Beckett and Ethics 0826498361, 9780826498366

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Beckett and Ethics

Continuum Literary Studies Series Also available in the series: Active Reading by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson Beckett and Death edited by Steve Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew Beckett and Decay by Katherine White Beckett and Ethics edited by Russell Smith Beckett and Phenomenology edited by Matthew Feldman and Ulrika Maude Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman

British Fiction in the Sixties by Sebastian Groes Canonizing Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Joyce and Company by David Pierce London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida by Ruben Borg Milton, Evil and Literary History by Claire Colebrook Modernism and the Post-colonial by Peter Childs Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon Recalling London by Alex Murray Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy by Simon Swift Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust by J. M. van der Laan Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips

Beckett and Ethics

Edited by Russell Smith

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 © Russell Smith and contributors 2008 Collected Shorter Plays by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1984 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. The Complete Dramatic Works by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © Faber and Faber Ltd. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The Complete Short Prose 1928–1989 by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1995 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Endgame and Act Without Words by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.: copyright renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-9836-6 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Beckett’s Ethical Undoing Russell Smith

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1. ‘We have our being in justice’: Formalism, Abstraction and Beckett’s ‘Ethics’ David Cunningham

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2. ‘A suitable engine of destruction’? Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx’s Ethics Matthew Feldman

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3. Withholding Assent: Beckett in the Light of Stoic Ethics Anthony Uhlmann

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4. Post-war Beckett: Resistance, Commitment or Communist Krap? Jackie Blackman

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5. A World without Monsters: Beckett and the Ethics of Cruelty Paul Sheehan

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6. The Anethics of Desire: Beckett, Racine, Sade Shane Weller 7. ‘So Fluctuant a Death’: Entropy and Survival in The Lost Ones and Long Observation of the Ray David Houston Jones

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8. Beckett and the World Steven Connor

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9. From Joyce to Beckett: From National to Global Peter Boxall

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10. ‘Throw up for good’: Gagging, Compulsion and a Comedy of Ethics in the Trilogy Laura Salisbury

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The editor and contributors are grateful to the Estate of Samuel Beckett, the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading and the Board of Trinity College Dublin, for permission to quote from Samuel Beckett’s unpublished manuscripts and letters. The editor and contributors also wish to acknowledge permission to quote from the following published sources: Collected Shorter Plays by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1984 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.; The Complete Short Prose 1928–1989 by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1995 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.; The Complete Dramatic Works by Samuel Beckett, copyright © Faber and Faber Ltd. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.; Endgame and Act without Words by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.; Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.; copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Notes on Contributors

Jackie Blackman is an IRCHSS scholar at Trinity College Dublin. Her work on Beckett has been awarded an IFTR prize (2007) and the Samuel Beckett Studentship (2007), and she has lectured on Beckett in Dublin, Paris and Tel Aviv. She was dramaturge for a centennial production of Endgame at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin (2006) and her short fiction has been published by the Evergreen Review and broadcast on RTE radio. Peter Boxall is Reader in English at the University of Sussex. His recent work includes Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006). Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism is forthcoming from Continuum. He has edited a Reader’s Guide to Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and a collection of essays entitled Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics. He is co-editor of Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and reviews editor of Textual Practice. He is currently preparing a book entitled Twenty-First Century Literature. Steven Connor is a writer, critic and broadcaster, and the Academic Director of the London Consortium. He is the author of Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (1988; 2nd edn, Davies Group Publishers 2007) and editor of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Endgame’: A New Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1992), as well as books on Dickens, Joyce, the post-war novel and topics in cultural history and theory including, most recently, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: OUP 2000), The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion 2003) and Fly (London: Reaktion 2006). His website at www.stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress. David Cunningham is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. Among his many publications are the co-edited collections Adorno and Literature (London: Continuum 2006) and Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2005). He is currently working on a study of modernism and abstraction, as well as on a co-authored text on theories of the metropolis. Matthew Feldman is Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Northampton and edits the Routledge quarterly, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. He has published widely on European modernism with texts

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on Beckett in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Journal of Beckett Studies and Genetic Joyce Studies, as well as Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ (London: Continuum 2006) and (edited with Mark Nixon), Beckett’s Literary Legacies (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007). He is currently writing a comparative history of interwar propaganda. David Houston Jones is Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter. He is the author of books and essays on Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and contemporary writing in French, including The Body Abject (Oxford: Peter Lang 2000) and a critical edition of François Tanazacq, La Suprême Abjection de la Passion du Christ (Brussels: la Pierre d’Alun 2001). He is currently working on a book on Beckett, testimony and informational narrative. Laura Salisbury is RCUK Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Culture at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published work on Beckett, comedy and ethics and on the philosopher Michel Serres, and is currently writing a book for Edinburgh University Press entitled From Late Modernism to Postmodernism. Her major research project is a study of the relationship between modernity and early-twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language. Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: CUP 2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition (Westport, Conn.: Praeger 2003). He is also a founding member of the London Beckett Seminar, and a contributor to The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber 2006). He has published chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: CUP 2004), The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded (London: Wallflower 2005) and Beckett after Beckett (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2006). He is currently working on a historical poetics of transgression in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and film. Russell Smith is Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published essays on Beckett in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Endgame’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2007). He is co-editor of Australian Humanities Review and has published numerous articles and reviews on contemporary Australian literature and visual art in Southerly, Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia, Broadsheet and other journals. Anthony Uhlmann teaches Literature at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: CUP 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge: CUP 2006) and co-editor of Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Notes (Amsterdam: Brill 2006). From 2008 he will be the coordinating editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies.

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Shane Weller is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His recent publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (Oxford: Legenda 2005), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and The Flesh in the Text, co-edited with Thomas Baldwin and James Fowler (Oxford: Peter Lang 2007). He is currently completing a book entitled Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Introduction: Beckett’s Ethical Undoing Russell Smith

Beckett and ethics Beckett and ethics: the copula implies a relation of some sort, and if one defi nition of ethics is the philosophy of relations, we might then ask: What is the relation between Beckett and ethics? At first sight, things don’t look very promising. Many of Beckett’s characters are implacably committed to a solipsistic withdrawal from the world and any other human beings who happen to inhabit it. When they do enter into relation with each other, the result—even in the throes of lovemaking—is often gratuitous cruelty and meaningless suffering. And perhaps worst of all, from an ethical point of view, this suffering and cruelty is the occasion, not for pity or tragic pathos, but for laughter: ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ (Beckett 1986, 101). So we might expect the relation between Beckett and ethics to be one of, at best, frosty indifference, at worst, outright hostility. And indeed, one example of such hostility comes from ethical philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, writing in the journal Ethics, bravely sinks the boot into Beckett for his ‘deeply religious sensibility’ and the ‘complete absence in [his] writing of any joy in the limited and finite’ (251). ‘Why is it’, she asks rather piteously, ‘that these voices are so intolerant of society and shared forms of thought and feeling?’ (252)1 Why indeed? Nussbaum’s disappointment in her reading of Beckett seems constrained by her demand for a straightforwardly realist treatment of ethical material. Nussbaum’s disappointment in her reading of Beckett seems constrained by her demand for a straightforwardly realist treatment of ethical material. But we might quite seriously ask: Is there anything of ethical value in Beckett’s writing? It depends, of course, on what you understand by ethics; for the moment, I will consider only three of the more prominent versions. First, in the founding text of Western ethical philosophy, The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines ethics as the formation of good character through the practice of moral virtue, where moral virtue is thought not to come naturally but to require cultivation, training and repetition, like learning

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to play a musical instrument. Eventually the practice of virtue becomes second nature, becomes habit: ‘moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit (ethos), and has indeed derived its name . . . from that word’ (Aristotle 33). Significantly, Aristotle rejects Plato’s ‘idea of good’ as the basis of ethics, instead orienting the practice of virtue towards the attainment of happiness (Aristotle 8–14). For Beckett, on the other hand, habit is ‘the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit’ (Beckett 1965, 19), and his characters could hardly be described as vigorous practitioners of virtue in pursuit of happiness. Little wonder that a ‘neo-Aristotelian’ ethicist like Nussbaum finds Beckett’s characters such lamentable role models. At best, they make fitful and often fruitless attempts to obtain relief from misery: as the narrator of From an Abandoned Work puts it, ‘unhappiness like mine, there’s no annihilating that’ (Beckett 1995, 159). Second, in the Christian era, ethics loses its focus on the self and its happiness, and becomes a matter of self-renunciation and submission to external law (Foucault 2006). The emphasis shifts from character and habit to decision and act. Good conduct becomes a question of choice, where at every turn the fate of the eternal soul hangs in the balance. Christian ethics is a drama of autonomous decision-making, a theme that dovetails neatly into modern pragmatic liberalism. Hence Kant’s categorical imperative, which seeks to ground Christian submission to the law on the more universal and incontrovertible foundation of Reason itself: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant 80). But here too, as Laura Salisbury observes in her chapter here, Beckett’s characters prove themselves woefully unqualified to act as Kantian ethical subjects, being only intermittently capable of reason, and almost entirely bereft of sensus communis, thereby fatally depriving rationalist humanism of its universality. A third mode of ethical philosophy, particularly in postmodern thought, focuses on the theme of alterity and difference. Here alterity is not understood simply in terms of an intersubjective relationship between Self and Other (which after all might just return us to good old Hegelian argy-bargy), but in terms of the attempt to think alterity itself—in its irreducible otherness— without subsuming it under a totalizing logic of the Same. Thus in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, the Other is not simply encountered by a fully formed Self, but is intimately implicated in the formation of that Self, which is thus constitutively divided from itself by the fissure of alterity. Moreover—and this is the Levinasian turn of the screw—this Other issues a demand, indeed a command, in a primordial face-to-face encounter that is prior to all representation or interpretation, that the wounded Self assume responsibility for the Other that wounds it, in a version of ethics as a kind of sacrificial dispossession and submission to an unappeasable law (see Levinas; Butler). It is, to a large extent, the Levinasian model of ethics that forms the basis of the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in critical and literary theory in the late 1990s, 2 a turn seen variously

Introduction

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as an attempt to give ethico-political substance to what was perceived as the empty linguistic formalism of deconstruction (see Critchley et al., 2000), or as a retreat from the conflictual space of the political in search of a consensual realm of the ethical. David Cunningham’s chapter here provides an astute analysis of the relations between ethics and politics in contemporary theory. Here too, however, Beckett’s characters seem implacably determined either to deny the existence of the Other—as for instance in the ending of How It Is: ‘never any Pim no nor any Bom no never anyone no only me’ (Beckett 1964, 159)—or, where such denials prove impossible, to evade responsibility for the Other by any means possible: through escape, or withdrawal, or inaction, or acts of violence. In Beckett’s world, if the Levinasian face-of-the-Other ever succeeds in commanding the subject’s attention—like Nagg emerging from his dustbin to demand ‘Me pap!’ (Beckett 1986, 96)—the outcome is rarely the ‘primordial phenomenon of gentleness’ that Levinas anticipates (Levinas 150). Indeed, accounting for the extraordinary violence of Beckett’s world, and the cool ambivalence of its presentation, is a significant ethical problem, one which is addressed here in various ways by Shane Weller, Paul Sheehan and David Houston Jones. Whether as a form of self-discipline oriented towards the attainment of happiness, or as a mode of rational decision-making oriented towards a universal notion of the good, or as an ontological mode of openness to alterity oriented towards acceptance of responsibility for the Other; each of these forms of ethics seems to get short shrift in Beckett’s universe. It is often said that Beckett’s writing involves an aesthetic of lacunae, whereby it is what is apparently absent that constitutes the stuff of the work. If this is the case for ethics, then the problem becomes how to account for the absence of ethics in Beckett’s work: how is that absence constructed, and what function does it serve? This is what we might call Beckett’s ‘ethical undoing’, which might be understood in various ways. It might mean an undoing of ethics through a disintegration of each term of the ethical relation: ‘no nominative, no accusative, no verb’ as Beckett puts it (Shenker 148). But also, might not Beckett’s insistence on this undoing—on the disintegration of subject, object and the possibility of an ethical relation between them—be itself thought of as an ethical act? Or, finally, if ethics is fundamentally, as Aristotle insists, practical philosophy, a science of doing, might not the insistence of Beckett’s characters on doing nothing itself take on an ethical value, an ‘ethical undoing’ as a principled rejection of an ethics of decision and action? Indeed, this brings us to one of the demonstrable connections between Beckett and ethics: Beckett’s lifelong interest in the Ethics of Arnold Geulincx. Beckett once suggested to Sighle Kennedy that Geulincx’s maxim ‘ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’, or ‘Wherein you have no power, therein neither should you will’, might serve as one of two key points of departure in interpreting his work (Beckett 1983a, 113). Both Geulincx’s philosophy, discussed in Matthew

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Feldman’s chapter here, and Stoical philosophy, discussed here by Anthony Uhlmann, question the degree to which human beings can exert control over their own actions, suggesting that ethics might consist of no more than the question of whether one mentally submits to one’s own powerlessness in the face of the inevitable. If this, fundamentally, is an ethics of undoing, if there really is ‘Nothing to be done’ (Beckett 1986, 11), then one might well ask: What kind of ethics is that?

Ethical Beckett If Beckett poses difficulties for ethics, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that allegations of a dubious ethicality in Beckett’s work, such as Martha Nussbaum’s quoted above, are exceedingly rare.3 Indeed, one gets the impression, not only that, as Andrew Gibson claims, ‘there has long been a widespread but often rather vague conviction of the ethical significance of Beckett’s work’ (Gibson 2002, 93–94), but that the ethical reading has been a dominant mode in the reception of Beckett. It is worth noting at this point the immeasurable influence of Beckett’s own life on the reception of his work. In 1941 Beckett became an active member of the French Resistance and only narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo, his extraordinary courage later earning him the Croix de Guerre. For many readers, myself included, Beckett is nothing less than a hero, not only as a writer, but as a man.4 Part of the furore about Deirdre Bair’s biography was its portrayal of Beckett as a neurotic misanthrope; James Knowlson’s authorized biography sought to correct this image, showing Beckett as a highly disciplined craftsman, a loyal friend, an unfailing correspondent, a companionable drinking partner and a generous supporter of younger artists and writers. ‘The modern age’s most lovable pessimist’ was Terry Eagleton’s sardonic description in a comment piece for The Guardian a few days before the centenary of Beckett’s birth, but Eagleton’s target here was neither Beckett himself nor his hero status, but sentimental and consolatory interpretations of his work as expressive of a ‘timeless human condition’. For Eagleton, too, Beckett is a hero, and Eagleton claims him, somewhat coercively perhaps, as a ‘militant of the left’ whose ‘fragmentary, provisional art is supremely anti-totalitarian’ (Eagleton 2006a). But what remains implicit in Eagleton’s article, as it does in much writing on Beckett, is the notion that, if Beckett was in some ways ethically admirable in his life, then this distinction must also be somehow present in his work. But this is something that really should be shown rather than taken as given, as Jackie Blackman’s article in this volume seeks to demonstrate. That said, David Cunningham, in his chapter here, warns against the search for ‘a Beckettian “ethics” as such’, arguing that it would either displace the concrete particularity of Beckett’s texts to a ‘quasi-transcendental’ plane, or

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reduce them to a ‘vaguely stoic set of soundbites’. It’s a warning worth heeding, though it does conjure the attractive prospect of a commonplace-book of wise saws culled from Beckett’s work, from Murphy’s inscrutable: ‘ “You do what you are . . . you suffer a dreary ooze of your being into doing” ’ (Beckett 1973, 25), to Play’s blithely practical: ‘Adulterers, take warning, never admit’ (Beckett 1986, 310), to Rockaby’s peremptory: ‘Fuck life’ (Beckett 1986, 442). This also raises the question of the extent to which ethics itself might be reduced to a set of soundbites, 5 from ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ (usually attributed to Christ but already in Leviticus 19.18) to Kant’s categorical imperative quoted above, to Lacan’s celebrated formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis: ‘do not give up on your desire’ (Lacan 311–325). Beckett is not averse to comically disfiguring ethical maxims, from Vladimir’s ‘Hope deferred maketh the something sick’ (Beckett 1986, 12), to Mr Nixon’s claim that Watt ‘would literally turn the other cheek, I honestly believe, if he had the energy’ (Beckett 1953, 20). Certainly, if there were a Beckettian ethics ‘as such’, it might be best expressed in the soundbites that Cunningham quotes: the delicately poised negation-affirmation of ‘fail better’ from Worstward Ho (Beckett 1983b, 7) and, especially, the famous last words of The Unnamable, ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Beckett 1994, 314). Slavoj Žižek, citing this passage, argues that ‘this simple persistence against all odds is ultimately the stuff ethics is made of’ (Žižek 120). So too, Peter Hallward notes of Alain Badiou that, ‘building on Lacan’s inspiration and Beckett’s example, Badiou’s ethical maxim is simply “Keep going!” ’ (Hallward 265). So, if the ethical has been a dominant mode of reading Beckett, it is probably worthwhile to distinguish the various formulations of an ethical Beckett. It begins with the early humanist reception of Beckett, a largely redemptive reading, offset by tinges of existentialism or absurdism, wherein the stoical resilience of Beckett’s characters becomes testimony to a universal, undefeated human spirit; where, in the words of the Nobel Prize citation, Beckett’s work ‘transmute[s] the destitution of modern man into his exaltation’ (Swedish Academy). Beckett’s apparent pessimism, the Academy concludes, ‘houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence, a despair that has to reach the utmost bounds of suffering to discover that compassion has no bounds’. If such a reading seems almost comically inadequate now, it is perhaps due to its cheerful disregard for the caustic irony to which such platitudes are subjected in Beckett’s work. The next major phase of Beckett criticism was the poststructuralist turn initiated by Steven Connor (1988), Leslie Hill (1990a), Thomas Trezise (1990) and Carla Locatelli (1990). This involved an often implicit rather than explicit ethical dimension, wherein the ethicality of Beckett’s prose was seen to inhere in its dismantling of the linguistic subject and its dedication to

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textual indeterminacy.6 As Shane Weller neatly summarizes, ‘the deconstructive Beckett . . . [maintains] an ethical openness to alterity on both the thematic level (as the self’s radical splitting) and the textual level (openness as indeterminacy)’ (Weller 2006, 28). Weller quotes Leslie Hill’s obituary as an exemplary statement of the deconstructive take on Beckett’s ethicality: ‘what emerges most clearly is the power of Beckett’s commitment to an ethics of writing, his respect for the trace of otherness, the alterity and difference at the heart of assumed identity that, for Beckett, was what was at stake in literature’ (Hill 1990b; quoted in Weller 2006, 27). But deconstructive readings of Beckett often faced the uncanny problem of seeming almost too easy. For example, when Moran writes ‘It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language’ (1994, 116), or the Derridean keyword ‘aporia’ appears in the opening of The Unnamable (1994, 293), it seems virtually impossible not to read Beckett as a precursor, a deconstructionist avant-la-lettre.7 Jacques Derrida himself explained that he had not written on Beckett because he felt such close ‘proximity to’ and ‘identification with’ Beckett’s writing that it made it both ‘too easy and too hard’ to respond philosophically to it (Derrida 1992, 60–61); too hard, perhaps, because too easy. By the same token, however, if deconstruction celebrated textual indeterminacy as the ‘free play’ of the signifier, and welcomed the dissolution of the linguistic subject as a liberation from the shackles of identity-thinking, it was difficult to show that such strategies were the outcome of a liberatory or celebratory impulse in Beckett’s writing. However, a significant strand of the poststructuralist reception of Beckett did seek to extrapolate such a liberatory impulse in Beckett’s writing, specifically through identification with the politics of postcolonialism. David Lloyd, Declan Kiberd, Nels Pearson and Pascale Casanova, among others, sought to recover the almost-erased traces of cultural and geographical specificity in Beckett’s writing, reading its scenarios of oppression and resistance in terms of the politics of Ireland in the twentieth century. What emerges in the ongoing debates around Beckett and politics (see Boxall 2000; Boxall ed. 2002; Eagleton 2006b), is the way that Beckett’s texts repeatedly appear both suggestive of and uncannily resistant to specifically grounded historical or political readings. This question of the geopolitical worldliness of Beckett’s texts is examined here by Steven Connor and Peter Boxall. Finally, in the wake of the highly influential deconstructive reading of Beckett, if there has been a more explicit ‘turn to ethics’ in recent Beckett criticism, it has, in part at least, involved a critique of the deconstructive version of Beckett’s ethicality. To conclude this section I will discuss four main contributions to this debate: those of Simon Critchley, Alain Badiou, Andrew Gibson and Shane Weller. In a series of reflections on the ethical implications of comedy and humour, Simon Critchley has repeatedly returned to Beckett’s work as exemplary.

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Critchley (following Freud) elaborates an ethical distinction between jokes and humour: jokes laugh at others, while ‘true humour’ laughs at oneself (Critchley 2002, 14). The ethical value of such humour lies in its acknowledgement of human finitude; it ‘arises out of a palpable sense of inability, inauthenticity, impotence and impossibility’ (Critchley 1999, 224–225). Critchley sees the famous ‘syntax of weakness’8 of Beckett’s prose—its characteristic rhythms of hesitation, qualification, correction and self-cancellation—as exemplary of this humour, an inherently comic technique that stages a ‘double inability . . . unable to go on and not to go on’ (Critchley 1997, 159). Critchley’s reading, as with many deconstructive readings, neatly draws together arguments based in textual form (syntax of weakness) and thematic content (acknowledgement of finitude). But, as Laura Salisbury argues in her chapter here, in his concern to safeguard the ethicality of Beckett’s prose, Critchley ‘persistently refuses to acknowledge the rage and desperate desire for mastery so clearly visible’ in Beckett’s work. As an example, we might consider the way Molloy exults after his assault on the charcoal burner: People imagine, because you are old, poor, crippled, terrified, that you can’t stand up for yourself, and generally speaking that is so. But given favourable conditions, a feeble and awkward assailant, in your own class what, and a lonely place, and you have a good chance of showing what stuff you are made of. (Beckett 1994, 84–85) There is something both glorious and gloriously funny about this passage; and just as there is nothing hesitant about the violence, so too there is nothing hesitant about the prose: it is thumpingly grandiloquent.9 If, for Critchley, the ethicality of Beckett’s work consists in its comical acknowledgement of weakness and finitude (‘I can’t go on’), then quite the opposite is the case with Alain Badiou, whose sequence of essays collected in English under the title On Beckett constitutes one of the more radical interventions in Beckett criticism in recent years. As Andrew Gibson puts it, Badiou reads Beckett’s work as ‘a project of thought . . . whose implications are ultimately ethical’ (Gibson 2006, 119). And, as noted earlier, the core of Badiou’s reading of Beckett’s ethicality is the relentlessness of that final ‘I’ll go on’: ‘In a manner that is almost aggressive,’ Badiou writes, ‘all of Beckett’s genius tends toward affirmation’ (Badiou 41). There are two main elements in Badiou’s reading of Beckett. First, and in some ways most problematic, is the claim that there is a ‘turn to ethics’ in Beckett’s oeuvre around 1960 with the writing of How It Is: ‘from 1960 onwards, the centre of gravity shifts to the question of the Same and the Other, and, in particular, to that of the existence—whether real or potential—of the Other’ (Badiou 4). Where Beckett’s earlier work is essentially trapped in the self-reflexive coils of a solipsistic cogito, Badiou claims, the later work opens

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onto the ‘the category of alterity, of the encounter and the figure of the Other’ (16), and somewhat surprisingly perhaps, to the possibility of love: ‘This is the question that ultimately ties together all of Beckett’s work. Is an effective Two possible, a Two that would be in excess of solipsism? We might also say that this is the question of love’ (5). Thus Badiou’s idiosyncratic readings of late Beckett texts such as Enough, ‘in which the figure of the couple is indisputable and gives rise to a strange and powerful form of happiness’ (64). The other significant aspect of Badiou’s reading is that, whereas philosophers have traditionally been cautious about treating Beckett’s works as if they were philosophical texts, Badiou has no such qualms: for Badiou, ‘Beckett treats a set of problems in the medium of prose’ (15); Worstward Ho is ‘a short philosophical treatise . . . a treatment in shorthand of the question of being’ (80). Central to Badiou’s version of Beckett as a thinker, according to Andrew Gibson’s summary, is its emphasis on truth, a word that the generation raised on Derrida and Foucault had learned to pronounce with a cautionary wiggle of their fingertips. But for Badiou, ‘truth is neither relative, nor thinkable only in its historical determinations, nor linguistically constructed. It is rather both radical and rare’ (Gibson 2002, 94). Truth is an event that breaks into the established order of things, forcing us to consider a new way of being. Badiou defines four truthdomains: art, science, politics and love, and gives as examples of rare and transformative events Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, Galilean physics, the French Revolution and Abelard and Heloise (Gibson 2006, 55). Beckett’s work can thus be seen as a procedure dedicated to truth, a rigorous means of ‘clearing the ground’ (Gibson 2002, 102) for the emergence of truth as a rare and unforeseen event. It produces, not truth but the ‘hope of a truth’ (Badiou 22), an openness to an event that can only be ‘ill seen’ and ‘ill said’, like the ‘slumberous collapsion’ glimpsed at the end of that work (Beckett 1982, 55). Following Gibson’s summary, it involves four aspects. First, a method of subtraction as a patient and disciplined rejection of doxa, or knowledge in its hardened form as repeated and repeatable opinion (94–96). Second, a concept of ‘action restreinte’, by which Beckett’s works often proceed from existential axioms or purely affirmative decisions that bring the work into being without reference to an ‘exterior reality’ (96–98). Third, an openness to the event, to chance and the unpredictable nature of an encounter with alterity, where ‘the Beckettian subject opens up to the voice of the other, for instance, to the possibility of happiness, even to love, in what are often tiny ways’ (99). And finally, and most importantly, a persistence in the wake of this encounter, ‘going on’ as an ethics of fidelity to the transformative event: ‘the intensity or persistence with which the subject continues to think a world according to what has happened to change it’ (100). Together, these constitute a ‘coherent, ethico-political aesthetic’ (102). Andrew Gibson’s massive study Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency is both a painstaking elaboration of Badiou’s philosophical system, and a

Introduction

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reflexive reading of Beckett against Badiou in order to ‘introduce a certain tension into that system’ (Gibson 2006, 5). Gibson stresses the importance of Badiou in indicating a ‘different direction’ for reading Beckett’s ethicality, an ‘ethico-political’ reading with significant divergences from what he calls ‘postmodern Beckett criticism’ (Gibson 2002, 94). Gibson is particularly forceful in articulating Badiou’s rejection of postmodern ethics, where ‘what was initially a sophisticated and theoretically demanding conception of ethics swiftly became a mixture of a bland ethics of the other and a doctrine of human rights whose essence is a reconstituted and basically sentimental brand of liberal humanism’ (Gibson 2006, 91). For Gibson, the ‘ethical turn’ became the last refuge of a demoralized radical theory, which, through its bracketing of ‘truth’ and its suspicion of binarisms, was ultimately unable to show us ‘how it distances itself from spin’, in a ‘pragmatic compromise’ with neo-liberalism that represents ‘the contemporary abjection of ethics’ (91). Against the grain of contemporary ethical thought, Badiou’s Beckett is one of disconcertingly peremptory affirmations rather than consolingly melancholy ambivalences. Gibson’s reading of Beckett and Badiou in tandem turns on the notion of a fundamental affinity between them, where ‘both structure their universe in terms of actual infinity,10 the event, and its remainder’ (26). The key difference is a question of emphasis: where Badiou concentrates on the event, banishing the remainder to the margins, Beckett sees the remainder as ‘the stuff of art’ (26). The status of the remainder, as an aftermath or residue of the event, is crucial here, and, as Gibson points out, ‘since events are rare, the remainder comprises and must comprise the larger part of historical experience’ (18). This is what constitutes the ‘pathos of intermittency’ of Gibson’s title. Badiou’s reading of Beckett categorically rejects the notion of pathos, but in taking this stance, Gibson argues, Badiou reveals ‘a traditional left pathophobia’ (262), a wariness of the pathos or melancholy that might attach to any remainder that ‘falls outside the capture of negativity by dialectics’ (263). Moreover, Gibson points out that there is a melancholy cast to many of the writers Badiou admires—not only Beckett, but Mandelstam, Pessoa and Celan (25)—and even describes Badiou despite himself as ‘a writer of vestiges’ (27). Here too Gibson is concerned to go beyond Badiou, not simply in his reading of Beckett, but in his thinking through, by reference to the work of Françoise Proust, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and others, a wider problem of contemporary politics and aesthetics: the notion of a historical and political intermittency. For Gibson, the value of writing such as Beckett’s is the way in which it affirms a sober, unsentimental melancholy as a means of ‘going on’ through the pathos of this intermittency, where the ‘hope of a truth’ appears temporarily to have receded beyond the horizon.11 In Beckett, Literature and Alterity, Shane Weller begins with the premise, following Adorno, that if the Holocaust can be seen as an unprecedented historical confirmation of the totalizing violence of identity thinking—an attempt

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Beckett and Ethics

to annihilate alterity in the interests of pure identity—then ‘the history of post-Holocaust thought is the history of the attempt to think a saving alterity’ (Weller 2006, 2). Through a consideration of the ethical issues raised by Beckett’s treatment of three major modes of alterity—translation, comedy and sexual difference—Weller’s study explores the extent to which Beckett’s writing might be seen as taking on the task of thinking such an irreducible alterity, and therefore of the possibility of a post-metaphysical ethics (30). He points out, however, that Beckett’s works are repeatedly preoccupied, not just with the presence of an unmasterable alterity, but also with ‘an unremitting struggle to reduce the other to nothing’ (24). In short, Weller’s argument concerns the power of negation in Beckett’s work, and in this sense may be seen as building on his earlier study A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism, where he argued that Beckett’s work played out ‘neither the possibility of nihilism not its impossibility, but its failure’ (Weller 2005, 23). Similarly, in the later work, he argues that In Beckett the negations repeatedly fail to deliver the very ‘nothing’ they seem to promise, and it is this failure that constitutes the very stuff of the work. This is not to say that what remains necessarily possesses a value; rather, in a process that disintegrates difference no less than identity, Beckett opens the ethicality of both negation and affirmation to question. (Weller 2006, 193) Weller reads this failed nothing, this ineradicable alterity, as a version of Levinas’s il y a, the irreducible ‘there is’ that remains beyond any possible negation. In Levinas the il y a is a source of horror, a form of alterity ‘with which no ethical relation can be maintained’ (29). But whereas, for Levinas, the ethical relation with the Other constitutes an escape from the absurd horror of the il y a, in Beckett it is inescapable, blocking the path to the ethical (29). The Beckettian il y a ‘appears to be the most radical form of unmasterable alterity’ (29), and Beckett’s disclosure of it marks the point at which a systematic ethics becomes impossible, but also the point at which a post-metaphysical ethics might begin to be thought. For Weller, this is the anethical, which he defines neither as impossible aporia nor incontrovertible imperative, but as taking the form of a ‘shuttling or a shuffling to and fro’ (194), an ‘indecision’ that is ‘an occasion, not of a new art or a new ethics, but rather of ways in which the experience of the disintegration of both art and ethics might be rendered visible’ (194). Weller thus rejects Badiou’s reading of Beckett as fundamentally affirmative, insisting instead on the radical emptiness of the Beckettian imperative: every attempt to make sense of [the imperative to go on] in terms of metadiscourse, be it ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, political, religious, or

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psychoanalytic, serves to negate the possibility that the ‘il faut’ is simply a blank at the very heart of Beckett’s oeuvre, a very specific nothing around which that oeuvre is painstakingly constructed. (193) The ‘anethical’, then, is neither affirmation nor negation, but a withholding of judgement in the scrupulously measured equipoise of ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. Each of these four readings must deal in different ways with the absence of a normative ethical position in Beckett’s works, a problem that arises not just from the works’ often painstakingly symmetrical patterning of negations and affirmations, but also from the corrosive effects of Beckett’s irony, which does not stop at the destruction of platitudes and orthodoxies, as would conventional satire, but goes on to gnaw away at itself, casting doubt on doubt itself as a means of attaining the rarity of truth. In fact, to simplify rather crudely, we might characterize these different readings of Beckett’s ethicality in terms of those famous last seven words from The Unnamable. If Critchley views the ‘I can’t go on’ as the essence of Beckett’s ethical comedy, Badiou takes the final ‘I’ll go on’ as a decisive overruling, ignoring, in his peremptory way, the pathos and irony that are as much a part of Beckett’s writing as its heroic persistence. Gibson and Weller, on the other hand, are more equivocal, citing the melancholic temporality of intermittency and the shuttling movement of the anethical as figures for the principled undecidability of Beckett’s ethics.

What ethics might be This brings us to the chapters in the present volume, which approach the problem of Beckett and ethics from a broad and often unexpected range of angles. Overwhelmingly what emerges, I think, is that there is no straightforward relation between Beckett’s writing and what ethics is, or has been conventionally understood to be. Instead, and repeatedly throughout the volume, Beckett’s work seems to open up the question of what ethics might be. The collection opens with David Cunningham’s rich and searching chapter on the relationship between Beckett’s writing and philosophy, specifically through an analysis of Beckett’s ‘abstraction’: the manner in which specific historical and cultural references are increasingly evacuated from Beckett’s texts. Cunningham presents a succinct and penetrating overview of the ‘ethical turn’ and its implications, particularly the persistently raised concern that ‘the return to ethics has constituted an escape from politics’ (Butler 15). In a reading of Leslie Hill’s influential essay, ‘ “Up the Republic!”: Beckett, Writing, Politics’ (Hill 1997), Cunningham shows that Hill’s reading may be seen as characteristic of the ‘ethical turn’ in subsuming the political to the ethical. But he also goes on to claim that the abstraction ‘from the world of meaningful action, morality, or history’ that Hill identifies in Beckett’s texts, and that

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Beckett and Ethics

Hill sees as the precondition for its capacity to examine the ethico-political question of the ‘logic of relation’ in general, can also be read as a fundamentally historical problematic. Taking How It Is as an example, Cunningham argues that the text’s abstraction is itself historically determined: the mathematical ‘ justice’ of the relations between torturers and victims crawling through the mud can be seen as, in its very formalism, reflective of the administration of social relations in capitalist modernity. Matthew Feldman’s chapter is concerned to trace the decisive influence, on his life as well as on his work, of Beckett’s reading of Geulincx’s Ethics. Through close examination of various texts from the period 1933 to 1936, Feldman shows the importance of this encounter for Beckett, which, he argues, assisted the formulation of Beckett’s ideas on art in 1934–5 and enabled the completion of Murphy after it had stalled in late 1935. For Feldman, the influence of Geulincx on Beckett’s thinking is manifest in many ways: in his insistence on a sub specie aeternitatis vision; in his insistence on detachment, a stoical withdrawal from the world into consciousness; in his insistence on the ineffable, and on the virtue of humility as a submission to the ineffable; and in his thus making a virtue of ignorance—opposing a ‘nescio’ or ‘I do not know’ to Descartes’ cogito. Feldman shows, through an examination of Watt and ‘From An Abandoned Work’, how these Geulingian themes saturate Beckett’s writing in a manner more diffuse than simple allusion. The ethical influence of Geulincx, Feldman suggests, is manifest in its ‘destruction’ of both rationalism and anthropocentrism, allowing to Beckett to formulate his own ‘agnostic’ version of Geulingian quietism. Anthony Uhlmann invokes the context of Vichy France and the complex repercussions of collaboration in post-war French society. He begins with a 1993 news item on the assassination of René Bousquet, a high-profile Vichy collaborator, by failed writer and would-be television celebrity Christian Didier. Using terms derived both from Stoic ethics and from Deleuze and Guattari, Uhlmann analyses Didier’s crime—which, rather than delivering ‘ justice’, effectively foreclosed a wider examination of French government complicity with Nazi war-crimes—as a victory of passion over reason, involving what Stoic philosophy would describe as ‘assent’ to a ‘diseased’ or ‘perturbed’ state of being. As Beckett writes in his notes from Windelband’s History of Philosophy, ‘The wise man, if he cannot control such perturbation, will deny it assent with his reason’. Uhlmann uses this concept to examine key moments of refusal in four Beckett plays—Rough for Theatre II, Catastrophe, Rough for Radio II and Eleutheria—moments that, by contrast with Didier’s action, might be read as evoking the power of ‘withholding assent’ as a mode of resistance to subjection or enslavement. Resistance is also a central concern of Jackie Blackman’s chapter, which considers two of the first texts Beckett wrote in French after his return to Paris in 1946: Suite et fin (The End), begun in English and finished in French, and

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Eleutheria, Beckett’s first and long-unpublished play. Blackman carefully sets the composition of these texts in the historical and intellectual context of postwar France, where much was deemed ‘unrepresentable’: the collaboration of the Vichy regime; revelations of the Holocaust; the ongoing anti-Semitism that greeted the return of deported Jews; and, particularly problematic for the Left, the revelations of totalitarian atrocities committed under Stalin. Blackman argues that Beckett’s ‘aesthetic of resistance’—which she pointedly distinguishes from Sartre’s ‘literature of commitment’—is characterized by a deep ethical questioning of political dogma of all kinds. In particular, Blackman speculates that Beckett’s disenchantment with Leftist politics is encoded into Eleutheria through the figure of Victor Krap, who recalls, in name as well as in other details, the most celebrated Soviet dissident of the period, Victor Kravchenko. Though we may never know for sure whether Eleutheria, which means ‘freedom’ in Greek, was influenced by Kravchenko’s memoir I Chose Freedom, Blackman shows that Beckett’s writing of the period is animated by an intense intellectual engagement with contemporary political debates. The next three chapters consider in various ways the problems raised by the presentation of violence and cruelty in Beckett’s work. Arguing that redemptive readings fail to treat either cruelty itself or Beckett’s presentation of it on their own terms, Paul Sheehan seeks to examine more closely ‘the ethical meaning of the meaninglessness of suffering . . . especially when inflicted by human beings on each other’. Central to Sheehan’s argument is his consideration of the ‘monstrous’: the category that blurs the boundary between identity and alterity, the human and its others. Given that the liminal status of the monstrous makes it a test case for ethics, Sheehan seeks to read what he defines as the three main forms of cruelty, or ‘applied monstrosity’, in Beckett’s work: the physical (with reference to Molloy), the emotional (with reference to Endgame) and the procedural (with reference to Catastrophe, What Where and Rough for Radio II). In each of these examples, cruelty is shown to be monstrous precisely in its blurring of the boundary between self and other, in its production of a fundamental meaninglessness and in its undermining of the basis for any normative ethics. For Sheehan, ‘cruelty demonstrates the impossibility of ethical conduct in a world of monsters’. Shane Weller also examines the question of cruelty, beginning his chapter by examining the influence of Racine. What Weller finds decisive in Beckett’s commentary on Racine from the 1930s is its insistence on a notion of the cruelty of desire, encapsulated in the figure of Oreste from Andromaque, which Beckett described as the most Racinian of Racine’s plays. This figure is important for three reasons: because he ‘defies analysis’ and is exempt from conventional psychological illumination, because his passion for Hermione is characterized by a violent polarization, the site of endlessly warring drives of love/hate, and because Racine’s treatment of this inscrutable, self-divided passion is ‘cold’, ‘dispassionate’. At this point Weller turns to Sade, and Beckett’s

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interest in Sade’s treatment of the cruelty of desire and the dispassionate mode of its statement. Weller uses these ideas as the basis of a reading of How It Is, contesting Alain Badiou’s claim that this is a key text in Beckett’s evolution from the solipsistic cogito towards alterity and the ethical. Instead, Weller argues that Beckett’s treatment of alterity is grounded in this Orestean figure: the affirmation of an inscrutable solitude, and a kind of polarized compulsion of contrary passions. In this, Weller concludes, Beckett’s work is ‘anethical’; neither a mastery of passion nor a submission to it, but an endless reversibility, a dis-passionate passion that is constantly at war with itself. David Houston Jones also responds to the ethical challenge posed by Beckett’s icily dispassionate statement, presenting an extraordinary reading of two of Beckett’s late ‘cylinder texts’: The Lost Ones and the unpublished Long Observation of the Ray. Jones reads the scenarios described in these texts against Jean-François Lyotard’s startling proposition in The Inhuman that if the human species is to survive the extinction of its solar system, it will be in the form of an ‘informational prosthesis’. Through reference to the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, Jones shows how Beckett’s texts draw on familiarity with Poincaré, Maxwell’s demon, Gibbs’s statistical mechanics and the scientific concept of entropy. These apparently dry scientific questions gain ethical urgency when one considers how The Lost Ones charts the gradual extinction of a human population, while Long Observation of the Ray bears witness to a world in which the human has ceased to exist except as an informational entity. Giorgio Agamben writes that ‘almost none of the ethical principles our age’ were able to survive the ‘decisive test’ of Auschwitz, an event that opened up a ‘new ethical territory’ that few have begun to explore (Agamben 13). It is perhaps one of the implications of Jones’s chapter that Beckett’s cylinder texts imaginatively present a ‘monument to human extinction’ and the ‘possibility of human survival in informational form’, and therefore, perhaps, a partial map of this ‘new ethical territory’. The question of the relation between Beckett’s worlds and the world ‘as we know it’ is also taken up in the next two chapters. Steven Connor is concerned with Beckett’s preoccupation with the creation and destruction of worlds, from the way early characters such as Murphy seek to retreat from the ‘big world’ to the ‘little world’, to the way the late texts construct their diminutive but sovereign worlds from a refreshingly uncluttered void. Connor uncovers a series of uncanny verbal echoes between Beckett and Heidegger here, but argues that the way Beckett’s characters approach the problem of being-in-the-world might be seen as a kind of ‘unworlding, a dyspeptic block to the project of Heideggerian worlding’. For, as Connor points out, the word ‘world’ derives from the Germanic roots wer = man and ald = age, the signification therefore being ‘the age of man’. But if this etymology simply puts man at the centre of his own idea of world, Heidegger goes further, making Dasein responsible for the revelation of the world as such. Beckett, on the other hand, insists on a kind

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of ‘constitutive maladjustment to the world’, but a maladjustment, as Connor continues, ‘out of which a kind of world may itself be made’. For Connor, this ‘singular resolve to decline any grandiose worlding of the world’ might be seen as ‘what constitutes the particular kind of worldliness of Beckett’s texts’, the way they naggingly question what a world is or might be, and how it might be possible to live in it or out of it. Peter Boxall also examines the question of Beckett’s ‘worldliness’, but this time through a comparison with Joyce, and their different responses to the problem of finding a third term that would transcend the tension between the national and the international, the regional and the cosmopolitan. Through a subtle analysis of the famous ending of Joyce’s short story The Dead, Boxall shows how the figure of the snow that is ‘general all over Ireland’ plays out Joyce’s ambivalent attachments to both European cosmopolitanism and Irish nationalism. By contrast, Joyce’s later attempt in Finnegans Wake to articulate a kind of internationalist Esperanto is perpetually undermined by the national languages it seeks to transcend, rendering its universal language universally incomprehensible. Boxall shows Beckett’s acute consciousness of this same triangular tension, where Belacqua’s wanderlust in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932) is figured as ‘trine’, torn between home, exile and a kind of double-negative third term, ‘immunity like hell from journeys and cities’ (Beckett 1993, 120). But, just as the nation state wanes in importance in the post-war period as a political and economic entity, so too in Beckett’s work ‘the antagonism between national and global starts to give way’. Beckett’s famously delocalized locations (which often retain, as Boxall shows, the faintest traces of Irishness) are a means of imagining an ‘any-space-whatever’ that can be seen as an attempt to articulate an inchoately ‘global’ imagination. Beckett’s fictional geographies thus offer ‘the beginnings of a new form in which to imagine emplacement and embodiment, a new language with which to articulate a continuing relation between the global and the local, between being somewhere and being nowhere in particular’. Finally, Laura Salisbury’s complex and finely tuned argument concerns what we might think of as the ethics of Beckett’s comedy. The chapter weaves together three main topics: the preoccupation with figures of bodily incorporation and expulsion in the Trilogy; a survey of theories of the comic and an analysis of what is peculiarly Beckettian in Beckett’s comedy; and a survey of ‘ethical’ readings of Beckett and the relation between ethics and comedy in Beckett’s work. Salisbury begins by arguing that the Trilogy plays out an important ethical theme in its extraordinary preoccupation with the figuration of language as material, as matter to be choked upon or swallowed, spat, vomited or shat out. If the alimentary system is a ‘fissure of exteriority that runs through our most central points’, then this extended metaphor is a powerful means of thinking the ‘complex lines of connection between the subject and the world outside

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of it’. Salisbury then shows how Beckett’s comedy works by gagging in other ways, too, perpetually extemporizing like a side-show entertainer destined never to be relieved by the main act. But against Critchley’s reading of the ethical implications of Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’, Salisbury argues that humour requires not just incongruity, but mastery of incongruity, in the cognitive synthesis of a ‘higher comic logic in which limits are transgressed but simultaneously marked and experienced as significant’. Finally, Salisbury’s third section provides a brilliant analysis of the problems raised by the ‘ethical’ readings of Beckett advanced by Badiou, Critchley and Gibson. If linguistic expression in Beckett is figured as a bodily compulsion rather than the product of a conscious will, then it is ‘somehow below the threshold of what might conventionally be considered to be ethical choice or action’. Salisbury concludes, following Gibson’s reading of the ‘intermittency’ in Beckett’s work, that it is just this ‘gagging’ rhythm of a kind of suspended compulsion, a spluttering refusal to swallow the world as it is ‘dished up’ (Gibson’s phrase), that constitutes both the comical and the ethical in Beckett: ‘a way of materializing how it is while opening up a space for how it ought to be’.

Nec tecum nec sine te Each of the writers here faces the problem, not only of what kind of ethics one might discover in Beckett’s work, but also of what it might mean to read Beckett ethically. Fortunately, as so often, we have Beckett’s own words to guide us here. In a famous letter to director Alan Schneider, Beckett wrote: But when it comes to these bastards of journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. That’s for those bastards of critics. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, or they don’t see it, it’s plenty for us. . . . My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could. (Harmon 1998, 24) According to these terms, any reading is a misreading; any interpretation a misinterpretation; or so it has often been misread. Steven Connor comments that ‘this notorious statement . . . has become a canonical nut that must ceremonially be cracked . . . if criticism of Beckett’s work is to proceed, and it must, it must’. But, as he goes on to point out, though Beckett appears to insist that the text is self-sufficient and self-explanatory, his point is ‘not primarily to criticize or discredit exegesis, but to keep it at a distance’ (Connor 2006).

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Exegesis is for us ‘bastards’, the critics; Beckett himself simply ‘refuses to be involved’ with it or to ‘accept responsibility’ for it.12 Taking the ‘exegetical opportunity’ afforded by Beckett’s quotation from Martial’s epigrams, Connor focuses on the phrase nec tecum nec sine te: ‘neither with you nor without you’. Like the relationship between Hamm and Clov, this might well sum up the difficult relationship we have with Beckett. As Connor continues: The phrase has the seesaw that Beckett liked . . . but it also names the predicament of conjoined contraries, in which opposites are inextricably implicated in each other. Beckett may well have thought that exegesis was folly, but this is not what he says here. The ‘nec tecum nec sine te’ may also hint that, just as Beckett cannot work in the theatre without the help of a director, cast and crew, he cannot expect his work not to provoke exegesis, which he can therefore neither live with nor without. . . . For Beckett to become involved in exegesis would be for him to loosen the very tension of the non-relation that is his relation with criticism, simplifying the difficulty of the nec tecum nec sine te. (Connor 2006) It is this relation of non-relation that defines our ethical difficulties, in which, if any reading is a misreading, then any act of fidelity must also be an act of betrayal. Perhaps to read an ethics into Beckett’s work ultimately means not to read Beckett ethically. Perhaps we critics are bastards, after all, but we can take responsibility for, and perhaps even a shy pride in our errors. And if the effort produces headaches, we’d best not turn to Beckett’s work, because there, as Clov gleefully informs Hamm, ‘There’s no more painkiller’ (Beckett 1986, 127).

Notes 1

2 3

Nussbaum herself might be accused of solipsism: 17 of the 34 footnotes in her article refer to her own work. Robert Eaglestone offers a fine critique of the limitations of Nussbaum’s approach to ethical criticism (35–60), which he describes as ‘blind to textuality, to “literariness” and to the self-reflexive nature of reading and of criticism’ (61). In treating texts as ‘dry-runs for life’, Nussbaum requires them to be as ‘realistic’ as possible, so that ‘when confronted with an anti- or unrealist text—Beckett, for example—she reads it as if it were a realist text’ (92). For a particularly good overview by a Levinas specialist, see Newton 2001. The other major example here would be Lukács’s chapter on ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Lukács 1995), where he charges modernist writers en bloc—not only Beckett, but Proust, Kafka, Joyce and Faulkner—with a nihilistic withdrawal from social reality into formalism and interiority. Shane Weller observes, ‘What is perhaps most striking . . . is not

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4

5

6 7 8

9

10

11

12

merely the fact that Beckett has so rarely been charged with nihilism, but that some of the most significant philosophers and literary theorists of the last halfcentury . . . have vigorously defended Beckett against this charge, a charge that has only rarely been made’ (Weller 2005, 6). Steven Connor discusses the ways in which the negativity of Beckett’s work, even in its explicit resistance to recuperation as positivity, is nevertheless recuperated as positive value in Beckett criticism (Connor 1992, 80–89). This view is nowhere stated more baldly than in the title of an interview by Simon Critchley: ‘Beckett is my hero (it’s alright)’ (Critchley et al., 2000). And thus the extent to which ethics might be indistinguishable, rhetorically at least, from marketing and spin; Andrew Gibson suggests as much in a passage discussed below. These developments are discussed in Gibson 2003. This problem is discussed in Begam (1996) and Uhlmann (1999). The phrase, like so many in the lexicon of Beckett criticism, was coined by Beckett himself in an interview with Lawrence Harvey (Harvey 435). For a different response to Critchley’s reading of the ethics of Beckett’s comedy, see Weller 2006, 107–110; 122–125. ‘Actual infinity’—put crudely, the notion of a diverse multiplicity that appears as monotonous sameness—derives from Badiou’s philosophical preoccupation with mathematical set-theory (see Gibson 2006, 6–16). For a different reading of the relations between history and remainder, melancholy and fidelity, see my ‘Endgame’s Remainders’ (Smith 2007), where I argue that the ending of the play explicitly works against melancholy—while of course acknowledging its seductive power—in Hamm’s pitilessly ethical process of ‘discarding’. Although Beckett didn’t always abide by this refusal, he was clearly well aware that to condemn any particular interpretation is implicitly to enter into exegesis by stating categorically what the text does not mean.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Aristotle, 1996. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Badiou, Alain. 2003. On Beckett. Eds. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. Manchester: Clinamen. Beckett, Samuel. 1953. Watt. New York: Grove. —. 1964. How It Is. London: Calder. —. 1965. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder. —. 1973. Murphy. London: Picador. —. 1982. Ill Seen Ill Said. London: Calder. —. 1983a. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder. —. 1983b. Worstward Ho. London: Calder.

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—. 1986. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1993. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. London: Calder. —. 1994. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder. —. 1995. The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press. Begam, Richard. 1996. Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boxall, Peter. 2002. ‘Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading’. Irish Studies Review 10.2: 159–170. Boxall, Peter, ed. 2000. Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics. In Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 207–294. Butler, Judith. 2000. ‘Ethical Ambivalence’. In Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics, New York & London: Routledge, 15–28. Casanova, Pascale. 2006. Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. London: Verso. Connor, Steven. 1988. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 1992. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2006. ‘ “On Such and Such a Day . . . In Such a World”: Beckett’s Radical Finitude’. www.stevenconnor.com/finitude/ Critchley, Simon. 1997. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. London: Routledge. —. 1999. ‘Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’. Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity. London: Verso, 217–238. —. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge. —, with Nicholas Strobbe, John Dalton and Peter Banki. 2000. ‘Beckett is my hero (it’s alright): An Interview with Simon Critchley’. Contretemps 1 (September). http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/1september2000/critchley.pdf Derrida, Jacques. 1992 ‘ “This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. In Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, New York: Routledge, 33–75. Eaglestone, Robert. 1997. Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 2006a. ‘Champion of Ambiguity’. The Guardian, 20 March. http:// arts.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1735248,00.html —. 2006b. ‘Political Beckett?’ New Left Review 40, July–August. http://www. newleftreview.org/?view=2626 Foucault, Michel. 2006. ‘Technologies of the Self’. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol 1. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press: 223–252. Gibson, Andrew. 2002. ‘Beckett and Badiou’. In Richard Lane, ed., Beckett and Philosophy, New York: Palgrave, 93–107. —. 2003. ‘Badiou, Beckett and Contemporary Criticism’. In Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Manchester: Clinamen, 119–136. —. 2006. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hallward, Peter. 2003. Alain Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harmon, Maurice, ed. 1998. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Hill, Leslie. 1990a. Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1990b. ‘Obituary: Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)’. Radical Philosophy 55. http:// www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9833 —. 1997. ‘ “Up the Republic!”: Beckett, Writing, Politics’. MLN 112.5: 909–928. Kant, Immanuel. 1949. Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kiberd, Declan. 1996. ‘Beckett’s Texts of Laughter and Forgetting’. In Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 530–550. Lacan, Jacques. 1997. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Lloyd, David. 1989. ‘Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism, and the Colonial Subject’. Modern Fiction Studies 35.1: 71–86. Locatelli, Carla. 1990. Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lukács, György. 1995. ‘The Ideology of Modernism’. In The Lukács Reader, ed. Arpad Kadarkay, London: Blackwell, 187–210. Newton, Adam Zachery. 2001. ‘Versions of Ethics; Or, The SARL of Criticism: Sonority, Arrogation, Letting-Be’. American Literary History 13.3: 603–637. Nussbaum, Martha. 1988. ‘Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love’. Ethics 98.2: 225–254. Pearson, Nels C. 2001. ‘ “Outside of here it’s death”: Co-dependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett’s Endgame’. ELH 68.1: 215–239. Shenker, Israel. 1979. ‘Moody Man of Letters’. In Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 146–149. Smith, Russell. 2007. ‘Endgame’s Remainders’. In Mark Byron, ed., Dialogues: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 99–120. Swedish Academy. N.d. ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1969: Presentation Speech’. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1969/press.html Trezise, Thomas. 1990. Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Uhlmann, Anthony. 1999. Beckett and Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weller, Shane. 2005. A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. Oxford: Legenda. —. 2006. Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta.

Chapter 1

‘We have our being in justice’: Formalism, Abstraction and Beckett’s ‘Ethics’ David Cunningham

Theodor Adorno once asserted, in his justly celebrated essay on Endgame, that ‘the criterion of a philosophy whose hour has struck’ might be located in its capacity to ‘prove equal’ to the ‘challenge’ posed by Beckett’s work (Adorno 244). Even from a man who planned, at one stage, to dedicate to Beckett his final, unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, such a claim may seem like hyperbole. Yet, from Blanchot to Deleuze, Cavell to Badiou, there are more than a few thinkers who have found such a ‘challenge’ irresistible, thus tacitly reiterating its status as a ‘criterion’ of judgement for their own philosophical contemporaneity. Even Derrida, while notoriously casting doubt on the possibility of any extended ‘philosophical’ account of Beckett’s work, does so in the name of deconstruction’s almost uniquely close ‘proximity’ to, and ‘identification’ with, such work (Derrida with Attridge 60). Such forms of ‘identification’ clearly bring with them certain difficulties and dilemmas. What Lambert Zuidervaart says of Adorno’s famous reading— that it is ‘hard to distinguish between the meaning to be found in Endgame and the meaning Adorno finds’ (Zuidervaart 156)—is true in far more general terms.1 Indeed, it might be said to be considerably more true of, say, Deleuze or Badiou who permit themselves few of the fundamental hesitations regarding a philosophical ‘metalanguage’ that mark Adorno’s text. As much to the point, it begs the still-more-general question of what it is that philosophy so often ‘finds’ in Beckett that should make him such a unique and repeated object of identification. What is it, so to speak, that philosophy recognizes of itself in Beckett’s work? Badiou is perhaps distinctive only in the characteristically unqualified directness of his proposition that a piece like Worstward Ho be read as a ‘short philosophical treatise’ on the ‘question of being’ (Badiou 80). Certainly there is no less apparent ‘identification’ at work where—as in Derrida or Adorno—philosophy emphasizes, above all, resistance to conventional ‘philosophical interpretation’ as Beckett’s supremely ‘philosophical’ quality or significance (see, for example, Critchley 1997, 141). Indeed, Beckett here becomes emblematic, in a newly generalized way, of the intensification

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of a self-questioning of philosophy’s own totalizing ambitions and disciplinary autonomy, definitive of much European thought since Kant, and of which Derrida and Adorno are exemplary.2 As the latter writes of Beckett, he ‘shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today, at the very possibility of theory’ (Adorno 244). In more general terms, of course, to note a certain kinship with philosophy is hardly new. The quasi-existentialist readings that dominated Beckett’s early reception, and which constituted one object of Adorno’s critique in the Endgame essay, laid out much of the groundwork in this respect, even if they are today largely derided. More recently, it has become customary to note the degree to which ‘philosophy’ is present within the texts themselves, as parodic allusion, appropriated formal device or ‘latent framework’. There is a minor industry in documenting Beckett’s interest in the writings of Mauthner or Geulincx, or in tracking down the more or less hidden references to Descartes, Berkeley, Spinoza or Kant that punctuate the oeuvre (see, for example, Murphy 1994). Indeed, as Critchley has suggested, it may be the very ‘network of philosophical allusions in a work like the so-called Trilogy’ that precisely makes Beckett’s writing seem to ‘offer itself’ so ‘generously to philosophical interpretation’; ‘only’, he continues, in Adornian fashion, ‘to withdraw this offer by reducing such interpretation to ridicule’ (Critchley 1997, 142, 143). As such, it remains an undoubtedly productive line of enquiry, despite the risks of scholasticism inherent in it. In the chapter that follows, however, I want to sketch out a rather different approach—one that is, at once, more specific and more general. This is an ‘approach’ that finds its focus, both literary and philosophical, in what, I will suggest, is a certain problematic of ‘abstraction’, apparent within the reception of Beckett’s works and within its dominant modes of commentary and criticism; a problematic that extends through to what Andrew Gibson, among others, has declared to be ‘an ethical turn in Beckett criticism’ over the last few years (Gibson 2002, 93). Like Schoenberg or Kandinsky in music and painting, Beckett remarks in one of his rare interviews, ‘I have perhaps turned towards an abstract language’ (cited in Oppenheim 126). And such a ‘powerful will to abstraction’, as Gibson describes it (Gibson 2006, 32), may well seem to manifest itself most clearly in Beckett’s ‘evacuation of history from his world’ (268), a remorseless negation of ‘historical clutter, [and] the traces of historical circumstance’ (73). Certainly what makes Beckett most ‘remarkable’, as a writer, can appear to come, in part, from ‘the vigour with which he expunges or holds at bay the density of specific, historical time’ (73). For Gibson’s own quintessentially ‘philosophical’ Beckett, this is connected to some ‘radically heterogenous’ grasping for ‘truth’, a Badiouian ethical ‘faith’ in ‘quasi-mathematical’ abstraction against a ‘world apparently surrendered to the logic of embodiment’ (273). Yet (as he effectively acknowledges) such a reading cannot— anymore than, say, a purely aestheticist one—in itself answer the question of why, as Bersani and Dutoit put it, if Beckett’s work is ‘almost entirely devoid

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of social and political references and resonances, it is still unthinkable apart from the historical moment at which it was written’ (Bersani and Dutoit 26). Something further is evidently required here. What I want to suggest then is fairly simple: What philosophy repeatedly ‘finds’ in Beckett’s texts is a kind of ‘mirror image’ of its own ‘abstraction’; a ‘mirroring’ that has itself specific historical coordinates and significance. If Beckett’s work appears to require a uniquely ‘philosophical’ or ‘theoretical’ mode of reading (as readers such as Gibson (2006) and Jean-Michel Rabaté (2005) have recently argued), it is because of the apparent correspondence of such a mode of reading to the abstraction of the work’s own form. Hence, for one thing, the seductive ease with which the questions that punctuate, for example, The Unnamable—‘Where now? Who now? When now?’—can, because of their apparently irreducible abstraction, be read as philosophical questions (that is, as fundamental ‘questions of being’). It is not my intention to suggest that this is simply a mistake. Nonetheless, to read such work directly as some form of philosophical treatise is, I want to suggest, to fail to interrogate adequately the precisely historical and social meanings of such abstraction as they are mediated in the literary text, and in Beckett’s writings in particular. As such, it must always risk substituting a fundamentally ahistorical instrumentalization of philosophical discourses (including those of ‘ethics’) for a properly critical attention to the modernity of these texts in the fullest sense, which would seek to grasp the literary text as a properly social and critical (as well as aesthetic) form. Of course, to talk of Beckett’s work in terms of abstraction is hardly new. Abstraction is, after all, not an unfamiliar problematic in accounts of modernist art and literature generally; indeed, in painting in particular, it is often thought of as definitive of the modern per se. For Pascale Casanova, for example, if Beckett’s texts amount to a ‘modernity at the level of form’ they do so, necessarily, as a form of ‘literary abstraction’; one which she explicitly relates to ‘pictorial abstraction’ in painting (Casanova 12, 83). In this, like Gibson’s Badiouian Beckett, they mark a turn away from ‘the world’, in which, as Eagleton glosses it, ‘freed from social function, art can now unfurl its own inner logic’ (Eagleton 4). Beckett’s project is thus ultimately that of ‘an absolutely self-sufficient writing, generating its own syntax, self-ordained vocabulary, self-ordained grammar . . . no more referents, no more attempts to imitate reality or provide an equivalent to it, no more direct links of transposition or description of the world’ (Casanova 21). However, unlike in Gibson, this process of ‘abstractivation’—which both equate to the ‘mathematical’—leads not towards the conceptual structure of the ‘philosophical treatise’ but emphatically away from it. Where philosophy appears in Beckett’s texts, it does so merely as a ‘literary operator’, in which philosophemes are ‘employed’ in specifically non-philosophical ways. What appear in The Unnamable as ‘philosophical questions’ are, Casanova asserts, in fact ‘technical’ ones (Casanova 73, 90).

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Yet it’s far from clear why these should not be both ‘philosophical’ and ‘technical’ questions in some sense. Indeed, it is precisely the enigmatic connection between a literary and philosophical abstraction, and their concomitant ‘formalism’, that might well hold our attention here. It is in this context, certainly, that any so-called ‘ethical turn in Beckett criticism’ should be situated. On the one hand, this means grasping what is at stake in the interrelation of artistic and philosophical form in all such discussions—discussions that such an ethical turn would seek to ‘renew’ in various ways—and, on the other, how—to the degree that Beckett’s work is ‘unthinkable apart from the historical moment at which it was written’—both such ‘forms’ might be seen to ‘reflect’ upon the fundamental social forms and relations definitive of capitalist modernity itself. It means trying to understand, that is, why the very ‘vigour with which he [Beckett] expunges or holds at bay the density of specific, historical time’ (Gibson 2006, 73) might be itself historical in nature. I will come to this in the final section of my chapter. But, first, it should be acknowledged that if there has indeed been some kind of ‘ethical turn’ in Beckett criticism, it is scarcely unique in recent literary studies. As such, some further contextualization is perhaps required here.

Formalism and the ethical turn In the opening pages of his 2002 book A Singular Modernity—a book which will itself go on to say some fairly odd things about Beckett (see Cunningham 2005)—Fredric Jameson bemoans what, in the midst of ‘the very sound of windows breaking and old furniture being thrown out’, he describes as ‘the return to and re-establishment of all kinds of old things’. Above all, he continues, ‘we begin to witness the return of traditional philosophy . . . beginning with its hoariest subfields, such as ethics; can metaphysics be far behind . . . if not theology itself . . .?’ (Jameson 1, 2) Jameson names no names here, but one can imagine that it is not only philosophy itself, in strictly disciplinary terms, that he has in mind, but also the more ‘philosophically-inclined’ strands of literary and cultural analysis that have, in fact, always defined his own primary terrain of theoretical activity. And there is, indeed, undoubtedly something rather peculiar about the extraordinary resurgence of ethical discourse in literary studies over the last decade or so.3 The widespread resurrection of this ‘hoariest’ of ‘subfields’ brings with it, if nothing else, the risk of ignoring Heidegger’s famous warning that ‘such names as . . . “ethics” . . . begin to flourish only when originary thinking comes to an end’ (Heidegger 241; cited in Derrida 312 n. 5). The question, for contemporary criticism, is whether this ‘return’ can amount to anything other than an essentially conservative move: a reassertion of classical, disciplinary identities, underwritten, as Jameson suggests, by traditionalist anxieties concerning the

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discursive ‘monstrosities’ of ‘Theory’, which would aim to recuperate new forms of radical thought into an inheritance left unchallenged. There is, at any rate, reason enough, in this regard, to be suspicious of somewhat complacent assertions—such as are made by one proponent of the ‘ethical turn’— that all this marks merely a welcome ‘turn’ to philosophy per se, forged by a realization, on the part of ‘literary scholars’, that ‘their debates’ are little more than ‘sometimes crude echoes’ of ‘debates long and well-established in both European and Anglo-American philosophy’ (Eaglestone 2003, 129). Significantly, if the ethical turn in literary studies has been understood to be a turn away from anything in particular, it has been from a certain ‘formalism’ seen as incipient in deconstruction’s influence during the 1980s and 1990s. Often described ‘in an imagery of imprisonment and claustrophobia’, as Paul de Man once put it, such formalism appears as a type of solipsism, or even irresponsibility (the well-known misunderstandings of deconstruction as textual ‘free play’). As a result, critics have indeed—like ‘the grandmother in Proust’s novel ceaselessly driving the young Marcel out into the garden, away from the unhealthy inwardness of his closeted reading’—cried out for ‘fresh air’, though less for that of ‘referential meaning’ per se, than of some rather vaguer ‘worldly’ significance that would be attributable to the critic’s act of reading (de Man 4). As such, the ‘ethical turn’ is a ‘turn’ that has largely taken place, not in fact against, but within what are understood to be the ‘philosophical’ terms of mainstream ‘deconstructive’ literary criticism itself. In this they have broadly followed developments in the theoretical interests of Anglophone ‘deconstruction’ more generally; developments which have sought to ‘add moral weight’, as one commentator has put it, to deconstruction’s definitive ‘preoccupation’ with alterity (Newton 604). I don’t intend to debate the accuracy of the standard perception that such developments follow, in turn, from some supposed shift within Derrida’s own later work—though there are grounds to be dubious about whether any such ‘shift’ does indeed take place4 —but, evidently, either way, its crucial philosophical reference is less Derrida than it is the work of Levinas (or, at least, a Levinas read back, in some way, through Derrida, somewhat against the grain of the latter’s own misgivings (see Derrida with David)). Philosophically, its motivations are spelled out very clearly by Critchley, in an interview with the intriguing title ‘Beckett is my hero’: The problem with Kant is that he leaves us in a formalism, an empty formalism, of pure duty without any relationship to effective social praxis. That [Hegelian] critique goes through into early Marxism. That’s the context of it. . . . Now, the problem of Derrida as well is the problem of formalism. It looks like a hyper-transcendental philosophy in which Derrida points out the conditions of possibility for any philosophical discourse as such. That seems to be persuasive. But what prevents this from simply being a formal

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This ‘fleshing out’ of deconstruction, against what Critchley describes as the ‘abstractness’ of its philosophically ‘formalist’ tendencies, has thus been informed, in literary studies as in philosophy itself, by a desire for a re-politicization of thought, which can, it appears, only go via the philosophical discourse of the ethical (see Critchley 1999, ch. 5). Yet, as others have pointed out, in doing so, it may actually risk subsuming the political, as a question of ‘effective social praxis’, under the formalizing and transcendentalizing momentum of the ‘ethical’ itself (see, for example, Rancière 2006). While, in the context of literary studies, the ‘ethical turn’ can thus seem to provide the basis for a long march back to politics—against Anglo-American poststructuralism’s supposed drift towards a newly ‘textualised’ formalism—elsewhere it has appeared, just as easily, to be an essential retreat from the political, the product of an apparent atrophying of plausible practical alternatives to contemporary neo-liberalism. This is not the place to dwell at any length upon such issues, although they are far from insignificant with regard to what I want to argue here, but part of the problem clearly revolves around the question of what exactly Levinas himself means by the ‘ethical’ in his work, and whether it does indeed provide the ‘substantive phenomenological flesh’ that Critchley, for one, desires. Judith Butler’s gloss, in her contribution to the influential 2000 collection entitled simply The Turn to Ethics, gives a neat summary of what are usually taken to be the key claims here: Given that we reflect ethically on the principles and norms that guide our relations to others, are we not, prior to any such reflection, already in relation to others such that that reflection becomes possible—an ethical relation that is, as it were, prior to all reflection? For Levinas, the Other is not always or exclusively elsewhere; it makes its demand on me, but it is also of me: it is the constitutive relation of this subject to the ethical, one that both constitutes and divides the subject from the start. (Butler 18) As is well known, what, on this account, Levinas thus presents as a necessary responsibility to the other is not a secondary decision, or act of will, made by ‘me’ in the face-to-face encounter with the other, but is a kind of a priori obligation that makes ‘me’ possible in the ‘first place’ (see Levinas, in particular Section III). More broadly, and ‘metaphysically’, insofar as this relation to the other (to ‘whom’ I am always already responsible) is the condition for any ‘encounter’ whatsoever— the ‘primordial’ relation with the Other is what, for

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the Levinas of Totality and Infinity, grounds all possible relations in and with the world—he goes on to make his famous assertion that, as opposed to a Heideggerian ‘ontology’, ethics be reclaimed as the ‘true’ first philosophy. I am grossly simplifying of course; though hardly more than is usual. However, even leaving aside the appeal to religious tradition which necessarily underpins Levinas’s own account, the central tension apparent within the use of Levinas’s thought, by those who would make the ethical turn in recent literary or cultural studies, can already be ascertained from this very brief exposition. In particular, it can be seen in the essential difficulty that, on Levinas’s own terms, must, without some ‘theological’ sleight of hand, always accompany any attempt to make the move from a fundamentally abstract understanding of the ethical, as the ‘metaphysical’ name given to the primacy and ineliminability of a quasi-ontological responsiveness to the other, to the suggestion of some more concrete and ‘substantive’ ethics, by which any specific ‘worldly’ relation to ‘the other’ might be judged. As much to the point, the very designation of a quasi-onotological ‘responsiveness’ to the other by the name ‘ethical’ is hardly self-evident. Michael Haar’s comment is as pertinent as it is disarming: ‘I don’t see why there is ethics since there is alterity’ (cited in Critchley 1997, 189 n. 53). Certainly, as Blanchot was perhaps the fi rst to suggest, there is little reason to presume that a quasi-transcendental relation to the other (in a roughly Derridean sense, as something like an ‘originary trace’) entails anything like a concomitant transcendence of the good (let alone of God) as Levinas argues. At best, one could claim that a quasi-transcendental relation to the other is the necessary condition of any ethics, as it is of, say, politics, or the social as such. Indeed, if the point here is to ‘give to Derrida’s thought, which looks formalistic, some substantive phenomenological flesh’, it is unclear, once we move to the terrain of specifically ‘inter-human relations’, why the term ‘social’—a term not entirely foreign to Levinas’s own writings—might not be a good deal more convincing name for what is actually at stake in this. Tellingly, what would precisely seem to be most often elided here is any account of the historical dimensions of the ethical as a kind of social discourse in itself. In this sense, it may well be the case that, as one commentator has argued, ‘the vogue for Levinas’ reflects some broader ‘symptom of a crisis in historical thought, in which the desire for ethics overwhelms the necessity of politics, with its attendant complexities of historical consciousness and action’ (Osborne 1995, 118). And, in fact, arguably, if the Levinasian ‘ethical’ comes to designate—once it is stripped of its specific connection to a certain religious (and, thus, historical) tradition—nothing more (or nothing other) than the name for a quasi-ontological relational form as such, such a discourse of the ethical cannot but, unavoidably, tend to present itself as precisely the kind of formalism, with regard to specific differences of historical ‘density’, that Critchley decries. As Adorno writes of existentialism in the essay on Endgame: ‘It courts those who are sick of philosophical formalism

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and yet cling to something accessible only in formal terms’ (Adorno 246). A ‘hyper-transcendental’ formalism of the ‘text’ attributed (no doubt mistakenly) to Derrida is—contra Critchley’s desire for a phenomenological substantialization—displaced, at least in literary studies, by what thus tends, in fact, to amount to a new formalism of the ‘ethical’ itself; one which risks merely placing socially particular experiences beyond the reach of criticism. This is no doubt why, in literary studies, there have been such difficulties in moving from largely abstract ‘Levinasian’ discussions of the ethical relation, as a ‘philosophical’ problem ‘inherent’ in any act of reading, to an engagement with actual instances of an ‘ethical’ dimension to specific literary texts. 5 For the ‘ethical turn’ in this sense would seem, almost by definition, to offer little critical purchase upon art as a concretely social form in itself. Let us take a specific example here: Leslie Hill’s 1997 essay ‘ “Up the Republic!”: Beckett, Writing, Politics’. Resisting the attempt ‘to extract from Beckett’s writing a global politics’, Hill suggests instead an attempt ‘to affirm within that writing the productive power of what one might call a micrologics of relation’. ‘To linger on this question of relation’ is, he continues, ‘not to fall short of the political; it is . . . to raise the very question of the political as such’ (Hill 911). While it is apparently ‘the political’ that is flagged up here, by the end of the essay it is very evidently the ‘ethical’ (in what is, at least implicitly, something like a Levinasian sense) that comes to take centre stage. The passage is worth quoting at some length: [I]f L’Innommable ends—and ends without ending—on an apparent contradiction . . . it is surely not in order that the contradiction be resolved by dialectical sleight-of-hand. . . . [A]ll such so-called solutions to the double bind on which Beckett’s text closes, which see it as their task to impose a sham unity on the aporia of the name (irrespective of whether that unity is sustained by a notion of being, truth, selfhood, or authorial subjectivity) are ethically objectionable and must therefore be resisted. Why? Because they fail to do justice to the irreducible alterity of the unnameable and the untranslatable. And because they do violence to the irreducible contestation of being that is voiced in Beckett’s text in the—unspoken—name of the other that is perpetually without name. . . . To write, here, is to squander identity of self in order to speak otherwise of the other. (Hill 924, emphases added) The ‘political’ here, characteristically displaced into a sphere of quasitranscendental reflection on conditions of (im)possibility, via its reconfiguration as a ‘question’ of the ‘logic of relation’ as such, is thus itself effectively subordinated to the ‘ethical’, as that which, in Beckett’s text, ‘hinges on the question, the challenge, directed at me by others’ (Hill 923). At the same time, the condition of such a reading, which imparts to Beckett’s work its own kind of ‘quasi-transcendental’ trajectory, must be to take, for example, ‘the injunction’

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of ‘il faut’, to ‘which the narrator of L’Innommable falls subject’, as ‘itself always already divorced from the world of meaningful action, morality, or history to which allusion is occasionally made, as though in passing, by Beckett’s narrators’ (Hill 920–921). Now, if I describe this as a certain kind of ‘formalism’, it is not so as to suggest some element of covert aestheticism within it. I have in mind something quite different. Rather it is to note that Hill’s reading revolves around a claim that— through its own abstraction from ‘the world of meaningful action, morality, or history’—Beckett’s text (‘singular’ though it may well be) demonstrates some ‘logic of relation’ in general that is then understood, necessarily, in ‘philosophical’ (as well as ‘literary’) terms. Thus, what is presented as the ‘irreducible contestation of being that is voiced in Beckett’s text’ can be read as immediately opening onto a question of the quasi-transcendental ‘ethical relation’ as such, in a form that, by tracing the ‘relation of non-relation between Same and Other’, does ‘ justice to the irreducible alterity of the unnameable and the untranslatable’. As such, and although, therefore, its intellectual lineage is actually quite different, Hill also relies here upon that ‘powerful will to abstraction’ which Gibson identifies in Beckett’s work, and upon its seeming proximity to philosophical form. An apparent ‘evacuation of history from his world’ becomes the very condition of the text’s ‘ethical significance’, as Hill presents it. This is apparent in his treatment of the phrase in Malone Dies—‘Up the Republic!’—from which he takes his title. Here is the relevant passage in Beckett: But I tell myself so many things, what truth is there in all this babble? I don’t know. I simply believe I can say nothing that is not true, I mean that has not happened, it’s not the same thing but no matter. Yes, that’s what I like about me, at least one of the things, that I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or, Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder if I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else. Yes, no reflection is needed, before or after, I have only to open my mouth for it to testify to the old story, my old story, and to the long silence that has silenced me, so that all is silent. (Beckett 1959, 236) As Hill rightly notes, this rare invocation of a ‘political pronouncement’ clearly demands to be read, most immediately, as a ‘piece of empty or irrelevant rhetoric’, a ‘tawdry cliché’ of the type common within Beckett’s work. As a political statement, Hill writes, it ‘belongs to a politics that has become divorced, so to speak, from political discourse as such’: ‘It lacks any precisely identifiable referent. Which Republic, one wants to ask, is in fact being upped in this passage?’ As he acknowledges, in the spectre of undecidability that such a phrase invokes, this makes a ‘point [that] is a stereotypical one in [recent] literary theory’ (Hill 912–913). However, I want to draw a somewhat different ‘consequence’ from

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it than does Hill. For there is, in fact, a fundamentally historical problematic of abstraction also at stake here that such ‘odd indeterminacy’ produces, and which Hill’s account elides; a problematic whose ‘ethical significance’ lies, perhaps, not so much in anything so determinate as a ‘Beckettian ethics’, but in its complex relations to the modern conditions of social experience itself.

Abstraction (how it is) how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it. (Beckett 1964, 7)

Starting both with its title and with its first line, it is hard to think of a much better ‘exemplification’ of the problem posed by abstraction in Beckett’s work than How It Is (Comment c’est). And, indeed, there are some fairly obvious, and fairly standard, observations to be made concerning the ‘ontology’ of the ‘world’ depicted by this strikingly unusual text. Spatially, we are given only the co-ordinates of ‘above’ (‘in the light’) and ‘under’ (‘in the mud’). Temporally, the text’s time is mapped onto the most simple and classical (if seemingly endlessly repeatable) of tripartite schemas—‘before’, ‘with’ and ‘after’—determined only by the ‘absence’ or ‘presence’ of Pim (who may also be ‘Bom’ or ‘Bem’, or may not ‘be’ at all). In terms of plot, the text apparently does little more than follow, across its three separate parts, this basic structural form, as ‘scraps of an enormous tale as heard so murmured to this mud’ (29). The narrator thus narrates his painful movement through a vast purgatorial mud, dragging his ‘sole good sole possession’—a sack with tins and tin-opener—behind him, until, in Part Two, he encounters Pim, when ‘thus our life in common we begin it’ (61). In Part Three, the narrator, abandoned, ‘after Pim’, speculates on the arrival of Bom or of Bem, for whom he will, in turn, play the role that Pim played for him: at the instant I leave Bem another leaves Pim and let us be at that instant one hundred thousand strong then fi fty thousand departures fi fty thousand abandoned no sun no earth nothing turning the same instant always everywhere (121) In the light of this ‘same instant always everywhere’, what, then, are we to make of the ‘ethical significance’ of what is one of the text’s most enigmatic images?: nothing to be done in any case we have our being in justice I have never heard anything to the contrary (135)

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Although this phrase, ‘we have our being in justice’, is far less obviously positioned as a ‘tawdry cliché’ here, we can apparently make much the same point of this seemingly ‘ethical’ statement as Hill makes of the ‘political’ statement, ‘Up the Republic!’, in Malone Dies. Who, ‘one wants to ask’, are ‘we’? What is this ‘being’? What is ‘ justice’? In fact, first and foremost, such ‘ justice’—in the sense, perhaps, of little more than a basic ‘ justness’ of its ‘world’—is, it would seem, structural in Beckett’s text: at the instant I reach Pim another reaches Bem we are regulated thus our justice wills it thus fi fty thousand couples again at the same instant the same everywhere with the same space between them it’s mathematical it’s our justice in this muck where all is identical our ways and way of faring right leg right arm push pull (121) This is apparently what, in the opening pages of the text, is called ‘the natural order more or less’ (7). As Bersani and Dutoit describe it: ‘In this perfectly organised world, at every moment, everyone—whatever the number may be—is either enjoying a victim or suffering at the hands of a tormentor, or he is either crawling toward his victim or confident that a tormentor is on his way’ (Bersani and Dutoit 57). It is in such a form, as they continue, that ‘How It Is diagrams a type of being (the being that is human)’ (59). Yet, if this ‘perfectly organised world’ does indeed provide a ‘description of human relations’, we surely need to be wary of reading this in terms of some ontology per se, the basis for the kind of ‘philosophical treatise’ that Badiou, for one, suggests. Rather, we might argue, with Adorno, that what ‘unfolds’ here is ‘a historical moment’, and it is precisely this that the reference to a form of justice ‘signifies’ (Adorno 244). For in its formal ‘depiction’ of a ‘being that is human’, How It Is draws the ‘diagram’ of a being that, precisely in its potentially ‘ethical’ dimensions, can never be without the social and historical conditions that define, and may constrain, such ‘human relations’ in themselves. Indeed, it is in this sense, I take it, that Adorno refers to Beckett’s abstraction as itself readable as a kind of ‘realism’, where it may—only seemingly paradoxically—be its very formalism that, contra Badiou, constitutes the precisely social content of the text. Let me try and sketch out what I mean by this. We know now, from Beckett’s notebooks of the 1930s, of the interest that he took in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and, perhaps not insignifi cantly, How It Is is among his most obviously ‘Sadean’ of texts. As Peter Boxall’s (wonderfully defamiliarizing) précis puts it: ‘How It Is is completely dominated by the slithery S/M erotics of Pim and his band of victims and tormentors who crawl through the mud prodding each other’s anuses with can-openers’ (Boxall 114). Moreover, this ubiquity of torture, of the infinitely substitutable relations of tormentor and victim, far from being exterior to a ‘being in justice’,

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or a deviation from it, is presented as intrinsic to its very form in How It Is; ‘ever changing aspects of the never changing life’ that is given diagrammatic substance throughout the text (81). Indeed, this simply is the ‘natural order more or less’ of its regulation: table of basic stimuli one sing nails in armpit two speak blade in arse three stop thump on skull four louder pestle on kidney five softer index in anus six bravo clap athwart arse seven lousy same as three eight encore same as one or two as may be (76) As this passage suggests, in the bringing forth of a world in which there is ‘no more reckoning save possibly algebraic’ (57), How It Is is marked particularly, if not uniquely, among Beckett’s works by the explicitly ‘mathematical’ character of its formal conception. (‘I always loved arithmetic it has paid me back in full’ (41).) This comes to be most explicitly thematized in Part III, where the very ‘infinite’ formal structure of the text becomes its own manifest ‘content’ in the narrator’s ‘murmuring’: number 814327 may speak misnomer the tormentors being mute as we have seen part two may speak of number 814326 to number 814328 who may speak of him to number 814329 who may speak of him to number 814330 and so on to number 814345 who in this way may know number 814326 (130) Now, famously, it is precisely such ‘rational’ order, as this ‘mathematical formalism’ suggests, that Adorno and Horkheimer, in their 1944 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, make much of in their notorious juxtaposition of Sade and Kant in the chapter entitled ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’.6 And it is in the form of such ‘order’, they claim, that ‘torture becomes the essential truth’—a literary ‘truth’ with which, we might say, Sade’s texts confront Kant’s own philosophical abstractions (without thereby being any less ‘abstract’ in themselves) (Adorno and Horkheimer 118). A relevant passage seems worth quoting at length here: Reason [as determined ‘mythologically’ by Enlightenment] is the organ of calculation, of planning; it is neutral in regard to ends; its element is coordination. What Kant grounded transcendentally, the affinity of knowledge and planning, which impressed the stamp of inescapable expediency on every aspect of a bourgeois existence that was wholly rationalized, even in every breathing-space, Sade realized empirically . . . The architectonic structure of the Kantian system, like the gymnastic pyramids of Sade’s orgies . . . reveals a structure of life as a whole which is deprived of any substantial goal. These arrangements amount not so much to pleasure as to its regimented

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pursuit—organization—just as in other demythologised epochs (Imperial Rome and the Renaissance, as well as the Baroque) the schema was more important than its content. (Adorno and Horkheimer 88) This is a violent and questionable reading of Kant, of course. Yet Adorno and Horkheimer are less concerned with Kant himself here than with what it is both in the precisely formal and schematic abstractions of Kantian philosophy, as in Sade’s writings, that may well be seen to ‘reflect’ those social forms of abstraction to which each necessarily relates. Hence: The true nature of [Kantian] schematism, of the general and the particular, of concept and individual case reconciled from without, is ultimately revealed in contemporary science as the interest of industrial society. Being is apprehended under the aspect of manufacture and administration. Everything—even the human individual, not to speak of the animal—is converted into the repeatable, replaceable process, into a mere example for the conceptual models of the system. (Adorno and Horkheimer 84) What I am leading up to, then, clumsily enough, is the suggestion that it is in something like this form that ‘experience’ is narrated in How It Is, and that it is this, so to speak, that formally constitutes the ‘undeviating organisation’ and ‘brutal efficiency’ of its ‘being in justice’, and, hence, something of its specific modernity as a text; a modernity which it is the ultimate task of criticism to grasp (Adorno and Horkheimer 87, 86). Yet, none of this is to say that How It Is is anything like a simple ‘literary’ transposition of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims, or, even, some allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment ‘itself’. At any rate, this is not what interests me here. Nor is any such reading what I want to ‘counterpose’ to the kinds of ‘ethical’ reading mapped out above. Instead, as with the juxtaposition of Kant with Sade, what concerns me at this point is a more basic correlation that is perceivable between the formal abstraction of a text like How It Is—both ‘literary’ and ‘philosophical’ in the discursive forms it modulates—and the abstraction of those social relations of the ‘historical world’ that it apparently divorces itself from; relations of, say, administration, information, knowledge and power, the formality of the law, commodity exchange. How It Is is, for sure, not about, say, the ‘morality’ of capitalism or ‘industrial society’ in any simple sense. Rather, I want to suggest, that in its re-organization of the materials of ‘ethical discourse’—‘scraps’ of the ‘humanities I had’ perhaps, as the narrator says at one point (33)—it serves to rework the social modes of abstraction in ‘art’ so as to reflect upon it as form. Such abstraction can, in this specific instance, thus be read, as Peter Osborne puts it, as ‘both a reflection of the form of social experience in developed capitalist societies and a specific artistic strategy to express such experience [critically] through its distance from

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and dissonance with established aesthetic norms’ (Osborne 1991, 62; see also Cunningham 2005). As Adorno argues in Aesthetic Theory, it is such ‘reflection’, more generally, that may define the essential ‘relation of [modern] art to society’—the means by which the unresolved antagonisms of reality return to it as immanent problems of form. Critically, what is at stake here, then, is the means by which art may operate as a transfiguration of certain specific forms of social relations (such as are described by Adorno and Horkheimer, but also many others7) into the terms of new formal schemas for the literary text, not so as to reduce them to their ‘aesthetic’ dimensions, but so as to mediate within itself, at the level of language and form, the structures of violence and division that those relations produce. Certainly, as regards its ‘ethical significance’ this seems more plausible—and, finally, less complacent—than to search the text for some distinctive Beckettian ‘ethics’ as such; a search which will always tend either to reduce him to something like a vaguely stoic set of soundbites—‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’; ‘fail again, fail better’—or to displace the historically and socially ‘concrete’ dimensions of artistic form altogether in making it a mere pretext for ‘quasi-transcendental’ reflection. Such significance, we might say, is found, then, not so much in the literary work’s ‘fleshing out’ of an ‘empty formalism’ of the ‘moral law’ (to which Critchley recalls our attention in Kant)—a very classical conception—but in the rigorous and exhaustive means by which it interrogates the character of this formalism itself, as if dictated for entry in the anonymous scribe’s ledger that, somewhere up ‘above’, records the narrative of How It Is itself. In such (always) indirect ways is the ‘we’ of How It Is also ‘us’. If this entails an abstraction from ‘the world of meaningful action, morality, or history’, the abstraction it engenders is, in this sense, no more abstract than those forms of social actuality, and of ethical relations, of the modernity that it so powerfully engages.

Notes 1

2

Cf., for example, Andrew Gibson’s acknowledgement that: ‘The trouble with Badiou’s reading of the plays is that it is more consistent with his philosophy than with the plays themselves’ (Gibson 2006, 233). Deleuze and Badiou are rather more exceptions than the rule in this regard, given the emphatic defence of philosophy qua philosophy that marks their work (particularly in the latter, where it is explicitly articulated as a return to philosophy against more ‘sceptical’ currents of post-Kantian thought); a defence which, in its certainty, seems seductive to many today. It is, of course, for this reason that both Badiou and Deleuze are considerably more impervious to concerns about the possible ‘violence’ of philosophical metalanguage in the apprehension of literary texts than, say, Adorno or Derrida. Whether one should view this as some kind of healthy ‘strength’ of conviction, opposed to the ‘timidity’ of deconstructive

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3

4

5

6

7

35

concerns, as the translators of Badiou’s writings on Beckett suggest, is a question I leave aside here, although one might wonder what this tacitly implies about the relationship of literature—the object of such shows of strength—to philosophy per se, despite Badiou’s various, apparently ‘humble’, claims for the former’s autonomy as a condition of ‘truth’. See Power and Toscano, xiii. An indicative list: Miller 1987, Eaglestone 1997, Gibson 1999, Robbins 1999, Harpham 1999, Garber et al. 2000. For a detailed (and, to my mind, extremely compelling) questioning of the standard ‘consensus’ concerning Derrida’s supposed turn towards a Levinasian ethics, see also McGettigan 2006. See, for example, the discussion of the final episode of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Andrew Gibson’s influential, pre-Badiouian text, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (Gibson 1999, 57–66). This conjunction between Kant and Sade is one of course also proposed (perhaps more famously today) by Jacques Lacan (see Lacan 1989). Lacan focuses here on Kant’s famous ethical formulation: ‘Act so that the maxim of your will may always be taken as the principle of laws that are valid for all’, and on the purely formal character of the moral law it expresses, which necessarily must be abstracted from any specific moral content. To this degree, and although he takes it in a quite different psychoanalytic direction, Lacan is in essential agreement with Adorno and Horkheimer, apparently without any awareness of their earlier text. Adorno and Horkheimer’s account itself, of course, draws variously upon a number of sources, including Marx, Nietzsche, Simmel and Weber.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’. In Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 241–275. —, and Max Horkheimer. 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso. Badiou, Alain. 2003. On Beckett. Trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. Manchester: Clinamen. Beckett, Samuel. 1959. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. —. 1964. How It Is. London: Calder. Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. 1993. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boxall, Peter. 2004. ‘Beckett and Homoeroticism’. In Lois Oppenheim, ed., Samuel Beckett Studies: Palgrave Advances, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 110–132. Butler, Judith. 2000. ‘Ethical Ambivalence’. In Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics, New York & London: Routledge, 15–28. Casanova, Pascale. 2006. Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso. Critchley, Simon. 1997. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

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Critchley, Simon. 1999. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —, with Nicholas Strobbe, John Dalton and Peter Banki. 2000. ‘Beckett is my hero (it’s alright): An Interview with Simon Critchley’. Contretemps 1 (September). http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/1september2000/critchley.pdf [Accessed 20 August 2007]. Cunningham, David. 2005. ‘Asceticism Against Colour, or Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett’. New Formations 55: 104–119. De Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London and New York: Routledge, 79–153. —, with Alan David. 2003. ‘Derrida avec Levinas’. Magazine Littéraire 419 (April): 30–34. —, with Derek Attridge. 1992. ‘ “This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. In Acts of Literature, London and New York: Routledge, 33–75. Eaglestone, Robert. 1997. Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —. 2003. ‘Navigating an Ancient Problem: Ethics and Literature’. European Journal of English Studies 7.2: 127–136. Eagleton, Terry. 2006. ‘Introduction’. In Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 1–9. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. 2000. The Turn to Ethics. London and New York: Routledge. Gibson, Andrew. 1999. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London and New York: Routledge. —. 2002. ‘Beckett and Badiou’. In Richard Lane, ed., Beckett and Philosophy, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 93–107. —. 2006. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harpham, Geoffrey. 1999. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. ‘Letter on “Humanism”.’ In Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 239–276. Hill, Leslie. 1997. ‘ “Up the Republic!”: Beckett, Writing, Politics’. MLN 112.5: 909–928. Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London and New York: Verso. Lacan, Jacques. 1989. ‘Kant With Sade’. Trans. James Swenson. October 51: 55–75. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. McGettigan, Andrew. 2006. Disputes in the ‘Metaphysics’ of Ethico-Political Transformation: A Re-Assessment of the Speculative Philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Unpublished PhD thesis, Middlesex University. Miller, J. Hillis. 1987. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Murphy, P. J. 1994. ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’. In John Pilling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 222–240. Newton, Adam Zachery. 2001. ‘Versions of Ethics; Or, The SARL of Criticism: Sonority, Arrogation, Letting-Be’. American Literary History 13.3: 603–637. Oppenheim, Lois. 2000. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Osborne, Peter. 1991. ‘Modernism, Abstraction and the Return to Painting’. In Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds., Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics, London: ICA, 59–79. —. 1995. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London and New York: Verso. Power, Nina and Alberto Toscano. 2003. ‘ “Think, pig!”: An Introduction to Beckett’s Badiou’. In Alain Badiou, On Beckett (Manchester: Clinamen Press), xi–xxxiv. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 2005. ‘Unbreakable B’s: From Beckett and Badiou to the Bitter End of Affirmative Ethics’. In Gabriel Riera, ed., Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 87–108. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’. Critical Horizons 7.1: 1–20. Robbins, Jill. 1999. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zuidervaart, Lambert. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chapter 2

‘A suitable engine of destruction’? Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx’s Ethics Matthew Feldman1

I remember coming out once, the regulation 20 years ago, being at that time less little than now, with an angry article on modern Irish poets, in which I set up, as criterion of worthwhile modern poetry, awareness of the vanished object. Already! And talking, as the only terrain accessible to the poet, of the no man’s land that he projects round himself, rather as a flame projects its zone of evaporation. A dismal kind of dodging, right enough, where the hunt goes on. Samuel Beckett, letter to Georges Duthuit, 1949 (quoted in Gunn 15)

I Languishing in darkness on the operating table, with only the ‘last ditch’ of his mind for company, Belacqua Shuah—the first in a procession of longsuffering Beckettian characters and, arguably, authorial alter-egos—suddenly realizes he had always ‘bragged of how he furnished his mind and lived there’ (Beckett 1970a, 174), and thus, seeking to defend his mental calm against the irksome idea of his impending surgery, ‘ransacked his mind for a suitable engine of destruction’ (175). At this early stage in his writing career, Beckett was already searching for a way of transcending—or at least kicking against— the pricks of consciousness. But in the 1933 ‘Yellow’, penultimate story in More Pricks Than Kicks, all that Belacqua, and latterly, I will argue, Beckett himself, could latch onto were ‘the extremes of wisdom’ found in one of John Donne’s verbal paradoxes: ‘Now among our wise men, I doubt not but many would be found, who would laugh at Heraclitus weeping, none which would weep at Democritus laughing’ (175). Yet if these opposing philosophical responses to the uncertainty and absurdity of human existence had worked for the moribund Belacqua, they failed spectacularly that year for the author. For the lancing of a boil in May, the

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death of his father in June, and a increasing sense of despair which sent Beckett to Wilfred Bion’s couch at the Tavistock Clinic in December 1933, collectively pointed to the end of one way of going on, understood by the contemporaneous quatrain ‘Gnome’ as merely ‘the loutishness of learning’ (Beckett 1977, 7). From this point on, intellect alone was no calmative. More than just ‘a suitable engine of destruction’ for the mind, ‘a suitable engine’ for perseverance of the spirit was missing. For Beckett, in a world ungraspable by logic alone, something else was needed; an ethics capable of mediating the problems encountered by this struggling artist in the 1930s. Enter Arnold Geulincx (1624–69), whom Beckett initially read around 1933, as part of his 267-page corpus of ‘Philosophy Notes’. Over several loose pages of notes taken from Wilhelm Windelband’s revised A History of Philosophy, Geulincx is initially treated as yet another philosopher at the extremes of thought; in this case, through the ideas with which he is traditionally most associated, ‘Occasionalism’: This furthest developed in Ethics of Geulincx. Illustration of the 2 Clocks which having once been synchronised by same artificer continue to move in perfect harmony, ‘absque ulla causalitate qua alterum hoc in altero causat, sed propter meram dependentiam, qua utrumque ab eadem arte et simili industria constitutum est’. What anthropologism! Leibniz illustrated with same analogy his doctrine of ‘preestablished harmony’, characterised Cartesian conception by immediate and permanent interdependence of 2 clocks, and Occasionalist by constantly renewed regulation of clocks by clock master.2 Contained here are the seeds of Beckett’s ongoing fascination with Geulincx, of which more presently. 3 These handwritten notes also point towards the documentary nature of the Beckett-Geulincx connection; and consequently, of the ‘falsifiable’4 methodology employed here. In turn, such a focus means relegating a number of interesting historiographical developments to the periphery. These include, or rather, for reasons of space must exclude: the mysterious story of a seventeenth-century philosopher attempting to marry Cartesian rationalism with a kind of Christian quietism; Geulincx’s then long-posthumous role, alongside Leibniz, in a nineteenth-century academic debate over ‘intellectual property rights’ (especially the idea of the synchronous clocks noted by Beckett above), spurring on J. P. N. Land’s monumental 3-volume edition over 1891–3, Arnoldi Geulincx Anverpiensis Opera Philosophica; the placement of these transcriptions within the larger corpus of Beckett’s extant reading notes during the interwar years; and even a recounting of Geulincx’s recent fashionability. But my concern here is with Beckett’s reading—and being heavily

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influenced by—Geulincx’s magnum opus the Ethics in Winter/Spring 1936. The relevance of the latter topic to Beckett and Ethics can hardly be overestimated, for, as Beckett stated to his great friend and correspondent, Thomas MacGreevy on 5 March 1936: I have been reading Geulincx in T.C.D., without knowing why exactly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is rationalisation & my instinct is right & the work worth doing, because of its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remaining alive. (Knowlson 219) In contrast to his earlier notes from Windelband, then, Beckett’s later reading of Geulincx finds the latter actually overcoming ‘anthropologism’ through an ultimately ethical vision: ‘from the perspective of eternity’. I will presently argue that Geulincx’s philosophy represented for Beckett (from 1936 if not from 1933) one answer to a perplexing question facing both philosopher and artist; one aptly formulated in Geulincx’s Ethics: ‘if both body and soul are foolish, what is my intelligence worth?’5 But first, a contextualizing note on the intervening ‘London Years’ (c.1934/5) is in order. Although the three years after the writing of ‘Yellow’ saw Beckett also complete Murphy and publish Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, these were, first and foremost, long years of particularly intense self-education and psychological distress. Beyond the loss and solitude Beckett felt over the middle 1930s, however, a fundamental change in his outlook was simultaneously taking shape. Two fundamental aspects of this evolving view, one of which I have elsewhere shorthanded as ‘agnostic quietism’,6 are relevant to this chapter. And both are, arguably, initially presented in two of Beckett’s non-fiction reviews published during Summer 1934 as well as in two letters to Thomas MacGreevy of the same period; that is, fully a dozen years prior to ‘the revelation’ in his mother’s room, later dramatized in Krapp’s Last Tape.7 The foremost of these is reflected in Beckett’s praise of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems for Dublin Magazine. ‘All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer,’ Beckett declared in his suggestively titled ‘Humanistic Quietism’, while ‘prayer is no more (no less) than an act of recognition’ (Beckett 1983, 68). Here my suggestion is that, during these transitional years, poetry was progressively taking over the long-lapsed role of belief in Beckett’s life. In other words, Beckett’s ‘recognition’ deliberately substituted Art for God.8 A second, related consideration may be witnessed in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ as a ‘principle of individuation’ (Beckett 1983, 70) separating modern from traditional art in Ireland. This chasm between ‘antiquarians and others’ (70), for the young Beckett, already centred upon an awareness of ‘the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook’ (70); or alternatively, the ‘breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing—rupture

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of the lines of communication’ (70). Though for his part strongly against the antiquarians—close connection with James Joyce and the Work in Progress circle in Paris from 1929 had ensured this—Beckett tacitly assigned himself an added task; a reconnaissance of what ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ dubbed the ‘no man’s land’ between subject and object (70). Precisely this artistic dilemma and precisely this review are, tellingly, referred to in Beckett’s 1949 letter to Duthuit quoted in the epigraph to this chapter. But that this becomes something of an artistic crusade actually much earlier is demonstrated by Beckett’s writing during the 1930s, by the insightful ‘German Diaries’ of 1936/7, and by various letters from the time, especially to MacGreevy. Exemplifying the latter is what James Knowlson calls ‘an exhilarating piece of analysis’ (Knowlson 197), ostensibly on the painting of Paul Cézanne, in two letters to MacGreevy in September 1934. In the fi rst of these, on 8 September, Beckett praised the post-impressionist who ‘seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’ (quoted in Knowlson 197). In turn, this view of Cézanne’s landscapes as ‘by definition unapproachably alien’ was umbilically linked to personal experience, as Beckett continued on 16 September: ‘he had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life . . . operative in himself’ (quoted in Knowlson 197). As with many of his comments on fellow artists, Beckett’s view of Cézanne— and indeed, of the Irish poetry scene of the mid-1930s—was heavily coloured by his own artistic preferences. Beckett may even have been writing principally about himself. ‘So you can’t talk art with me’, Beckett wrote twenty years later to George Duthuit, putative ‘D’ in the infamous Three Dialogues, ‘all I risk expressing when I speak about it are my own obsessions’ (2 March 1954; cited in Oppenheim 85). In this light it is not surprising to find that, in the first of these two letters on Cézanne, Beckett notes with admiration the latter’s rejection of anthropomorphization, an idea roughly interchangeable with the dreaded ‘anthropologism!’ Moreover, variations on the word ‘anthropomorphism’ occur four times in his letter to MacGreevy of 8 September 1934—the last instance through an insightful comment that anticipates Beckett’s post-war literature: Perhaps it is the one bright spot in a mechanistic age—the deanthropomorphisation of the artist. Even the portrait beginning to be dehumanised as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself. (Cited in Tonning 45) As distinct from Belacqua’s ‘suitable engine of destruction’, a search was now underway for a method of writing existence from the outside, as it were; to

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write about life with detachment, as though it were inanimate, which was to be an artistic ‘bright spot’ among human suffering. It was therefore necessary to examine the ‘no man’s land’ between subject and object, while simultaneously returning to Art a sense of numinousness and ‘incommensurability’. That this was an ethical challenge no less than an intellectual exercise is made clear in a remarkably self-definitional letter to MacGreevy some six months later: I cannot see how ‘goodness’ is to be made a foundation or a beginning of anything. Am I to set my teeth and be disinterested? When I cannot answer for myself, and do not dispose of myself, how can I serve? . . . Macché! Or is there some way of devoting pain and monstrosity and incapacitation to the service of a deserving cause?9 Discussing this letter in his groundbreaking thesis, Mark Nixon notes an important difference between the divinely-oriented Geulincx and Thomas á Kempis (the ostensible subject of the letter), and Beckett’s own, secular concerns. Having no ‘disposition for the supernatural’, as he told MacGreevy in his discussion of The Imitation, Beckett removed the origin of the self-effacement, the ‘contempt for self’, as deriving from the human worthlessness before God, in order to arrive at the ‘self-referring quietism’. This removal of the transcendental application of the quietist position did nothing to diminish the value of the Imitation or the ‘guignol world’ of the Ethica, which nevertheless offered an aesthetic and an ethic by which to exist within a meaningless universe.10 Beckett, in life no less than in literature, was searching for a way to eff the ineffable, to mediate inner and outer worlds though art, to find a ‘deserving cause’ for suffering—all without recourse to God. Over the next ten months the dilemma became still more acute artistically: the writing of Murphy began to stall around Christmastime 1935. The problem for the character Murphy, the novel Murphy, as well as its writer, was how to ‘tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco’ (Beckett 1993b, 101). Linguistic paradoxes alone no longer offered ‘a suitable engine of destruction’; and for Murphy, it ‘was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing, nor even to take the further step of renouncing all that lay outside the intellectual love in which he alone could love himself’. Affective attachment to the world plagued both author and character, ‘as witness his deplorable susceptibility to Celia, ginger and so on. The means of clinching it were lacking’ (102; my emphasis). Enter Arnold Geulincx again, this time in January 1936. Only at this point did Beckett take up the study of Geulincx specifically and in earnest. In addition to numerous letters documenting his reading of Geulincx at Trinity College, Dublin between 9 January and 15 April 1936, Beckett transcribed nearly 15,000 words, in arduous Latin, from three of Geulincx’s central works. These were taken from Land’s compendium, Opera Philosophica (Geulincx 1891–3): about one hundred words from Quaestiones Quodlibeticae [Questions

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Concerning Disputations] (Vol. I, pp. 67–147), some 2,500 words from the Metaphysica [Metaphysics] (Vol. II, pp. 137–310) and the rest from Geulincx’s masterpiece, the Ethica [Ethics] (Vol. III, pp. 1–271). As attested by the relative lengths of transcription, the Ethics were of far greatest interest to Beckett than the rest, also borne out by three surviving handwritten pages and a ‘fair copy’—meaning that at some point Beckett likely handwrote, typed and then re-typed his detailed reading notes from the Ethica. Alongside a supporting essay by Anthony Uhlmann, these transcriptions are now reproduced in Martin Wilson’s excellent translation, Arnold Geulincx Ethics (Geulincx 2006), one of several studies covering Beckett’s extant manuscripts between about 1928 and 1938—covering a variety of subjects from literature and painting to philosophy and history—a corpus of materials I have termed ‘Interwar Notes’.11 In this approximately four-month encounter with Geulincx, moreover, Beckett was to establish a longstanding influence both unusually explicit in his work, and equally surprising in terms of the dearth of scholarship on the subject. For Geulincx remains the Third Man of Beckett Studies: everyone knows he’s there, but no one really knows how. This makes for rich irony given Geulincx’s philosophy; but then again, this is Beckett Country.

II This encounter with Geulincx’s philosophy was the first of its type for Beckett: erudition that ultimately asserts human ignorance. Much like his psychoanalytic notes taken two years previously—principally typed up from an introduction to psychology and various psychoanalytic texts mainly taken from disciples of Freud—Beckett’s transcriptions of the central tenets of Geulincx’s moral philosophy hit Beckett for what they ultimately are: self-cancelling binaries of thought; namely, the mystical and the rational. Now, talking about Beckett’s thinking about Geulincx’s writing about the idea of ineffability not ‘doomed to fail’ from the outset, a few words on the idiosyncratic Geulincx are necessary. Idiosyncratic is apt if only on account of the strange circumstances in which Geulincx found himself: an erudite believer anxious to reconcile the rationalism of the so-called New Philosophy with the ineffable power of an interventionist God, leading to Proposition 9 that Beckett recorded from the Metaphysics, ‘I call that body mine, by whose occasion diverse thoughts arise in my mind that do not depend on me’.12 For this reason, the divine occasion of an internally thinking subject and an external object means that thought and action correspond like two simultaneously running clocks, leading this extreme mix of rationalism and mysticism to be dubbed ‘Occasionalism’. Without doubt, Murphy is the work most explicitly concerned with Geulincx, in keeping with Beckett’s general practice of drawing upon his contemporaneous reading in his writings. And Geulincx was to become the single figure

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most explicitly referred to across Beckett’s oeuvre. Unsurprisingly then, mere days after encountering Geulincx at T.C.D., Beckett had already identified his famously favourite Geulingian maxim in a comment to MacGreevy: I suddenly see that Murphy is break down between his: Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis (position) [where you are worth nothing, you will wish for nothing] and Malraux’s Il est difficile a celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens (negation) [It is hard for someone who lives outside society not to seek out his own]. (Knowlson 219) As the writing of Murphy faltered—‘with three, four chapters to write, only about 12,000 words, but I don’t think they will be’ on 29 January 1936; ‘Murphy goes from bad to worse’ on 25 March; and ‘Murphy won’t move for me at all. I get held up over the absurdest difficulties of detail’ on 15 April13 —Geulincx was along for the ride, a companion in misery. Yet over these months, too, Beckett found, I want to suggest, a moral justification of what he was looking for: I am obliged to read in Trinity College Library, as Arnoldus Geulincx is not available elsewhere. I recommend him to you most heartily, especially his Ethica, and above all the second section of the second chapter of the first tractate, where he disquires on his fourth cardinal virtue, Humility, contemptus negativus sui ipsius [negative disregard of oneself ].14 It is a reasonable assumption that Geulincx was directly inserted into Beckett’s last ‘three, four chapters’ of Murphy written over Spring 1936, perhaps facilitating both author’s and character’s answer to the ‘lacking’ means noted in chapter 9, quoted above, itself practically a hymn to the Ethics. ‘The issue therefore . . . lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world’ (Beckett 1993b, 101), Beckett writes at the turning point of the novel, where Murphy decides for the ‘little world’ of consciousness: ‘His vote was cast. “I am not of the big world, I am of the little world” was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. . . . In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ (101). Earlier Anglophone scholars, such as Samuel I. Mintz (1959) and Rupert Wood (1993), have commented upon the overt use of Geulincx in Murphy. However, it is worth noting that Murphy’s first good night ‘since nights began so long ago to be bad’ comes as he retreats into the MMM asylum—paralleling the attempted retreat into his ‘little world’—‘the reason being not so much that he had his chair again as that the self whom he loved had the aspect, even to Ticklepenny’s inexpert eye, of a real alienation. Or to put it perhaps more nicely: conferred that aspect on the self whom he hated’ (109; my emphasis).

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This is strictly in accordance with Geulincx’s chief virtue and second, negative, application of humility: ‘Requiritur ad Humilitatem contemptus negativus sui ipsius’—or as Martin Wilson’s translation has it, ‘Humility therefore calls for negative disregard of oneself’ (Geulincx 2006, 30). This, in turn, provides both the positive and negative obligations of humility towards both God and His gift to humanity, reason, codified as: ‘ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’: ‘Wherein you have no power, therein neither should you will’ (Geulincx 2006, 244). Even if Beckett did not accept the theological basis of Geulincx’s thought, the practical aspect of this ethical injunction was to be of great use, found in exactly the place in Beckett’s notes where the just-cited letter recommends: This gives rise to the chief axiom of Ethics . . .: Wherein you have no power, therein neither should you will (Note that this axiom includes both parts of humility . . . inspection and disregard. Wherein you have no power; we read in this the inspection of oneself . . . Therein you should not will; we read in this . . . disregard of onself, or neglect of oneself across the whole human condition, and resigning ourselves into the power of His hand, in which we are indeed, whether we like it or not) or what comes to the same thing, Do nothing gratuitously, do nothing in vain. (Beckett 2006, 337; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 244–245) Geulincx’s Ethics is invoked still more explicitly by the 1945 short story ‘The End’, where the narrator’s old tutor ‘had given me the Ethics of Geulincx. . . . The Ethics had his name (Ward) on the fly-leaf’ (Beckett 1995, 91). Although the narrator comments that to ‘know I had a being, however faint and false, outside of me, had once had the power to stir my heart’ (97), this is not enough to keep him from retreating to a boat, ostensibly committing very un-Geulingian suicide, all the while likening the world—with its ‘icy tumultuous streets, the terrifying faces, the noises that slash, pierce, claw, bruise’ (98)—to human excrement. Here the outlook is similar to Geulincx’s, but the ultimate result, as for Belacqua and Murphy, is death. In contrast, the allusion to Geulincx and sailing is made yet more specific in Molloy, the most famous direct invocation of the Ethics: I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. (Beckett 1976, 48) This perfectly corresponds to a sentence in Beckett’s transcriptions of the Ethics: ‘Just as a ship carrying a passenger with all speed towards the east,

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so the will of God, carrying all things, impelling all things with inexorable force, in no way prevents us from resisting his will (as much as in our power) with complete freedom’ (Beckett 2006, 317; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 182). Anthony Uhlmann has reprinted an excerpt from a letter of 17 February 1954 by Beckett to the German translator of Molloy, Dr Erich Franzen, with reference to this passage in Molloy: This passage is suggested (a) by a passage in the Ethics of Geulincx where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boat carrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within the limits of the boat itself, as far as the stern; and (b) by Ulysses’ relation in Dante (Inf. 26) of his second voyage (a medieval tradition) to and beyond the Pillars of Hercules, his shipwreck and death . . . I imagine a member of the crew who does not share the adventurous spirit of Ulysses and is at least at liberty to crawl homewards . . . along the brief deck. (Cited in Uhlmann 1990, 54) Finally, in a 1967 letter published in Disjecta, Beckett advised Sighle Kennedy (and thereby, readers of Beckett’s work generally) on how to understand his art: I simply do not feel the presence in my writings as a whole of the Proust & Joyce situations you evoke. If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the ‘Naught is more real . . .’ and the ‘Ubi nihil vales . . .’ both already in Murphy and neither very rational. (Beckett 1983, 113) A last, more opaque kind of evidence connecting Beckett with Geulincx concerns literary allusions made to Geulingian philosophy. Two, for instance, can be observed in characteristically defaced ‘traces’ in the post-war writing. The first occurs near the conclusion of the 1946 Mercier and Camier: ‘One shall be born, said Watt, one is born of us, who having nothing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath’ (Beckett 1993a, 114). Similarly, in the 1959 radio play, Embers, a play on the word ‘ineffable’—transcribed seventeen times in Beckett’s notes on Geulincx—is no longer a reference to God, but to Music: MUSIC MASTER: [Violently.] Eff! Eff! ADDIE: [Tearfully.] Where? MUSIC MASTER: [Violently.] Qua! [He thumps note.] Fa! [Pause. ADDIE begins again, MUSIC MASTER beating time lightly with rule. When she comes to bar 5 she makes same mistake. Tremendous blow of rule on piano case. ADDIE stops playing, begins to wail.]

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MUSIC MASTER: [Frenziedly.] Eff! Eff! [He hammers note.] Eff! [He hammers note.] Eff! [Hammered note, ‘Eff!’ and ADDIE’S wail amplified to paroxysm, then suddenly cut off. Pause.] ADA: You are silent today. HENRY: It was not enough to drag her into the world, now she must play the piano. (Beckett 1992, 259) In addition to these more ‘direct’ references and allusions, Uhlmann is surely right in arguing that several recurrent Beckettian ‘images’ also derive from Geulincx. These function as a kind of shorthand for tropes of impotence and ignorance—including pendulum clocks, rocking-chairs and rocking boats—which testify to Geulincx’s role in the evolution of Beckett’s writing; that is, in ‘a shift from an art of relation to an art of nonrelation . . . an understanding of thought which stresses how our thinking is intimately interinvolved with ignorance. . . . [F]ollowing Geulincx, he identifies the cogito (the “I think”) with a nescio (an “I do not know”)’ (Uhlmann 2007, 89–90). Uhlmann also fi nds Beckett’s understanding of the cogito is not Cartesian, but Geulingian; for the two, even if both based on Cartesian fi rst principles, are very different in logical effect: ‘Descartes leads us from obscurity to clarity (knowledge), whereas Geulincx leads us into obscurity (and offers no real hope of our departing from there) so that we might recognise our own ignorance and in turn recognise the omniscience and omnipotence of God’ (Uhlmann 2007, 101–102). Deeper than mere references, then, Beckett’s writings are also marked by Geulincx’s philosophy, particularly the virtue of humility that he so carefully transcribed and heartily recommended. Yet even in Beckett’s typescript from Treatise I of the Ethics, let alone all six difficult treatises of challenging Latin, so great an overlap between the two exists that it seems difficult to pull them apart. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Beckett’s transcription from Geulincx’s Seventh Obligation, Death: Yet there is this boundless ocean of miseries, on which I presently toss. I am hurled from one calamity to another, only to sink back as often as not from the latter to the former. . . . Thrust into a body as if into a prison, am I paying the penalties that I have deserved, and among others this grave one, that I am oblivious of the offence that I am expiating? Someone who is being beaten can at least take comfort in knowing why he is beaten. (Beckett 2006, 350–351; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 54–55) Viewed through the prism of Beckett’s writing, shades of Molloy, Murphy, Didi and Gogo, in fact, most characters, seem to abound. It would seem

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clear, then, that Geulincx keys into a number of strands later visible in Beckett’s writing. But how, precisely? Aside from the odd phrase or allusion to Geulincx—especially in the notoriously opaque ‘mature’ post-war writing—what is this connection actually worth?

III Ethics may be, in fact, the most important answer. The preceding has offered an overview of Beckett’s reading and direct employment of Geulincx’s Ethics from 1936. This has been itself largely situated within formative events of the 1930s, especially in respect of Beckett’s search for a way of negotiating his artistic impasse and ongoing personal crises. But after this period, a deeper employment of the Geulincx’s Ethics can be observed, too, in writings after Murphy, in the years when Geulincx’s ethical vision had marinated over a period of years in the evolution of Beckett’s art. These ethical debts are two, I want lengthily to conclude by arguing, centring on Geulincx’s ideas about detachment and acceptance. Before applying these to two later prose texts, Watt and ‘From an Abandoned Work’, however, locating the relevant ethical appropriations within Beckett’s transcriptions recalls Geulincx’s take on these ethical responsibilities. The first, detachment, involves a quietistic submission to God, thereby ‘listening to Reason’. With Geulincx, God is the ultimate arbiter and perpetually acting miracle maker, coordinating our motion with the outside world (of just how we are ignorant), which we only partially grasp through the inescapable prison of consciousness. But even if one cannot know how an action actually takes place, for Geulincx, this does not relieve individuals from moral responsibility, or from freedom of will—if only within the skull. Through Cartesian reason, as Beckett transcribed, an ethical turning inward to consciousness becomes one of Geulincx’s cardinal virtues, diligence: ‘It has two parts: Turning away from external things (for they hinder listening), and turning into oneself . . . an intense and continuous withdrawal of the mind (no matter what its current business) from external things into itself, into its innermost sanctum, in order to consult the sacred Oracle of Reason’ (Beckett 2006, 320; Geulincx 2006, 198, 19). ‘Autology’, or self-inspection, is thus manifested as a supreme detachment from the world. A stoical withdrawal into consciousness, an ultimate alienation from, or incommensurability with, the grotesque world outside the mind, then, is a direct consequence of Geulincx’s metaphysics (specifically, ‘I merely experience the World. I am a spectator of the scene, not an actor’ (Beckett 2006, 334; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 35)). In other words, a ‘deanthropomorphisation’ of existence follows the escape into consciousness; offering the ‘perspective of eternity’. This ‘inorganic’ view of humanity and the world—one Beckett was already seeking in Spring 1936—is

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ethical insofar as it produces a paradoxical kind of wisdom: knowledge of ignorance. The latter is intimately connected to Beckett’s second ethical debt to Geulincx, namely a submission to human powerlessness. This means ultimately accepting that true knowledge is ineffable, as Beckett noted at length: ‘I cannot get beyond I do not know, there is nothing I can add to this I do not know. I do not know how I came to this condition’ (Beckett 2006, 334; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 35). Such a realization leads to Geulincx’s supreme virtue—and Beckett’s personal favourite—humility, which ‘is carelessness of oneself; not in a positive sense, but (as I employ the words) in a negative sense. Hence, humility is better described as carelessness and neglect of oneself than as disregard of oneself’ (Beckett 2006, 326; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 221). Humility, submission, acceptance: in Geulincx’s philosophy, these become ethical responses to ineffability; simultaneously, for Beckett, they are a way of proceeding. For Beckett’s characters after Murphy may be tortured by ignorance, but they endure (even the narrator of ‘The End’ does not actually die); they withdraw into consciousness and submit to their own impotence. There is no exit for either Geulincx or Beckett’s characters. Indeed, this may be again understood as an essentially ethical process: autological detachment from the world, leading to acceptance of ignorance, capped by a ‘neglect of oneself’, or humility. This ethical process heavily pervades Beckett’s wartime novel, Watt. By withdrawing into the ‘little world’ of Mr Knott’s establishment—importantly, ‘Watt never knew how he got into Mr. Knott’s house’ (35)—Watt sets the stage for his self-defeating attempts to understand the world, above all through mathematical logic gone awry.15 Yet Watt’s logical travails are preceded by the most important event in the novel, Arsene’s ‘short statement’. Leaving in synchronicity with Watt’s arrival, Arsene describes his shift from detachment to acceptance; a movement from the ‘being of nothing’ (38) to ‘that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that presence within, that presence between, though I’ll be buggered if I can understand how it could have been anything else’ (43). This acceptance leads to an ethical humility for Arsene, which naturally earns ‘quite useless wisdom so dearly won’: ‘what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail’ (62). Interestingly, Arsene describes this ‘change of degree’ as ‘existence off the ladder’: ‘Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away’ (Beckett 1970b, 42). While much speculation has been advanced about the origin of this ‘ladder joke’ in Watt—variously ascribed to Mauthner’s Kritik, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and an old Irish joke (see Acheson 1992)—I would argue it comes from the Ethics, specifically from Geulincx’s section on Humility. Considering the corresponding ‘ladder’ passage in Beckett’s transcriptions, Arsene’s analogy

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would seem to make more sense in the context of Geulingian detachment, or withdrawal into consciousness: The virtuous man is always ascending and descending this ladder [of existence]: he seeks ease that he may be fit for work; he wants to be fit for work that he may work; he wants to work that he may have something else to eat; he wants to eat that he may live; he wants to live because God has ordered it, not because it pleases him, and not because life (as it has become popular to say) is so sweet. (Beckett 2006, 327; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 219) It therefore appears that Arsene’s entire statement is powered by an appropriation of Geulingian ineffability. Moreover, this vital speech foreshadows Watt’s own attempts to grasp the world through reason alone while in Knott’s house, including the ‘fugitive penetration’ (67) by the piano-tuners, his encounter with a ‘pseudo-pot’ (78–80) and ‘others of a similar kind, incidents that is to say of great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport’ (71). All of these obscure Watt’s own pursuit of a ‘being of nothing’, as when Watt finds himself wondering about Knott’s bedclothes: ‘Does he seek to know again, what is cold, what is heat? But this was an anthropomorphic insolence of short duration’ (202). By accepting the ineffability of Knott’s universe, Watt is able to yield to Geulingian detachment, for ‘Watt suffered neither from the presence of Mr. Knott, nor from his absence. When he was with him, he was content to be with him, and when he was away from him, he was content to be away from him. Never with relief, never with regret, did he leave him at night, or in the morning come to him again’ (207). Upon his rotation out of Knott’s house and back into the world, Watt’s detachment is disturbed by Micks: ‘One moment I was out, and the next I was in’ (215), and Watt’s acceptance of ineffability is supplanted by an ‘inner lamentation’ (215) as he departs. Lacking the humility born of self-disregard now that ‘logic was on his side’ (218) again, Watt quickly becomes fatigued and irritable—despite the fact that, seeing the train station, ‘for an instant his mind turned off from care’ (221). But this is insufficient, for Watt then troublingly encounters ‘a figure, human apparently’ (224) but, unable to determine its movement, gender or dimension, finds himself highly impatient, for ‘all he desired was to have his uncertainty removed’ (225), although ‘it was greatly to be deplored, that he cared what it was, coming along the road, profoundly to be deplored’ (226). Waiting for an answer in an ineffable world, ‘staring at this incomprehensible staffage, suffering greatly from impatience’ (226), Watt remains unable to assimilate this figure into his consciousness. It is this final ineffability that leads to Watt’s paradoxical realization, and perhaps subsequent institutionalization with Sam: detachment from the world offers knowledge of ignorance, which thereby provides a humble submission to human impotence. Thus, waiting for his train, ‘the darkness gradually deepened.

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There was no longer a dark part and a less dark part, no, but all now was uniformly dark, and remained so, for some time. This notable change took place by insensible degrees’ (235). By the time he buys his ticket, Watt has reconnected with Geulincx’s chief principle of Ethics—that is, ‘wherein you have no power, therein you should not will’—and consequently does not care in which direction his train leaves. In turning to ‘From an Abandoned Work’, an abortive writing project in English originally called ‘The Gloaming’, Geulingian ethics seem more difficult to locate, in keeping with the well-recognized opacity of Beckett’s post-war art (Pilling 2006a, 133). But around the time this text was written, Beckett sent Mary Hutchinson information on Geulincx and Democritus on 7 November 1954; two years later he told the same recipient about Geulincx’s ‘fascinating guignol world’ (Nixon 2005, 60–61). Some twenty years after first reading him at T.C.D., then, Geulincx was still not far from Beckett’s mind. The scenes presented in ‘From an Abandoned Work’ ostensibly centre on an unnamed narrator who ‘was very quick as a boy and picked up a lot of hard knowledge’ (157), focusing especially on memories of three different days, the first offering the opening, representative sentence, ‘Up bright and early that day, I was young then, feeling awful, mother hanging out of the window in her nightdress weeping and waving’ (155). Like so many Beckett narrators, this unnamed sufferer has ‘never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way’ (156). Similarly, too, the narrator is flayed by memories of his dead mother and father, chooses days seemingly at random to recollect, before sarcastically conceding powerlessness: ‘No there’s no accounting for it, there’s no accounting for anything, with a mind like the one I always had, always on the alert against itself, I’ll come back on this perhaps when I feel less weak. There was a time I tried to get relief by beating my head against something, but I gave it up’ (157). Realizing that ‘all is mental’ (158), the narrator clearly used to pursue knowledge at some past point: ‘A fair scholar I was too, no thought, but a great memory’ (158). Although it is unclear whether this text is written or dictated, one thing is clear: ‘words have been my only loves, not many’ (162). Having never been in love with anything outside the mind, the best of the narrator’s ‘only loves’ is the word ‘over’—sometimes inverted as ‘vero, oh vero’ (162), for which, along with much else, there shall be no apology: ‘No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found’ (158). In closing, I want to consider this text from the perspective of Geulincx’s philosophy, in two complementary ways. The first of these is through Uhlmann’s discussion of images cited earlier. To be sure, allusions to Geulincx are important, from mention of ‘my two books, the little and the big’ (Beckett 1995, 162), the latter so often associated with Murphy’s gloss on Geulincx; but also the image of ‘life in a big empty echoing room with a big old pendulum clock, just listening and dozing, the case open so that I could watch the swinging, moving my eyes to and fro’ (162–3). There are numerous

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betrayals of ignorance in ‘From an Abandoned Work’ as well, from the narrator’s inability to distinguish a boy from ‘a small man or woman’ (156), to phrases like ‘why the curses were pouring out of me I do not know, no that is a foolish thing to say’ (163), in addition to the ominous question: ‘My father, did I kill him too as well as my mother, perhaps in a way I did, but I can’t go into that now, much too old and weak’ (159). Therefore, not only in terms of certain evocative phrases and especially images, but indeed in the entire trope of wallowing in what Uhlmann calls ‘nescience’—the opposite of omniscience—the narrator of ‘From an Abandoned Work’ reveals traces of Geulingian ethics. And it would seem clear that, to agree with Uhlmann, there is a prima facie case for Beckett’s continuing, direct—if nevertheless defaced and allusive—employment of Geulincx, whom he read and transcribed fully a generation earlier. And second, there is also a deeper influence of Geulingian ethics, one pervading the form of ‘From an Abandoned Work’ (and by extension, I would suggest, Beckett’s corpus as a whole), much like with the structure of Watt. To reformulate this in terms of a final question: is there a mode of ‘deanthropomorphised’ art—understood here as a secular version of Geulincx’s ethics of detachment, acceptance and consequent endurance—that Beckett appropriates from Geulincx? In approaching this question, we are already honing in on the narrator’s own ineffability: ‘Where did I get it, from a dream, or a book read in a nook when a boy, or a word overheard as I went along, or in me all along and kept under till it could give me joy, these are the kind of horrid thoughts I have to contend with in the way I have said’ (160). For the narrator of ‘From an Abandoned Work’ talks but no one listens, is a slow walker but was one of ‘the fastest runners the world has ever seen, over a short distance, five or ten yards, in a second I was there’ (158). Here, paradox is the method, and failure is the result. For this characteristic Beckettian narrator is old and weak and uncertain, as indeed is the language of the text itself. For example, consider an excerpt from the closing sentence: ‘awful English 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). The memory is insufficient, the language is insufficient, even the body seems to be divorced from consciousness—and all these are major Beckettian tropes recurring across the post-war writings. As Geulincx has it, this failure of understanding, this ignorance, yields insight into, and demands worship of, an ineffable God: ‘I have learned by inspecting myself that the totality of my human condition, comprising birth, life and death, is a monument to the ineffable wisdom of God. . . . [W]e know that it exists, but we do not know how it exists, and we know only this much, that we cannot know’ (Beckett 2006, 345; corresponding to Geulincx 2006, 267). Contrast this with, in ‘From an Abandoned Work’: ‘the old half-knowledge of when and where gone, and of what, but kinds of things still, all at once, all going, until nothing, that kind of thing’ (163). For as an artist, flailing in a world bereft of God, Beckett’s understanding of

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Geulingian humility, in effect, is not given the relief of belief, meaning that one consequence of trying to ‘eff the ineffable’ in ‘From an Abandoned Work’ is that with ‘unhappiness like mine, there’s no annihilating that’ (159). And are these sentiments, then, not all the more frightening in Beckett’s world, where even God is cuffed in abeyance, even ignorance is radically doubted and ineffability and failure become literary as well as personal injunctions? The self-defeating logic of this ‘Geulingian cogito’ was indeed the source of much Beckettian pastiche from Murphy on. But ‘this submission, this admission’, may also be seen in terms of literary expression—as with Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’, or ‘intent of undoing’—one perhaps similar to Geulincx’s habit of writing propositions in the negative, his assertions of ignorance; or finally, via the Geulingian paradox raised earlier: knowledge of ignorance is both empowering and simultaneously implies utter powerlessness. The deeper connection at work in Beckett’s reading of Geulincx, then, is manifested in detachment and acceptance—surely not the commands of divine reason. If Beckett submitted to the dictates of anything during the restless 1930s, let alone in the decades beyond, it was certainly not Geulincx’s God. For Beckett’s ideal artist ‘is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion’, as he famously declared in the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit: ‘this fidelity to failure [creates] a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation’ (Beckett 1983, 145). The paradoxical inevitability of failure, and of the possibility of failing better— towards religious knowledge of God for Geulincx, towards artistically expressing the inexpressible for Beckett—leads from introspective detachment to an ultimately ethical acceptance of ignorance. If this is what Beckett may be said to have learned and applied from the Ethics, then Arnold Geulincx survives in and through an ultimately ethical suffering manifest in the former’s ‘deanthropologised’ characters—and narratives generally—in light of the latter’s question: ‘what is my intelligence worth?’

Notes 1

2

I am particularly grateful to Edward Beckett, The Beckett Estate and the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading for permission to quote from unpublished and archival sources. Excerpted from Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’, TCD MS 10967/189 recto and verso. Extensive transcriptions from these notes, alongside a discussion of their relevance to Beckett’s writing, can be found in Feldman 2004. Martin Wilson translates the passage quoted in Latin as follows: ‘and all that without any causality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but rather on account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have been constructed with the same art and similar industry’ (Geulincx 2006, 232).

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54 3

4

5 6 7 8

9

10

11

12 13

14

15

For details of Geulincx’s philosophy in English, see Bardout 2002; Nuchelmans 1988; De Vleeschauwer 1957; Schmaltz 1992 and Nadler 1999. For discussion of Popper’s term ‘falsifiability’ in the context of literary criticism, see Feldman 2006a. TCD MS 10971/6/29; cited in Feldman 2004, 380. For further discussion of this theme, see Feldman 2008. For Beckett’s account of the revelation in his mother’s room, see Knowlson 352. For this argument in full, see Feldman 2006b, 8–13. Evidence for the substitution of Art and God suffuses Beckett’s writing at this time, as exemplified by a July 1934 review of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poems: ‘This is the very language of apostasy . . ., where God is the tower and the heart whatever you please to call it. . . . Such a turmoil of self-deception and naïf discontent gains nothing in dignity from that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides to the interchangeability of Rilke and God’ (Beckett 1983, 66–67). Samuel Beckett, Letter to MacGreevy of 10 March 1935, TCD MS 10904. For discussion of ‘non-euclidean logic’, see Feldman 2006b, 13–20. Nixon’s footnote to this fascinating passage cites the phrase referring to Geulincx’s ‘guignol world’, in a letter from Samuel Beckett to Mary Hutchinson of 28 November 1956: ‘Frightful kitchen latin but fascinating guignol world’ (Nixon 2005, 60–61). For further discussion of these archival materials, see Uhlmann 2006, and the essays by Nixon, van Hulle, Caselli and Pilling in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16 (2006). See also the essays in Van Hulle, ed., 2005; Ackerley 2004; Pilling 1998a and Pilling 1998b. TCD MS 10971/6/2; corresponding to Geulincx 1999, 41. TCD MS 10904. I am especially grateful to Mark Nixon for his assistance with these passages. Samuel Beckett, Letter to Arland Ussher of 25 March 1936, cited in Feldman 2006b, 132. For discussion of Watt’s maddening mathematics, see Mood 1971; and more recently, Ackerley 2005.

Works cited Acheson, James. 1992. ‘A Note on the Ladder Joke in Watt’. Journal of Beckett Studies 2.1: 115–116. Ackerley, Chris. 2004. Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy. Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. —. 2005. Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt. Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. Bardout, Jean-Christophe. 2002. ‘Occasionalism: La Forge, Cordemoy, Geulincx’. In Steven Nadler, ed., Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 140–151. Beckett, Samuel. 1970a. More Pricks Than Kicks. London: Calder. —. 1970b. Watt. London: Calder.

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—. 1976. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. —. 1977. Collected Poems in English and French. New York: Grove. —. 1983. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder. —. 1992. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1993a. Mercier and Camier. London: Calder. —. 1993b. Murphy. London: Calder. —. 1995. ‘From an Abandoned Work’. In The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 155–164. —. 2006. [1936] Notes on Arnold Geulincx, Opera Philosophica (ed. J. P. N. Land). TCD 10971/6. Reprinted in Arnold Geulincx Ethics with Samuel Beckett’s Notes. Ed. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann. Trans. Martin Wilson. Amsterdam: Brill, 311–353. Caselli, Daniella. 2006. ‘The Promise of Dante in the Beckett Manuscripts’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16, 237–258. De Vleeschauwer, H. J. 1957. Three Centuries of Geulincx Research: A Bibliographical Survey. Pretoria: University of South Africa. Feldman, Matthew. 2004. Sourcing ‘Aporetics’: An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Development of Samuel Beckett’s Writing. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Oxford Brookes University. —. 2006a. ‘Beckett and Popper, Or, “What Stink of Artifice”: Some Notes on Methodology, Falsifiability, and Criticism in Beckett Studies’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 373–391. —. 2006b. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. London: Continuum. —. 2008. ‘ “Agnostic Quietism” and Samuel Beckett’s Early Development’. In Séan Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, eds., Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive (forthcoming). Geulincx, Arnold. 1891–3. Arnoldi Geulincx Antverpiensis Opera Philosophica (3 vols). Ed. J. P. N. Land. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. —. 1999. Metaphysics. Trans. Martin Wilson. London: Christoffel Press. —. 2006. Arnold Geulincx Ethics with Samuel Beckett’s Notes. Ed. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann. Trans. Martin Wilson. Amsterdam: Brill. Gunn, Dan. 2006. ‘Until the Gag is Chewed’. Times Literary Supplement, 21 April, 15. Knowlson, James. 1996 Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Land, J. P. N. 1891. ‘Arnold Geulincx and his Works’. Mind, vol. XVI, 223–242. Mintz, Samuel I. 1959. ‘Beckett’s Murphy: A Cartesian Novel’. Perspective 2.3: 156–165. Mood, John J. 1971. ‘ “The Personal System”—Samuel Beckett’s Watt’. PMLA 86: 255–265. Nadler, Steven. 1999. ‘Knowledge, Volitional Agency and Causation in Malebranche and Geulincx’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7.2: 263–274. Nixon, Mark. 2005. ‘What a tourist I must have been’: Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries. Unpublished PhD. Thesis, University of Reading. —. 2006. ‘ “Scraps of German”: Samuel Beckett Reading German Literature’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16, 259–282.

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Nuchelmans, Gabriël. 1988. Geulincx’ Containment Theory of Logic. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie. Oppenheim, Lois. 2000. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogues with Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pilling, John. 1998a. Beckett before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998b. Beckett’s Dream Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, Reading. —. 2006a. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave. —. 2006b. ‘ “For Interpolation”: Beckett and English Literature’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16, 203–236. Schmaltz, Tad M. 1992. ‘Descartes and Malebranche on Mind and Mind-Body Union’. The Philosophical Review 101.2: 281–325. Tonning, Erik. 2007. Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962– 1985. Bern: Peter Lang. Uhlmann, Anthony. 1990. Beckett and Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2006. ‘Introduction to Samuel Beckett’s Notes to the Ethics’. In Arnold Geulincx Ethics with Samuel Beckett’s Notes. Ed. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann. Trans. Martin Wilson. Amsterdam: Brill, 301–309. —. 2007. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Hulle, Dirk. 2006. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Faust Notes’. Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 16, 283–298. —. ed. 2005. Beckett the European. Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. Wood, Rupert. 1993. ‘Murphy, Beckett; Geulincx, God’. Journal of Beckett Studies 2.2: 27–51.

Chapter 3

Withholding Assent: Beckett in the Light of Stoic Ethics Anthony Uhlmann

On 9 June 1993, a news story by Andrew Gumbel of Reuters, one among many written concerning these events, was electronically transferred to English language newspapers around the world. The story begins: A lone gunman, described as a failed author desperate for world fame, today killed a wartime French police chief who deported Jews to Nazi death camps. (Gumbel) The story goes on to detail how Christian Didier, pretending to be carrying court documents, tricked René Bousquet, the ex-General Secretary of Police for the Vichy government, into opening his door. Didier is quoted as saying: Instead of taking out the documents, I pulled out the revolver and fired at point-blank range but he ran towards me. The guy had incredible energy. I fired a second time and he kept coming at me. I fired a third time and he started to stagger. The fourth time I got him in the head or the neck and he fell with blood pissing out of him. (Gumbel) Didier is described as ‘a thin, greying man aged about 50’ who had tried several times to force his way into television studios and had been jailed previously for attempting in 1987 to assassinate the former Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, who had also been charged with crimes against humanity. Gumbel recounts how Didier confessed to a French television journalist off-camera that his ‘literary career was a failure and he had wanted to make a big splash at least once in his life’. *** Rough for Theatre II, written in French by Samuel Beckett in the late 1950s, finally published in English in 1976 and seldom performed, presents us with two bureaucrats, called ‘A’ and ‘B’, who are sorting through testimonies and details

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concerning the life of another man, called ‘C’, in order to decide whether C should or should not commit suicide. After some half-hearted squabbling, and realizing they have to hurry to catch the last train, they decide that C should die, as his life has been one of unmitigated failure. Wondering how to finish having made their decision, A goes one last time to inspect the ‘exhibit’ that is C’s face. C has stood all the while motionless at the window with his back to the audience. In the play’s penultimate action, lighting a match and holding it to C’s face, A is startled to see tears streaming from C’s eyes; the last action is A moving a handkerchief towards C’s face (Beckett 1990, 235–249). Written in French in the early 1960s but only published in 1976, Rough for Radio II presents us with a team of interrogators led by an Animator, and including a female Stenographer and a silent torturer, Dick, who prod a mysterious character, Fox, who recounts aspects of his past apparently without purpose. The interrogation team seem to be charged both with extracting and recording Fox’s confessions and attempting to make some sense of them. Driven to a kind of despair by this task, at last the Animator and Stenographer feel that they have found something significant in Fox’s speech, a curious passage in which he talks of his brother inside of him, like a foetus, and a woman called Maud who recommends Fox be cut open to release the child-brother. In considering the meaningfulness of this speech the Animator moves beyond interpretation and instructs the Stenographer to falsify the record of Fox’s speech, so that a precise meaning might be drawn from Fox’s elusive comments. It is worth noting that from the late 1950s through to the early 1960s France was engaged in a war of independence with its colony Algeria, and that these events affected Beckett through his friend and publisher Jérôme Lindon who was actively campaigning against the use of torture by the French military in this conflict. Knowlson outlines how these events touched Beckett, who did not sign Lindon’s petition condemning France’s conduct in this war only because he felt his position as a resident alien was too precarious (Knowlson 493). The use of state-sponsored torture, then, is an issue that would have been very much before Beckett when he wrote both Rough for Radio II and Rough for Theatre II. Catastrophe was written in French in 1982 at the request of the Association internationale de défense des artistes (AIDA) and performed at a night of theatre held at the Avignon festival of 1982 in support of Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, later President of his country, who was, at the time, imprisoned by the Communist Czech government (Cournot). Catastrophe presents us with the rehearsal of a play. A totalitarian Director, with the aid of a resentful but obsequious female assistant, sculpts a humiliated protagonist into representing something like ‘suffering humanity’. Wanting the man standing scantily clothed on a plinth to appear as degraded as possible, the Director moves into the stalls to add the finishing touches from the audience’s point of view. The process, which seems to strip the protagonist of all dignity, involves an

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oppression that implicates everyone: not only the characters within the play, and those who had imprisoned Havel, but the audience watching the play, and those who fabricated and commissioned it. Having just rejected the assistant’s timid suggestion that the protagonist be allowed to show some vestige of spirit (by raising his head) as ludicrously utopian, the Director, satisfied with the spectacle, imagines he can already hear the audience’s rapturous response. Tape-recorded applause bursts out on cue, and, as the play’s last action the protagonist does raise his head and fi xes his stare on the audience. The applause falters, dies, and after a long pause the spotlight on the face fades to black (Beckett 1990, 455–461). I will argue here that the events surrounding Didier’s assassination of Bousquet, and the three plays mentioned above, along with Beckett’s first play Eleutheria, might all be analysed via reference to key concepts drawn from Stoic ethics; that both the real event of the assassination and the fictional events of the plays might be understood through the notion of the ‘state of being’ or ‘disposition’ of a soul, and that these concepts might be further drawn into relation with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘social subjection’ and ‘machinic enslavement’. I will argue that both the state of being which Christian Didier identifies himself with and the states of being described in Beckett’s plays have the potential to bring about negative actions or events; events or actions, that is, which might be loosely described as unethical because they produce negative effects (oppression, ignorance, sadness, violence). Yet whereas these potential actions or events are realized in the case of Christian Didier they are in some sense avoided or opposed in Beckett’s works. Further, I will argue that this deliberate failure to realize a potential, which has become manifest to the point where it is demanding to be realized, comes about through a process of active refusal, in which the apparently manifest meaning or reality of a state of being is denied. This denial or withholding of assent, rather than involving a passive process, amounts to an active reinterpretation of the real, which, in some sense, succeeds in changing that reality. Josiah Gould outlines the link between disposition and action as understood by the major Stoic philosophers Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus. For Chrysippus: a cause ‘has being and is a body’ but that of which it is a cause has neither being nor body. Zeno had held that that of which the cause is a cause is an ‘accident’ or a ‘predicate’; the cause is that through which something comes about; for example, through wisdom ‘being wise’ comes into being; through the soul, ‘living’ comes into being; and through self-control, being self-controlled comes into existence. (107–108) Such an understanding implies that given actions should not be understood to be discrete, but rather as emerging from dispositions which have become

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established; which have, in effect, become states of being which persist and are identified with states of the soul. Furthermore, then, once such a state of being or disposition has become established the actions or events which are a consequence of it become if not inevitable then at least highly probable. These consequences can be avoided, however, according to the Stoics, by withholding assent. Beckett’s notes from his reading of Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy have recently been made available to scholars (see Engelberts et al.). These notes confirm that Beckett was familiar with many of the key Stoic concepts from the 1930s on. Following Windelband’s reading of the Stoics, Beckett writes, ‘Practical virtue implies a certain positive disposition of the soul’ (Beckett n.d., 114 recto). That is, Beckett recognizes the necessary link between any action and the disposition of the one who acts. This is true in a positive sense as much as a negative sense: that is, a good action is the result of a good disposition, a bad action of a bad disposition. Later in these notes he adds, Consciousness is reason as well as perturbability. Passion is a disease of consciousness, a perturbation of the soul, contrary to nature, to Reason. The wise man, if he cannot control such perturbation, will deny it assent with his reason. His virtue is the absence of emotions in the sense that if rational assent is withheld from them the personality cannot be moved. Rational self-sufficiency. Virtue (control of passion by reason) is the sole good, Vice (control of reason by passion) is the sole evil. All other things & relations are in themselves indifferent. This withdrawal of the individual personality into itself, which all these Greek epigones considered the mark of the wise man, was nowhere so valuably supplemented as among the Stoics. (Beckett n.d., 114 verso; see also Windelband 168–170)1 Beckett, then, was clearly aware of this fundamental premise of Stoic ethics: good actions emerge from (or are caused by) a good disposition (one which is ordered in accordance with reason). Bad actions emerge from a bad disposition (one which is controlled or impelled by passion). Further, while we, as human beings, cannot avoid being affected by passions we can either control these passions through reason, or, as a kind of last resort, withhold our assent from them. To withhold assent here means to refuse to acknowledge their power as ‘reality’. As an artist, however, Beckett was more interested in processes of perturbation than in the apathy generated by living in accordance with reason. That is, he was more interested in diseased or perturbed states of being than healthy apathetic ones. Speaking to his cinematographer prior to the shooting of Film,

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Beckett described the perception of both ‘E’ and ‘O’ in Film as ‘diseased’ (see Gontarski).2 With Christian Didier, however, we witness a process of complete identification with a diseased or unhealthy worldview, one which expressed a parallel disposition. Didier stated that he felt his assassination of Bousquet amounted to a triumph of Good over Evil. He was obsessed with the Holocaust and with French complicity therein. It might be argued that such an obsession marked his character as one deeply touched by a desire to oppose the injustices perpetrated by state power. If such was partly his motivation, then his opposition to and subversion of this power was effectively valueless. In condemning fascism and anti-Semitism his actions proved counter-productive: they were immediately condemned by historians and Jewish leaders. Bousquet was to have been put on trial for crimes against humanity; a trial which would have been invaluable as a means of examining the French government’s complicity with Nazi war-crimes and helping to set the historical record straight (see Raffy). Didier had done the victims of Bousquet’s actions a disservice. Furthermore he had brought back the spectre of the post-war purge, when ten thousand Frenchmen and women accused of collaborating with the Nazis had suffered summary execution (see Rousso). Rather than transcending and bringing closure to the dark years of the forties by judging and executing, Didier had merely dragged Bousquet and France back to the diseased value-systems of the 1940s; those successive moral orders which first justified collaboration with the Nazis and complicity in certain of their crimes, and then justified the purge of alleged collaborators, a purge at times manipulated by self-serving individuals, in the same way that many Jews had been denounced by individuals who would gain from their removal. Just as the perceptions of ‘E’ and ‘O’ in Film are diseased (in different ways), so too is Christian Didier’s perception: he is unable to understand the true effects or his actions or to control the passions, which force him to act in a given way. Didier, who dreamed of becoming a writer and entering into relations with the technical machines of the world of publishing, was inspired to act because he felt he was a failure. His failure, unlike the failures of Beckett’s characters, did not help him to escape the order of society but rather further pressured him to join it, to make a ‘splash’ through whatever possible means. So as to shed further light on this problem it is worth moving to concepts (developed in response to the very worldviews which Didier inhabited) in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari outline how our actions might be determined by the social systems to which we are subjected and by which we are subjectified. I would argue that these views might be reconciled with Stoic ethics because both reason that actions can be produced by states of being. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts allow for further precision, however, as they underline how such states might be generated through the social systems we inhabit. According to Deleuze and Guattari, in considering

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processes of oppression it is possible to distinguish between ‘social subjection’, and ‘machinic enslavement’: We distinguish machinic enslavement and social subjection as two separate concepts. There is enslavement when human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and with other things (animals, tools), under the control and direction of a higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine. (457) In the modern capitalist world there has been a tendency to move from the machinic enslavement of ancient slavery and feudal serfdom, where humans formed part of the machine (the human machine that constructed the pyramids, for example), to social subjection, where the workers use ‘machines’ which in turn determine their place in society (which determine, that is, the state of being they identify with and inhabit, which in turn allows them to act, but only in the ways specified by the social organization). Yet there has been in recent times a counter-tendency towards a new machinic enslavement, enslavement brought about by the current explosion in the field of information technology: it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible ‘humans-machines systems’ replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action. (458) Television is given as an example of the oscillation between social subjection and new machinic enslavement. You are subjected to television insofar as you use and consume it, but you are enslaved by television when you become not a consumer or producer of television but an intrinsic component piece, ‘input’ and ‘output’ (459). It is as if, rather than developing one’s own apparently autonomous disposition, one’s disposition might already pre-exist one’s being, residing outside it, within the general dispositions affirmed and promoted by mass media. Machinic enslavement describes someone who becomes a media event, who turns themselves into a piece of television as a way of making a big splash, like Christian Didier, who held a press conference which he delayed

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while waiting for all the French TV channels to arrive, immediately after killing Bousquet and before turning himself in to the police. Rather than opposing oppressive power then, Didier, viewed through the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, might be said to have merely underlined his acceptance of and complicity with the apparatuses of capture which constitute that oppression. The event of the assassination was not a simple ‘one-off’; rather, it might be understood as emerging from a state of being, in this case a state of subjection to a media order which involved a desire to become a component of the machine which constitutes that order. Didier, an avid consumer of the media (understood as the realm of fame), being denied access to the media (the successful writer as ‘input’), made a final desperate effort to become a component piece of that machine (the media event as ‘output’) through notoriety. No doubt there are many other elements involved in this state of being: for example, a resentment at exclusion and a compulsive desire to find a kind of inclusion by any means; an absolute faith both in the moral certainty of one’s own judgements and in one’s right to act on those judgements. The event of assassination, then, emerges from this complex state of being. Further, however, the event involves a projection of this state of being onto others, an outward expression of one’s own self as this disposition, and this projection in effect serves to fi x in place the one who expresses as a certain kind of being: Didier now is an assassin (one who feels himself to be an instrument of vengeance, of ‘good over evil’), just as Bousquet before him is a war criminal (one who sent Jews to death camps as an expression of a servitude to the Vichy government). Furthermore, in both cases their identities are fi xed through their agreement: their willing assent. *** When enslavement is projected on to others it becomes the site of an unethical act. We see an analogue to this process in some of Beckett’s works. If the Stoic understandings of disposition are drawn into the reading here it is apparent that such a projection, manifested in an act of violence, is a projection which expresses the disposition particular to the person in question, a disposition produced by assent to an idea linked to a greater social body. If both Didier and Bousquet might be understood to be enslaved by worldviews, both might also be understood to express dispositions that arise from these worldviews. Rather than their acts involving unexpected or senseless eruptions, they affirm and further set in place the state of being to which each in turn is subjected or enslaved. Didier’s act of murder involves assent, in the Stoic sense of the word: in committing this act he is affirming the reality of the state of being that has taken hold of him and that will from this point on constitute him. So too, in sending the Jews to the death camps, Bousquet assents to the reality of an idea of himself as servant of a state machine and forever ties himself to this interpretation of himself.

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The plays which I am interested in here might be thought to involve an opposite process: rather than attempting to undertake actions which affirm or assent to particular states of being, these plays might be thought to figure attempts to refuse to accept the reality of these states of being, through the deliberate withholding of assent. Rough for Theatre II might be read as a critique of the process of judgement. C, standing motionless, his back to the audience, looking out a window upstage centre which shows a bright night sky, is having his life evaluated by A and B, who have gathered the evidence for and against, more like junior clerks than judges, as if the process were one of the most minor import. Among the disasters they list that have led them to conclude that C should jump to his death are ‘Work, family [and] . . . fatherland’ (Beckett 1990, 238), a clear reference to the slogan of the Vichy government and its fascistic National Revolution: ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’.3 While the decision of A and B seems clear from the beginning, for a time B half-heartedly looks through the documents he has at hand for arguments in C’s defence, evidence of moments of what might appear (dubiously) to be optimism. It is the documents themselves and they alone that B is willing to accept as constituting hard evidence. The facts are fixed, castiron, making an incorrect judgement impossible. To quote B: We have been to the best sources. All weighed and weighed again, checked and verified. Not a word here [brandishing sheaf of papers] that is not cast iron. Tied together like a cathedral. [He flings down the papers on the table. They scatter on the floor.] Shit! (Beckett 1990, 238) Both Rough for Theatre II and Catastrophe involve acts that attempt to overcome or cut off processes of interpretation which are in train. C’s tears, like the act of the Protagonist of Catastrophe who raises his head to gaze at the audience, cut across the interpretations of their states of being which are being developed by the bureaucrats on the one hand and the Director on the other. Rather than assenting to a particular interpretation of a state of being (as Didier and Bousquet might be seen to have done) these characters act to alter the state of being which has been described and which would become fixed were one to assent to it. Rough for Radio II shows us a slightly different process. While Fox is subjected to torture by the Animator via Dick, this torture in no way seems to touch Fox’s state of being, which remains elusive. It seems to remain elusive not through any act of will or deliberate resistance, but simply through the uncertain nature of Fox’s being itself. Here the act that seeks to change a state of being might be seen to come from the interrogators rather than the subject of the interrogations. It is the ones who interrogate who are shown not only to be enslaved but also to be conscious of this enslavement at the end of the play. The Animator, then, tries to escape this enslavement through a deliberate lie: he seeks to falsify the record of Fox’s statements by introducing an invented interpolation. In doing

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this, through desperation, he seems to be seeking to escape from the circuit in which he is trapped, a circuit of interpretation without end or meaning: A: Don’t skip, miss, the text in its entirety if you please. S: I skip nothing, sir [Pause.] What have I skipped, sir? A: [Emphatically.] ‘. . . between two kisses . . .’ [Sarcastic.] That mere trifle! [Angry.] How can we ever hope to get anywhere if you suppress gems of that magnitude? [. . .] S: But, sir, I— A: What the devil are you deriding, miss? My hearing? My memory? My good faith? [Thunderous.] Amend! S: [Feebly.] As you will, sir. A: Let us hear how it runs now. S: [Tremulous.] ‘Have yourself opened, Maud would say, between two kisses, opened up, it’s nothing, I’ll give him suck, if he’s still alive, ah but no, no no.’ [Faint pencil.] ‘No no.’ [Silence.] A: Don’t cry, miss, dry your pretty eyes and smile at me. Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free. (284) The title of Beckett’s first play, written in French in 1947, published posthumously in 1995 and never yet performed, is Eleutheria, a Greek word meaning ‘Freedom’. The protagonist Victor Krap, who wants nothing other than to not take part in society at all, is constantly harried by others who are scandalized by his behaviour (he comes, after all, from a good middle-class family), and who demand that he explain his failure to act, his failure to take part; his failure, in short, to assent. He cannot or will not express his reasons until at last he says: I have always wanted to be free. I don’t know why. Nor do I know what it means, to be free. If you were to pull all my nails out, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But although I can’t put it into words, I do know what it is. I have always desired it. I still desire it. That is all I desire. At first I was a prisoner of other people. So I left them. Then I was a prisoner of myself. That was worse. So I left myself. (Becomes absent.) (Beckett 1996, 147) It is distance from others, the world, and the self, and the failure to assent to that contract of subjectification described by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘no longer concluded between two people but between self and self, within the same person—Ich = Ich’ (460), that Victor Krap equates with freedom. He finally blurts this out, the stage directions suggest, ‘incoherently’, as follows: You accept it when someone is beyond life, or when life is beyond you, and that people can refuse to compromise with life if they are prepared to pay

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the price and give up their liberty. He’s abdicated, he’s dead, he’s mad, he’s got faith, got cancer. Nothing wrong with that. But not to be one of you through being free, that’s a disgrace and a scandal. (Beckett 1996, 148) In the light of the three plays discussed above it might be argued that what Victor wishes to escape from is the machines that enslave or subject, including the machines of the self as a fi xed identity, and that his means of escape involves nothing other than simply withholding assent in refusing to interpret his own being in the expected way. Each of the three plays mentioned above bring to mind (via the historical contexts from which they emerge) specific moments of ethical crisis: Vichy; torture in Algeria; Communist oppression in Central Europe. In each case the systems of oppression brought to bear are attempting to fix into place ways of seeing, and the effort to achieve these ways of seeing in each case involves the projection of interpretations of being onto others through unethical acts. Further, these projected acts themselves arise from states of being or dispositions that precede and effectively produce them. If one assents to these interpretations and the processes which fix them in place one becomes part of the machine that produces them. Withholding assent is one way in which such processes of subjection or enslavement might be resisted.

Notes 1

2

3

My thanks to Anthony Cordingley who kindly accessed and transcribed these notes at my request. Elsewhere I have developed similar ideas in reading What Where to argue that violence might be thought to emerge from a violent disposition: that a violent act erupts from out of a violent disposition or state of being, though I do not discuss assent in this context (see Uhlmann, 129–149). On this slogan see Rousso, 36–37. Beckett, of course, spent the war in France where he worked for the Resistance before fleeing the Gestapo in 1942 and hiding out in a small village in Southern France for the rest of the war (Knowlson 279–339).

Works cited Beckett, Samuel. 1990. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber. —. 1996. Eleutheria. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: Faber. —. N.d. ‘Philosophy Notes’. MS 10967, Trinity College Dublin. Cournot, Michel. 1982. ‘Avignon: une nuit pour AIDA’. Le Monde, 24 July. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell, eds. 2006. Notes Diverse Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College, Dublin, with Supporting Essays, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gontarski, S. E. 1985. ‘Appendix A: Beckett on Film’. In The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 187–192. Gumbel, Andrew. 1993. ‘Assassination of René Bousquet’. Reuters, 8 June. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Raffy, Serge. 1993. ‘Bousquet: Les pièces du procés’. Nouvel Observateur, 10 June, 28–33. Rousso, Henry. 1992. Les années noires: vivre sous l’Occupation. Paris: Gallimard Découvertes. Uhlmann, Anthony. 2006. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Windelband, Wilhelm. 1958. A History of Philosophy. Two volumes. New York: Harper.

Chapter 4

Post-war Beckett: Resistance, Commitment or Communist Krap?1 Jackie Blackman

Every action, in the middle of the twentieth century, presupposes and involves the adoption of an attitude with regard to the Soviet enterprise. (Aron 55)

Beckett, in his early French texts of 1946–7, offers a vivid, if fragmented picture of post-Occupation France, a time when, for many, the horrors of war, Nazi occupation and life under the Vichy regime were deemed ‘unrepresentable’. His artistic position, in this sense, stands apart from the prevailing norms of the period as an ‘aesthetic of resistance’. In resisting the culture of denial in post-war Paris, Beckett’s work of this time appears to some extent ‘committed’ to the ideals of the ‘literature of commitment’ associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Les temps modernes (the destination of Beckett’s earliest published piece of post-war fiction, ‘Suite’, in July 1946). In ‘Présentation’, the editorial from the first issue of Les Temps modernes in October 1945, Sartre wrote: ‘concerning the political and social events to come, our journal will take a position in each case. It will not do so politically—that is, in the service of a particular party— but it will attempt to sort out the conception of man which inspires each one of the conflicting theses, and will give its opinions in conformity with the conception it maintains’ (Sartre 34). My contention here is that a closer reading of Beckett’s texts from the immediate post-war period, in particular his novella Suite et fin (written in 1946) and his first full-length play Eleutheria (written in 1947), reveals an ironic, and at times even hostile, investigation into the existentialist/Marxist dogmas that defined après-guerre ‘commitment’. In this chapter I suggest that Beckett, who is still sometimes portrayed as ‘apolitical’, was well-informed about and keenly interested in contemporary politics, but was too wary of rigidly systematic intellectual or political programmes to follow any specific dogma, either in life or art; instead, his response to suffering was an individual and ethical, rather than a collective and political one. I then examine Beckett’s early post-war writing in terms of

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what it might tell us about his unique aesthetic reaction to international political issues of the period.

The ‘pressures’ of war Mark Nixon argues that an examination of Beckett’s German Diaries of 1936–7 and his ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ shows a ‘move from a recondite mode of writing to one that would allow his writing to issue more directly from his own personal pressures’ (250). He presents Beckett’s ‘German comedy’ Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) as a ‘purging of a recent past and an even more recent present’ (259). Nixon also explains that Beckett’s personal writings of 1936–7 ‘are the culmination of a self-introspective mode closely tied up with German language and culture . . . show[ing] Beckett walking up to the threshold of writing “the things I feel” ’ (278). Accordingly, we can say that a method of ‘writing the self’ had already begun in Beckett’s first novel, Dream, even if ‘recondite’ in style. I will argue in the same vein that Eleutheria (often thought of as a dramatization or continuation of Dream) can be read as Beckett’s ‘Russian tragicomedy’, but less ‘recondite’ in its references than Dream. Beckett’s German visit and his experience of World War II intervened between the writing of Dream and Eleutheria. While Beckett was in Germany it appears he was well aware of the restrictions being placed on Jews and political dissenters, but at the time did not yet realize the full implications of Nazi policy, nor did he ‘actively’ oppose it. Arguably, Beckett’s later witnessing of Irish and French anti-Semitism, his activities in the French Resistance and his subsequent knowledge of the horrors of the concentration camps, changed what might be termed a laissez faire attitude to political affairs into a serious aesthetic engagement with post-war ethics.2 In this context it is interesting to note that Suite et fin and Eleutheria cite Marxism, Communism and Stalin, yet make no specific reference to Germany, Hitler or the Nazis. Nevertheless, Beckett’s treatment of the themes of otherness, expulsion, violence, interrogation and dehumanization in these works arguably show this writing ‘issuing’ from the ‘pressures’ of World War II as much as it does from its aftermath. I will suggest that not only are Eleutheria, and its main protagonist Victor Krap, layered with autobiographical and local references,3 but they also refer to the biography of a man almost exactly the same age as Beckett, Victor Kravchenko. This now-forgotten Russian defector portrayed the Soviet Union’s collectivization programme as a totalitarian system that included concentration camps and slave labour. In identifying with the dissident Kravchenko, a controversial figure later publicly accused by ‘the Left’ of falsifying information and slandering the Stalinist regime, Beckett, through clever use of Pirandellian metatheatrical techniques such as including one of the play’s spectators as an

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onstage character, questions the post-war principles of his audience without in any way proselytizing. If I am right in my speculations, Beckett’s treatment of contemporary subject matter, his tragicomic illumination of both Nazi and Stalinist oppression and violence, appears well ahead of his French counterparts. Raymond Federman describes the impact of first seeing Waiting for Godot in New York in 1956: When Lucky walks on stage with that rope tied around his neck, that long rope extending off-stage and one hears Pozzo shout, Go Pig, I was horrified. Who is this writer who has the guts, the courage to show us something so horrible, so inhuman, and yet make us laugh at the same time. I was horrified, and yet like the rest of the people in the audience, I too laughed. That’s when something slipped in me. This was about the time when I was starting to write. And I told myself, if I write the story that I have in me, the story of a survivor of the Holocaust, then that’s how I must tell it, in the tragicomic mode. With a mixture of sadness and laughter. . . . Beckett taught me how to write sad laughter. But he also taught me how to escape the imposture of realism and naturalism. (Federman) While some critics see Godot (written October 1948–January 1949) as referencing the master/slave dynamics of the ‘camp’ in an absurdist mode, I suggest its precursor Eleutheria (written January–February 1947) shows a somewhat different approach. Eleutheria implicitly cites the more recent, perhaps more difficult to discuss Holocaust. In Act III of Eleutheria an oblique reference to the ‘Final Solution’ comes in the form of Victor’s puzzling nightmare: ‘towers . . . circumcised . . . fi re . . . fi re’ (Beckett 1996, 118). Evidence of circumcision in France meant sure transportation to Auschwitz, where 97 per cent of the 75,721 Jews deported from France met their deaths (Laqueur 475). Yet Glazier, the character who interprets Victor’s nightmare, only sees the ‘lascivious’ element (118). Later, Beckett, rather ironically perhaps, gives Glazier the following lines: ‘language wasn’t created to express that sort of thing. So let us have the decency to keep quiet, yes, decency . . . we were crazy to dare talk of anything other than food restrictions’ (126). In the same Act, Spectator suggests that the author of ‘this rubbish’, Samuel Beckett (he says Béké), must be ‘a cross between a Jew from Greenland and a peasant from the Auvergne’ (136). These dramatic moments combine to suggest the recent life-and-death issues of Nazi racial selection under the Vichy regime. By the time Beckett had written Godot he had perhaps come to realize the wisdom of a ‘discerning’ kind of aesthetic erasure. In the manuscripts of Godot Estragon was originally called Lévy; records tell us that 1,528 Jewish deportees from France 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. One wonders if a Godot with a Jewish Lévy would have been quite so well

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received in Paris (or even in Britain and Ireland) in the early 1950s? And if it were, how would we read Beckett now?

Beckett’s ‘aesthetic of resistance’ In 1969, the Swedish Academy, in its Nobel Prize citation, described Beckett’s writings of the period 1945–9 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. (Gierow) While Beckett’s active membership of the French Resistance (1941–2) might appear to be inconsistent with, or separate from, this post-war (ostensibly) apolitical, humanitarian stance, I will argue that this was not the case. In Metapolitics, Alain Badiou usefully meditates on membership of the French Resistance in terms of the Resistance figure’s individual ethics of engagement: No group, no class, no social configuration or mental objective was behind the Resistance . . . a Resistance figure ‘by logic’ obeys an axiom, or an injunction, which he formulates in his own name, and whose major consequences he lays out, without waiting to win over other people, in the objective group to which he belongs. (5) In other words ‘the Resistance member’ was not necessarily part of a structured political group (even though there were Communist, Jewish and many other differently affiliated cells). Badiou also describes the ‘Resistant Philosopher’, that is, a brand of philosopher who was politically active in the war, yet for whom, after the war, ‘personal and political silence on [his] action was the measure of [a] simultaneously radical and intimate, violent and reserved, necessary and exceptional action’ (1). Beckett, I think, can be similarly described as a ‘Resistant Writer’. Badiou’s observations are constructive in helping to illuminate Beckett’s wartime involvement and subsequent development as a strongly independent ethical writer. I would further suggest that the quality and intent of Beckett’s resistance to the prevailing culture of complacency and indifference, during wartime and after, both in France and in Ireland,4 is consistent with Badiou’s idea (somewhat paradoxical) of silence in action. Beckett’s transition from wartime French Resistance member to post-war French language writer marks a key phase in his development. Badiou’s idea

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that ‘All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself’ (7) offers a starting point for thinking through the ethics of such a change. Beckett himself suggests an emotional shift of great magnitude when discussing this transitional time with Gabriel d’Aubarède: ‘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’ (D’Aubarède 217). Barbara Bray (Beckett’s long-time companion) shed further light on Beckett’s ‘hyperaesthetic’ relationship with art and the suffering of humanity when she commented to me that although 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). When I asked her what Beckett thought of Communism, she replied: ‘He wouldn’t have liked the cruelty that went with Communism. He would have had a vision of the gulags and the famine’ (Bray 2007).

‘Commitment’: Sartre, Camus and the Holocaust In December of 1945, when Beckett returned to Paris to resume his writing career, Sartre had just published issues 2 and 3 of Les temps modernes (November and December 1945) which contained the articles ‘Vie d’un Juif’, ‘Portrait de l’Antisémite’ (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’. The commentary for an exhibition marking the centenary of the birth of Sartre in 1905 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France 2005) suggested that in these articles Sartre was responding both to the recent revelations of the Nuremburg Trials and to the pressure of his Jewish friends. In the preface to a 1995 re-print of Anti-Semite and Jew, Michael Walzer adds, ‘Sartre noticed that in discussions about post-war France, the imminent return of French Jews deported by the Nazis was never mentioned. Some of the speakers . . . were not pleased by the prospect; others, friends of the Jews, thought it best to be silent’ (Walzer 1995, v). In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre asked: ‘Do we say anything about the Jews? Do we salute the survivors’ return? Do we give a thought to those who died in the gas chambers at Lublin? Not a word’ (71). Yet Enzo Traverso sees Sartre’s essay as ‘emblematic of the silence about the Shoah [Holocaust] in post-war culture’ (26). Traverso points out that, however admirable Sartre’s largely uninformed5 efforts might have been in writing Anti-Semite and Jew, the above quotation is his only ‘discreet’ reference to the Holocaust, adding ‘this lucid and sobering statement remains undeveloped’ (26). Unlike Sartre, Beckett’s response to the camps and Jewish suffering, beginning with Suite et fin, can be seen as a starting point for an informed engagement with such matters, carrying through

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much of his post-war work including Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, How It Is, Catastrophe, The Lost Ones and Fizzles. Badiou, the reformed existentialist (or latter-day ‘young cretin’, as he now refers to himself), reads Sartrean ‘commitment’ as ‘evidently a trompe l’oeil assessment of that which was played out in the sequence of the Resistance’ (5). Camus, who like Beckett was more actively involved in the war than Sartre, was somewhat similar in his criticism of ‘commitment’, writing in 1947: I prefer committed men to literatures of commitment. Courage in one’s life and talent in one’s works—this is not so bad. And moreover the writer is committed when he wishes to be. His merit lies in his impulse. But if this is to become a law, a function, or a terror, just where is the merit? . . . Yes I should like to see them less committed in their works and a little more so in their daily life. (140–141) If Beckett’s ‘aesthetic of resistance’ is to be seen as any kind of ethical response to the Holocaust or Stalinist-led Communism, it is clearly not one which is heroically oppositional but rather, as he put it in a 1960–1 interview with Lawrence Harvey, ‘revolted but not revolting’ (quoted in Knowlson 2006, 137).6 In practical terms, Beckett had joined the French Resistance because of his disgust at the treatment of the Jews in Paris, especially the deportation of his friend Paul Léon. Arguably, for Beckett, there was a natural progression from loyalty to Jewish friends, to active Resistance membership, to a questioning of the dogmatic blindness of the French intellectual Left, to a continuing ‘apolitical’ sympathy for the politically oppressed. Beckett was fully conscious of the fate that he as a French Resistance member had so narrowly missed. In August 1942, his friend Alfred Péron had been arrested and imprisoned with other members of the ‘Gloria’ cell, the Resistance group to which Beckett had belonged. Péron died of exhaustion on 1 May 1945 due to his time at Mauthausen (Fondation Mémoire Déportation, p.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 Georges Loustaunau-Lacau (1945), which describes Péron’s pitiful attempts to stay alive in the days before liberation, is particularly harrowing. According to James Knowlson, Beckett probably would have been shown this by Péron’s widow (Knowlson 1996, 344). When asked by Rosette Lamont if Godot and the Trilogy related to images of the Holocaust, Beckett, instead of answering the question directly, talked of Péron’s experience at Mauthausen, and his own horror after the opening up of the camps (Lamont 37). Albert Camus, after reading David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946), had written in his notebooks: ‘what silences me is that I was not deported. But I know what a cry I stifle as I say this’ (Camus 184). Shoshana

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Felman and Dori Laub have suggested that Camus’ wartime and post-war work testifies to the ‘cataclysmic trauma’ (xvii) of the Holocaust, which they in turn interpret as a ‘radical crisis in witnessing’ (xvii). I suggest that Beckett’s early post-war writing can be read in a similar light.

Suite et fin and the ‘Marxist haranguer’ Although Beckett was a war hero who had already been awarded the Croix de Guerre by order of the Provisional French Republic and was thus free from suspicion of collaboration, we know that the après-guerre intellectual and artistic atmosphere in Paris into which he returned briefly in 1944–5, and then for good in 1946, was emotionally difficult for him. Yet from 1946–50 he produced what is considered by many to be his most important work. On 13 March 1946 Beckett began writing an untitled story/novella in English, but two-thirds of the way through he changed course and finished in French. The story became Suite et fin (later published in English as The End). After Suite et fin Beckett wrote three more stories directly in French: L’Expulsé (The Expelled), Le Calmant (The Calmative) and Premier Amour (First Love), as well as the short novel Mercier et Camier, before starting on Eleutheria in January 1947. In Suite et fin (The End), Beckett places an expelled or dispossessed person in confrontation with the somewhat self-righteous politics of post-war Parisian Marxism. The narrator is discharged from a kind of asylum or prison where he appears to have been impounded for some time and eventually resorts to begging on the street. The End not only conjures bombed out buildings, devastated countryside and problems of survival during or immediately after the war, but also images of the camps and returning deportees, presented, with heavy irony, through the voice of a Marxist orator who seizes on the narrator as a convenient exhibit of the limit of human degradation: Look at this down and out . . . this leftover. If he doesn’t go down on all fours, it’s for fear of being impounded. Old lousy, rotten, ripe for the muckheap. And there are a thousand like him, worse than him, ten thousand, twenty thousand. . . . Every day you pass them by . . . and when you have backed a winner you fling them a farthing. Do you ever think? . . . It never enters your head . . . that your charity is a crime, an incentive to slavery, stultification and organized murder. Take a good look at this living corpse. You may say it’s his own fault. Ask him if it’s his own fault. (Beckett 2000, 26) Recent research on the publishing history of Suite et fin reveals that ‘while he was in Dublin in May 1946, Beckett heard that Tony Clerx . . . had placed the first part of his story, Suite, with Les Temps modernes. . . . Simone de Beauvoir [the then editor] was unaware that the story was incomplete’ (Overbeck et al.,

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356). As a result only Suite, the first half of Suite et fin, was published in the July 1946 issue of Les Temps modernes. Beckett anticipated that the latter part of the story, Fin, was to be printed in the August or September issue. Arguably it is this latter section (that includes the above quotation) that shows Beckett most acutely aware of the more disturbing aspects of his Parisian environment: a coming to terms with collaboration, the disturbing sight of returning deportees, the continued persecution of the Jews and the rising influence of dogmatic Marxist or Communist ideals. In Fin the habitually inattentive (or perhaps even ‘apolitical’) narrator tells us: Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. . . . But that day I must have come back. For some time past a sound had been scarifying me. I did not investigate the cause, for I said to myself, it’s going to stop. But as it did not I had no choice but to find out the cause. . . . It was a man perched on the roof of a car haranguing the passers-by. That at least was my interpretation. He was bellowing so loud that snatches of his discourse reached my ears. Union . . . brothers . . . Marx . . . capital . . . bread and butter . . . love. It was all Greek to me. (Beckett 2000, 25–26) The narrator concludes the passage by remarking, again with heavy irony and a leaden pun: ‘Perhaps he was an escaped lunatic. He had a nice face, a little on the red side’ (26). However, Fin was deemed unacceptable by the editors of Les Temps modernes. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the second half of the story ‘was simply not in keeping with what we wanted to print in the magazine’ (quoted in Overbeck et al., 357). Deirdre Bair suggests that the story was never read by Les Temps modernes, that Beauvoir simply thought of it as a second submission (see Overbeck et al., 357). Although Beauvoir’s letter was perhaps no more than a standard rejection (we can never be sure), Beckett’s response to their decisive editorial action indicates that he might have perceived it as something more ‘nightmarish’. In a letter of complaint to Les Temps modernes, Beckett wrote My feelings are . . . these. You are giving me the chance to speak only to retract it before the words have had time to mean anything. You are immobilizing an existence at the very moment at which it is about to take its definitive form. There is something nightmarish about that. I find it hard to believe that matters of presentation can justify, in the eyes of the author of l’Invitée, such a mutilation. (Quoted in Overbeck et al., 367) Eleutheria, begun just over three months after Beckett sent this letter to Beauvoir, can be seen both as a reaction to the ‘mutilation’ of Suite et fin and an ironic response to the inadequacies of Sartrean ‘commitment’.

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Beckett and Kravchenko: ‘lunatics for liberty’ The staking out of political and intellectual positions for and against the Soviet Union did not begin with the post-World War Two division of Europe. But it was in these post-war years, between 1947 and 1953, that the line dividing East from West, Left from Right, was carved deep into European cultural intellectual life. (Judt 197)

Beckett, in calling his first post-war drama Eleutheria, the Greek word for freedom, reminds us of the idea that notions of freedom in ancient Greece were about freedom to participate in political life, in contrast to the political powerlessness of slavery. Ruby Cohn tells us that ‘Beckett hesitated between Eleutheria and L’Eleutheromane’; the latter translating as ‘ “the lunatic for liberty”, and it defines the play’s hero, the young, latter-day bourgeois Victor Krap’ (Cohn 152) who has defected from his parents’ ‘respectable’ cluttered home to a ‘sordid’ (Beckett 1996, 5) empty room. Much of the action of the play threatens Victor, physically and emotionally, and is designed to return him to his former position as ‘life and soul of the family’ (18). Spectator: I distinguish, in this charivari, two conflicting attitudes. I cannot distinguish them very clearly, but I can distinguish them. In the first place, (to the glazier:) yours, and I couldn’t say whether it’s moral, aesthetic, intellectual, or whether it quite simply stems from a kind of Stakhanovite mawkishness, as your premisses are so vague and so muddled. And then there is the attitude of the doctor, which is much simpler . . . Doctor Piouk, who seems to believe, in so far as he knows our language, that we try to avoid pain as necessarily and, let’s be fair, as blindly as the moth tries to avoid the dark. . . . And that is the basis on which you have the nerve to try to turn this poor wretch . . . this wretched Victor, into a comedy character. (Beckett 1996, 135–136) Tony Judt sees the ‘intellectual Left after 1945’ as demonstrating ‘a clash of incompatible moral alternatives, excluding all possibility of compromise: Good versus Evil, Freedom against Enslavement, Resistance against Collaboration’ (188). In 1946–7, Beckett was not seduced by such dualities; in fact his concept of ‘Eleutherian’ freedom might well be read as a ‘resistance’ to the muddled premisses of both Left and Right, and their fashionable, if desultory, ‘exaltation of industrial work and workers’ (Judt 199). Throughout Eleutheria there is a sense of relentless questioning of the ethics of the Parisian Left, just as Beckett’s narrator in Fin had said of Marxist rhetoric ‘It was all Greek to me’ (Beckett 2000, 25–26). Eleutheria’s protagonist, Victor, who espouses inaction and inarticulacy as a mode of existence, highlights Beckett’s suspicion of the post-war Marxist exaltation of both revolutionary action and

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revolutionary rhetoric; but he also argues for freedom from any kind of dubious Sartrean ‘commitment’. Peter Boxall’s suggestion that Beckett’s use of the word ‘Eleutheria’ might allude to ‘a group of colonists called the Company of Eleutherian Adventurers, [who sought] to provide a safe haven for freethinking dissenters from the 17th century religious disputes in Bermuda’ (Boxall 250) provides an interesting corollary to this argument. Eleutheria not only provides an obvious twist on the Sartrean buzzword ‘freedom’, but, as I have suggested, can also be read as an evocation of Kravchenko’s memoir I Chose Freedom, published in English in 1946. On publication of the French translation in 1947, the communist journal Les Lettres Françaises dismissed Kravchenko’s account of the Stalinist labour camps (gulags) as manufactured by American intelligence, an allegation that in turn provoked the infamous Kravchenko v Les Lettres Françaises libel case in Paris in 1949. Even though the French edition of Kravchenko’s book was not published until a few months after Eleutheria was finished, I believe that Beckett, in response to his horror both at the Stalinist regime and at the blindness of French Communists to its brutality (Arthur Koestler’s revealing novel Le Zéro et l’Infini had provoked much criticism from the Parti Communiste Français when it was published in 1945), chose to reference the topical story of Kravchenko, while also, somewhat petulantly perhaps, alluding to the recent publishing debacle with Les Temps modernes. Illustrating the notoriety of the Kravchenko story, Time magazine reported: In 1944 Victor Kravchenko suddenly quit his job with the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, went into hiding, and began work on the most sensational of all recent books about the Soviet Union. In eight weeks it climbed to fi fth on the non-fiction best-seller list. Reader’s Digest condensed it: the Hearst papers have run it as a daily serial. (Time 1946) In Eleutheria, which refers to ‘the latest twist in your serial story’ (149), we are told repeatedly that Victor Krap has been away from home for ‘two heroic years’ (149). Victor Kravchenko defected in 1944 and published his memoir in 1946. He spent the intervening years ‘under harrowing threats against my life’ (Kravchenko 480). Kravchenko adds: ‘Had the agents caught up with me during this period, I might have been “erased”; or worse’ (480). Victor: Ever since I’ve been living like this—for two years now, so you say— I’ve been pursued by people I don’t know. Glazier: They want to understand. You provoke them. Victor: But why this sudden mania to understand a life like mine? You come across an infinite number of mysteries every day, and you pass by on the other side. But with me you stop and stare, hypnotised, hungry for knowledge, basely curious, determined to see through me. . . . Saints, madmen, martyrs, victims of torture—they don’t bother you in the least, they are in

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Victor’s question that begins this exchange, ‘I obsess you. Why? Ask yourselves. It isn’t me you should be interrogating, it’s yourselves’ (144) perhaps shows Beckett suggesting that Leftist intellectuals might have done better to examine their own attitude to the Soviet system rather than attempt to suppress or dismiss testimonies such as Koestler’s or Kravchenko’s. Victor: I told you a story to get you to leave me in peace. Spectator: . . . It wasn’t all bad, your story, a bit long, a bit boring, a bit . . . stupid, but not bad, not bad at all, even quite nice in places, provided we don’t look at it too closely, which is a thing we never do. (150; my emphasis) Again, Beckett comments on the capacity of the intellectual Left, or perhaps the public more broadly, to ignore the main point of the ‘story’ presented to them. In a postscript for the American edition of I Chose Freedom (dated ‘New York, February 11th, 1946’), Kravchenko wrote: Another compelling reason for speaking my mind is the fact that since the end of the war many peoples and nations have been ‘swinging left.’ This trend seems to me healthy and inevitable—provided that it does not present the first stage, or as in some cases, a finished model of Totalitarian Kremlin Communism. Unhappily that seems to be the case in large areas of the civilized world where Soviet force and Soviet doctrines have the right of way. (480) Eleutheria elucidates stories of Soviet hardship through the perceptions of Glazier who reproaches Victor sarcastically: Glazier: . . . but you have your duties—to yourself, to your work, to science, to the party. . . . You are the model of the poor young man, the heroic young man. People see you dying like a dog at thirty, thirty-three, exhausted by your labours, by your discoveries, ravaged by radium, prostrated by sleepless nights and privation, killed in the performance of your duty, shot by Franco, shot by Stalin. Everyone applauds you. (87) Kravchenko reports that during the time of the Stalinist purges, when he was in his early 30s, ‘night after night for many months I was summoned to

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headquarters, interrogated, threatened, cajoled. The ordeal of sleeplessness was calculated to wear me down’ (263).

Sartre and Beauvoir as ‘Gods’ Whereas Victor Krap loosely suggests Kravchenko, Dr Piouk, both in his name and in the fact that he is ‘especially interested in humanity’ (14), echoes contemporary caricatures of Sartre, such as Boris Vian’s in L’Écume des jours (published in the spring of 1946), which featured the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, the author of Vomit, who was at work on a twenty-volume ‘encyclopaedia of nausea’ (Aronson 239). Mme Krap asks Dr Piouk, the selfconfessed ‘man of action’ (108), if he is ‘interested in humanity’ and then adds ‘You wouldn’t be a Communist?’ To which Piouk replies: ‘My private life is my business’ (43). Even as late as 1949, in The Unnamable, Beckett writes disparagingly of Sartrean existentialism: ‘They must consider me sufficiently stupefied, with all their balls about being and existing’ (Beckett 1994, 351). Dr Piouk tells us that ‘existence weighs so heavily on [Victor] he prefers to eliminate himself from it’ (113). The following exchange between Dr and Mme Piouk and M Krap (Victor’s father) could be read as alluding to the editorial disagreement between Beckett and Beauvoir: Dr Piouk: You are a writer Monsieur? . . . M Krap: I’ll be frank with you. I was a writer. . . . Dr Piouk: What genre? . . . M Krap: The shit genre. Mme Piouk: Really? Dr Piouk: In prose or in verse? M Krap: One day the one, another day the other. Dr Piouk: And you now consider your work complete? M Krap: The God has spat me out. Dr Piouk: Doesn’t a little book of memoirs tempt you? M Krap: That would spoil my death throes. (37) The ‘God’ who has spat out the would-be writer is suggestive of Sartre and Beauvoir. In fairness, while Les Temps modernes had indeed ‘immobilised’ Beckett’s prose voice, two-thirds of the way through Suite et fin, having considered his work complete, they had soon after, perhaps by way of reparation, published some of his ‘verse’. Beckett, in this passage, satirizes the ever-tempting desire to write oneself into the text by quoting one’s own ‘memoir’, as it were. An example of the kind of ‘shit genre’ that M Krap is referring to can be found in the unpublished section of Suite et fin: ‘It was in the arse I had the most

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pleasure, I stuck in my forefinger up to the knuckle. Later, if I had to shit, the pain was atrocious’ (Beckett 2000, 25). A few moments after the above exchange, Mlle Skunk, pointing to a thin strip of barbed wire fi xed under the edge of the table and running down to the floor 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. (40) If Dr Piouk is a caricature of Sartre, the portrayal of Mme Piouk may carry a veiled attack on Beauvoir’s perceived self-absorption and failure to understand the gravity of contemporary suffering. It also perhaps contains a reference to a more commonplace perception of Sartre and Beauvoir as politically apathetic during the war. Beckett would have been well aware that the majority of Parisians did not react to what was happening under their noses, when, as he told Knowlson, the Parisian police ‘were rounding up the Jews, including all their children . . . ready to send them to extermination camps’ (quoted in Knowlson 2006, 79). (It is worth remembering that Beckett had joined the French Resistance in 1941, while membership was relatively low.) Beauvoir had read I Chose Freedom when in America in the spring of 1947, and recommended, in a personal letter to Sartre, that it might be worth publishing an extract in Les Temps modernes. But this did not happen. Later, during the Kravchenko v Les Lettres Françaises libel case in 1949, Beauvoir wrote to her Jewish American lover, Nelson Algren, ‘another dark funny story here is the Kravchenko trial. It is a very important Parisian snobbish business’ (29 January 1949; Beauvoir 264–265). A month later she admitted, ‘The Kravchenko trial is no longer funny; there was an interesting witness, a German communist woman whose husband disagreed with the official C.P. policy in 1936; he was called to Russia to discuss it with the central comity [sic] and then sent to a camp in south Russia (a terrible working-place) where he died. She was given to the S.S. who sent her to Ravensbrück. She told the story in a simple dignified way, and even the communists were much impressed’ (25 Feb. 1949; Beauvoir 270). The Mandarins, Beauvoir’s novel of the period, is thought by many to have retrospectively rewritten early mistaken allegiances. Eleutheria, if my speculations are right, shows a Beckett well informed of international affairs and quick to react to humanitarian issues. It is possible that Beckett may have developed an interest in Kravchenko through his friend George Reavey, who served as a British diplomat in Moscow during the war.

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Another noteworthy point is that Beckett, unlike Sartre and Beauvoir, felt the pressure not only to express the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust by reflecting his audience’s prejudices back at them, but also to find a new form for writing it, something which would necessarily differ from personal testimony of the camps, yet would convey his experience as witness to the war and its aftermath. In the mid-1940s narrative was linked to survival; anyone alive enough to tell the tale was a survivor. So narrative in its traditional form could be seen to emphasize the shame of the survivor. Arguably Beckett realized that ‘any event you can turn into literature [or drama] becomes, as it were, speakable’ (Kluger 141), so he set about experimenting with innovative literary approaches to the problems of bearing witness.

‘Resistance’ to the dehumanization of the worker We know that Beckett, unlike some of his close friends and associates, was not actively involved in politics. However, his early post-war work suggests a great suspicion of any theory that might develop into what Kravchenko called a ‘finished model of Totalitarian Kremlin Communism’ (Kravchenko 480). It could be argued that Beckett, resistant to all forms of political totalization, felt, like Kravchenko, ‘compelling reason for speaking my mind’ (Kravchenko 480). In Eleutheria Beckett, through the voice of Spectator, a character with obvious Communist connections who is at one point described as ‘the People’s Commissar’ (128), comments: I make out, in this racket, two stances confronting each other. I make them out dimly, but I do make them out. First yours. About which I cannot tell if it is moral, esthetic, or whether it doesn’t stem quite simply from a kind of taylorising sentimentality. (Beckett 1995b, 147) I quote here from Michael Brodsky’s American translation. Barbara Wright, whose excellent English translation of Eleutheria I have used elsewhere in this chapter, translates Beckett’s ‘d’une sorte de sensiblerie taylorisante’ (Beckett 1995a) as ‘Stakhanovite mawkishness’ (Beckett 1996, 135). However, in this instance ‘taylorising sentimentality’ appears to be more appropriate. Beckett, one might assume, specifically chose to use the reference to Taylorism, an American capitalist theory of scientific management of work processes that sought to extract maximum efficiency from a dehumanized labour force, rather than Soviet Stakhanovism, to which Kravchenko had devoted an entire chapter entitled ‘Faster, Faster’, and which incorporated elements of Taylorism but with the added competitive ethic of the ‘heroic worker’.7 In this way Beckett makes a concrete connection between dehumanizing capitalist labour techniques and the continuing terror of the Stalinist gulags.

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The argument offered in this chapter suggests that the text of Eleutheria shows an early post-war Beckett concerned with writing a kind of political exposé, the main thrust of which seems to be the interrelatedness of capitalism, fascism and communism in their dehumanizing ideologies of labour effi ciency. Victor, ‘the lunatic for liberty’ who espouses inaction, is trying to attain freedom from oppression in the name of ‘progress’, exemplified by the empty ‘good-faith’ and ‘workerism’ of Sartre.8 During the Soviet purges Kravchenko had seen himself as witnessing ‘a super-drama, with millions of men and women as actors, one-sixth of the earth’s land surface as the stage. . . . I waited uneasily, in mounting nervousness, for my turn on the stage’ (135). Later he described ‘a special closed meeting of the factory Party Committee’ called to resume consideration of his case (226) as a ‘theatrical performance’ (226), ‘a strange morality play’ (226) in which ‘every actor had his lines and his cues’ (227). ‘The morality play had been upset by a perverse spectator’s intrusion on the stage!’ (228). I propose that Beckett, at the time of writing Eleutheria, might have hoped for some success in his metatheatrical ironizing of Kravchenko’s story for the Paris stage—a time when, as he noted about Godot, ‘les théâtres refusèrent longtemps cette pièce ou il n’y avait “ni femme, ni communiste, ni curé” ’ [theatres had for some time rejected this play in which there was no woman, no communist and no priest] (Beckett 1983, 104). After the success of Godot, Beckett decided to withdraw Eleutheria, a play that was no longer compatible with his idea of what he wanted his theatre to be: For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller’s sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. 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. I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed. I couldn’t give the answers which were hoped for. There are no easy solutions. (quoted in Knowlson 1996, 477)

Notes 1

2

3

This chapter, which draws on material from my forthcoming doctoral thesis ‘Traces of Jewishness in Samuel Beckett’s Postwar Drama’, was originally presented in an earlier draft at Beckett at 100: Looking Back/Looking Forward, Trinity College Dublin, April 2006, and has since benefited from the comments of Anna McMullan, Declan Kiberd, Paul Sullivan and Mary Turley-McGrath. See Blackman 2007 for a fuller account of Beckett’s response to the plight of the Jews. Such as Beckett’s financial dependence on his own bourgeois family and the use of his Paris address. See also Matthijs Engelberts (2003) on Eleutheria as derivative

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of Roger Vitrac’s Victor, ou les enfants au pouvoir (1928), and also Angela Moorjani (2003) for an alternative existentialist reading, which places Beckett firmly in a post-war Parisian context highlighting Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and the ‘freedom’ theories of Alexandre Kojève. When Beckett returned to Ireland in May 1945 he famously commented ‘My friends eat sawdust and turnips while all Ireland safely gorges’ (quoted in Bair 359). He would have witnessed the spectacle of Eamon de Valera delivering personal condolences at Hitler’s death to the German envoy in Dublin. For the duration of the war, de Valera’s ‘neutral’ government had imposed strict censorship; when this was lifted in June 1945 and pictures and films of the liberation of the camps were shown, many felt that it was no more than Allied propaganda (see Wills 408–409). Sartre wrote Anti-Semite and Jew without having much knowledge of or doing any major research on Jewish culture (Walzer vi). Harvey adds that Beckett ‘was using the word in its etymological sense of turning away from but not active opposition to. He sees the individual as having been the subject of a form of destruction and as more passive than active’ (quoted in Knowlson 2006, 137). This philosophy is dramatized in Eleutheria through the body language of protagonist Victor Krap, who at the close of the play turns his back on the audience. Beckett’s aforementioned ‘aesthetic of resistance’ can be seen at work here as a deeply ironizing (at times Chaplinesque) political aesthetic. Charlie Chaplin had already satirized Taylorism in his 1936 film Modern Times (from which Sartre and Beauvoir took the name for their journal Les temps modernes), and as we know, Beckett’s drama, especially Godot, was greatly influenced by Chaplin. Tony Judt gives an excellent picture of the period’s ‘universal exaltation of industrial work and workers—a distinct political asset for parties claiming to represent them’ (199). He describes Sartre, who never joined the French Communist Party, as ‘the best-known intellectual exponent of “workerism” in Europe’ (200), and explains that ‘Left-leaning, educated middle-class men and women embarrassed by their social origin could assuage their discomfort by abandoning themselves to Communism. But even if they didn’t go so far as to join the Party, many artists and writers in France . . . “prostrated themselves before the proletariat” (Arthur Koestler)’ (199).

Works cited Aron, Raymond. 1957. The Opium of the Intellectuals. Trans. Terence Kilmartin. London: Secker & Warburg. Aronson, Ronald. 2003. Camus & Sartre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Metapolitics. London: Verso. Bair, Deirdre. 2002. Samuel Beckett. London: Vintage. Beckett, Samuel. 1983. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder. —. 1994. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder.

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Beckett, Samuel. 1995a. Eleutheria. Paris: Minuit. —. 1995b. Eleutheria. Trans. Michael Brodsky. New York: Foxrock. —. 1996. Eleutheria. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: Faber. —. 2000. First Love and Other Novellas. London: Penguin. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 2005. Sartre. http://expositions.bnf.fr/Sartre/ index.htm [Accessed 7 December 2007]. Blackman, Jackie. 2007. ‘Beckett Judaizing Beckett: “a Jew from Greenland” in Paris’. In Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, eds., ‘All Sturm and no Drang’: Beckett and Romanticism/Beckett at Reading 2006, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui 18, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 325–340. Boxall, Peter. 1998. ‘Freedom and Cultural Location in Eleutheria’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui 7, 245–258. Bray, Barbara. 2005. Personal interview with the author, October 2005. —. 2007. Personal interview with the author, September 2007. Camus, Albert. 1965. Notebooks 1942–1951. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Cohn, Ruby. 2005. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. D’Aubarède, Gabriel. 1979. ‘Interview with Samuel Beckett’. In Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 215–217. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1998. Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947–64. London: Phoenix. Engelberts, Matthijs. 2003. ‘Victor(ious) Retreats: Beckett’s Eleutheria and Roger Vitrac’s Departure from Surrealism’. In Linda Ben-Zvi, ed., Assaph: Studies in the Theatre 17–18 (Beckett Issue), 89–112. Federman, Raymond. 2005. Interview with Mark Thwaite. Ready Steady Book. http://w w w.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=raymondfederman [Accessed 7 December 2007]. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York : Routledge. Fondation Mémoire Déportation. 2004. Livre-Mémorial: Des déportés de France arrêtés par mesure de répression et dans certains cas par mesure de persécution 1940–5. 4 volumes. Paris: Tirésias. Gierow, Karl Ragnar. 1969. Presentation Speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature 1969. http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1969/press.html [Accessed 14 September 2007]. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: William Heinemann. Kluger, Ruth. 2003. Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. London: Bloomsbury. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. —, and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds. 2006. Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Kravchenko, Victor. 1947. I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official. London: Robert Hale Ltd.

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Lamont, Rosette. 1990. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Wandering Jew’. In Randolph L. Braham, ed., Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 35–53. Laqueur, Walter, ed. 2001. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Yale: Yale University Press. Loustaunau-Lacau, Georges. 1945. Chiens maudits: Souvenirs d’un rescapé des bagnes hitlériens. Paris: Réseau Alliance. Moorjani, Angela. 2003. ‘Diogenes Lampoons Alexandre Kojève: Cultural Ghosts in Beckett’s Early French Plays’. In Linda Ben-Zvi, ed., Assaph: Studies in the Theatre 17–18 (Beckett Issue), 69–88. Nixon, Mark. 2006. ‘ “Scraps of German”: Samuel Beckett Reading German Literature’. In Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost, eds., Notes diverse holo, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui 16, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 259–282. Overbeck, Lois, Martha Fehsenfeld and George Craig. 2006. ‘In Defense of the Integral Text’. In Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost, eds., Notes diverse holo, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui 16, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 347–371. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1999. ‘Presentation’. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. In Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman, eds., Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts. New York: The New Press, 29–42. Time. 1946. ‘Goodbye to All That’. (Review of Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom.) 8 July. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,778774,00.html [Accessed 14 September 2007]. Traverso, Enzo. 1999. Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz. London: Pluto Press. Walzer, Michael. 1995. Preface to Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. New York: Schocken Books. Wills, Claire. 2007. That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War. London: Faber and Faber.

Chapter 5

A World without Monsters: Beckett and the Ethics of Cruelty Paul Sheehan

The scenes are, by now, part of the canonical bedrock. They begin on the land, with an itinerant man of property mistreating his porter/slave, lashing him intermittently with physical and verbal abuse. Moving indoors, a son can only communicate with his blind, deaf, incontinent mother via blows to her skull, based on an esoteric code of his own devising. (Much later, in the middle of a forest, he uses his crutches to fend off what appears to be a sexual advance from a fellow vagrant, delivering some rather vigorous kicks to the ribs.) Another crippled son, confined to a wheelchair rather than crutches, administers to both his parents by housing them in dustbins, taunting and punishing them with promises of food. However, these individual incidences seem almost like minor lapses of judgment in comparison with a quasi-ceremonial epic of physical violation, where bodies move through mud and darkness to find their victims, all the while adhering strictly to predetermined patterns of reciprocated torture involving fingernails, fists and tin-openers. Back behind closed doors, this time in a theatre, an actor is placed on the stage and, under the fastidious command of director and assistant, has his body wrenched into various ‘expressive’ positions. The world according to Samuel Beckett, before it is anything else, is a place of extreme hardship and suffering. More disturbing, however, is the fact that when torment is the outcome of human action, the results are nearly always nasty, brutish and long-winded. Routine acts of atrocity are performed without caveats, and in the absence of the standard reassurances of dramatic logic or ethical norms. Thus, insofar as the production of pain inflects Beckettian story and drama, it invariably takes place outside the framework of cause and effect. Suffering is both necessary, in that no alternative is proffered, nor any mitigating circumstances; and it is gratuitous, with a piling-on of woes that surpasses any reasonable expectation of human forbearance. In a world where everything runs inexorably down—story, drama, language, situation, bodies—a logic of cruelty becomes the chief yardstick of order, with infirmity and torture tentatively joining forces to hasten the work of entropy.

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Yet the suffering and wretchedness that Beckett’s ‘people’ endure, without consolation or rationale, have traditionally been seen as part of a redemptive structure. One strategy is to see their agonies as made bearable through humour, in which laughter affirms profound links to common humanity. Ruby Cohn, for example, argues that ‘through the obsessions of Beckett’s heroes, we understand our own deepest humanity. . . . We laugh at the leg ailments, verbal difficulties, ignorance and passion of Beckett’s heroes, but our laughter is nervous and anxious’ (296). They have also been redeemed through beauty, as Francis Doherty claims, in his analysis of Endgame: ‘All we can say is that, in the end, man’s role is absurd and meaningless in a world designed for cruelty, though agonizingly one can recognize the possible beauty too’ (99–100). But perhaps the most common strategy is to find redemption in catharsis, where the sheer fact of confronting so much misery cleanses us of our sadness and horror, leaving us relieved and open to the experience of pleasure, as Aristotle saw in the workings of tragedy. However, these strategies of displacement not only neglect to address cruelty on its own terms, they also ignore Beckett’s terms. Put simply, the pleasure he takes in describing scenes of pain and misery is palpable, and their recurrence in his work, in different guises, suggests something more than just an unpleasant means to a noble end. Where can Beckett be located, on the spectrum of cruelty? At one extreme, sadism—or, more properly, Sade-ism, insofar as it derives from the writings of the iniquitous Marquis—obtains when pain and punishment, inflicted on (willing or unwilling) others, is the basis for sexual pleasure. In 1938 the founder of Obelisk Press, a pornographic publishing house, approached Beckett about translating Sade’s Les 120 Jours de Sodome. In dire financial straits at the time, and desperate for work, the then-unknown writer nevertheless turned down the commission—not on the grounds of prudishness or cowardice, but because the potential infamy of being associated with Sade might imperil his own publishing future. In a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, dated February 1938, Beckett compared the rigour of the book’s construction to Dante, and wrote that ‘The obscenity of surface is indescribable. . . . It fills me with a kind of metaphysical ecstasy’ (quoted in Knowlson, 293). ‘Sadism’, as a term, and its complement ‘masochism’, come from the sexological writings of Krafft-Ebing and his Psychopathia Sexualis—originally published in 1886, but not incorporating the new terms until the 11th edition, in 1901. As a psychiatric disorder, however, sadism is too particular to accommodate Beckettian cruelty. In the first place, a properly sadistic act depends not just on the infliction of physical pain, but also on what might be termed ‘affective pain’, or the suffering caused by humiliation and/or subjection. Without this emotional dimension, sadism metamorphoses into something else (Freud, for example, prefers to use the late-nineteenth-century term ‘algolagnia’, to distinguish simple physical cruelty from sadism proper (71)). Given that Beckett’s characters are more likely to exhibit emotional glaciation than

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passionate, lustful outpouring, there is little sign of the violent degradation that marks the Sadean temper.1 Second, properly Sadean cruelty involves a necessary quotient of sexual gratification. Anthony Cronin avers that the many attempts to find Sadean elements in Beckett inevitably founder on this point: ‘There is . . . a certain delight in the gougings and thumpings that are described, but this is rather a long way from the quite specifically sexual cruelty of de Sade’ (292). Though this is not entirely true—sexual pleasure from the exercise of cruelty is apparent enough in Beckett’s Rough for Radio II, for example, discussed below—it is most often the case that morbid enjoyment, a ‘certain delight’, is the chief outcome of cruelty. Hamm and Clov, in Endgame, set the tone with their routines of two-way torment. Thus, although Hamm revels in issuing orders to Clov, which he knows cannot be refused, Clov takes similar delight in turning those orders back on his ‘master’, and adding his own pitiless touches to them. The enjoyment each takes in such exercises comes as much from the ritualized nature of the exchange—that is, situations in which each knowingly plays a role—as it does from the pleasures of practising torment for its own sake, in a more gratuitous register. In order to examine more closely this and other forms of Beckettian cruelty, it is necessary to address two preliminary issues. Each is a potential linking point for cruelty and ethics, and depends, to some extent, on the existence of an other: first, the nature, and implications, of inter-subjective encounters; and second, the problematic status of evil in the work. Both raise difficult questions as to what the ethical meaning of the meaninglessness of suffering is, especially when inflicted by human beings on each other (or, as we shall see, on themselves).

Selves and others: the question of company One of Beckett’s earliest obsessions is the undecidable nature of presence and absence, insofar as it concerns the character of inter-subjective relations; or, to use Beckettian terminology, insofar as it turns on the question of company. In the Trilogy, there is a marked dwindling of such relations, from Molloy’s encounters with flesh-and-blood, albeit mostly anonymous, fellow beings; to out-and-out ‘fictioned’ others, whose existence is not only deeply entwined with their author’s, but threatens to outlast his, in Malone Dies; to the agglomeration of voices, tones, discursive by-products and ‘fundamental sounds’ that comprise The Unnamable. Nearly thirty years later, in Company (1980), Beckett makes clear the heuristic function of voice(s): ‘May there not be another with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking? . . . The voice alone is company but not

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enough’ (Beckett 1989, 6–7). Voices can insinuate, propose or indict, but their lack of substance means they cannot be, the way another human presence can. Daniel Albright suggests that the narrating voice of Company peoples his mind with ‘the companionable ghosts of his own plurality’ (Albright 16). Yet these ‘ghosts’ subtend a logic that points, paradoxically, away from solitary acquiescence: ‘If the voice is not speaking to him it must be speaking to another. . . . To another of that other. Or of him. Or of another still’ (Beckett 1989, 8). The possibility of company, of potential (or potentially imaginary) others, has decisive implications when it comes to cruelty. For whether it is the coupling of master and slave, interrogator and suspect or torturer and victim, cruelty takes two. The consequences of this structural imperative shape How It Is, Beckett’s most refi ned and exquisite vision of ritualized suffering. The narrator of this barely categorizable prose-poem lies face down in mud, crawling naked in the dark towards a creature known as ‘Pim’. When he reaches him, a violent ritual commences, with ‘nails in armpit’ (Beckett 1964, 62) and, thanks to the availability of a tin-opener, ‘blade in arse’ (69). The purpose of the torture is stimulus-response training, in which the narrator uses his blade to carve letters onto Pim’s back, to extract a story from him. Once this has been accomplished, Pim crawls away to find his own victim, and take his place there as tormentor, while the narrator awaits the arrival of ‘Bom’, who will violate him in his turn . . . and so on. The advancement of bodies through the mud generates an infinite movement or process from west to east, an endless, interlocking chain of tormentors and victims. The formal precision of this so-called ‘afterdeath’ evokes another architecturally exact nether-world: Dante’s Hell, and its nine circles of punishment, with rings, ditches and zones adding further topographical detail (see Terry 1998). The clawing and scratching that Beckett’s narrator describes, and the fact that it is so unremitting, also bring to mind the chronic suffering in the Inferno. The mud world itself is a baleful echo of Dante’s River Styx, whose endpoint is a ‘soggy marsh’; in canto VII, the Sullen are consigned to this mire, condemned to recount their sins in a mud-choked gargle—‘Sullen we lie here now in the black mud’ (113). But for all their material similarities, the two realms differ when it comes to cruelty. Mary Bryden writes: ‘In the Divine Comedy universe, the mental and physical are wedded together, with every punishment tailored to the nature of the sin, so that a physical assault has “meaning” within the psyche of the recipient’ (157). Suffering, then, loses its mystery in Dante’s Hell; indeed, it is overburdened with meaning, governed by a direct causal link between life and afterlife. The tortures of the damned match the transgressions committed in their lives, in ways that are quantifiable, though somewhat abstruse or esoteric (the twenty-four levels require some elaboration). In Beckett’s mud world, by contrast, there is no such parity, no tailoring of sin and punishment, no causal

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explanation. Suffering exists because that is just how it is, in ‘the place without knowledge’ (123). The bodies condemned to this world are denied any ‘meaningful’ interactive relationship, outside the gratuitous acts of cruelty they seem compelled to perform. Instead, they are literally ‘wedded together’, in that the couple of narrator and Pim are ‘glued together like a single body in the dark the mud’ (122). This physical union has wider implications. For it is hinted that all the beings in the mud world, linked as they are through rites of cruelty, are not autonomous entities as such but parts of a larger master-self, a meta-identity, that resolves into the ‘voice of us all’ (76). Their secret unity is revealed when the narrator admits to ‘the same voice the same things nothing changes but the names’ (114). As Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit point out, ‘If everyone on the chain has the same movements and sequence of roles, and the same remembered life, as everyone else, we might as well think of them all as a single person; they are nothing but exact copies of one another’ (4). What appear to be ‘others’, then, are just dispersed articulations of an ‘I’ that possesses neither source nor centre. If cruelty does, indeed, require company, as noted earlier, the possible non-existence of the latter turns the complex machinery of suffering into a solipsistic construct, an elaborately engineered self-tormenting fantasy. But to explore the ramifications of this possibility, we must detour through Beckett’s other forefather in the art of torture, Marcel Proust. Unlike Beckett, Proust is a (distant) Sadean inheritor. Perhaps his greatest comic creation, the Baron de Charlus, is also his most deviant, finding pleasure in physical punishment and routine self-abasement (see, in particular, Sodome et Gomorrhe). Charlus aside, Proust converts inter-subjective Sadean cruelty into self-reflexive torment. In his study of the Recherche, Beckett locates this alteration in the space where death and memory co-habit: The insistent memory of cruelties to one who is dead is a flagellation, because the dead are only dead in so far as they continue to exist in the heart of the survivor. And pity for what has been suffered is a more cruel and precise expression of that suffering than the conscious estimate of the sufferer, who is spared at least one despair—the despair of the spectator. (Beckett 1970, 44) Cruelty thus begets self-cruelty (‘flagellation’), an inward turn which pity only exacerbates. In Harold Bloom’s estimate, Proust shows sexual jealousy to be the ‘most aesthetic of all psychic maladies’ (184). Extrapolating from this, we might say that sexual cruelty is the most isolating of all psychic torments, that it ruptures entirely the inter-subjective bond conjoining tormentor with sufferer. For the most astringent and invasive form of emotional cruelty in Proust’s world is the self-torture that ensues from sexual jealousy. Both Swann and Marcel—not to mention Saint-Loup and Charlus—suffer the agonies of distrust, suspicion and (imagined) betrayal

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most intensely when their love objects are absent. That their greatest sufferings occur in private is no accident; solitude is the essential precondition for self-torture, where it can take place unhindered by the consolations of presence. The self-tormentor thus singlehandedly stage-manages all the dramas of cruelty inside his own head, successfully thwarting the reliance of cruelty on company. Jealousy is not just an exemplary form of suffering but one which, notes Fredric Jameson, ‘was for Proust a positive and indeed a productive experience and which is concentrated in the account of jealousy for Albertine’ (200). Beckett’s derelicts, too, seem to enjoy their pain, though this enjoyment could not be said to be ‘positive’ or ‘productive’, but rather something that confirms their indifference, indigence or aloofness. Pain-avoidance mechanisms are, in general, either faulty or non-existent. If Beckett’s characters do not exactly welcome the suffering that attends their being-in-the-world, they nevertheless bear it without demurral, and even embrace the constancy and dependability it confers in a world of rising destitution.

Negative anthropology: the problem of evil As a response to the traumas and forebodings of the post-war world, Beckett’s oeuvre is not without reflective historical import. At the same time, the writer’s steadfast resistance to, as one of his characters calls it, ‘this craze for explicitation’ (Beckett 1984, 299) distances him from more mainstream varieties of moral and ethical response. María Pía Lara notes that although the last century is thick with acts of human abomination, the means for understanding those acts have become more and more refined. ‘In other words’, she says, ‘in spite of our failure to cope with human cruelty, we possess a clearer, more moral way to analyse what we call “atrocities”. Our last century was plagued by horrific actions of human cruelty, nevertheless something about our understanding has been transformed’ (1). In Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Richard Kearney attempts to codify those ‘transformations’ of understanding by elucidating various categories of evil. Mythological evil, he says, deals with explanations that are beyond us, such as origins, fate and destiny. Scriptural or biblical evil, by contrast, is the exercise of wisdom that ‘tries to make moral sense of the monstrous’ (84). Metaphysical evil is different again, in that it provides more speculative means for seeing evil as a deficit of being and as punishment for sin. None of these explanations, however, can adequately account for the presence of pain, suffering and misery in Beckett’s writing, nor the abject cruelty that augments these conditions. But Kearney proposes a fourth category, anthropological evil, to answer to the otherwise inexplicable ills of the last century (Auschwitz and Hiroshima) and their remote antecedents (Job’s ordeals, Gethsemane). This anthropological

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approach comes to us through Kant, he says, who forces us to confront human responsibility: He enabled us to see that evil is not a property of some external demon or deity but a phenomenon deeply bound up with the anthropological condition. With the arrival of Kantian ethics evil ceases to be a matter of abstract metaphysical accounting and becomes instead an affair of human practice and judgement. (87) Paradoxically, the humanity of evil also invokes the alterity of evil. The more that evil is shown to be a product of human design, the more pressing does its otherness become. Beckett’s work, too, explores the intertwinement of humanity and alterity, though not in such a way as to endorse the duality of good/evil. That is because he does not eliminate mythological, scriptural and metaphysical elements, so much as reduce them to ‘anthropological’ dimensions, through parody, perversion and/or allusion. I suggest, then, that the coupling of humanity/alterity is most evident in Beckett’s writing through the category of the monstrous, an incontrovertible watermark in the work. Thus, if more easily discernible categories of evil cannot be found in the world Beckett makes (or unmakes), there is, nevertheless, abundant evidence of monstrosity. To date, Beckett’s imagining of the monstrous has been explored in decidedly non-ethical ways. Andrew Gibson, for example, approaches it through the ‘negative anthropology’ that impels the work, in which man is defined by what he is not. The Beckettian body in the Trilogy, he suggests, is undetermined and incomplete, inhabiting the kind of world ‘in which, in the depths of bodies, everything is monstrous mixture, and there are no appropriate modes of discrimination’ (Gibson 265). Gibson’s ‘aesthetics of monstrosity’ covers not just the grotesque bodily appearances and physical degeneracy of Beckett’s monologists, both namable and unnamable, but also distortions in storytelling logic and its organization. He writes: ‘The narrative itself keeps on developing curious and peculiar growths, like a monster’s body. This necessarily makes for incompleteness, breakdown, amnesia, disconnection, constant lapses into “shapelessness” ’ (266). Gibson, therefore, traces a path from the human body, and its deformities, to disfigurations of that particularly human-shaped phenomenon that is narrative form. Furthermore, in the Trilogy, Beckett’s transmutation of the human organism is necessarily political, because the ‘thought of monstrosity is a liberating thought. It affirms the right to difference and variation, the possibility of becoming other’ (271). Could the path be extended still further, to that equally pressing human concern, ethical agency? Is it possible, in other words, to extrapolate from Gibson’s delineation of textual irregularities an ‘ethics of monstrosity’?

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Seen through the lens of ethics, the category of the ‘monstrous’ is a notoriously double-sided term. On the one hand, its ascription implies disrespect and maltreatment; to regard another human being as a ‘means’, rather than an ‘end’, contrary to the Kantian directive, is to show a monstrous disregard for human autonomy. On the other hand, monstrosity as physical (rather than moral) deformity has been recuperated by French theory, as Gibson suggests above, into yet another version of radical heterogeneity, of inassimilable otherness, that leads away from fi xity and essence towards becoming. Michel Foucault, for example, describes it as the ‘transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of the table, and of the law of the table’ (Foucault 63). In this respect, monstrosity works not as a fortification of ethical boundaries, but as an anti-category that reveals the limitations, the assertive inducements, of the normative—a violation of the law that also, deftly, evades the law. Monstrosity, says Foucault, is ‘both the point at which law is overturned and the exception that is found only in extreme cases’. This is played out in the range of contradictory responses it provokes—from violent denunciation and suppression to medical care and pity (56). The problem this begets, in a nutshell, is that the monstrous insinuates itself onto the border where the ‘other’ achieves recognition; and since ethics is concerned with the actions of individuals towards others, whether from the vantage point of self-responsibility (in the Kantian tradition) or social responsibility (the Hegelian tradition), the monstrous is unavoidably implicated in the functioning of ethical choice. The questions that ensue from this, then, concern the kinds of monstrosity that Beckett displays, in his animadversions of cruelty; whether he posits any kind of relation between physical and moral attributes; and whether these issues foreclose or not on the possibility of ethical value, or merely complicate it. Let us turn now to the works themselves, and to the three forms of cruelty, or applied monstrosity, that they describe: physical, emotional and procedural.

Cry in darkness: regarding the pain of others Physical violence as a form of ‘training’ is evident in Molloy (1950), in the novel’s first act of cruelty. Molloy’s mother is a ‘deaf blind impotent mad old woman’ (Beckett 1955, 24), hence beyond the reach of human contact. But Molloy has other ideas: ‘I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull. One knock meant yes, two no, three I don’t know, four money, five goodbye. I was hard put to ram this code into her ruined and frantic understanding, but I did it, in the end’ (22). How he ‘did it’ was by adopting a more drastic approach: ‘This consisted in replacing the four knocks of my index-knuckle by one or more (according to my needs) thumps of the fist, on her skull. That she understood’ (23). As a form of training, this harks back to Nietzsche’s assertion that

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pain played an important role in the historical development of memory. He writes: ‘When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments and sacrifices . . . all this has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics’ (Nietzsche 41). Thus, if Molloy’s methods are effective, it is because they are (unwittingly) undergirded by an ontogenetic imperative, making the excesses of his method curiously reasonable. A more wanton form of violence is inflicted on Molloy himself, as he journeys to his mother’s house (to carry out, we can assume, another bout of skullthumping). Apprehended by a police officer for ‘resting’ on his bicycle, and unable to provide the necessary papers, he feels ‘a man’s hard fist’ and is taken into custody for questioning. ‘Insults, abuse, these I can easily bear, but I could never get used to blows’ (28)—the implication being that if he could ‘get used’ to violence, Molloy might find it ‘acceptable’, that is, be able to assimilate it to a higher purpose, such as communicating with the otherwise incommunicable. Subsequent to this scene, Molloy finds other reasons for unjustifiably aggressive behaviour. Making his way through the forest he comes across a ‘charcoal-burner’, whom he once ‘might have loved’, had he been several decades younger: ‘He was all over me, begging me to share his hut, believe it or not’ (113). Wielding one of his crutches, Molloy deals this would-be sexual predator a good crack on the skull, enough to subdue him. For no apparent reason, Molloy then goes to some lengths to bestow ‘a few warm kicks in the ribs’ (114) with his heels, though this, too, fails to satisfy him. ‘I always had a mania for symmetry’, he confesses, and applies himself to the other side of his victim’s prone body—missing the ribs, but landing his heel instead somewhere near the kidney, though ‘not hard enough to burst it, no, I fancy not’ (114). A different kind of ‘order’ prompts this last uncalled-for act, as a way of (presumably) saving it from gratuitousness. If the infliction of violence forms a pattern or ‘symmetry’, then it is, in Molloy’s economy of action, ‘ justified’. Cruelty then begets cruelty, following its own course and circumventing the logic of causal explication. The movement of that course is made evident in the specifically emotional cruelties of Beckett’s drama. In Endgame, for example, Hamm’s pitiless treatment of Clov, Nagg and Nell marks him out a petty tyrant, seizing whatever power he can to wield over others. However, as in the psychoanalytical adage, in which the abused typically become abusers themselves, the most monstrous act of cruelty in the play is actually perpetrated against Hamm. Nagg tells him that when he was a small boy he was frightened of the dark and would call out, to no avail: ‘We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace’ (Beckett 1958, 38). There is no gallows humour leavening Nagg’s words, only the harsh declaration of parental neglect. His dispassionate admission is underscored by further inter-generational malice, in the form of Nagg’s most fervent desire: ‘I hope the day will come when you’ll really need to have me listen to you . . . Yes, I hope

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I’ll live till then, to hear you calling me like when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark, and I was your only hope’ (38). Further, there is an echo of the young Hamm’s distress in Clov’s story of Mother Pegg, who requested oil for her lamp from the adult Hamm, was denied it and subsequently died ‘of darkness’ (48). Hamm’s escape from that fate has enabled him, in a cruelly ironic twist, to pass it on to another. In his last broken speech he chants a phrase, rehearsing his finale: ‘You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness. . . . Nicely put, that’ (52). The notion that cruelty could be part of both a limited, reflexive economy and a more general, trans-individual economy is intrinsic to the anti-romantic manoeuvring of Eh Joe, Beckett’s first television drama. The piece turns on the fact that the title character is both a heartless womaniser and a Christian moralist. His religious temper, alert to the voice of God, is interrupted by his sexual history: the voice he hears is not his deity’s, but the taunting, pointed intonation of a rejected lover. ‘She’ alleges that Joe has hitherto stifled or suppressed such voices of conscience, by ‘throttling the dead in his head’ (Beckett 1984, 203). Having (barely) escaped Joe’s clutches herself, the voice reminds him of one who didn’t, whose unrequited love for Joe caused her to commit suicide with an overdose of pills. There is no real company for Joe, only the voice in his head—a poisonous, accusatory voice that torments him ceaselessly. So cruelty here is, once again, a two-way current. Though self-inflicted suffering is evident elsewhere in Beckett, Eh Joe suggests proximity to the specifically Proustian theme of sexual cruelty. And yet at the same time, it stresses the distance. For Proust’s suffering male protagonists are victims of wily females, and of their own ultra-refined, aesthetically regulated sensibilities. Joe is both victim and tormentor, and his temper is much coarser. Indeed, his is a stone-hearted sensibility; in the final moments of the drama the metaphor is concretized, with his victim suffocated by stones as she utters his name. Where physical cruelty circulates freely and abundantly, through the rigours of training and method, emotional cruelty provides a compass for that circulation, revealing the lineaments of its bipolar passage.

Regulated cruelty: rituals of torture An unpublished story Beckett composed in 1952, ‘On le tortura bien’, anticipates some of the initiatives that Beckett will explore more fully in the socalled ‘procedural’ plays. As Ruby Cohn describes the tale, in A Beckett Canon, its semi-digested contents reveal the administrative machinery of torment. ‘He was thoroughly tortured, until he spoke’ (205): the opening sentence posits a close relationship between torture and language, cruelty and utterance. The narrator of the story does not himself carry out or even witness these acts of

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cruelty—which take place in a tent—but instead instructs another how to proceed, whilst a third records the victim’s agonized cries. The need to, as it were, outsource the torture to minions emphasizes the necessarily remote operation of power, and the demand for clearly designated roles within that operation. As the typescript concludes, the narrator imagines ways of imposing continuity of meaning and address on the victim’s increasingly digressive expostulations. Cohn notes: ‘He imagines someone sticking a fork in his rectum, thus forcing him to connect his utterances’ (205). The merciless training routines of How It Is loom into view here, perhaps indicating an ur-text for later exercises of procedural cruelty. Crucial to these exercises is the shift in emphasis from utterance to enactment. Elaine Scarry suggests that at the conceptual heart of torture is a connection between the two. She writes: ‘While torture contains language, specific human words and sounds, it is itself a language, an objectification, an acting out’ (27). Scarry then cites practices of institutionalized torture in which the names given to torture chambers have cinematic or theatrical references (‘having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama’ (28)). Enactment thus raises questions about the very nature of theatre—questions that Beckett confronts directly in his late drama. Despite the wealth of theatrical allusions and intimations in the early works (Godot, Endgame, Happy Days) it is not until Catastrophe (1982) that an actual theatre production is depicted. A rehearsal is in full swing, and the director (D) and his assistant (A) run into a problem with the final scene. The performer or protagonist (P) is made up to appear as corpse-like as possible, in ash-grey attire with whitened face and body. He does not speak, but is treated as malleable and insentient, a conspicuous yet inert prop. It is gesture, then, rather than utterance, that causes the problem: should P raise his head at the climax, or keep it lowered? There is a critical tendency either to allegorize this play as a political statement (Beckett dedicated it to Václav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright imprisoned by the Communist authorities) and thereby discount its theatrical relevance (see Sandarg); or to treat it purely as a kind of manual detailing the overt tyranny of theatrical direction (see Lyons 90–94). H. Porter Abbott, however, suggests that the two approaches need not be mutually exclusive. He cogently outlines the quasi-sadistic nature of the theatre: Of all the arts, the theatrical are inherently the most tyrannical. Theatre is art applied to the human body and mind. It requires a director, and directors can indeed be tyrants. . . . At the least, then, autocratic control is implicit in the literal meaning of theatricality. (81) Abbott does not say what the ‘most’ might entail, but hints that it is advanced with the play being staged in Catastrophe.

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These two readings, the political and the theatrical, are thus tacitly conjoined, each implying the other. For it is not just that the art of making theatre encourages tyrannical conduct, but rather that there is an irreducibly political dimension to that conduct. It rests, in essence, on a two-fold demand: first, there is the question of representation, whereby political themes, problems and states of affairs are dramatized; and then there is the matter of dramaturgical procedure, of the ways in which these subjects are made to fit theatrical protocols. Catastrophe stages a situation in which the two demands are at perfidious odds. Though D is attempting to make a statement against political cruelty—he rebukes A for suggesting that P be outfitted with a gag, thereby submitting to ‘this craze for explicitation!’—he succeeds only in instituting a kind of artistic despotism, insidiously fastening one form of oppression to another. Both theatrical and meta-theatrical, Catastrophe creates a literal ‘theatre of cruelty’; in staging it, Beckett’s specular condemnation of dramaturgical method enables him to exhibit the politically dubious underpinnings of theatrical art. If Catastrophe demonstrates that theatre, at its most elemental, is a medium hospitable to tyranny, other works suggest that tyranny and torture function best when mediated by theatre. This is made explicit in What Where (1983), Beckett’s last stage play. ‘We are the last five’ (Beckett 1984, 310), announces V, the voice of Bam, who summons to the stage (and hence into existence) four figures: Bam, Bem, Bim and Bom. Having imagined these creatures into being, V then directs them to torture each other in turn, creating a chain-like structure of torment similar to the one shaping How It Is. The chain emerges because of the tug-of-war that takes place between coercion and concealment. Bam asks Bom if his interrogation, of an unnamed first figure (Bum?), was successful, if ‘he didn’t say anything?’ (312). Bom denies that anything was said, but is presumed to be withholding information, and so is himself interrogated by Bim, then Bim by Bem and so on. In outsourcing the torture to his imagined underlings, V is forced continually to repeat his directive, with each (negative) outcome prompting further torture. By the end of the play everyone appears to know the secret (of either ‘what’ or ‘where’) except V, the administrator condemned to ignorance. ‘Make sense who may’, he says. ‘I switch off’ (316). The chain of tortures takes place offstage; indeed, in the play’s cruel logic, it cannot be represented. The procedural play, as Beckett envisages it, shows the methods of cruelty to be incapable of providing closure. For although torture may succeed in its self-directed task of bringing to light hidden information, it is destined to fail at a more fundamental level. Jean-Paul Sartre outlines what is at stake: Torture is senseless violence, born in fear. The purpose of it is to force from one tongue, amid its screams and its vomiting up of blood, the secret of

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In What Where, this elusiveness of outcome is embedded in the language of torture, in its stringently performed question-and-answer rituals: ‘Well? . . . He didn’t say it? . . . You gave him the works? . . . And he didn’t say it? . . . He wept? . . . Screamed? . . . Begged for mercy? . . . But didn’t say it?’ (312–313). As in ‘On le tortura bien’, the complicitous relationship between language and torture—in which punishment, supposedly, provokes utterance—is shown to founder before it can yield knowledge, insight, revelation. Torture cannot produce truth, only a pale approximation of it, a mere fraction that falls short of true disclosure. The figures brought into being by V are echoes of himself. Their near-identical nature (‘Players are as alike as possible’, reads a prefatory note (309)) makes the torture(s) they carry out a form of oblique self-cruelty, turning inter- subjectivity, once again, into an unsettling illusion. In Rough for Radio II, by contrast, company is increased by monstrosity. Drafted in the early 1960s, but not performed (and broadcast) until 1976, it is self-evidently Beckett’s most Sadean work. A brutal, pedantic Animator orders his aide, Dick, to extract a meaningful statement from the inscrutable Fox. He has a young female assistant, Stenographer, on hand to ensure that Fox’s every word is duly recorded. Her presence partly explains why Animator’s discourse of cruelty is punctuated with sly sexual innuendo—‘My cup is full’ (Beckett 1984, 116)—and flirtatious platitudes—‘Ah were I but . . . forty years younger!’ (117); only partly, however, as it soon dawns that his lascivious demeanour is also prompted by his role as torturer’s master, and by the pain he must administer in the course of playing out that role. Language and torture are held together in a tight creative clench: Fox’s verbal emissions are treated as oracular utterances that must be shaped— animated—by the regulated cruelties of Animator. The latter awaits the phrase juste, the key slogan or expression that will release them all from the parts they are compelled to perform. In Daniel Albright’s words, Animator is in the position of ‘trying to decode a tortured text, a text produced by torture’ (Albright 118). The crucial admission Fox makes, which may provide the closure they are seeking, is that he has a twin brother (‘ah to be he’) latent inside him: ‘Have yourself opened up, Maud would say, opened up, it’s nothing, I’ll give him suck if he’s still alive, ah but no, no no. No no’ (119). Having revealed the presence of this immanent ‘double’, Fox (or his monstrous inner twin) screams, ‘Let me out! Peter out in the stones!’ (121) He might thus be seen as an embodiment of the impasse to which Sartre alluded, the ‘secret’ that no amount of torture can bring to light. Recoiling from the revelation, Stenographer considers Fox’s internal other to be ‘quite simply

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impossible!’, but is disabused of her incredulity by a wiser, worldlier Animator: ‘No no, such things happen, such things happen. Nature, you know . . . Fortunately. A world without monsters, just imagine!’ (120). A world without natural monstrosities would be a world to which Animator and his team would not belong, a place where they would have no purpose. And yet, if (as we saw earlier) the monstrous ambiguously borders the ethical by either enabling or undoing it, a world without this border would also permit the exercise of prolonged and systematic abuse—be it physical, emotional or procedural. Despite his apparently monstrous claims of parthenogenesis, Fox ultimately has the upper hand. His tormentors are dutifully constrained by their roles, as Animator admits in his final, disenchanted, remark: ‘Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free’ (124). The ability to violate others is thus no freedom at all, and is not predicated on the ownership of power. This is the dilemma that finally enfeebles even Beckett’s most monstrous protagonists. Pozzo, Hamm, Joe, Director, Animator and Bam are not agents of cruelty as such, but constrained by a network of coercive mandates that subjects them to its own workings. The violent acts exerted on others within that network are part of the processes with which all must comply; the system, and its role-oriented rituals, cannot be breached. Consequently, all of Beckett’s tyrants, despots and autocrats inevitably suffer losses, ending up as either blind, impotent, overruled, beleaguered or alone, and still helplessly beholden to the network that coerces both them and their ‘victims’. We have seen that although cruelty often requires an other to be able to function properly, in each form of its three primary forms—physical, emotional and procedural—self and other become blurred or interchangeable, revealing the ethically indefinite or unsettled nature of cruelty. In the fiction, blurring of self and other brings about violence in attempts to make meaning and make oneself understood. And in the procedural cruelties of the stage works, the interchangeability of positions produces a monstrous confounding of self-other distinctions, whether it takes shape as the violence of representation (Catastrophe) or the Nietzsche-inflected ‘training’ routines that reveal the ultimate meaninglessness of meaning-producing torture (What Where). Monstrosity also figures in this troubling interchange. If the monstrous is a boundary of the human, then making it indistinct calls forth cruelty. Moreover, as Rough for Radio II suggests, the problem is not that there are bad (or cruel or monstrous) people in the world, but that there is a world at all, and that it is the way it is. If, then, Beckett’s work secretes a nascent politics of cruelty, it is one that cannot be elaborated into anything solid or secure, into a lens through which the workings of power might be gauged (and, if necessary, resisted). Cruelty in its political aspect, with the acquisition of power as its objective, is thus one more scene of failure in the Beckettian purlieu. Insofar as failure possesses an irreducibly ethical potential—as a signifier of human frailty, binding us to our limitations—then cruelty is implicitly allied

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to that potential. But cruelty also demonstrates the impossibility of properly ethical conduct in a world of monsters. Since the web of cruelty ensnares perpetrator and victim alike, and can be pared down to a two-way circuit of selfinflicted punishment, where company is a ploy or deception, there is no space beyond these operations in which properly ethical imperatives might be negotiated. Cruelty thus betokens a displacement of ethics, always tied to certain needs—for an audience, for order and precision, for the cadenced comforts of ritual—and forever open to the possibility of reciprocated abuse. Beckett’s art of monstrosity mines the pathways leading out, preventing its assimilation into more theoretically useful or ‘constructive’ forms of ethical enquiry.

Note 1

Pozzo’s subjection of Lucky in Waiting for Godot might seem a forceful argument to the contrary. Yet if the scene is unsettling, it is largely because of the irksome sense that Pozzo and Lucky are ‘dramatising’ cruelty, carrying out a show devised in advance for an audience of two. Pozzo comports himself like a stage-managercum-performer, whilst Lucky is both props man and performing animal. Not only does the latter fail to voice any objection to the harsh treatment he receives, but when he does speak, or rather ‘think’, a howl of semi-coherent anguish is unleashed, a highly patterned gibberish that suggests he is ‘acting out an entropic drama whose script has worn away in his mind’, a drama that might once have constituted his ‘star turn’ (Goodall 189, 191). By these lights, Pozzo is exercising Lucky’s histrionic potential, inducting him into the ways of theatre via acts of extreme violence. The meta-theatrical nature of this ‘performance’ thus reflects more tellingly on the medium—discussed more closely in a later section—than it does on any individual practice of cruelty.

Works cited Abbott, H. Porter. 1988. ‘Tyranny and Theatricality: The Example of Samuel Beckett’. Theatre Journal 40 1: 77–87. Albright, Daniel. 2003. Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alighieri, Dante. 1949. The Divine Comedy, Cantica I: Hell. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Beckett, Samuel. 1955. Molloy. New York: Grove Press. —. 1958. Endgame and Act without Words. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1965. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1970. Proust and Three Dialogues. London: Calder & Boyars. —. 1964. How It Is. New York: Grove Press. —. 1984. Collected Shorter Plays. London: Faber. —. 1989. Nohow On. London: John Calder.

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Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. 1992. ‘Beckett’s Sociability’. Raritan: A Quarterly Review 12.1: 1–19. Bloom, Harold. 2001. How to Read and Why. New York: Touchstone. Bryden, Mary. 1998. Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cohn, Ruby. 1962. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. —. 2001. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cronin, Anthony. 1997. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: Flamingo. Docherty, Francis. 1971. Samuel Beckett. London: Hutchinson. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Freud, Sigmund. 1977. On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gibson, Andrew. 1996. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goodall, Jane. 2006. ‘Lucky’s Energy’. In S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, eds, Beckett after Beckett. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Jameson, Fredric. 2007. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso. Kearney, Richard. 2003. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. London and New York: Routledge. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Lara, María Pía. 2007. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyons, Charles R. 1987. ‘Beckett’s Fundamental Theatre: The Plays from Not I to What Where’. In James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur, eds, Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 80–97. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1994. On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sandarg, Robert. 1988. ‘A Political Perspective on Catastrophe’. In Robyn J. Davis and Lance St-John Butler, eds, ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works, Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 137–144. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1958. ‘Preface’. In Henri Alleg, The Question. Trans. John Calder. London: John Calder. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terry, Philip. 1998. ‘Waiting for God to Go: How It Is and Inferno VII-VIII’. Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 7, 349–360.

Chapter 6

The Anethics of Desire: Beckett, Racine, Sade Shane Weller

Beckett’s Racine, or towards an Orestean conception of desire A ‘latter-day Racine’—that, according to Vivian Mercier, is how we should view Samuel Beckett, given the extent of the Irish writer’s debt to the seventeenthcentury French dramatist (Mercier 87). Racine’s influence on Beckett is evident, Mercier argues, not least in the classical structure of Beckett’s plays, in his obedience to the three unities of time, place and action, in his preference for a ‘lieu vague’ as his setting, in the tendency of his characters to come in pairs, and in his treatment of desire. Regarding this last point, Mercier observes that in Beckett’s Play (1963), as in Racine’s Bérénice (1670), there is a triangular structuration of desire: in Bérénice, two men (the Emperor Titus and King Antiochus) desire the same woman (Bérénice); in Play, two women (W1 and W2) desire the same man (M). Furthermore, in both plays, ‘the situation at the end remains the same as at the beginning’ (Mercier 81); in both Racine and Beckett, the subject and the object of desire repeatedly fail to coincide: desire remains essentially non-reciprocal. This non-reciprocity of desire, so characteristic of Racine’s plays, extends beyond Beckett’s drama, being present even in his earliest prose works. Mercier anticipates numerous later commentators by describing Murphy (1938) as a comic parody, and indeed a perfect circularization, of desire as it is presented in Racine (see Mercier 79). In the undergraduate lectures he delivered on Racine at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1930–1, Beckett claims that the structuring of desire in Racine takes the form of ‘A loves B, and B loves C, and C loves D. The great pagan tiger of sexuality chasing its tail in outer darkness’ (Burrows 6), and refers to this as the ‘situation circle’ (Quoted in Mercier 79). If such a circle of desire is indeed present in Murphy, where Neary loves a Miss Dwyer, ‘who loved a Flight Lieutenant Elliman, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in

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all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs West of Passage, who loved Neary’ (Beckett 1938, 5), in Beckett’s later works desire is generally unreciprocated not because the love-object’s own desire is directed elsewhere, but rather because the loved one is either lost or dead—as, for instance, in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Words and Music (1962), and . . . but the clouds . . . (1977). In other words, not only can there be no possible reciprocation of desire here, but that which was rejected in life returns as a nonreciprocating object of desire in death. Thus, one might argue not only that there is a death-drive in Beckett, a desire to get back to an inorganic, mineral state (see Freud 308–311), but also that in many of his later works there is a decided passion for the dead, a desire that depends upon the very irretrievability of the object. There is considerable textual evidence to support Mercier’s claim regarding Racine’s enduring importance for Beckett. Beckett studied Racine as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1923–7, and as a lecturer there in 1930–1 he delivered undergraduate lectures on ‘Racine and the Modern Novel’. He referred to Racine in his academic spoof, ‘Le Concentrisme’ (1930); in his fi rst novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1931–2; see Beckett 1992, 144); and in the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ of the mid1930s. He saw productions of Bérénice in 1929 and Andromaque in 1948, and in a letter of 9 April 1956 to MacGreevy he mentioned two new biographies of Racine, and observed ‘that a course of Racine would be of benefit for his own work’ (Pilling 2006, 130). Then, in a letter of 4 June 1956, also to MacGreevy, he remarked that he had reread Andromaque, Phèdre and Bérénice (Knowlson 426). This return to Racine in the early summer of 1956 is particularly significant, since it occurred at a moment when Beckett was finding it impossible to proceed with the writing of what would eventually become Fin de partie (1957; translated as Endgame, 1958), the play he had begun over two years earlier, in January 1954. As James Knowlson observes, this return to Racine twenty-five years after Beckett’s lectures on the playwright at Trinity College, arguably not only made the completion of Endgame possible, but helped to determine the future development of Beckett’s drama: His readings of Andromaque, Phèdre and Bérénice may have focused his mind on the theatrical possibilities of monologue and of what could be done with virtually immobile characters inhabiting a closed world in which little or nothing changes. (Bérénice was, he thought, a wonderful example of such a play.) This daily diet of Racinian claustrophobia forced Beckett to concentrate on the true essentials of theatre: Time, Space and Speech. It pointed him in the direction that made a tightly focused, monologic play like Happy Days or Play possible. And eventually it was to lead him to write the short monologues of the 1970s. (Knowlson 426)

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For precisely what it was that prompted Beckett’s abiding attachment to Racine, one has to return to his 1930–1 lectures on ‘Racine and the Modern Novel’, the students’ notes for which make clear that Racine stands out for Beckett as an absolutely decisive figure in the history of European literature. Indeed, Beckett considers Racine to be the writer who inaugurates a literary tradition both adumbrated and championed by Beckett, a tradition characterized above all by its respect for what Beckett terms the ‘incomprehensibility of the real’ (Burrows 6). This tradition would include Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust and Gide, each of whom is to be seen in opposition to the naturalists, and above all to Balzac and Zola, the former of whom is mocked repeatedly in Beckett’s early works, most notably in Dream and Proust (1931), precisely for what Beckett takes to be his conception of the ‘real’ as both comprehensible and masterable in art. For Beckett, to respect the ‘incomprehensibility of the real’ in art is, first, to acknowledge the rupture that separates mind from world, and indeed one individual from another, rendering any kind of community (be it the community of friends or of lovers) simply impossible. Racine is thus valued by Beckett for his having captured the ‘solitary nature of every human being’ (Burrows 7). Prior to his lectures on Racine, this radical solitude is already emphasized in Beckett’s monograph on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, written in the summer of 1930 and in which he refers to Proust’s insistence on ‘the irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned’ (Beckett 1965, 63); and it is reaffirmed half a century later in the ending of Company (1980): ‘And you as you always were. / Alone’ (Beckett 1980, 89). As I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2007), for all this emphasis upon the essential solitude of the individual (or the windowlessness of the monad, to put it in the Leibnizian terms that so appealed to him), Beckett nonetheless imagines the possibility of one very specific kind of bond between solitudes. This bond, repeatedly figured in Beckett’s works as the ‘hand in hand’, is a paradoxical relation without relation of father and son—or what Maurice Blanchot (following Georges Bataille) terms ‘the community of those who do not have a community’ (Blanchot 1988, 1). One example of this community without community is to be found in the first of the Texts for Nothing (originally written in French in December 1950): Yes, I was my father and my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe, or we walked together, hand in hand, silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other. (Beckett 1995, 103) A second example occurs in Worstward Ho (1983): Bit by bit an old man and child. In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child. Any other would do as ill.

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Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. [. . .] Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade. (Beckett 1983b, 12–13) In this ‘as one’ of male solitudes (father and son), with the mother either absent or dead (as she is in the first of the Texts for Nothing), Beckett offers a version of the relation without relation that may be termed Orestean, since, as we shall see, it is derived from the figure of Oreste in Racine’s Andromaque (1667). In his lectures on Racine, Beckett claims that to respect the radical isolation of the individual is, in part, to avoid explaining characters, to resist the compulsion to illuminate them fully, to keep them ‘mal dégagés de l’ombre’ (Burrows 6). According to one of his former students, Beckett ‘loved the “clairobscur” [the French term for chiaroscuro], the light comes in at one moment to leave the rest in shadow. He quoted Gide as saying “Balzac paints like David, Dostoevski like Rembrandt” ’ (Burrows 8). That said, Beckett does not argue that Racine always manages to resist the temptation to illuminate. Indeed, Racine generally ‘develops from chiaroscuro to chiaro’ (McKinley 311). In the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, Beckett even refers to ‘Racinian lighting, darkness devoured’ (Quoted in Knowlson 743, n. 58), and, as he puts it in his 1961 conversation with Tom Driver: The destiny of Racine’s Phèdre is sealed from the beginning: she will proceed into the dark. As she goes, she herself will be illuminated. At the beginning of the play she has partial illumination, but there has been no question but that she moves toward the dark. That is the play. Within this notion clarity is possible. (Beckett in Driver 220) Crucially, however, there are figures in Racine who are not illuminated in this way, and, among these, by far the most significant is Oreste in Andromaque, the play identified by Beckett as the most Racinian of all Racine’s works. Racine’s Oreste is the very embodiment of both doubleness and reversibility. He arrives at the court of Pyrrhus as the ambassador of the Greeks whose mission it is to demand the death of Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromaque. But he also comes as the would-be lover of Pyrrhus’ fiancée, Hermione. She in turn agrees to become his lover if Astyanax is not put to death. So it is that Oreste’s two missions stand in irreconcilable relation to each other. Ultimately, at Hermione’s request and because he believes that it will win her as his lover, Oreste kills Pyrrhus, only to be rejected by Hermione for this very act. In an irony that relates precisely to the themes of doubleness and reversibility, Hermione blames Oreste for his failure to read the difference between her ‘heart’ and her ‘words’. This rejection results in Oreste being overwhelmed by madness.

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Now, according to Beckett, Oreste stands out because he ‘defies analysis’; his mind ‘is left complex, contrary to most of Racine’s characters’; he ‘is stated by Racine as indisponible, inaccessible’ (McKinley 311); ‘il se sépare du mouvement de clairvoyance auquel [Racine] soumet le plupart de ses personnages, qui répondent aux exigences de la psychologie moderne’ (‘he is exempt from the movement of illumination to which [Racine] submits most of his characters, who respond to the demands of modern psychology’) (Burrows 10). Oreste stands out for Beckett not simply on account of his radical isolation, however, but also because he is unremittingly subject to the passions. Racine’s modernity lies precisely in his presenting us in Oreste with a figure who evolves ‘beneath the conscious in the shadow of the “infraconscient” ’ (McKinley 312–313). Paradoxically, the passion that is on display in Oreste is hidden or ‘repressed’: it occupies a zone between the conscious and the unconscious, and it is a passion that has been complicated or divided from itself: We can reduce everything in Racine to a cerebral position. We cannot overestimate the importance of this. Racine is only concerned with the passion that is refoulée, repressed. He only can see it when it has been forced underground. Not interested in any simple relations between a man and a woman. If the relations receive no interference they do not interest him. (McKinley 311) The ‘interference’ that prevents any ‘simple relations between a man and a woman’ is not, however, the result of merely external circumstance. Rather, it is an ‘interference’ at the heart of passion itself. For, in Beckett’s Racine, the passion of passions is love/hate, love as hate and hate as love—in other words, a kind of ‘pseudocouple’ (Beckett 1953, 16), neither single nor double, and characterized by endless reversibility, the subject oscillating between love-objects and the object itself oscillating ceaselessly between being a loveobject and a hate-object. The resistance to psychological analysis, and to the ultimate illumination of character, that is exhibited by Racine’s Oreste is to be understood, then, as his being subject to an irreducible ‘cerebral polarisation’ (McKinley 309), which is to say that he is the site of endlessly warring drives. The students’ notes on Beckett’s Racine lectures also reveal that, for Beckett, Racine is, like Oreste, a radically divided figure, and that there are in fact two Racines, only one of whom belongs properly within the literary tradition that Beckett is championing. On the one hand, there is the author of Andromaque; on the other hand, there is the author of Bérénice and the later plays, including Phèdre. The distinction between these two Racines lies precisely in their treatment of the passions. While, in Bérénice, Racine continues to treat the passions, and indeed the reversibility of love/hate, the crucial difference between this play and Andromaque lies (according to Beckett) in the fact that Racine introduces a ‘sense of sin’ into Bérénice that is simply absent from

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Andromaque. More generally, Racine’s works may be divided between those in which he treats a ‘moral issue’ and those in which he does not (McKinley 310). Furthermore, just as Andromaque is Racine’s most Racinian play, so Bérénice is his most Cornelian, precisely because, unlike Oreste, Bérénice ultimately ‘sacrifices what she thinks is her passion for what she also considers her duty’ (McKinley 312). In Bérénice, then, ‘Racine is treating a subject of duty and will, in which as a psychologist he could not have been interested’ (McKinley 312). This introduction of a sense of duty, and the liberation of the self from passion through a commitment to duty, renders the work an evasion, a failure to hold to the statement of how it is with passion. In short, Bérénice is a piece of idealism, a flight from the insight that there can be no escape from the endless reversibility of a passion that will never coincide with its object or achieve reciprocity and thus the stability of a relation or community grounded in the reciprocity of desire. In stark contrast to Racine the ‘idealist’ is Racine the ‘psychologist’ (McKinley 312), and it is the artist as ‘psychologist’ who produces the kind of non-moral treatment of the passions that is to be found in Andromaque. Similarly, in his Proust monograph, Beckett argues that there are in fact two Prousts: the one who produces a non-moral treatment of the passions, and the one who frames phenomena in terms of right and wrong: Proust is completely detached from all moral considerations. There is no right and wrong in Proust nor his world. (Except possibly in those passages dealing with the war, when for a space he ceases to be an artist and raises his voice with the plebs, mob, rabble, canaille.) (Beckett 1965, 66–67) That Beckett will remain convinced that the artist must avoid framing the passions in terms of right and wrong is clear from his response to Charles Juliet’s claim (in conversation with Beckett in October 1973) that the ‘artistic enterprise is inconceivable without rigorous ethical standards urgently upheld’. Having acknowledged that Juliet is ‘correct’, Beckett goes on to qualify this as follows: But moral values are not accessible and not open to definition. To define them, you would have to make value judgements, and you can’t do that. That’s why I have never agreed with the idea of the theatre of the absurd. Because that implies making value judgements. (Beckett in Juliet 148–149) For Beckett, then, the non-moral statement of the passions means stating the endless reversibility of desire (as love/hate) without framing that desire in moral terms, and without falling for the illusion that there can be a sense of ‘duty’ that would free the loving/hating being from the reversibility of desire. Indeed, for the artist as ‘psychologist’, love itself is to be seen as hate.

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In Racine, Beckett claims: For the first time in the Fr[ench] theatre we have no heroic love. Sexuality is rep[resented] at last, and treated realistically. None of the fine Cornelian phrases. The word hate is more frequent than the word love. We have the cruelty of sexuality stated. (McKinley 307) For the writer who does not distort the reality of desire, then, it is essentially cruel in nature. This, as John Pilling observes, is where the explicit connection between Racine and Sade is made by Beckett (see Pilling 2004, 62). Andromaque is ‘the most terrible and cruel’ of Racine’s works because it states the madness of desire: with one using the other as a lever. The play is an explicit statement of Sadism: and even the mother complex which occupies us so much today, (c.f. descrip[tion] of Andromaque in Astyanax’s nursery). There is the hate impulse applied to Andromaque and Hermione: There is every cruelty. (McKinley 308) And if Andromaque is an ‘explicit statement of Sadism’ in its insistence upon the hatred (and thus the cruelty) that lies at the heart of an irreducibly polarized desire of the kind exhibited by Oreste, it also anticipates Sade in another key respect, namely the manner of this statement. For, according to Beckett—and this will have considerable bearing upon the manner of Beckett’s own works, not least Endgame and How It Is—Racine’s statement of Orestean desire in its cruelty and madness is ‘cold’ (Burrows 14). This coldness is not simply owing to the absence of any moral frame; it is a commitment to an art of statement of the passions that is itself dispassionate.

Beckett’s Sade, or towards a ‘dispassionate statement’ of the passions Beckett’s reference to ‘Sadism’ in his 1930–1 lectures on Racine is unsurprising given his recent return from France, where a major revaluation of Sade’s writings had been initiated by the Surrealists in the 1920s. This revaluation was followed in the 1930s by a series of important publications, including Maurice Heine’s edition of Les Infortunes de la vertu (the first version of Justine) in 1930 and of Les 120 Journées de Sodome in 1931–5. Beckett encountered extracts from Sade’s writings directly as early as 1931, when he read and culled phrases from Mario Praz’s La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura (1930; later translated as The Romantic Agony), which includes a brief section on Sade and several substantial extracts from the novels Justine and Juliette. Three years later, in a letter

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of 8 September 1934 to MacGreevy, Beckett declares that he has been reading Sade (see Pilling 2006, 49). Then, in early 1938, Beckett read parts of Les 120 Journées de Sodome, after an invitation from the publisher Jack Kahane to translate that work into English, a commission that Beckett was initially inclined to accept but ultimately rejected on the grounds that it might impact adversely on his own career as a writer (see Knowlson 293)—this being arguably an instance of Beckett failing to hold to his own principles of artistic integrity. The entries in Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook (1930–1) suggest that the references to Justine and Juliette in Dream of Fair to Middling Women are owing to Beckett’s reading of Praz rather than of Sade. Significantly, it is also at this time that Beckett read and plucked numerous phrases from Flagellation and the Flagellants (1887), a work attributed to one William M. Cooper, but actually written by James Glass Bertram (see Pilling 1999, 47). In his introduction, Praz refers to the recent revaluation of Sade in France, and quotes from Jean Paulhan’s September 1930 review of Heine’s edition of Les Infortunes de la vertu. According to Paulhan, Sade deserves a place among the greats—‘un écrivain qu’il faut placer sans doute parmi les plus grands’ (Quoted in Praz xvii)—a judgement that anticipates Beckett’s own, when, in a letter of 20 February 1938 to his literary agent, George Reavey, he declares Les 120 Journées de Sodome to be ‘one of the capital works of the 18th century’ (Quoted in Knowlson 293). According to Praz, this revaluation of Sade is to be dismissed, for Sade lacks the ‘most elementary qualities of a writer’ (Praz xviii). Praz goes on to claim, however, that Though more worthy of the title of polygrapher and pornographer than a writer such as Aretino, [Sade’s] whole merit lies in having left documents illustrative of the mythological, infantile phase of psycho-pathology: he gives, in the form of a fantastic tale, the first systematized account of sexual perversions. (xviii) No less importantly for Beckett, Praz also emphasizes the externalist nature of Sade’s work: ‘While the persecutions of [Richardson’s] Clarissa and of [Laclos’] Madame de Tourvel follow a psychological course, those of Justine, developing on a physical plane, offer no more spiritual interest than a series of chemical experiments. Everything is seen externally’ (Praz 108). Now, it is precisely upon these two elements—the systematized account of sexual perversions and the almost scientific nature of their statement—that Beckett will himself insist in a letter to MacGreevy of 21 February 1938, in which he compares Sade with Dante: I have read 1st and 3rd vols. of French edition [of Les 120 Journées de Sodome]. The obscenity of surface is indescribable. Nothing could be less pornographical. It fills me with a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. The composition is

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extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante’s. If the dispassionate statement of 600 ‘passions’ is Puritan and a complete absence of satire juvenalesque, then it is, as you say, puritanical and juvenalesque. You would loathe it whether or no. (Quoted in Knowlson 293) The 600 passions treated by Sade are subdivided into four blocks of 150: the simple, the complex, the criminal and the murderous. As for the manner of their ‘statement’, this, Beckett observes, is ‘dispassionate’. Thus, Beckett’s Racine shares with Sade not only a conception of desire in its cruelty, but also the non-satirical and non-moral mode of their ‘statement’. Repeatedly in the course of the 1930s, Beckett conceives of art as ‘statement’ rather than as presentation, representation, expression or imitation. Crucially, however, art as statement would not take the form of a statement on or about the passions: the very notion of art being ‘about’ anything is rejected by Beckett as early as his 1929 essay on Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (see Beckett 1983a, 27) and reiterated twenty years later in his letter of 9 March 1949 to Georges Duthuit, in which he declares: ‘Je ne peux pas écrire sur’ (in Gontarski and Uhlmann 17). Thus, the art of both Racine and Sade would be a ‘dispassionate’, non-moral statement of the passions. In his 20 February 1938 letter to Reavey, Beckett also declares that he has had an idea for an essay on Sade (see Pilling 2006, 75). Although there is no evidence that this essay was ever written, Sade certainly remained in Beckett’s mind, and, as John Pilling suggests, Beckett’s reading of Sade in early 1938 ‘may have been some kind of influence on the more erotic of the subsequent French poems, the second and third as published in 1946’ (Pilling 2006, 76); that is, the poems ‘à elle l’acte calme’ and ‘être là sans mâchoires sans dents’. Arguably, however, Sade’s influence on Beckett is considerably greater than this; indeed, in his final full-length novel, Comment c’est (1961), Beckett produces a work that, while certainly not strictly Sadean, is nonetheless inconceivable without the 1938 reading of Les 120 Journées de Sodome. That Sade was in Beckett’s mind when writing Comment c’est (translated into English as How It Is, 1964) is evident not least from the direct references to Sade in part two (‘with Pim’): ‘sadism pure and simple no since I may not cry’ (Beckett 1964, 70). A few pages later, the word ‘orgy’ is used in reference to the impossibility of any community that would overcome that radical isolation of the individual which will be affirmed at the end of the novel: ‘orgy of false being life in common’ (76). But such explicit references to Sade are far from being the only evidence of Sade’s influence on this text. The entire encounter with Pim in the second part of the novel takes the form of a torturer/victim relationship in which violence is the principal form of contact and communication with the other, and the anus (privileged far above the vagina by Sade) is a key zone in a realm characterized as excremental, the mud—referring us back to Leopardi’s ‘E fango è il mundo’ (‘And the world is mud’; from the poem ‘A se stesso’, and chosen by Beckett

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as the epigraph to his book on Proust)—being likened to ‘shit’ (Beckett 1964, 58). Furthermore, as one of the first reviewers of the novel, Maurice Nadeau, observes, the homo-fraternal relation between tormentor and victim in How It Is is presented as erotic in nature: ‘Having found his equal, his brother, whom he can martyrise, treat like an object and manipulate at his will, he [the narrator] is indeed no longer alone. He is the torturer who forms an amorous couple with his victim’ (Nadeau 227). The anally fixated nature of desire here is stated from the outset—‘Pim’s right buttock then first contact’ (Beckett 1964, 59)— and the ‘orgy of false being’ is characterized by both its cruelty and its naked intimacy: ‘his mouth against my ear our hairs tangled together impression that to separate us one would have to sever them’ (Beckett 1964, 100). Like Dolmancé’s encounter with Eugénie in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), the encounter with Pim (or ‘life in common’) takes the form of an education, a relation between tormenting ‘master’ and tormented ‘pupil’ (Beckett 1964, 79): ‘train him up bloody him all over with Roman capitals’ (69). As in Sade, this education is presented as a series of acts of violence punctuated by reflections, and relies throughout on penetrative violence: ‘first lesson theme song I dig my nails into his armpit right hand right armpit he cries’ (69); ‘take the opener in my right hand move it down along the spine and drive it into the arse not the hole not such a fool the cheek’ (74). And, as in Sade’s Justine, for instance, the body (a male body in Beckett) serves as the material for violent inscription, writing in How It Is taking the form of an incision into the flesh: with the nail then of the right index I carve and when it breaks or falls until it grows again with another on Pim’s back intact at the outset from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilisation I carve my Roman capitals (77) As for the purpose of this violent education of Pim, it is to teach him the art of communication in order that the reciprocity of desire in its cruelty may be established: Pim’s education in communication ultimately serves for the articulation of the question ‘do you love me cunt’ (99). In other words, the violence of the encounter is directed towards determining whether or not there is indeed a community or ‘life in common’ here, that life in common being defined precisely in terms of the reciprocity of desire in its homo-fraternal cruelty. There are, however, a number of important differences between the purposes of the violent educations in Sade and in Beckett, and, as we have seen, Beckett’s text denies that what it states is in fact ‘sadism pure and simple’. If How It Is is in dialogue with Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome in particular, it is also an act of aggression directed back at Sade. Beckett’s distance from Sade here is perhaps most obvious in his treatment of Schopenhauer’s claim in section 63 of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (1818) that tormentor and victim are in fact one and the same, both of them being merely phenomenal forms (or

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objectifications) of the one will (Wille), which is perpetually at war with itself (and fails to recognize itself) on the stage of representation (Vorstellung): in the fierceness and intensity of its desire [Drange] it buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form through the medium of individuation the conflict with itself which it bears in its inner nature. Tormentor and tormented are one [Der Quäler und der Gequälte sind Eines]. (Schopenhauer i. 354) In How It Is, this identity of tormentor and victim is stated with the affirmation that the ‘I’ is alone in the mud, and that Pim’s ‘extorted voice’ is in fact his own (Beckett 1964, 23). That this affirmation remains part of a more general process of affirmation and negation, both of which are stated to be impossible— ‘he can’t affirm anything no deny anything no’ (107)—indicates the extent to which Beckett’s text is at odds with Sade’s precisely in its keeping open of the very ‘perhaps’ that Sade would negate. For all their differences, however, Beckett may be seen, and indeed identifies himself, as one of Sade’s inheritors, no less than as one of Racine’s. Thematically, this is perhaps most evident in their conceptions of the necessary cruelty of desire and in their insistence upon the radical isolation of the individual. Stylistically, they share both a manner of dispassionate statement and an art of repetition that would produce what Beckett terms ‘metaphysical ecstasy’. How It Is undoubtedly marks a crucial moment in Beckett’s own version of an art of ‘dispassionate statement’ of the passion of love/hate. What remains to be considered, however, is the extent to which that art avoids treating this passion as a ‘moral issue’, and whether the art of How It Is in particular may be said to be governed by an ethics.

Beckett and the anethics of writing desire A series of short works on Beckett by Alain Badiou, collected in English translation as On Beckett (2003), is undoubtedly one of the most significant recent contributions to the tradition of reading Beckett’s œuvre as ethical precisely in its non- or even anti-nihilism (on this tradition, see Weller 2005). Indeed, in his postface to this collection, Andrew Gibson claims that Badiou’s readings ‘help us see’ that Beckett’s ‘project is, in the highest degree, an ethical one’ (Gibson 136). This ethicality would lie, according to Badiou, in a writing that poses the question ‘of the existence of the Two, or of the virtuality of the Other. This is the question that ultimately ties together all of Beckett’s work. Is an effective Two possible, a Two that would be in excess of solipsism? We might also say that this is the question of love’ (Badiou 5). According to Badiou, Beckett’s ‘evolution’ as a writer is from ‘a programme of the One —obstinate trajectory or interminable soliloquy—to the

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pregnant theme of the Two’ (Badiou 17). Significantly, Badiou identifies How It Is as the key text in this evolution towards the question of the Two, or the opening onto alterity and the encounter. This work, he argues, marks a major transformation in the way that Beckett fictionalises his thinking. This text breaks with the confrontation that opposed the suffering cogito to the grey black of being. It attempts to ground itself in completely different categories: the category of ‘what-comes-to-pass’ [‘ce-qui-se-passe’]—present from the start but now recast—and, above all, the category of alterity, of the encounter and the figure of the Other, which fissures and displaces the solipsistic internment of the cogito. (Badiou 15–16) While the notion of love as ‘a kind of lethal glue’, as it is described in Malone Dies (Beckett 1959, 264), continues to operate in How It Is, Badiou observes that tormentor and victim are bound together in How It Is by ‘stoic love’ (Beckett 1964, 69), which is to say a love that does not negate alterity in the interests of identity: ‘In no way does love turn a pre-existing Two into a One; this is the romantic version of love that Beckett never ceases to deride. Love is never either fusion or effusion. Rather, it is the often painstaking condition required for the Two to exist as Two’ (Badiou 28). Thus, one might conclude, if the ethical is conceived in terms of a relation to the Other that is not governed by the principle of identity, then, for all its apparent cruelty, for all the violence of the education in communication that would render possible a response to the question ‘do you love me cunt’, the relation to the Other that is explored in How It Is would be essentially ethical in nature. Despite Badiou’s attempts to distance himself from Blanchot’s reading of Beckett—which Badiou characterizes as ‘nihilist’—he nonetheless shares with Blanchot the sense that How It Is is a work in which the One is opened to the Other by an act of ethical violence—that is, by a kind of good or justifiable violence that ‘fi ssures and displaces the solipsistic internment of the cogito’ (Badiou 16). Although Badiou claims that, in How It Is, ‘The use of the words “tormentor” and “victim” must not lead us astray. It does not imply any sort of pathos or ethics—besides the ethics of prose, that is’ (Badiou 63), that ‘ethics of prose’ is directly related to what Badiou sees as the work’s opening itself up to the Other (see Badiou 55). Badiou is ‘entirely opposed to the widely held view according to which Beckett moved towards a nihilistic destitution’ (Badiou 55), and in How It Is he fi nds not destitution, not the reduction to nothing of the Other, but precisely ‘stoic love’ as an ethical relation to the Other. Albeit after a series of failed attempts by Beckett during the 1950s, this opening to the Other would follow upon that absolute disintegration of the subject which Beckett himself sees as occurring in The Unnamable (1953) and from which he declares that he failed to escape in the Texts for Nothing (written 1950–3). As Beckett puts

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it in conversation with Israel Shenker: In the last book—L’Innommable—there’s complete disintegration. No ‘I’, no ‘have’, no ‘being’. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on. The very last thing I wrote—Textes pour rien— was an attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration, but it failed. (Quoted in Shenker 148) In Badiou’s reading, then, How It Is would be precisely the accomplishment of that escape, an opening to, and affirmation of, the Other through the ethically justifiable fissuring of the One. However, that opening to the Other is precisely what is negated at the end of How It Is: ‘only me in any case yes alone yes in the mud yes the dark yes’ (Beckett 1964, 159). Even if this affirmation of radical solitude remains but part of a more general economy of affirmation and negation (and this is arguably the case), it nonetheless stands as a challenge to the reading of the novel as any accomplished opening onto the Two. Furthermore, the relation to Pim is one in which ‘stoic love’ remains violently homo-fraternal, and stands in striking contrast to the non-violent relation without relation of father and son in works such as Texts for Nothing and Worstward Ho, this relation of father and son being, however, no less predicated on the absence of the female than the relation with Pim. In short, the violated male ‘pupil’ in How It Is remains an other that is not ultimately determinable as other. To claim, as does Badiou, that this text is governed by a programme of the Two is to negate precisely this non-determinable, this ‘perhaps’. If, instead of insisting that How It Is constitutes the key text in an ‘evolution’ from the One to the Two in Beckett’s œuvre, one approaches the novel by way of Beckett’s reading of Racine and Sade, and the notion of art as the dispassionate statement of Orestean desire in its endless reversibility as love/hate, then one finds not an ethics grounded in the value of the Same or the Other, or of the One or the Two, but rather a conception of the human—or ‘humanity in ruins’, as Beckett puts it in his unbroadcast 1946 radio script The Capital of the Ruins (Beckett 1995, 278)— as governed by a double or polarized compulsion, namely that of the ‘on’ and the ‘no’: on the one hand, the ‘you must go on’ of The Unnamable (Beckett 1959, 418), and, on the other, the ‘Oh all to end’ of Stirrings Still (Beckett 1995, 265). This double compulsion is to be distinguished both from Kant’s categorical imperative and from the imperative governing the ethics of Sade’s texts. In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant formulates the categorical imperative first as ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant 80), and then as ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only’ (Kant 87). As Lacan observes in his 1959–60 seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the

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Sadean version of this imperative is: ‘Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure’ (Lacan 79). Lacan proceeds to argue that in fact ‘Kant is of the same opinion as Sade’ (Lacan 80). Lacan’s claim regarding the ethical in Kant and Sade in both The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and the essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (in Ecrits, 1966) is anticipated, however, by Horkheimer and Adorno. In their chapter on ‘Enlightenment and Morality’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), they argue that, far from Kant and Sade being in simple opposition to each other, as one might assume, Sade is in fact the fulfilment of Kant, insisting as he does on the ratio and recognizing before Nietzsche that ‘after the formalization of reason, pity still remained as, so to speak, the sensual consciousness of the identity of the general and the particular, as naturalized mediation. It constitutes the most compulsive form of prejudice’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 101). In short, Aristotle’s determination of the human as the rational animal (zoon logon echon) lies at the origin of the kind of instrumentalist rationality that, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, leads ultimately to a catastrophic reversal, reason becoming absolute unreason. Now, in Beckett, both the Kantian and the Sadean categorical imperatives are countered by a double, Orestean imperative that can only result in failure. This failure is neither ethical nor unethical in nature; rather, it is anethical. By this I mean that it is the endless reversibility of the ethical and the unethical, without being either non- or pre-ethical. Thus, anethical failure may also be distinguished from that violence which Derrida identifies as the ‘nonethical opening of ethics’ (Derrida 140). The ‘cerebral polarisation’ that Beckett identifies in Racine’s Oreste is far from being restricted to the figures in Beckett’s works, in their passage ‘from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself’, as he puts it in the 1979 text ‘neither’ (Beckett 1995, 258). For just such a polarization manifests itself in Beckett’s writing as the compulsion both to go on and to have done. This double, Orestean compulsion of affirmation-negation is captured by Racine in what Beckett terms a ‘piétinement sur place [a marching on the spot]’ (McKinley 312). Beckett’s artist, then, is like Racine’s Oreste precisely in his unanalysable, irreducible polarization, in his not being carried from fragmentation to unity, and in his remaining within the half-light of the ‘clair-obscur’. Writing, for Beckett, is neither a duty nor an obligation, it is an impersonal ‘necessity’: an ‘il faut’ (‘you must’), as it is put in L’Innommable (Beckett 1953, 213). In his letter of 18 October 1932 to MacGreevy, Beckett distinguishes between works that are ‘facultatif ’ and those that ‘represent a necessity’ (Quoted in Pilling 1997, 87). However, this necessity to write is countered by another, namely the necessity to put an end to writing, and this other necessity remains in place beyond How It Is. Caught within the polarization of these two necessities—or two ‘needs’ (besoins), as Beckett puts it in the 1938 text ‘Les Deux Besoins’ (Beckett 1983a, 55–57)—Beckett’s artist is Orestean, and for that very reason the works—or at least some of them, some of the time—may themselves be described as anethical.

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We are faced here, however, with an apparent contradiction: how it is possible for Beckett’s artist to be Orestean—that is to say, governed by a passion that is fundamentally at war with itself—and at the same time ‘dispassionate’ in the manner of a Racine or a Sade (as Beckett reads them)? The crucial point here lies in what is meant by an art of ‘dispassionate statement’. For, in Beckett’s case, the art that is practised in works such as Endgame and How It Is is not simply free from passion or comfortably apathetic; rather, it is an art that takes the form of a passion that is constantly at war with itself: in short, a dis-passion. And, in Beckett, this anethical dis-passion certainly does not entail distance rather than intimacy; indeed, it is the very form of intimacy in Beckett, and extends beyond both the works and the act of producing those works to the life of the writer. Such, at least, might be one’s conclusion on reading Beckett’s remark to MacGreevy in a letter of 18 April 1939 that ‘There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me’ (Quoted in Knowlson 295). The anethical art of dis-passionate statement would fi nd its origins, then, not simply in Beckett’s readings of Racine and Sade, but in an Orestean nature that would govern the life as much as the art. According to Beckett, only an ‘idealist’ would dream of either explaining or moralizing that nature.

Works cited Badiou, Alain. 2003. On Beckett. Ed. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. Manchester: Clinamen Press. Beckett, Samuel. 1938. Murphy. London: Routledge. —. 1953. L’Innommable. Paris: Minuit. —. 1959. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder. —. 1964. How It Is. London: John Calder. —. 1965. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder. —. 1980. Company. London: John Calder. —. 1983a. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder. —. 1983b. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder. —. 1992. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier. Dublin: Black Cat. —. 1995. The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill. Burrows, Rachel. 1989. ‘Interview with Rachel Burrows (1982)’. Journal of Beckett Studies 11–12: 6–15. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Driver, Tom. 1979. Interview with Samuel Beckett (1961). In Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 217–223. Freud, Sigmund. 1984. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 269–338. Gibson, Andrew. 2003. ‘Postface—Badiou, Beckett and Contemporary Criticism’. In Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 119–136. Gontarski, S. E. and Uhlmann, Anthony, eds. 2006. Beckett after Beckett. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Juliet, Charles. 1995. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde. Trans. Janey Tucker. Leiden: Academic Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1949. Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge. —. 2006. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. McKinley, Grace. 2006. ‘The Unpublished Lecture Notes of Grace McKinley, 1931’. In James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds, Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, New York: Arcade, 307–313. Mercier, Vivian. 1977. Beckett/Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press. Nadeau, Maurice. 1979. Review of Comment c’est (1961). Trans. Larysa Mykyta and Mark Schumacher. In Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 224–229. Pilling, John. 1997. Beckett before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —, ed. 1999. Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation. —. 2004. A Companion to ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. —. 2006. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Praz, Mario. 1965. The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn. Trans. Angus Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press. Sade, Marquis de. 1990–8. Œuvres, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover. Shenker, Israel. 1979. ‘An Interview with Beckett’ (1956). In Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 146–149. Weller, Shane. 2005. A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. Oxford: Legenda. —. 2006. Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2007. ‘The Politics of Body Language: The Beckett Embrace’. In Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler and Shane Weller, eds, The Flesh in the Text, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007.

Chapter 7

‘So Fluctuant a Death’: Entropy and Survival in The Lost Ones and Long Observation of the Ray David Houston Jones

The human race is already in the grip of the necessity of having to evacuate the solar system in 4.5 billion years. It will have been the transitory vehicle for an extremely improbable process of complexification. The exodus is already on the agenda. The only chance of success lies in the species’ adapting itself to the complexity that challenges it. And if the exodus succeeds, what it will have preserved is not the species itself but the ‘most complete monad’ with which it was pregnant. (Lyotard 65)

The spare, apparently affectless universes of Beckett’s The Lost Ones and Long Observation of the Ray,1 texts preoccupied with the scientific observation of the extinction of the human species, create a number of resonances with Lyotard’s notion of the inhuman. Here, human survival is paradoxically figured as a ‘monad more “complete” than humanity has ever [been] able to be’ (64), undercutting the idea of the human with an informational prosthesis which threatens the very survival it promises to bring about. Drawing upon Leibniz, Lyotard figures the survival of the human species as an informational entity: Lyotard’s monad contains the sum total of human memory in electronic form, surviving the extinction of its physical support. Since the defining feature of human life, for Lyotard, is a never-ending ‘process of complexification (of neg-entropy)’ (64), the preservation of complexity in sophisticated forms of information storage is equivalent to the preservation of the human, or of human thought. In positing human survival in an informational ‘monad’, Lyotard constructs a genealogy linking informatics pioneers like Norbert Wiener to Leibniz. Leibniz’s fascination with automata and machine computation, as well as the specific concerns of the Monadology, prefigures Lyotard’s concerns in The Inhuman, and has particular resonances with the notion of the archive which Lyotard considers there. The specifically

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visual nature of Leibniz’s universe, meanwhile, is an acknowledged influence both on Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener 19–20) and on Beckett.2 At the same time, Lyotard’s inhuman anticipates the encounter with the archive which is announced in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz. Agamben’s account of the seemingly intractable epistemological problems of survivor testimony promises an exploration of a set of rules which ‘define . . . the limits and forms of the sayable’ (Foucault 59, quoted in Agamben 144). The new kind of ‘ethical territory’ (13) which Agamben claims to identify, however, is informed by an informational problematic as well as the Foucauldian approach which he explicitly draws upon. The attempt to locate testimony comes up against two informational entities: the archive and ‘the corpus of what has already been said’ (161). The problem of human survival, then, produces an informational supplement. Testimony, in Agamben, is accompanied by the archive, while for Lyotard the inhuman (which carries the possibility of survival) is bound up with the informational and with (neg)entropy. This aspect of Lyotard’s and of Agamben’s work recontextualizes the figure of unspeakability which dominates Beckett’s later work, and ties that figure to scientific ideas which periodically inform earlier works. Most important here is the idea of entropy: if Lyotard equates negentropy with the human, much of Beckett’s later work is explicitly preoccupied with a world running down to zero. The Lost Ones, in particular, sees a human population reach the verge of extinction, while Long Observation of the Ray represents the culmination of such a process, documenting what survives the disappearance of the human species. Modern conceptions of entropy are rooted in William Thomson’s formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, according to which energy in a closed system is gradually lost, eventually resulting in stabilization at absolute zero. Such heat death must eventually affect the earth as a whole: ‘within a finite period of time . . . the earth must again be unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted’ (Thomson quoted in Hayles 39). This is the very situation dramatized in the two texts which I will consider here. Long Observation of the Ray and The Lost Ones depict the final struggle of life against entropy; at the same time, they function as informational registers or archives which testify to that struggle. The attempt to describe the extinction of life is uniquely preoccupied with its own status as information, leading to a disabling sense of self-scrutiny. In turning to the The Lost Ones, I highlight the epistemological unease which characterizes the relation of survival and the informational. The problems inherent in the observer’s account of the cylinder feed into a narrative which, in Long Observation of the Ray, has still greater pretensions to scientific accuracy and correspondingly greater epistemological flaws. Analysis of these two late texts paves the way for a consideration of Beckett’s earlier notes on entropy, and on Poincaré, Gibbs and Leibniz. The explicit presence of this material in the Whoroscope Notebook

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offers vital clues to the subtle treatment, in the literary texts, of the possibility of human survival in informational form. The narrators of both texts are at pains to describe what they see with mathematical accuracy: the world of The Lost Ones proves to be a ‘flattened cylinder fi fty metres round and sixteen high’ (55), and that of Long Observation ‘a spherical chamber full six feet in diameter’ (Beckett 1976b).3 The use of units of measurement gives an impression of scientific precision, but that impression is subsequently undermined by the equivocations and inconsistencies that punctuate both texts. The Lost Ones describes a hermetically sealed environment, a cylinder world in which a population of ‘bodies’ circulates. The opening description relentlessly suggests the final stages of an inexorable decline: ‘The light. Its dimness. Its yellowness. Its omnipresence as though every separate square centimetre were agleam of the some twelve million of total surface. Its restlessness at long intervals suddenly stilled like panting at the last. Then all go dead still. It is perhaps the end of their abode’ (55). The inexplicable oscillations of temperature and of light are taken as signs of the impending ‘end of all’ (55), the chief preoccupation of the opening and closing passages of the text. The ‘twofold vibration’ of light and temperature (78) dominates throughout, suggesting that the text’s main concern is with the analysis of phenomena rather than with the cylinder’s population as differentiated human individuals. Indeed, the population of searchers tends to lapse, in the face of the cylinder’s inscrutable laws, into a ‘ jumble of mingled flesh’ (78). The narrator’s clipped, scientific register is striking: ‘with regard to the temperature its oscillation is between much wider extremes and at a much lower frequency’ (69), tapping into an ambivalent but far-reaching fascination with scientific metalanguage in Beckett. The narrator sets out a taxonomy of the ‘searchers’, from those who search the ground-level part of the cylinder to those who climb ladders and enter the niches in the cylinder’s walls (26); those who have abandoned the search are subsequently divided into ‘the sedentary’, ‘ex-searchers’ (58) and, finally, ‘the vanquished’ (64). The last category poses problems for the narrator, however, and leads to an equivocal revisitation of the previous description: the thinking being coldly intent on all these data and evidences could scarcely escape at the close of his analysis the mistaken conclusion that instead of speaking of the vanquished with the slight taint of pathos attaching to the term it would be more correct to speak of the blind and leave it at that. (69) The narrator’s description creates both rhetorical and epistemological problems: the categories of searchers are not watertight (the sedentary sometimes resume the search), and the term ‘vanquished’ leads to a procedural stalling in which the narrator explicitly revisits the terms of his analysis. The proposed

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modification of the narrator’s terminology is ultimately rejected, condemned as a ‘mistaken conclusion’, but much of the impact of the passage is precisely in its cultivation of redundancy, of the failure to capture the data on which the description depends. ‘At the close of his analysis’ is fussily interpolated, and we are presented not only with ‘data’, but also ‘evidences’. Every gesture towards scientific accuracy is undercut with a labouring of language: instead of ‘evidence’, ‘evidences’ suggests antiquated scientific terminology, or even the French ‘évidences’, in the sense of self-evident facts. The endless undercutting of the attempt to provide scientific detail is ultimately more than a simple parody of scientific observation: the ambivalent position of the ‘thinking being’ is the key to a persistent and recurrent preoccupation in Beckett with the process that dominates The Lost Ones, entropy. The process of decline spreads insidiously from the human population in the cylinder world to the questionable figure of the narrator, so that the truthstatus of the narrative is called into question. The dead tone of the piece downgrades the searchers as human protagonists until little remains outside of the ‘two vibrations’ (59) and the intervals noted by the narrator between the two extremes. The ‘lost bodies’ of the opening (55) begin to look more and more like bodies as defined in physics, a reading which is endorsed by the more neutral ‘les corps’ in Le Dépeupleur (7). The scenario evokes a closed environment in which these faceless bodies are buffeted around by unseen forces, reading increasingly as a study of Brownian motion: the properties of the bodies allow them to be assigned to a particular category, and determine their trajectory across the cylinder. If The Lost Ones presents a world winding down towards extinction, its scenario and narrative mode demonstrate affinities with the key understanding of entropy in thermodynamics: that of the progressive loss of available energy within a closed system. More specifically, Beckett’s text resonates with a famous thought experiment described by James Clerk Maxwell in 1871 which would indicate a transgression of this second law of thermodynamics. Maxwell’s experiment concerns an imaginary being who is able to prevent heat loss within a closed vessel by sorting bodies moving at different speeds (and therefore bearing different amounts of heat energy) into different locations: If we conceive a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are still as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. . . . Now let us suppose that . . . a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower ones to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. (Maxwell 328)

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According to Maxwell, the demon is able to maintain the temperature differential that is essential to life, and therefore keep entropy at bay. This is the opposite of the universe of The Lost Ones, where the cylinder gradually approaches the ‘last state when every body will be still and every eye vacant’ (Beckett 1999, 58). Most perplexingly in Maxwell’s scenario, the Demon is able to achieve this reversal without expenditure of energy, so that the second law is invalidated, and the fundamental assumptions of thermodynamics must be rethought. The extraordinary (although dubious) claims made for Maxwell’s demon display important parallels with the creeping sense of epistemological crisis in The Lost Ones. Despite the apparently authoritative narrative, the narrator’s own position within the cylinder world is deeply problematic. To give such an account, he would have to inhabit the cylinder and relay the narrative to the reader, in contradiction of the claim that there is no way in or out. Like the closed chamber in Maxwell’s experiment, the imperative of observation stands in direct contradiction of the closedness of the world to which it applies. Moreover, the dimensions of the cylinder are famously inconsistent, with the declared area of 80,000cm2 in the French Le Dépeupleur contradicting the dimensions given elsewhere in square metres, and failing to match the figure of twelve million given in The Lost Ones (Beckett 1970, 7; Beckett 1999, 55). The narrator’s viewpoint, meanwhile, is inconsistently aligned both with that of the searchers and with that of an outside observer: ‘the notion requiring as long as it holds that here all should die but with so gradual and to put it plainly so fluctuant a death as to escape the notice even of a visitor’ (59–60).4 The narrator, moreover, is dehumanized by his own quasi-scientific vocabulary, as ‘the thinking being coldly intent on all these data’. Like Maxwell’s demon in William Thomson’s description, he functions as ‘a creature of imagination having certain perfectly well defined powers of action, purely mechanical in their character’ (Thomson quoted in Leff and Rex, 5). The observer is no more than a device with which information can be conveyed about the cylinder and, like Maxwell’s demon, one of his principal functions is to identify ‘bodies’. Such an identification is of course dependent on the visual apprehension of objects, and leads to a passage on the nature of the light in the cylinder: ‘this light is further unusual in that far from evincing one or more visible or hidden sources it appears to emanate from all sides and to permeate the entire space as though this were uniformly luminous down to its least particle of ambient air’ (69). The concern with locating a light-source signals another parallel with Maxwell’s demon, as one of the principal objections to the scenario is that the demon would need light in order to identify and sort the molecules, and that the power required to provide light would negate the reversal of entropy in the experiment: ‘The Maxwell demon can work indefinitely only if additional light comes from outside the system and

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does not correspond in temperature to the mechanical temperature of the particles themselves’ (Wiener 30). If the light-source constitutes a blind spot in Maxwell’s experiment, it occupies a similar position in Beckett’s closed systems, providing the principal subject-matter of Long Observation of the Ray. Here, the dehumanized observer is further refined into an entirely impersonal act or process of observation, directed towards the ‘ray’ which illuminates a closed space: Long observation of the ray suggests a spherical chamber full six feet in diameter. Hermetic inasmuch as no trace of inlet and / or outlet has appeared. This ray does not vary in intensity. Faint it grows no fainter! Cross section say one inch through the air poor in motes and lighting where it falls an area in accordance. Unvarying length of same three feet from unseen slide or shutter to point of impact. Saltatoriality of erratic transfer from one blank to another and thence similarly to another and so on. Occasional extinction or more likely occultation accompanied by faint sound. (Beckett 1976b) While the observation of the light-source is the central concern, it is claimed that it is only through observing the ray that details of the closed chamber are obtained: there is again a blind spot at the heart of the fictive scenario, or a relocation of its apparent centre of interest. Unlike the periodic variations in light and temperature in The Lost Ones, the ray is constant; the threat of entropy in the plummeting temperatures of the cylinder appears to have been removed. One of the key concerns of The Lost Ones is retained, however: that of the possibility of a way out of the cylinder. While the problem, which can never be resolved, triggers a clash of irreconcilable dogmas in The Lost Ones (59–60), and no searcher finds such an exit in the course of the text, two ways out are evoked in Long Observation of the Ray. One is, as in the other text, a mere hypothesis (‘If of way in and / or out no trace has yet appeared some perhaps may yet to some eye to come if any’ (Beckett 1976b)). At the same time, though, the existence of a door or shutter is asserted with some certainty: ‘Unvarying length of same three feet from unseen slide or shutter to point of impact’ (Beckett 1976b). In such a presentation the shutter exists, for all its invisibility; observation is fundamentally concerned with a trajectory, probably that of the ray, from the shutter to the wall of the chamber. Like Maxwell’s demon, Long Observation depicts a closed chamber containing a shutter through which movement is possible: Maxwell’s demon reverses entropy by allowing fast-moving molecules to pass through the shutter and closing it to slow-moving molecules. The convergence is underlined by Beckett’s concern with microscopic bodies: ‘motes’ are twice referred to in the manuscript, recalling the ‘particles’ of The Lost Ones and the ‘microscopic’ size of Maxwell’s demon itself.5 It is not long, however, before the spectre of entropy appears once more. The ray ‘does not vary in intensity’, and its ‘occasional extinction’ is ‘more

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likely occultation’. The notion of a constant and inexhaustible source is raised in both MS 2909/2 and MS 2909/4: ‘Unvarying intensity meaning that no increase or decrease has been observed though perhaps by some eye to come. Hence finally the notion of an inexhaustible source’ (Beckett 1976b). The parallels with Maxwell’s thought experiment are increasingly compelling: the narrator explores the problematic status of the light-source and explicitly, albeit indecisively, attributes an inexhaustible form of energy to it. The reference to the inexhaustible source is crossed out in MS 2909/4 and replaced by ‘or if not itself inexhaustible inexhaustibly replenished’. This is not merely authorial hesitancy, however. MS 2909/2 explicitly links the light-source to the problem of observation: ‘What finally most strongly strikes the observer of this Ray is its constant intensity ascribed in his weariness to an inexhaustible source’. Again accompanied by numerous deletions, the passage creates considerable doubt as to the reliability of the observation. In an amplified version of the uncertain metalanguage of The Lost Ones (‘if this notion is maintained . . . ’), the precise dimensions of the chamber instantly give rise to disabling equivocation. The image of the chamber is conjured up by ‘the tired mind’ and, still more damning, the analysis of the ray in MS 2909/2 is evident even to ‘the weak mind’. In a redistribution of agency between observer and observed, the calculation of the time it would take to inspect the entire chamber is followed by speculation on the observing function of the ray itself: ‘Methodical inspection of total surface with observed average of ten seconds on each detail would take upwards of six days. Assuming for no good reason that inspection is afoot. For it does not follow as even the weak mind can grasp because its eye inspects the ray that the ray inspects anything whatever’ (1976a). The inspection which we assume the observer is carrying out is speculatively ascribed here to the ray itself; the disparaging references to the observer’s mental faculties might suggest that the narrator and observer are not identical, contrary to the assumption we are likely to have formed from the preceding, apparently authoritative descriptions. The epistemological basis of the narrative is much less secure than at first appears, suggesting a treatment of scientific discourse which is at least partly ironic. The narratorial irony of Long Observation alerts us to connections with a considerably earlier phase in Beckett’s career, and ultimately reveals a sustained engagement with physics. The queering of the position of the observer leads, in MS 2909/2, to ‘what one observer (the late Mr Exshaw) so happily termed its saltatoriality or erratic transfer from one point to another’. In sharp contrast to the rigorously impersonal process of observation in MS 2909/4, the observer is not only personified but given a concrete identity. Far from firming-up the sense of scientific observation, however, Mr Exshaw takes his place alongside other pastiches of scientists and philosophers: Puncher and Wattman in Godot no more carry a guarantee of scientific truth than do the authorities appealed to in Watt, and signal an apparent flippancy like that in ‘Les Deux

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Besoins’: ‘S’il est permis en pareil cas de parler d’un principe effectif, ce n’est pas, Dieu et Poincaré merci, celui qui régit les petitions [sic] de principe de la science et les logoi croisés de la théologie’ (‘if in such a case it is permitted to speak of an effective principle, it is not, thank God and Poincaré, that which governs the petitio principii of science and the Word-games of theology’) (Beckett 1983a, 56; translation mine). The ensuing discussion is rather more than the ‘parallel scorn for science and theology’ which Ruby Cohn identifies, however (Cohn 173): ‘Les Deux Besoins’ is concerned above all with the double bind of artistic creation, subtly echoing the ‘twofold vibration’ of The Lost Ones (Beckett 1999, 78). The ‘expression that there is nothing to express’ (Beckett 1983b, 139) cannot be resolved, we read in ‘Les Deux Besoins’, ‘à moins d’être le démon de Maxwell’ (unless one is Maxwell’s demon) (56). The ironic counterpoint of God and Poincaré in fact disguises an energetic engagement with post-Newtonian physics which goes back at least to the 1930s and to Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook. After some remarks on the number of molecules composing the human body (confirming the preoccupation with the micro-scale seen in Long Observation), the Notebook contains a long section from Poincaré’s La Valeur de la science (The Value of Science). The section which interests Beckett here is chapter 8, ‘The Present Crisis in Physics’. Tellingly, Beckett transcribes a long passage on Carnot’s principle of the dissipation of energy and on Maxwell’s demon (Beckett 1936, 41–2). The passage that Beckett cites here allows new light to be shed on the baffling fluctuations of light and temperature in Long Observation and The Lost Ones, and ultimately on the tense relationship of order and disorder in those texts: The demon of Maxwell: ‘Si le monde tend vers l’uniformité, ce n’est pas parce que les parties ultimes, d’abord dissemblables, tendent à devenir de moins en moins différentes, c’est parce que, se déplaçant au hasard, elles finissent par se mélanger. Pour un oeil qui distinguerait tous les éléments la variété resterait toujours aussi grande; chaque grain de cette poussière conserve son originalité et ne se modèle pas sur ses voisins; mais comme le mélange devient de plus en plus intime, nos sens grossiers n’aperçoivent plus que l’uniformité. Voilà pourquoi, p.e., les températures tendent à se niveler sans qu’il soit possible de revenir en arrière. Qu’une goutte de vin tombe dans un verre d’eau etc . . . on aura beau agiter le vase, le vin et l’eau ne paraîtront plus pouvoir se séparer. Un grain d’orge dans un tas de blé . . . type du phénomène physique irréversible. (Cf. Gibbs: Principles of Statistical Mechanics) Le démon imaginaire de Maxwell, qui peut trier les molécules une à une, saurait bien contraindre le monde à revenir en arrière’. (Poincaré 1902 214– 215; quoted in Beckett 1936, 42)6

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Beckett seizes on Poincaré’s vision of smaller and smaller fields of observation as revealing patterns of ever-greater variety, feeding into the concern with an observation, in Long Observation of the Ray, which can only ever be partial and unsatisfactory. The fallibility of the observer, then, is not mere whimsy, a pretext for mocking scientific description, but entirely consistent with the postNewtonian physics which is such a key point of reference for Beckett. Maxwell’s demon, with its capacity to sort molecules at great speed, is the exact opposite of the ‘weak mind’ of Long Observation, and of the ‘gross senses’ (‘sens grossiers’) which Poincaré attributes to all human observers. Beckett abbreviates Poincaré’s second paragraph, perhaps indicating lack of interest in the examples of irreversible phenomena or, more likely, Beckett’s existing familiarity with them.7 But Poincaré’s example of the grains of barley added to a heap of wheat suggests an additional source of the image of the grains added to a heap of sand in Endgame and The Lost Ones: ‘a great heap of sand sheltered from the wind lessened by three grains every second year and every following increased by two if this notion is maintained’ (Beckett 1999, 66). While the influence of Zeno is well documented, and supported by the allusion to ‘that old Greek’ in Endgame (126), the heap’s gradual dwindling suggests entropy once more, and the image may well be shaped by Poincaré and Gibbs. Poincaré’s example gives Beckett’s image the additional meaning of irreversibility, illustrating the impossibility of extracting the barley from the wheat once it has been added.8 Beckett’s notes subsequently follow Poincaré’s section headings on relativity and on Lavoisier’s principle of the conservation of mass. Beckett paraphrases here, indicating that he is working through a set of ideas rather than simply copying out passages from Poincaré, and the key problem with which he engages is that of microscopic bodies moving at extremely high speeds: ‘Principe de Lavoisier—cesserait d’être vrai pour des corps animés de vitesse [sic] comparables à celle de la lumière (tels les rayons cathodiques et du radium)’ (Lavoisier’s Principle—would cease to be true for bodies animated by velocities comparable to that of light (the cathode rays or those of radium)) (Beckett 1936, 44; Poincaré 1958, 102). The passage helps contextualize the inscrutable worlds of The Lost Ones and Long Observation: Beckett’s reflections on the apparent impossibility of bodies reaching the speed of light and of temperatures falling below absolute zero feed into the fluctuations of light and temperature in those texts. The seemingly random passage from one extreme to another conforms to unspoken regulatory laws but always courts the possibility of escaping them and of constituting ‘une mécanique entièrement nouvelle’ (‘an entirely new mechanics’) (Beckett 1936, 44; Poincaré 104). The interest in cathode rays and radium, meanwhile, surfaces in the explicit concern with light sources in Long Observation and the apparently inexhaustible source of energy which makes the ray’s unremitting activity possible. Shortly after the section on Lavoisier’s principle, Beckett makes further notes on Poincaré’s argument on the conservation of energy, with which the chapter

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closes: ‘Mayer’s principle jeopardized by apparently inexhaustible energie [sic] provision of Radium’ (Beckett 1936, 44). Much of the interest of Poincaré’s text for Beckett comes from the claim to present a new physics, born of the invalidation of previously established laws, and radium, initially seen as an inexhaustible energy source, is a case in point. At the time of writing, Poincaré was able only to point to William Ramsay’s theory that radium decayed in 1250 years: ‘Sir W. Ramsay a cherché à montrer que le radium se transforme, qu’il renferme une provision d’énergie énorme, mais non inépuisable’ (‘Sir W. Ramsay has striven to show that radium is in process of transformation, that it contains a store of energy enormous but not inexhaustible’) (Poincaré 1902, 228; Poincaré 1958, 105). The concluding equivocation over inexhaustible energy in Long Observation finds important echoes here: ‘Whether faintness due to that of inexhaustible source. Or to nursing of some finite blaze’ (Beckett 1976a, 2). There is even something rather Beckettian in the wry humour of Poincaré’s text: ‘le radium s’épuiserait en 1250 ans; c’est bien court, mais vous voyez que nous sommes du moins certains d’être fi xés sur ce point d’ici quelques centaines d’années. En attendant nos doutes subsistent’ (‘radium would wear itself out in 1,250 years; this is quite short, and you see that we are at least certain to have this point settled some hundreds of years from now. While waiting, our doubts remain’) (Poincaré 1902, 228; Poincaré 1958, 105). In The Lost Ones even apparent demonstrations of scientific certainty—‘But this is a disturbance analysis makes short work of’ (70)—insistently produce the mantra ‘if this notion is maintained’ (79), demoting fact to hypothesis. Beckett’s text, like Poincaré’s, closes on a radical uncertainty. The painstaking and yet implosive universes of The Lost Ones and Long Observation of the Ray owe a great deal to the ideas which Beckett derives from Poincaré, in particular that of entropy. They attest, above all, to the impossibility of an accurate representation of reality, and expose the fallible nature of language and mathematics as representational systems. The refrain ‘if this notion is maintained’ underlines this fallibility but also alerts us to a further implication of the self-undermining fictive reality. The scenarios outlined in The Lost Ones and Long Observation, I want to suggest, function precisely as simulations: rather than indicating a fully realized fictional world, they draw attention to the limited and unstable nature of that world, problematizing the reader’s imaginative investment in it and foreclosing the passage of information into the real. Their self-conscious, provisional worlds resonate with the probabilistic universes of information theory, originating in the work of another of the key thinkers of the Whoroscope Notebook, Willard Gibbs. Gibbs’s mechanics introduces a statistical approach because of the impossibility of knowing how individual molecules will behave: while larger objects are relatively predictable, microscopic scale introduces intractable uncertainties. By considering how systems might evolve from a set of initial states, it was possible

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to arrive at what Norbert Wiener later described as ‘all the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions concerning our environment’ (Wiener 15). The interest in Gibbs which Beckett shows in the Whoroscope Notebook grows into an acute preoccupation with ‘possible worlds’ in the later prose works.9 It is continually emphasized in The Lost Ones that the conditions observed represent only one of many possible outcomes: ‘So much roughly speaking for these bodies seen from a certain angle and for this notion and its consequences if it is maintained’ (59). The most explicit acknowledgement of provisionality comes later in the text, however: in comparing the relative slowness of changes in temperature compared to changes in luminosity, the narrator concludes that the disparity is part of the self-regulating mechanism of the cylinder. If the interval were the same in both cases, ‘that would not answer the needs of the cylinder. So all is for the best’ (70). At the very end of the text, though, the emphasis changes: ‘But the persistence of the twofold vibration suggests that in this old abode all is not yet quite for the best’ (78). The echo of Leibniz’s ‘best of all possible worlds’ is ambiguous in function: the cylinder is far from utopian, and the narrator’s account documents the inexorable decline of the population: ‘So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unspeakable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained’ (79). The text’s closing words conflate the final stages of entropic decline with the beginning of life in the cylinder which, it seems, is merely the first step towards extinction. This first state of life in the cylinder is declared to be unknowable (‘unspeakable’), reflecting another of the implications of Gibbs’s theories: the movement of molecules is unpredictable because, due to the inevitable imprecision of measurements, initial states can never be accurately established. Despite the shared emphasis on possible worlds, however, Gibbs and Leibniz are in fact poles apart. Whereas in Gibbs each world is a ‘possible answer’ to a question, in Leibniz, famously, the best of all possible worlds is chosen by God: ‘Now, since in the divine ideas there is an infinity of possible universes of which only one can exist, the choice made by God must have a sufficient reason’ (Leibniz 156). That choice is determined by ‘fitness, that is, in the degree of perfection contained in these worlds’ (156). It is here that the engagement with Leibniz in The Lost Ones comes to the fore: the initially baffling preoccupation with harmony is explained by the pre-eminence of perfection as the criterion for the selection of worlds. The dimensions of the cylinder, ‘fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony’ (Beckett 1999, 55), read now as a conflation of narration and creation, and in positioning himself as the architect of the cylinder-world, the narrator aligns himself with Leibniz’s God. Such an alignment, however, proves unsustainable: the cylinder’s dimensions are not only unharmonious but inconsistent, and description is insistently loaded with the disclaimer ‘if this notion is maintained’ (66). The world which is described

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in the text is recalcitrantly provisional: even once it has been chosen and brought into being it remains just one of an array of possible notions. The simultaneous invocation and revocation of the reference to Leibniz’s God allows conclusions to be drawn regarding the role of entropy, memory and agency in The Lost Ones and Long Observation of the Ray, and to assess those texts’ performances of the archival with reference to Lyotard. For Lyotard, Leibniz’s ‘God is the absolute monad to the extent that he conserves in complete retention the totality of information constituting the world’, and the figure of God as architect in Leibniz’s Monadology is modified in The Inhuman by that of God as archivist: ‘For the absolute memory of God, the future is always already given. We can thus conceive, for the temporal condition, an upper limit determined by a perfect recording or archival capacity. As consummate archivist, God is outside time, and this is one of the grounds of modern Western metaphysics’ (Lyotard 60). By contrast, the narrators of The Lost Ones and Long Observation are singularly incapable of perfect recording and recall, and their insistence on an archival process which they are unable to bring into being recalls the ambiguous coupling of the human and the informational in Lyotard. The frank acknowledgement in Long Observation of the gradual impairment of the observing eye and mind allows us to begin to assess the fate of the human in Beckett, and its putative preservation as information: ‘Before the mind even weaker then than before and knowing it. Weakened by struggle with other adversaries earlier to emerge. The eye strains henceforward for greater weakness however little or less. And so perhaps fails to see what but for this preoccupation it might have seen’ (Beckett 1976a, 2). The temporal ambiguity of the passage recalls the relativity of time in Lyotard’s argument: God is outside time, and actualizes past, present and future in the limitless archive imagined in The Inhuman. The paradoxical ‘before . . . then than before’, however, indicates the failure to preserve information, as ambiguity overtakes sense-making. The ambivalent phrasing of the passage culminates in a straining ‘for greater weakness’ in which ‘for’ is poised between a causal function (the eye strains because of its growing weakness) and the sense that weakness is the object of the whole self-defeating operation (straining to obtain still greater weakness). There is a growing suggestion that the creation of closed systems in the two works is intrinsically linked to the problem of unspeakability, the ‘obligation to express’ which can only be realized in the ‘expression that there is nothing to express’. The two contradictory imperatives, set out in ‘Les Deux Besoins’ alongside the figure of Poincaré and of Maxwell’s demon, are visualized as the cylinder and sphere of The Lost Ones and Long Observation, respectively. While neither text can achieve the perfect, instantaneous archival process imagined by Lyotard, both nevertheless function as archives. The archive operates principally in Beckett as a fantasized prosthesis, a mechanical support which

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will finally make good the perpetual failings of human memory, and plays at the edges of most of Beckett’s works. Songs, jokes and the omnipresent lost ‘classics’ function as techne in Lyotard’s sense, each constituting ‘an artefact allowing its users to stock more information, to improve their competence and optimize their performances’ (62). Beyond these (failed) discursive performances, concrete realizations of the archive are extremely rare: the archival apparatus of Krapp’s Last Tape is the most important, with its boxes, tapes and ledger. Krapp, then, might appear to function as a parody of God as archivist, with his incomplete archive and still more imperfect memory. The play, however, suggests rather more significant parallels both with Leibniz and with the post-human informational monad that I have derived from Lyotard. In his description of Krapp as a ‘wearish old man’ (Beckett 1990, 215), Beckett signposts the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus (via Robert Burton’s description of Democritus Junior as ‘a little wearish old man’ in the Preface to the Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton 2)), and the doctrine of atomism, the theory at the origin of Leibniz’s conception of monads as the building blocks of the universe. At the same time, the bathetic narrative of Krapp’s rejection of love in favour of the ‘magnum opus’ bears within it another narrative, in which his haphazard archive would take on sudden ethical significance. As in Endgame, the play contains implicit references to a post-apocalyptic scenario in which human life subsists only in minimal, debased form: ‘Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited’ (221). Although its evocation is still more muted than that in Endgame, the possibility persists, as Krapp ruminates on the ‘things worth having when all the dust has—when all my dust has settled’ (217), of a threat to life as grave as that in The Lost Ones. His words inevitably recall Clov’s dream of order, ‘each thing in its last place, under the last dust’, making of the archive a monument to a lost species (Beckett 1990, 120). The culmination of Beckett’s use of the archival, however, comes in the dehumanized world of Long Observation of the Ray. If, as Steven Connor has argued, ‘Long Observation of the Ray postulates a process which is purely mechanical and without human agency or object’ (Connor 86), this may be because it documents a preservation of the human like that theorized by Lyotard. Since the key characteristic of sophisticated forms of information storage is that ‘they make the programming and control of memorising, i.e. the synthesis of different times in one time, less dependent on the conditions of life on earth’ (Lyotard 62), such informational entities can ultimately evolve so as to preserve the ‘human’ in a post-apocalyptic future. The inscrutable machinery of Long Observation depicts thought itself (or perhaps, ‘complexity’, in Lyotard’s terms), ‘a recessive space which itself alternates between the darkness of rest and the illumination of thought’ (Connor 88–89), in a process of ‘perfect, infernally iterative reciprocity’ (85). The relation of the archival process which Long Observation represents to survival is an ambiguous

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one: like Lyotard’s monad, its endless reflexive scrutiny may be taken either as a preservation of the human mind or as a coldly informational process with no object other than itself. In information theory, information may in fact stand for entropy rather than the temporary conservation of life through negentropy (see Hayles 45–60). Information, then, may be a properly inhuman process whose own propagation takes place at the expense of human survival, as Lyotard concludes: ‘when the point is to extend the capacities of the monad, it seems reasonable to abandon, or even actively to destroy, those parts of the human race which appear superfluous, useless for that goal’ (76). The chilling note sounded here repositions The Lost Ones and Long Observation as book-ending an unspoken atrocity: if information is understood as the agent behind the agonized disappearance of the species in The Lost Ones, that slow and fluctuant death may be rethought as genocide. Long Observation, in turn, is devoid of human presence because it is a monument to human extinction. If it still makes sense here to speak of a Foucauldian archive in which the speakable is codified and defined, the discursive act itself has undergone a terminal transferral from the human to the informational.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

‘Long Observation of the Ray’ exists in two manuscripts and three typescripts, numbered MS 2909/1–5 in the Beckett International Foundation archive. Reference here is to two substantially different typescripts, MS 2909/2 and MS 2909/4. Beckett describes Leibniz as a ‘great cod, but full of splendid little pictures’ in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy (6th December 1933), quoted in Ackerley and Gontarski, 314. References to this version of the text, MS2909/4, have no page references since the typescript is only one page long. My transcription incorporates Beckett’s amendments. On problems of viewpoint in the cylinder, see Murphy 1990; on measurement, see Gontarski 1995 and Brater 1983. Indeed, analysis at a microscopic level is central to Maxwell’s claims: it is at this level, he claims, that the second law is questioned: the ‘second law of thermodynamics [. . .] is undoubtedly true as long as we can deal with bodies only in mass, and have no power of perceiving the separate molecules of which they are made up’ (Maxwell quoted in Leff and Rex, 4). ‘If the world tends toward uniformity, this is not because its ultimate parts, at first unlike, tend to become less and less different; it is because, shifting at random, they end by blending. For an eye which should distinguish all the elements, the variety would remain always as great; each grain of this dust preserves its originality and does not model itself on its neighbours; but as the blend becomes more and more intimate, our gross senses perceive only the uniformity. This is why, for example, temperatures tend to a level, without the possibility of going backwards.

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A drop of wine falls into a glass of water, etc. . . . One may shake it afterwards, the wine and the water do not seem capable of again separating. A grain of barley in a heap of wheat . . . the type of the irreversible physical phenomenon (Cf. Gibbs: Principles of Statistical Mechanics). The imaginary demon of Maxwell, who is able to sort the molecules one by one, could well constrain the world to return backward’ (Poincaré 1958, 96–97). In full, the paragraph runs as follows: ‘Qu’une goutte de vin tombe dans un verre d’eau; quelle que soit la loi du mouvement interne du liquide, nous le verrons bientôt se colorer d’une teinte rosée uniforme et à partir de ce moment on aura beau agiter le vase, le vin et l’eau ne paraîtront plus pouvoir se séparer. Ainsi voici quel serait le type du phénomène physique irréversible: cacher un grain d’orge dans un tas de blé, c’est facile; l’y retrouver ensuite et l’en faire sortir, c’est pratiquement impossible. Tout cela, Maxwell et Boltzmann l’ont expliqué, mais celui qui l’a vu le plus nettement, dans un livre trop peu lu parce qu’il est un peu difficile à lire, c’est Gibbs, dans ses Principes de Mécanique statistique’ (A drop of wine falls into a glass of water; whatever may be the law of the internal motion of the liquid, we shall soon see it coloured of a uniform rosy tint, and however much from this moment one may shake it afterwards, the wine and the water do not seem capable of again separating. Here we have the type of the irreversible physical phenomenon: to hide a grain of barley in a heap of wheat, this is easy; afterwards to find it again and get it out, this is practically impossible. All this Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained; but the one who has seen it most clearly, in a book too little read because it is a little difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his ‘Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics’) (Poincaré 1902, 215; Poincaré 1958, 97). Beckett notes Gibbs’s English title rather than transcribing Poincaré’s reference to the translation, Principes de Mécanique statistique, suggesting that he may already have been familiar with the work. In addition to the reference to Gibbs in the Whoroscope Notebook (42), Beckett takes extensive notes from Poincaré on the movement of molecules and electrons (42–44).

Works cited Ackerley, C.J. and Gontarski, S.E., eds. 2004. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to his Works, Life and Thought. New York: Grove Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Beckett, Samuel. 1936. ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook. Beckett International Foundation, RUL MS 3000. —. 1970. Le Dépeupleur. Paris: Minuit. —. 1976a. Long Observation of the Ray. Beckett International Foundation, RUL MS 2909/2. —. 1976b. Long Observation of the Ray. Beckett International Foundation, RUL MS 2909/4.

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—. 1983a. ‘Les Deux Besoins’. In Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder, 55–57. —. 1983b. Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. In Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder, 138–145. —. 1990. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1999. The Lost Ones. In Six Residua, London: Calder, 53–79. Brater, Enoch, ‘Mis-Takes, Mathematical and Otherwise, in “The Lost Ones” ’, Modern Fiction Studies, 29:1 (1983): 93–109. Burton, Robert. 1989. The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1. Ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair (6 vols). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohn, Rudy, ‘Notes’. In Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Rudy Cohn, London: John Calder, 167–178. Connor, Steven. 1992. ‘Between Theatre and Theory: Long Observation of the Ray’. In John Pilling and Mary Bryden, eds., The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 79–98. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gibbs, J. Willard. 1902. Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, Developed with Especial Reference to the Rational Foundation of Thermodynamics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Gontarski, S. E. 1995. ‘Refiguring, Revising and Reprinting The Lost Ones’. Journal of Beckett Studies 4.2: 99–101. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Leff, Harvey S. and Rex, Andrew F., eds. 1990. Maxwell’s Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing. Bristol, Hilger. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. 1977. Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. Trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity. Maxwell, James Clerk. 1871. Theory of Heat. London and New York: Longmans & Green. Murphy, J. 1990. Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Poincaré, Henri. 1902. La Valeur de la science. Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé. —. 1958. The Value of Science. Trans. George Bruce Halstead. New York: Dover. Thomson, William. 1874. ‘The Kinetic Theory of the Dissipation of Energy’. Nature 9: 441–444. Wiener, Norbert. 1968. The Human Use of Human Beings. London: Sphere.

Chapter 8

Beckett and the World1 Steven Connor

Short of the world The last words of More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett’s first volume of fiction to be published, conclude the diminuendo constituted by the gardener’s reflections on the lifespan of roses with a dismissive shrug: ‘So it goes in the world’ (Beckett 1970, 204). The world, or its word, makes a fleeting, but piercing appearance in Worstward Ho, Beckett’s last substantial piece of published prose, as the narrative is proposing to itself a series of accelerating abbreviations: ‘From now one for the kneeling one. As from now two for the twain. . . . As from now three for the head’ in order ‘For to gain time. Time to lose. Gain time to lose. As the soul once. The world once’ (Beckett 1983b, 20). The allusion is dual; to Dryden’s All For Love, or the World Well Lost (1677) and Mark 8.36: ‘what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (King James Version; see also Matthew 16.26). In his semi-summons of this phrase into his text, Beckett equalizes its antithesis. Now it is not a matter of gaining, or preserving one’s soul (‘that jakes’ according to Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett 1982, 58)) in preference to the world, but rather of garnering both in order that both may be ‘well lost’. Where the ‘so it goes’ of More Pricks Than Kicks is sardonically offhand, ‘the world once’ has a gentler, more delicately decayed melancholy. It seems there was a world once, must have been perhaps, if it is now to be counted lost. Human beings have spent millennia trying to live in the world, or trying to combat their willingness to eschew living in the world. Nearly every religion has tried to instil in its followers the precept that ‘the world is too much with us’, or we with the world. Quakers in particular developed the habit of referring to ‘the world’ as that which they have left behind or set themselves apart from: George Fox writes A Word to the People of the World (1660) and Mary Anderdon wrote from Exeter prison a pamphlet entitled A Word to the World (1662), a title that was frequently used by Quakers, Baptists and other religious sects. Beckett’s work exhibits something of this constitutive maladjustment to the world, a maladjustment out of which a kind of world may itself be made.

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If the world presents difficulties, then so does ‘the world’, the concept or idea of the world. One might easily say of the idea of the world what St Augustine said of time, namely that we understand it perfectly well as long as nobody asks us what it means (Confessions 11.14). Beckett’s work is concerned not only with the understanding of the world, but also with the understanding of what might be called the world question. What makes a world? How can one live in the world? Where else could one live but in a world? One of the few philosophers to have given sustained attention to the idea of world is Martin Heidegger. Chapter I.3 of Being and Time is devoted to a discussion of ‘the worldhood of the world’. This consists primarily for Heidegger in the assignedness of the world, which is always a world in-order-to or forthe-sake-of (um etwas zu tun), because ‘ “for-the-sake-of” always pertains to the Being of Dasein, for which, in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue’ (Heidegger 1985, 116–117). Dasein is always a ‘being-in-the-world’ and never merely being as such, because it is the essential function or vocation of Dasein to make sense of the world, to disclose it as world. When he returned to the question of worldhood in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, first given as a lecture course in 1929–30 at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger sought to make this argument clearer by establishing a distinction between those beings which merely consist of their world, and those beings which are able to establish a relation to their world, and thereby bring it into being as a world. Heidegger distinguishes between the animal—his principal example is a lizard on a stone—who has an immediate or instinctive relation to the world, or rather to its world—and man who is open to the world ‘as such’. He offers three theses that distinguish between stones animals and men, in terms of their relation to the world: ‘[1.] the stone (material object) is worldless [weltlos]; [2.] the animal is poor in world [weltarm]; [3.] man is worldforming [weltbildend]’ (Heidegger 1995, 177). Animals, he writes are absorbed, or captivated by their worlds, and thus unable to have a relation to them: We shall describe the specific way in which the animal remains within itself . . . the way in which the animal is absorbed in itself, and which makes possible behaviour of any and every kind, as captivation. The animal can only behave insofar as it is essentially captivated. . . . Captivation is the condition of possibility for the fact that, in accordance with its essence, the animal behaves within an environment but never within a world. (Heidegger 1995, 238–239) The animal is not merely inert or insentient, like the stone: it has a kind of openness to what stimulates its action, but ‘this possession of being-open is a not-having, and indeed a not-having of world—if the manifestness of beings as such does indeed belong to world’ (Heidegger 1995, 270). Heidegger derives much support for his thinking about the nature of the animal’s world from the work of the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who

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developed the notion that each animal exists not within the world as such, but rather in its own Umwelt, consisting only of the particular items of the world which have importance or significance for it. The most famous example is of Ixodes ricinus, or the European tick, which perches at the tip of a blade of grass waiting for a passing mammal to bump into it and dislodge it. Eyeless as it is, the world of the tick has only three components of significance: the odour of butyric acid which is contained in the sweat of all mammals; the skin characteristics of mammals (usually hairy and quite densely supplied with accessible blood vessels) and the temperature (typically 37°) of the blood of mammals. The rest of the world’s complexity leaves it utterly unimpressed, so much so, in fact that, deprived of any of these prompts to action, a tick may remain in a state of suspended animation for many years. The European tick, as described so wonderfully by Uexküll (Uexküll and Kriszat 1992, 320–326), has travelled extremely widely in the hand-luggage of European philosophers, appearing as it does in the work of Heidegger (1995), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Serres (1982) and, most recently, Agamben (2004). Deleuze and Guattari find in the starveling ethology of the tick, bounded as it is by ‘the optimal limit of the feast after which it dies, and the pessimal limit of the fast as it waits’, an elementary kind of ethics, founded not so much on the nature of the organism in question—‘generic and specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout’, but on ‘longitude and its relations, . . . latitude and its degrees. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 256–257). Heidegger helped himself to Uexküll’s argument that the world of an animal consists of those things which captivate its action and attention. The term Umwelt usefully chimes with the two aspects which Heidegger had argued in chapter 3 of Being and Time constitute the ‘worldhood of the world’: first of all, the for-ness, or assignedness (the um-zu) of the world, and second, the fact that the ready-to-hand world is always constituted ‘regionally’, and ‘the regional orientation of the multiplicity of places belonging to the ready-to-hand goes to make up the aroundness—the “round-about-us” [das Um-uns-herum]—of those entities which we encounter as closest environmentally’ (Heidegger 1985, 136). It is tempting to associate Heidegger’s threefold distinction—man, animal and stone—with Malone’s curriculum of the four, later three, stories he proposes to tell: ‘I shall begin, that they may plague me no more, with the man and the woman. That will be the first story, there is not matter there for two. There will therefore be only three stories after all, that one, the one about the animal, then the one about the thing, a stone probably’ (Beckett 1973, 182). It very possible that Beckett knew enough of Heidegger’s modes of locution to have a swipe at him, in having Molloy claim that the ‘meaning of being’ was beyond him (Beckett 1973, 39), especially as one of Beckett’s friends at the Ecole Normale Supérieure was Jean Beaufret, whom Beckett later recalled as

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‘the Heidegger expert’ (Knowlson 1996, 96). But, as Heidegger’s lectures were not published until 1983, it is not safe to assume any direct allusion. However, there is another intriguing resonance between Heidegger and Beckett, in the idea of ‘poverty in world’. In Beckett’s Three Dialogues With Georges Duthuit, B. says ‘There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without those esteemed commodities. The one is a predicament, the other not’ (Beckett 1983a, 143).

Little world In his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, Beckett tries everything he can to assert a retreat from what Murphy calls the ‘big world’ into the ‘little world’, the fine and private place of the head. It would be easy to see this movement repeated through the ever tighter constraints of the cylinder pieces, through to the oneiric spaces of Nacht und Träume, Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. These acts of miniature mundation are anticipated towards the end of The Unnamable: make a place, a little world, it will be round, this time, it’s not certain, low of ceiling, thick of wall, why low, why thick, I don’t know, it isn’t certain, it remains to be seen, all remains to be seen, a little world, try to find out what it’s like, try and guess, put someone in it, seek someone in it, and what he’s like, and how he manages, it won’t be I, no matter, perhaps it will, perhaps it will be my world, possible coincidence (Beckett 1973, 409) This strain in Beckett accords with an espousal of a more conventional aesthetic aim of making autonomous worlds within worlds, or worlds against the world— for example where he praises Proust for the quality of his language which, he says, ‘makes no attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is the concretion of the other, the revelation of a world’ (Beckett 1987, 88). The punchline of the ‘Monde et le Pantalon’ joke given to Nell in Endgame expresses neatly Beckett’s preference for the well-wrought world of the work of art over the messiness of the actual world: ‘ “But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look—[disdainful gesture, disgustedly]—at the world—[pause]—and look [loving gesture, proudly]—at my TROUSERS!” ’ (Beckett 1986, 103). The defiant preference for being without the world over being short of world expressed in the Three Dialogues might also seem to accord with this opposition both to the big world and the big word ‘world’. But I would like to try to show in what follows that the condition of being weltarm, or short of world, is what constitutes the particular kind of worldliness of Beckett’s work, which is a work, not so much of trying to escape from the world as of trying to find a way to have your being, or, better still, to have had your being, in it. My surmise is that Beckett alternates between the two kinds of world: the world as such, which is almost always notional and inaccessible,

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and the particular world within which the finitude or being-there of a particular being or state of being is constituted. Beckett has a strong sense of what Heidegger might call ‘worlding’, the creation of worlds. But his characters and narrators live, not within ‘the world’ or worlds as such, but within Umwelts that they constitute from themselves, or that are constituted from themselves, not voluntarily, but unavoidably. As he wrote in Proust: ‘Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals. . . . The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day’ (Beckett 1987, 18). In Beckett’s narratives from the 1940s onwards, the world does not so much recede as become intermittent, fluctuating, spasmodic, liable both to seeming extinguishings and sudden insurgences. ‘Just at the moment when the world is assembled at last, and it begins to dawn on me how I can leave it, all fades and disappears’, we hear in The Unnamable (Beckett 1973, 336–337). Or in ‘The Calmative’: ‘Little by little I got myself out and started walking with short steps among the trees, oh look, trees!’ (Beckett 1984, 36). ‘From an Abandoned Work’ is particularly full of these intemperate flarings of world, in the vision of the narrator’s mother, framed in her window, the vision of the white horse crossing his path, the pursuit by stoats. The paradox of Beckett’s writing is that, while he continues to try, or feint to try, to detach his characters from ‘the world’, or to limn various forms of ‘little world’ against the ‘big world’ of the polis, a copular form of being-there is always necessary for him. This ‘there’ is coeval with existence, in that it is what existence starts out from, in both the temporal and spatial sense. In Worstward Ho, the positing of ‘a body’, even one gratefully disencumbered with mind, instantly requires ‘A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in’ (Beckett 1983b, 7). The irreducible condition of existence in Beckett’s writing is that one must always have what being one has ‘in such a place, and in such a world’, as he says of the characters in Endgame (Harmon 1998, 24). It is in The Unnamable and even more tautly and paradoxically in Texts for Nothing that this production of the sense of world takes place. Texts for Nothing may be seen as a long, discontinuous meditation on the possible meanings of the words ‘here’ and ‘there’. The here and the there are part of the fabric of a world that must always already be there; and yet this world also seems dubiously episodic. The Texts for Nothing are driven by the desire to find a way ‘to have being and habitat’ (Beckett 1984, 98), though the point of succeeding in being ‘there’ in the world, is to be able to cease being there. But this assurance of place and time is not merely or continuously given, and the various speakers find themselves assailed by perplexities about the nature of their ‘here’ and ‘now’: I must be getting mixed, confusing here and there, now and then, just as I confused them then, the here of then, the then of here, with other spaces,

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other times, dimly discerned, but not more dimly than now, now that I’m here, if I’m here, and no longer there. (102) The speaker in Text V testifies ‘I don’t know where I am’ (85). In Text VI, the speaker longs for location: ‘I’d join them with a will if it could be here and now, how is it nothing is ever here and now? It’s varied, my life is varied. I’ll never get anywhere. I know, there is no one here, neither me nor anyone else’ (89). Sometimes the narration seems to give up on the project of worldmaking: ‘Let there be no more talk of any creature, nor of a world to leave, nor of a world to reach, in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures’ (100–101). And yet, for all the anxiety and fatigue involved in dreaming up both being and a world to be in, it is not possible to abolish them altogether, since ‘being’ is always in fact compound or embedded, a hyphenated ‘being-here’, or a ‘beingthere’. The resolution articulated at the end of Text X—‘I’ll have gone on giving up, having had nothing, not being there’ (106)—is contradicted by the recognition that there is ‘[n]o point under such circumstances in saying I am somewhere else, someone else, such as I am I have all I need to hand, for to do what, I don’t know, all I have to do’ (84). ‘I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me’ (81). ‘What elsewhere can there be to this infinite here? . . . Yes, I’m here for ever’ (90). This is to say, with Heidegger’s help, and as others similarly assisted have said before me, that Sein, for Beckett, is always Da-sein. But we should also recognize that this kind of being-there does not add up to the project of worlding that Heidegger sees as immanent to Dasein. The two aspects of Uexküll’s Umwelt that recommended themselves to Heidegger are disjoined: one is always within a world, that is ‘um sich herum’, but the ‘um-zu’ of that world is never guaranteed. The finitude of being in the world, being in some particular circumstance, some here or other, is perfectly compatible with indefiniteness: if one is out of place, it is always in some particular configuration. Beckett’s later works thematize this condition as that of the ghost, the figure who is both there and, as Amy claims in Footfalls, ‘not there’ (Beckett 1986, 43). But it should be remembered that the ghost has a curious relation to finitude, which means it is never entirely unearthly or out of this world. For ghosts, unlike gods and angels and sometimes demons, who have the gift of ubiquity, are traditionally tied to places, condemned for a certain time to walk the earth.

Earth ‘What counts’, we hear in Text IV, ‘is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth’ (84). As I just suggested, this is perhaps because to be ‘on earth, come into the world’ means that one is ‘assured of getting out’

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(Beckett 1984, 98). Though ‘world’ and ‘earth’, ‘monde’ and ‘terre’, often consort together and can readily be substituted for each other, Beckett does seem to maintain a distinction between them. Again, I want to make out a clarifying difference from Heidegger, who considers the relation between world and earth in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Heidegger sees in the work of art a strife between world and earth. He means by world and earth an openness and a closure, respectively. The world is always an opening or revealing, a showing of the nature of something, or bringing of it to its being. The earth, simply because it is that which is experienced, is concealing and self-concealing. ‘The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth’ (Heidegger 1975, 46). One might say that the world is simply the disclosing of the closure of earth. The world produces the earth as earth, for ‘To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding’ (Heidegger 1975, 47). The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there. The opposition of world and earth is a striving. (Heidegger 1975, 49) Included among the many things Heidegger seems to want to mean by this striving is the contrariety of material and form. The earth, as ‘the massiveness and heaviness of stone, . . . the firmness and pliancy of wood, . . . the hardness and luster of metal, . . . the lighting and darkening of color, . . . the clang of tone’ (Heidegger 1975, 46), though subtending and supporting everything in the work of art, does not offer itself as an intelligible whole until it is lifted up into discernibility by that work. However, Heidegger strives to prevent this strife being understood in these simple terms, telling us, for example, that The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. . . . In essential striving . . . the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their natures. . . . In the struggle, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. . . . The earth cannot dispense with the Open of the world if it itself is to appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion. The world, again, cannot soar out of the earth’s sight if, as the governing breadth and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on a resolute foundation. (Heidegger 1975, 49) In a certain sense, Beckett’s practice might seem to shadow Heidegger’s claims. When Beckett’s narrators evoke the earth, it is to name something proximate, familiar, impending, but indistinct. The earth is often associated with the desire for merger or coalescence of identity. Molloy thinks of his ditch, ‘[h]ow joyfully

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I would vanish there, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains’ (Beckett 1973, 27–28). The narrator of ‘From an Abandoned Work’ tells us that often now my murmur falters and dies and 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. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth. (Beckett 1984, 133–134) Beckett’s characters often seem literally to have a global or geomorphic awareness of the earth, as a sphere or ‘earthball’. Molloy fixes the beginning of his journey to the middle of June through reflections on the hemisphere (Beckett 1973, 17), while the narrator of ‘Enough’ evokes an eternal springlike mildness—‘As if the earth had come to rest in spring. I am thinking of our hemisphere’ (Beckett 1984, 143). The planetaria inhabited or projected by the speaker in The Unnamable and the listener in Company attest to this kind of astronomical grasp of global spaces. If these speakers move in blind orbits, they are geostationary ones. Beckett’s earth is perhaps also to be seen as closed or secluded in Heidegger’s sense, precisely in the way it withholds or withdraws itself from being constituted as ‘world’, ‘a world’ or ‘the world’. It is in this sense that all Beckett’s characters are local, parochial, regional. It is never the world as such, but always one or other version of ‘my part of the world’ (a phrase used twice by Molloy (Beckett 1973, 17, 51)) that is in question. But it is also true that the earth (and its correlative, the sky, which might be said to be a modality of earth) is open in another sense, namely that it is uncompleted, unordered and unbordered. So we have this odd sequence following Molloy’s observation (itself repeatedly made through Beckett’s work) of the lightening of the sky just before nightfall: This phenomenon, if I remember rightly, was characteristic of my region. Things are perhaps different today. Though I fail to see, never having left my region, what right I have to speak of its characteristics. No, I never escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. But I felt they were far away. But this feeling was based on nothing serious, it was a simple feeling. For if my region had ended no further than my feet could carry me, surely I would have felt it changing slowly. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another. And I never noticed anything of the kind, but however far I went, and in no matter what direction, it was always the same sky, always the same earth, precisely, day after day and night after night. (Beckett 1973, 65) It is precisely because Molloy cannot be sure that he has ever escaped his ‘region’ that it becomes so vast, and potentially limitless: ‘I preferred to abide

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by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall. And wheresoever you wander, within its distant limits, things will always be the same, precisely’ (Beckett 1973, 65–66). So Beckett’s earth is both ineluctable and indefinable, extending beyond memory and experience, but also refusing to be levered or rounded out into anything like the condition of ‘a world’. Where Heidegger sees the work of art as the struggle of world to lift earth up into openness, Beckett’s work, whether of art or not, strives to keep open the discretion of earth, or earth’s withholding of itself from world.

Worlding Heidegger insists that the world ‘is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there’ (Heidegger 1975, 44). And yet it is also more than just the abstract idea of the world in general. Rather, the world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. (Heidegger 1975, 44) When we say ‘globalization’, we mean that world is more and more, and perhaps more and more pinchingly, becoming one world. But perhaps we also name this strange sense that ‘the world’ is becoming more palpable than the ‘actual’ places and regions in which we may have our being. Heidegger’s account of the worlding of the world (or, rather, more reflexively, the world ‘worlding’), as a disclosing of the ‘as-such’ of the world, has recently been resumed and amplified in Michel Serres’s account of what he calls ‘hominescence’, which consists of much more than the increased integration between different areas of the human world. Where animals of different species inhabit different and non-communicating Umwelts, human beings are building a technological masterworld: If the ensemble of signals of all kinds is accessible as signs by the totality of living beings, our various devices tend to the reconstruction of this ensemble, like the sum of the habitats—our own, or each individual of our own— which each species carves out from its environment. Are we thus tending, at

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least asymptotically, towards a global reality, an integral of these spaces and times, the niches and durations of each species and by unifying them, to the beginning of integration? (Serres 2001, 145–146; my translation) Serres proposes that we are some way advanced into the creation of what he calls a ‘Biosom’, which composes ‘the complex, intersecting global space-time of the ensemble of all living creatures of this world’ (Serres 2001, 147; my translation). This involves much more than the joining together of places or the shrinking of gaps and distances. It involves the synchronization of world time too. As Heidegger’s rapt evocations of destiny suggest, the worlding or worlded world is temporal as well as spatial. The word ‘world’ in fact derives from a Germanic root wer = man, and ald = age, the primary signification therefore being ‘the age of man’. World signifies, therefore, not a place, or environment, but a span of existence (the time of your life). It is doubtless for this reason that the OED gives as the primary meaning of the word ‘world’ usages that emphasize this temporal sense, as man’s present life, in this world, as opposed to the world to come. That the idea of ‘the world’ has always hitherto had some sense of the persistence of a form of being in time, and therefore necessarily of limited duration, is suggested by the phrase ‘world without end’. The world must be something that can come to an end, as in Malone’s rapt lunar vision of the ‘Dead world, waterless, airless’ (Beckett 1973, 201), or the vision entertained by Molloy that seems to anticipate it: a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. . . . [H]ere nothing stirs, has ever stirred, will ever stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen. Yes, a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began, is it clear enough? (Beckett 1973, 40) We can, I think, posit a perverse conversation between Beckett’s insistence on considering the ends of man and man’s contemplation of the fact that ‘the world’ is definitively, though certainly not irreversibly, entering its condition as the ‘the age of man’.

Something out of Beckett Some of the most dubious obiter dicta ascribed to Beckett appeared in an obituary in the Boston Globe: ‘ “There are no landmarks in my work,” Mr. Beckett once said. “We are all adrift. We must invent a world in which to survive, but even this invented world is pervaded by fear and guilt. Our existence is hopeless” ’ (quoted in Campbell 1989, 67). These words have the authentically naff ring of the manufactured quotation, foisted on and extracted from

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the ‘corpse-obliging’ Beckett. But the idea of a distinctively ‘Beckett world’ is of course very strong. Reporting on the 1992 Beckett Festival in The Hague, the Samuel Beckett Stichtung observed that ‘From 1 to 16 April 1992 the city of The Hague was immersed in the world created by Samuel Beckett’ (‘Samuel Beckett Festival and Symposium’). Other reports during the centenary year of 2006 reflected on the conjunctions and interferences between ‘Beckett’s world’ and ‘the world’. CBS News offered a slightly more intriguing spin on this by remarking that ‘The world may have caught up with Beckett’ (‘Beckett Embraced By Native Land’). The rivalry between ‘the world’ and ‘Beckett’s world’ becomes almost sinister in Michael Hall’s remark that ‘In his centenary year, the spectre of Beckett is more visible than ever, with events taking place around the world to celebrate his work’ (Hall 2006). Beckett seems to acknowledge his own relation to the ‘Beckett world’ in the reference, in an early draft of That Time, to someone who looks ‘like something out of Beckett’. Curiously enough, the consolidation of the ‘Beckett world’, with its familiar landmarks, languages and local customs, has assisted rather than impeded the absorption of Beckett into the ‘big world’. Beckett not only plays, but presumably also pays in capitals across the world, to audiences who have as strong a pre-understanding of what is to be expected from ‘the world of Beckett’ as readers of Dickens do of ‘the world of Dickens’ or Terry Pratchett fans do of Discworld. It would be foolish to pretend that the condition of becoming a ‘world author’ is unique to Beckett, or to search for the particular forms of universality that might account for the steadily increasing reach of his work. The amplification and ramification of his work and the idea of his work, the ‘world’ of his work, are just what we should expect. (Though let us not overstate this, either: ‘Beckett’ has nowhere near the global reach or tradeability of an average gone-tomorrow model or film-star. If Beckett is going global, then it is as a kind of ‘global niche’, a paradox that gets us to the heart of what we might mean by globalism today.) Nor, by contrast, do I seek to encourage the work of enforced repatriation that is being undertaken by those who seek to assert the essential regionality of Beckett’s work—its ‘Irishness’, its ‘Protestantism’ and so on. I think that, following the critical work being undertaken on the work of Joyce, by writers such as Emer Nolan and Andrew Gibson (however different they may be in their approaches), which seeks to weaken the consensus about Joyce’s cosmopolitan modernism made by writers such as Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner and bring Joyce back home, we will see similar efforts to distort Beckett back into ethnic intelligibility. Indeed the global and the local, the ahistorical and the atavistic, act in perfect consort here. Both Joyce and Beckett have become the PR darlings of the Celtic Tiger, with its assertions of European Ireland, cosmopolitan Ireland—‘World Ireland’. But the worlding of the world, the production of the world as such, finds a resistance and a complication in the work of Beckett. If Beckett’s work

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needs to be seen as a kind of unworlding, a dyspeptic block to the project of Heideggerean worlding, then it may perhaps also be seen as a reflection of and on the nature of this worlding. Globalism means many things—among them the imposition on more and more of the world of risibly particularized and parochial notions of what the world should be. But, in political and philosophical terms, it might also be thought to name an incipient, but growing work of reflection on the same kind of questions that animate Beckett’s peculiarly worldly work—the work he conducts on ‘world’. Questions like: What is a world? Can one live in such a thing? Or out of it? What worlds have there been, and what might there be? Can a world be made? Can one help making worlds? Of course, Beckett’s work gives us no obvious guidance on such matters—why on earth or anywhere else should we expect such a thing?—but he does instance for us a singular resolve to decline any grandiose worlding of the world, while also denying us and itself the consolation of ever being able to live out of this world.

Note 1

A lecture given at the Global Beckett conference, Odense, 26 October 2006.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderdon, Mary. 1662. A Word to the World. London: no publisher. ‘Beckett Embraced By Native Land’. 2006. CBS News, 13 April . http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/2006/04/13/entertainment/main1497010_page2.shtml [Accessed 15 August 2007]. Beckett, Samuel. 1970. More Pricks than Kicks. London: Calder and Boyars. —. 1973. Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: Calder and Boyars. —. 1982. Ill Seen Ill Said. London: John Calder. —. 1983a. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder. —. 1983b. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder. —. 1984. Collected Shorter Prose 1945–1980. London: John Calder. —. 1986. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1987. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder. Campbell, Charles. 1989. ‘Samuel Beckett: Playwright, Winner of Nobel Prize’. Boston Globe, 27 December 1989, 67. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fox, George. 1660. A Word to the People of the World: Who Hates the Light, to be Witnessed by the Light in Them All. London: Thomas Simmons.

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Hall, Michael. 2006. ‘More Kicks Than You Might Think’. Guardian, 13 April . http:// arts.guardian.co.uk/beckett/story/0,,1751741,00.html [Accessed 15 August 2007]. Harmon, Maurice, ed. 1998. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge Mass and London: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1975. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. —. 1985. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. ‘Samuel Beckett Festival and Symposium, April 1992, The Hague, The Netherlands’. http://www.samuelbeckett.nl/festival.htm [Accessed 15 August 2007]. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 2001. Hominescence. Paris: Le Pommier. Uexküll, Jakob von and Kriszat, Georg. 1992. ‘A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds’. Trans. Claire M. Schiller. Semiotica 8, 319–391.

Chapter 9

From Joyce to Beckett: From National to Global Peter Boxall

Steven Connor, in his contribution to this volume, writes that the ‘repatriation’ of Joyce’s writing, the rediscovery of his commitment to nation, will bring about a similar critical move in Beckett studies. Connor predicts that ‘following the critical work being undertaken on the work of Joyce, by writers such as Emer Nolan and Andrew Gibson . . . which seeks to weaken the consensus about Joyce’s cosmopolitan modernism made by writers such as Ellmann and Kenner and bring Joyce back home, we will see similar efforts to distort Beckett back into ethnic intelligibility’. Connor’s prophecy of an Irish Beckett is no doubt accurate, and indeed there is already a strand of Beckett studies that is devoted to reappraising Beckett’s Irishness, and to ‘weakening the consensus’ about his own rejection of national politics.1 But while this manoeuvre, this repatriation of European writers such as Joyce and Beckett, might look like a new commitment to the materiality of the local, Connor argues that this trend in Joyce and Beckett studies sits strangely happily with the production of an unanchored global perspective. The critical urge to root out their geographical specificity does not limit Joyce’s and Beckett’s global reach, Connor argues, because ‘the global and the local, the ahistorical and the atavistic, act in perfect consort here’. The tendency to confuse the global and the local that is a marked characteristic of globalization itself—the tendency that leads to ‘the imposition on more and more of the world of risibly particularized and parochial notions of what the world should be’—allows the work of localization to become effortlessly subsumed into the global, as in the phrase ‘world Ireland’, or ‘world Beckett’. In reading the tensions between the national and the global in Joyce and Beckett, this chapter sets out to examine more closely the ways in which the balance between the cosmopolitan and the parochial in Joyce is refigured in Beckett’s writing, in the context of the post-war decline in the power of national sovereignty. If for contemporary critics the friction between the local and the global has become more difficult to detect, in a culture which is saturated by the logic of the ubiquitous advertising campaign which claims that HSBC can,

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without contradiction, be thought of as the ‘world’s local bank’, I will argue that for Joyce the contradiction between the national and the international is one that remains impossible to resolve. His work, I suggest, is shaped by a distinction between Ireland and Europe, between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, that proves stubbornly resistant to sublation or conflation. Beckett’s writing, I suggest, is also marked by this contradiction. Despite the fact that the critical industry has accepted with some complacency the idea that Beckett’s work is set in ‘the void’, in a fictional place that is at once everywhere and nowhere, Beckett’s writing is beset, from the early prose all the way through to the transparent later pieces, with a certain anxiety about how a given body might occupy a particular place. The distinction between a specific place and any place whatever, between home and exile, between the local and the global, does not fade away in Beckett’s writing, but rather remains one of his most persistently difficult preoccupations. While remaining mindful of Connor’s timely warning against distorting Beckett into ‘ethnic intelligibility’, I would argue that the struggle between the national and the international that has such a shaping role in Joyce’s work reaches deeply into Beckett’s writing, that his narrators are not happily dis- or un-placed, but are tormented by the experience of emplacement and embodiment in a world that is still understood partly in terms of nation, and in terms of specific ethnicity. But if Joyce’s engagement with nation remains a powerful presence in Beckett’s writing, it is also the case that the latter half of Beckett’s writing life coincided with a period that brought significant changes in the ways national boundaries were configured and understood. Joyce’s writing is shaped by national boundaries which have since become ever more porous, as global communication and global trade in the post-war period has become easier. While Joyce’s reaching for an internationalist, cosmopolitan perspective was impeded by the limits of the nation state, Beckett’s writing registers an increasing accommodation between the national and the international, the local and the global, an accommodation that leads to the phrase ‘world Ireland’, and to the slogan ‘the world’s local bank’. I will argue in this chapter that it is possible, as a result, to see Beckett’s writing as an early exploration of the aesthetic and political possibilities of a global imagination. But in reading the development of the global in Beckett, I will focus on the ways in which the inheritance of a Joycean struggle between the national and the international is reimagined in a proto-global context. In reading the passage from the national to the global, as it is mirrored in the passage from Joyce to Beckett, I will aim to resist that easy accommodation between local and global that Connor regards as a key feature of global culture; I will argue, instead, that Beckett’s writing can be seen, in a certain light, as an attempt to imagine a new and barely articulable kind of ethical relationship between the global and the local, after the waning of the sovereign nation state. Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ has become an important work in Joyce criticism, partly because it seems to offer itself as a key to the movement in Joyce’s writing

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from the national to the international. The story closes, famously, with an epiphany, in which the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, sees anew his relationship with Ireland, and with an Irish community. Preparing to join his sleeping wife in bed, after his traumatic realization that she has an intensely lived past of which he had no conception, Gabriel gazes out of his hotel room window at the snow falling outside: He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Joyce 2000, 176) This is an extraordinarily rich moment in Joyce’s writing, which arguably frames his entire oeuvre. The passage has proved stubbornly difficult to understand, partly because it seems to set contradictory drives in motion, staging the difficult relationship between cosmopolitanism and local nationalism that Connor suggests is now in the process of being revised by Gibson and Nolan. Richard Ellmann has influentially read the end of the story as Joyce’s ‘first song of exile’, seeing this moment as a ‘linchpin’ in Joyce’s writing career (Ellmann 253), or what Emer Nolan describes as a ‘ “hinge” between an early and mature Joyce’ (Nolan 32). It is this elegiac close to the story, in which Ireland is buried under a blanket of white snow, that is Joyce’s farewell to the parochialism of the Dubliners, and that marks his entry into the wider reaches of European modernism. But to read this passage as taking Joyce eastwards across the Irish Sea to continental Europe is of course to read against the westerly direction in which Gabriel decides to travel, as his soul swoons under the spell of his wife’s secret love for Michael Furey. If Joyce is signalling a farewell to Ireland here, then it is also a return, prefiguring the cyclical structures of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The snow that falls at the close of the story bears out this doubleness. The ‘newspapers were right’, the passage reads, ‘snow was general all over Ireland’, and the suggestion is that the snow, like the binding properties of newspapers described by Benedict Anderson, is forging a nation, a community that huddles together in the festive collective isolation that colours ‘The Dead’ as a whole, and that makes of the paralyzing closeness of Dubliners something briefly magical.2 But while the snow offers this sense of belonging, this sharing of intimate space, it also of course suggests the

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opposite, a cold, detached blankness and loss of differentiation. As Gabriel’s physical and spiritual intimacy with his wife is at once produced and annulled by his distance from her, so the snow conjures a sense of national identity from its erasure of identity. The snow falls over Ireland, but it also falls through the ‘universe’, summoning both the living and the dead into a post-apocalyptic shared presence that is also an annihilation. Gabriel’s awakening here, his coming to a consciousness of an Irish heritage of which he has been unaware, or which he has repressed, is also a swooning, a loss of consciousness, a form of death. This passage is at once an epiphanal alertness and a kind of stupefaction, at once a remembering and a forgetting, a leavetaking and a return, a warm embrace and a cold shoulder. It is for this reason that the passage offers itself so insistently as a key to Joyce’s work, albeit one which opens his work in a number of different and contradictory ways. At this critical moment in the trajectory of his career, Joyce articulates a struggle between the national, the international and the universal that shapes the rest of his writing. Despite the critical orthodoxy that places Joyce in opposition to Yeats, reading the latter as a cultural nationalist and the former as a modernist who rejects Ireland as the ‘sow that eats her farrow’ (Joyce 1992, 220), several critics have argued, with Gibson and Nolan, that Joyce’s development of an internationalist, cosmopolitan aesthetic is bound up with, haunted perhaps, by the nationalism that it seeks to overcome.3 The curious reassertion of a national consciousness at the very moment that Joyce, in Ellmann’s reading, reconciles himself to exile, is thus emblematic of a persistence of the nation as an organizing category in Joyce’s internationalism. And if ‘The Dead’ can be read as a story which plays out an antagonism between Gabriel’s infatuation with cosmopolitan Europe and his tenacious psychical investment in the Irish nation, then this struggle between the national and the international is modulated by a third term. In ‘The Dead’, the contradiction between Ireland and Europe is organized around the possibility of the universal—the proto-global, perhaps—a category which transcends the national and the international, and which reaches for an absolutely inclusive expression of identity which is also a loss of identity, a simultaneous fullness and emptiness registered by the warming, obliterating snow, and by Gabriel’s overwhelmed swoon. This three-way relationship between the national, the international and the universal asserts itself time and again as an organizing structure, throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce, it is argued, attempts to write a world language in the Wake, to produce an amalgam of languages and national traditions that is universally readable, but also, by virtue of its allinclusiveness, universally unreadable. Such a collective language is marked at every moment, for Joyce, by the national cultures that it tries to overcome, just as it is shaped by the struggle between Ireland and Europe, home and exile, that Gabriel lives out in ‘The Dead’. It is as if, in 1939, Joyce is reaching towards a global vision, struggling, in his notoriously ‘ambivalent’ fashion, to divest

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himself of the suits and trappings of nation; but the signifying power and the political limitations of the nation state, in what we might think of as the gloaming of European modernity, are too powerful, too deeply etched into the fabric of the culture and the psyche, to allow him to conceive of a global condition that is not born out of, and always returning to, the nation state. Nationalism is written into the genetic material of Joyce’s global imagination. If Samuel Beckett might be thought of as a writer who more successfully disentangles himself from Joyce’s famous nets of language, nationality and religion (Joyce 1992, 220), it is nevertheless the case that Beckett inherits some of that genetic material. It is possible to find running through Beckett’s writing what the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said might call the ‘tenacious trace’ of nation (Beckett 1992, 96); the same triangulation that shapes Joyce’s writing, I would argue, provides a barely perceptible frame for Beckett’s work. The close of ‘The Dead’, in fact, reappears in Beckett’s first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, as the narrative draws to a close. Belacqua finds himself ejected, in the closing paragraphs, onto a Dublin street on which the ‘rain fell in a uniform untroubled manner’: It fell upon the bay, the champaign-land and the mountains, and notably upon the central bog it fell with a rather desolate uniformity. (Beckett 1993, 239) Joyce’s elegiac passage, as it reappears in early Beckett, is stripped of much of its nostalgia for nation, and of the echoes of romantic cultural nationalism that can be heard in the former. Rain offers nothing like the simultaneous warmth and cold that Joyce discovers in snow. In Beckett’s rendering, the rain produces only a damp and desolate uniformity that encompasses Dublin and the ‘central bog’, and that carries none of the epiphanal sense of a shared community that uniformity offers to Gabriel. But the close of Dream can convincingly be read, in sympathy with the climax of ‘The Dead’, as Beckett’s ‘first song of exile’, and in bidding farewell to Ireland here Beckett exhibits some of the same equivocations as Joyce. Even the thin, miserable uniformity of the endless rain does pre-empt a kind of homesickness in Beckett’s exilein-waiting. The rain, Belacqua reflects at the end of Dream, is part of Ireland’s ‘charm’, creating the ‘impression one enjoys before landscape in Ireland, even on the clearest of days, of seeing it through a veil of tears’ (240). The rain that falls throughout Beckett’s writing is an obliterating force, summoning the grey undifferentiation of what Deleuze calls an ‘any-space-whatever’ (Deleuze 1998, 162). But, just as Joyce’s snow simultaneously obliterates and preserves, so here rain becomes a less romantic, comically bathetic medium through which the landscape can nevertheless still be viewed, and in which something of its specific ‘charm’ is preserved. The rain here forms a ‘veil’ which hides the landscape from view, and which, Belacqua thinks, is responsible for the ‘mitigation of contour’ that he finds in the ‘compresses of our

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national visibility’ (240). This gauzy veil might call to mind the thick light in which Kaspar David Freidrich’s landscapes are obscured (an occluding light in which much of Beckett’s earlier work is bathed), as it might suggest the ‘veil’ of the English language that Beckett, four years later, wants to ‘tear apart’ in order to ‘get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it’ (Beckett 1983, 171). Either way, rain here serves a double purpose, at once drowning out contour and relief, and serving as a kind of optic through which the homeland might be viewed, that same landscape of memory which takes fleeting shape in the rain seen falling through the imperceptibly open window of Beckett’s television play Ghost Trio.4 Belacqua’s wanderings around Europe throughout Dream can be read through this simultaneously transparent and opaque medium. Thinking of his exhausting journeying across Europe, and pondering on why he goes to such trouble to travel the continent—why he persists in putting his ‘trust in changes of scenery’ (Beckett 1993, 177)—Belacqua suggests a triangular model to account for his wanderlust, a model which takes us back to Joyce. ‘At his simplest’, he thinks, ‘he was trine’: Centripetal, centrifugal and . . . not. Phoebus chasing Daphne, Narcissus flying from Echo and . . . neither. Is that neat or is it not? The chase to Vienna, the flight to Paris, the slouch to Fulda, the relapse into Dublin and . . . immunity like hell from journeys and cities. (Beckett 1993, 120) Like Joyce, Beckett here choreographs the movements of his protagonist in terms of three geographical categories: European exile, Irish home and then a third category which is conceived here as a negative version of Joyce’s universalism. The centripetal and centrifugal paroxysms of the novel, its systole and diastole, are orchestrated around the ‘neither’, the ‘not’, the ‘immunity like hell from journeys and cities’—that ‘neither’ which reappears towards the end of Beckett’s career in his brief piece ‘Neither’. In Dream, as in ‘Neither’, the movement between home and away, the restless pacing to and fro ‘as between two lit refuges’, has as its fulcrum ‘that unheeded neither’, that ‘unspeakable home’ (Beckett 1995, 258). And, for Beckett as for Joyce, this third term, this swooning immunity from distinction, at once structures those oppositions between to and fro, between home and exile, and serves to annul them. Both for Joyce and for Beckett, the universal, conceived either as the absolutely empty or as the absolutely full, negotiates between the competing desires for exile and for homeland. But for both the third term—that ‘unspeakable home’ of ‘neither’, that unreadable Esperanto of Finnegans Wake—cannot free itself from the terms that it transcends, cannot discover ‘immunity’, cannot remain at rest, in the words of ‘neither’, ‘absent for good from self and other’. Rather, the dead opacity it reaches for, the annulment of movement and of longing, of to and of fro, is conjured only from a certain restless transparency, as Beckett’s

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rain both shields the Irish landscape and makes it visible, as Joyce’s snow both buries Ireland and brings it into being. To a larger degree than is often acknowledged, then, I would argue that tensions between the national and the international are grained through Beckett’s indifference to place, that the fabric of Beckett’s ‘nowhere in particular’5 is woven from the to and fro between the national and the international. But, as I have already suggested, it is nevertheless the case that the limitations that operate upon Joyce’s leap towards a global, postnational vision, are different, historically and materially, from those that constrain Beckett’s imagination. In 1939, Joyce’s reaching for a universal language could only be a demonstration of the organizing power of national boundaries: the very possibility of thinking or speaking globally was one, for Joyce, that was produced and constrained by the nation. But the passage of Beckett’s writing career, from the triangular exploits of Belacqua in Dream to the restless movements of ‘Neither’, Stirrings Still and ‘What is the Word’, runs hand in hand with the gradual waning of the post-war nation state as the prime administrative unit in world affairs. It is the strengthening of the US and the USSR in the aftermath of World War II that marks the final demise of the European colonial powers, and that prepares the ground for the development of global markets, and a global culture.6 With this weakening of the nation state, from 1945 to Beckett’s last work written in 1989, there is a significant shift in the balance of power between the national, the international and the global—that three-way contest that dominates Joyce’s writing, and that structures Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In the passage from 1939 to 1989, the possibility of a global community, and of a global language—that possibility which is shadowed forth but still unrealizable for Joyce—becomes not only imaginable, but the basis upon which the legitimacy of national sovereignty rests, if one which is stripped of much of the utopian energy of Wakean Esperanto. As the first major conflicts of the twentyfirst century have amply demonstrated, sovereignty is no longer the vehicle of power, but a privilege granted to nation states by the arbiters of international ‘law’ as a reward for good behaviour. For the ‘rogue state’ to be occupied by an international force requires ‘no state of exception’, requires no suspension of the inviolability of national boundaries (and, as we have seen, no resolution passed by the United Nations, a body whose ineffectiveness is arguably due to its embeddedness in the anachronisms of sovereignty). Rather, national boundaries are always porous, and a given nation can only appear sovereign when such sovereignty does not come into conflict with the economic and political forces that drive global relations. National sovereignty is now, arguably, a residual political form, one that is at the point of giving way to an emergent global power that is not affiliated to or legitimized by any of the democratic processes that are still conducted at the level of the state, and in the name of the sovereignty that has already passed away. One of the ironies of the Second Gulf War is that, while it is prosecuted partly in the name of democracy—with

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the stated aim of exporting Western style democracy to the Middle East—the conflict is to some degree a result of the movement from national democracy to a new form of global political power that is fundamentally undemocratic.7 This movement from the national to the global in the exercise of state power, I suggest, finds a kind of reflection in Beckett’s writing, however oblique. The national ‘conscience’ that is forged in the smithy of Dedalus’ soul is reshaped in Beckett’s writing, partly because the nation exerts pressure in a different way in the post-war. While Joyce’s universalism is a kind of polyglot ubiquity, in which one can detect both the urge towards and the failure of a global consciousness, Beckett’s ‘immunity’ from nation is the marker of an inchoate global imagination, conceived as an ‘any-place-whatever’, and formed in response to this shift from national democracy to global hegemony. For Belacqua in Dream, the friction between national, international and global still produces heat. Belacqua imagines a perspective that would not be coloured by nation, that would not be refracted through that veil of Irish tears. He imagines at one point in the narrative, as he moves between Ireland and continental Europe, that he is hemmed in by the sky, as by a ‘taut skin’. ‘The night sky was stretched like a skin’, he reflects, ‘He would scale the inner wall, his head would tear a great rip in the taut sky, he would climb out above the deluge, into a quiet zone above the nightmare’ (Beckett 1993, 27). This is a fantasy of escape from the national borders that Belacqua negotiates throughout the novel, of escape from that nightmarish national history from which Dedalus sought to awake, but this early in Beckett’s career, and this early in the 1930s, such a fantasy is still shaped by the geopolitics of European nationalism. Belacqua here imagines himself tearing through the fabric of the nation state, again calling to mind that tearing movement that Beckett evokes in the German letter of 1937. In Murphy, similarly, the movement to and fro between home and exile is conceived in terms of nation, and in terms of a struggle between London and Dublin. Here also, Murphy’s movements are hemmed in by the ‘soft sunless’ sky, which is all that Celia ‘remembered of Ireland’ (Beckett 1973, 27), and which, in a reprise of Belacqua’s fantasy, Mr Kelly seeks to puncture with his kite: ‘Now’, thinks Mr Kelly, as he flies his kite out of sight, through the veil of the soft, sunless, Friedrich sky, ‘Now he could measure the distance from the unseen to the seen, now he was in a position to determine the point at which seen and unseen met’ (157). As Beckett’s career progresses, however, the antagonism between the national and global starts to give way, to produce less friction, as if it becomes increasingly easy to force one’s way through the skin of the nation, or as if national boundaries yield increasingly easily to the global forces which penetrate them, and which erode them. The narrator of The Unnamable, for example, masquerading as his various characters, wanders, like Belacqua and like Murphy, from place to place, and like these earlier ‘vice-existers’, his wanderings are determined, constrained to some degree, by the narrator’s difficult, ‘ambivalent’

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relation to nation. The narrator writes that ‘Bally’ is the place where the ‘inestimable gift of life had been rammed down my gullet’ (Beckett 1994, 300), and this suggestion that the narrator is attached, via his ‘mannekins’, to an Irish home, to the Ballys that run through Beckett’s prose, resonates with other places in the novel where a remembered, Beckett/Irish landscape seems to pull at the narrator, unsettling his rejection of place. Towards the close of the novel, the narrator yearns for such placedness, pleading that ‘if only I could feel a place for me’, a place with the sea under the window, higher than the window, and the rowboat, do you remember, and the river, and the bay, I knew I had memories, pity they are not of me, and the stars, and the beacons, and the lights of the buoys, and the mountain burning. (Beckett 1994, 403) This characteristically self-cancelling nostalgia, this hollowed out longing for a remembered homeland, is held against an internationalist rejection of home, which again follows the pattern of Dream, and of Murphy, and which might be thought of as a version of Gabriel Conroy’s and Stephen Dedalus’ simultaneous rejection of and return to a homeland. But in The Unnamable, the movement from home to exile both involves a much wider sweep, taking the wandering narrator much further from home than the Germany, Austria and France of Dream, and also tends to blur the boundary between home and away, between the national and the global. The narrator, for example, devotes several pages to a description of the circuitous travels he undertakes as Mahood when, presumably as a result of having only one leg (‘they whip off a leg and yip off I go again, like a young one, scouring the earth for a hole to hide in’ (Beckett 1994, 317)), he travels the globe in ever widening spirals. The narrator frets that such spirals might ‘unfold ad infinitum’, taking him further and further away from his home, where his ‘dear absent ones are awaiting [his] return’ in their ‘small rotunda’ (320) (this is surely a quiet parody of Donne’s ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, a work in which another wanderer traverses the earth in circles on one ‘foot’). But the narrator corrects himself, realizing that the sphericality of the globe means that his spiralling movement will not unfold forever, but will eventually require him, like Donne’s lover, to ‘end where I begun’ (Donne 1971, 85). ‘It seems to me’, he reasons, ‘that once beyond the equator you would start turning inwards out of sheer necessity’, and that, after taking him to a point at the other end of the world, his spirals would eventually find him ‘returning to the fold’ where ‘I could be restored to my wife and parents, you know, my loved ones, and clasp in my arms, both of which I had succeeded in preserving, my little ones born in my absence’ (Beckett 1994, 320). This kind of wanderlust, however much it might owe to the travels of Murphy and Belacqua, rests on a significantly altered conception of the relationship between the national and the global. The narrator here finds that his ‘island

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home’ is not held in Belacqua’s ‘trine’ relationship with other European nations and capitals; this is not a grounded struggle between Dublin and London, or between Ireland and continental Europe. Rather, the narrator imagines himself sweeping across the globe, conducting a ‘world tour’. Perhaps, he thinks, I left my leg behind in the Pacific, yes, no perhaps about it, I had, somewhere off the coast of Java and its jungles red with rafflesia stinking of carrion, no that’s the Indian Ocean, what a gazetteer I am. (Beckett 1994, 319) With this enlargement of the narrator’s global imaginative sweep, the nation itself loses some of its organizing power. Finding himself unconvinced by his own story of his faithful return to his family home, the narrator decides that his spiralling to a fi xed point on the surface of the earth in fact owes nothing to such fidelity, but is dictated simply by the shape of the planet. Attachment to his family, he insists, ‘had no part or share in what I was doing. Having set forth from that place, it was only natural that I should return to it, given the accuracy of my navigation’ (324). The global, here, has replaced the national as a means of orientating and positioning narrative perspective. But with this reorientation, with the incursion of the global into the national, the national itself becomes to a degree global. Pages later, the narrator abruptly changes his mind about his travels as Mahood, insisting that, in fact, he has never left his ‘island home’, that I’m on the island, I’ve never left the island, God help me. I was under the impression I spent my life in spirals round the earth. Wrong, it’s on the island I wind my endless ways. The island, that’s all the earth I know. (329) The sweeping global spirals, taking in Pacific and Indian Oceans, are compacted here into a sightseeing tour of the homeland that ‘embraces entire boglands’ (329), becoming a version of that visit to ‘your own land’ that the fervent nationalist Miss Ivors recommends to a reluctant Gabriel in ‘The Dead’ (Joyce 2000, 149). ‘When I come to the coast’, the narrator says with a slightly embarrassed bathos, ‘I turn back inland’ (Beckett 1994, 329). But what is most striking about this alternation between the global and the national as the boundaries of the narrative helix is how little these two organizing categories seem to be in conflict, how easy it is for the narrator at once to ‘set out on his journey westward’, and to disavow the call of nation. What Beckett discovers or registers in The Unnamable is a certain weakening of the boundary between nation states, as if the global and the national have come to inhabit each other. Where Belacqua tears at the skin of the nation with a certain anguish, the narrator of The Unnamable finds that the boundaries that position him tend to give way, to dissolve soundlessly before the eye of the imagination.

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It is in Beckett’s later works, in The Lost Ones, in Ill Seen Ill Said, in Imagination Dead Imagine, that this collapsing distinction between the global and the national plays itself out most fully. Indeed, the enigmatic novella Ill Seen Ill Said turns around the dissolving and reforming of a skin, of a boundary, or of what the narrator refers to in one resonant moment as a ‘partition’ (Beckett 1992, 92). The story consists of a narrator ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’ the scene before him, the scene of a spectral woman living alone in a shed in the middle of a desert. As the narrator hesitantly draws the scene, he dwells for a paragraph on the possibility that the woman’s habitation might be divided by an ‘inner wall’: Next to emerge from the shadows an inner wall. Only slowly to dissolve in favour of a single space. East the bed. West the chair. A place divided by her use of it alone. How more desirable in every way an interior of a piece. The eye breathes again but not for long. For slowly it emerges again. Rises from the floor and slowly up to lose itself in the gloom. (68) This boundary that asserts itself only to crumble, that divides the narrative space only to return it to a unity, has a rich resonance in Beckett’s work. It might recall the wall that divides and fails to divide Victor Krap’s bedsit from the bourgeois sitting room of the Krap family in Beckett’s first full length play Eleutheria, as it might suggest the partitions, veils and skins that have fitfully divided the fictional space of Beckett’s prose since Dream of Fair to Middling Women. From Belacqua and Murphy onwards, Beckett’s narrators/characters have pressed against such boundaries, seeking to penetrate the skin that divides mind from world, language from nothingness, nation from nation, reaching for what Belacqua thinks of, in Dream, as an ‘insistent, invisible rat fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface’ (Beckett 1993, 17) (a metaphorical echo of the rats that disturb Belacqua’s sleep, scratching against the partition that divides his cramped attic room in Germany). But here, in Ill Seen Ill Said, the barriers that divide are always on the point of giving way, rising like an inverted stage curtain only to dissolve, as if political and aesthetic boundaries have weakened in the passage from the thirties to the eighties. Beckett’s use of the word ‘partition’ to describe this dissolving boundary lends a political hue to the ‘inner wall’, calling to mind the partition of Ireland into North and South in 1921, as well as the countless other acts of partition that have marked the withdrawal or attenuation of colonial power in the second half of the twentieth century. And in imagining the crumbling of a wall that divides east from west, the story suggests the reunification of Germany, the fall of the Berlin wall that lay a decade in the future when Ill Seen Ill Said was written. The global political and economic forces that have worked to weaken the boundaries between nation states, to allow the freer flow of capital across the boundary between east and west, are registered in Beckett’s later prose as an increasing failure to maintain

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the distinction between the local and the global. In these later works, the very capacity to think of the local, to imagine a place that is distinct from any other place, is threatened by the encroachment into the particular of the general, the incursion into the national of the global. The ‘partition’, the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said tells us, is ‘of all the properties doubtless the least obdurate’. ‘See the instant’, the narrator writes as if to prove this claim, ‘see it again when unaided it dissolved. So to say of itself. With no help from the eye’ (92). One has only to imagine a place, in these late works, for one to find oneself imagining the world, as distinctions sunder before us, releasing us into what the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said thinks of as an unboundaried profusion. The rotunda that lies at the heart of the unnamable narrator’s spiral travels re-emerges in these late works, but now almost entirely stripped of the vacillations that are still played out, in The Unnamable, between the national and the global. At the opening of Imagination Dead Imagine, for example, the Irish view from the window in Malone Dies and The Unnamable—the sea, the bay, the beacons, the lights burning in the mountains—is resurrected in the briefest of fashions, only to be brutally dismissed, as the rotunda, erstwhile home of the unnamable narrator’s loving family, is lost in the undifferentiation of Beckett’s global imagination. The story opens with a command, a kind of stage direction: ‘Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit’ (Beckett 1995, 182). As Malone puts it, with a bravado that belies his incapacity to forget the contours of homeland, ‘to hell with all this fucking scenery’ (Beckett 1994, 279). At the very opening of this agonizing slip of prose, the narrative stages the final collapse of the mechanisms that allow for the distinction between one place and another. The snow that was ‘general all over Ireland’ in Joyce’s story returns at this moment, but only as an obliterating force, as the rotunda is conjured, magically but fatally impossibly from the endless emptiness that surrounds it, and that swallows it up. The rotunda is lost in its surroundings, ‘all white in the whiteness’, as the statue of O’Connell is erased by the snow in ‘The Dead’ (Joyce 2000, 194). This is figure, as Murphy might have put it, returning to ground. As, in Ill Seen Ill Said, the partition emerges only to dissolve, so here the material of which the rotunda is made is only imaginable at the moment of its dissolution, as if the occupation of place can only be conjured momentarily from the dissipation of place into the profuse, global emptiness. The rotunda is constructed, we are told, of a ‘little fabric’, a fabric which, like the spectral partition in Ill Seen Ill Said, vibrates on the very boundary between the seen and the unseen, that boundary that once seemed more susceptible of measurement, that was marked, in the thirties, by the jubilant Mr Kelly’s kite. Throughout Beckett’s late prose, from How It Is to Stirrings Still, this weakening of the partitions that allow for narrative placement—that allow us, as the narrator of Worstward Ho has it, to put a ‘body’ in a ‘place’ (Beckett 1992, 101)—leads the narrators towards a global vision. Beckett’s late narrators, like

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the imaginary observer of the cylinder in The Lost Ones, are required to divine ‘a perfect mental image of the entire system’ (Beckett 1995, 204), as the local divisions between one place and the next continually give way. The fragility of the partition that divides the narrative space of Ill Seen Ill Said, the delicacy of the vibrating fabric in Imagination Dead Imagine, mean that the attempt to put a discrete body in a discrete place repeatedly fails, and the limits of the fictional space unravel, unfold towards the global. The closed cylinder of The Lost Ones, with its ‘imaginary line running midway between floor and ceiling’ (Beckett 1995, 203) like a kind of equator, is presented as a globe, as a complete world, a self-perpetuating machine or system which we can only see as a whole. The geography of Ill Seen Ill Said, in which ‘The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though outlined by a trembling hand’ (Beckett 1992, 59); the geography of How It Is, in which legions of crawlers travel from east to west in an ‘immense circuit’ which straddles the globe (Beckett 1964, 131); the empty, unboundaried expanses of Imagination Dead Imagine and Ping; the space of Quad, described by Deleuze as ‘a closed, globally defined, any-space-whatever’ (Deleuze 1998, 162); all of these fictional geographies figure as worlds which one can only grasp by seeing complete, by attaining ‘a perfect mental image of the entire system’. Where Joyce, in ‘The Dead’, in Ulysses, in Finnegans Wake, finds that the leap towards a global vision is blocked by the persistence of national categories in his creative imagination, for Beckett’s later narrators, the opposite is the case: it becomes difficult not for the narrator to think globally, but rather to resist the global. The ambivalent need at once to speak of one’s home and to leave it persists in Beckett’s work, even into these whitely empty late prose pieces, which retain a certain nostalgia for nation. Even in that excruciating opening of Imagination Dead Imagine, one can read the trace of a struggle between persistent local reference, and the obliteration of the local. But here, in later Beckett, the possibility of thinking nationally, of placing oneself locally, is threatened by the development of a global perspective which was not available to Joyce, and which attenuates the very mechanics by which a national consciousness might recognize itself. The struggle to find an ‘island home’ continues in Beckett; the ‘true home’ of How It Is (111), the ‘unspeakable home’ of ‘neither’, remain entangled with the persistent need to give a voice to a remembered, semi-autobiographical, Irish landscape. But in the passage from the thirties to the eighties, as political and economic power migrates from colonial Europe to global America, the national comes to the point of unravelling, of giving way to the global. As Beckett’s writing extends into the post-war, the struggle to speak of one’s homeland, to find a form in which to give some kind of expression to one’s ‘unspeakable home’, is balanced against this encroachment of a global perspective. This is not to say that Beckett’s writing simply dramatizes the subsumption of the local into the global, or that it yields itself up to the kinds of easy accommodation between global and local that Connor sees as symptomatic of

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globalization. On the contrary, Beckett’s writing registers at once the failure of the organizing power of nation, and offers the beginnings of a new form in which to imagine emplacement and embodiment, a new language with which to articulate a continuing relation between the global and the local, between being somewhere and being nowhere in particular. That dissolving partition that appears and disappears in Ill Seen Ill Said suggests the beginning of a new way of placing the body in the world, a fragile form of demarcation and distinction that survives the collapse of national sovereignty, as Hamm and Clov, in Adorno’s phrase, survive the destruction of their world (Adorno 275). Throughout Beckett’s writing, his narrators struggle to give a kind of expression to what they refer to as an ‘unspeakable home’. But in later Beckett, this search for homeland is balanced against an equally unimaginable totality, what the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said calls the ‘unspeakable globe’ (Beckett 1992, 95). If there is an ethics to be found in Beckett’s recasting of the relationship between the national and the global, then it lies in this inchoate relationship between home and globe, between entities that lie just on the other side of the speakable, waiting in Beckett’s writing to come to a form of life that is still unthought.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

See, for example, Lloyd 1993, and Kiberd 1996 (454–467; 530–550), which seek to rethink Beckett’s relation with postcolonial Ireland. As Connor suggests, there are a number of strands in Beckett criticism that attach his writing to specific contexts. See for example Mooney 2000, Harrington 1991 and Eion O’Brien’s peculiar encyclopaedic tracing of references to Ireland in The Beckett Country (O’Brien 1986). See Anderson 1991, where he extends an analysis of the connection between the development of print media and the forging of the nation. The reading of the newspaper, Anderson argues, is performed in isolation, in the ‘lair of the skull’, yet ‘at the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life’ (35–36). See for example Nolan 1995, Gibson 2006 and Declan Kiberd, ‘James Joyce and Mythic Realism’, in Kiberd 1996, 327–355. See Samuel Beckett, Ghost Trio, where the ‘faint sound of rain’ (Beckett 1986, 412), through the window of the room in which the play takes place suggests an oblique, faint relationship with the rainy landscapes of Beckett’s earlier work. See Samuel Beckett, Company, where the narrator describes himself as being ‘Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z’ (Beckett 1992, 18). There are various ways of thinking about the relationship between the decline of the nation state and the development of globalization. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that ‘the sovereign authority of nation states is declining

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and there is instead emerging a new supra-national form of sovereignty, a global Empire’ (Hardt & Negri 7). While for most thinkers there is a relationship between the waning of the nation state after World War II and the production of global relations, there is some disagreement about the history of globalization, and how far back this history reaches. For a useful account of different positions on this question, see Lechner and Boli, 55–119. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004) give a rather patchy but sometimes insightful account of the possibilities of democracy in the transition from sovereignty to globalization. Jacques Derrida gives a different account of the same problems in his recent work Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005).

Works cited Adorno, Theodor. 1991. ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’. In Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, New York: Columbia University Press, 241–275. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso. Beckett, Samuel. 1964. How It Is. London: Calder. —. 1973. Murphy. London: Picador. —. 1983. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder. —. 1986. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1992. Nohow On, London: Calder. —. 1993. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. London: Calder. —. 1994. Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. London: Calder. —. 1995. The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. ‘The Exhausted’. In Essays Critical and Clinical, London: Verso, 152–174. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Donne, John. 1971. ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. In The Complete English Poems. London: Penguin. Ellmann, Richard. 1983. James Joyce. New and revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Andrew. 2006. James Joyce. London: Reaktion. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude. London: Penguin. Harrington, J. P. 1991. The Irish Beckett. New York: Syracuse University Press. Joyce, James. 1992. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin. —. 2000. Dubliners. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kiberd, Declan. 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage. Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli, eds. 2004. The Globalization Reader. Second edition. London: Blackwell. Lloyd, David. 1993. ‘Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject’. In Anomalous States, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 41–58.

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Mooney, Sinead. 2000. ‘ “Integrity in a Surplice”: Beckett’s (Post-)Protestant Poetics’. In Peter Boxall, ed., Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd hui 9, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 223–237. Nolan, Emer. 1995. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge. O’Brien, Eion. 1986. The Beckett Country. Dublin: The Black Cat Press.

Chapter 10

‘Throw up for good’: Gagging, Compulsion and a Comedy of Ethics in the Trilogy Laura Salisbury

And yet is it useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The glutton castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones. To hunger, thirst, lust, every day afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old whores, that’s the nearest we’ll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden. (Beckett 1976, 43)

So intones Arsene, the servant at the end of his time with Mr Knott who is ready to quit the place for good. But he leaves Watt, the new servant, not with an image of expulsion; Arsene isn’t quite at the arse-end of the series of servants that nourish and are finally churned through the system of Mr Knott’s household. Arsene is instead somewhere in the middle, and the hint of anal excretion held in his name is overwritten by a figure of endless consumption and desire. As Arsene implies, there is no escape from this system: to seek to satisfy desires offers a semblance of ‘felicity’; but there are no gains to be held, and this fruitless desiring ends up offering little more than the smirk of commodity culture, ‘the new porch and the very latest garden’ and an endlessly deferred satiety. Arsene also sees that giving up on desire, on fetishisms of the commodity or indeed the body, gets one no further towards a completion or repletion. Ceasing to seek, wanting nothing, may seem like an achievement of wanting for nothing, but as is often the case in Beckett’s work, nothing has a materiality of its own that is alarmingly substantial. To seek nothing is to begin to find. What one finds is perhaps not exactly something; it is more like the quiddity of nothing itself, which once rammed into the gagging subject, is regurgitated and then forced down again, until that nothing takes on the

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character of a something which can offer its own subsistence and ambivalent pleasures, its own ironic nourishment. This paradox of desiring nothing, of seeking a nothing that would bring an end to all wanting, alongside a subject that wants for nothing, is, of course, one of the signatures of Beckett’s Trilogy, and particularly of Malone Dies and The Unnamable, in which the achievement of a kind of self-presence perversely offers to enact consummation as extinction. Malone too looks to make an end for himself; as such, he is on his guard against ‘throes’ (Beckett 1994, 179), the agonized labour of childbirth that sits as an uneasy mirror-image of his own death-struggles. The stories, which might serve as a distraction from himself and thus hasten his end, of course, produce further throes, become the very thing which makes an ending impossible. As Malone’s stories are delivered into the world according to an irresistible ‘sense of dilation’ (235), and marked by the peculiarly Beckettian association of birth with anality (see Hill 1990, 101), there is the beginning of a sense that bodily motions might produce matter that would only magnify the subject’s spatial occupation in the world, rather than enact any wasting away. ‘My arse, for example, which can hardly be accused of being the end of anything’, writes Malone, is of such potential expanse and power that it could achieve an intercontinental incontinence: ‘if [it] suddenly started to shit at the present moment, which God forbid, I firmly believe the lumps would fall out in Australia’ (Beckett 1994, 235). Malone encircles himself with words, but as that linguistic matter tightens around the mouth of the textual subject, narration is in the end more strongly in thrall to the gag reflex than to the pleasures of either suffocation or starvation; matter that is pushed down the gullet is thrown up in and as a throe of its own—‘choke, go down, come up, suppose, deny, affirm, drown’ (Beckett 1994, 210).

Gagging for it Words are matter, here, and they offer sustenance; indeed they offer the only sort of ‘nourishing murk’ (Beckett 1994, 193) a fictional character can ever really have. But words are also a choking hazard, small parts of irreducible matter that resist absorption, are coughed up in gobbets which resist the subject’s supposed desires, only then to be swallowed again as a bare subsistence diet. There is no chance of Malone simply giving up on words. Even to articulate the desire to give up on expression enacts a paradox by which words become both the method and means of force-feeding: ‘when they cannot swallow any more someone rams a tube down their gullet, or up their rectum, and fills them full of vitaminized pap, so as not to be accused of murder’ (253–254). The subjects, which include Malone himself, are nourished by words because not just any death will do for them; there is a requirement that each die after its own fashion, replete and ‘glutted’, ‘of old age pure and simple’ (254), rather

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than in a silence in which pen or book is simply put down. In The Unnamable, where birth rather than death is the chief concern, the desire to labour and bring the subject into the world, to speak of itself alone rather than its avatars, is similarly interfered with by a gagging mechanism which seeks as much to interrupt the clean birth as the quick death. Here, words contaminate the body into which they are violently forced, infecting the subject so that it vomits and brings up a monstrosity that can never be the longed-for thing itself—a means of expressing the self alone—but will always be some kind of regurgitated other: ‘It’s a poor trick that consists of ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed’ (327). The Unnamable’s only hope is the alimentary dysfunction perhaps caused by the constant application of emetics, its ‘inability to absorb, [its] genius for forgetting’. Knowing it has ‘never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in vomit’ (327), means perhaps that it will know enough to sense that these words, this matter, are not at one with it. Although literal gags are associated with the violence of torture and forced expression in Beckett’s theatre,1 there is another tradition of gagging into which the Trilogy insinuates itself. The contortions which displace the Unnamable’s attempts to give birth to its own voice alone are not simply torturous; they are also painfully funny and enlivening. Tracing out the ineluctable sinus rhythm of this particular form of life, these spasms, whose interruptive force works at the level of narrative but shudders down even to the aporetic syntactical refusals of individual sentences, are indeed also gags in a theatrical sense. In the nineteenth century, the word ‘gag’ is used to denote an interruption within a written piece by some extempore play, with it only later applying more specifically to a deliberately staged joke. Defined as ‘Expressions, remarks, etc. not occurring in the written piece but interpolated or substituted by the actor’ (OED), ‘gag’ perhaps evolved from a mining term for a piece of wood that could be used in an interim period to stay a collapse. In this sense, the maundering of the Trilogy is nothing but a series of gags, of interpolations, that never give way to the main story. In its defeat of expectation and manipulation of incongruity, it is possible to see why the word gag might now be commonly associated with a particular kind of staged joke. In the history of theorizations of the comic, the appearance of the aesthetically incongruous and the interruption of an audience’s expectations have been seen in terms of what John Morreall has called an Incongruity Theory of humour (see Morreall 1987). I will not rehearse these arguments here; but if we accept that one of those most common comic effects arises from unpredictability, then in the Trilogy, within its most overt thematics and all the way down to the level of syntax, expectation is derailed by clownish failure and pointless persistence so that a recognizable comedy ensues. Moran never finds Molloy (apart from within himself perhaps) yet

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he continues; Malone doesn’t die but continues to throw up ‘throes’; despite all that effort the Unnamable never articulates words that are its alone but gags on the lexicon of others. At the level of narrative episode, interruption is similarly and persistently the cause of comic effect; Malone diverts his story of Macmann and Moll in the asylum, which is, in itself, a detour in his drive towards the longed-for destination of death, to note, comically, that he is picking up: ‘I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps’ (258). Even in the construction of the sentences, this sense that syntactical trajectories are comically derailed is clearly everywhere to be found. Simon Critchley notes that Beckett’s famous ‘syntax of weakness’ is an inherently comic form which stages ‘sequences of antithetical inabilities: unable to go on, unable not to go on’ (Critchley 1997, 23). It functions as ‘a paradoxical form of speech which defeats our expectations, producing laughter with its unexpected verbal inversions, contortions and explosions’ (Critchley 1997, 159). There is, however, something particular about Beckett’s comedy which borrows from the vaudeville or burlesque gag but draws out and exorbitantly extends a significant part of the latent form of such performances. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have noted Beckett’s theatrical interest in the side-show, pointing out, however, that the side-show usually retires in favour of the main act for which it functions as a warm-up. But Vladimir and Estragon ‘have to do their number for far longer than they had planned, indeed are condemned never to make way for the big number’ (32). In The Unnamable, too, the torturous attempts to bring a voice into existence which is itself alone, the hiccups in narration as the story gags and commences again, are duly imaged as the staging of a ‘compulsory show’, a form of forced entertainment: ‘you hear a voice, perhaps it’s a recitation, that’s the show, someone reciting, selected passages, old favourites’ (385), it states. But both narrator and reader slowly come to realize that in fact we’re still watching the gags and not the main event: ‘he’s only preluding, clearing his throat’, but ‘that’s the show, waiting for the show, to the sound of a murmur’ (385). What I have termed elsewhere Beckett’s ‘limping gags’ (see Salisbury 2005) even refuse to be subject to the form of vertical accumulation of the running gag that usually functions as a substitute for more conventional narrative form within music hall performances. In one sense this is the very essence of clowning, of continuing in the face of the mutely malign object world that will not submit to the subject’s projects. But what seems to be denied Beckett’s clowns and the characters in the Trilogy is the acknowledged mastery of a skilled and willed performance, a sense that they are in control of the gag and its itinerary. It is this recognition of mastery that causes failure or incongruity finally to be funny in aesthetic terms. As I have discussed elsewhere (Salisbury 2001), joking is not simply based upon the appearance of incongruity, which could of course be as disconcertingly paradoxical as it is humorous; instead, transgression must be understood as improper and its juxtapositions brought

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together, bound and controlled under a higher comic logic in which limits are transgressed but simultaneously marked and experienced as significant. Freud is quite clear in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (165–190) that laughter occurs when material from the unconscious and the desire to circumvent repression are suddenly and surprisingly brought into consciousness. The comic is cognitive because improper juxtapositions must be understood as being incongruous, as that which should be repressed, if release is to be felt. Good jokes are always, on one level, end-oriented, then, in that they work towards a kind of synthesis as incongruity and defeated expectation are marked and gathered into momentary understanding. The most historically tenacious philosophical account of the comic has, indeed, always emphasized its commerce with a certain mastery—what Morreall calls a Superiority Theory of humour—as a subject recognizes its ability to mark forms or, as frequently and more alarmingly, other people as incongruous and consequently debased or risible (see Morreall 1987). Although it is obvious at the level of the sentence that Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’ is funny, the verbal comedy of the Trilogy is not what we could call securely witty, if wit can be defined in Schlegel’s terms as a chemical process, a synthetic unification of distinct elements, or a ‘sudden meeting of two friendly thoughts after a long separation’ (Schlegel 1991, 37). Instead, the jokes are more like Murphy’s ‘ jokes that had once been good jokes’, but are perhaps no longer quite so, than those that ‘had never been good jokes’ (Beckett 1983, 41). One reason why it is so hard to extract quotable comic matter from the Trilogy is not because of its lack; it is more that comic incongruities are everywhere but that they never give up on going on. Malone ponders on a phial he once had: ‘Laxatives? Sedatives? I forget. To turn to them for calm and obtain diarrhoea, my, that would be annoying’ (256). But he immediately and irresistibly expels an excess of matter into the scene: ‘In any case the question does not arise I am calm, insufficiently, I still lack a little calm. But enough about me’ (256). As the end of the joke becomes increasingly hard to detect, the synthesis of the punch line towards which a comic instance races is overshot in a logic that does not simply make a masterful joke of clownish failure. This joking is instead brought into commerce with a particular, although not total, failure of comic writing, with the comic gag partaking of the violent evacuations of a gagging reflex which brings up and reconsumes the same old words, the same old jokes—jokes that are winding down but are never finally wound up. For within the Trilogy nothing completely new is ever really taken into the system—only words which are the expectorant matter of others. Instead of invention, what is offered up is narration as incontinence or an emetic compulsion, to be followed by a re-consumption of the body’s undigested discharges. So stories are nourished by that which resists either being smoothly incorporated into a curve towards a denouement, or passed through the body of the text according to the unconscious muscular spasms of

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peristalsis that deliver matter downwards from mouth to anus. What remains is instead endlessly churned, expressed and reincorporated into a narrative system figured as a derailed digestive system: ‘They chew, swallow, then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the next mouthful. A neck muscle stirs and the jaws begin to grind again’ (9). The Trilogy’s obsession with a materialized language that is imaged according to the processes of peristalsis might productively be thought through an unexpected peculiarity of the construction of the body that the texts appear to intuit. For the alimentary system precisely interferes with conventional models of what might be the interior and exterior of the body. The body is not a smoothly enclosed object in space; rather, the linings of all exocrine glands, including the digestive glands, are continuous with the surface of the body. Anything taken into their lumen remains, in a strict sense, exterior to the body (see Gershon 1998, 84). Representing words as matter in the gut, then, allows them to be imaged as both inside and outside the subject; and this matter, that is on the threshold of becoming part of the body but stalls before it is fully absorbed, offers the Trilogy a site in which significant aspects of the form and function of language and expression might be articulated. For language is the putative achievement of the interiority of an intending mind, but still only ever the product of an interaction with the external world. As such, the peristaltic system, that fissure of exteriority that runs through our most central points, perhaps offers a privileged location for inscribing some of the vagaries of expression. Language expressed according to the logic of peristalsis and compulsion may yet illuminate the complex lines of connection between subject and the world outside of it.

Expression, obligation, ethics By the time The Unnamable is reached, narration and excretion have become part of the same embodied motion which proceeds compulsively to incarnate that which is not yet the thing itself, but the matter of the world, held in the inside/outside of the alimentary system and then evacuated: ‘For if I am Mahood, I am Worm too, plop. Or if I am not yet Worm, I shall be when I cease to be Mahood, plop. On now to serious matters, no not yet’ (340). Malone asserts that ‘what matters is to eat and excrete. Dish and pot, dish and pot, those are the poles’ (185), and in The Unnamable, anal excretion similarly becomes an analogue for the birth of subject and artwork: ‘I’ll let down my trousers and shit stories on them, stories, photographs, records, sites, lights, gods and fellow-creatures. Be born, dear friends, be born, enter my arse, you’ll just love my colic pains, it won’t take long, I’ve the bloody flux’ (383–384). But to be born is to breathe, and to be materialized causes a further gagging. To breathe ‘air is to make you choke’ (368) on words that are never yours but

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clichés of the very notion of Romantic inspiration as self-expression: ‘ah misery, will I never stop wanting a life for myself . . . I’ve tried, lashed to the stake, blindfold, gagged to the gullet, you take the air, under the elms in se, murmuring Shelley’ (Beckett 1994, 396). So what is forced down the throat of the Unnamable, taking on the character of a reflexive compulsion, is bound from the beginning to an obligation to express itself in such a way that it could have done with all expressing:2 Strange task, which consists of speaking of oneself. Strange hope, turned towards silence and peace. Possessed of nothing but my voice, the voice, it may seem natural, once the idea of obligation has been swallowed, that I should interpret it as an obligation to say something. (Beckett 1994, 313) Obligation, which is etymologically linked to the notion of being bound to something through the Latin ligare, once taken into the body, swallowed, does not stay in the space of ‘interpretation’ for long; instead, as we have seen, it is brought back up as an embodied compulsion to express. Denuded of a sense of intention and rational action, it is hard to see how such an obligation could be ethical in a normative sense in which the subject is bound to an oath or law within the terms of which it stages its acts. But the famous ‘obligation to express’, which appears in Three Dialogues (begun the same month as L’Innommable), suggests an obligation loosened from the realm of what could be rationally chosen. For if there is ‘nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett 1999, 103), then artistic expression becomes an obligation that is not bound by and through the reason of an autonomous or self-determined subject. It is in the Trilogy that this negative theology of the obligation of artistic expression finds a material linguistic aesthetic. The alibis of artistic expression invoked here insist on expression in an embodied sense; language is spewed, vomited, dribbled, shat and belched. Of course, Beckett is not miming an automatic writing, and neither are these motions completely unconscious, for all can be retarded or interfered with by intention, or, more strictly, trained according to repetition and habit that inscribe intention into the automatic processes of the body. Nevertheless, in the end they are expressions of the body that will admit no cognitive denial. So the obligation to express is here figured as a compulsion that binds textual subjects within a space of linguistic assault and embodied reflex that is somehow below the threshold of what might conventionally be considered to be ethical choice or action made in relation to a priori principles of abstract universality—a moral law that has objective validity and that could be binding upon practical reason in Kantian terms. Beckett’s texts clearly do not stage such ethical questions or possibilities. Reason is a sufficiently rare achievement that any ethical framework that

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is necessarily bound and authorized by the autonomous willed commitments of the rational subject would flare up only intermittently and would, thus, be fatally denuded of its universal quality. An ethics based upon shared moral sentiments or passions would similarly be hard to sustain when the characters of the Trilogy find normative affects sufficiently puzzling that they can only be performed rather than felt or comprehended. Such passions are rarely more than transitory affects that flicker on the surface of the skin or are passed through a subject in such a way that it becomes, in the end, little more than an agglutination of those drives, desires and sensations—insufficiently coherent even really to allow it to qualify as a subject, never mind the loadstone of a moral theory. If the figure of the gag effects a suggestive commerce between structures of comedy and the obligation to express, however, it is instructive to note that humour has persistently been used by Beckett criticism to adumbrate the ways in which the texts seem to remain freighted with an ethical significance, even as they seem to etiolate the form of a subject who could rationally bind itself to obligation. For readers of Beckett who have sought to find in his work an ethics of the human, the persistence of the comic and its absurd incongruities has indeed offered enticing lifelines. Although it is clear that modernity, particularly in its post-war form, stages the disappearance of precisely that community, habit and tradition upon which an ethics grounded in ethos might be cultivated, readers of Beckett have yet found in his texts ties which might bind the human to others and to itself. When the dominant accent within Beckett criticism could still be thought of as ‘existential- humanism’, the comic seemed to work as both an instigator and underwriter of the most essential Beckettian thematic. The suggestion was not that the work provided a little comic relief; it was more that, through humour, shards of a persistent and shared humanity and dignity were yet to be found amidst the ruins of narrative and the detritus of a post-apocalyptic theatre space. The early work of Ruby Cohn, in particular, marked out the ways in which comedy and laughter directed at existential incongruity could function as the means by which the human condition might wearily be acknowledged and endured (Cohn 1962). In the 1990s, Carla Locatelli, who in many senses inaugurates those ethical readings of Beckett bound to a broadly Levinasian inflection of Derridean deconstruction, declines to read Beckett’s humour as an illumination of the tragic heroism of the human condition, however; instead, the tenacious trace of the comic that limns the texts functions as critique of the authority of those metanarratives and hierarchies of value that continue to rattle in an almost corpsed humanism. Deriving her discourse from Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, it is ‘the comic in Beckett [that] is the locus of doubtful discourse . . . the arch-enemy of logocentrism’ (31). By binding Beckett’s aesthetic of ‘unwording’ to a deconstructive ethics irreducible to habits, shared passions or universal abstractions, she forges a congruence with

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a broadly Levinasian ethics of alterity in which the subject and its language of totality and certainty, which is always attempting to reduce otherness to the same, is interrupted by that subject’s pre-ontological exposure and responsibility to others, to an otherness which always finally exceeds its grasp. Simon Critchley, the philosopher of a deconstructive Levinasian ethics, has also returned to Beckett and to humour; but he detours from any specific analysis of Beckett’s language in favour of a discussion of the ways in which ethical subjectivity is structured according to a primary relationship with alterity that divides it at its core. This essential lack of self-coincidence is the effect of an internalization of an ethical demand that is ‘impossibly demanding, a demand to be infinitely responsible, a demand that divides us, that sunders us’ (Critchley 2007, 87). Critchley decisively moves humour from violent laughter at the butt of a joke, an other, to a process by which the subject sees itself and its projects as the object of humour, as laughable. In Beckett’s humour of inability, interruption, weakness and finitude, Critchley finds a subject able to view itself from that position of fracture and acknowledge the ethical demand that divides it, that sunders it primordially, thus saving it ‘from tragic hybris, from the Promethean fantasy of believing [it]self omnipotent’ (Critchley 2002, 105). Alain Badiou, writing specifically of Beckett’s drama, has also forged a link between the comic and his particular conception of a politicized ethics: Beckett must be played with the most intense humour, taking advantage of the enduring variety of inherited theatrical types. It is only then that the true destination of the comical emerges: neither a symbol nor a metaphysics in disguise, and even less a derision, but rather a powerful love for human obstinacy, for tireless desire, for humanity reduced to its stubbornness and malice. (Badiou 2003, 75) For Badiou, Beckett’s characters represent in and through their comedy a tireless desire that is ethical. In Ethics, Badiou returns persistently to the maxim ‘Keep Going!’ which finds its epitome in the oft-quoted final lines of The Unnamable, ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Beckett 1994, 418). This heroic decision to continue that is the foundation of Badiou’s ethics cuts specifically across a Levinasian ethics of alterity, however. Where Levinas privileges an ethics of difference and distance as sacred, Badiou counters that infinite alterity isn’t ethical, it is simply banal: ‘infinite alterity is quite simply what there is’ (Badiou 2001, 25). Sameness, however, is what ‘comes to be’, what is faithfully worked for and affirmed in the face of the differences which are the terrain of exclusion and ground for the injustice of the relationships between people. Sameness offers the possibility of something universal, of a truth (or, more properly, truths) ‘indifferent to differences . . . ; a truth is the same for all’ (Badiou 2001, 27). An ethics of the same is concrete and situated in

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the world; its demand for fidelity, which Andrew Gibson has described as ‘the determination to think the world according to the principle of what has come to change it, to make it new’ (Gibson 2006, 98), is the demand to face the as yet unknown. Badiou borrows Lacan’s formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis, which orientates itself towards unconscious desire, as a maxim for an ethic of truth that exceeds the present state of the human who has not yet become a subject: ‘ “do not give up on your desire” . . . “do not give up on that on that part of yourself that you do not know” . . .: “Do all you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you” ’ (Badiou 2001, 47).3 For Badiou, ‘all of Beckett’s genius tends towards affirmation’ (Badiou 2003, 41) and thus the clownish refusal to give up on failed action in The Unnamable, or to submit to given orders of reason, knowledge or sense, the refusal to give up on that which currently exceeds it, is an articulation of ethics. Critchley rightly suggests, however, that the most characteristic feature of Beckett’s writing, and indeed his comedy, ‘is not just the decision to continue, but also the acknowledgement that I cannot continue: Beckett’s prose is characterized by an aporetic rhythm of continuity and discontinuity’ (Critchley 2000, 26). Critchley explicitly forces Badiou’s conception of heroism to face the weakness and inability that is the contrary imperative of Beckett’s work: the imperative that articulates Critchley’s own conception of Beckett’s comedy as one of weakness, inauthenticity and the acknowledgement of finitude. Critchley might justifiably argue that Badiou’s maxim of continuation isn’t really comic at all, or only becomes comic in its commerce with the failure and inability that persistently retards its progression. One might note, however, that Badiou himself complicates matters: he writes that it is through ‘interruption, or the maxims of comedy’ that ‘Beckett’s writing attempts, at one and the same time, to speak unrepentantly of the stony ingratitude of the Earth and to isolate, according to its proper density, that which exceeds it’ (Badiou 2003, 44). Although comic interruption is that which breaks with the given world, and is thus on the side of continuation in relation to what will come to change it, it is also implicit that the defeat of expectation in the comic only appears in a world in which this change is still to come. Because comedy marks the ‘stony ingratitude of the Earth’, alongside ‘that which exceeds it’, it may represent an orientation towards the event, but it necessarily pre-exists it. Gibson describes how, for Badiou, Beckett’s work before the Texts for Nothing (c. 1951) demonstrates a commitment (a courage, rather than a fidelity) that appears in an ascetic form; Beckett’s work subtracts itself from established forms of knowledge with grimly comic persistence, and only later opens itself to affirming and even materializing the glimmers of the event (Gibson 2006, 130). Gibson rightly suggests, however, that this rather teleological version of Beckett’s writing career risks occluding the persistent sense that Beckett’s work functions according to more general pulsions of intermittence and oscillation,

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‘disunity and complicating incoherence’ (132), that poststructuralist Beckett criticism has relentlessly illuminated and invoked. Gibson offers a brilliant supplement to Badiou’s account of Beckett because instead of swerving away from the inertia in Beckett’s work towards those moments that assert affirmation more clearly, as Badiou does, he reads this sense of intermittency as part of a pathos of modernity which feels that banal difference is everywhere and that truth and event are rare, although not non-existent. Modernist art such as Beckett’s registers this ironic truth, or perhaps the rareness of truth, which speaks itself in irony. For Gibson, the inability of the characters in The Unnamable, for example, to subtract themselves sufficiently from the given world interrogates that world, but ensures that they have no means to express other than the words of others; they gag on and compulsively bring up the language that ‘a whole college of tyrants’ (Beckett 1994, 312) force down their throats: ‘It is they who dictate this torrent of balls, they who stuffed me full of these groans that choke me’ (338). In Gibson’s terms this plight is ‘quintessentially comic’ (Gibson 2006, 191); nevertheless, for Gibson, irony is not everywhere: affirmation supersedes inability in the end.4 There is progression, of sorts, for stories shat out or vomited forth are not as easy to take back into the system as if they had never been born. Gibson thus suggests that The Unnamable takes us to the threshold of an event, of something new being born which is not just another shape broken from the same mould as what has gone before. But if the ‘pathos of intermittency’ marks the limit of the given world and is melancholic, it nevertheless affirms an orientation towards what comes to render things anew. If comedy could also be thought of as the sign of a materialization of the paucity of that world alongside a raging against it—a gagging in disgust—then Gibson’s vital reading of The Unnamable as ‘intense, aggressive, furious, even violent’ (191) makes sense of the necessary will to mastery, the drive to transform, that impels and compels the comic gagging in the texts. Taking at least some impetus from satire, the Trilogy never flinches from representing the torture of ‘tyrants’, nor of materializing such torture for textual and reading subjects in submitting them to fading comic forms bound only to ‘on’ rather than the enjoyments of the finale. Nevertheless, these comic forms oscillate between a sense of having to bear it and refusing to bear it—of bearing it in a paradoxically furious yet etiolated fashion that refuses to give up on the desire to materialize change. As such, the gag might thus be a way of materializing how it is while opening up a space for how it ought to be.

Tiring desire Steven Connor has recently pitted a paradigm of ‘radical fi nitude’ against particular philosophically inflected readings (including his own) that have

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sought to find in Beckett resources for proposing an often ethically bound logic of endless propagation, of uncertainty, ambiguity and repetition which is never bound by the rule of the one, totality or presence. Connor suggests instead that Beckett remains transfi xed by the possibility of articulating a ‘finitude that, seemingly without let or cease, remains finite’ (Connor 2006, 15). This is not quite a stick of totality with which to beat Levinas’s infinity, for Connor’s suggestion is that the poststructuralist swear-word ‘presence’, with its attributes of ‘permanence, essence, adequacy-to-self’ (Connor 2006, 7) has always been far too susceptible to the contagion of ‘infinitive attributes’ (Connor 2006, 7) to allow it an equivalence with finitude. Radical finitude does seem to bear some comparison to Critchley’s account of a comic finitude, but Connor’s analysis of the near-impossibility of thinking finitude allows a useful prizing open of the degree to which such comedy, which seemingly accepts the limits of the ‘human situation’, can also function as an alibi for a certain infinitizing drive. Not, presumably, that Critchley would deny this, given the title of his latest book—Infinitely Demanding. It is significant to note, though, how the awareness of the ‘limitedness’ of the human condition in the comic paradigm seems simultaneously to be dependent upon an acknowledgement that in seeing things as they are, one might be, momentarily, more than one is, more than one’s material finitude. This is the movement of sublimation in comedy that, for Critchley, offers its lucid consolation (2002, 111). Critchley suggests that a significant part of the comic lies in our nature as ‘eccentric animals’ (Critchley 2002, 43). Defined by a continual failure to coincide with ourselves, we are fi nite and material; but we are also capable of lifting ourselves from that condition sufficiently to see that finitude and its comic incongruity with a mind that is able to register it. It is Freud’s late model of humour in which the superego gently mocks and protects the ego in its fragile finitude, forcing a consoling acknowledgement from the ego of its weakness and inability, that is central to Critchley’s reading of comedy. 5 The man who is being led to the gallows looks up at the sky and says ‘Well, the week’s beginning nicely’ (Freud 1987, 427). In such humour the superego says to the ego, ‘Look here! This is all that this seemingly dangerous world amounts to. Child’s play—the very thing to jest about!’ (Freud 1987, 432–433). As Shane Weller rightly points out, however, where Critchley emphasizes the acknowledgement of finitude, Freud is willing to entertain that such humour is also a ‘rebellious denial of the real’ (Weller 2006, 108). For the gallows are dangerous; this humour offers sublimation, but it is also a lie in relation to death. Even the infinity of the ethical relationship to be found in that which breaks apart and exceeds a singular subjectivity will cease, in this case, with that subject’s last breath: finitude will out. Ethics may well be not giving up on one’s desire; nevertheless, desire will one day give up on us. It is strange that Critchley refuses what Weller identifies as the duplication of a fairly standard self-other relation in this account of the super-ego’s gentle

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mockery of the ego, alongside the implication of a cognitive supremacy of one over the other, that occurs in Freud’s model of humour (Weller 2006, 109). In an instructively analogous occlusion, it might be important to notice that Critchley persistently refuses to acknowledge the rage and desperate desire for mastery so clearly visible in Beckett’s sardonic early work, but that also resounds within the Trilogy. If joking is always implicated within certain sensations of mastery, what makes a joke funny is not just an awareness of fi nitude; it is the cognitive recognition of incongruity. The comic involves the capacity to dissolve finitude sufficiently to see it as a finitude that is registered from the very moment of its temporary supersession. Connor’s Beckettian radical finitude is similarly not simply the thing itself; it is a ‘finitude that, seemingly without let or cease, remains finite’ (Connor 2006, 15; my emphasis), that seeks continually, tirelessly, to encompass and place itself. I think that Connor is right to read everywhere in Beckett’s work something ‘that strives to permit itself the very least remission it can manage from this awareness of always having to live, move and have its being “in such a world . . . on such and such a day”, never in the world in general’ (12). But this exists always with the stubborn awareness of the fact that we also ‘fi nd it impossibly hard to apprehend the limited and fi nite nature of the lives we live every day, the fact that we can only live the life we can live, in such a place, in such a world’ (12). It is this impossibility that cognition, which tricks itself that it is more than matter, indeed that it fi nally matters more than the material, persistently seeks to gainsay: ‘Better still, arrogate to me a mind’, says the Unnamable, as it vaguely hopes to ‘speak of a world of my own, sometimes referred to as the inner, without choking’ (394). But in the Trilogy, notions are always more like motions than anything else, all sweat and spasm, and the idea of a mind ever to be neatly separable from the body is nothing but a joke, a choking interruption of the omnipotent fantasies of cognition. It is indeed as much the hopeful sublimations of the mind as the desublimated body that are comic; it is in the gagging discontinuity between materiality and the idea of its transcendence (which is thinking) that the comic appears. If there is a sense in which Beckett’s work perhaps seeks in the end to get beyond comedy, the torturous sensation that something must be more than itself, then perhaps this makes sense of the fact that as the oeuvre progresses, humour does seem to fade out, even if not necessarily for good.6 For there is no comedy to be found in absolute fi nitude, just as Freud notes that binding on its own could not produce the release of laughing energy; it is only as a felt limit is suddenly and momentarily transgressed that bound energy can be released and experienced as comic pleasure. One might similarly wish to note that it would be hard to imagine jokes in a realm of just sameness; and this is perhaps the reason why Badiou has little sustained interest in Beckett’s comedy except as a clownish orientation towards persistence.

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Badiou reads the Trilogy as a work of radical subtraction from the world as given—a vomited forth realm of banal difference—which offers to clear the way for an event. Gibson suggests that Unnamable’s labours leave it at ‘threshold of what, for Badiou, is historical time, the time of a truth-sequence that begins with the event’; however, in his careful fidelity to Beckett, Gibson insists that ‘it is not Beckett’s concern to take us across that threshold’ (Gibson 2006, 196). In Badiou’s reading, how it is is persistently ceded to how it ought to be because he is articulating a politics: and politics does not come just to interpret the world but to change it. But the comedy of the Trilogy seems more like a marker of how things are in a world perceived according to an impossibly binding fi nitude that the subject can never quite encompass nor exceed. Gibson, who reads Beckett from the space of subtraction rather than from what it portends, sees the vagaries of the enraged, sometimes manic refusal to give up on ‘on’, as part of its refusal of ‘the world dished up’ (Gibson 2006, 189), a violent and angry pitting of text and subject against a powerful inertia. And this is one reason why a comedy of mastery and indeed of violence does inhere in the text (in spite of Critchley’s very proper hopes for an ethical Beckett); the rage of the text to lift itself out of its world always risks the production of ‘a great crackle of laughter, at the sight of his terror and distress . . . To see him flooded with light, then suddenly plunged back in darkness, must strike them as irresistibly funny’ (Beckett 1994, 358). Yet there is also a powerful motivation here, for if the Unnamable ‘has no apparent hope of becoming a subject, it also resists objecthood’ (Gibson 2006, 197), Gibson claims. It both exceeds the given world through thought and remains nailed to it. For Gibson, the pathos of this structure is melancholy and irony; I would note that it is also the basal condition for Beckett’s failing gags, always being played out according to a logic of the punch line, even if the end of the joke, the transcendent topper gag, never arrives. The profound difference between the Trilogy and Badiou’s ethics, however, is that the Unnamable knows that even though this is all just ‘preluding, clearing the throat’, nevertheless, ‘you can’t leave, you’re afraid to leave, it might be worse elsewhere’ (385). Where Badiou believes he knows what an event looks like and can recognize in it the glimmer of a new world, the Unnamable always fears the main act might be nothing other than a violent punch line, a tortured mastery from which no further incongruity could ever wrest itself. Comedy represents a materialization and acknowledgement of the ‘world dished up’, then, or the world repeatedly thrown up; but it also ensures that the text is bound for critique. This world of banal differentiation, of subjects that are never the things themselves but always the regurgitations of others, is indeed the given world of late modernity in at least one clear sense. Molloy knows that ‘if I go on long enough calling that my life I’ll end up believing it. It’s the principle of advertising’ (53), and the discourse of repetition, consumption and circulation in the Trilogy as a whole could indeed be read as a

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parodic mirroring of the fantasies of a world of commodification and capitalist exchange. In the Trilogy, the repetitions of regurgitation that mark out body and text seem to hope to become perfected systems—systems of infi nite circulation as matter is incorporated, expelled or excreted, then reincorporated, in a parody of a perfectly self-sustaining machine. But if capitalism imagines the possibility of absolute exchangeability, unfettered by the material or by use-value, it nevertheless has, as its final aim, the desire to hold up the system of exchange sufficiently, according to its own desires, to extract some surplus value from it. Here, however, the force-fed body resists becoming toilet-trained and docile, resists ultimately the retention which would allow the smooth incorporation of the matter of the world into its digestive system, into itself and the production of fuel and waste; instead, it has been habituated and trained by the application of textual emetics to gag on gobbets of raw material, of inassimilable matter, bringing them up or excreting them in a movement that is both a reproduction of the given world and its fantasies of consumption, and an embodied refusal of the ways in which that given world believes the material can always be possessed and transformed. Such gagging is habit in one sense—the habit of living. Beckett writes in Proust that ‘habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit’ (Beckett 1999, 19). It is, of course, Bergson who reminds us that such mechanical regurgitation is laughable: we laugh when faced with ‘a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find wide-awake adaptability and the living pliablenss of a human being’ (Bergson 25), with the predictability of the machine systems of modernity only compounding the ways in which organic matter finds itself distanced from itself. It is indeed laughable, in one sense, to imagine that all—body, thought, system—will always go on as before; the future, writes Beckett in Proust, ‘lazily considered in anticipation and in the haze of our smug will to live, of our pernicious and uncurable optimism . . . seems exempt from the bitterness and fatality: in store for us, not in store in us’ (Beckett 1999, 15). For that ultimate future of death—fi nitude—remains, as Connor shows Beckett reminding us, finally unassimilable to the projects of the individual: ‘Death has not required us to keep a day free’ (Beckett 1999, 17). Death isn’t waiting for a window in the diary in which to score itself in darkest pencil; the efforts to institute habit, to control the future laid down by the smirking repetitions of advertising, are, in one sense, simply attempts to keep us regular in the cosy belief that the future will remain as it is. ‘Thus I am exhorted, not merely to try the aperient of the Shepherd, but to try it at seven o’clock’ (Beckett 1999, 17), Beckett notes. The gagging of the Trilogy may then be a parody of the fantasies of the given world of habit, desire, consumption, reproduction, but in the end it is laughable because things are never totally regular here—there is an untranscendable materiality that cannot quite be transformed into the subject’s

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projects, despite repetition. This gagging on finitude, this incessant warm-up for a main act that never shows up, may reveal something of the unhomely indigence of how things are; but it also institutes another kind of habit, a habit of persistence, that takes its furious drive from an orientation towards a future which will render such banal circulations finally absurd once and for all. Nevertheless, by placing the matter of word and world in the lumen, in a system habituated to resist complete digestion, the texts hold back from achieving that towards which they find themselves driven. Such gagging thus becomes finally a resistance to being lifted up into either the world of commodified habit and circulation, or the realm of truth; it causes the texts to remain, to use a word from The Unnamable, ‘ephectic’—held back from judgement. ‘Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?’ (293), the Unnamable asks. Taking the matter of word and world into the habituated body certainly removes from the text a sense of obligation to be experienced cognitively by the subject; but the resistance of the material, its grudging refusal to be more than it is for either the world of commodification or philosophy, is nevertheless held against a compulsive sense that things should be different. Unawareness is rounded on by a persistent awareness in a movement that is the very root of the comic. The Trilogy remains humorous because it furiously spits out the given world; but the changed future is, however, only ever a triangulation point on a map that allows the terrain to be measured rather than a summit that is reached. Like Clov at the end of Endgame, the texts are packed and ready for the road, even though we know Clov will probably never leave, although clearly neither can he stay. ‘Let’s drive on now to the end of the joke, we must be nearly there’ (363), says the Unnamable. We’re probably not nearly there; but we’re carrying some indigestible sustenance, some ‘nourishing murk’, for the journey.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5 6

See Rough for Theatre II (Beckett 1986, 276) and Catastrophe (Beckett 1986, 459). Sheehan notes that the obligation to express is figured as an inhuman and mechanical compulsion in the Trilogy (170–174). Critchley also uses Lacan’s articulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis in his theory of humour. See Critchley 1999; Critchley 2007, 69–87. Sheehan similarly notes that the impetus forwards overrides the tendency towards retreat in the Trilogy (173). See Critchley 1999, 223–235; Critchley 2002, 93–111; Critchley 2007, 70–82. This might be aligned with Weller’s striking observation that one is no longer sure if there is anything left to laugh at, or who might have the last laugh, in Beckett’s later work. For Weller, this ‘posthumorous’ work illuminates a condition of indecision that is neither ethical nor unethical but ‘anethical’. By concentrating only on the laughter and smiling that takes place within the earlier

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texts, however, Weller’s account seems to resist analysing the moments where a recognizable humour is affectively produced (111–133).

Works cited Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso. —. 2003. On Beckett. Ed. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. Manchester: Clinamen. Beckett, Samuel. 1976. Watt. London: John Calder. —. 1983. Murphy. London: Picador. —. 1986. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1994. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder. —. 1999. Proust, and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder. Bergson, Henri. 1911. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan. Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. 1993. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohn, Ruby. 1962. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Connor, Steven. 2006. ‘ “On Such and Such a Day . . . In Such a World”: Beckett’s Radical Finitude’. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/finitude/ Critchley, Simon. 1997. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. London: Routledge. —. 1999. ‘Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’. Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity. London: Verso, 217–238. —. 2000. ‘Demanding Approval: On the Ethics of Alain Badiou’. Radical Philosophy 100, 16–27. —. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge. —. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Freud, Sigmund. 1987. ‘Humour’. Art and Literature. Penguin Freud Library 14. Trans. James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 424–433. —. 1991. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Penguin Freud Library 6. Trans. James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gershon, Michael. 1998. The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine. New York: HarperCollins. Gibson, Andrew. 2006. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Leslie. 1990. Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locatelli, Carla. 1990. Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Morreall, John, ed. 1987. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany, NY: SUNY. Salisbury, Laura. 2001. ‘So the Unreasoning Goes: Comic Timing and Trembling in Ill Seen Ill Said’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11, 372–382.

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Salisbury, Laura. 2005. ‘Beside Oneself: Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude’. Parallax 11, 81–92. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1991. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. P Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sheehan, Paul. 2002. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weller, Shane. 2006. Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Index

Note: Beckett’s works are listed separately by title Abbott, H. Porter 96 abstraction aesthetic/literary abstraction 22–4, 29–34 historical abstraction see history mathematical abstraction see mathematics philosophical abstraction 23–8, 32–4, 92, 142, 169–71 act/action 2–4, 16–17, 26, 35, 43, 45–6, 48, 59–66, 71, 76–7, 93, 113–14, 169, 172 Adorno, Theodor 9, 21–2, 27–8, 31–4, 34–5 n, 115, 160 aesthetics ‘aesthetic of resistance’ 68–9, 71–2, 73, 83 n aestheticism 22–3, 29 aesthetics of humour 165–6 modernist/postmodernist aesthetics 33–4, 92, 137, 148, 150–1, 157 Agamben, Giorgio 9, 14, 119, 136 agency see act/action Albright, Daniel 89, 98 alterity 2–3, 6, 8–10, 25–9, 88–90, 92–3, 98–9, 112–15, 165–7, 171, 173–6 Anderson, Benedict 160 n animal/animality 100 n, 135–6, 142–3, 174 anti-Semitism 13, 61, 69, 72, 83 n, see also Jews/Jewishness Aristotle 1–2, 3, 87, 115 Auschwitz 14, 70, 91, 119, see also Holocaust

Badiou, Alain 5–9, 10–11, 18 n, 21–3, 31, 34–5 n, 71–2, 73, 112–14, 171–3, 175–6 Bair, Deirdre 4, 75 Beauvoir, Simone de 74–5, 79–81, 83 n Bergson, Henri 177 Berkeley, George 22 Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit 22–3, 31, 90, 166 Bion, Wilfred 39 Blanchot, Maurice 21, 27, 104, 113 Bloom, Harold 90 Bousquet, René 57, 59, 61, 63, 64 Boxall, Peter 31, 77 Bryden, Mary 89 . . . but the clouds . . . 103 Butler, Judith 26 ‘The Calmative’ 74, 138 camps 57, 63, 69–70, 72–4, 80–1, 83 n, see also Holocaust Camus, Albert 72–4 ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ 114 Cartesian philosophy see Descartes, René Casanova, Pascale 6, 23 Catastrophe 12, 13, 58–9, 64, 73, 96–7, 99, 178 n categorical imperative 2, 5, 114–15, 169–70, see also Kant, Immanuel Cavell, Stanley 21 Cézanne, Paul 41 Chaplin, Charlie 83 n Chrysippus 59 cogito 7–8, 12, 14, 47, 53, 113, see also Descartes, René Cohn, Ruby 76, 87, 95–6, 125, 170

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Index

comedy 6–7, 10, 11, 15–16, 18 n, 87, 94, 165–8, 170–8 ‘commitment, literature of’ 13, 68, 72–4, 75, see also Sartre, Jean-Paul Communism 58, 66, 69, 71–3, 75, 77–82, 83 n Company 88–9, 104, 141, 160 n Connor, Steven 130, 147–8, 149, 159 corporeality see embodiment cosmopolitanism 15, 144, 147–50, see also nation/nationalism Critchley, Simon 21–2, 25–8, 34, 166, 171–2, 174–5, 176, 178 n Cronin, Anthony 88 cruelty 86–100, 108, 110–11, 112, 113 Dante (Dante Alighieri) 46, 87, 89, 109–10 ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ 110 De Man, Paul 25 decision see act/action deconstruction 3, 6–7, 21, 25–8, 34–5 n, 170–1 Deleuze, Gilles 12, 21, 34–5 n, 59, 61–3, 65, 136, 151, 159 Democritus 38, 51, 130 Derrida, Jacques 6, 8, 21–2, 25–8, 34–5 n, 115, 161 n, 170, see also deconstruction Descartes, René 12, 22, 39, 47, 48, see also cogito desire 5, 13–14, 102–3, 107–8, 111–16, 163–5, 167, 169–70, 171–2, 173–8 detachment (as virtue) 42, 48–50, 52, 53, 60 Didier, Christian 57, 59, 61–3, 64 Disjecta 3, 40, 46, 53, 54 n, 82, 110, 115, 125, 137, 152 Donne, John 38, 155 Dream of Fair to Middling Women 15, 69, 103, 104, 109, 151–4, 155, 157 Duthuit, Georges 38, 41, 110 Dutoit, Ulysse, and Leo Bersani 22–3, 31, 90, 166 duty 25–6, 107, 115, see also obligation, responsibility

Eaglestone, Robert 17 n Eagleton, Terry 4, 23 Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates 40 education see training Eh Joe 95, 99 Eleutheria 12, 13, 59, 65–6, 68–85, 157 Ellmann, Richard 144, 147, 149–50 Embers 46–7 embodiment 15, 16, 120, 121, 148, 158–60, 163 and consciousness 43, 47, 52, 138, 175 and language 164–8 and monstrosity 92, 164–5 as state of being 59–60 and violence 96, 98, 111 ‘The End’ 12, 45, 49, 68, 69, 72, 74–5, 76–7, 79–80 Endgame 1, 3, 13, 16–17, 18 n, 21–2, 27, 73, 87, 88, 94–5, 96, 99, 103, 108, 116, 126, 130, 137, 138, 160, 178 ‘Enough’ 8, 141 entropy 14, 86, 100 n, 118–31 ethics of alterity 2–3, 6, 8–10, 25–9, 88–90, 92–3, 98–9, 112–15, 165–7, 171, 173–6 as attainment of happiness 2–3, 8 Badiouian ethics 7–9, 10–11, 22–3, 34–5 n, 112–14, 171–3, 175–6 of bearing witness 119, 130 of deconstruction 25–8, 34–5 n, 170–1 and ethical action see act/action ‘ethical turn’ 2–3, 6, 7–8, 9, 11, 22, 24–30, 33–4 Geulincx’s Ethics 37–53 as habit 1–2, 169–70, 177–8 Levinasian ethics 2–3, 10, 25–8, 35 n, 170–1, 174 and politics 3, 8–9, 11–12, 13, 26–8, 31, 34, 68–9, 71–3, 96–7, 99, 145, 171, 176 Stoic ethics 4, 12, 59–61, 63, 113–14 event in Badiou 8–9, 172–3, 176 in Stoic ethics 59–60, 63 evil 60, 63, 88, 91–2 exile 15, 148–52, 154, 155

Index existentialism 5, 8, 22, 27, 68, 73, 79, 83, 170 expression, Beckett’s theories of 41, 53, 90, 110, 125, 129, 159–60, 164–5, 168–70, 173, 178 n Film 60–1 Fizzles 73 Footfalls 139 formalism 3, 12, 17 n, 24–9, 31–2, 34 Foucault, Michel 8, 93, 119, 131 France complicity of Vichy period 12–13, 57, 63–4, 66, 68, 70 post-war period 12, 57, 61, 63, 66, 68–82 post-war purge of collaborators 61, 74, 75 war with Algeria 58, 66 freedom as free will 45–6, 48 as liberation 13, 65–6, 76–7, 82, 83 n, 99 Freud, Sigmund 43, 87, 103 theory of humour 7, 167, 174–5 ‘From an Abandoned Work’ 2, 12, 48, 51–3, 138, 141 ‘German Diaries’ 41, 69 Geulincx, Arnold 3, 12, 22, 37–53 Ghost Trio 160 n Gibbs, Willard 119, 125–8, 131–2 n Gibson, Andrew 4, 7–9, 11, 16, 18 n, 22–4, 29, 34–5 n, 92–3, 112, 144, 147, 149, 150, 172–3, 176 Gide, André 104, 105 globalization 28, 142–5, 147–60 ‘Gnome’ 39 God 27, 40–3, 45–8, 50, 52–3, 54 n, 91, 95, 128–30 good (concept of) 1–2, 3, 27, 42, 60, 63, 92, 113 Guattari, Félix 12, 59, 61–3, 65, 136 gulags 72, 77, 81, see also camps Haar, Michael 27 habit 1–2, 169–70, 177–8

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Hallward, Peter 5 Happy Days 96, 103 Hardt, Michael 160–1 n Harvey, Lawrence 73, 83 n Havel, Vaclav 58–9, 96 Hegel, G. W. F. 2, 25, 83 n, 93 Heidegger, Martin 14, 24, 27, 135–45 Heraclitus 38 Hill, Leslie 5, 6, 28–31 history apparent absence of historical reference in Beckett’s work 6, 10, 11–12, 13, 22–4, 27–30, 31, 33–4, 40, 91 historical context of Beckett’s work 18 n, 66, 68–83, 91, 153–5, 157–8 Hitler, Adolf 69, 83 n Holocaust 9–10, 13, 61, 70, 72–4, 81, see also Jews/Jewishness Horkheimer, Max 32–4, 35 n, 115 How It Is 3, 7, 12, 14, 30–4, 73, 89, 96, 97, 108, 110–16, 158, 159 humanism Beckett’s anti-humanism 2, 5, 41–2, 48–9, 79, 91–2, 114, 118–19, 170 humanist readings of Beckett 5, 71, 87, 170 the inhuman 118–19, 131, 178 n, see also monstrosity ‘Humanistic Quietism’ 40 humility (as virtue) 12, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 53 humour see comedy ignorance (as virtue) 12, 43, 47, 49, 50, 53 Ill Seen Ill Said 8, 134, 151, 157–60 Imagination Dead Imagine 157, 158, 159 Ireland/Irishness 6, 15, 40–1, 69, 71, 83 n, 144, 147–60 irony 5, 11, 173, 176 Jameson, Fredric 24, 91 Jews/Jewishness 57, 61, 63, 69–75, 80, 82–3 n, see also anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Nazism

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Index

Joyce, James 15, 17 n, 41, 46, 110, 144, 147–62 ‘The Dead’ 148–51, 155–60 Judt, Tony 83 n Juliet, Charles 107 justice 12, 28–31, 33, 61 Kandinsky, Wassily 22 Kant, Immanuel 2, 5, 22, 25–6, 32–4, 34–5 n, 92–3, 114–15, 169 Kearney, Richard 91 Kempis, Thomas à 42 Kenner, Hugh 144, 147 Knowlson, James 4, 41, 58, 73, 80, 103 Kojève, Alexandre 83 n Krapp’s Last Tape 40, 103, 130 Kravchenko, Victor 13, 69, 76–82 Lacan, Jacques 5, 35 n, 114–15, 172, 178 n law moral law 2, 25–6, 34, 35 n, 73, 114–15, 169–70 scientific law 93, 119–22, 131–2 n Leibniz, Gottfried 39, 104, 118–19, 128–30, 131 n Levinas, Emmanuel 2–3, 10, 25–8, 35 n, 170–1, 174 Locatelli, Carla 5, 170 Long Observation of the Ray 118–19, 123–31 The Lost Ones 14, 73, 118–31, 157, 159 love 41, 42, 44, 51, 90–1, 95, 102–3, 106–8, 112–14, 171 Lukács, Gyorgy 17 n Lyotard, Jean-François 14, 118–19, 129–31 MacGreevy, Thomas 40, 41, 42, 44, 54 n, 87, 103, 109, 115, 115, 131 n Malone Dies 29, 31, 88, 113, 136, 143, 158, 164–5, 166, 167, 168 Marx, Karl/Marxism 25, 35 n, 68, 69, 74–5, 76 mathematics 12, 18 n, 22–3, 31–2, 49, 54 n, 120, 124, 127 Mauthner, Fritz 22, 49 Maxwell, James Clark 121–6, 129, 131–2 n

melancholy 9, 11, 18 n, 69, 134, 173, 176 Mercier, Vivian 102–3 Mercier and Camier 46, 74 modernism/modernist art 17–18 n, 23, 144, 147, 149–50, 173, see also aesthetics: modernist/ postmodernist modernity 23–4, 33–4, 106, 151, 170, 173, 176, 177 Molloy 6, 7, 13, 45–6, 47, 72, 88, 93–4, 136–7, 140–2, 143, 165–6, 168, 176 monstrosity 91–3, 94, 98–100 More Pricks Than Kicks 38, 41, 45, 134 Morreall, John 165, 167 Murphy 5, 12, 14, 40, 42–9, 51, 53, 102–3, 137, 154, 155, 157, 158, 167 Nacht und Träume 137 Nadeau, Maurice 111 nation/nationalism 64, 147–60 Nazism 12, 57, 61, 68–70, 72, see also Jews/Jewishness Negri, Antonio 160–1 n ‘neither’ 115, 152–3, 159 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35 n, 93–4, 99, 115 nihilism 10, 17–18 n, 112–13 Nixon, Mark 42, 54 n, 69 Nolan, Emer 144, 147, 149, 150 Nussbaum, Martha 1–2, 4, 17 n obligation 26, 45, 47, 53, 115, 129, 168–70, 178, see also duty, responsibility ‘On le tortura bien’ 95–6, 98 ontology 3, 27, 30, 31, 171 Osborne, Peter 33 other/otherness see alterity passion 60–1, 106–8, 110, 112, 116 pathos 1, 9, 11, 113, 120, 173, 176 Péron, Alfred 73 ‘Philosophy Notes’ 39, 60 Pilling, John 108, 110 Play 5, 102, 103 Poincaré, Henri 119, 125–7, 129, 132 n politics of nation state 147, 151, 153–4, 157

Index political oppression 13, 58–9, 62–4, 66, 70, 73, 82, 96–7, 99 political thought 3, 6, 8–9, 11–12, 26–9, 31, 171, 176 politics of post-war period 13, 68–82 Praz, Mario 108–9 Proust 2, 90, 104, 107, 110–11, 137, 138, 177 Proust, Françoise 11 Proust, Marcel 17 n, 25, 46, 90–1, 95, 104, 107, 111, 137 psychoanalysis 35 n, 43, 114–15, 172, 178 n quietism 12, 39–40, 42 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 23 Racine, Jean 13, 102–8, 110, 112, 114, 115–16 rationalism 12, 39, 43, see also reason reason/rationality 2, 12, 32, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 60, 115, 169–70, 172 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ 40–1 Resistance, French 4, 66 n, 69, 71, 73, 80 responsibility, moral 26–7, 48, 92–3, 171, see also duty, obligation Rilke, Rainer Maria 54 n Rockaby 5 Rough for Radio II 12, 13, 58, 64–5, 88, 98–9 Rough for Theatre II 12, 57–8, 64, 178 n Sade, Marquis de 13–14, 31–3, 35 n, 87–8, 90, 98, 102, 108–12, 114–16 sadism 87–8, 96, 108, 110–12, see also Sade Sartre, Jean-Paul 68, 72–3, 75, 77, 79–81, 82, 83 n, 97–8 Scarry, Elaine 96 Schoenberg, Arnold 22 Schopenhauer, Arthur 111–12 Serres, Michel 136, 142–3 Sheehan, Paul 178 n Simmel, Georg 35 n society/social relations 1, 12, 17 n, 21–34, 59, 61–2

185

solipsism 1, 7–8, 14, 17 n, 25, 90, 112–13 Spinoza, Baruch 22 Stalin/Stalinism 69–70, 73, 77–9, 81 Stirrings Still 114, 137, 153, 158 Stoics/stoic ethics 4, 5, 12, 59–61, 63, 113–14 subject/subjectivity and ethics 2, 8, 26, 28–9, 113–14, 169–70, 171–2 and identity 6, 9–10, 66, 90, 113, 150 and interiority 15–16, 42, 48, 164–5, 168, 175 and subjection 12, 61–3, 66, 88–90, 98, 100 n, 164–5, 176 subject/object relation 3, 40–2, 113–14 suffering 1, 5, 13, 31, 38, 42, 53, 58–9, 68, 72–3, 78, 80, 86–91, 95 Suite et fin see ‘The End’ survival 14, 74, 81, 118–20, 130–1 ‘syntax of weakness’ 7, 16, 53, 166–7, 171–2, 174 Taylorism 81, 83 n testimony see witnessing Texts for Nothing 104, 105, 113–14, 138–9, 172 That Time 144 theology 24, 27, 45, 125 Thomson, William 119, 122 Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit 41, 53, 125, 137, 169 torture 12, 31–2, 58, 64, 66, 77–8, 86–8, 89–91, 95–100, 110–13, 165, 173, 176, see also violence totalitarianism 4, 13, 58, 69, 78, 81 tragedy 1, 87, 170–1 training (use of violence in) 89, 93–5, 111, 113 Trilogy 22, 73, 88, 92, 163–78, see also Malone Dies, Molloy, The Unnamable truth 8–9, 11, 22, 28, 29, 32, 34–5 n, 98, 121, 124–5, 171–3, 176, 178 Uexküll, Jakob von 135–6, 139 Uhlmann, Anthony 43, 46–7, 51–2 The Unnamable 5, 6, 11, 23, 28–9, 79, 88, 113–14, 137, 138, 141, 154–6, 158,

Index

186

164, 165–6, 168–9, 171–2, 173, 175, 176, 178 Valera, Eamon de 83 n violence 3, 7, 9–10, 13, 28, 34, 34–5 n, 63, 66 n, 69–70, 88–9, 93–4, 95–100, 110–11, 113–14, 115, 165, 167, 173, 176, see also cruelty, torture virtue 1–2, see also detachment, humility, ignorance Vitrac, Roger 83 n Waiting for Godot 4, 5, 70–1, 73, 82, 83 n, 96, 99–100, 124, 166 Watt 5, 48, 49–51, 52, 54 n, 124, 163 Weber, Max 35 n Weller, Shane 6, 9–11, 17–18 n, 174–5, 178–9 n What Where 13, 66 n, 97–8, 99 ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ 14, 103, 105, 119, 125, 127, 128, 132 n Wiener, Norbert 118–19, 128 Wilson, Martin 43, 45, 53 n

Windelband, Wilhelm 12, 39, 40, 60 witnessing/testimony 14, 69, 74, 80–1, 95–6, 119–20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 49 Words and Music 103 world creation of worlds 126–8, 137–9, 145, 158–9 as earth 119, 130, 139–42, 155–6 as global/globalised 15, 141–3, 144–5, 147–8, 150–1, 153–60 as Umwelt (Uexküll) 136, 138, 139, 142 and ‘worlding’ (Heidegger) 14–15, 138–9, 142–5 Worstward Ho 5, 8, 21, 104–5, 114, 134, 137, 138, 158 Yeats, W. B. 150 ‘Yellow’ 38, 40 Zeno 59, 126 Žižek, Slavoj 5 Zuidervaart, Lambert 21