, que par la conjonction des épisodes de “tendresse” et de “véritable amour” – avec leur ambiguïté quant au genre, à l’âge et à l’identité des protagonistes et avec leur côté pécuniaire – avec l’épisode de la rencontre “sans gravité” du narrateur avec le charbonnier – qui déclenche les souvenirs amoureux de celui-ci et qui finit par l’assassinat de celui-là –, des épisodes qui représentent sans aucun doute, du point de vue de l’histoire, les moments les plus ‘choquants, incongrus et excessifs’ de la première partie de Molloy. L’ampleur du travail textuel dont l’expression “les verts et les pas mûrs” fait l’objet ne peut donc pas être circonscrite en la rapportant seulement à la locution figée “des vertes et des pas mûres.” Le cadre de référence de la circonscription de ce travail doit comprendre à la fois deux ‘systèmes:’ celui du français contemporain – où “des vertes et des pas mûres” est lexicalisé – et celui de Molloy – où “les verts et les pas mûrs” entretient des rapports sémiotiques de nature variée avec i) les éléments de la phrase dont cette expression fait partie, ii) l’environnement intra-textuel restreint de celle-ci et iii) son environnement intra-textuel étendu. En plus, le travail po(ï)étique entrepris sur “les verts et les pas mûrs” n’étant que difficilement et artificiellement isolable des procédés po(ï)étiques dont d’autres unités lexicales, qui apparaissent dans le contexte immédiat de ce cliché par défaut, font l’objet (telles que “Rose,” “vieux – vieillard – vieille,” “tendresse – tendrement,” etc.), ceux-ci doivent être eux-mêmes analysés dans leur particularité. Ainsi, un regard plus détaillé encore sur 386
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la “tendresse” et l’aimer “tendrement” qui représentent, somme toute, le noyau sémantique et thématique autour duquel s’organise tout cet extrait, fait voir que non seulement le français contemporain, mais aussi l’ensemble des systèmes synchroniques successifs qui constituent, d’une perspective diachronique, l’histoire du français, forment un des cadres d’inscription des ‘jeux de mots’ de Molloy. La “tendresse” dont le narrateur enfant aime “tendrement” les “vieillards” contribue, comme il a été montré, à travers sa configuration po(ï)étique avec “véritable amour” et “Rose/Ruth/Edith,” à l’inscription contextuelle de “les verts et les pas murs” comme “des vertes et des pas mûres.” Cette “tendresse” semble signifier d’emblée, dans ce passage, ‘affection,’ ‘attachement’ et elle s’y applique, en tant que dérivé de “tendre”-‘affectueux,’ au domaine des sentiments humains. Ce domaine est d’ailleurs le seul où le lexème “tendresse” peut être actualisé en français contemporain. Toujours est-il que la structuration de tout ce passage autour de l’axe de l’âge et surtout la manière dont “tendresse” y est introduit6 permet, voire requiert, la réalisation de “tendresse” non seulement dans son sens contemporain d’‘affection,’ ‘attachement,’ mais aussi avec son sens ancien d’‘enfance’ (Rey, 2099). La “tendresse”-‘enfance,’ dérivée de “tendre”-‘jeune,’ génère par métonymie la “tendresse” du narrateur enfant envers les “vieillards:” si le narrateur a de la “tendresse”-‘affection’ “à revendre” seulement quand il est “petit,” voire “enfant,” c’est aussi parce que ce sentiment est lexicalement dépendant de la diachronique “tendresse”-‘enfance.’ Celle-ci se laisse ranger, selon l’axe de l’âge, à côté de “précoce” (‘jeune/enfant mais mature’) et de “les verts et les pas mûrs” (‘jeune/enfant et immature’), dans leur acception métaphorique obscurcie. Dans leur acception littérale, les éléments du réseau végétal qui organise ce fragment et surtout le nœud “les verts et les pas mûrs” contribuent à l’inscription d’un autre sens ancien de “tendresse:” ‘ce qui se laisse facilement entamer, mollesse, fraîcheur’ et qui est dérivé non pas de “tendre”-‘jeune,’ ni de “tendre”-‘affectueux,’ mais de “tendre”-‘frais, mou, qui se laisse facilement entamer.’ Il convient d’observer que toutes ces acceptions synchroniques et diachroniques de “tendre – tendresse” qui sont simultanément configurées dans cet extrait sont aussi réalisées, individuellement ou en combinaison, ailleurs dans le texte (Beckett 1982, 9; 109; 149; 161), souvent en rapport avec un ou plusieurs des termes, réseaux ou axes signifiants qui 387
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opèrent dans ce passage et dont l’expression “les verts et les pas mûrs” fait toujours partie dans une de ses possibles actualisations. Signalons aussi l’occurrence, dans ce fragment, de “tendre” et “(avec) tendresse” dans l’adverbe modal “tendrement:” “[…] j’eus le temps d’en aimer un ou deux [vieillards], oh pas d’un véritable amour bien sûr, […] mais quand même, comment dire, tendrement, comme les promis à une meilleure terre” (112). Il s’agit, dans le cas de la précision qui suit “tendrement,” comme dans le cas de “les verts et les pas mûrs,” d’une modalité po(ï)étique morpho-sémantique qui porte sur des idiotismes, mais qui consiste cette fois-ci non pas dans le changement de genre grammatical, mais dans la contraction de deux clichés sur la base d’un élément commun: sont contractés, grâce au participe passé du verbe “promettre,” les locutions “être promis à un meilleur avenir/sort/destin” et “terre promise.” Cette deuxième locution par défaut qu’on retrouve dans ce court passage et qui devrait servir à la clarification de ce que veut dire “aimer tendrement” a elle-même besoin d’explication puisque le procédé de contraction qui se trouve à sa base la voue d’emblée à l’ambiguïté et, partant, à plusieurs réalisations simultanément possibles. Ainsi, ce qui apparaît d’abord comme un moyen de précision du sens de “tendrement,” n’est en réalité qu’un mécanisme de différenciation et multiplication de ses significations contextuelles. Déjà la syntaxe de la phrase ci-dessous permet d’actualiser “comme les promis à une meilleure terre” de deux manières: Et je crois même que j’eus le temps d’en aimer un ou deux, oh pas d’un véritable amour bien sûr, aucun rapport avec la vieille, j’ai encore oublié son nom, Rose, non, enfin vous voyez qui je veux dire, mais quand même, comment dire, tendrement, comme les promis à une meilleure terre. (Beckett 1982, 112-113; nous soulignons) “Aimer tendrement” peut dire ici à la fois ‘aimer comme on aime les promis à une meilleure terre’ et ‘aimer comme aiment les promis à une meilleure terre.’ L’indécidabilité syntaxique entre la fonction de sujet et celle d’objet direct de “les promis à une meilleure terre” est consistante avec le renversement et la relativisation/modalisation des autres sujets et compléments d’objet direct reliés, dans ce fragment, par l’action d’aimer soit “tendrement,” soit d’un “véritable amour.” 388
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Quant à savoir ce que sont ces “promis à une meilleure terre” qu’on aime ou qui aiment “tendrement,” plusieurs possibilités sont envisageables, en fonction des acceptions contextualisables des unités lexicales en collocation obligatoire de départ – “terre promise” et “(être) promis à un meilleur avenir/sort/destin” – qui ont été fusionnées. Cette fusion repose non seulement sur la communauté formelle du verbe “promettre” – qui s’applique dans le premier cas à une chose /INANIMÉ/, la “terre,” et dans le deuxième cas à des /ANIMÉS/ /HUMAINS/ –, mais aussi sur un sémantisme commun qui implique un engagement passé dont l’accomplissement est placé dans l’avenir. La généralité de ces deux sèmes, /ENGAGEMENT PASSÉ/ et /ACCOMPLISSEMENT FUTUR/, de même que la possibilité d’activer par rapport à l’/INANIMÉ/ “terre” à la fois les sèmes /CONCRET/ et /ABSTRAIT/ permettent la réalisation des “promis à une meilleure terre” de façon multiple dans le passage en question. Ainsi, “les promis à une meilleure terre” ne sont pas seulement les “vieillards” ou les “pourrissants” – auquel cas “meilleure terre” peut fonctionner comme i) un euphémisme métaphorique de la mort, ii) une métaphore du discours religieux, voire mythologique, qui s’applique au concept abstrait d’un espace générique équivalant à celui de ‘paradis’ ou de ‘champs élyséens’ et iii) une référence inter-textuelle biblique à l’histoire de Moïse –, mais aussi les “petits,” les “précoces” ou “les verts et les pas mûrs” – auquel cas “meilleure terre” peut être réalisée soit comme le substitut métaphorique d’‘avenir/destin/sort,’ soit littéralement et concrètement comme ‘terre fertile’ (Rey, 1647). Cette dernière acception est soutenue par la présence contextuelle du réseau métaphorique végétal obscurci, en termes duquel sont traités les /ANIMÉS/ /HUMAINS/ de cet extrait, réseau qui mène à ce que “meilleure terre” puisse être lu comme ce qui ‘fertilise’ les “Rose”-s, les “précoce”-s et “les verts et les pas mûrs” et est ‘fertilisé’ par les “pourrissants.” Il convient de remarquer qu’il y a dans le texte bon nombre de données qui permettent l’intégration de chacune de ces possibilités d’actualisation dans des réseaux co-signifiants plus larges. Le déroulement même de l’épisode avec le charbonnier – qui est inauguré par cet extrait – en représente une, puisqu’à la fin de cette séquence le charbonnier finit par être assassiné, en accomplissant ainsi son destin (programme/rôle) textuel, inscrit dès le début de la scène, dans plusieurs des significations contextuelles de “les promis à une meilleure terre.” 389
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A la fin de cette discussion qui traite de la transformation de “des vertes et des pas mûres” en “les verts et les pas mûrs” on peut dire que la modalité po(ï)étique de changement de genre qui opère au niveau de ce cliché n’est en effet que l’élément le plus saillant d’un ensemble de procédés po(ï)étiques qui configurent le texte par différenciation et accumulation de sens. Réseaux sémantiques et axes de construction; sens propres et métaphoriques, synonymiques et antonymiques, synchroniques et diachroniques; répétitions formellement identiques ou par famille de mots; constructions syntaxiques et contractions morphosémantiques voilà autant d’opérations qui sous-tendent la configuration de ce court passage et que seule la recontextualisation indispensable de “les verts et les pas mûrs” arrive à mettre en évidence. Si l’isolement de “les verts et les pas mûrs” détermine les critiques à affirmer que le texte réinstaure le sens littéral de l’idiotisme original (“des vertes et des pas mûres”), la recontextualisation de cette expression fait voir, d’une part, que cette littéralité est problématique – dans ce double sens i) qu’elle repose sur des composantes lexicales (“les verts,” “les pas mûrs”) utilisées métaphoriquement et ii) qu’elle n’est pas une littéralité, mais plusieurs métaphoricités – et, d’autre part, que le texte ne renonce pas au sens métaphorique global du cliché de départ (‘dire, entendre, voir des choses très choquantes, incongrues, excessives’), mais qu’il exploite po(ï)étiquement d’autres modalités qui permettent son actualisation. En plus, le travail po(ï)étique mené sur ce cliché considère celui-ci non seulement comme un tout, mais aussi au niveau individuel de ses termes constitutifs, ce qui le rend extrêmement complexe et, partant, impropre à une approche qui ne s’arrête qu’à un seul de ses aspects. Ce complexe travail est doublé par un riche (méta)discours détracteur du narrateur, mais ce sont précisément les éléments soulignés négativement (comme “Rose”) ou modalisés (comme “vieux – vieillard – vieille” ou “tendresse – tendrement”) qui jouent un rôle primordial dans l’organisation textuelle. Les commentaires métadiscursifs du narrateur sont donc à prendre avec caution extrême quant à leur applicabilité à la configuration po(ï)étique qu’est Molloy, le narrateur ne représentant qu’un des dispositifs textuels qui contribuent à la mise en place de celle-ci. La fonction des propos dénigreurs du narrateur dans le processus po(ï)étiquement configurateur du texte, telle qu’elle ressort de notre discussion, semble être non pas tant de contredire et réfuter tout ce qui est dit, mais plutôt de signaler des ‘nœuds’ textuels particulièrement importants qui laissent voir la manière dont Molloy est 390
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construit. Ce qui apparaît de prime abord comme une “rhétorique du discrédit” (Pingaud, 5), comme une poétique de la rétraction et de la négation, comme une manifestation de l’impuissance expressive, se révèle être en effet, quand scruté de très près, une po(ï)étique de la multiplication différenciatrice des significations. En exploitant des mécanismes morpho-sémantiques et syntaxiques de génération, différenciation et multiplication de sens, les principes configurateurs de Molloy indiquent le fait que ce texte n’opère pas au niveau des acceptions toutes faites des mots et des expressions (figées ou non), mais à celui de leur construction, variation et accumulation contextuelle. Pour cette raison, l’étude des modalités po(ï)étiques qui configurent ce texte est, à notre avis, indispensable à l’examen d’autres dimensions textuelles (thématique, narrative, méta-, inter-textuelle ou autre), dans la mesure où celles-ci reposent, en tant que paliers signifiants d’ordre supérieur, sur les éléments de base représentés par les lexèmes (simples, en collocation libre ou en collocation obligatoire). Et il est fort tentant de spéculer que si Molloy se laisse agencer thématiquement, narrativement, méta- et inter-textuellement de manière si diverse, c’est parce que ses éléments de base sont po(ï)étiquement configurés. Notes 1. Il convient de préciser d’emblée que le Molloy qui fait l’objet de la présente discussion est le Molloy français. La prémisse fondamentale de notre propos est que le texte est tel qu’il est parce qu’il est écrit en français et que, conséquemment, dans une autre langue on ne lit pas tout à fait le même texte. Le français de Molloy est largement responsable de la génération et l’organisation du tissu textuel, si bien que l’identification de la particularité de ce français mène automatiquement à la reconnaissance des modalités po(ï)étiques de configuration du texte. 2. Le mot “contexte” veut dire, dans ces pages, ‘environnement intratextuel (restreint et/ou étendu).’ 3. Ce passage est susceptible de ne pas passer inaperçu, puisque les règles de combinaison chromatique qu’il décrit font ressortir la différence entre le monde réel, où le bleu est une couleur primaire et le vert une couleur secondaire, et le monde fictif de Molloy dans la forêt, où le vert est une couleur primaire et le bleu une couleur secondaire.
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Carla Taban 4. Dans Mercier et Camier, écrit avant Molloy, monsieur Madden utilise cette expression: “On m’aimait presque. Je leur racontais de toutes les couleurs, sur l’hymen, la vaseline, l’aube de la poisse, la fin des soucis” (60; nous soulignons). 5. La modalisation, par de divers moyens po(ï)étiques, des sujets, des objets et de l’action d’“aimer” dans cet extrait est consistante avec la forte concentration de moyens modalisateurs discursifs et méta-discursifs du passage. 6. Cette ‘manière’ a en vue l’expression “quand j’étais petit” en tant qu’unique exception à la restriction “Je n’ai jamais eu de tendresse à revendre exactement,” aussi bien que les modalités po(ï)étiques différenciatrices de sens dont “petit” fait l’objet dans cette phrase et dans ce passage.
Ouvrages cités Beckett, Samuel, Mercier et Camier (Paris: Minuit, 1970). –, Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1982). Chantreau, Sophie, et Alain Rey, Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions. Le Trésor des manières de dire anciennes et nouvelles (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1989). De Larquier, Jeanne-Sarah, “Beckett’s Molloy: Inscribing Molloy in a Metalanguage Story,” in French Forum, 29.3 (2004), 43-55. Fitch, Brian T., Dimensions, structures et textualité dans la trilogie romanesque de Beckett (Paris: Minard, 1977). Jakobson, Roman, Essais de linguistique générale, trad. Nicolas Ruwet (Paris: Minuit, 1963). Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, “Molloy: un événement littéraire, une œuvre,” in Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1982), 241-74. Pingaud, Bernard, “Dire c’est inventer, ” in Quinzaine Littéraire, 67 (1969), 56. Rey, Alain, dir., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1992). Sherzer, Dina, Structure de la trilogie de Beckett: Molloy, Malone meurt, L’Innommable (La Haye et Paris: Mouton, 1976).
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POSTURE DE LA PRIÈRE, ÉCRITURE DE LA PRÉCARITÉ (Mal vu mal dit, Cap au pire et ...que nuages...)
Guillaume Gesvret
Samuel Beckett’s works describe many postures. One of them is particularly interesting and helps us to analyse some major problems: the praying posture. In Beckett’s prose, theatre or TV plays, especially in the last works, we find obsessive, strange or comic invocations which mix spectral figures and body or memory fragments. In Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho and ...but the clouds..., images of prayer are like furtive apparitions. They may also be signs of a paradoxical and ambiguous view on writing.
“L’art (pictural) qui est prière déclenche la prière, libère la prière chez celui qui regarde,” écrivait Samuel Beckett en 1936 dans les notes de son carnet de voyage en Allemagne.1 La figure de la prière apparaît ainsi jusque dans les toutes dernières oeuvres: dans la pièce télévisée …que nuages…(1976) ou les textes Mal vu mal dit (1981) et Cap au pire (1983), on trouve respectivement le “souvenant” courbé sur sa table, la “prière” de la vieille femme, et “l’agenouillé.” De manière générale, la prière, transitive (demande de grâce ou de salut) ou intransitive (prière pour les morts), présuppose ou s’adresse à une puissance autre, séparée, absente. L’attention ou la réponse espérée se caractérise donc par la précarité, par l’incertitude et la fragilité de cette relation. Le sujet fait alors l’épreuve d’un manque, d’une absence, dans son adresse à Dieu comme dans l’intimité de sa solitude. On pense à l’étymologie commune des mots précarité et prière, du latin precari: ‘prier’ et precarius: ‘qui s’obtient par la prière.’ Est précaire ce qui est donc mal assuré, comme un bien que l’on possède par la faveur d’une prière exaucée. Mais surtout la précarité définit le rapport du sujet à la présence absente du sacré. C’est sans doute ce lien spécifique à la question du symbolique qui intéressait Beckett, en deçà de toute croyance. En effet, cet autre rapport induit une certaine distance au sens et à la forme, un équilibre fragile et précaire de l’un à l’autre, et de
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toute chose à ce qui n’est pas elle; l’autre est là, présent dans l’invocation et fait cependant éternellement défaut, comme le réel pour l’imaginaire ou l’image pour le texte. L’expérience poétique de Beckett se caractérise selon Gilles Deleuze par cette “disjonction incluse,” “où tout se divise, mais en soi même, et Dieu, l’ensemble des possibles, se confond avec Rien, dont chaque chose est une modification” (Deleuze 1992, 60). Aucun recours extérieur pour cette logique qui échappe en effet à toute causalité simple ou à toute binarité prévisible. ‘Spectrale,’ paradoxale et ambiguë, elle interroge le statut de l’image du corps et la nécessité de son apparition: invention fantasmatique de quel narrateur, remémoration de quel souvenir, de quel deuil? Dans cette tension des mots à l’image, il s’agirait donc d’analyser l’interaction de ce thème de la prière, comme motif récurrent mais toujours provisoire et comme expérience fondamentale (de lecture et de création), avec la structure précaire et spectrale des oeuvres: comment cette référence sacrée, maintenue à l’état latent par le travail d’empêchement beckettien, ouvre, dans son inachèvement même, l’écart d’un espace de présentation où puissent se jouer la tension et les devenirs de l’écriture: entre corps et langage, texte et image, rapport et non-rapport, représentation et présentation. D’abord, cet exemple dans Mal vu mal dit où le motif à peine évoqué de la prière rencontre le travail d’apparition-disparition de l’écriture: Elle réémerge sur le dos. Immobile. Soir et nuit. Immobile sur le dos soir et nuit. La couche. Attention. Difficilement à même le sol vu les chutes à genoux. La prière. Si prière il y a. Bah elle n’a qu’à se prosterner davantage. Ou ailleurs. Devant sa chaise. Ou sa huche. Ou à la lisière de la caillasse la tête sur les cailloux. Donc paillasse à même le sol. Pas d’oreiller. Recouverte des pieds au menton d’une couverture noire elle ne livre que la tête. Ne que ! Soir et nuit sans défense ce visage. Vite les yeux. Dès qu’ils s’ouvriront. Soudain les voilà. Sans que rien ait bougé. Un seul suffit. Exorbité. Pupille béante nimbée chichement d’un bleu délavé. Pas trace d’humeur. Plus trace. Sans regard. Comme n’en pouvant plus des choses vues paupières closes. Sans transition de plein fouet le vide. (Beckett 1981, 48) 394
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Comme souvent chez Beckett l’apparition du corps est une réapparition. Elle correspond ici au retour fuyant, multiple et imprévisible d’une vielle femme, figure ancienne dont le retour hante tout le texte. Dans ce paragraphe, auquel nous reviendrons à plusieurs reprises, sont juxtaposées deux images, deux postures de la “vieille”: la posture couchée du gisant mains jointes et celle de la “prière,” ici prière du soir pour un mort sans nom. On ne sait si cette prière se fait agenouillé (“chutes à genoux,” “se prosterner”) ou couché. L’ambiguïté se joue dans le passage d’une hypothèse spatiale à une autre: “Devant sa chaise. […] Ou à la lisière de la caillasse la tête sur les cailloux. Donc paillasse à même le sol ». Gilles Deleuze distinguait deux postures de l’ “épuisé” dans l’œuvre de Beckett: “entre l’épuisement assis et la fatigue couchée […] il y a une différence de nature” car “on (est) fatigué de quelque chose, mais épuisé, de rien” (Deleuze 1992, 59) (au sens logique et physiologique, mécanique et pathétique, que Deleuze donne à l’épuisement beckettien). Or la posture de la prière, inquiète et inquiétante, incertaine, immobile mais sans lieu fixe, fait peut-être figure d’ ‘entre-deux’: entre fatigue et épuisement, transitivité et intransitivité, verticalité du sacré au pied duquel on se ‘prosterne’ et horizontalité du plan de la ‘paillasse,’ de la ‘caillasse’ (le suffixe commun connotant péjorativement le matériau pauvre, vulgaire, profane...). Elle se joue aussi entre vie et mort. Le corps spectral beckettien apparaît avec une temporalité spécifique: à la fois mourant épuisé et revenant fantomatique, il déconcerte l’avant et l’après d’une mort impossible qu’il semble toujours différer. Cette temporalité est celle d’un ‘mourir’ sans cesse recommencé, mouvement paradoxal décrit par Maurice Blanchot comme le dessaisissement d’où surgit toute création et tout désir en déjouant la fascination pour la mort: “Mourir, c’est, absolument parlant, l’imminence incessante par laquelle cependant la vie dure en désirant. Imminence de ce qui s’est toujours déjà passé” (Blanchot 1980, 70). Il s’agit ici d’une autre modalité de la précarité beckettienne; elle met en scène un corps et un texte en voie d’extinction et donne forme à ce processus, à ce mouvement d’une disparition qui n’en finit pas d’échouer pour permettre à l’œuvre de continuer.2 Cette précarité constitutive est comme la figuration dans l’écriture d’une autre forme de vie assumant sa part d’absence; elle relève de cette tentative permanente de trouver dans l’empêchement et la négation, dans l’approche de la mort, un fragment de corps, un reste de vie d’autant 395
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plus évident et intense, et toujours déjà mis en suspens, engagé dans un autre mouvement de l’écriture. Temporalité spectrale donc, discontinue, imprévisible et déceptive, qui engage avec elle la remise en cause des repères classiques de la narration, du rapport entre texte et image comme de l’opposition entre vie et mort. On y rencontre ainsi cet “effet de spectralité” analysé par Jacques Derrida (1993). Dans l’optique d’une déconstruction de la métaphysique de la présence, le processus spectral doit selon lui déjouer toute identification ontologique de l’être à la présence, toute présence effective. L’apparition du spectre rend indécidables les oppositions établies entre “réel et non-réel, effectif et non-effectif, vivant et non-vivant, visible et non-visible,” entre “ce qui est présent et ce qui ne l’est pas” (Derrida 1993, 33). Ainsi, l’auteur s’interroge sur la temporalité et la nature du spectre qui n’est “ni substance ni essence ni existence”: Quel est le temps et quel est l’histoire d’un spectre? Y a-t-il un présent du spectre? Ordonne-t-il ses allées et venues selon la succession d’un avant et d’un après? [...] Avant de savoir si on peut faire la différence entre le spectre du passé et celui du futur, du présent passé et du présent futur, il faut peut-être se demander si l’effet de spectralité ne consiste pas à déjouer cette opposition, voire cette dialectique, entre la présence effective et son autre. (Derrida 1993, 72) Dans Cap au pire cette fois, autre texte bref et fragmenté du dernier Beckett, le terme de ‘prière’ n’apparaît plus et la référence sacrée reste latente. Parmi les trois ‘figures’ rencontrées, il ne reste que ce corps identifié à sa posture: l’ “agenouillé.” Ici la précarité est tension vers le moindre, vers le minimum de connotation et d’épaisseur symbolique (plus loin, ce corps se révélera être celui, pathétique, d’une vieille femme, pour rejouer encore le processus d’amoindrissement...): “Plus qu’à se mettre debout si jamais fut gisant. Ou jamais ne fut gisant. Perpétuel agenouillé. Mieux plus mal perpétuel agenouillé. Le dire désormais perpétuel agenouillé. Pour l’instant désormais perpétuel agenouillé. Pour l’instant” (Beckett 1983, 21). Le spectre est dit “pour l’instant perpétuel” agenouillé; “pour l’instant” renvoie à la forme ironique d’une réflexivité critique (à cet ‘instant’ de l’écriture, d’un ‘dire’ qui est tout sauf narratif ou dialectique), mais aussi à ce moment spectral qui, selon Derrida, “n’appartient plus au temps, si l’on entend sous ce nom l’enchaînement 396
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des présents modalisés (présent passé, présent actuel: ‘maintenant,’ présent futur)” (Derrida 1993, 17). La prière du spectre rencontre donc le travail formel et logique d’une disjonction qui présente tous les possibles sur le même plan; elle participe en même temps de la logique spectrale qui remet en cause toute unité de l’espace et du temps, et implique de nouveaux rapports, de nouvelles dépendances de l’un à l’autre. A la fois description poétique d’un objet fuyant et multiple, et invocation en acte, ‘performance’ qui crée l’image furtive à mesure qu’elle s’écrit sur le blanc de la page, l’apparition du corps se fragmente à la surface du texte comme dans la représentation toujours rejouée (toujours ratée) de sa mise en scène. On se trouve alors au croisement de cette logique épuisante mais créatrice de la spectralité et d’un constant travail du reste comme résidu textuel et corporel. Le texte incarne bien alors ce rapport de plasticité si exemplaire de l’écriture beckettienne où se nouent, dans un même geste, représentation et présentation.3 Le spectre engage donc toute une logique de l’écriture: il est ce reste qui fait retour, retour d’un réel toujours déjà dérobé. Aussi trouvet-on de nombreux passages où la posture de la prière réapparaît avec celle du gisant, et où la multiplicité des postures s’oppose à leur ‘immobilité,’ suivant la même logique de l’énumération; citons encore Mal vu mal dit: “Les bords de sa longue jupe noire frôlent le sol. Mais le plus souvent elle est immobile. Debout ou assise. Allongée ou à genoux” (Beckett 1981, 25). Dans notre extrait, la réflexivité de l’écriture implique certains dédoublements où voir et être vu relèvent d’une même indécidabilité. On remarque d’abord le motif récurrent des “yeux clos écarquillés”: “Exorbité. […] Paupières closes,” où l’on retrouve cette violence froide et contastée de l’oxymore beckettien, quand vie et mort, horreur et calme se rencontrent (“silence à l’œil du hurlement”). Ce motif renvoie ainsi parallèlement à la modalité singulière du visible, du “mal vu,” déjà énoncé par Joyce dans Ulysse: “Fermons les yeux pour voir.” Mais surtout, le ‘guetteur’ partage avec la figure maternelle de la vieille femme sa posture de l’invocation. Invocation d’un dieu absent et conjuration du spectre au sens déjà évoqué: Conjuration signifie d’autre part l’incantation magique destinée à évoquer, à faire venir par la voix, à convoquer un charme ou un esprit. Conjuration dit en somme l’appel qui fait venir [...] ce qui 397
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n’est pas là au moment de l’appel. Cette voix ne décrit pas, ce qu’elle dit ne constate rien, sa parole fait arriver. (Derrida 1993, 74) C’est aussi la posture du souvenant de …que nuages… avec sa “supplique de l’esprit”: “je commençais à la supplier, elle, d’apparaître, de m’apparaître. Telle fut longtemps mon habitude coutumière. Aucun son, une supplique de l’esprit, à elle, qu’elle apparaisse, m’apparaisse” (Beckett 1976, 43) Ce guetteur, comme l’écrivain réel, met en jeu “l’obscure tension spirituelle” dont parle Deleuze au sujet de la création de l’image, “une évocation silencieuse qui soit aussi une invocation et même une convocation, et une révocation, puisqu’elle élève la chose ou la personne à l’état d’indéfini: une femme…” (Deleuze 1992, 96). Il est intéressant de confronter cette analyse à la question des “images obsessionnelles” qui, de son aveu même, hantent le travail de Beckett (Knowlson 1999, 849).Celui-ci insiste dans le même temps pour relativiser l’aspect décisif et final qu’un lecteur voudrait leur donner pour clore l’interprétation. Il ne s’agit pas de la fixation obsessionnelle d’une phrase, d’une syntaxe unique, mais d’images mouvantes, indécises, innommées, qui “harcèlent” comme les figures de Cap au pire. “Harcelant” est d’ailleurs le mot choisi par Edith Fournier pour traduire preying utilisé dans la version originale anglaise de Beckett: preying on something signifie en effet ‘faire sa proie de quelque chose,’ de prey la proie. On entend évidemment l’homonymie avec praying, c’est à dire ‘être en prière’; ici, la prière rencontre l’obsession du souvenir et la répétition du fantasme: prier, ce serait aussi être en proie à la hantise d’une image qui revient comme le revenant spectral, ou encore ressasser activement, rejouer une scène qui ne cesse d’échapper (l’apparition de la mère dans Mal vu mal dit, mais aussi le vieil homme et l’enfant dans Cap au pire...). Entre passivité et activité, apparition et disparition, il s’agit de mettre cette image à l’épreuve d’un “regard froid,” d’une distance nouvelle; épuiser le fantasme dans la précarité de l’écriture pour l’ouvrir aux multiplicités de la forme et du sens. Ainsi, l’image de la femme âgée se dédouble, voire se confond, avec celle du guetteur (du fils, de l’écrivain): de qui cette femme en noir porte-elle le deuil si ce n’est d’elle-même? Sujet et objet du deuil, n’est-elle pas à la fois la gisante couchée et l’agenouillée qui prie pour son mort, comme l’écrivain invoquant le souvenir du corps spectral, de 398
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la mère disparue? On peut ainsi comprendre la double valeur de l’évocation d’une figure maternelle réelle: rappel du deuil et apparition épiphanique hors du temps (cf. Houppermans 2000), elle est à la fois partage, réunion des deux êtres dans une écriture du “désaveu de la mort” (Grossman 1998, 123), et distance qui empêche la fascination, travail formel qui, soudain, “fait l’image” dans cette “détermination de l’indéfini” (une femme, une prière...). Intéressons-nous un instant à Cap au pire; le motif de la prière semble s’y esquisser avec la figure de la paire (père et fils, vieil homme et enfant, les mains jointes), dans un jeu, là encore, de dédoublement et d’unification: “Lentement sans pause tant mal que mal s’en vont et jamais ne s’éloignent. Vus de dos. Tous deux courbés. Unis par les mains étreintes étreignant. Tant mal que mal s’en vont comme un seul. Une seule ombre. Une autre ombre” (Beckett 1983, 15) On entr’aperçoit une figure de la prière avec cette fusion de deux corps “mains étreintes” dans un lieu sans lieu, un éloignement paradoxal, suspendu, qui ne cesse de se répéter comme l’apparition d’un spectre ou d’un souvenir obsédant (“s’en vont et jamais ne s’éloignent”); cette fusion correspond de plus à une réduction (du nombre: de deux à un, mais aussi de la forme: une ombre, une silhouette, une trace qui n’adhère plus nulle part, seulement caractérisée par ces “mains étreintes étreignant”). Là encore, passif et actif, proche et lointain, vie et mort se rencontrent dans la logique de la disjonction incluse et s’annulent un instant, le temps de faire l’image, dans le texte même. Cet évènement du ‘mot fait image’ caractérise selon nous l’enjeu ‘plastique’ d’une écriture beckettienne du spectral. Pour le cerner mieux encore, étudions maintenant le rapport de plasticité qui fait jouer formellement la précarité du texte et l’apparition-disparition de l’image dans notre passage de Mal vu mal dit. Le texte met en scène le travail sur l’absence et la présence selon différentes modalités; on note l’apparition de compléments, de fragments qui viennent trouer et déséquilibrer la phrase: “Immobile. Soir et nuit. Immobile sur le dos soir et nuit” (1981, 48). Chaque mot semble décrire le cadre d’une image à venir tout en fragmentant et en variant ses composantes. La répétition permet d’exténuer les possibles avec insistance et précaution (car ce travail induit un risque et donc une ‘attention’ nécessaire pour ne pas basculer dans l’excès et le superflu ou dans la fascination pour le geste lui-même); mais elle rejoue aussi infiniment le travail d’amoindrissement, en cassant toute linéarité, donc toute fin possible. 399
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Cette répétition peut devenir énumération, par exemple des différents lieux: “Ou ailleurs. Devant sa chaise. Ou sa huche” (1981, 48). On retrouve ici l’hésitation comme mouvement de l’écriture beckettienne: à la fois incertitude toujours nouvelle, indifférente ou angoissée, drôle ou mélancolique, et certitude d’une logique sèche et calculée de l’énumération. Cette accumulation des mots, qui apparaissent pour mieux disparaître, est donc soustraction paradoxale: il faut aboutir au ‘mot fait image,’ quand il ne reste plus qu’un seul mot pour “mal dire.” Ainsi, le syntagme ‘la prière’ est aussi bien un achèvement éphémère, une “intensité pure” que l’amorce d’une autre tentative marquée par l’écart et le repentir de l’épanorthose (Clément 1994, 423): “La prière. Si prière il y a” (1981, 48). Mise en œuvre de la logique la plus illogique, dans le suspens d’une affirmation aussi étrange que comique où celui qui décrit laisse échapper sa description: “Si prière il y a. Bah elle n’a qu’à se prosterner davantage.” On remarque ainsi que l’épanorthose comme figure de correction s’applique au texte comme au fonctionnement de l’image. Finalement, les mots servent autant à la description (d’un souvenir, d’une fiction fantasmée) qu’au travail actif de l’empêchement beckettien. Chaque mot fait l’image, invente l’image à amoindrir dans son défaut même. Celle-ci n’est donc pas le résultat d’un dépassement dialectique du mouvement d’apparition-disparition: ce n’est pas le sens qui ‘prend’ mais seulement une forme qui ne se sépare pas du processus de sa disparition; “l’image est un souffle, une haleine, mais expirante, en voie d’extinction. L’image est ce qui s’éteint, se consume, une chute” (Deleuze 1992, 97). Ainsi, l’image beckettienne est prise dans un rapport complexe au temps et à l’espace: un temps non linéaire de la disparition de l’image et de la présence-absence du spectre, inséparable de l’espace de sa ‘présentation’ dans l’écriture. C’est ainsi que l’image pourrait tenir lieu de ‘trace,’ notion définie par Jacques Derrida comme “devenirespace du temps” et “devenir-temps de l’espace” (Derrida 1972, 8). Citons ainsi un autre extrait de Mal vu mal dit où la prière fait image: Un endroit l’attire. Par moments. Une pierre s’y dresse. Blanche de loin. C’est elle qui l’attire. [...] Mais dans ces moments-là à ses pieds la prière, Emmenez-là. La nuit par temps clair surtout. Avec lune ou sans. Ils l’emmènent et l’arrêtent devant. Là comme en pierre elle aussi. Mais noire. Sous la lune parfois. Les étoiles souvent. L’envie-t-elle? (Beckett 1981, 14) 400
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Il s’agit là encore d’un mot fait image, et ‘juste une image’: une image unique, un seul mot, qui prend sa ‘valeur’ (temporaire) dans cette rareté même, et une image tout juste réussie, à peine une image, prise dans les accélérations et les soubresauts de la vitesse d’écriture. ‘La prière’ ne se fixe en effet qu’un instant dans la représentation et se défait aussitôt grâce au jeu sur l’immobilité et le mouvement: “à ses pieds; emmenezlà,” grâce au flou laissé dans l’énonciation: “emmenez-là” (qui parle?), et aux échos et variations homonymiques: ‘pieds’; ‘prière’; ‘pierre’ qui n’en finissent pas de déséquilibrer les identifications (on retrouve le motif récurrent du corps dédoublé et pétrifié). Ces échos sonores et formels, dans l’écriture même, créent d’ailleurs le voisinage qui définit et permet toute image. Ils sont l’équivalent de la confrontation des matériaux picturaux ou de l’apparition intermittente des lignes d’une trame, d’un tressage qui recouvre et laisse entrevoir.4 On assiste au même mécanisme dans …que nuages…, concernant cette fois l’image visuelle de la femme invoquée par le souvenant. Deleuze a commenté la précarité de cette ‘réussite’ qui définit la création de l’image ‘pure,’ ‘non entachée,’ libérée de toute adhérence personnelle à la mémoire, à la raison (ce parti-pris serait bien sûr à nuancer, en montrant à nouveau comment sont nouées les questions de l’image, du désir et du deuil): “Et quand on réussit, l’image sublime envahit l’écran, visage féminin sans contour, et tantôt disparaît aussitôt, “d’une même haleine,” tantôt s’attarde avant de disparaître” (Deleuze 1992, 97) On peut rapprocher pour finir ces interrogations d’un texte de François Noudelmann: Image et absence (1998, 159). Selon lui, l’image “vit de cette tension, de cette fixation de l’œil en instance d’effondrement.” Il rapproche la question de l’image de l’absent du travail de présentation nécessaire à la mise en scène de cette image. L’image du mort ne peut se fixer dans le temps et l’espace de la représentation, elle se caractérise par son intermittence “inscrivant la discontinuité au sein de son propre espace,” et par l’incertitude de son retour. Son apparition nécessite alors l’évidement, l’abandon de toute profondeur, de tout artifice ou arrière-plan hétérogène à la représentation. C’est une “absence assumée” qui s’incarne dans l’image de l’absent, comme dans celle de la vivante Olympia décrite par Georges Bataille: “Cette femme est là dans son exactitude provocante, elle n’est rien; sa nudité […] est le silence qui s’en dégage comme celui d’un navire vide: ce qu’elle est, est l’ ‘horreur sacrée’ de sa présence – 401
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d’une présence dont la simplicité est celle de l’absence” (Noudelmann 1990, 72). Le “mal vu” beckettien participe du même rapport à l’absence en s’incarnant dans un travail formel et textuel. Celui-ci doit permettre de “déjouer le voir et le bien voir,” pour produire une image “en exception des lois ordinaires de la visibilité” (Badiou 1995, 43). Ainsi, le motif de la prière participe du caractère latent d’une forme évoquant à la fois le rapport au sacré, la ritualité d’une incantation, et une expérience réelle, voire pathétique (la prière comme imploration, quand tout fait défaut...). Il est aussi évocation du caractère formel qui sous-tend l’écriture de Beckett, dans sa précarité même. Finalement, cette prière sans dieu, neutralisée, dans l’attente suspendue d’une “main pie” (L’Innommable), constitue une nouvelle image de l’épuisement.5 Figure du “dos courbé,” elle est une autre posture qui diffère d’ailleurs par son caractère d’épuisement de la majesté hiératique des statues en prière gothiques ou des silhouettes de Giacometti (en gardant de ces dernières la fixité précaire, épurée et lointaine). L’évocation de “la vraie prière enfin, celle qui ne sollicite rien” apparaissait déjà dans Malone meurt (non comme pur paradoxe formel, mais plutôt comme l’approche d’une vérité de l’œuvre et de l’écriture...): Les yeux usés d’offenses s’attardent vils sur tout ce qu’ils ont si longuement prié, dans la dernière, la vraie prière enfin, celle qui ne sollicite rien. Et c’est alors qu’un petit air d’exaucement ranime les vœux morts et qu’un murmure naît dans l’univers muet, vous reprochant affectueusement de vous être désespéré trop tard. (Beckett 1951, 172) Ou encore dans Pas moi, avec la prière du ‘cerveau’ à la ‘bouche’: ...et tout le temps la prière... quelque part la prière... pour que tout s’arrête... et pas de réponse... ou pas entendue... trop faible... ainsi de suite... pas lâcher... essayer toujours... ne sachant ce que c’est... ce que c’est qu’elle essaie... ce que c’est qu’il faut essayer... (Beckett 1975, 94) En somme, cette prière sans dieu renvoie depuis sa solitude6 à une inquiétude fondamentale qui fait l’essence, la structure et la tonalité de l’œuvre. Cette précarité caractérise ainsi les éléments de l’écriture de la posture (ici la prière): avec la temporalité spectrale d’une posture sans 402
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lieu fixe, l’identité du sujet sans nom de la représentation, mais aussi l’image et le texte, le ‘mot fait image’ comme enjeu esthétique majeur. On pourrait s’interroger pour finir sur l’objet paradoxal de cette prière beckettienne, considérée comme expérience de l’art (là encore, de lecture et de création). Comme l’attente d’En attendant Godot ou l’Angoisse chez Heidegger, cette prière est dissociée de son objet. Elle ne s’abandonne pas au tout autre et refuse la fascination. En éprouvant ce défaut d’adresse et d’objet, elle impose un mouvement qui remet en cause présence et absence, intérieur et extérieur, et induit une séparation qui est aussi ouverture: de soi à soi, et de soi à l’autre, au réel et à la mort. Ainsi, le spectre beckettien et le ‘mot fait image’ rejouent sans cesse le processus de leur disparition et participent en même temps d’une ‘quasi-présence,’ d’une “visibilité imminente.”7 Il faudrait peut-être situer l’objet introuvable d’une telle prière du côté de cette “imminence toujours déjà passée” de la mort et de l’image, mise en scène dans la solitude muette du spectre comme dans la logique formelle des oeuvres. D’une incarnation dans le corps de l’écriture à sa disparition syncopée, suspendue, lumineuse, cette prière est nécessairement déçue et répétée sans fin pour continuer le travail d’évidement, travail de l’écart et du jeu, tantôt comique, tantôt mélancolique. Entre dedans et dehors et dans sa précarité même, le mouvement de la création se jouerait alors entre la nécessité d’une “obscure tension interne”8 et la recherche d’une bonne distance qui libère de la fascination et du fantasme. Notes 1. Devant une “tête de femme” de Schmidt-Rottluff. Cité par Knowlson (1999, 316). 2. “Elle serait morte déjà que cela n’aurait rien de choquant. Elle l’est bien sûr. Mais en attendant cela ne fait pas l’affaire. Elle gît donc encore en vie sous la couverture” (Beckett 1981, 51). 3. Cf. Derrida 1993, 58, concernant la “question du spectre” dissimulée par “la réponse ontologique de Marx”: “il ne s’agit peut-être plus du tout d’une question et nous visons plutôt une autre structure de la ‘présentation,’ dans un geste de pensée ou d’écriture, non la mesure d’un temps.” 4. Pour cette notion de ‘tressage’ dans son rapport aux problématiques de la figure et du fond, du voir et du lire, de la figuration et de l’abstraction dans la peinture contemporaine, cf. Damish 1984).
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5. On pourrait penser au Belacqua dantesque dont rêve le personnage de Comment c’est (1961): ce dernier “halète dans la boue [...], ne se repose pas, rêve d’un Belacqua n’attendant plus rien et qu’il voit seulement basculé sur le côté. Cette prière (inconcevable), ainsi l’autre prière de Belacqua, n’a pas de valeur; elle n’est pas entendue, non è udita (Purgatoire, IV, 135). Elle ne va pas plus avant” (Ferrini, 42). 6. Cf. L’Innommable: “Moi seul suis homme et tout le reste divin. ” (1953, 13) 7. Cf. Merleau-Ponty: “[...] la quasi-présence et la visibilité imminente qui font tout le problème de l’imaginaire.” (23) 8. Cf. Le Monde et le pantalon, concernant les tableaux des frères Van Velde: “Tout ce qu’on peut dire, c’est qu’ils traduisent, avec plus ou moins de pertes, d’absurdes et mystérieuses poussées vers l’image, qu’ils sont plus ou moins adéquats vis-à-vis d’obscures tensions internes.” (1991, 21)
Ouvrages cités Badiou, Alain, Beckett l’increvable désir, coll. Coup double (Paris: Hachette, 1995). Beckett, Samuel, Malone meurt (Paris: Minuit, 1951). –, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953). –, Pas moi in Oh les beaux jours suivi de Pas Moi (Paris: Minuit, 1975). –, Mal vu mal dit (Paris: Minuit, 1981). –, Cap au pire (Paris: Minuit, 1983). –, Le monde et le pantalon (1945) in Le monde et le pantalon suivi de Peintres de l’empêchement (Paris: Minuit, 1991). –, ...que nuages... in Quad (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Blanchot, Maurice, L’Ecriture du désastre, coll. NRF (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Clément, Bruno, L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1994). Damish, Hubert, Fenêtre jaune cadmium ou les dessous de la peinture, coll. Fictions & Cie (Paris: Seuil, 1984). Deleuze, Gilles, L’Epuisé, introduction à Quad (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Derrida, Jacques, “La différance” (1968), Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). –, Spectres de Marx, coll. La philosophie en effet (Paris: Galilée, 1993). Clément, Bruno, L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
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Posture de la prière, écriture de la précarité Damish, Hubert, Fenêtre jaune cadmium ou les dessous de la peinture, coll. Fictions & Cie (Paris: Seuil, 1984). Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, Dante et Beckett (Paris: Herman, 2003). Grossman, Evelyne, “Beckett et la représentation de la mort,” in Samuel Beckett: l’écriture et la scène, ed. E. Grossman et R. Salado (Paris: Sedes, 1998). Houppermans, Sjef, “Continuité du deuil: de Proust à Beckett,” in SBT/A 10, “L’Affect dans l’oeuvre beckettienne,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts, Sjef Houppermans, Yann Mével, Michèle Touret (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 73-84. Knowlson, James, Beckett (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L’œil et l’esprit (1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Noudelmann, François, Image et absence. Essai sur le regard, coll. Ouverture philosophique (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1998).
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RENCONTRE DE CHARLES JULIET AVEC SAMUEL BECKETT: “Cette parole nue qui vient de la souffrance”1
Anne Cousseau In 1986, Charles Juliet published his Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett, which included four interviews he had with the author. Juliet had discovered Samuel Beckett as early as 1965 by way of his writings. Reading Beckett, notably his Textes pour rien, Molloy and L’Innommable, had a determinant influence on Charles Juliet’s literary career. It is mostly in the company of Beckett that he finds his own voice. This article examines both the way in which Beckett’s writings may have had an influence on the beginning of Charles Juliet’s existential and poetic voyage, and the dialogue established between two related literary worlds.
Le 15 avril 1965, Charles Juliet note dans son Journal: “Découverte de l’œuvre de Beckett. Violente secousse.” Charles Juliet a alors 31 ans, sa carrière d’écrivain commence difficilement, et surtout douloureusement: il traverse en effet depuis 1957, année où il décide d’abandonner ses études de médecine pour se consacrer complètement à l’écriture, une période de grande confusion et de souffrance psychique intense, liées tout à la fois à un mal-être identitaire profond et à la difficulté d’écrire. La lecture de l’œuvre de Beckett entre alors en résonance parfaite avec ce qu’il vit. Ce n’est pas cependant en 1965, mais dix ans plus tôt, qu’il a découvert cet auteur: il n’y avait alors “rien compris,” selon ses propres mots. Sans doute n’était-il pas à une étape de son cheminement existentiel et littéraire propice à une véritable rencontre. C’est le peintre Bram van Velde, ami commun de Charles Juliet et Samuel Beckett, qui ramène le poète à une seconde lecture. Juliet rencontre Bram van Velde en 1964: celui-ci lui parle de Beckett dès leur premier entretien. Par la suite, ils l’évoqueront quasiment à chaque rencontre. C’est encore Bram van Velde qui incite Juliet à rencontrer Beckett, ce qu’il fera finalement le 24 octobre 1968. Suivront 3 autres entrevues: le 29 octobre 1973, le 14 novembre 1975,
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et le 11 novembre 1977. Curieusement, il se contente de noter chaque fois dans son Journal ces quelques mots: “Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett.” Et cependant ces conversations, déterminantes pour lui, s’impriment profondément dans sa mémoire. En 1986, il en publie le récit chez Fata Morgana. Le texte sera ensuite réédité chez P.O.L. en 1999. Avant d’être un écrivain, Charles Juliet est un grand lecteur, un lecteur passionné. Dans le dernier tome de son Journal, on trouve ainsi un vibrant éloge de la lecture dont nous ne citons ici que quelques lignes: Sans les livres et la lecture, ma vie aurait été désertique. Grâce à eux, ma terre a été richement fertilisée par les eaux d’une source qui n’a jamais tari. D’où d’inoubliables heures de découvertes, d’errances, de trouble, de doutes, de remises en question, parfois d’effondrement, ou à l’inverse, d’allégresse, de plénitude, d’élévation. (Cité par Barry, 136) Cet appétit insatiable de lecture est au départ déterminé par la conviction absolue de son ignorance: lorsqu’il décide en effet de se consacrer complètement à l’écriture, il est dans le même temps conscient que son enfance paysanne, puis ses études dans une école militaire, l’ont privé d’une culture littéraire qui lui est maintenant indispensable. Avant d’écrire, il lui faut avant tout fréquenter assidûment les grands écrivains, et il s’adonne alors avec avidité à ce qu’il appelle ses “orgies de lectures” (1995, 129-30). Il pratique un mode de lecture empathique qui lui coûte énormément d’efforts: Je lis très lentement, avec une participation plénière de la sensibilité, et […] lorsque c’est possible, je m’aide de la phrase pour remonter à ce qui l’a engendrée, m’efforce à parcourir le chemin qu’a emprunté l’écrivain, à découvrir ce qui a pu le conduire à écrire telle ou telle phrase. (4 janvier 1962, in 1978, 185) La lecture n’est pas seulement le lieu d’un enseignement de l’écriture, elle est aussi, mais les deux sont intimement liés pour Charles Juliet, ce qui permet de progresser dans la connaissance de soi: 408
Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett
Heures merveilleuses des voyages immobiles ! […] Tu rencontrais là ce qui en toi reposait encore dans des limbes, et tu vivais des heures exaltées à sentir que tu t’approchais de la source. Ces hommes et ces femmes dont les œuvres t’ont aidé à te mettre en ordre, dénuder ton centre, glisser parfois à la rencontre de l’impérissable, de quel profond amour tu les as aimés. (1995, 148) C’est dans cette double perspective qu’il faut situer la lecture des textes de Beckett avec qui, écrit-il au début des Rencontres, “dans ma solitude, j’ai poursuivi d’interminables dialogues” (Barry, 10), et dont l’œuvre l’a “bouleversé.” C’est curieusement par l’un des textes les plus ardus, les Textes pour rien, que Charles Juliet renoue avec Beckett en 1965: il le “dévore avec passion.” Par la suite, il se “jette” dans son œuvre, « lit et relit chacun de ses textes.” Toutefois, ceux pour lesquels il se sentira le plus d’affinités resteront, outre les Textes pour rien, Molloy et L’Innommable (et c’est donc la raison pour laquelle nous avons choisi de les privilégier dans notre étude). La rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett est d’abord l’histoire d’une reconnaissance. L’univers beckettien lui offre alors la projection de ses tourments existentiels, de ses questionnements identitaires. Juliet se lit, se reconnaît et se découvre au travers de Beckett. La lecture de Beckett participe donc pour lui à une aventure essentielle qui est de l’ordre de la naissance: naissance, ou renaissance à soi, sur un plan psychologique et spirituel, mais aussi naissance d’un écrivain. Beckett fut l’une des figures déterminantes qui aidèrent Charles Juliet à placer sa voix, et à trouver la voie de son écriture. Ainsi l’étude de cette rencontre offre-t-elle deux perspectives: analyser l’émergence d’un écrivain au travers d’une communauté qui est tout à la fois psychique, spirituelle et littéraire, mais aussi relire Beckett en empruntant les chemins de traverse que nous offre la sensibilité de Charles Juliet. Car le processus réflexif n’est pas unilatéral: si l’œuvre de Beckett offre à Charles Juliet le miroir de son aventure intérieure, en retour les poèmes des premiers recueils de Juliet, les notes de son Journal (essentiellement les deux premiers volumes), ou encore certains passages de Lambeaux, entrent en résonance intime avec les textes écrits par Beckett entre 1946 et 1950. Là se situe le sens de cette rencontre: échange, partage de deux univers littéraires qui, à un moment de leur parcours, ont trouvé des points de convergence. 409
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Il y a chez Charles Juliet la conviction établie d’une identité absolue entre le désir d’écrire et la souffrance: Si nous étions véritablement heureux, nous n’aurions pas à écrire. L’écriture révèle toujours une souffrance, une grave insatisfaction, parfois une impuissance à vivre. (Barry, 89) C’est là tout d’abord ce qui soude Charles Juliet à l’œuvre de Beckett: la reconnaissance d’un même mal-être psychique, profond, intense, désespéré. A Rodolphe Barry, il déclare: “Je me retrouvais dans ses héros, dans leur impuissance à vivre” (79). Cette souffrance, Juliet la reconnaît jusque dans les traits de Beckett: Un visage modelé, creusé, spiritualisé par la souffrance et la tension intérieure. (Juliet 1999a [1986], 51) Assurément, quelqu’un d’essentiellement différent. Un homme supérieur. Je veux dire: un homme qui se tient au plus bas, dans l’intimité d’une permanente interrogation sur le fondamental. Soudain, cette évidence: Beckett l’inconsolable. (25) Lorsque Charles Juliet se plonge dans l’œuvre de Beckett, il traverse la période la plus douloureuse de sa vie. Sa décision d’arrêter ses études de médecine pour se consacrer à l’écriture, en 1957, signe le début d’une véritable traversée du désert, marquée par un état de chaos et de confusion absolus, et de repli sur soi. Les notes de son Journal, dont il commence la rédaction au même moment, révèlent des pulsions suicidaires très fortes. L’aventure intérieure qu’il vit alors est de l’ordre du cheminement initiatique: Curieusement, on peut dire qu’être soi-même ne nous est pas donné. Il faut partir à sa découverte et s’engendrer. Nous naissons physiquement et nous avons à naître ontologiquement. (Barry, 53) Partir à la découverte de soi, c’est tout d’abord éliminer la personnalité qui l’a constitué jusqu’alors, “personnalité de surface” qu’il avait reçue 410
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en particulier des années d’école militaire: il s’agit donc d’entreprendre un travail d’élimination, de destruction, de dénudation, selon ses propres termes, véritable étape de déstructuration psychique, sociale, qui conduit, selon le schéma du scénario initiatique, à l’état de mort initiatique, à partir duquel peut s’opérer la reconstruction identitaire. Ce parcours existentiel, dont son œuvre enregistre l’évolution, Charles Juliet l’a souvent évoqué. Ainsi le titre du recueil qui réunit ses premiers poèmes, écrits entre 1960 et 1965, est lourd de sens: Fouilles “désigne ces explorations que j’effectuais dans la nuit de la substance interne. Il fallait au préalable couper les entraves, démanteler appuis et défenses, défoncer le sous-sol” (7). Les lectures qu’il effectue alors l’aident activement dans cette recherche d’élucidation personnelle. Celle de Beckett en fait partie: le 7 novembre 1965, il note dans son Journal que Beckett appartient à ces écrivains qui “échappent à leur époque, nous concernent directement, nous tirent de la confusion, nous engagent à naître, nous engendrent à nous-même” (1979, 64). On peut dire alors que le ressort sur lequel s’appuie sa lecture de l’écrivain est tout d’abord identificatoire. L’univers de Beckett offre un espace psychique dans lequel Charles Juliet reconnaît ce qu’il vit. Dans les Textes pour rien, Molloy et L’Innommable, en particulier, il entend “cette parole nue qui vient de la souffrance,” celle d’un être “que consume ce désespoir [de ne pouvoir accéder à la vie]” et que “rien ne peut consoler,” comme il le note dans le poème qui accompagne la mention de sa première rencontre avec l’écrivain, le 24 octobre 1968. Plus encore, les textes de Beckett mettent en mots, mettent en œuvre, au sens littéraire du terme, ce que Charles Juliet ressent confusément et qu’il perçoit comme le fondement essentiel de son écriture, mais qu’il ne parvient pas à mettre en forme: “Je me sens proche de ceux qui souffrent, doutent, cheminent, refusent de se soumettre, et c’est cette souffrance, cette expérience de chacun que je voudrais traduire” note-til le 27 mai 1959 (1978, 72). Chez Charles Juliet, l’expression de la souffrance se dérobe, ne s’est pas encore ajustée à une parole qui serait sienne, une parole juste, n’a pas encore subi l’alchimie littéraire comme a su le faire Beckett, mêler les mots et les larmes: Je pleure aussi, sans discontinuer. C’est un flot ininterrompu, de mots et de larmes. Le tout sans réflexion. […] je les confonds, mots et larmes, mes mots sont mes larmes, mes yeux ma bouche. (Beckett 1958, 167) 411
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La souffrance n’est pas chez Beckett psychologisée, ni verbalisée – le vocabulaire de l’affect est assez peu employé –, encore moins l’objet d’un épanchement sentimental: elle est le lieu d’une élaboration littéraire. Si Beckett “décrit à chaque page sa situation psychique” (Juliet 1999b), c’est par l’effet de l’opus littéraire: l’incertitude qui pèse sur l’identité et l’histoire de ce que l’on n’ose plus appeler un personnage à partir de Malone meurt, l’expression d’une parole en souffrance et qui ne parvient plus à coïncider avec le réel ou même avec celui qui l’émet, qui ne dit plus rien d’une intériorité devenue opaque, disent obliquement l’effondrement psychologique et la douleur d’être au monde. Et cependant rien d’intellectuel dans cette démarche d’écriture, et c’est là un autre point auquel Charles Juliet est tout particulièrement sensible. La parole de Beckett est viscérale, elle se tient au plus près, au plus juste, de la souffrance humaine, “chaque phrase que Beckett a écrite, il l’a vécue quelque part. Chez lui, jamais rien de cérébral” (Bram van Velde cité par Juliet, 26 octobre 1969 in 1982, 36). Dans le même temps, la lecture de Beckett aide au cheminement intérieur: Ainsi, un peu au hasard, laissant se dévider ce que je porte en moi, je me mets à lui expliquer qu’il m’a enseigné la lucidité, arraché à la confusion, centré sur l’essentiel. […] Que mon trouble avait été profond de rejoindre à travers des contrées si étranges ce qui n’avait cessé de me ronger depuis l’adolescence. […] Que le silence qui peuple les pages des Textes pour rien m’avait conduit en des régions de moi-même où jusqu’alors je n’avais jamais osé me risquer. (Juliet 1999a [1986], 44-45). Ainsi, le miroir qu’il offre n’est pas seulement réflexif, il est aussi projectif et permet d’élucider ce qui est encore très confus chez le poète, notamment ce qu’il appelle la recherche du “neutre”: le neutre désigne pour lui l’accès à l’intériorité la plus enfouie de chacun, et qui par là-même atteint à l’essence de l’être humain. La recherche du neutre participe donc à la fois de la singularité et de l’universalité humaines. Elle s’inscrit dans la logique du cheminement initiatique, ce que Charles Juliet appelle le passage du ‘moi’ au ‘soi’:
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Il faut quitter le moi pour atteindre le soi, le soi étant une manière d’être, de voir, de sentir, dégagée des limites de l’individuel. Le soi, c’est s’ouvrir à la totalité, à l’universel… Toutefois, je dois préciser que cet universel on ne le vit qu’à travers sa singularité. (Barry, 58-59) La recherche du neutre, obsédante dans les notes de son Journal à partir de 1959, constitue donc une étape essentielle de son écriture puisqu’en étant au plus près de la vérité humaine, elle permet d’accéder à une parole juste, susceptible de communiquer pleinement: celle d’un “je travaillé en profondeur […], de quelqu’un qui cherche la part commune et qui, à travers ce qu’il est, exprime […] ce qui peut concerner autrui” (Juliet, 1994). L’accès à cet état de “singularité anonyme,” ou de “singularité commune,” comme il dira également, Charles Juliet le perçoit précisément chez Beckett, dans ce mouvement de désincarnation progressive qui saisit les textes et qui permet d’atteindre le “neutre d’une fiction anonyme” (Janvier, 41), tout en se situant au centre2 du fonctionnement de la psyché et de l’âme humaines. Parvenir au neutre exige de dénuder: dénuder le ‘je’ de l’égocentrisme du moi, mais aussi dénuder la parole pour percevoir, et traduire, le murmure de la voix intérieure. L’évolution de l’œuvre de Beckett est entièrement gouvernée par l’émergence progressive de cette voix qui peu à peu envahit complètement l’espace du texte. Elle est perceptible par intermittences dans le récit de Molloy. Mais il semble alors que le personnage oppose encore une certaine résistance à la laisser s’exprimer.3 Peu à peu, elle s’empare du discours narratif dans la trilogie romanesque, et s’impose définitivement dans L’Innommable, qui n’est plus qu’un long monologue soumis à la pulsion impérative de la parole. Dans les Textes pour rien, cette emprise prend l’ampleur de la démence. Le ‘je’ n’est “plus qu’une poupée de ventriloque” (170) et ne semble plus coïncider avec une identité stable, il est poreux, aliéné par des voix qui le traversent et en dissolvent les contours: Ce sont eux qui murmurent mon nom, qui me parlent de moi, qui parlent d’un moi, qu’ils en parlent à d’autres, qui ne les croiront pas, ou qui les croiront. C’est à eux toutes ces voix, comme un bruit de chaînes dans ma tête, ils me grincent que j’ai une tête. (151)
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Lorsque Charles Juliet rencontre Beckett pour la première fois, en 1968, c’est cette voix qu’il évoque tout d’abord face à l’écrivain: Ce qui m’avait le plus impressionné, c’était cet étrange silence qui règne dans les Textes pour rien, un silence qu’on ne peut atteindre qu’à l’extrême de la plus extrême solitude, quand l’être a tout quitté, tout oublié, qu’il n’est plus que cette écoute captant la voix qui murmure alors que tout s’est tu. (Juliet 1999a [1986], 12) C’est précisément ce murmure intérieur que Juliet cherche à saisir dans la confusion qui l’agite alors, si faible parfois, toujours menacé de retourner au silence de la “substance interne.” Ainsi ce poème extrait de Fouilles: journée d’épais brouillard secrète amortie je me parcours d’un pas morne minutes interminables inaudible la voix murmure appelle cherche inlassablement à éclairer ces heures grises ruminations ressassements […]
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Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett
mais bientôt ce qui balbutiait s’engrisaille retourne au magma et l’évidence s’impose qu’aujourd’hui tout demeurera voilé inerte (49-50) Charles Juliet trouve dans l’œuvre de Beckett un dispositif créateur qui est au cœur de sa propre recherche littéraire: l’écriture est d’abord écoute. “Il y a une écriture de derrière, et c’est la parole écoutée” (Janvier, 77): cette belle formule de Ludovic Janvier à propos de Beckett éclaire aussi bien la singularité poétique de Charles Juliet. Cette voix intérieure à laquelle l’écrivain cherche à se rendre réceptif n’est pas bien sûr étrangère à la notion d’inconscient, et Charles Juliet le suggère à plusieurs reprises: Nous connaissons tous ces moments où une voix parle à l’intérieur de nous. Parfois, elle est faible, inaudible, d’autres fois, elle parle avec assez d’intensité pour qu’on entende ce qu’elle dit. Mes poèmes, ils s’écrivent dans ma tête quand je marche dans les rues, ou durant des insomnies. Je n’ai rien à reprendre à ce qui s’est dicté en moi. De même pour mes notes de Journal au début. Ces notes très brèves étaient dictées, elles surgissaient, je n’avais plus qu’à les transcrire. Molloy et En attendant Godot ont été écrits sous cette dictée de l’inconscient. Beckett m’a montré le manuscrit de cette pièce, il ne comporte pas une seule rature. Il m’avait dit: ‘Ça s’organisait entre la main et la page.’ C’est tout à fait cela. (1999b) On connaît effectivement l’intérêt que Beckett a manifesté pour les théories de la psychanalyse dans les années 30, en particulier lorsqu’il entreprend sa psychothérapie avec le docteur Bion, qui lui donnera par ailleurs l’occasion de se rendre à quelques conférences données par Jung à l’automne 1935. Les propos de Jung sur l’autonomie de la pulsion créatrice, qui sourd des profondeurs de l’être indépendamment des facultés conscientes pour s’exprimer sur le papier, font écho aux propres convictions de Beckett à ce moment. Cette conception de 415
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l’écriture se renforce encore lors de la fameuse révélation de 1946, qu’il évoque à deux reprises avec Charles Juliet: Jusque-là, j’avais cru que je pouvais faire confiance à la connaissance. Que je devais m’équiper sur le plan intellectuel. Ce jour-là, tout s’est effondré […] J’ai écrit Molloy et la suite le jour où j’ai compris ma bêtise. Alors je me suis mis à écrire les choses que je sens. (Beckett cité par Juliet 1999a, 39) Ce qu’il découvre à ce moment précis, comme il l’expliquera à Ludovic Janvier, c’est qu’il devait désormais écrire avec “l’obscurité qu’il s‘était efforcé de refouler” (Beckett cité par Bair, 319). Ces paroles, le poète Charles Juliet les prolonge en un écho presque parfait: “Le livre que l’écrivain écrit monte de sa part obscure” (1999b), “Il faut laisser advenir ce qui doit être, sans intervenir… Plus on s’efface et mieux c’est… Il faut se mettre en état d’être écrit” (Barry, 93). Ce qui marque donc la rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Beckett, c’est bien là encore le partage d’une expérience scripturale qu’il reconnaît comme identique et qui l’aide à progresser sur les sentiers de la création. Dans le même temps, il serait réducteur d’assimiler la voix qui porte les textes de Beckett et de Juliet à la simple expression de l’inconscient. Chez ces deux écrivains, l’œuvre se noue autour d’une véritable poétique de la voix. La voix intérieure n’est pas un simple dispositif d’inspiration, elle inscrit au lieu, au cœur, de l’écriture le surgissement de la parole dans sa matérialité physique: elle imprime au texte une pulsation, une scansion, un souffle, que l’on perçoit aussi bien, quoique différemment, dans la disposition paginale des poèmes de Charles Juliet que dans les proses denses de Beckett. Chez l’un comme chez l’autre, le flux de l’écriture est porté par le rythme de la parole: “Je parle mentalement tout ce que j’écris. L’écriture doit se calquer sur la parole, sur le rythme de la parole” (Barry, 95). Mais c’est aussi la matérialité sonore de la parole qui s’entend dans ces textes: Les mots que j’entendais, et je les entendais très bien, ayant l’oreille assez fine, je les entendais la première fois, et même encore la seconde, et souvent jusqu’à la troisième, comme des sons purs, libres de toute signification. (Beckett 1951 [2002], 66) 416
Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett
Les paroles prononcées ici par Molloy valent pour l’œuvre de Beckett toute entière: il y a chez l’écrivain un abandon du langage à la simple dimension sonore de la parole, indépendamment du sens, de la même façon que les poèmes de Charles Juliet font retentir l’épaisseur vibratoire de la langue, hors de toute recherche musicale. C’est au sens propre le “grain” de la voix que ces textes font entendre. Ce qui sans aucun doute donne à la voix une telle épaisseur est l’intimité qu’elle entretient avec le silence: “La voix module le silence” note Charles Juliet le 20 septembre 1959 (1978, 87). Chez Beckett comme chez Charles Juliet, la voix sourd du silence sans le recouvrir. Silence et voix se maintiennent en un équilibre étroit qui les renforce l’un l’autre sans en altérer l’intégrité: “une voix et un silence, une voix de silence, la voix de mon silence” dit le récitant des Textes pour rien (186). A la lecture de Beckett, Charles Juliet avait été fortement saisi par “cet étrange silence qui régnait dans les Textes pour rien” (1999a [1986], 12), et qu’il retrouve d’une autre manière dans les conversations qu’il mène avec l’écrivain. Il y revient d’ailleurs avec insistance: Sa beauté. Sa gravité. Sa concentration. Sa surprenante timidité. La densité de ses silences. L’intensité avec laquelle il fait exister l’invisible. (1999a [1986], 24-25) Si les textes de Beckett sont traversés par le silence, c’est paradoxalement au travers d’une parole surabondante, dont le flux est constamment heurté par les ruptures de syntaxe, les répétitions qui l’étranglent, les ellipses, les pauses qui en suspendent brutalement le cours: autant de disjonctions discursives qui trouent la parole et “[ménagent] la part du silence, de l’indicible” (Juliet, 7 juillet 1960 in 1978, 130), en signalant à chaque instant ce qui échappe au langage, à son pouvoir de signifier et de nommer. C’est en revanche une parole douloureusement arrachée au silence qui est rendue par les poèmes de Charles Juliet, marquée par la brièveté des vers, la fragmentation syntaxique, et l’importance accordée au blanc paginal qui semble toujours près de la faire retomber dans les profondeurs de l’aphasie:
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hors des mots enfoui sous des strates de silence tension calme espace fragile le murmure de la source (1998 [1981], 81) Le silence apparaît ainsi comme une chambre d’écho qui permet l’auscultation de la voix intérieure, tout comme il constitue un espace vibratoire qui en prolonge les résonances: “L’œuvre s’élabore dans le silence, tend au silence, n’admet que des mots gonflés de silence, et c’est encore dans le silence de l’être qu’on la reçoit” note Charles Juliet le 28 janvier 1965 (1979, 23). Une parole qui s’accorde, au sens musical du terme, à la ténuité du murmure intérieur et au silence qui le porte, l’enveloppe et l’exhausse, ne saurait être qu’une parole simple, dénuée de toute surcharge stylistique, une parole qui s’en tient à l’essentiel, une parole nue. “Un étrange silence, oui, et que prolonge la nudité de la parole. Une parole sans rhétorique, sans littérature, jamais parasitée par ce minimum d’affabulation qui lui est nécessaire pour développer ce qu’il lui faut énoncer” (Juliet, 1999a [1986], 12): Charles Juliet lit ici Beckett, qui lui tend en retour le miroir de ses propres exigences poétiques. Tout comme Beckett, Charles Juliet se situe, comme il le dit lui-même, “d’une certaine manière […] hors de la littérature” (Barry, 81), “se défiant du ‘poétique,’ s’en tenant à une langue simple et nue, exempte de tout lyrisme et de tout effet” (1998 [1981], 8). Chez Beckett, ce désir d’affaiblir la dimension poétique de l’écriture en passe d’abord par le choix de la langue française: selon ses propres termes, “[en anglais], on ne peut pas s’empêcher de faire de la poésie; en français, c’est plus facile d’écrire sans style” (Cité par Durozoi, 131). Cette recherche d’une certaine neutralité stylistique commence à se marquer fortement à 418
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partir de la Trilogie romanesque (textes de prédilection de Charles Juliet, rappelons-le): le passage au monologue intérieur, qui correspond par ailleurs à la recherche d’une parole au plus près de la vérité intérieure de l’être, éclipse progressivement toute rhétorique. Ainsi que l’explique Gérard Durozoi, à partir de 1946, la recherche scripturale de Beckett répond à un souci constant de neutraliser les effets stylistiques: l’écrivain cherche à s’approcher “d’un langage commun, presque oral, qui tend à devenir celui de n’importe qui, où ne subsistent que des écarts minimes par rapport au discours non littéraire” (Durozoi, 134). Beckett parlera lui-même à son propos d’une “écriture de la pénurie.” Chez Charles Juliet, la recherche de la neutralité stylistique dérive très directement de la quête du neutre évoquée précédemment. Elle en est l’expression scripturale, et relève de ce que Charles Juliet définit comme un classicisme de la langue: Est classique une langue où chaque mot est induit par la tension du neutre. D’où égalité du ton, simplicité du vocabulaire, de la structure de la phrase, absence de particularités dérivant de l’individu, de ses inclinations, de son histoire personnelle… (9 novembre 1965 in 1982, 65) On a pu parler à propos de sa poésie d’une poésie minimale: un lexique restreint, des structures phrastiques souvent très simples, peu d’adjectifs, et peu de tropes. L’écriture de Charles Juliet est une écriture ascétique: par la simplicité, la densité, et la rigueur – on pourrait dire aussi l’austérité –, l’écrivain recherche le mot vrai et juste (ce sont deux termes qui reviennent sans cesse chez lui), qui soit au plus près de la pensée et de la sensation à traduire. Alors qu’elle pourrait paraître aux marges de la poésie, cette écriture atteint au contraire par le refus des “beautés de style ou des richesses de langage” (4 décembre 1961 in 1978, 176) un “maximum de poésie” selon Jean-Pierre Siméon: “L’intransigeance du choix dans l’arsenal des moyens poétiques disponibles confère inévitablement aux partis pris du poète une plus forte valeur expressive. C’est simple: au lieu qu’il y ait déperdition du sens sur la surface pleine de la page, circulation dans le réseau des figures, il y a concentration, cristallisation sous les mots ou les rares effets élus […]. Chaque mot est un puits” (Siméon, 11). Se déploie chez Juliet comme chez Beckett ce que l’on pourrait appeler une “esthétique de la pauvreté”: 419
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Je lui parle de la ‘pauvreté’ de son univers, tant en ce qui concerne la langue qu’en ce qui concerne les moyens mis en œuvre: peu de personnages, peu de péripéties, peu de problèmes abordés, et cependant, tout ce qui importe est dit, et avec quelle vigueur, quelle singularité. […] Il me parle de Joyce, de Proust, qui visaient tous deux à créer une totalité, à la rendre dans son infinie richesse. Il suffit, remarque-t-il, d’examiner leurs manuscrits ou les épreuves qu’ils ont corrigées. Ils n’en finissaient pas d’ajouter et de surajouter. Lui, il va dans l’autre sens, vers le rien, en comprimant son texte toujours davantage. (Juliet 1999a [1986], 55) A cette exigence de pauvreté défendue par Beckett, Juliet fait écho par une formule lapidaire, qui résume parfaitement les enjeux de leur quête littéraire: “La pauvreté du verbe est le garant de sa vérité” (13 février 1965 in 1979, 31). D’une certaine façon, l’un et l’autre travaillent contre la langue, dans une défiance permanente de ses dérives qui faussent, ou excèdent, le sens de ce que l’on a à dire: “Dire c’est inventer. Faux comme de juste” dit le narrateur de Molloy (41), à quoi Charles Juliet répond dans son Journal “La chose surgit et meurt dans le mot qui la nomme” (29 novembre 1959 in 1978, 95). Ce combat mené contre les défaillances du langage évolue toutefois différemment chez les deux écrivains. Chez Beckett, il se radicalise peu à peu et en passe par une désagrégation progressive de la langue. Il mène à un constat d’échec, annoncé bien sûr par le titre suggestif de L’Innommable, définitivement validé par les Textes pour rien selon la formule bien connue: “Nommer, non, rien n’est nommable, dire, non, rien n’est dicible, alors quoi, je ne sais pas, il ne fallait pas commencer” (190). L’esthétique de la pauvreté dérive vers l’appauvrissement du texte et de l’écriture, vers l’extinction de la voix peu à peu absorbée par le silence: Elle faiblit encore, la vieille voix faible, qui n’a pas su me faire, elle se fait lointaine, pour dire qu’elle s’en va, essayer ailleurs, ou elle baisse, comment savoir, pour dire qu’elle va cesser, ne plus essayer. […] Des traces, elle veut laisser des traces, oui, comme en laisse l’air parmi les feuilles, parmi l’herbe, parmi le sable, c’est avec ça qu’elle veut faire une vie, mais c’est bientôt fini, il n’y aura pas de vie, il n’y aura pas eu de vie, il y aura le silence, l’air 420
Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett
qui tremble un instant encore avant de se figer pour toujours, une petite poussière qui tombe un petit moment. (Beckett 1958, 202) Lors de leur première rencontre, Beckett dit à Juliet: “L’écriture m’a conduit au silence” (Juliet, 1999a [1986], 21). Chez Juliet bien au contraire, le combat mené contre l’insuffisance du langage, quoique toujours vécu comme une souffrance, constitue néanmoins un moteur de création puissant, la source d’une parole certes parfois lente à venir, douloureusement arrachée au silence, mais qui jamais ne renonce, car animée par une foi inébranlable dans les mots, malgré tout. Cette divergence de positions est l’une des raisons qui conduira Charles Juliet à s’éloigner de l’œuvre de Beckett. Peu à peu, Charles Juliet quitte effectivement l’œuvre de Beckett, suivant en cela le conseil que Beckett lui-même lui avait adressé: “Éloignez-vous de moi.”4 Alors qu’il entame une lente reconstruction de lui-même et une lente remontée à la vie, l’œuvre de Beckett s’avère avoir sur lui un “pouvoir mortifère” selon ses propres termes. Il revient à Camus, qu’il avait délaissé pour Beckett, Camus “dont l’ardeur à vivre, la sensualité, l’exigence morale trouvent en [lui] de profonds échos” (Cité par A. Lauricella, 133), et se plonge dans la lecture des mystiques. Quoique son admiration pour Beckett demeure intacte, il ne le relira plus: Il y a déjà plusieurs années, lisant un livre de Beckett, je me suis heurté à cette affirmation: vivre, c’est se décomposer. En moi, il y eut un sursaut et tout ce que je suis a silencieusement crié: non, vivre ce n’est pas se décomposer. Vivre, c’est se construire, s’élever, se hisser vers la lumière. Et j’ai mis plusieurs secondes avant de me rendre compte que la vigueur de ma réaction m’avait fait me dresser. Un instant, je suis resté debout, rassemblé autour de mon centre, vibrant de la découverte que je venais de faire. (10 mars 1982, cité par Barry, 82) Reste la rencontre de deux écrivains qui a constitué, on l’aura compris, un moment décisif dans le parcours littéraire de Charles Juliet. La voix de Samuel Beckett, travaillée par la souffrance, le doute et le silence a offert au poète le lieu d’émergence de sa propre voix. Ces quelques vers du recueil Approches, quoique ne s’y référant pas 421
Anne Cousseau
directement, le disent superbement: “quand ta voix défaille / et me fait don / de ce qui en moi / s’était tu” (Juliet 1998 [1981], 176). Et demeure au-delà de cette rencontre le dialogue de deux œuvres qui ne cesse de se poursuivre. Ainsi ce poème de Affûts qui m’évoque tout à la fois Charles Juliet et Samuel Beckett: chassé livré à la nuit et à la soif alors il fut ce vagabond qui essaie tous les chemins franchit forêts déserts et marécages quête fiévreusement le lieu où planter ses racines cet exilé qui se parcourt et s’affronte se fouille et s’affûte ce banni que corrode la détresse des routes vaines mais qui parfois aux confins de la transparence hume l’air du pays natal (1990, 4è de couverture) Notes 1. Cette expression est celle de Charles Juliet lorsqu’il évoque Molloy, L’Innommable et les Textes pour rien, lors de l’entretien accordé à Philippe de Jonckheere et Jacky Chriqui. 2.
“Le neutre c’est le centre” (Juliet, 20 novembre 1959, 1978, 94).
3. “J’écoute et m’entends dicter un monde figé en perte d’équilibre […]. Et j’entends murmurer que tout fléchit et ploie, comme sous des faix. […] Et j’écouterais encore ce souffle lointain, depuis longtemps tu et que j’entends enfin […]. Mais je ne l’écouterai plus, pour le moment, car je ne l’aime pas, ce souffle lointain, et même je le crains. Mais c’est un son qui n’est pas comme
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Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett les autres, qu’on écoute, lorsqu’on le veut bien, et que souvent on peut faire taire, en s’éloignant ou en se bouchant les oreilles, mais c’est un son qui se met à vous bruire dans la tête, on ne sait comment, ni pourquoi. C’est avec la tête qu’on l’entend, les oreilles n’y sont pour rien, et on ne peut l’arrêter, mais il s’arrête tout seul, quand il veut” (Beckett 2002 [1951], p. 52-53). 4. La phrase complète, telle qu’elle est rapportée par Juliet dans les Rencontres, est la suivante: “Éloignez-vous et de vous et de moi” (1999a [1986], 43). Anne Lauricella reproduit l’intégralité de la lettre qui contient ces mots, adressée par Beckett le ler janvier 1969. La formulation en est légèrement différente: “Éloignez-vous et de mon travail et de vous-même” (Lauricella, 284).
Ouvrages cités Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett (Paris: Fayard, 1979 [1978]). Barry, Rodolphe, Charles Juliet en son parcours, Rencontre avec Rodolphe Barry (Paris: Les Flohic Éditeurs, 2001). Beckett, Samuel, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953). –, Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Minuit, 1958). –, Molloy (Paris: Minuit ‘Double,’ 2002 [1951]). Durozoi, Gérard, Beckett (Paris: Bordas, “Présence littéraire,” 1972). Janvier, Ludovic, Beckett par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, “Écrivains de toujours,”1969). Juliet, Charles, Affûts (Paris: P.O.L., 1990). –, Fouilles suivi de L’Œil se scrute, Approches, Une lointaine lueur (Paris: P.O.L., 1998). –, Journal I 1957-1964 (Paris: Hachette, 1978). –, Journal II 1965-1968 (Paris: Hachette, 1979). –, Journal III 1968-1981 (Paris: Hachette, 1982). –, Lambeaux (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1997 [P.O.L., 1995]). –, Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett (Paris: P.O.L., 1999a [Fata Morgana, 1986]). –, “Juliet, l’insoutenable légèreté de l’abîme,” entretien avec Dominique Sampiero in Le Matricule des Anges, avril-juin 1994, n° 7 (article disponible sur le site www.lmda.net). –, “Rencontre avec Charles Juliet,” entretien avec Philippe de Jonckheere et Jacky Chriqui, 21 juin 1999b, www.initiales.org. Lauricella, Anne, Charles Juliet, d’où venu? (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 2004). Siméon, Jean-Pierre, Charles Juliet, La conquête dans l’obscur (Paris: jeanmichelplace Poésie, 2003).
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Chris Ackerley is Professor and former HOD of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His speciality is annotation, especially of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. Recent works include Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (2nd. ed. 2004), Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt (2005), and with S. E. Gontarski the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004 & 2006). Elizabeth Barry is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published widely on Samuel Beckett in Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Irish Studies Review, and her monograph, Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché, appeared with Palgrave Macmillan in September 2006. She has also published book chapters on the dramatists Jean Genet, Roy Williams and Sarah Kane. Jackie Blackman is a Government of Ireland scholar and has lectured on Beckett at Trinity College Dublin. In 2006 she was dramaturge for a centenary production of Endgame at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin. She gave the inaugural lecture for the Annual Beckett Lecture Series in Tel Aviv University (2007) and her essay “Beckett Judaizing Beckett” was awarded second place in the IFTR New Scholar’s prize, 2007. John Bolin is writing a D.Phil. thesis on Beckett’s novels and early aesthetic theory. He is a student at Exeter College, Oxford University. Gregory Byala has recently completed his doctoral work at Yale University with a dissertation entitled Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Beginning. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Muhlenberg College where he teaches courses on twentieth-century literature. María José Carrera is Lecturer in English Philology at the University of Valladolid (Spain). Research interests include Beckett’s short prose texts and manuscript editing. Anthony Cordingley teaches in l’Institut du Monde Anglophone at l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. He is completing a PhD from the University of Sydney on Samuel Beckett’s philosophical and literary education, with a special focus on Comment c’est/How It Is. Thomas Cousineau, Professor of English at Washington College in Maryland, has recently retired as the editor of The Beckett Circle/Le Cercle de Beckett.
Notes on Contributors His latest book is Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2008). Anne Cousseau est Maître de Conférences en Littérature française à l’Université Nancy 2. Auteur de plusieurs articles et communications sur Marguerite Duras, elle a également publié Poétique de l’enfance dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Duras (Droz, 1997) et co-édité les actes du colloque Marguerite Duras : Marges et transgressions (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2006). Ses champs de recherche portent par ailleurs sur le roman contemporain, et l’écriture de l’enfance. Andrew Eastham specializes in Victorian Aestheticism, Modernism and Contemporary literature. He has recently written articles on Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Allan Hollinghurst. The current essay is part of a wider project on “Literary Modernity and the Concept of Irony,” stretching from Pater to Hollinghurst. He is also writing a book on Aestheticism and Theatricality: from Pater to Eliot. Marion Fries-Dieckmann is lecturer in the English Department of the University of Düsseldorf. She is co-editor of the volume Der unbekannte Beckett. Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur (2005). Her recently published PhD thesis – Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Sprache (2007) – is on the German translations of Beckett’s drama. Maximilian de Gaynesford is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading and author of I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (OUP, 2006), Hilary Putnam (McGill-Queens, 2006) and John McDowell (Polity, 2004) as well as of various articles on the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. Karine Germoni is Professeur agrégée of French literature, and teaches twentieth century French Literature at the Université de Provence. She is currently completing her doctorat “Ecarts, Jeux et Enjeux de la ponctuation beckettienne.” She has already published several articles on Beckett in The Journal of Beckett Studies and SBT/A. Guillaume Gesvret est étudiant en Lettres Modernes à l’Université Paris 7Denis Diderot. Il termine sous la direction d’Evelyne Grossman un mémoire de Master 2 intitulé: “L’écriture du corps spectral dans Mal vu mal dit, Worstward Ho, Quad et ...que nuages... de Samuel Beckett.” David A. Hatch teaches British Literature and Advanced Writing at Brigham Young University. His recent scholarship includes essays on Samuel Beckett’s
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Notes on Contributors “Three Dialogues” with Georges Duthuit, little magazines including Eugene Jolas’s Transition, and Utopia/Dystopia. Sjef Houppermans teaches modern French literature at Leiden University. He is the author of books on Raymond Roussel, Marcel Proust, Alain RobbeGrillet, Claude Ollier and Renaud Camus. He also published a collection of articles on French literature in a philosophical and psychoanalytical perspective : Lectures du désir (1998) and wrote a study on Beckett entitled Samuel Beckett et Compagnie. He is a member of the board of SBT/A. Dirk Van Hulle teaches English literature at the University of Antwerp and maintains the Beckett Endpage (www.ua.ac.be/beckett). His publications include Joyce and Beckett, Discovering Dante and Textual Awareness. He is executive editor of the series of genetic editions of Beckett’s bilingual works and is currently working with Mark Nixon on Beckett’s Library. Paul Lawley has published widely on Beckett’s work over many years. His most recent publication is a student guide to Waiting for Godot (Continuum). Seán Lawlor is writing his Ph.D. thesis, on quotation and allusion in the early poems in English, at the University of Reading under the supervision of Dr Rónán MacDonald. Rónán McDonald is Director of the Beckett International Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Literature, University of Reading. His recent publications include The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2006) and The Death of the Critic (2007). Franz Michael Maier is a Privatdozent of Musicology at the Freie Universitaet Berlin. His ‘Habilitationsschrift’ Becketts Melodien. Die Musik und die Idee des Zusammenhangs bei Schopenhauer, Proust und Beckett appeared in 2006. Mark Nixon is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. He is the CoDirector of the Beckett International Foundation there and has published widely on Beckett’s work, with a focus on Beckett’s relationship with German culture. He is currently preparing an electronic genetic edition of Beckett’s Textes pour rien / Texts for Nothing, and working with Dirk Van Hulle on Samuel Beckett’s Library. John Pilling is Emeritus Professor of English and European Literature at the University of Reading. He was for more than ten years a Director of the Beckett International Foundation there, and Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He published his first book, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and
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Notes on Contributors Kegan Paul) in 1976, and his last, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Palgrave Macmillan), to ‘celebrate’ the centenary in 2006. Friedhelm Rathjen is a free-lance literary critic, writer and translator. He is the editor of In Principle, Beckett is Joyce (Split Pea Press, 1994) and the author of more than twenty books in the German language, including weder noch: Aufsätze zu Samuel Beckett (Edition ReJoyce, 2005), Samuel Beckett (Rowohlt, 2006) and Beckett: Eine Einführung ins Werk (Edition ReJoyce, 2007). Michael Angelo Rodriguez earned his M.Phil. in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin, his M.T.S. from Harvard, and his Ph.D. from Florida State University. He is currently a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University. Russell Smith is a Lecturer in English in the School of Humanities at the Australian National University. He has published several essays on Beckett in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies, and is currently preparing a collection of essays on Beckett and Ethics for Continuum. He also writes regularly on contemporary visual art. Paul Stewart is Associate Professor and Head of the Languages and Literature Department of Intercollege, Nicosia. He is the author of Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions, (Rodopi, 2006) and has published a number of articles on various facets of Beckett’s work, including articles in The Journal of Beckett Studies, and SBT/A. Carla Taban a obtenu en mars 2007 son doctorat en littérature française du 20e siècle de l'Université de Toronto, avec une thèse titrée “Modalités po(ï)étiques de configuration textuelle: le cas de Molloy de Samuel Beckett.” Un autre article traitant de “La dimension diachronique des textes beckettiens” paraîtra sous peu dans “Voix plurielles, la revue électronique de l'Association des professeur-e-s de français des universités et collèges canadiens.”
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Avant-Garde and Criticism Edited by Klaus Beekman and Jan de Vries
Avant-Garde and Criticism sheds new light on the complex aims, functions, practices and contexts of art-criticism in relation to the European avant-garde. Although many avant-garde works and the avant-gardes of various countries have been analyzed, considerably less attention has been given to the reviews in newspapers and journals on avant-garde literature, art, architecture and film. This volume of Avant-Garde Critical Studies will look at how art critics operated in a strategic way. The strategies of avant-garde criticism are diverse. Art critics, especially when they are artists themselves, attempt to manipulate the cultural climate in their favour. They use their position to legitimize avant-garde concepts and to conquer a place in the cultural field. But they are also markedly influenced by the context in which they operate. The position of fellow-critics and the ideological bias of the papers in which they publish can be as important as the political climate in which their criticism flourishes. The analysis of avant-garde art criticism can also make clear how strategies sometimes fail and involuntarily display non-avant-garde characteristics. On the other hand traditionalist criticism on the avant-garde offers new insights into its status and reception in a given time and place.
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The Mourning After Attending the Wake of Postmodernism Edited by Neil Brooks and Josh Toth
Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field – N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others – this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to “get over” postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.
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