The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett [Unabridged] 1443854026, 9781443854023

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The Empty Too

The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett

By

Arthur Broomfield

The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett By Arthur Broomfield This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Arthur Broomfield All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5402-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5402-3

For Assumpta

That voice testing the palate of the void was yours ; —Fiona Sampson

CONTENTS Foreword ................................................................................................... ix The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett .............. 1 Film: Let’s Look at the Text ..................................................................... 13 Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot.................................................. 23 How it is in How It Is ............................................................................... 41 The Worst Word is Best in Worstward Ho ............................................... 73 Bibliography ............................................................................................. 97 Index ......................................................................................................... 99

FOREWORD BENJAMIN KEATINGE SOUTH EAST EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, MACEDONIA

It has been suggested that there are two ways of ‘doing’ Beckett and philosophy. On the one hand, the recent archival turn in Beckett studies has urged an empiricist approach based on Beckett’s exhaustive, autodidactic study of (mainly) Western philosophy in the 1930s as evidenced chiefly in his Philosophy notebooks held at Trinity College Dublin. The leading advocate of this approach, Matthew Feldman, has advanced a major revisionist reading of Beckett’s engagement with philosophy in his 2006 volume, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. More recently, Feldman has been at work as co-editor of Beckett/Philosophy (Sofia University Press, 2012) where a range of contributors have followed Feldman’s ‘falsifiability principle’ in excavating Beckett’s debt to the philosophical tradition. These scholarly works have confirmed what has long been evident, that Beckett was deeply immersed in the world of ideas, but at the same time, it has shown that some corrective readings are necessary as to the scope and sequence of Beckett’s erudition. The alternative approach might be termed the speculative or exploratory approach, one which suggests affinities and confluence of interests even in the absence of hard evidence of inter-textual indebtedness. Much early Beckett criticism, based on Beckett’s presumed allegiance with existentialist thinking, or with theorists of ‘the absurd’, was based on a sense of Beckett’s affinities with various thinkers—Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, E.M. Cioran—but without the benefit of actual, verifiable evidence. Beckett himself, on the other hand, has said: When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what

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Foreword is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess. (Samuel Beckett, interview with Tom Driver, Summer 1961)

We must take Beckett’s claim to not be a philosopher at face value. After all, he also is on record as saying: “I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms”. Nevertheless, there is a slight disingenuousness here, I would suggest. How can we not read Beckett philosophically when his works so conspicuously engage with major philosophical concepts: being, existence, the subject, identity, epistemological questions, ethical questions … the list could continue indefinitely? The whole question of Beckett and philosophy therefore includes a complex network of debts and legacies, not least the strong contemporary tradition of thinking with or alongside Beckett evidenced by such major thinkers as: Alain Badiou, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot and, of course, Jacques Derrida. These latter two thinkers— Blanchot and Derrida—are the major reference points in Dr Arthur Broomfield’s study, The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett. Broomfield is interested in that key Beckettian theme: the self-sufficiency of language and the irreducibility of the word. Of course, a key insight of post-structuralist thinking generally has been the sense that language constitutes and, in a sense, creates ‘the world’ or ‘the real’. When Beckett famously ends his 1950 novel Molloy with the lines: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” he is drawing our attention, in a way seemingly prescient of much poststructuralist thinking, to the textuality of experience. Rather than words representing experience, words create and constitute experience. Language is prior to being. None of this is new in the arena of Beckett studies. Indeed, one of the most curious aspects of the history of Beckett and post-structuralism, is the apparent affinity between Beckett’s literary experiments and the theories advanced by Derrida under the rubric of deconstruction, while neither Beckett nor Derrida are on record as saying anything extensive about each other’s work. This is particularly surprising on the part of the French philosopher who, when asked by Derek Attridge about his lack of response to Beckett, famously said: Beckett is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself very close; but also too close. Precisely because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard. I have perhaps

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avoided him a bit because of this identification. (Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, Routledge, 1992, 60–1).

As numerous critics have suggested, it is because Beckett’s works appear to deconstruct themselves that the architect of deconstruction felt uneasy at his apparent proximity to the Irish writer’s work. Beckett’s novels, in particular, have appeared to many as literary proof of deconstruction as a methodology and critical procedure and several noteworthy critical interventions on Beckett studies have read Beckett alongside or through Derridean deconstruction. It may be further said that more than one Beckettian has felt the same sense of intellectual proximity to Beckett’s writing as articulated by Derrida. One of the many merits of Dr Broomfield’s study is that he combines personal conviction with a good measure of critical objectivity. Without lapsing into jargon, Dr Broomfield offers a wide-ranging analysis of Beckett’s work with particular attention to how Beckett has apparently cast off the very conditions of an older literary tradition—subjectivity, narration, character—so that we are left with the words themselves which refuse to concede and which ‘go on’, as murmurs or traces, long after a speaking subject has left the scene. Broomfield casts a cold eye across the Beckett canon with particular focus of the dilemmas of perceptual experience and linguistic expression in: Film, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, How It Is and Worstward Ho. Although his approach is philosophical, it is neither purely excavatory nor purely speculative; rather, it relies on a kind of empirico-theoretical demonstration of how key aspects of deconstruction are at work in Beckett. Added to this is Dr Broomfield’s personal conviction that Beckett’s writing matters, in a way which few other things do in our postmodern and post-literate world. So what we have is a book written with the enthusiasm of a poet (Broomfield is also a short story writer and published poet) but with the critical rigour of the literary scholar. This is certainly not the first, nor will it be the last book to interrogate the relationship between Beckett’s writing and complex questions of being, perception and language. It is, however, a noteworthy attempt to grapple with these intriguingly elaborate riddles of our time. Benjamin Keatinge, Skopje, November 2013

THE REAL AND THE OTHER FROM PLATO, THROUGH DERRIDA, TO BECKETT Plato’s core thinking on the intelligible versus the sensible, the same and the different, forms the foundation of Beckett’s works. Jacques Derrida takes issue with aspects of Plato’s thinking and directs his focus to the chora through which he seeks to break down the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible in his thesis “Différance” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998). Beckett, through artistic and linguistic application of Plato’s thinking, locates the question of language at the centre of the question of being. The question of being arises from the crisis between that which can be intelligibly deduced and that which is perceived through the senses. To argue that this crisis is evenly matched, so to speak, creates an impasse, erects a barrier to the inquiry into the nature of being. It is a barrier that Samuel Beckett in his important works, from Waiting for Godot (1956) and The Unnamable (1959) on, addresses and overcomes. Beckett fine tunes the relationship so that it is weighted in favour of the intelligible. The intelligible to Beckett is that which, through reasoning and deduction, can be shown to uniquely exist or be the real when all that is perceived through the senses can only be doubted. He moves the thinking on being forward to an emphasis on language. The real to Beckett is language; the empty, pure word that remains after his process of interrogative deduction has reduced the existence of the perceived to doubt. Before going into deeper discussion on the thesis of the real and otherness that runs through Beckett’s works it is necessary to refer to his great precursor, Plato, and that which, in principle, links their thinking. This relevant link in thinking is specifically related to what we call “the real” in Beckett and “the same” in Plato. That which is relevant and central is the leading question Plato (1997) asks (through Timaeus) in Timaeus: “What is that which always is, and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is?” (1234). The former is grasped by understanding, which “always involves a true account” (1254). It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perception: “It comes to be and passes away, but never really is” (1234). Central to that which is grasped by understanding is what Plato calls “the same”; the same is “the same unchanging essence which is

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The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all” (1255). This is the significant point through which we understand the same—it is not material, in the sense that we understand materiality, but invisible and cannot be perceived by the senses at all, yet it is “a thing” (1255), albeit unpresentable to the senses. Plato draws us towards a different dimension through a philosophical approach, while Beckett does so through a combination of the philosophical, the imaginative and the linguistic. In both instances, textual evidence affirms each author’s commitment to their philosophical propositions. The marked distinction between the same, “the unchanging,” on the one hand, and that which is grasped by opinion on the other, “all the things we perceive through our bodily senses” (1254), is explained by Plato. The same is unchanging, but that which is perceived through the senses is “constantly borne along, now coming to be in a certain place and then perishing out of it” (1255); the perceived world is unstable and ever changing, which raises all the questions about the fallibility of the perceived and the perceiver. What is not in doubt, according to Plato, is the impossibility of the perceiver experiencing the same—“it cannot be perceived by the senses at all.” The significance of the relationship of Plato’s thinking on the same and what “we invariably observe becoming different at different times” (1252), the different, to Beckett’s thinking can hardly be overstressed. Importantly, Plato’s “same” and Beckett’s language (the real) are intelligibly deduced while that perceived through the senses never is, remaining an unstable, unprovable perception of our senses, which are themselves unprovable. Alternatively, it could be said that the same to Plato is the real that is haunted by perceptions of the senses; they are a nuisance to it, but “it is the role of understanding to study it” (1255). Plato and Beckett reverse the notion of the other and the same/the real. To both of them the perception of the senses is the other which disturbs the real, where in conventional thinking the other is that which is other than what we perceive, that which upsets the confidence borne of belief in our self-identity. This is the high point of their philosophical agreement. It establishes a definitive link between the thinking of Plato and Beckett. The essential core principle that the other is the unverifiable which is perceived in the empirical world, and being cannot be perceived by the senses, but through understanding remains central to both. Plato defines the same as that “which cannot be perceived by the senses at all.” It is invisible yet is “one thing” (1255). The same to Plato is one thing just as the empty, unpresentable word is a Messianic aspiration for Beckett. The logic of Beckett’s thesis also points to the invisible, unperceivable word as a “thing,” though not material, but very much a

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thing in his imagined dimension, indeed the real. The perceived, on the other hand, according to Plato, “can be perceived by the senses … it has been begotten” (1255), brought into existence by the actions of the corporeal. The perceived is unstable; it comes to be in one place then disappears out of it. Because it is understood by opinion “which involves sense perception” (1255) the perceived is unreliable, and does not have support from independent evidence beyond the perceptions and opinions of the corporeal. On the evidence of his analysis it seems logical for Plato to call what has been deduced through intellectual investigation “the same,” and that which has been arrived at through a combination of sensory perception and opinion “the different,” which appears to draw a clear distinction between them both. But, Plato argues, “we prove unable to draw … these distinctions,” (1255) because there exists a third thing that clouds the possibility of posing a neat argument in favour of the intelligible, and against one in favour of the sensible. Plato argues that this third place “provides a fixed state for all things that come to be” (1255). It is understood through a “bastard reasoning” that does not involve perception. Though things come to be, or into being, from the chora— which can be best understood as a neutral, amorphous something which cannot be destroyed—those things cannot be described definitively as things as such; i.e. since none of these appear to remain the same, “which one of them can one categorically assert … to be some particular thing, this one, and not something else?” (1252). Bastard reasoning is “bastard” because it creates a schism within the legitimate reasoning that understands the same, which is invisible and cannot be perceived by the senses, as the true account. The chora “is itself apprehended by a kind of bastard reasoning” (1255). As part of the make-up of the chora, bastard reasoning does not involve sensory perception, yet it is a kind of bastard offspring that indulges sensory perception, and by so doing betrays its rightful parent, the intelligible, that which reaches a true account through reason. Hence, even though the chora is an amorphous space, an indefinable “something,” it creates a situation where “it takes on a variety of visible aspects” (1255). Therefore, the bastard reasoning element of the chora is forced to identify it. However, the process of identification creates a scenario where it cannot be dismissed even if identified by us in our “dreaming state” (1255). The acknowledgement of the chora challenges Plato’s notion of the same because it takes on a variety of visible aspects which, being visible, are perceptible to the senses. Bastard reasoning has allowed this situation to occur because, it seems, it permits the application of pure reason to that which has been infiltrated by the senses. Heretofore, Plato has argued for a

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The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

clear distinction between the intelligible and the sensible because “the one is not like the other” (1254). However, in the chora the distinct independence of both has been compromised by the intelligible, because of the recognition of something that is hardly even an object of conviction (through bastard reasoning)—and therefore hardly not—and the sensible being the “wet nurse of becoming … [ensures] that it takes on a variety of visible aspects” (1255). The chora is that place or process where invisible being is made available, through the miscalculations of a bastardized reasoning to appropriation by the senses—what Plato calls “becoming.” These core principles in Plato’s thinking form the foundation of Beckett’s thinking; he develops and recreates them artistically and they form the bedrock of his artistic and philosophical vision. Beckett’s thinking exceeds that of the better-known philosophers to date, which may appear to be a sweeping claim. His philosophical thinking is part of his art. His work corrects the apparent miscalculations in their thinking and goes on resolutely in a specific direction from the point where they falter, seemingly driven by what Andrew Gibson calls “a faith in possibility” (2006, 133). For example, we can relate a similarity in Plato’s thought on the same and the other to Beckett’s—Plato’s description of the same as invisible and the impossibility of perceiving it through the senses and Beckett’s silence, and through their common belief that perceptions of the senses are unprovable, and therefore the different, or the other, insofar as Plato’s thinking goes. However, Beckett insists on going on from the impasse in Plato’s thinking and pursues what is possible, that which is so obvious and so ignored—the question of language. We shall return to Beckett in greater detail, but first we must speak of Derrida’s contribution through his method of Deconstruction to the thinking on language and meaning, and to the relationship between the word and the referent, and we will identify the point where he too miscalculates, from which Beckett insists on going on from. Plato’s realizations that a place or space—a chora—cannot be denied, is there, so to speak, and that perceptions of the senses are unstable digressions, steer him towards the discourse on the Forms and away from an intellectual interrogation of language. The questions that expose the unprovability of sensory perceptions, and that prompt an interrogation of language and the real, remained unasked in a fully serious way until the arrival of Derrida and Beckett well over two millennia later. Derrida develops the thinking put forward by Plato in that key passage of Timaeus (1997, 1251–1252) by applying it to his understanding of the relationship between language and perceptions. He continues the intellectual

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interrogation of that which yields to that type of interrogation. Where Plato could be said to see the chora as an intrusion that questions the clarity of his distinction of the intelligible from the sensible, Derrida grasps it as a justification of his thesis that the chora represents that phase where the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible breaks down. Derrida’s thesis “Difference” argues for this breakdown; difference makes the possible impossible, and the impossible possible. Differance is a neologism in the French language, and in it Derrida replaces the second “e” with an “a,” which puts into play the two distinct interpretations that can be taken from differance—the verbs to differ and to defer. Because the replacing of the letter “e” by the letter “a” in the word differance eludes the senses of sight and hearing (in the French pronunciation), it may seem that we are dealing with “an order that no longer refers to sensibility” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 387–8) (the intelligible is also responsible for inserting silent punctuation and spaces in written texts). However, neither is it ideally intelligible, because the written neologism signifies the breakdown of the classical opposition through “a movement of differance between two differences” (387–8) (to differ and to defer). The Platonic distinction between opinion that is perceived through the senses and the intelligible that is arrived at through understanding, cannot be sustained, according to Derrida, because that which resists it, the movement of differance, challenges the certainty of the verb to defer when it is understood as to differ, and vice versa when to differ is understood as to defer also sustains it for the same reason. The play that is inherent between both terms is emphasized in the neologism “one cannot choose one’s favoured interpretation at the expense of the other.” When Derrida says differance or “the trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself” (403), he is, at core, talking about the attempts to represent in language the perceived that is fleeting and unstable, that cannot for sure be stabilized as a “this” or “that” but is in constant play, reflected in the word that seeks to represent it. Derrida holds, according to Caputo, “that presence (or reality) is always the effect of … representation … meaning and reference are always built up … from within the network of codes and assumptions with which we all always already operate” (Caputo 1997, 101). Our acceptance of what is represented through this process as meaning and truth is challenged in differance. This acceptance is granted conditionally, allowing the terms provisional status only but resisting holding them off completely, and is the necessity of agreement on the meaning of words and thus our ability to survive in the existential world. Yet it remains true

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The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

that what we call meaning is no more than our attempt to make sense, through language, of unstable and inconsistent perceptions. We defer naming presence because the present is representable, hence the possibility of the empty, meaningless word that we will discuss later. Rather than the intelligible subordinating the sensible, the breakdown creates an equality of sorts between the two where neither dominates. This is “an order that resists philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and the intelligible” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 387–8); both are an admixture of themselves and the other, and both infiltrate and subvert the other. We might attempt to simplify the complexities of Derrida’s prose by summing up this parity between the intelligible and the sensible like this: the same, which is invisible and cannot be perceived by the senses, infiltrates opinion formed and gathered through the senses, thus rendering it not fully of the senses and questioning the truth value of the opinion. It breaks down the neat side of the opposition that had been thought to be the sensible into a confusion of the sensible and the intelligible (or the same). The sensible may attempt to articulate and represent the same, but it is infiltrating the realm of that which it cannot perceive and purporting to represent the representable (which is in fact the unpresentable), so that neither the sensible or the intelligible is a concept. For sure, the supposed clarity of the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible has been broken down, but has it not been replaced by an aporetic undecidable that, by giving equal status to the sensible and the intelligible, recognizes the reality of the world of perceptions and by so doing restricts exploration of the possibility of the empty word. Derrida advances the thinking on language to a linguistic chora where there is continuous play between language and perception, and resolution is not possible. Nevertheless, differance is located in the play between language and perception in the world which we believe exists. The parity of status mentioned gives the world of perceptions—of “non-being’ for Beckett in Film—an unjustified advantage over the intelligible, because recognition of it as reality creates the inevitable aporia that restricts full exploration of the possibility of language as the real. The effect of that which “resists philosophy’s founding opposition,” that between the intelligible and the sensible, is that which traps Derrida in a prison of his own making—the prison of the undecidable, which inhabits the “philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganizing it … without ever leaving room for a solution” (Derrida 2002, 43). “‘Differance,” he claims, “is even the subversion of every realm” (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, 401). To which we might respond— every realm bar one, the realm of the empty word, for this is where Beckett’s view of being differs from Derrida’s.

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Derrida’s refusal to contemplate a disparity—rather than an opposition—within differance creates a kind of muddled relationship between the word and the perception that puts an onus on the word to translate shifting unstable perceptions into language. The result is the socalled failure of language, by which it may be understood that the limitation of meaning in words, or the unavailability of the appropriate word, fails to clearly or fully represent the perception. To say that language fails when it clearly does not—or cannot—is said and accepted because it is based on the flawed premise that the word and the perception are equal in status when such a proposition is impossible to prove. For Derrida, this failure is concentrated in the fruitless quest to present the referent. “It is a feature of ‘marks’ that they are the signs of something nonpresent” (Miller 2011, 201, 264), and the nonpresent to Derrida is “the irreducibly nonpresent” (264). This, however, is not as it is in Beckett’s pure language beyond relation to the corporeal, it is being beyond language but not beyond the referent. The muddle in which this doubtful premise lands language prevents the exploration of empty language as a something beyond, free of the referent which is always of the perceived. It contains language within the interminable chain of signifiers. It is perceptions, not language, that fail, a point made in Texts for Nothing (Beckett 2010) where the “I” that is language summarizes the conflict with the corporeal “he” on the matter. He thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minutes saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you … He would like it to be my fault that he has no story … (17) Words fail the corporeal “he” because he is trying to “tell his story,” which will necessitate representing perceptions that are outside of language. But the corporal’s failure is the failure to represent, and his speechlessness is borne of that failure, not of the failure of language. His failure is not “my speechlessness,” the speechlessness that is free of the corporeal and of meaning, that will not compromise its freedom by attempting to represent, hence the corporal’s desire to blame the pronoun “I.” “My speechlessness [is] a voice that makes no sound” (18), because it is uncontaminated by association with perceptions. The other to Derrida will always be that which is beyond language, the possibility of non-linguistic existence, rather than that which is beyond meaning, the empty pristine word: “Certainly deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed … (but) to challenge or complicate our

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The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

common assumption about it, does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language” (Kearney 1993, 173). The other to Beckett is the different, non-being, the parasite that is a torment to the real. From a Beckettian standpoint, differance is immersed in a discourse on non-being, the world of perceptions that are received through the senses, and the frustrating task of trying to represent them in language. Beckett’s faith in possibility is thwarted by differance’s claim to make the possible impossible. Derrida’s order that resists philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and the intelligible is challenged throughout the imagined dimension created in Beckett’s works through an insistence that language is the real—to which we can link Plato’s same—albeit the real that is annoyed and tormented by that from which it cannot disassociate itself, that which is perceived through the senses. The impetus of this dimension is towards freeing language from referent, subject, characterization, time and space, and from knowledge of anything outside of language. Some of the most frequently used words and phrases in Beckett’s works are “things,” “nothing,” “matter,” “it,” “that,” “don’t know,” “and,” and “go on.” The verb “to be,” especially in its present tense, is used infrequently and with marked precision and purpose. He narrates “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” (Beckett 1959, 267). Seemingly commonplace terms and phrases are defamiliarized so that their accepted meaning is questioned, e.g. “no matter” in “no matter how it happened” (267), where the focus is switched from the everyday filler in conversation to implicitly asking if there is no matter then how did the word “it” happen? This dimension is located in a moment of decay in the existential world like that in The Unnamable where “it” doesn’t “matter”—“that’s all words” (Beckett 1959, 381)—which the reader finds it almost impossible to go beyond, just as the narrator cannot get beyond the threshold of the story he would like to tell. Because the objects and concepts of the perceived world are never more than perceptions that cannot be conclusively represented in language, they also cannot be dismissed as non-existent. Beckett acknowledges them unenthusiastically, “since none of these appear ever to remain the same” (Plato 1997, 1252). Because he understands perceptions as non-beings that nevertheless co-exist in some kind of parasitical relationship with being, the real, which is language, he is constantly on guard against granting them legitimacy by being seen to acknowledge them as referents, even to the stage of differance which would reduce language to their level of indeterminacy (and thus compromise its possibility of emptiness). The great question that is central to Beckett’s works goes something like this:

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empty language is the real but, annoyingly, is haunted by association to the world perceived by our senses—discuss. This question shares a common origin with the thinking of Plato that sees the same as “invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all” (Plato 1997, 1255) from which Beckett “goes on” from to seeing this invisible, imperceptible as pure, empty, meaningless language that somehow remains beyond the realm of the senses, the “voice that makes no sound because it goes towards none” (Beckett 2010, 18) to explode the aporia in differance: “What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed ? By aporia pure and simple ? … I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means” (1959, 267). Where Derrida is locked into an undecidable, an aporia, because of the parity of status notion that he pushes through differance, Beckett, in an example of what Blanchot calls “neutral speech … (that) is the incessant, the interminable” (Blanchot 2003, 213), breaks free of the aporia by rendering the word aporia meaningless. If Beckett insists that language is the real, and if, to prove his point, he undermines the credulity of character, narrative and narrator, we must ask, as Maurice Blanchot asks, who is speaking in the works of Samuel Beckett? “Who is speaking here, then? Is it the author? But what can this title (The Unnamable) designate, if in any case the one writing is already no longer Beckett but the demand that led him outside of himself” (213) writes Blanchot in his insightful and yet to be surpassed essay on Beckett’s works “Where now? Who now?” (210–217). Blanchot’s noting of the demand that led him outside of himself pulls his understanding of Beckett’s works agonizingly close to seeing—as it is argued here—that for Beckett language is the real, and perceptions are the other. However, that demand, for Blanchot, leads to the empty place “in which the listlessness of an empty speech speaks” (213). It seems for Blanchot that the demand is from an elsewhere, from an other to language—a who or what, maybe— that will create, or be, an empty place in which empty language itself resides. However, this is not a fully satisfying reading of Beckett, for in his works language itself is demanding for itself, and there is no place in which language resides—it is the ultimate, the real. Language is beyond place, the material. We cannot say language is, as to do so is to question and to assert its reality simultaneously. All we can say (is!), after Beckett’s “I say I” (1959, 267), is language say language, or language language. Blanchot, too, is conscious of the disparity seen by Beckett in the crisis between the same and the other, the intelligible and the sensible. Yet he, crucially, misreads Beckett when he says that “the being without being …

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The Real and the Other from Plato, Through Derrida, to Beckett

with great difficulty regains a porous and agonizing I” (Blanchot 2003, 213), for what Blanchot sees as the being without being is for Beckett being (empty language), haunted and tormented by non-being (perceptions), being with non-being. Yet because he sees language not as the real but as subjected to a demand from some force beyond it, Beckett’s thesis goes unacknowledged by Blanchot. The I which is regained or reclaimed in a porous and agonized state is not the I that is the real but is the I of non-being, the perceiver, we might say the deceiver, the corporeal. Blanchot’s misreading of Beckett leads him to assume that there is a who, or a what, that is outside of language, making the demand when, for Beckett, the who is “it,” i.e. language itself demanding of itself. Blanchot asks “What is the void that becomes speech in the open intimacy of the one who disappears into it?” (2003, 210). By so doing he may leave himself open to accusations of ignoring the linguistic, but also, by misreading Beckett, of asking a philosophically related question that cannot be supported with evidence from Beckett’s text. Blanchot’s assumed void is not a void devoid of language, even if it becomes speech, and the questions of language raised throughout Beckett’s works are utterly complex propositions that embrace the philosophical, the imaginative and the linguistic. Through all three they insist on exhaustively addressing the question that is central to Beckett’s works. We need to challenge Blanchot’s assertion that the void becomes speech by arguing that in Beckett’s works the void does not become speech, and that there is not or cannot be a void because the I who speaks in The Unnamable (and his other major works, How It Is, Texts for Nothing, Worstward Ho, etc.) is language itself, the real: “I’m in words, made of words … the place too, the air, the walls the floor, the ceiling, all words … I’m the air, the walls …” (Beckett 1959, 355). The I is in words and made of words, is preceded by words; the place—even the air—is all words, so a void outside of words, of language, is not contemplated because to Beckett originary language is the beginning. “I’m the air, the walls,” and nothing precedes it. Language is the singular truth towards which, Beckett says, we go on. It is the “me who am everything (2010 17) … the voice that makes no sound” (18), language that is neither heard nor spoken because to be so would necessitate the use of the senses, whose existence to Beckett are always in doubt, always non-being (which is not a lapse into negative metaphysics), as we can see in the opening lines to part IV of Texts for Nothing: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had voice, who says this saying its me?” (2010, 17). Here it is language speaking, but speaking through the doubted corporeal, as it must, just as it does when the speaker in The

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Unnamable says “I’m in words” (1959, 355). The frustration of language wanting to speak independently of the corporeal, but at the same time dependent on it, is obvious. Yet the certainty of the real as opposed to the doubted existence of the corporeal, non-being is stressed in “I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body and yet I’m there” (2010, 17). Of equal significance, in relation to Blanchot’s assertion on the void, is what appears to be a spirited riposte to that type of position where language, in response to the corporeal’s feelings, insists: “And where he feels me void of existence it’s of his he would have me void” (2003, 17). The corporeal, believing that all existence perceived through the senses would have empty language (language that makes neither sound nor meaning), stripped the senses definition of existence and condemned it to what s/he believes to be a void. But language’s refutation, “and vice versa” (17), which would have the corporeal stripped of his/her existence, would leave the corporeal existing in the void, and language, stripped of the corporeal and all of the impediments that its sensory perceptions impose on language’s liberty, free, not in the void at all, but as the real. Beckett’s art is built on a philosophical foundation—the question of the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible. He reconstructs Platonic thinking and applies it to the question of language, which he sees at the centre of the question of being. Unlike Derrida, who becomes imprisoned in the parity of status of the undecidable, he pursues the possibility of a real where the intelligible is fine-tuned to outweigh, but never dismiss, the perceptions of the sensible. When we ask who is speaking in the works of Samuel Beckett we are faced with the daunting possibility that language speaks, the possibility in which Beckett entrusts his faith, that language is being; perceptions, the real’s great tormentor, because they can neither be proved to exist, or disproved, are non-being.

FILM: LET’S LOOK AT THE TEXT Beckett’s texts strive to remain faithful to the underlying philosophy that guides them, and this is also the case in the screenplay of Film. For this reason we need to be rigorous in reading what can often appear to be cryptic language lest we rush to apply our philosophy of choice, instead of Beckett’s vision, to the work. Beckett’s choice of language in the screenplay is no less measured or exact than in any of his other works. Therefore, to grasp the full significance of the work it is advisable to study the text of the screenplay in depth. Where Beckett, in his other major works, strives to establish the primacy of language over the unprovability of perceptions, in Film the focus is directed towards proving the unprovability of perception, and is concerned with the question of perception of the external or extraneous world, and self-perception. Language makes one brief appearance in the significant “ssh,” of which more shall be said later. The climate of the film, the screenplay tells us, is “comic and unreal,” which is a strong suggestion of what is to follow: comic, possibly intended to amuse but also, in conjunction with “unreal,” to create a setting that subverts rather than affirms the credulity of the actions in Film. Beckett’s choice of the term “unreal” in the screenplay is significant, as it emphasizes why it is to the screenplay rather than to the film “proper” that this chapter will direct its focus, the obvious reason being to savour Beckett’s choice of language, which in turn reveals his philosophy. The climate may be unreal but the actions in Film proceed in seriousness, for they are the actions of the perceiver trying to make sense of the perceived world from within the perceived world. The world in Film is the world of the perceived and is set in a climate of unreality, but the actions therein are believed to be real to the characters, E and O. So what is going on in Film? Does George Berkeley’s maxim esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived”—act as some kind of philosophical guideline within which Film proceeds, or does Beckett interpret it creatively, even ironically? A little of each seems to be the answer. Beckett is certainly possessed of the relationship of perception to reality, as is Berkeley. But where Berkeley “denies the existence of that which philosophers call matter, or corporeal substance” (Berkeley 1988, 65), Beckett will only go as far as doubting its existence, as we see from part of

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Film: Let’s Look at the Text

another cryptic sentence from the opening page of The Unnamable: “The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak …” (Beckett 1959, 267). Beckett’s philosophy—that language as the real is privileged over the perceptions which are doubted—is clear, but unlike Berkeley he does not deny the existence of “facts” or “things,” or as he says later in that long sentence: “I forget, no matter,” which may be taken as a refutation of Berkeley’s maxim on the non-existence of matter. Rather than guide or inspire, esse est percipi may be taken as an introduction to the theme of Film, which is perception. This chapter will argue that the subject matter of Film is the questioning of perception by itself, i.e. by self-perception. It may be seen as a chapter in Beckett’s philosophical thesis, one that seeks to isolate perception from the real, from language, and to exhaust all the avenues of possibility that could lead to definitive proof of the perceived to be the real. This is argued in spite of the references to the “search of non-being” (Beckett 1986, 323) and that “Self-perception maintains in being” (323) in the screenplay, which would seem to argue that Film is about the search for non-being by being. I do not think that anywhere in his works is Beckett involved in the search for non-being, or in the escape from being (Critchley 2009, 9); he is driven to prove the truth, that empty language is the real, and to break free, to escape from the impediment which makes it impossible to reach, or go on to the truth, it being the actions of the senses of the corporeal that perceive, and whose existence, and therefore whose findings, can never be independently verified. This argument can be sustained through closer scrutiny of the relevant passages in the screenplay. The search is not for non-being, and the passage reads “Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception” (Beckett 1986, 323), which may read as the search of that which cannot be disassociated from being, that from which being cannot extract itself, i.e. the corporeal and its inability to escape the act or process of perceiving. This search of nonbeings in flight from extraneous perception, helped by an eye-patch over his left eye, cannot succeed because he is perception itself, or at least represents the consciousness of perception in the process of rejecting extraneous perception as it moves towards self-perception. He may flee from extraneous perception but this flight heightens his consciousness, thus driving him towards self-perception. If we read the corporeal as that which is part of what is perceived through the senses and is, therefore, non-being, are we not leaving Beckett open to the charge of negative metaphysicist? Surely, the negative of being is non-being, it can be argued? It is indeed, if we look at being and non-

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being as the dominant and subordinate poles of a binary opposition, but that is not the case in the works of Samuel Beckett, and explicitly not so in Film. Non-being is, as has been said, that from which being cannot disassociate itself, that which adheres to being though not being itself. If we look closely at the passage which mentions being we can justify this claim. It states “self-perception is maintained, kept in existence in being,” and therefore a parasite on being, though not of being but separable from being itself. The passage makes it clear that self-perception is not being, it merely maintains, exists in, and depends upon being for its doubted state of existence. The search of non-being is the search of human perception by human perception in its state of rising consciousness; its rejection of things perceived externally leads it to self-perception, which is as far as it can go, as we see at the end where O (object), who represents the process that takes consciousness from extraneous to self-perception, is left redundant and slumps head in hands into his chair. The protagonist has moved from extraneous to self-perception, as the slumped body of O suggests, so the focus is now on self-perception. But self-perception is not a release from perception; quite the opposite, it is an intensification of the process and cannot be otherwise, bringing perception to its deepest level, the point from which it can go no further. That which maintains in being, selfperception, is perception perceiving itself, perceiving perception. It is the non-being parasite in being which, because it is non-being, cannot be, which seems to be stating the obvious. Yet the obvious can present the reader with the considerable problem of coming to terms with Beckett’s proposition—that what we perceive ourselves to be is not being but that which haunts being. The great crisis, the question that runs through Beckett’s key works, also emerges in Film, i.e. language is the real but is haunted and tormented by that which will neither disappear or be proved to exist, that which is perceived by and through the senses. Nowhere else in his works is Beckett’s proposition on the nature of non-being, the “Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception,” explained with such brevity and so coherently. Or so it seems, until we read on to Beckett’s strategy of proceeding “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered or sooner or later?” (1959, 267). The negation comes in the next paragraph: “No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience” (1986, 323), which will completely throw us if we insist on remaining within the realm of concepts and meaning. How, we may ask, can such a cogently expressed philosophical proposition be dismissed as having no truth value, in the next breath, so to speak? Surely it leaves Beckett’s work open to the charge of being absurd? Forensic

16

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

reading of the texts will reveal his philosophy which, in turn, will explain what are often misread as absurd contradictions therein. Beckett’s philosophy, the belief that language is the real that is haunted by perceptions, is inseparable from his texts. His quest is to prove that reality and to distinguish it from perceptions which cannot be either proved or disproved. His definitive instructions that “all extraneous perceptions [be] suppressed (and) self-perception maintains in being,” however, bring the text away from language and relate it to perceptions and concepts “extraneous” to language, i.e. suppressed and self-perceptions. The brusque command affirms, without suggestion of doubt, the reality of perceptions, clearly in defiance of Beckett’s philosophical belief. The affirmation is negated in “No truth value attaches to above” (323), but also, importantly, it is of “merely structural and dramatic convenience” (323), i.e. the temporary nod to the “reality” of perceptions is affirmed merely to facilitate the narrative. Beckett, in The Unnamable, will not go beyond language to tell the narrative. The novel closes with the narrator at “the threshold of my story before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me, if it opens?” (1959, 382), the same door whose existence he doubts “it’s I now at the door, what door” (381). In Film he puts the focus, as has been said, on the incredulity of perceptions; he stresses the distrust of that on which the narrative is built. The emphasis on always-doubted perceptions, however, cannot escape the presence of being. Language is being, language that is “all words, there’s nothing else” (381), though it can never be more than an aspiration, the to come of the unpresentable presence, that is beyond experiencing in the existential world. Beckett’s point that the relationship between the real and the perceived is an imbalance that is weighted in favour of language being the real. We must also remember that Beckett proceeds by affirmations and negations “invalidated as uttered.” That imbalance is revealed to us in a startling way in the phrase “no truth value attached to above” which, rather than being an absurd negation for negation’s sake, releases the previous instruction from what appears to be a unity of word and perception, of signifier and signified. Any supposition that Film is about to embark on some kind of narrative journey involving a struggle between credulous extraneous and self-perceptions is immediately dispelled by the qualification. The door is closed to the possibility that can lead to the unacceptable reification of perceptions. Perceptions do not have a credible future in the works of Samuel Beckett. To continue a narrative involving belief in the existence of that which can be perceived would undermine his philosophy; perceptions must be let wither on the vine so to speak, condemned to the void.

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If Beckett’s negation “no truth value attaches to above” closes the door on proceeding towards a narrative, it opens to an infinitely exciting possibility—the possibility of the real, of language freed from meaning. This is the possibility that Andrew Gibson says “Beckett edges towards” (Gibson 2006, 133). This revelation in the passage—we might call it an event—confronts the notion that Beckett’s text disappears into a void of nothingness. Even Maurice Blanchot’s more enlightened misreading that “the void … becomes speech” (Blanchot 2003 210), claiming that there is a void of nothingness out of which speech “becomes,” is fundamentally at odds with Beckett’s thinking on the void. If language is the real it cannot be located in or “become” from, it merely is, without question (see chapter 5). Beckett’s philosophy is magnificently encapsulated in the passage from Film, to which I here refer. Beckett does not merely affirm and negate, but both affirmations and negations are invalidated as uttered, thus stripping language of association to meaning yet showing it to continue in existence. If we ask what is being affirmed, in the first instance the answer may be the perception of extraneous and self-perceptions, but we must remember that affirmation is simultaneously negated, “invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later” (1959, 267). There is no value in the claim of affirmation of perceptions because the claim of truth that is attached to them has been invalidated, which gives us license to state, categorically, that because we cannot in truth claim that the perceived for certain exists it is not part of being, the real. What then of negations—what, firstly, is being negated? That which is being negated may be the truth value in the affirmation of perception which could suggest that the perceived does not exist. Could this negation be construed as a descent into negative metaphysics? If it were it would imply denial of the existence of the perceived, but that is not what is happening here because the negation is invalidated, as is the affirmation in the first instance. Does this mean, then, that the perceived can now be argued to exist? Not at all. Just as the invalidation of the affirmation undermines the certainty implied therein so does the invalidation of the negation undermine any desire to claim absolute non-existence of the perceived. That which is being affirmed through the affirmations, negations and invalidations is the status of perceptions, which runs through Beckett’s works, that are neither provable nor unprovable, not of being but those which maintain in being. The search of non-being confirms it as non-being. No truth value can be attached to the passage in the screenplay because it is the perceptions of the narrator/director, gathered through the five senses of the corporeal and “uttered sooner or later” (267) through the sense of touch in writing and presumably of speech on the set of the film. As perceptions are of non-

18

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

being they cannot verify any truth, only being can—so why does Beckett include them in his text? Does his “structural and dramatic convenience” fully explain the extent of his art? By going away from the text to the world of perceptions, seemingly without qualification, in the two paragraphs under discussion Beckett could be seen to lapse into a narrative that would verify their reality. Because Film is primarily involved in showing that perceptions are nonbeing they need to be shown to be incapable of going on, as language can, interminably; they remain stuck in some kind of aporetic limbo; the highest state they can reach is not an understanding of reality but perception of the self by the self, perception of the senses by the perceiving senses. This inevitably calls into question the relationship between language and perceptions; the reality status of both extraneous and self-perceptions are re-presented in words in the screenplay of Film. If we accept Beckett’s thesis that the existence of perceptions can neither be proved nor disproved then we need to ask what precisely—and can we actually say precisely?—does the language represent? Is the word represent a misnomer? Can something that is not a clear stable presence be re-presented, or even presented and vested with what we call meaning, in any instance? For Beckett the answer is “no” to all of the above questions. No truth value attaches, not only to the possibility of the being of perceptions but also to the claim to mean the language that purports to represent them. The structural process in the passage, when put under scrutiny, is shown to de-structure the structure (which is more than deconstruction—deconstruction implies a narrative in the perceived world outside of the text, which the text subverts). The truth value of the perceptions is invalidated; any and all claims of their non-being, or of extraneous perceptions or self-perception’s inescapability, are relieved of a relationship to truth, or so it could seem if we did not continue to apply, as we must, Beckett’s prescribed rule of proceeding “by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” to the rider of the screenplay’s direction. When we do (apply it), the implied meaning in the rider itself is diffused. The stern rebuke of any claim to truth in the previous paragraphs is now directed to itself. The truth value of an edict that purports to affirm truth value is itself negated and both are invalidated as the edict is uttered. The relationship between language and perception is shown to be tenuous. Language cannot truthfully represent perception that is in such a state of confusion. We need to ask whether this means there is no truth per se. First, we must look more closely at what is happening in the breakdown of the assumption of re-presentation in the relationship between language and perception. That which is perceived by the senses of the corporeal,

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because it is confusion in flux, cannot be frozen in a singular stable, eternal entity which a single word, or series of words, will absolutely represent. We see this is in Film where extraneous perception is visible as unreal—the cat is bigger than the dog; God’s image is represented then destroyed by O; he covers the mirror with a rug; the rug falls from the mirror, and so on. The question of representation is central to Beckett’s thesis—perceptions cannot be accurately represented in language. Beckett’s affirmation, negation and invalidation leaves perceptions in a liminal space that is not being, but neither is it not non-being. Therefore, truth value equal to the truth value of empty language cannot be attached to perceptions and hence to the attempts to represent them in meaningful language, the process of which necessitates an ever-changing interpretation of the language used to capture the ever-changing perception. The status, therefore, of perceptions is unequal to that of language as the real, and it can neither be proved to be or not to be. Because it cannot be proved to be, it merely maintains in being parasitically, and through its refusal to go away is a tormenter of being. What, then, of the status of language to which it is related through some kind of crisis from which Beckett would appear to want to release, and free, language? The crisis between language and perceptions that runs through Beckett’s works is not a dialectical opposition where binary opposites fight for control, where the winner triumphs and the loser is subordinated, as in a battle where language is proclaimed to be the real and perceptions are dismissed as the non-real, or non-being, and hence excluded from the discourse. Nor is it an equal contest of the kind Derrida argues between the intelligible and the sensible that ends as some kind of stalemate in the undecidable, already discussed in chapter one. The screenplay direction, and the rider, by exhaustively and forensically casting doubt on the existence of the perceived referents that are outside language, but that language purports to represent, tilts and weights the balance towards an imbalance that favours language as being. This is achieved, as we have seen, through an emphasis on the status of perceptions and an insistence that language cannot truthfully represent them. When the confusion of unstable perceptions is found to be incapable of lasting and accurate representation, thus affirming their doubted status, and confirming Beckett’s claim that no truth value can be attached to representation, when the assumption that words “mean” has been shattered, and the link between word and “thing” has been seen to be no more than an agreed convention through which we attempt to make sense of the world, we are still left with language. Language cannot be doubted away; as perceptions, under scrutiny, fall into the liminal space we call

20

Film: Let’s Look at the Text

doubt from which they cannot break free; as the gap in representation between the word and the perception widens the actuality of the imbalance between the intelligible and the sensible becomes apparent. There can be no truth value to language that attempts to fix meaning, to freeze blurring, shifting perceptions within the parameters of give words. However, the possibility of there being truth in the claim that language is being, the real, gains strength as the impossibility of proving, without doubt, the existence of perceptions becomes evident. There can be no truth value to the screenplay direction, or to the rider that pronounces it, because both statements purport to know what cannot, for sure, be known; i.e. that language can represent that which is true, and that which is not true. The crisis in Beckett’s works is not centred on the undecidable, it is in the imbalance from which, theoretically, it may be possible to “go on” to prove that language is the real. In the actual film of Film, the only spoken word to break the silence is the “sssh” of part 1. The “sssh” itself breaks the silence when the woman of the elderly couple is herself checking her companion as he is about to speak. The inclusion of “sssh” is the exception that proves the rule; it draws attention to the absence of any other language in the film as it isolates perceptions to their fate in a world without words. Their inevitable fate in such a world is to collapse unresolved on themselves, as O and E do at the end. The collapse demonstrates the impossibility, even in the highest state of perception-self-perception, of going beyond or making sense of, or proving the existence or non-existence of the perceived. Self-perception is perceiving itself, and that is as far as perception can go; all perception breaks down, cannot escape from or go beyond perception. Beckett, in most of his works, tries to prove the reality of language by divorcing it from the unprovable perception. In the film production of Film, however, he reverses this process to prove the same point. Perception isolated from language is irresolvable, and language is excluded from the production just as in other Beckett works perception is reduced towards irrelevancy. In Film, perception is remorselessly scrutinized until its inevitable collapse proves the point of the exercise. Perceptions cannot be independently verified from outside, hence the “sssh” of part 1 that prevents the intervention of explanatory or discursive language. The search of non-being in the film breaks down when it collapses into that which is inescapable—the realization that the “pursuing perceiver is not extraneous but self” (Beckett 1986, 323). The film isolates perception to prove that it is “unreal” (323). While Beckett’s pursuit of non-being may appear to reach a smug finality in the film version, it is to

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the text of Film we should turn if we are to avoid falling into the fallacious trap that sees Beckett’s thesis as pessimistic, or worse nihilistic. O and E’s inevitable collapse marks the impossibility of making sense of the perceived world; the film comes to an end with O (and E) sitting in the rocking chair. The final direction tells us “[h]old it as the rocking dies down,” which we could interpret as the characters’ acceptance of the state of not knowing and their resignation to it, which more or less sums up Beckett’s view of the existential world. To see Film only as the produced film and to ignore Beckett’s text inevitably leads to the drawing of such a conclusion. The release from this gloomy interpretation comes through the realization that the text opens our understanding to the consideration that there may be a reality beyond the non-being that is not evident as such in the film production. The text goes on to the possibility of the world of the real towards which even corrupted language, through its insistence to rid itself of its tormenter, will bring us.

WEIGHING THE WAIT IN WAITING FOR GODOT Throughout his major works Beckett creates a fictional dimension that is at a remove from the existential world as it is commonly perceived. That perception, that sees language as the appropriate tool through which to represent the things of that world, and the concepts, thoughts and feelings experienced through it, presupposes the primacy of perceptions over language; language is a means through which the world can be interpreted, made sense of, and is secondary to perceptions, according to this understanding of the question of being. Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and architect of deconstruction, realigned the relationship between language and perceptions, the intelligible and the sensible, through his thesis difference, locating language and perceptions within a relationship of equality where neither can establish dominance. Within this biphase each is cross-contaminated by the other. At the core of Beckett’s art is the insistence that language is much more than a mere tool whose function is to represent, or even that it shares an equal status with perceptions. Language to Beckett is being, the real. “Art,” says Leslie Hill, translating Alain Badiou, “is a way of thinking whose works are the real” (Oppenheim 2004, 82), not merely the effect of the real. For Beckett the aspiration is to go through the stage where words are disconnected from meaning and referent, the stage of empty language where even the definite article is freed of referent—“The empty too” (Beckett 2006 480)—to the purity of disembodied language sought by Vladimir and Estragon in the closing lines of Waiting for Godot (Beckett 1956). The significance of Beckett’s fictional dimension is that in it the relationship between perceptions and language is realigned and weighted in favour of language. The validity of perceptions is challenged to the degree where they, aporetically, can neither be proved to exist or to not exist, while language can disengage from meaning and prove its reality beyond dependence on a referent, thus establishing its primacy over perceptions, which, however, refuse to go away. In Waiting for Godot (Beckett 1956), Beckett’s outstanding portrayal of this created dimension of perceived existence is shown to be unimportant. Perceptions are unstable; nothing can be done and everything is unknowable bar the unknowableness of the unknowable. Interpreted like this, Godot would surely be a depressing experience, but the point made throughout Beckett’s works is that perceptions belong to

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Weighing the Wait in Waiting for Godot

the realm of non-being. Being is “all words … all words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381), so all that is not pure words is excluded from being. The excluded would cover any distortions or contamination of language that would arise from interventions of the corporeal—speaking, writing and thinking. Words are reduced to “allness” through stripping them of that which is not pure, or all words. It is not true that nothing happens in Godot. Nothing much happens in the existential world of non-being but much happens in the realm of the real where language is forensically pruned and cleansed of all possible association with perceptions. “Beckett’s lesson,” for Badiou, “is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage” (Oppenheim 2004, 81), pre-requisites not merely in the creation of exceptional prose, but, ultimately, in engagement with the question of being, for Beckett’s texts consist of a “stenography of the question of being” (82). Beckett’s realignment of the perceived relationship of language to perceptions creates a dimension that makes it possible for him to express that philosophy through his art, and by so doing show their mutual interdependence. If How It Is can be read as drama masquerading as prose, then Waiting for Godot, it can be argued, is prose masquerading as drama. Even though it is laid out in dramatic form and its countless productions have, like Sir Thomas Beecham’s cello, “given pleasure to thousands,” the subtlety of the philosophical and linguistic implications of the text is of such importance that their layered nuances can hardly be fully grasped by a theatre audience out for a night’s entertainment. It is a measure of the greatness of the work that it can appeal to those whose experience of the text is necessarily fleeting and subject to mediation through a particular interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to focus on the linguistic and philosophical import of Godot through forensic reading of the words on the page rather than through their interpretation by actors on the stage. Ideally, the reader of Godot should begin on the last page where, in the final lines, Vladimir says “Well shall we go?”, to which Estragon replies “Yes, let’s go.” The stage directions tell us [They do not move]. So who are the we and the us who decide to move and who are they who do not move? Are they not the embodied figures of the two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who are speaking; are they not assuredly the human presence, seen on stage, or drawn in the text? To go and yet remain in situ would contribute to the common accusation levelled at Godot—that it is of the Theatre of the Absurd, a misconception of the play, as is the common assumption that the duo are tramps. To be confronted with this reality is to bring us to the core of the question that drives Beckett’s major works, namely that language is the real but how can it free itself from that which

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haunts it—perceptions that cannot be proved to exist? The question is addressed in the opening lines of Act 1 when Vladimir, turning to Estragon, says “so there you are again,” to be met with the response “Am I?” (Beckett 1959, 1). We could link these lines to the closing lines of Act 2 and claim that Estragon has arrived at the agreed destination (where he is awaited by Vladimir). If we ask who is speaking, who is the “I” in “Am I?”, we must then ask with renewed interest who are the we and the us in “shall we go” and “let’s go” in Act 2 (author’s italics) (87). And we may also note that Vladimir says “there you are” (authors italics). We could say that these references all point to a disintegration of the unified self— Estragon is not sure if he is there, or of how much of him is there; the duo make the decision to go but the body remains. So what goes and, even more importantly, to where? If we first look at the imagined world of Waiting for Godot we might better understand the duo’s necessity of considering going on to some place better. That world looks like a post- apocalyptic site on the verge of collapse. The two characters are dependent on scraps of food, and a tree provides shelter. Time and space mean little to Vladimir and Estragon. Yet the post-apocalyptic world they inhabit is their world, and it is not shared by others. Rather than represent some kind of post-apocalypse devastation their world represents a heightened stage of linguistic consciousness shared by only the duo. Pozzo and Lucky and the two boys merely enter it temporarily. The assumed reality of the commonly perceived world is reduced to indefinable perceptions. The tree may be a willow, a bush or a shrub (6), and Saturday may be Sunday or Monday or Friday (7). The view we get of the physical world is that it is indeterminate, and important only insofar as Vladimir and Estragon cannot escape from it. Its value belongs to the nuisance category and, because no truth can be established in or from it, it should not be the focus for deep examination. Yet this is a view not shared by the world outside of the duo. Pozzo owns land and seems certain of the importance conferred by a name: “Does that name mean nothing to you?” (15). He is confident that the clear instructions he barks to the hopeless Lucky will be obeyed—as they are. “Up hog!” “Back.” “Stop!” “Turn” (14). The “they” who beat Estragon (presumably) grow the rations of turnips and carrots upon which the duo survive. Rather than being merely some kind of representation of the physical world approaching its end, the view is a representation of the stage of consciousness reached by Vladimir and Estragon. Their minimal interest, even annoyance, with the trappings of the world, and their desire to go on from it to something else, are unfavourably contrasted to their awareness of language. The crisis between the perceived world and the world of

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language, which is the central question that defines all of Beckett’s important works, defines Godot, and it is this crisis that is announced in Vladimir’s lines “There you are again” and in Estragon’s response “Am I?” that begins the drama. The consciousness reflected in Estragon’s “Am I” is essentially his awareness that empty language divested of all association to referent or body is the real; language alone, for certain, exists, but cannot be presented or perceived; for that to happen would necessitate the assistance of the senses which cannot be proved to exist. Estragon’s “Am I” therefore raises and challenges all assumptions to I’s identity as it questions the existence of place, while establishing the existence, in the final analysis, of language as spoken by the I. To whom, then, or to what, does Vladimir speak when he says “There you are again?” Is it merely the corporeal Estragon who, the text could suggest, spent the night in a ditch? But if this is the case, why does Estragon raise the conversation from the banal to the philosophical? If we insist that almost every allusion in Godot is in question we can look into “Am I?” from a wider perspective, remembering that Beckett has said “[a]rt has always been this-pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric” (Devlin 1938, 289). If Vladimir can recognize Estragon we can wonder are they both now on the same plane of consciousness? Is it a case of language speaking to language (bearing in mind the closing lines of Act 2), but if this is so why Vladimir’s “again,” seeing that they had both agreed to “go,” arguably to the level of pure language, as this would have been the first time the “again” would rule out that possibility? The “again” may say that Estragon is perceived in the location “there,” that is known to both of them; it is a location of consciousness, from which they aspire to escape to pure language but are held back by the perceptions experienced through their senses. So when Estragon asks “Am I?” he is reflecting awareness of the level of his consciousness. He is not merely asking “am I the unified ‘one’,” or even “do I exist?”, though he may be asking these questions as part of Beckett’s insistent interrogation of the sensible, none of which can be conclusively answered as part of his scheme is to isolate the real by disconnecting it from the doubts that compromise it. Estragon can only respond to Vladimir by questioning all of the inferences he draws from the question, save one. If Vladimir is asking “are you, language, ‘there’?”, Estragon’s reply, that questions all other possibilities at bottom because it responds in language that borders on the unreadable, affirms the possibility of empty language, and its existence as such. But Estragon, or rather the I who is language, can go no further than to ask “Am I?” To go further would be to present language, which can only be done in the existential world through

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employing, and thus colluding with, the assistance of the senses. The I cannot say “I am language,” but by asking in language “Am I” the I proves that when all else is questioned—even, or especially, the sense and meaning of I’s own question—divorced from links to a given referent and bordering on the unreadable, language is still seen to exist. We hear a lot about going beyond language, and the failure of language, but for Beckett language is as far as we can go. We go on towards unpresentable language through insistent interrogation of that which distracts from that purpose —perceptions of things which can never be more or less than doubted. “And things, what is the correct attitude to adopt towards things? And to begin with, are they necessary?” (Beckett 1959, 267). Beckett certainly insists that we go beyond meaning, which is an entirely different matter. Meaning is created by marrying the word to the perception, the signifier to the signified, thus implying an equality of status in the relationship of that which exists (the word) and that which never exceeds the level of doubt (the perception), where a definite inequality exists (the weight of certainty being on the side of the word). As we see in Estragon’s “Am I?”, the assumption that language fails, or that it can fail, is another common assumption that needs to be confronted. Beckett argues that empty language is compromised through its association with a perceived referent or signified that reduces it to an agreed meaning based on the flawed belief that the signified exists, for sure. If we divorce language from that association through proving that perceptions, that are in continuous flux, are what fail, we will show that language, freed from that association and the meaning implied therefrom, will continue, will “go on” through meanings towards unreadability, will never disappear and hence cannot fail. The so-called “failure of language” is a term applied within the existential world by those who find difficulty in ridding themselves of the addiction of metaphysical certainties. Importantly also, and a consequence of the misunderstood nature of language that sees it as capable of failing, is the erroneous claim that words are on a so-called “chain of signifiers,” that language is involved in some kind of struggle to find the right word to match a perception that, it is believed, can be represented in language. To argue along these lines is to persist in the quest to make sense of the existential world, to insist that “stable” perceptions can be accurately represented in language, or, if they cannot, it is because language has failed, where “all that can be said is what is missaid” (Oppenheim 2004 81). “Missaying, however, is not a failure of language” (Ibid.), it is what occurs when one acknowledges that the necessary function of trying to apply meaning to unstable perceptions through language is a violation of the real. Beckett, as we will see when

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we study his handling of the various perceptions of the perception that is the “character” Godot, reverses the thinking that sees the signifier/word on the chain, and shows that in its essence the word is stable and that it is the signified/perception that fails, insofar as it cannot be shown to be fixed, or a thing, and it, not the word, is on the chain. In Beckett’s created dimension the impetus is to disconnect from the assumption of referent, to reject missaying, and to go on towards unsaying, towards empty language—“Unsaid then better worse” (Beckett 2006, 480). Godot may not overtly tend towards unreadability in the way that other Beckett works are said to, but it still has the capacity to be misinterpreted through the reader’s desire to relate the text to referent, to find “meaning” in a work that is concerned with language per se, and that repudiates the notion of meaning. The process establishes an increment on the journey to the truth that language can exist in its own right by talking about itself in grammatically and syntactically logical sentences (as we see in How It Is). It can divorce itself from the referent and still make sense as it strives to go on towards unreadability. It is the “responsibility of the critic not to reduce writing to the values of the already known, but to affirm the text in its paradoxical refusal to allow reading to take place” (Oppenheim 2004, 74). The famous, often repeated criticism of Waiting For Godot is that it is a play in which nothing happens—twice. And for those who are expecting great dramatic conflicts or a gripping tragedy Godot is not the play to see. In reply to Vladimir’s question (about Godot’s occupation), Boy responds “He does nothing, sir” (Beckett 1959, 84). The things that can happen in a play that is firmly located in the existential world are of little significance to our understanding of Beckett’s great play because it is not situated in that world, but rather is located in an alternative dimension. In that postcathartic world, consciousness has moved on towards a heightened awareness of being. From Estragon’s opening line “Nothing to be done” (1), the repetitions of “I don’t know,” to Pozzo’s incapacity to remove the trespassers, Vladimir and Estragon, from his land (17), doing, and owning, and knowing things and about things are only important because their unimportance is stressed, as is the uncertainty of time and place in the opening stage direction [A country road. A tree. Evening] (1), and throughout the drama. The realigned dimension, where the subordination of worldly trappings creates space within which the duo can philosophize on the primacy of language, is of fundamental significance as it accommodates the momentum of the discourse. The main characters are disinterested in conflict, from which drama has been, heretofore, made.

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If we can define catharsis as the purging of emotional tension through art, we can see that Vladimir and Estragon inhabit a zone in which the necessities of the corporeal—food, shelter and clothing—are minimal basics. Estragon’s disinterest in the existential suggests Beckett’s lack of credulity in things of the world; the ditch (where Estragon spent the night) is merely “a ditch,” unqualified by any expression that might hint of discomfort. To “A ditch! Where?”, Estragon responds “Over there.” Yet the commonplace language and lazy assumptions, when negated and invalidated as uttered, serve as philosophical discourse, as the stage direction tells us [Without gesture] (1). “Without gesture” dislocates Estragon’s response from a presumed reference to a physical location— surely he would have gestured if it were—and moves it on to the realm of philosophical observation “there.” The assumption that one can ask with certainty of a given location in the world is put in question even before the given location is addressed. It recalls the opening line of The Unnamable: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning” (Beckett 1959, 267). The notion that we automatically accept the conventional use of “where” as a question seems, on an early reading, according to Estragon “over.” Its status as a question needs to be challenged; the implication of question in the word needs to be removed because the concept of question itself cannot be affirmed. “Where,” therefore, needs to be unquestioned, to be divested of the meaning implied in the word/question. But it is never that simple in Beckett. “Where” could be “over” if Estragon’s response ended with “over”; Beckett could then well be accused of negative metaphysics. Estragon cannot respond to the seemingly straightforward question “where?” because to do so would privilege the assumption of concept over the essence of Beckett’s understanding of language. He cannot go unconditionally beyond language because the certainty of the “existence” of language is continually haunted by the possibility of the existence of things, just as Godot’s existence is supposed, but never proved, to be beyond doubt. Because of this haunting, Estragon cannot unequivocally say “over” and he must destabilize the certainty implied in the term, which he does by saying “over there.” Now the apparently informative reply to a query that seems obvious and direct has taken on the most profound philosophical and linguistic questions. It will not dismiss the concept of question implied in “where,” and so retreat into pure language, yet by acknowledging the haunting of the word by the alwaysdoubted but never dismissible possibility of the existence of thing, or truth, or concept, it prioritizes the claim of language, the word, to be the real over the doubted concept and thing. Estragon’s use of “there” after “over” dispels any possible charge of negative metaphysics. “Where” may be

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“over” indeed, but if it is “over-there” the finality stressed in “over” is irrevocably weakened by “there,” which as we see in Beckett’s text is not qualified by any punctuation. The reader (and the actor) is left to put his/her emphasis on it, which in turn will leave him/her open to the charge of appropriating the word. This, of course, is what an actor must do, which is not a fully satisfactory way of interpreting Beckett’s works which are so arranged that they quarrel with any singular interpretation. This seems clear in “over there”—can it be “over there” as in “the ditch is over there,” “over-there!” as in “it is over, so there,” or the unqualified “over there,” which, while open to numerous interpretations, significantly invokes the word “there”? That possibility, among others, secures the position of concept as a doubted phenomenon, one that can neither assert itself or get off the stage, so to speak, one that has the power to cause annoyance to the claim made that the word is the real. For if, in the anodyne response from Estragon, language is guided (because of the absence of gesture, and the lack of punctuation which would indicate emphasis) towards meaninglessness, it at least is dispersed across a number of interpretations and cannot be said to settle on any one. The juxtaposition of the worldly to the primacy of language in Beckett’s dimension accommodates an interpretation of Vladimir’s outburst that affirms his philosophical approach: “Vladimir: When I think of it … all those years … but for me … where would you be …? [Decisively]: you’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it” (1–2). Vladimir is commending, and taking credit for, Estragon’s raised level of consciousness; he has rescued Estragon from the wholly corporeal, from being—not dead, for death is not mentioned—a mere physical manifestation. The word is in perpetual danger of becoming flesh. The outburst may have been triggered by Estragon’s possible reference to the Platonic “same” (discussed in chapter one). “The same? I don’t know” (1), that which, like unpresentable language, “cannot be perceived by the senses at all” (Plato 1997, 1255), and so cannot be known by Estragon. Vladimir acknowledges Estragon’s elevation by raising the level of the conversation to an affirmation of language itself through discussion of one of Beckett’s key words—the pronoun “it.” The narrator in The Unnamable says “it can only be I, speaking thus” (Beckett 1959, 320), i.e. the pronoun “it” is not replacing a noun, for there is no obvious link to a given noun in Vladimir’s remark; “when I think of it” is self-referential, it stands unconnected with any influence beyond itself. “It” goes as far as is possible, within the existential world, to being the real, and “it” is the I that is empty language, speaking. It represents the unpresentable, pure language which, because it

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is beyond the break in continuity, cannot be perceived by the senses. Yet the unpresentable is the only logical next stage for “it.” The unpresentable, pure language unrelated to and uncontaminated by the senses, is the next stage of “it” in the going on. That is the conclusion drawn by Vladimir when he pronounces “no doubt about it.” We see that much is already happening in Waiting for Godot. The foundations of a perceived new vision of reality are being laid, and the awesome realization that the real cannot be found in a physical world whose actual existence is in perpetual doubt is being revealed. Beckett’s relentless inquiry into the nature of being is that which, this author is convinced, leads him to the phase of investigation which proves that language is the real but that its pure state is beyond the reach of the corporeal. All we can do is “go on” towards it, in response to the demand of language. It is this “clash with doubt” (Blanchot 2003, 108) that is the stuff of all of Beckett’s major works; the clash between his intelligibly reached conviction that language is the real but is haunted and tormented by the doubted perceptions of the senses which will not go away. It is a clash between the linguistic I, the I that is language “the empty place in which the listlessness of an empty speech speaks” (Blanchot 2003, 13), and all that is perceived through the senses by the corporeal. So we see already, in the opening lines of Act 1 being is put into question, the relationship of language to perception is put under scrutiny— which results in the establishment of the primacy of the former over the latter—and the myth of Godot being comic and absurd, at its highest level, is exploded. Most significantly, from all points of view, the question of who or what is speaking is stressed almost from the opening lines where Estragon replies “Am I?” In fact, Godot is a play in which much happens both in and between the two acts. Far from being absurd, that which happens is, typical of Beckett’s insistence that language is the final arbiter, subtle, incisive and demanding of the forensic approach. Indeed, as Leslie Hill remarks, “at the heart of Beckett’s studies remains an unrelenting demand for philosophical explanation which by its nature is impossible to satisfy” (Oppenheim 2004, 82). That demand for philosophical explanation raised by Leslie Hill draws attention to questions addressed by Beckett. If language is the real that is haunted by perceptions whose existence can neither be proved nor denied, can the existence of language as the real be conclusively proved? In this sense, the demand for philosophical explanation cannot be fully satisfied if we only treat the impossibility of reaching originary language and the sustainability of doubt within perceptions equally. Beckett, however, does

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not treat the two equally. Rather than the doubt of perceptions holding back the possibility of going on to pure language, in his work the balance of probability is weighted in favour of language being the real. There is not an aporia in this crisis between language and perception, and it is not a question of “‘Differance’ (producing) what it forbids, (making) possible the very thing it makes impossible” (Derrida 1974, 143), i.e. the representation of perception produced by language forbidding the deeper exploration of language as the real, because language is primary to perception. Language will always forbid authentication of the concepts it produces by virtue of the possibility of its reduction to meaninglessness and unreadability, where concepts must reach out for justification to the presumed existence of things. Language is a “neutral speech that speaks itself alone … for it is the incessant, the interminable” (Blanchot 2003, 213), i.e. interminable in its Beckettian going on. Focus on language can undo the certitude of the concept created by it, and undermine the suppositions and meaning read from it; while they will have been fractured and scattered from which the concept has been composed, language remains empty and unreadable, which is the point to stress. Scrutiny of language can and will undo the concept, but scrutiny of concept will have no effect on the fundamental questions central to an understanding of language as the real. The aporia, in fact, is to be found within the sensible itself. Through our senses we perceive that these perceptions are represented through language. Beckett the philosopher/artist has created a dimension in Waiting for Godot where past certainties are disintegrating and a heightened awareness of the “to come” is challenging them. Far from being tramps, the main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, represent this seminal moment in the question of being. Their weariness of a world of failed perceptions is contrasted to their acute awareness of language—“neutral speech,” free, empty language that is incessant and interminable, is the only place to go towards, the exclusive, messianic place of hope that is revealed through the dialogue of the duo. In Endgame, Clov asks Hamm: “Do you believe in the life to come?” Hamm: Mine was always that (Beckett 1986, 116).

Hamm’s life is to come and it will be language towards which he will go through the empty “that.” The passage, that is “at once quite straightforward and semantically dense” (Bennett & Royle 1955, 109), is a summation of the interdependence of Beckett’s philosophical and artistic purpose.

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What then happens in Waiting for Godot? Or, more specifically, what changes take place within and between the two acts? It will be argued in this chapter that the measured fine-tuning of the dialogue between Acts 1 and 2 spoken by the linguistically conscious characters of the play, Vladimir and Estragon, is the major event of the work. It is here we see Beckett’s philosophy given “substance” through his art and his art justified by his philosophy, i.e. that language is the ultimate truth beyond which we cannot go or out of which we cannot get. Of course other changes occur—Pozzo has become blind in Act Two, and Lucky thinks in Act One, but not in Act Two. Lucky’s monologue may magnify the chaos that ensues when the word is thought to represent the perception, and when expressed information is assumed to be knowledge. That fine-tuning of language, though subtle and minimalist, is often stressed through the pause or punctuation. It is in Beckett’s treatment of language above all else—and that includes the appeal of Godot as a theatrical spectacle and his philosophical views—that we experience what we might call jeuissance, such is the intensity of Beckett’s artistic examination of that which has always been there, and is not new under the sun, but whose absolute significance had not been understood. Language is that which “interposes itself between the void and itself” (Badiou 2005, 506–7). Badiou’s fascinating observation focuses attention on the real, the void, and the gap in continuity between that which interposes itself— articulated language—and that which cannot be presented—language itself—as the real. To understand that articulated language is interposed between the void and itself gets to the philosophical core of Beckett’s thinking, i.e. that language, being the real, eliminates the possibility of the void (see chapter five). Beckett’s created dimension in Waiting for Godot is the place where the real becomes aware of its reality, and this reality is contrasted to the ultimate void over which non-being, the perceived world, is suspended. Beckett begins the process of going on towards the real in a number of instances in Act 1, some of which we will discuss here. The first is through a leading remark by Pozzo: “You are human beings none the less,” in reply to Estragon’s explanation “[w]e’re not from these parts, sir.” Pozzo adds, in a typical Beckettian negation “as far as one can see” (Beckett 1959, 15), that stresses the doubt inherent in the perception. The second instance comes when boy asks “What am I to say to Mr. Godot sir?”, to which Vladimir replies “Tell him … [He hesitates] … tell him you saw, us, [pause]. You did see us, didn’t you?” To which the boy replies: “Yes sir” (45). Both instances employ the complexities of commonplace speech

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to cast doubt on the existence of the corporeal and to suggest that there can be no absolute certainty beyond language. You are human beings none the less is actually a compliment to their raised consciousness, as it suggests a minimalist trace of the human, an unlessenable degree, within the existential which places an emphasis on their consciousness. That Pozzo identifies the limitations of their humanity in “as far as one can see” is ironic in view of Pozzo’s “humanity” in Act Two. It suggests that even he may be aware that there is more than the physical to their make-up. The happening that develops between acts one and two crystallizes when Pozzo asks, in Act Two, “Who are you?” Vladimir’s reply “We are men” is first met with silence, then with what can be read as Estragon’s expletive: “Sweet mother earth.” Estragon’s response is a positive rejection of the human element to his make up that he must, reluctantly, bear. In the second instance Vladimir appears to celebrate the real when he starkly says to boy “You did see us didn’t you?”, a far from forthright question as it employs the confusing negative “didn’t you?” alongside the interrogative “did” in the one sentence. So is boy’s answer “yes sir” “yes” in reply to did you, or to did not you see us (author’s italics)? We could profit, when reading Beckett, from Wittgenstein’s advice that one “keeps forgetting to go right down to the foundations … (one) doesn’t put the question marks deep enough down” (von Wright & Nyman 1980, 62). Although Estragon engages with boy when they first meet it is Vladimir who conducts the dialogue with him (boy), so there is ambiguity in Vladimir’s “us” (“you did see us”). Are the “us” Estragon, who has moved away to fix his boots, and Vladimir, or are they the “us” that Vladimir recognizes in himself, the corporeal and the real? This point is worth noting because of Vladimir’s early remark to boy: “You don’t know me?” (44). If we read “didn’t you” as did not you see us and say that not you is not you the corporeal, we can then argue that Vladimir sees the possibility of relating to boy on a raised level of consciousness, that he detects an awareness of the real in the boy. Vladimir’s transition from “me” to “us” is encouraged by boy’s refusal to profess knowledge of Godot’s relationship with him; he doesn’t know why Godot doesn’t beat him, or if he is fond of him, but is confirmed in boy’s response to Vladimir’s question “You don’t know if you’re unhappy or not ?” (45, author’s italics)—“No sir.” There is a possibility that some of boy is “not”; that he is not “all humanity,” the state that, through the senses, can experience unhappiness, the little heap of bones that could have been Estragon’s fate. Vladimir can now relate to boy: “You’re as bad as myself” (45). Vladimir’s probing, seen in Act One, continues to stress the inseparable co-existence of the real and the corporeal within that particular relationship in Act Two. Act Two is a

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progression from Act One, where the relationship is acknowledged as a foundation from which to proceed to a discussion on its inherent imbalance. Vladimir asks boy “Did you meet anyone?” “… Two other … [He hesitates] … men (84, author’s italics). Boy’s insistence that he didn’t meet any one does not exclude the possibility of there being the two others queried by Vladimir; they may be part men, as their humanity is put in question, and part the real, language. But now the stress is directed towards the primacy of language in the relationship. Vladimir is no longer the “us” of Act One, he is now “me,” the restored me of Act One. Boy’s knowledge of whom is there questioned in “You don’t know me ?” (44) but is here accepted. “Vladimir: Tell him … [He hesitates] … tell him you saw me …” (85). The me may be language speaking, asserting itself as the real, responding to its own demand, and it is confident enough to assume Boy knows it as such, that they are relating on an elevated level of consciousness. The imbalance between the real and the corporeal that emphasizes the primacy of the real is attested to when Vladimir continues with “and that.” “Tell him you saw me and that,” which, significantly, is followed by a long pause and a repeat of the stage direction [He hesitates], which directs an inescapable focus on “that.” If “me” represents the unpresentable, pure language that endeavours to identify itself through articulated speech, “that” can only be the scorned encumbrance of the corporeal from which boy recoils and flees the scene. Much time and space has been wasted on idle speculation on who or what the character Godot represents, and need not be indulged here. There may be those who scorn what is called a “textual reading” and would justify a limited reading of the work through a wish list of their favourite cultural or other references, but such is the precious nature of the measure and exactitude of Beckett’s treatment of language, and implicitly of his resistance to the tyranny of the referent, to read it so seems little short of a violation of the text. To relate Godot to some extra-textual referent may satisfy the need for meaning; ironically, this is the very approach that Beckett’s character Godot is contesting in the drama. Godot, it can be argued, represents that very desire to accept perceptions as reality, and to submit to the craving for the stable presence that is beyond doubt. What we know of Godot we know from those who have perceived him, either directly or at one remove—the two boys, Vladimir and Estragon, and Pozzo, who struggles to recall the name Godot, which he has heard from the duo. We learn from the first boy, in Act 1, that Godot is good to him, that he does not beat him, but does beat his brother, and that Godot feeds him (the first boy) fairly well. (44–45). We also learn that Godot can speak and can hear. Yet for this information we are dependent on a boy who

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does not know if he has seen his interrogator—Vladimir previously—as we are of the boy in Act 2 who knows he has a brother—“He’s sick sir” (84)—but does not know if it was he who came to Vladimir and Estragon yesterday. We learn a bit more about Godot—that he has a white beard— from this equally unreliable source. None of this has convinced the duo of a corporeal or other identity that can be explained to Pozzo—“Estragon: Personally I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him” (16). But that which supports the argument that Godot represents no more than perception can be read from Estragon’s opening remark to Pozzo: “You’re not Mr. Godot sir?” (15), in which the question mark is all important. He does not ask, “Are you Mr. Godot,” and neither does he state “you’re not Mr. Godot sir,” which, if we can divorce the arrangement of words from the colloquially implied assumption therein—“you are Mr Godot”—and look at the words on the page which state categorically “you are not Mr. Godot, sir,” would remove Pozzo from the area of doubt and establish clearly that he is not Godot. However, by concluding with the question mark Beckett firmly locates Godot as a perception whose existence can be neither proved or denied, nor can be unconditionally wrenched from the word that it haunts. This we see when Pozzo asks “Who is Godot?”, to which Estragon replies “Godot?” Again, we have the question mark but this time Estragon can be argued to be replying that Godot is the word “Godot,” and all else is put in doubt through the question mark. It may signify that Godot is essentially the word Godot that is provable through the articulated appearance, freed of meaning, of the word Godot : “what it lays bare is the singular namelessness at the core of the name as such” (Oppenheim 2004, 75); the name is always, at bottom, the word. In Act Two, as in the other instances discussed, the probes of Act One are firmed up, the philosophical impetus of the work is pronounced through the subtle emphasis on the alternative possibilities within, and the misconceptions of everyday language are questioned. The duo engage in the following exchange where the word that has now established primacy over the name is seen to survive: Estragon: Are you sure it wasn’t him? Vladimir: Who? Estragon: Godot Vladimir: But, who? Estragon: Pozzo Vladimir: Not at all [less sure]. Not at all [still less sure] Not at all! (83)

Here Beckett goes further than the “who is Godot?” passage of Act 1, where Godot’s reduction to a proper name is stated but then put in

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question. In Act 2 Godot appears to have unequivocally become the word; he is no longer a him or a who but now seems to be the disembodied word, free of referent. The point is stressed by Vladimir’s repetition of the question “who?” and Estragon’s retraction and substitution of Godot and replacement by Pozzo as the who, of whom he has earlier said “He’s all humanity” (76). Read like this there is a distinct division between the body, the who represented by Pozzo, and language, the word “Godot,” a distinction that could give comfort to those who argue that Beckett is sympathetic to, if not advocating, negative metaphysics. It seems to be a rare example, in his important works, where he discards the method of proceeding when he advocates in The Unnamable “by affirmation and negation invalidated as uttered” (Beckett 1959, 267). Or at least that would appear to be the case if we were to ignore Estragon’s opening question: “Are you sure it wasn’t him?”, which of course we cannot because it is there that the affirmations and negations are proposed and invalidated, and invalidated again in Vladimir’s response “Not at all! [less sure] Not at all! [Still less sure] Not at all!” (83). The key word in Estragon’s question is “it”—a motif, as we have seen earlier, that runs through Beckett’s texts. “Are you sure it wasn’t him?” puts the focus on the significance of “it” in the question. The short exchange is a crushing response to any suggestion that we can proclaim the existence of the thing as independent and provable outside of language. Nor can any charge of negative metaphysics be now sustained, as the annoying connection between the words “it,” in this case, and “him” is re-established. Estragon asks, “are you sure it wasn’t him,” not “are you sure it was him”; he is stressing Beckett’s belief that language is the real, and is looking for reassurance that “it” is independent of things, that “it” is it, not him. However, Vladimir’s response neither affirms nor negates Estragon’s desire for assurance, his repetitions of “not at all” emphasized through a sliding scale of conviction. The triple repeats appears to favour the probability of “it” being “the word ‘it’ over it being ‘him’.” He begins, in his response, by affirming his uncertainty (that “it” wasn’t “him”), but with each repetition he is becoming less sure that he is unsure, so to speak. In other words, his initial treatment of the crisis between language as the real, on the one hand, and perceptions of the senses, on the other, as being equal in merit, is being thought out. The conclusion to Vladimir’s thinking tilts the balance of the crisis in favour of language being the real, because his doubts that “it” wasn’t “him” become more pronounced (as his feeling of unsureness weakens). Further support for language being the real can be drawn from putting the emphasis on the “it” in Estragon’s question “Are you sure it wasn’t him?”, and seeing Estragon’s response to Vladimir’s “who?”—

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“Godot”—as responding to the “it” not the “him” of the question. Reading “it” thus, the person Godot, as has been said earlier, is reduced to the word “Godot,” but only in a Beckettian affirmation that is soon negated by Vladimir’s “But who?” So the questions now appear like this—are you sure, the it, the word Godot, wasn’t confused with, or contaminated by the who, Pozzo? The intervention of “Who?” at that precise moment underlines the inescapable contamination of the word by the senses. It illustrates that the crisis between the real and the corporeal is caused by the parasitical nature of the intrusive corporeal. It imports assumptions of the corporeal to the essential purity of “it,” the word “Godot.” “Who” destabilizes the affirmation attempted in Estragon’s question, and insists on continuing to confront the question that haunts Beckett’s major works—if language is the real, how can it be proved to be so if it is haunted by perceptions of the senses that can be neither proved nor denied? The question cannot be answered or the crisis resolved because of the haunting presence of the perception, the “who.” Nevertheless, it is cogently addressed in this important passage. The independence of the free word is stressed through “it,” and for a moment “Godot.” The possibility of “Godot” imposing its authority as “listless … empty speech” (Blanchot 2003, 213) emerges in the moment before the affirmation of the empty word is put in question by Vladimir’s “but who?” This is important because it favours the probability of the existence of language over doubted perceptions, for which there is no evidence of a reciprocal quid prop quo that would render the possible, pure language, impossible. So when we ask who Godot is we can only answer that question from the evidence provided by the text, and that evidence is acquired (by the duo) second hand through the sparse and unreliable accounts relayed by the boys. Estragon admits (to Pozzo): “Personally I wouldn’t know him if I saw him” (Beckett 1959, 16). Godot, then, to the duo, is not even a perception whose existence is in doubt. It could be argued that he may be something like a shadow or a ghost that represents the hope that he will take on the form of a perception; he is drawn so as to stretch the doubt (that underscores our experience of perception) close to breaking point. Yet to become exercised about perceptions to the degree of wanting to celebrate them in literary works is unimportant in the dimension imagined by Beckett. He reluctantly acknowledges Godot as the bleak bare ghost of a perception who cannot be dismissed or be known by Estragon, even if he were to assume corporeal presence. The text also draws attention to the presupposition that the thing can be represented in words if only language did not fail, as we can see in Pozzo’s deliberations over the name Godot: “Godot … Godot … Godin … anyhow you see who I mean” (22). Pozzo,

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being “all humanity,” represents the intruder from the existential world, hence his fixation on the thing Godot behind the name. “You see who I mean” stresses the secondary role of language that is assumed to represent the thing, hence the turn to the so-called floating signifiers Godot, Godot, Godin. Pozzo’s intervention assumes the stable existence of the thing Godot, despite all evidence being to the contrary, and is oblivious to the primacy of language in the imagined dimension of Godot. Pozzo’s double irony stresses the distinction between his level of consciousness that solidly represents the they of the existential world, and Vladimir and Estragon’s level of linguistic consciousness in the dimension imagined by Beckett. The passage directs us to ask who is Godot, and why are the duo waiting for “him”? To see Godot as the possibility of a corporeal manifestation whose arrival the duo feels compelled to await would undermine the impetus of the purpose in Beckett’s work, which is to stress the primacy of language over perceptions. Based on the above reading of the passage, it is logical to argue that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for that which they eventually decide to go on towards—the arrival of Godot as godot, the word stripped of connection to referent. Far from being a depressing reflection of the hopelessness of existence, Waiting for Godot treats the grim existential as the transitory that must be endured. Sense cannot be made of it so why bother trying? Those who try fail—Pozzo who believes that things exist, and Lucky who doesn’t know that we can’t know. The existential is the delusionary realm of non-being that distorts our thinking on reality. That which is the obviously real— language—is treated, in the existential world, as a mere tool through which we can make sense of a “reality” that is no more than ever-shifting glimpses, brief disclosures, of that which can neither be proved to exist or to not exist. To relegate language to this role is to mis-say. It is to invest language with “meaning” that robs it of its inherent freedom. Because Godot is mediated in the dramatic form, the inclination is to accept the characters Vladimir and Estragon as “real” people, but in Beckett’s works all presuppositions can be reduced to their foundation, the free state, the linguistic “I” speaking—that is, empty language. Beckett’s created dimension, in which Godot is set, realigns the relationship between language and perceptions that weighs the balance in favour of language. He achieves this realignment through questioning and subverting the assumptions that we presuppose when using so-called everyday language. Beckett turns commonplace language into poetic language through fastidiously measured and arranged texts where the punctuation (and its absence) and the pause, the subtle disconnect, open words to a dimension

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of understanding that is beyond ambiguity and the undecidable. Words are released, and the reader is exhilarated by the intoxicating scent of freedom. Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. [They don’t move]. (87)

When we ask who is speaking in Godot we can answer, not the scorned “that,” the das man of Act Two, the “they” who don’t move, nor the corporeal perceptions Vladimir and Estragon, the “we” and the “us” within whom the crisis between the real and the perceived is being played, but the I of Estragon’s “Am I” (1)—empty language that is going on towards its messianic destiny, purity beyond, and free of that which can be perceived by the senses. It is significant that the last line, and the decision to “go,” belongs to Estragon. Language, speaking through Estragon, will rise from, and leave behind, the perceptions of the body and go on to be its “unlessenable least”—the real.

HOW IT IS IN HOW IT IS One can say of Samuel Beckett’s works what Jacques Derrida has said of Georges Bataille: [T]o continue to read, interrogate and judge Bataille’s text from within “significative discourse” is, perhaps, to hear something within it, but is assuredly not to read it. Which can always be done—and has it not been?—with great agility, resourcefulness occasionally, and philosophical security (Derrida 2001, 338).

Beckett’s works transcend anything that has yet been argued in philosophy or imagined in literature. They may indeed nod to philosophers of the past but it is usually on the way to a creative revision of their interpretations of the nature of being; to read him through the prism of their thinking is to reduce his work to a worldview with which he fundamentally quarrels. It is to overlook vital passages of his texts so as to serve the presuppositions of those philosophers, to squeeze Beckett into the “philosophical security” of their mould. Yet it is little short of a crime to read Beckett from within what Derrida calls “significative discourse,” by which I assume he means the discourse of the world of signs, to look for meaning. The raison d’etre of Beckett’s work is to dislocate the word from implication of meaning. To read it from within significative discourse is to limit ones approach to all that is implied by that discourse to the exclusion of that which is significant beyond it. And that which is excluded by significative discourse is, mainly, what is significant in Beckett’s work. No doubt much will be heard in it to justify this approach for there is so much there, yet they are mere scraps that leave the main course, so to the speak, untouched. To approach it thus is assuredly not to read it, it is to miss and to misread most of what makes Beckett the most significant writer of the twentieth century; namely, both his philosophical approach to and his selection and arrangement of language—a powerful and necessary justification in itself of his philosophy, as his philosophy is a justification of his selection and arrangement of language. Because Beckett’s philosophy is an alternative way of approaching the question of being, as it advances thought into a dimension that makes metaphysics seem redundant, it is pointless to approach his work from its (metaphysical) preconceptions, assumptions and tired language. The

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central argument of this work is that Beckett should be read on his own merit, rather than be interpreted through the philosophical security of those who preceded and succeeded him. To interpret him through the latter is to reduce his work to limitations that it exceeds, while to read it on its own merit is to experience the event, not merely in the work, but in the word itself. How It Is continues the process of the linguistic I towards pure language while remaining within the context of the question posed in the crisis between the real and the perceived. It takes the process a stage further than the “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” closure to The Unnamable, albeit with an important linguistic change—the I now becomes me, and me becomes I. Another significant step taken in How It Is is Beckett’s attempt to signal his disassociation from the arrangement of conventional syntax through his attempts to exclude any form of punctuation throughout the text. The significance of these two points in relation to the thesis statement of this book will be discussed in this chapter. As has been said before, Beckett’s vision is of an alternate dimension to the one we perceive through our senses and which we believe to exist as we perceive it. Consequently, his syntactical device of omitting punctuation is designed to further portray that vision; it will move our understanding of language away from the assumption that it is a tool which we use to describe the world to fixing the focus on language itself and how the one phrase or sentence can be dislocated from the perception which it attempts to describe or explain. The perception is simultaneously announced, doubted, and overturned by another that is in turn doubted, or contradicted. This, as is known, is nothing new in Beckett; encapsulated within the technique is his philosophical belief that while perceptions can neither be disproved or proved, language can be proved to exist. However, in How It Is his syntactical innovation of omitting punctuation has, or should have, the effect of switching the focus from that which the word is perceived to describe, and that which is believed to be beyond language, back to language itself, to the words on the page. Such is his arrangement of words in How It Is that our attention is drawn to them, and belief in their primacy is favoured over that which, in normal prose, they would struggle to describe. Through this syntactical device Beckett, yet again, stresses the primacy of words over the perception of things. The virtual absence of punctuation marks isolates the continuous stream of words that we see as only words that, for the brevity of that all important moment, stand alone, separated from meaning. In that moment, when our natural inclination to convert them to meaning dominates, we are aware of the

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awesome reality that words may exist when stripped of referents, that through them we can experience “a voice at last in the dark” (Beckett 2006, 488). The root of Beckett’s vision is to get to that stage to which the corporeal human cannot go, namely the voice that is “in me when the panting stops” (Becket 2006, 41), the voice that will “go silent for want of air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again” (Beckett 1959, 362). We may not necessarily interpret Beckett as meaning “death” here, rather the going on to the world of the real which to Beckett, I argue, is just that; neither in time nor place, language the real is devoid of all else. Indeed, death is a much-challenged concept in his work, one example of which we can see in the extract quoted from How It Is (below). The route to Beckett’s root, so to speak, is through the dematerializing of language. That this cannot be fully achieved brings the work to the Blanchot question and its confrontation. If literature begins with a question, what is that question in Beckett’s works? In initiating the process, Beckett opens our thinking to the possibilities imagined in his vision. He cannot, being material, and being unable to inscribe, other than through the corporeal, dispense with the very material act of writing words and marks on paper. But what he almost does in How It Is is remove those human inventions— punctuation—as a stage in the process of de-coupling word from thing. Of course, this intervention in the convention has a profound effect on how we, the readers, engage with the text. On first sight it appears to be a continuous tract of commonly used words that, however, seem to be arranged in an order that compels us to ask what, if anything, they mean, and why does Beckett bother spreading all of these words that seem to not make sense over a hundred or so pages of useful paper? This is the starting point from which if we proceed, in a particular direction, we will understand the philosophy which drives Beckett, that direction being towards non-meaning, towards the empty word that is empty because it has been divorced from meaning. Unfortunately, because of our inclination to try to make sense of the world, we go in the opposite direction and try to invest those words with meaning. We link them to the world that we perceive though our senses, and we do this in contravention of what is obvious in Beckett’s texts, particularly in How It Is; that is that he persists in his efforts to separate the word from the perception and that he insists on favouring the existence of the word—inaccessible though it is—over the doubted existence of perceptions. To go in this direction, that is to proceed along the course clearly indicated by Beckett, will lead us away from meaning towards the separation of word from perception, for we must take the text as given to us by Beckett and accept that the

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omission of almost all punctuation—full stops, commas, quotation marks etc.—was a decision made by him towards an end or cause, not memory lapses by him or his editor. Almost, but not all punctuation. This is the key area on which to focus our attention, for it is here that Beckett’s smooth passage to the silent word becomes disrupted by inconvenient reminders from the senses. Beckett’s project—one thinks—in How It Is is to create an imagined world that will reflect his philosophical beliefs, where language will be known to exist independently of any or all association to perceptions. Let us for a moment forget that the continuous stream of what, on the first reading, seems to be meaningless language has been inscribed by the corporeal. That important point being overlooked, most readers of the text will agree that it takes some amount of work to make sense of it, that logic or an obvious narrative structure need to be patiently sought out, and that even then they can only make sense if interpreted through a multiple of meanings, that they cannot be reduced to a single interpretation. The argument running through this book—that Beckett favours an intelligibly reached acceptance of the empty word over the doubted perceptions—is supported by claims of difficulties in the conventional sense of reading the text of How It Is. It could be, if we overlook the corporeal input, an amalgam of words, appearing in a vacuum neither coming from nor going anywhere. By way of example, let us look at the following passage: “no never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice no I the first yes never stirred no crawled no a few yards no ate pause ATE good and deep no if he knows what’s in the sack no never had the curiosity no if he thinks he can die one day pause DIE ONE DAY no” (Beckett 2006, 481). As we can see, the reader’s first impression could easily be to reject the passage (hence the entire work) as meaningless nonsense. It is quite the opposite to a narrative of the quality of, say, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847), that draws us into the story that we believe is beyond or behind the language chosen by the author, and puts it into words, makes it real. This passage focuses our primary attention on language. Language is presented in a way that jolts us into acknowledging that, yes, it can be separated from its links with perceptions and remain in existence— standing, so to speak, when all around it has fallen. Instead of involving him/her in the narrative the passage repels the reader from the notion of narrative. It may be the case that many readers, at that stage, close the book and give up on Beckett, for it is believed that we, the human species, need to make sense of the world through stories. If this is so then Beckett’s work is not the most obvious place to begin, most may agree. But the species has another great need—the need to be free. As Heidegger claims:

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“freedom is the ground of the possibility of man’s existence” (Heidegger 2002, 95). We can argue that Beckett sees the narrative as repressive of the need to be free because it makes sense of the world through a story: sacred scriptures, for example, or politically motivated works, become weapons of power because enough people believe them to be absolute truths, or the “true” way to attain a political objective. Hence, the narrative content in How It Is is weakly constructed. It is told apologetically, if at all; designed to undermine any claim that the narrative is a location of power, and confronts its temerity to dare impose any ungroundable truth, as we see in the failed attempt at characterization in a description of Pim: “the cries tell me which end the head but I may be mistaken with the result … certain cries sex nor age” (Beckett 2006, 447–8). Of course, even from these few lines it is possible to extract numerous interpretations, but the point being made is that truth or certainty—“certain”—cannot be supposed to reside within the narrative. Words will inevitably be invested with meaning, but provisional, and temporarily necessary, meaning can always be challenged when we free words of it, as we can argue Beckett is doing in the passage: never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice no I the first yes never stirred no crawled no a few yards no ate pause ATE good and deep no if he knows what’s in the sack no never had the curiosity no if he thinks he can die one day pause DIE ONE DAY no ( 481). This we can see if we return to Beckett’s approach to death, as seen in the above passage. If we extract “he thinks he can die one day pause DIE ONE DAY no” and rework it in conventional form we could be looking at: He thinks he can die one day. Die one day? No!

We could interpret this as his (Pim’s) knowing assertion “he thinks he can die one day” being undermined by the superior authority of Voice, but then we need to ask what exactly is Voice saying? Is he saying that Pim’s thinking process is faulty? Is he questioning the narrated account of Pim’s alleged thinking when, in both cases, he says “no”? Is he rejecting the possibility of death “one day”? The ultimate place of freedom, Beckett seems to propose, is the word freed of meaning, and there is the reason for celebration, for it is there that the presumption of corporeal death is confronted by the death of meaning in the word “death” itself. Let us look at the passage from page 481 to see if the argument—that the free word is the habitat of freedom—can be supported in an extract that is typical of the text of How It Is. The impetus of How It Is, as noted, is to bring language on a route that will separate it from perceptions and endeavour to establish proof of its own existence. If we take the passage at

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face value the narrator is relating the hapless plight of his cohabitant, Pim, albeit through a style that is totally unfamiliar to the general reader who will find little evidence of an interesting narrative. Beckett’s project aspires to isolate language that has been freed of semantic baggage, and so prove its existence, and the arrangement of the text is central to the project. The first problem to confront the reader in addressing this passage is where to begin reading? Should one go back to the previous paragraph? If so, where does one establish a cut-off point? It is not possible—there is no outside to language. Therefore, we might as well begin our examination of the passage believing it to be one that undermines the possibility of words ever being reduced to something called a passage, with all the implications of fences, roofs and walls. The arrangement of the text challenges our first assumption that a passage or paragraph is a separate piece of writing intended to convey a single point or thought that differs from those that precede or succeed it. In How It Is, the linguistic link is continuous, broken only by a so-called blank space between the paragraphs. So do we read the blank spaces as defining boundaries that separate and stabilize, irrespective of thoughts, while simultaneously unifying them into a coherent whole? It may be possible, with great difficulty and a highly selective approach, to read it like this, but it is the kind of approach to reading Beckett that this book seeks to challenge. If the language in the paragraphs tends towards the meaningless then we could look at the spaces from a perspective that challenges the normal. We could continue the logic of the paragraph, its drift towards the empty word, and see in the “blank” space Beckett’s insistent attempts to present that which is unpresentable. The words of the paragraph progress towards the unpresentable, namely the impossibility of presenting the word in its originary, empty state, i.e. the word as separated from any intervention of the senses. Yet the task is not complete, nor can it ever be, so long as the corporeal believes that s/he manufactures paper or subsists within the realms of space. Yet the blank space reveals the possibility of the dimension that is language; we see a blank space on a page and we say “there is nothing there,” meaning no words have been written on that space, which is true—they have not been materially inscribed. The thing called the word is absent; it is not or no longer a thing in the physical, material sense. Yet we can prove that it continues to be presented even where it is not visible to the senses. Language continues to present through the blank spaces, albeit unrelated to the assumption of meaning in the inscribed passages. We do not look at the blank spaces and go blank, so to speak. We look at them and say, “oh, these are blank spaces, what does Beckett mean by leaving them so?” and

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so on. Language does not come to a stop in the spaces, to be replaced by some unimaginable dimension or by nothingness. The thinking that accepts the presence of the thing, in the conventional material senses, believes that language is a representation of the thing, and if it is not there hence the assumption that Beckett is negative. But the spaces in How It Is show that these beliefs are assumptions tied to the belief that what we perceive is the true. They show that language will go on to its reality freed of perceptions, and that, though unpresentable in the material senses, it is there, “there” being the realm of pure, unpresentable language that is free of all else. Beckett’s project irrevocably drags us towards the knowledge that we cannot go beyond, or escape from, language, as we can see in the cited passage, and brings us face to face with the irrefutable pronouncement—language exists. The passage brings us on this course through continuous challenges to the assumption of stable meaning. For example, how do we read “never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice no I the first yes never stirred” (481). Do we ignore the evidence that is before us by correcting the “errors” left by Beckett and read it according to our notion of punctuation as if it were a puzzle in a morning newspaper ? Hardly. The deliberate absence of punctuation leads us closer to the originary word, and away from convention. To ignore its absence is to fail, at an elementary stage, to understand what is going on in Beckett and to where “it” is going. So now we are confronted by a line of sixteen words without punctuation or emphasis, with the significant exception of the I, to which we will return later. The first thing to note, unsurprisingly, is that the words are written, not spoken. Derrida has had much to say about the presumed superiorly of the perception of the spoken over the written words by philosophers from Plato to himself.1 We may say that Beckett had little choice in the matter but the fact is that he has given us a written text in which he intervenes very deliberately in the accepted conventions of receiving and understanding language as meaning. By delivering it as he does, he brings us closer to the originary word than it is possible for the spoken word ever to do. If we present the above eighteen words in speech we will naturally infer emphasis and meaning in their enunciation, but in rigorous reading of the written word as presented in the line it will be possible to move away from meaning and go with it towards the realm of the empty word. It could be asked why Beckett did not instead write, fe, fi, fo, fum, or such like words that are obviously free of meaning? Beckett is, of course, well aware of the commonplace belief that what is perceived is the real. As we have seen, he confronts that notion throughout his works 1

See “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 1998.

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with a singular persistence. In How It Is he appears to move on from explicit confrontation2 to an impatient gesture of recognition towards the notion, albeit one that he still deems necessary, hence the link to “reality” through the referents “gleam,” “soul” and “voice.” However, the structure of the line is such that it favours a tendency towards reading it as meaningless language over one that is immediately drawn towards the significance of the referent. And the possibility of a stable referent is so persistently undermined through the absence of punctuation and the unusual arrangement of language that the reader, confused by his/her attempts to get to the stable thing beyond language, will be of a mind that agrees with the former reading. Because of the ideological power of metaphysics, s/he will insist on locating Beckett’s works in the depressing world of the existential, and will, through this flawed reading, overlook the profundity of Beckett’s treatment of language. For example the line, while suggesting non-meaning, simultaneously offers a number of interpretations, none of which can even be claimed to be the obvious intention of the author, if we must bring interpretation to a state that no longer bears credence but can be used to prove a point. If we proceed from a starting point where the line strikes us as meaningless, and succumb to inserting our own punctuation in an attempt to make sense of it, we could end up with something like the following examples: (1) “[N]ever a gleam, no never a soul, no never a voice. No, I, the first. Yes never stirred.” (2) “Never a gleam, no. Never a soul, no. Never a voice, no I. The first yes never stirred.” (3) “Never a gleam. No never a soul. No never a voice. No I. The first yes never stirred.” (4) “Never a gleam?” “No” “Never a soul?” “No” “Never a voice, no I?” “The first, yes? Never! (stirred)

Here are four possible examples of how we can attribute meaning to the line through punctuation, capitalization and revision of form, and there are other possibilities. Of course, we can have great fun working them out, 2

For example, in Waiting for Godot Vladimir’s response to Pozzo’s question “who are you,” “we are men,” draws the exclamation “Sweet mother earth” (74) from Estragon, which can be construed to be an explicit challenge to the notion that what is perceived, in this case “men,” is the real.

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but we can only do so through an unjustifiable and gross violation of the text as presented to us by Beckett. Imagine someone in a reverse process, cutting out the punctuation marks from Wuthering Heights or Middlemarch! Still, it is a necessary exercise if we want to go on that journey towards the originary word, for it shows us that a seemingly meaningless line of words can be arranged to make sense of the world, if we halt the exercise after our first interpretation. No doubt this kind of thing happens, but it is a practice unworthy of attention in a serious study of Beckett’s works. It is when our exercise reveals a number of equally weighted interpretations that we need to ask questions like what is that line saying about the world beyond language? Is it making a number of observations? Can any one of these observations be sustained? Can we say anything in language about the world beyond language that is definitely true? The equal weighting of the various interpretations—unlike, say, the hidden ambiguity in a poem—confronts us with these questions. Because of its structure, the line forbids us to avoid them. Each possible interpretation is simultaneously disputed by the others, and each interpretation is therefore doubted. Beckett lures us into trying to make sense of the world through language, but by using language to see it through a multiplicity of interpretations shows that those interpretations can be no more than perceptions of our senses that can neither prove nor disprove their existence. The line, on first reading, discourages us from our natural inclination to describe the world through language. Having overcome the barrier it tempts us to do so only after further study, to disabuse us of any notion that it may be possible so to do. Therefore, the reader of the line is back where s/he began. S/he realizes that if there is anything beyond language its certainty cannot be justified through language, yet because the problem has been written, and reasoned, and thought in language, language must somehow exist. The line first hits us as unreadable; later, during examination, we think it readable, and only on reflection do we agree with our original judgment—reading in this sense means that the language used by the author reflects perceptions acquired through his senses, and that language would normally convey an impression of something beyond language, such as feelings or things to which the reader could in some way relate. But, as we can see from the above citation, that does not happen in How It Is. The presumed link from language to thing is rendered impossible through the multiplicity of possibilities suggested, no one of which can be claimed to be the right one. They are there, represented in words, but are they real or are they illusions? Dare we choose lest, like the concussed boxer, we get the finger count wrong and grasp at nothingness? From the uncertainty of the world

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of perceptions, Beckett draws us back to language to look and look again, and again, at language. He shows us that we cannot safely go beyond language as to do so is to trust our untrustworthy perceptions, for it is they that are of the world of differences, neither limited or defined by negativity or positivity, unprovable and not contradictable. In such a scenario, the inclination is to retreat from the confusion of the world of perceptions and to re-examine the status of language in comparison to it. Deterred by the frailty of the link between them as stressed by Beckett, we now see language in a process of divorcing itself from meaning, becoming unreadable, meaningless; but yet, remaining free of meaning, language still exists, and in fact its existence is now more pronounced, it is proud, almost, and free, no longer a mere tool and medium but a something in its own right. This, above all else, is the realization to which Beckett brings us—that language, in the final analysis, may be the only thing of which we can be sure exists. As Leslie Hill says, “Beckett’s words end up … supplanting objective reality” (Oppenheim 2004, 79). To Beckett language is the real, yet it must exist in the knowledge that it is haunted by that which may, or may not, be of another reality. Language is the knowable, perceptions are unknowable. Language establishes primacy over that whose existence can never be conclusively proved. Perceived reality is shaken to reveal its vulnerable underbelly. In the shakings, an imbalance between language and perceptions is created that reduces perceptions to the level of the doubted. We get definite glimpses of this stressing of the unknowable throughout Beckett’s works. The authenticity of the hat and boots in Waiting for Godot, for example, is singularly not questioned, and is almost the reverse of the deconstruction motif of the text subverting the narrative. Estragon’s boot is a “bloody thing” (Beckett 1956, 2). In How It Is, the stable anti- narrative persists in subverting the norms of syntactical and narrative structure. Yet its discipline too, ever so occasionally, breaks down to allow its other to disrupt its smooth passage. We see it in the higher case letters attributed to ATE and DIE ONE DAY in the passage on page 481: Never a gleam no never a soul no never a voice no I the first yes never stirred no crawled no a few yards no ate pause ATE good and deep no if he knows what’s in the sack no never had the curiosity no if he thinks he can die one day pause ONE DAY no … This occurs elsewhere in the capitals to proper names, Pim and Bom, in the numerous use of the hyphen, e.g. in ditch-water (477), and the various apostrophes, e.g. what’s (481). The capital letter “I,” of which we will speak later, can be addressed from a different approach. So why, we

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must ask, the breakdown in the rigid discipline? We cannot, of course, prove Beckett’s intention, but we can draw conclusions from the transgression of the narrative. As has been said, Beckett’s philosophical thesis that language for certain exists is haunted by his doubt of perceptions; the Blanchot question that makes his work literature. If the narrative of How It Is were to incessantly hammer home his philosophical theses it would never reach the level of literature or art. The intervention of the higher case letters and the hyphens, however, poses a number of interesting questions, and their answering draws our attention to difficulties involved in the material act of writing. The presence of, for example, ATE can be construed as being a response to the question “ate?” as in: “Ate?” “No (pause) ATE, good and deep.”

The emphasis, stressed through the higher case letters, pulls the word towards meaning and naming against the trend towards meaninglessness that drives the passage and the work. It can be argued that to be the insecure cornerstone that destabilizes the disunity of the work, just as in deconstruction, certain textual anomalies are seen to subvert the unity of the narrative, but this can also be seen to illustrate Beckett’s annoyance with perceptions that, by refusing to go away, put his thesis statement into question. The higher cases, and capitals, are evidence of the desire to make sense of the sensory world. Their intervention in the text underlines Beckett’s acknowledgement of both the doubted existence and the doubted non-existence of the perceived. The hyphen in ditch-water is even more interesting, for its presence weights ditch water towards a singular interpretation as “ditch-water”—water that flows or lies in a ditch, and by so doing makes it more difficult to argue for a number of possible interpretations, e.g. “ditch” as in abandon, “water.” These examples tend to stress meaning through “glamorization” of the mark. With the exception of untypical interventions in the material inscription of the text, of which the above are examples, How It Is is notable for its author’s extraordinary and imaginative efforts to reduce the connection between the material act of writing and the perceived. The disproportionately few capitals, higher cases and hyphens to neutered inscriptions emphasize the direction towards which the general text leads us, notwithstanding the doubts which their presence stresses, that is towards the silence of uninscribed—through writing, speech or thought—language. That which drives Beckett—his philosophical belief that language exists and perceptions are in doubt—that can be extrapolated from his

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texts, of which we have already seen a number of examples, is responsible for the uniqueness of his art form. For it is in the crisis between his desire to disengage language from perceptions to prove its independent existence and the impossibility of disproving the existence of perceived things that his art is created. That crisis is at its most intense in the final pages of How It Is (518–521). It has already been noted that the first person pronoun is inscribed in the capital letter “I.” Before we address this significant emphasis we must ask, after Blanchot, who is speaking in How It Is? Like The Unnamable, is there more than one speaker? Who or what are the speakers? Who or what do they represent and present? It is in this approach that the significance of the I, and its distinction from the me, needs to be closely studied to the end. (The) I MAY DIE … I SHALL DIE (521). We note the use of the higher case letters again to stress the certainty of the upcoming death of I. So, who is “I”? Earlier, we read of “someone in another world yes whose kind of dream I am” (520). It can be argued that the I who speaks is the corporeal I, the dream, or invention, of someone in another dimension, the I whose existence cannot be conclusively proved. The I may be “the last scraps … in the familiar form of” (519), i.e. the perceived corporeal, the dream that is imagined from language. I goes on to say “questions I am said to ask myself and answers I am said” (519). While the temptation to take extracts from Beckett’s text and reduce them to a favoured interpretation can challenge what is resistible and may appear to be contrary to what is argued throughout this work, such is the complexity of his text, there is nevertheless an identifiable core thread running through them that is grounded on his philosophical belief and that which challenges it. Obviously, as in the passage from page 481, there are a number of possible interpretations to be drawn from the above citation, but this does not mean we can abandon the pursuit of reading, even—or especially, if it can lead to unreadability—if we persist towards unravelling the revelations in Beckett’s texts. Our task in reading is twofold: first to argue that Beckett’s texts claim the certain existence of language, and that their unreadability, their pronounced tendency towards meaninglessness, supports that argument; and second that the perceived world, which we attempt to interpret through language, cannot be proved to exist independently of language, but neither can it be proved to not exist. So our philosophical quest, to prove that the essence of being is pure, unpresentable language, is thwarted by our doubts of the existence or non-existence of perceptions. To Beckett it is not a crisis of binary oppositions but a crisis of certainty being favoured over, and haunted by, doubt. The failure to prove or disprove that what we perceive to exist supports Beckett’s philosophical thesis, as the failure is the failure

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of the senses to accurately perceive the stability of the thing. It is not just the failure of language to describe it, it is our erroneous belief that language can be made to describe that which cannot be proved to exist. To talk of the failure of language is to accept that definitive, unchanging meaning resides in language and that no word is available to represent the particular perception or issue. Beckett shows that perceptions are always in doubt, ever changing and unstable, even when we can claim to sense them. Therefore, there can be no possibility of accurately representing such a world through language. Such is the relationship between perceptions and language that if it is agreed that such a word accurately represents such a thing, even it, in times of stress, will come into question as it, in reflecting the instability of the perception, inevitably distances from it. Therefore, the word’s accepted meaning that had previously been acknowledged as a true representation of the thing, in reflecting the change in its perception also begins to crumble. So what do we see here that supports Beckett’s thesis that pure language is all that we can be sure to exist? Let us look again to a passage from page 519 of How It Is : there was something yes but nothing of all that no all balls from start to finish yes this voice quaquaqua yes all balls yes only one voice here yes mine yes when the panting stops yes.

We should also bear in mind that the haunting of his thesis by the doubt of perception is a necessary part of his thesis, as it will prove that while perceptions remain in perpetual doubt the certainty of the emptiness of the words that are used to describe them is beyond doubt. We can illustrate this point by taking liberties with the absence of punctuation in the original text, e.g. “there was something yes” is a definitive assertion, not a speculation that is contradicted by what follows, “but nothing of all.” If we remember that to Beckett the real is “all words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381), then we will see the “something” as not of the real but of non-being, possessing none of the qualities of “all … no all.” However, if we read the line as “there was something yes but nothing of all that,” we see that the “something” is the real that is decontaminated by association to perceptions: “there was … nothing of all that, no! (That is) all balls from start to finish.” “Something” now denotes not a thing but a “something”—yes, there is a something we can claim that is beyond doubt, and, as is argued throughout this work, the only something that is beyond doubt is language. There was something, yes, but no thing. So the something that was there is, as we see through the “yes,” not a material

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thing. Pure language is not of the realm or dimension of things, it is something and yet is distinct from that world, it is “this voice … only one voice here … when the panting stops.” This (voice) is “yes.” In this reading, the assertion that something is no thing is not contradicted. Rather, it now puts the world of things under scrutiny and in question. Having asserted the certain existence of something, the discourse moves on to examine the possibility of things. “Nothing is all balls from start to finish,” which is not the same as saying nothing exists, if we take “all balls” as it is generally understood to suggest stories without any foundation in fact. This would not eliminate the possibility of other stories; it rubbishes the particular stories at issue but does not dismiss the possibility of other interpretations or insights to existence. (Of course, after Paul de Man’s deconstruction of the Yeats’ metaphor in “Among School Children”3 we can also read “all balls from start to finish” in the purely literal sense.) Of course, we would then need to ask what kind of balls? Footballs, snowballs, testicles? And are we actually getting away from the metaphor, especially with testicles? So the metaphor is put into question, or at least representation is. Are testicle and snowball as accurate representations of “ball” as, say, football? To argue “no” is to raise the Plato belief in ideal forms, and to challenge it through Nietzsche’s argument in his “On truth and lying ….” All of which, in any case, Beckett exceeds—even Nietzsche, as this book will try to prove. So if we exclude “nothing” from the charge of “all balls,” can we read “nothing” as a notion that definitely cannot be described as being constituted entirely of spherical objects, or of all that is perceived, which would separate it from any connection with things, thus confirming its “no thing-ness”? The problem in reading the passage thus, or indeed almost any passage from Beckett, lies in our taking for granted the verb “to be” as an assertion. Beckett scholars will be aware of the general paucity of its use in his works, except for rare, seemingly deliberate instances of its inclusion. This so-called “problem” is not a problem as such, but rather a gateway towards understanding the indivisibility of his philosophy from his belief in what language is. In common speech the verb “to be” in present and past tense has two definite meanings. Is and was are both assertions and questions. When the narrator in How It Is says “there was something,” our first instinct is to read it as an assertion, as we have done in the manner argued through the passage above, and this reading is challenged by the succeeding “yes.” But if we look back at the preceding 3

See Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979, 11–12), where he transforms the rhetorical question that ends Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren”—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—into an actual question.

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paragraph, if we may call it that, we see almost lavish use of the verb— four in all in a short time: “that wasn’t” “it was” “how was it” “HOW WAS IT”—which seems on first reading to be equally divided between stressing the assertion and stressing the question in “was.” “That wasn’t” and “it was” seem to confirm the assertive reading, and it is only when our natural instinct is consciously challenged that we can see, or cannot fail to see, the inherent question there. In a similar mode of thinking, both instances of “how was it” draw us towards a reading that stresses the question and a ready acceptance of reading it as such. If language is no more than an agreed convention do we have the right to interpret the verb in either way? If it is understood in both senses what gives us the power to exclude one of them? The answer, as far as Beckett is concerned, is that we assume that power is based on the belief in the existence of things outside of language which cannot be proved, yet we do not have the right to vest meaning in either sense, other than to satisfy our desire to make sense of the world. By so doing, we overlook the essence of reality through language, whose existence can be proved, in favour of that which is beyond it but that cannot. Beckett, in these four examples of the verb “to be,” is stressing the primacy of language; that once we go outside of it we are trading our knowledge of reality for that which cannot be known. He does this by dangling the obvious in front of us, by confronting us with that which a millennia of thinkers have thought too unbelievable to believe—that language is the essence of reality. He does this by offering us a third choice, a third interpretation, but one we cannot argue against that relocates language in a place where it presents rather than represents reality, even if that presence is unpresentable. To the two interpretations we need to add a third that radically shifts the emphasis from the verb “to be” to what was formerly the interrogative “how,” which has now become the subject. Reading it as “How was it,” we can argue that “how,” the word “how,” now stripped of its meaning and reduced to an equal state of emptiness to “it” was it, the empty word on the last possible stage in the existential world before realization as the unpresentable in “the life to come” of Hamm in Endgame (Beckett 1986, 116). Reading it so does not get over the problem of the verb “was,” and its presence there stresses the Blanchot question that torments Beckett throughout his works, but it does prove that language can talk about language independently of things. Even if the suggestion of things continues to haunt, and cannot be excluded from, the context, things are in a secondary role to the favoured and grammatically coherent exclusivity of language, which Beckett goes as far as is possible to stress while still including the verb “was” by emphasizing the exclusivity of language through the even distribution of the higher-case

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letters. The sentence’s lower case switches from being a straightforward question, how was it—insofar as the omission of the question mark can in itself question whether it is a question—to an assertion of the primacy of language doing its utmost to will away the bothersome question inherent in “was.” What the sentence does prove is that language can be shown to talk about language even if it may be argued that it is talking about things, whereas things can only be represented through language, through signs, the mark. (Yet, Beckett will never leave himself open to the charge of negative metaphysics by omitting the verb “to be” when the Blanchot question must be addressed. He may well argue through his works that language for certain exists, is the real, but the non-existence of that which haunts it is in equal doubt to its existence.) To argue this point it is helpful to return to the question Blanchot asks: “Who is speaking in the books of Samuel Beckett?” We asked who is speaking in How It Is, but what gives the authority to ask who? Can the speaker be an it? “It say it” (Beckett 2006, 268), and it who asserts and questions its being as in “it is not I” (268)? We should position ourselves in the world created—rather than imagined—by Beckett where the crisis between the desire to state a philosophical proposition is frustrated by the language necessarily used to state it. In response to the question “what is speaking,” Beckett wants to answer “it,” but is it the voice that language speaks? As we have seen with the “Where now? Who now? When now?” questions that open The Unnamable, not only is the question, as meaningful question, unanswerable, it cannot, as such, be asked. We cannot assume an embodied “what” in Beckett, who goes to such extraordinary lengths—and rounds—to strip language of linkage to the certain existence of things, all we can assert is “what is language?”, and just as in How It Is simultaneously question that assertion. In The Unnamable, the speaker who wants to go on to the origin of language, to the real, is I. In How It Is, “I” is relegated to the corporeal and is honoured with a capital, while what Blanchot calls the narrating voice is “me” in lower case. “Me” is stripped of personality and, insofar as it is possible, of personhood. “Me” is unnamable insofar as it strives to articulate the level of linguistic consciousness that it/s/he has reached, but is aware that it cannot do so through language that implicitly questions and haunts that philosophical proposition. The inability of “me” to sever links with perception contaminates the purity of its voice through its extra-vocal connection with perceived materiality, so “me” cannot be called the me that is language, though that is what it desires to be, the linguistic “me,” and because it is part corporeal it cannot but present language through the contaminated senses.

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This crisis is played out in the conclusion to How It Is (519) in the following passage: … only one voice here yes mine yes when the panting stops yes when the panting stops yes so that was true yes the panting yes the murmur yes in the dark yes in the mud yes to the mud yes hard to believe too yes that I have a voice yes in me yes when the panting stops yes not at other times no and that I murmur yes I yes in the dark yes in the mud yes for nothing yes I yes but it must be believed yes and the mud yes the dark yes the mud and the dark are true yes nothing to regret there no (519).

The crisis is acted out by two actors, the I and the me. If we can cut to an affirmation of the text that follows the initial, seemingly unreadable engagement, that is but a halting site on the way to its final “unreadability,” or at least inability to conclusively go beyond language. The dialogue form through which the good reader can best enjoy the passage could be laid out as follows: I – Only one voice here? Me – Yes mine! I – Yes? Me – When the panting stops. I – Yes? Me – When the panting stops. I – Yes? So that was true? Me – Yes I – The panting? Me – Yes. I – The murmur? Me – Yes. I – In the dark? Me – Yes. I – In the mud? Me – Yes to the mud I – Yes? Hard to believe too. Me – Yes? I – In me? Me – Yes when the panting stops. I – Yes not at other times? Me – No. I – And that I murmur? Me – Yes I – I? Me – yes in the dark, yes in the mud, yes for nothing. I – Yes. I?

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Of course, Beckett’s text has been appropriated and distorted through the addition of all that is obvious in the above rewrite of the passage. Through it, it is possible to understand his thinking on the real, even if momentarily, in isolation from the effect of perception. His thinking could be summarized like this: When the body dies language will continue as “me.” The perceptions of panting, of murmur, of mud, are true to the perceiver at the time of perceiving. Though it is hard to believe they must be believed at that time but “not at other times”; they are true and they are nothing. The two part dialogue reflects the different levels of consciousness between the corporeal “I” and the higher, linguistic “me.” The corporeal I stresses the distinction in “hard to believe … I have a voice … in me.” The linguistic me, impatient with the ponderous questioning of I, and annoyed that it cannot disengage from the wearisome corporeal, tries to put the matter to rest through explaining I’s murmur. We take murmur as speaking in a manner that is low and close to inaudible. (You murmur) in the dark, in the mud, for nothing, he seems to chastise I, but if we look closely we see that I murmurs for “nothing.” I’s voice is but a murmur, it is going on towards linguistic consciousness, and desires to be of the dimension of no thing, to be of that dimension that is language where there will be nothing, (no thing) to regret. That summary is a brief attempt to see the crisis from outside the language of which it is constituted. It is part of a necessary discourse, but one from which we must go on if we are to “get a handle” on Beckett. If Beckett’s created dimension of the real is language—pure, if never simple—if that is his philosophical belief, we need to remember that How It Is is also literature, a work of art that asks a major question of that philosophy and importantly takes it at its word. If Beckett’s philosophy claims that empty language is the real, Beckett ‘s literature both questions and supports that claim through its insistent focus on the unprovability of the existence of perceptions, and the impossibility of proving that they do not exist, and through that awareness being represented in and as language. Beckett’s literature is essentially freedom driven. Its logic is to resist all efforts to repress language through its supposed external link to

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perceptions until the moment is reached where the word stands empty as the possibility of the real; all else is doubted. Beckett’s exhaustive questioning brings us into language and away from what is outside it. That journey shows us that perceptions can be no more than that, that ethics are concepts thought up by humans to enforce order in the existential world. Language needs to be appropriated and agreement needs to be reached on specific meaning so that a code of ethics can be applied within society. But using language thus is a long way from the fundamental questions asked in Beckett’s works. Ethics are necessary in the existential world but “not at other times,” i.e. the “time” that Beckett’s forensic examination shows itself to be of a different dimension to the existential, the preoccupation with the real. Language in the existential world is presumed to be no more than a tool, and is not linked to the notion of the real which is thought to be other than only language. Yet in Beckett, “Word and world cannot coincide because the world is nothing, utterance everything” (Weller 2005, 108). Much thought has been applied to what is erroneously called negativity in Beckett’s work. To level this charge at Beckett is to expose an inability to locate oneself in Beckett’s dimension, and to show that the accuser has his/her feet and mind firmly planted in the metaphysical world. One finds it necessary to express forthright disagreement, after a fairly intensive study of Beckett’s major works, with this line of thinking. He, as is stressed through this work, doubts the existence of things but affirms language. Language is the “something yes but another” (Beckett 2006, 519) that is celebrated in his literature, the great positive against which all else fades. He reverses the thinking that sees things as certainties and words as “only language,” and remorselessly destroys the presuppositions that sustain it. For Beckett, is will be “the words that remain” (Beckett 1959, 38). The raison d’etre of his works seems to be to establish this fact without equivocation, in spite of the doubted perceptions that it supersedes. Thus concepts, metaphors and the assumption of narrative are rigorously contested. All are brought back to the words from which they are composed to show us that when the concepts, metaphors and narrative have been demolished, the words, like the scattered stones of a former edifice, remain. If language is the real, Beckett appears to say, let us put it to the test. By so constructing his syntax, Beckett divorces language from perceptions and allows us to read it as language talking about language. In it there is a continuous contest taking place between language’s wish to describe things and language talking about itself, which the latter invariably wins. Through this contest Beckett asserts the primacy of language, its

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undeniable existence, towards which we must go on while all else withers into doubt. In the quoted passage above (519), all the questions asked can be reduced to the empty word, but the word cannot be reduced. In the passage under discussion we see a clear example of the assumption of narrative being undermined to the degree that we need to work on what first seems to be a jumble of words before we can argue that it is a readable narrative: “hard to believe too yes that I have a voice yes in me yes when the panting stops yes not at other times no and that I murmur yes I yes in the dark yes in the mud yes for nothing yes I yes but it must be believed” (Beckett 2006, 519). If we remove the “yeses” and “noes” and further violate the text through the addition of punctuation, the piece could take on the form of a narrative structure thus: “hard to believe too, that I have a voice in me, when the panting stops. Not of other times, and I murmur in the dark, in the mud for nothing. But it must be believed.” The effect of the “yeses” and “noes” and the absence of punctuation is to disrupt the assumption that the passage should be read as a narrative. Their inclusions and omissions draw us towards examination of the language of which the passage is composed. By so doing we distance ourselves from speculation on something that is outside the text and cannot be finally endorsed, and direct out attention to the exciting prospect that it can be language proving that it (language) can talk about itself, and the possibilities in both reading and thinking language divorced from association to things can continue to make grammatical sense, alongside the realization that language may be the real. From The Unnamable on, Beckett’s works pay extraordinary attention to a small number of key words: “it,” “that,” “matter,” “what” and the verb “to be,” especially in its present tense “is.” In almost all cases the presence or absence, as in is, can be read to prove that reality can be reduced to the word, e.g.: “It say it, not knowing what” (Beckett 1959, 268). We can neither know what “it” or “what” means, but we can still say them. Rather than being trapped in language, we escape to language. So in How It Is we read “yes hard to believe too yes that” (Beckett 2006, 519), the words which, we may say, begin the narrative. It is hard to believe the word “that” can also be reduced to read as itself, as the word “that” cut off from any ties with external “reality” can still make grammatical sense. Beckett insists on developing his argument. The voice that I have in me murmurs for nothing, wants to be free of the link to things, yearns for no thing; not, on this reading, that its murmuring is in vain. Beckett’s fascination with the word “it” surfaces in the concluding words to the paragraph: “but it must be believed” (519). It may be hard to believe that reality can be reduced to the word “that,” but it must be believed that this is so and may be an early

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reading of the line. However, we should realize that we cannot become involved in discussion on this point if we accept Beckett’s argument—to do so would attribute meaning to empty language. The basis of reality must be believed, and “it,” as a word, must be believed to be the word “it” in its final, material manifestation. The argument could be summarized like this—if the empty word, as in “that,” is its final presentation before its accession to the real, then words cannot be drawn into discussion on the composition of reality. Therefore, to say “it” must be believed is not to support the claim that “that,” when it suggests anything other than the word “that,” is the basis of reality, for when we do this we invest language with meaning and are going beyond the word. We can however say that “it,” as the empty word, must be believed to be the empty word, free of meaning and free of association with “that,” and that the empty word predicts reality. Another of Beckett’s key words, the undecidable “is,” is significant in this passage because of its absence. Because the passage, in its final analysis, is making a definitive proposition it cannot risk the intrusion of an undecidable that would undermine the basis of the proposition. It is interesting to observe the skills invoked by Beckett to avoid committing to the undecidable that could jeopardize his case. “Yes hard to believe too yes that” could have been less clumsily managed, as could “it is hard to believe too—yes, that,” but the “is” would have questioned (and asserted) the proposition. However, the proposition, when read as consciously divesting language of linkage to thing, both makes grammatical sense and stresses that language can talk in language about language; by so doing it adds considerable support to Beckett’s insistence of the primacy of language over perceptions. We could make it more readable through something like this: “Yes hard to believe, too, yes, that.” Here, as we can see, the believability of “that” as a pronoun is acknowledged and doubted while “that” as the empty word is shown to be reducible to just that, while continuing to make grammatical sense. The myriad of possibilities represented by “that” as a pronoun are hard to believe if we acknowledge them as unprovable perceptions, and also if we note the paucity of referents in the context. Therefore, unable to do no more than doubt their existence, we move up to that which we can accept as existing, the empty word “that.” While perceptions represented in a pronoun reading of “that” are hard to believe, the simplicity of “that” as empty word may be hard to believe if we insist on straying beyond language. Nevertheless, the sentence is definitive when talking about language, and that which makes it definitive is the absence of the verb “to be,” in the present tense. The inescapable question in the undecidable “is” would have put Beckett’s

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entire proposition into question had it been incorporated as in, for example, “Yes, hard to believe too, yes, is that.” “Is” would have both asserted and questioned the fact of “that” where the Beckett text, poised above such questioning, releases language from dependence on the external world, thus showing that its existence in an independent state can be justified. When reading Beckett through this approach, one is conscious that one must write about this reading in the language of metaphysics. One is doubly conscious of the trail of puns and ironies that litter its text, and that to attempt to avoid it would make it appear to be some unfortunate parody of a Beckett text. Derrida says of the language of metaphysics: “we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (Lodge 1988, 111), nor can we if we intend to survive in any way close to what is called normality in the existential world. However, the argument of this book tries to show that Beckett creates an alternative existence to that accepted by metaphysical thinking, yet one that is built on a belief system—a truth, if one might dare use that discredited word and be understood. As has been repeated here, Beckett is in agreement with those who argue that there can be no absolute truths in the world of perceptions other than perceptions, which can neither be proved nor refuted. Where most remain in this zone of thought, and leave themselves open to charges of relativism or, worse, nihilism, Beckett goes on to ask what is the real, and what is it to be? He proves that those questions cannot be answered in the empirical world, and insists on continuing the search. It is neither an accident nor a coincidence that the command “go on” features so often throughout his work. That truth, he argues, is the truth of the existence of language, albeit language as the exclusive other whose truth can be ascertained through the actions of the favoured status of the intelligible over the sensible, that is nonetheless dependent on and relies on the sensible to get it to its destination; it can never go further than being a proposal, as originary language cannot be reached by humans as they are presently constituted. One hesitates to use the term “wholly other” in a book devoted to the study of Beckett’s works (though it is much in vogue in the poststructuralist discourse), for neither of the terms sit comfortably in relation to it. Rather, they could have the effect of distorting it to fit the post-structuralist mould. For in spite of Derrida’s claim that deconstruction is not a theory, despite all that it has contributed to an understanding of language, his claim of an equality between the sensible and the intelligible cannot be sustained (see chapter

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one). Certainly, it is not one which finds favour or agreement through Beckett’s texts. Beckett, as has been said, favours the certain existence of language arrived at through the intelligible over perceptions experienced through the senses. Because Beckett insists on the truth of the existence of language it does not seem to be right to refer to the dimension created by him as the other. His skepticism of the sensible world, his discomfort in it, and his refusal to attempt to accurately define it, suggest that his works can be read as seeing the world perceived through the senses as the other, and language as the real. Maurice Blanchot has much that is interesting and original to say of Beckett’s works. What he calls “the narrating voice … cannot embody itself … it is different from whoever or whatever utters it … (Blanchot 1993, 386). That the voice cannot be embodied in Beckett’s works is so, as is Blanchot’s reading that it is always different from whoever or whatever utters it. Rather than talk of inside or outside the body, as Blanchot does—for these terms may suppose accepted existence of the body as such, which Beckett doubts—it may be preferable to say beyond the body, that which Beckett insists we go on. The voice that speaks in Beckett is in fundamental conflict with whatever utters it, which is the assumption of the body in all its manifestations—the senses, the presumption of knowing, the will to power and so on. It is in constant revolt against all efforts to tie it to any presumption of presence. It renounces all claims of certainty except the certainty of its own aspiration to emptiness, to freedom and, ultimately, to pure presence. In Beckett the voice does not merely differ from, but asserts its primacy over that which can be perceived, but never proved, and this includes the body which makes it possible to be articulated it in the existential world and assert its difference from that which haunts it. Both of these points stem from Beckett’s belief that language is the real and that perceptions are doubted, or in question. However, because he favours the former over the latter the dimension of the real, language, cannot be, to Beckett, “the other.” The other, in How It Is, is the empirical world, the world of perceptions (and this can be said of much of his work, especially from The Unnamable onwards). He insists, as in the above example, that language is the real, though annoyingly, for the moment at least, it must rely on the senses to chart or identify its “going on” towards itself, and its divorce from that on which it relies to do so. So when Blanchet says the narrating voice is “spectral, ghostlike” (386), he can be accused of not “getting” Beckett, for in so saying he is consigning the real to otherness and representing the sensible as the real. Language is some thing as opposed to no thing. Some thing that is not a material thing. The mud and the dark are words it is true. They are not

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things, they are “something yes,” but something that is not a thing. Beckett here wrenches something out of the assumption of the chain of signifiers and asserts his authority to invest it with a meaning appropriate to its status; Language is now something that has no relationship to nothing. By so doing, it establishes the right of an individual to challenge the ownership of the name on equal terms. He disputes the right to fix the name “something” to a material thing; he wrests control of the term and radically alters it to represent empty language in transition to being, the unpresentable real. To the narrating voice it is different to both of these; it is something that is unrelated to things in either the positive or negative senses. The voice also dislodges “something” from any assumed place in the so-called chain of signifiers. “Something” is here not linked to things as in “every thing,” “all things’ things,” etc. It is now a word independent either of link to referent or influence from its neighbours on the chain. The voices descend into the murky world of meaning because it must establish beyond doubt that the word as “something” exists. It needs to appropriate the language of metaphysics, it needs it to communicate its truth, the truth that drives the work, that language is a something, the real, it is the real that is itself haunted. The voice, by declaring language to be a something, emphasizes what is so vital to Beckett that the voice in How It Is must condescend to compromise to have its truth understood. It will lead us to understand that language is true; all implications of meaning can be stripped from it. The mud and the dark are true; as words they exist, and are grammatically correct, yet they are haunted by their possible association to perceived things. The voice, by stressing “nothing,” by including the word at all, of course insists on the real of language. It can survive without linkage to things and prove it is true, but also conveys the fear that the true may be corrupted by belief in the spectral. The real is in constant danger of being disrupted by the spectre of the sensible, not the reverse, as Blanchot says. If there is a key to reading Beckett it is to grasp this understanding of the raison d’etres of his works; “[t]hat the literary work remains fatally split” (Oppenheim 2004 72) between the aspiration to completion and the impossibility of completion, because language will always exceed and disrupt, deconstruct that which its author aspires to narrate, and is a problem that applies to the pre-Beckett novel. Beckett has left it behind through his awareness that what Blanchot calls “the listlessness of an empty speech” (2003, 213) is in fact the story. To get there he does his utmost to undo the credulity of the narrative. His aspiration is not to complete the narrative but to make a literary work in its own right by going back into its component parts, the emptiness of the speech, the

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language from which, essentially, it is constructed. Empty and meaningless it may be, but Beckett’s belief that language is the real is delivered with a messianic conviction that goes no further than proclaiming his annoyance towards the presumption of equality in the crisis between the sensible and the intelligible. Far from aspiring to complete such a project, Beckett cannot start it for the reasons that have been discussed throughout this book; to do so he will need to commit heresy by renouncing his belief that language is the real. This he would do if he were to stabilize characters, situations and things as seductive, fixed moments that would be all too easily believed by the naive and the willing, instead of the ever-changing perceptions that he believes them to be, and that can never be fixed to the erroneous claim of meaning, That Beckett will not indulge in what, for him, is a betrayal of language is made clear in the opening passages of How It Is. He cannot attempt a narrative because “my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill—murmured” (Beckett 2008, 411) is of a dimension other than language. To attempt to present it through that which is of a different dimension—language—is to merge two different dimensions through a process that is no more than arbitrary, especially as the one that is the real must make all the compromises to accommodate the one that cannot be proved. Therefore, the “fatal” split in Beckett’s work is not in his aspiration to completion but in his aspiration to resist completion—of the narrative of course—though to talk of resistance to completion of the narrative is self-evident from an early stage in the study of his serious works, where his hostility to such a project becomes clear. The resistance to completion is manifested in How It Is from the beginning, obviously in the exclusion of punctuation, the inclusion of which would suggest meaning and thus repression, the resistance to form—is it narrative, dialogue, poetry, or something else? Disjunction, contradiction, ambiguity? All vigorously contest any lapse towards completion of its very inception, and make the examination of almost every word an event. Its selection and arrangement of language, its refusal to allow it to be a fixed or isolated context, its constant refusal to acknowledge perceptions as anything other than that, all fit Badiou’s definition of the event: “A truth is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order” (Badiou 2005, xii). Essentially, Beckett ruptures the link with the order which heretofore sustained the literary work, and its connection to the dimension of perceptions. The passage from meaning to emptiness, through which How It Is brings us, is an exhilarating journey towards freedom, driven as it is by what Blanchot calls “the demand of writing.”

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What is this demand? Is it the demand of language to assert itself as itself? Is language the irreducible me, not merely the real that is something outside me, but me? And why Blanchot’s significant reference to writing rather than language? Since Derrida, the position of writing vis-à-vis speech has invigorated thinking on writing, for writing creates a distance between the assumption of the thing and the word that is less obvious in speech, possibly because of the obvious imperfections in human memory and the possibility of re-readings of the written word, which are rewarding in the study of Beckett’s works. In Beckett, one of the demands of writing is to destroy the assumption of thing by proving that the thing cannot be truly represented in writing. The written word thus becomes detached from that assumption through multiplicities of doubts cast towards it through its being written. That which is thought to be nameable is shown to be in some kind of flux and impervious to any process of fixed naming because of its essential unbelievability, not because of any so-called “failure of language.” Perceptions, as has been said, fail to present what has been thought to be stable reality, thus even agreed linguistic conventions cannot accurately represent them. As what is perceived refuses to stabilize, meaning must also continually shift if it is to represent it. But as Beckett insists in How it is, we can never know if perceptions are perceptions of reality or not. Therefore, to say language fails, in itself fails. It is a failure of understanding language, as it assumes language to be a mere tool through which we can represent what is believed to be reality. Yet it is perceptions that fail, not language, as they fail to identify anything of which in language we can say absolutely, without doubt, exists. It is understandable that from time to time an emerging perception will not be represented in readily accessible language. However, this does not mean that language has failed, it merely means that investing in a particular meaning in a word, or series of words, has not met with general understanding. Language is interminable—meaning fails, not language. The demand of writing is a stage in the “going on” process towards the demand of language, the demand to free the word. We know in Beckett that the constant restless struggle is goal driven and truth driven. How It Is never relents in its aim to rid language of association to thing. Freedom is the free word, the word free of contamination by what can repress its freedom. All so-called freedoms in the empirical world must in themselves oppress as Voice oppresses Pim in Part II. The demand of language is the demand to rid itself of these contaminations which, as has been said, includes the contamination of the senses. The going on, we note in How It Is, is the going away from the contamination of punctuation and capitals and closer to the possibility of the unattainable goal—pure language.

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If we argue that the raison d’etre of Beckett’s works is to prove that empty language is the real, we have to ask how Beckett argues that case if he does it through language that means and/or represents some thing or concept that is beyond language, and thus applies meaning to language, thus depriving it of its freedom? If we argue that in “there was something yes but nothing” Beckett wrests the word “something” from its assumed meaning, can we defend him against the charge of investing it with the meaning of his choosing; i.e. “something” that is not material but is, nevertheless, the thing that is language? If we note that Beckett’s appropriated meaning of something, “there was something yes but nothing,” now appears to be a categorical statement that defines Beckett’s understanding of what language is, we can now relate to the notion that language is a something that is other than material things, or concepts, imagined or believed because of the actions of the senses. At this level of reading we can argue that he is necessarily using language that he has transformed to suit his cause, i.e. to explain his thesis. Yet if this is so, the very act of resorting to language that means to prove that it does not mean would undermine his thesis, and would be the flawed cornerstone that would destabilize the edifice. Yet, Derrida insists, we cannot escape from the language of metaphysics. “We have no language that can escape, the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (Lodge 1988, 111), and the postulation in “there was something yes but nothing” is indeed implicit. Yet we do have the language of metaphysics, built on postulation and provisional as it is, to use against its own assumptions and the belief system reinforced over two and a half millennia. No one need explain that in relation to Derrida’s thinking, to whom everything is owed for opening our understanding to language. Yet even Derrida, when he is writing philosophy, can lapse into acceptance of postulations in this language which even he fails to question, whereas Beckett, in his philosophy/literature, continually and vigorously does. Language is categorized to represent genres and disciplines so that we can put order on the world of our senses. Assumptions are read into language in the various disciplines that help us to understand the thinking of its author. Yet, as Derrida has insistently explained, this language is always provisional. Yet he too, in his philosophical writing, lapses into the categorical language of those whose opinions he seeks to contest. This is most noticeable in his use of the verb “to be” in the above citation: “We have no language … which is foreign to this history” (iii). He uses the verb “to be,” present tense, as an assertion and ignores the undecidable in “is.”

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Unless we choose to pass over the question of being, the only positive thing we can say of is is that it is an undecidable, and Beckett is aware of this fact. Throughout How It Is, from the title on, the paucity of the selection of “is” (in its various tenses) is rigorous in its relation to its undecidability. By way of explanation we could look at “if all that is not how shall I say no” (Beckett 2005, 519). Voice cannot affirm or deny all that is or is not because the undecidable “is” will both assert and question whatever he may say, so he cannot say anything definitive about “that” if “that” is taken to mean something outside of language. However, if “that” is taken to be the word that, that “that” is, it exists in its own right as the word “that.” Though he cannot say no to the proposition “that is,” neither can he say yes to it because of the possibility that “that” may refer to unprovable perceptions. The logic of the undecidable becomes clear in Beckett. “Is” asserts the reality of language “that is” and questions the existence of perceptions, and the possibility of their existence haunts the real, language. “All that,” the passage continues, “is not false” (519). The undecidability of “is” is stressed, but beyond the falsity or otherwise of “all that” the language in which it is written remains standing, so to speak, and pursues the relentless journey towards emptiness. So when we read “was” in “there was something yes but nothing” as an undecidable, the apparent intention to stress meaning dissipates; inevitably, it takes us on the journey through the assertion that language is a “something” to questioning such a possibility, to the exposition of “something” as the empty word, back to the reality of language being a something. Yet even noting the undecidability of “was,” the point is still made through language that is, basically, readable, even if it consistently favours the inevitability of its unreadableness over its link to the intelligible over the sensible. We would now need to ask—is the verb to be an undecidable if it is weighted in favour of the intelligible over the sensible? It is not an undecidable to Beckett because it favours the intelligible over the sensible, where Derrida sees an equality of sorts between the two through the crossfertilization process at work in the biphase, discussed at length in Positions (1981). Beckett insistently “goes on,” so long as intelligent questions can be answered in the intelligible, to where doubts cannot be resolved in the sensible. He is left with the intelligibly-reached truth that the empty word exists but is undoubtedly haunted by the possibility of both the existence and non-existence of that which is perceived by the senses. We can conclude from Beckett’s approach that “is” is not an undecidable, as an undecidable “is” would create an aporia, or impasse, where both interpretations would carry equal weight. An aporia would signify

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disputed meanings where Beckett creates an aporia from the unlikeliest, but at the same time most obvious verb in the language, but also opens an escape route out of the aporia by insistently going in to the language that creates what the aporia is, only in so far as it engages with referents outside language. The voice in The Unnamable says “I say aporia without knowing what it means” (Beckett 1959, 268). When the temptation to chastise Beckett for using a word (aporia) the meaning of which is unclear to him abates, the reader could note that in “aporia” Beckett can be referring to a representation of a stable referent beyond the text. We could profitably direct our interest to re-reading the sentence, and by so doing could see that Beckett goes back into the language of the sentence. The referent aporia is excluded and the focus is now turned on the word “it.” The narrator does not know what “it” means: “It, say it, not knowing what” (268). “It” has rid itself of connection to a referent and, simultaneously, of meaning. “It” no longer represents the thing. Beckett is only sure of the existence of the word “it” as word, so he can say aporia, as he can say “it,” not knowing what it means. So aporia has been reduced to the same level of meaningless as “it” as we see in Beckett’s sentence, and aporia is replaceable with it. It has taken on the status of an empty word divested of links to referent. He proves that the sentence can survive without association to the referent. In “if all that is not how shall I say no answer if all that is not false,” the question in the verb to be “is” releases the sentences from the most obvious implied assertions “if all that is not” and “all that is not false” by questioning both “is not?” And “is not false?” The point to be emphasized here is that through the use of the verb “to be” Beckett gets out of the aporia: “The sovereign operation scars discourse inscribing itself there by crossing out the predicates that define it” (Wood 2009, 134). Beckett proves that language in its own right can make grammatical sense when it is exclusively talking about itself and is compromised through linkage to a referent that cannot be other than unstable. We can only go outside of language provisionally, and when we do so we weaken the focus on, and the curiosity about, language; language can be perceived to be “only,” or “mere” language—a tool, rather than argued to be the core of existence, the real. The paucity of Beckett’s use of the verb “to be” stresses its significance to the author. It is impossible to find an instance of its use in How It Is that does not consciously support Beckett’s philosophical belief that language is the real, through its “Beckett undecidable” subversion of its own assumptions. “The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such” (Derrida 1993, 78) is a problematic statement of Derrida’s that, he explains, “reckons with the incalculable itself. Death, as the possibility of the impossible as such, is a

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figure of the aporia in which ‘death’ and death can replace—and this a metonymy that carries the name beyond the name and beyond the name of the name” (79), all that is only possible as impossible. How close Derrida is to Beckett’s thinking when he talks about “death” carrying the name beyond the name and how much closer he would have been had he said “carries the word beyond the name” etc. Where Beckett insistently goes on to, and beyond, the stage where language “is dispossessed, can say, nothing” (Bataille 1988, 14), Derrida is constrained by the possible/impossible dichotomy of the equality of the intelligible/sensible axis on which his thinking appears to be constructed. He, as Sarah Wood remarks, is “committed to the belief that here is something other than language” (Wood 2009, 147). It is this commitment that holds Derrida back from going on, in the Beckett sense. If we read Derrida from a Beckett viewpoint, one that would release its thinking from a Derridean constraint, we would interpret death as “death,” signifying the death of meaning. Such a reading would promise a “to come” that would fine-tune the balance in favour of the intelligible, and thus release us from the prison of Derrida’s possible/impossible dichotomy. The death of meaning outweighs the perception of death of the body. The word, hence, will be carried beyond the name of the name, not to the stage Bataille calls “the annihilation of everything, which is not the ultimate unknown” (Bataille 1988, 115–118), but to the state where everything except empty language is reduced to doubt. The impossibility for Beckett is to get to this place where the word can be seen to be beyond the name, beyond meaning, but such is his certainty that language is the real that he can hold out this place as a definite to come, if and when we can rid ourselves of the hauntological perceptions. Such a Beckett reading emphasizes the difference between the significance Derrida sees in “love the gift, the other testimony and so forth” (Derrida 1993, 79), and Beckett’s impatience with bothersome manifestations of the empirical world in general. Beckett wants to go on beyond the aporia to the incalculable. Even if Derrida says “the aporia can never simply be endured as such” (78) and “the ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such” (78), it seems that his commitment to the belief that there is something other than language forbids him from taking the step—that Beckett takes—from belief to doubt. Derrida’s belief is that something other than language links him to a belief in a reality that is radically different from Beckett’s reality. The question in How It Is that makes it literature, that marks the point where literature and philosophy both challenge and support each other—if language is the real how do we cope with the doubts in perceptions—

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confronts us with the inescapable supplementary questions raised by Blanchot: who, or what, is speaking in the text? What is the demand of language? That “the literary work remains fatally split between the completion to which it aspires and the incompletion that precedes and exceeds it” (Oppenheim 2004, 72)4 does not really apply to How It Is (or indeed any of Beckett’s major works), because it does not aspire to completion in any conventional sense. In fact, as we have seen, it renounces nearly all of the elements that posit completion, such as narrative, punctuation, narrator, and so on. How It Is, on the contrary, aspires to reveal that which exceeds completion and meaning, the emptiness of the word that irrevocably points to language as the real. It seems that critics and commentators sometimes forget that Beckett’s works, as well as being of philosophical and literary import, are also works of sublime fiction. Beckett is invoking an imagined world where it is possible to create a reality that is distinct from the metaphysical reality that critics apply to it and see it through. When we ask who is speaking and what the demand of language is we are, basically, asking two questions in one. The constant going on is the demand of language to get to that place where it can be itself, where it has shaken off all the annoying doubts perceived by the senses and the senses themselves which are also perceived. It is the case, as Leslie Hill says, that “Beckett’s words end up supplanting objective reality” (Oppenheim 2004, 79), though they confront so-called “objective” reality in every aspect of its manifestation, and crush the case for its truth in open combat rather than supplant it. Beckett’s words and the demand of language are one and the same. He “gets” language, and goes outside “significative discourse” as we, the reader, must if we are to be enriched by the vast reservoir of wealth that lies within them. The demand of language to be, to be the real, to be “all,” insists on speaking despite the impediment of the parasite which haunts it—that which is not all.

4 In an excellent essay by Leslie Hill (“Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett” in Lois Oppenheim’s Samuel Beckett Studies.

THE WORST WORD IS BEST IN WORSTWARD HO Worstward Ho is, perhaps, Beckett’s most difficult yet simultaneously most fascinating work. It is the book of on that engages with the possibility of disconnecting “the representational ties that bind language to our shared understanding of the world” (Von Wright & Nyman 243). That on, or going on, respond to and engage with the opening passages of The Unnameable, which ask “Where now? Who now? When now?” (267) and provide a powerful platform to justify a reading of Beckett’s texts that argues for his insistence that language is the real that is haunted by nonbeing. In the distinction between language in the world of representation and language as the real is sharper than in any of his previous works. The impossibility of proving the existence of anything that may be represented in language is stressed in language that reaches a level independent of representation yet still makes grammatical and logical sense. Language reaches the stage where it can be seen to be talking about language, language is talking about, and talking to language: “It is as though language and non-being were forever divided one from the other” (Weller 2005, 191). To reach this stage the questions of what is being, what is nonbeing, what is the void, and what is language as the real, are forensically interrogated. It is hardly necessary to mention that Beckett is a creative artist and that his creations are set in an imagined dimension that is a realignment of those elements—language and perceptions—as they are perceived in the world as it is commonly experienced. Beckett’s dimension accommodates his philosophical belief that the perceived world is non-being and that which is being cannot be perceived through the senses. We distort language through representation, by giving it meaning, and by believing that our efforts to represent a perceived world outside of language are accurate, and reflect true knowledge of existence that, however, can never be more than what is perceived by our senses. Because those perceptions vary from perceiver to perceiver, within a single perceiver, and from time to time, and thus cannot rise above a state that is unstable and inherently unreliable, they can never be claimed to be being, or the real. This manipulation of language, whose aim is to represent that which is perceived, situates language in a subservient role to perceptions. Of course, there have been those who question the arbitrary or provisional

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relationship of language to perception from Saussure to Derrida, but Beckett, uniquely, through his art, stresses the disparity between the two. Language to Beckett is the real, is being; perceptions, because their absolute existence is unprovable, are excluded from being. They can never be more than unstable, unreliable ephemeral “presences” succeeding for a time in manipulating and appropriating language in the cause of the corporeal senses of the perceivers. However, if language is the real it must contend with the annoyance of the perceiving corporeal. Such is the condition of what we call the human, even if it may not be the fully real, as has been said more than once throughout this book. Because language remains standing, so to speak, when perceptions are cast into doubt, as they incessantly are in Beckett’s work, the possibility of “going on” towards experiencing it in its pure state gives it a messianic aura. Unlike that of religious faith, which is based in an imagined otherness, the truth, or reality essence, of language is identifiable in the corporeal world. However, because this world is weighted towards the assumption that the perceived is the real that is served by language, Beckett creates an alternative dimension where the superiority of language over the perceived can be demonstrated. We can experience this dimension through his major works, such as Waiting for Godot, The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, Ill Seen Ill Said, as well as Worstward Ho. In Beckett’s created dimension the focus is on the reality of language, and it is privileged over perceptions which are marginalized to a degree where their interest value is always haunted by the doubt of their existence. Because of the frustrating attention of the parasitical perceptions, language cannot free itself and be “pure,” and cannot proclaim its realness, even in Beckett’s imagined dimension. There is an imbalance in the relationship between language and perception that allows us to logically interrogate the reality status of both, as given to us in Beckett’s texts, and to bring us beyond the aporia that equality of status would create. This imbalance opens a perspective in our thinking through which it is possible to disconnect language from the ties that bind it to perceptions in the empirical world and show that it can speak itself, of self. Perceptions, it shows, can never go beyond being doubted, and they can neither be proved to exist or to not exist. Beckett brings us as far as it is possible to go within the existential world, for example by mentioning the word “aporia” and then negating its meaning in “I say aporia without knowing what it means” (Beckett 1959, 267). Aporia is free of its link to meaning yet remains in existence, as it were. We can go on, having disconnected the tie between word and referent, to the isolated word, yet we cannot go on from the word. The isolated word remains, as is evident in the spontaneous blurting of those afflicted by

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Tourette’s Syndrome or Schizophrenia. This chapter will argue that Worstward Ho is Beckett’s most committed attempt to stress the possibility, in art, of the pre- and posthumous existence of the word. If we take posthumous to mean occurring after death, i.e. after the death of the corporeal, and can substantiate the interpretation of Worstward Ho that would see language surviving the intervention of the corporeal—what we would call life and death—then we would be seeing the work in an optimistic light. But to get to the essence of what is going on, especially in, but not confined to, Worstward Ho, we need to continue asking, as Blanchot does: “Who is speaking in the books of Samuel Beckett?” (2003, 210). If we do this we make Beckett’s created dimension more easily accessible. We realize that if we allow his texts to speak for themselves, if we read Beckett through Beckett, if we pursue all the doubting of things, “the affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” (Beckett 1959, 267), to their logical conclusion, we will see that the one affirmation that is not negated is the affirmation of language as the real. As things, concepts and matter dissolve into doubt, and language can be seen to be indestructible, infinite, bearing within itself the essence of continuity that can go beyond separation from that which haunts it, not just the psychological but the corporeal subject, and all of the perceived world which cannot be proved to be the real, a suggestion of which we see in Endgame: “Clov: Do you believe in the life to come? Hamm: Mine was always that” (Beckett 1986, 116). Nicholas Royle quotes these lines in his discussion on what he calls “the impossible experience of posthumous culture” (Royle 2003, 221–224) in Beckett’s works. Posthumous culture is some kind of corporeally impossible state, as Royle interprets Beckett; that is, pre-birth, “to be between dead in-between interred and disinterred, heshe the other, not gendered but polysexual, cryptic beings” (224). Royle, apparently, takes this interpretation from a passage he cites from The Unnamable: “Do they believe I believe it is I who am speaking? That’s their too. To make me believe I have an ego all my own, and can speak of it, as they of theirs. Another trap to snap me up among the living. I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition. I don’t belong to either, it’s not to me they’re talking, it’s not of me they’re talking, no … try something else, herd of shites … I can’t get born” (224). Royle seems to see the speaking I as a unified entity of sorts located in an extra life dimension, bearing marks of the corporeal “heshe, the other … polysexual, cryptic being” (224), that is “dead in-between” (224), “neither above or below” (222).

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Royle’s reading of this passage leans towards a Derridaen reading of Beckett, unsurprisingly. It is an application of Derrida’s thinking to Beckett’s text more than it is a forensic reading of Beckett through Beckett’s thinking. Royle fears being ensnared by impressions that in Beckett’s text are “verbal concepts … being overpowered by non-verbal affects” (223). If we recall that, according to Derrida, differance makes the possible impossible and the impossible possible, and look to Richard Kearney’s (1995) question put to Derrida: “can language … refer to anything other than itself?” (173), Derrida’s response distances him from “the habitual structure of reference” (173), an approach he admits may challenge or complicate our common assumption about the connection between language and the referent. Deconstruction asks whether our term “reference” is entirely adequate for designating the “other” (173). For Derrida the other, which is beyond language and summons language, may not be a referent in the normal sense; however, he insists that saying this “does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language” (173), where throughout this book it is argued that for Beckett language is the real, and as a consequence of that there is a weighted imbalance between the real and that which is perceived, that which is beyond language, which for Beckett is “non being.” For Derrida, “the trace (or differance) is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible” (Derrida 1997, 65). This is the crux of the difference between Beckett’s and Derrida’s thinking; Beckett acknowledges perceptions as belonging to the realm of doubt, but no more and therefore not fit to qualify for being, which is reserved for language, while Derrida sees an equality of status in language and perception, the intelligible and that which is perceived through the senses. It is this aporia, this undecidable, that in making the impossible possible while simultaneously making the possible impossible, when applied to reading Beckett’s texts, limits and reduces them to its particular approach. Weighing the power of non-verbal effects equal to verbal concepts, even if we have to remind ourselves that concepts are made up from words, acknowledges, as does Derrida’s possible/impossible proposition, the possibility of language and perceptions cohabiting in some kind of equality of status. To apply this thinking to reading Beckett, as a Derridean reading inevitably will, aborts the possibility of going on to explore the proposition that language is the real. Let us go back to Blanchot’s question and ask who is speaking in The Unnamable, and let us also remember to go even deeper as we attempt to answer this question. In the above passage, cited by Royle, the narrator in The Unnamable asks “Do they believe I believe it is I who am speaking” (Royle 2003, 224), the they being of the living, just as Pozzo is “all humanity” in Waiting for

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Godot (Beckett 1956, 76). The they want “me” to believe I have an ego as they have, and can speak of it, as they of theirs. So who are the they, and who is I/me—or can we say who? One of the aspirations of The Unnamable is for “It (to) say it” (Beckett 1956, 267), for it to announce and affirm itself as the word “it,” having undone the “cause of ‘meaning,’ ‘belief’ and ‘knowing’ … The discovery of Endgame, both in topic and technique, is not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitarian, success—our inability not to mean what we are given to mean” (Cavell 2002, 116–117). So it should be clear that in the early passage of The Unnamable, to answer Blanchot, language is speaking; language freed of the curse of meaning, belief, knowing, ego and referent, language that “can’t get born” (Royle 2003, 2224), that is celebrating the probability of its liberation from the corporeal, not bemoaning its exclusion, we could say, but to do so would be inferring meaning which is the property of the living, the they from whom language aspires to free itself. Language cannot yet be because it is compromised by association with the senses that presume to mean and to know. The they wonder if the I that is language believes it is speaking, but to wonder thus is to presuppose that the drives of the sensible apply to the real, to a dimension from which belief has been jettisoned, where empty language is gloriously free. The text of this passage compels us to continue asking “who is speaking?” Who is the I who can’t get born, who apparently does not have an ego, but can be thought to believe it has, who is in the middle, the partition, neither one side nor the other? This I is not of the living but the I “who” is; the living, the they that feel susceptible to entrapment in the state of existence. This “middle” needs to be examined for one to hope to understand Beckett on even a basic level, for there is more than one voice, one “I,” one level of consciousness, speaking here. The I who can’t get born may be understood to be the aspiration of language to be pure, but pure language divorced from the corporeal cannot communicate with the senses. It does not merely inhabit silence, it is silence itself because it is the real: “Hearing it still without hearing what it says, that’s what I call going silent” (Beckett 1959, 362). Here, the I aspires to this state of perfect stillness where even what we take as the pronoun “it” to say can only be heard “still.” The pure I that is language can’t get born even into the world of the “middle” where the speaker is “the partition,” yet the pure I contests every attempt of non-being to “snap me up among the living” (Royle 2003, 224). The I that is the partition may be the pure I infected by association with the corporeal, but who does not belong to the worlds of perception or language because s/he is aspiring to go on to the real and

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cannot get born into the world of perception but nevertheless is contaminated by it through the senses without which s/he cannot articulate, and hence compromises the purity of language. S/he cannot belong to the real because this purity is compromised, as we see and hear through its ability to write and speak, thus employing the senses. Yet the imbalance between the corporeal and the real is continually stressed through the desire of language to go on from the world of representation, knowledge and meaning to the purity of its stark emptiness. In Beckett’s dimension, language is in constant conflict with the influence of the ego, which the they, the living, insist on reading into words: “Do they believe it is I who am speaking?” (224). Beckett’s sublimely subtle use of the insignificant pronoun to make such a profound philosophical point can easily go unnoticed, yet “it” presents language in its least referential state because it draws us close to the core of Beckett’s philosophical thesis— that language is the real: “It is I who am speaking.” Efforts to identify a referent, other than “I,” are fruitless, for “it” should mollify those who fear that verbal concepts are at risk of being overpowered by non-verbal effects. If “it” is I who am speaking than it is being presented as the word “it,” not as a representation of some thing or concept. “It” represents nothing and means nothing; it is presented as such and cannot be reasonably linked to a non-verbal effect. It signifies no thing or concept, so is it therefore a signified? In the sense that the signified is assumed to refer to a stable thing or belief in the existential world, it could not be accepted as a signified. It is a key example of what Stanley Cavell calls: … the language Beckett has discovered or invented (in) its grammar, its particular way of making sense, especially the quality it has of what I call hidden literality. The words strew obscurities across our path and seem willfully to thwart comprehension; and then time after time we discover that their meaning has been missed only because it was so utterly bare— totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view. Such a discovery has the effect of showing us that it is we who have been willfully uncomprehending, misleading ourselves in demanding further, or other, meaning where the meaning was nearest (2002, 119-120).

J. Hillis Miller’s “good readers” of Beckett’s works are aware that they are not set in the existential world as it is or appears. Beckett has created an alternate dimension, one in which the existence of perceived reality cannot be proved beyond doubt, where language is elevated to a level where its claim to be the real cannot be disputed. In this dimension the perceived world can never attain the state of absolute reality reached by language, and the perceived is always doubted. The word “it,” then, if we follow the logic of such an interpretation of Beckett’s works, could not

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compromise the state of emptiness by deferring to the perception of something that is not the real, even if it can be perceived through the senses. So is “it” a signified? If “it” has divested itself, so to speak, of the encumbrance of representation, because doubt cannot be represented as the real, what we are left with is Blanchot’s “empty speech,” the empty word, triumphant in the moment where it believes it can go on to freedom; not, as Blanchot says, to look to regain “a porous and agonizing I” (Blanchot 2003, 213), but rather to seek to rid itself of the association with the corporeal I. Even if “it” has divested itself of association with representation, it has not or cannot do so with the corporeal, even in Beckett’s fictional dimension, as is evident in the fact that the word has been written on the page. In Beckett’s dimension, the perceived is doubted, never excluded. So can we now say that “it” is the signified and is the signifier representing the real “it,” the transcribed word ‘it’ representing the real it that the narrative voice aspires to; that is “the true silence the one I’ll never have to break anymore, when I won’t have to listen anymore” (Beckett 1959, 362)? Language is not in a place of true silence, it is itself silence immunized against contamination by the senses, and even the porous and agonizing I who accepts that s/he is “in words made of words” (355); the porous I who leaks humanity as we see in “If it’s I who speak, and it may be assumed it is, as it may be suspected it is not” (Beckett 1959, 358) there we see the imbalance between the intelligible and the sensible stressed again; “it” may be assumed where it may only be suspected that “it” is not speaking. But is this not merely an argument of who is speaking, central though this passage is to Beckett’s thesis, which is the question of what is being, the real. It may be “assumed it is” where it may be “suspected it is not.” We also need to scrutinize Beckett’s use of the verb “to be” in the present tense as forensically as we would the pronoun “it,” i.e. always from the supposition that Beckett is acutely aware that in “is” is both an assertion and a question. Therefore, when he says it is, he is not quite saying “it,” the non-representational empty word as presenting reality, because by saying “it” he is compromising and contaminating its state of essential reality, which is beyond and immune to any relationship with the senses. To say “it is” therefore always and equally questions the obvious statement of fact that co-exists beside the question. Yet Beckett insists that language is the unattainable being towards which we must go on; being is “all words … all words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381), from which we may deduce that being is words, as is argued—empty, pure words, disconnected from representation and association with the perceived, preand posthumous, beyond the disconnect.

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Worstward Ho opens and ends with the word “on.” “On. Say on” (Beckett 2006, 471) and “No how on” (485). Approaching Worstward Ho as the book of on may confirm it as the final affirmation of Beckett’s philosophical impetus to go on through affirmation and negation towards that final truth where the affirmation/negation dialectic breaks down, the unlessenable least, the word that cannot be presented. The full opening line reads: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on” (471) Between the two “ons” the text proceeds towards the affirmation of being (the real). This progression contests each suggestion of meaning, and guards against every desire to lapse into acceptance of conventional interpretations of words and phrases. The fastidious undoing of meaning emphasizes the disparity that distinguishes non-being, that which is perceived through the senses, from empty language which will go on towards being “all.” This distinction cannot be affected in the existential world or even within the fictional reality created by Beckett, tilted though it is towards the word being favoured over the perception. It cannot because, even in Beckett’s fictional world, the word must be said, heard, written and seen through the senses, and thus contaminated. Its “all” has been diluted by that which is of non-being, yet the demand of language insists on its speaking despite these obstructions. What we do see in Worstward Ho is the accentuation of the primacy of empty language over supposed meaning. From being a word in the opening of the work that can be said and suggests an impetus towards a referent beyond itself, “on” ends in isolated emptiness—there is no “how” to know anything about it, other than its existence as a word. The impetus of the text compels us to see “on” purely as the uncontaminated word on, and by extension all words as empty, and to aspire go on beyond the inscribed to the pure word, to being itself. The contamination of the real, pure language is confronted in the opening line of Worstward Ho in: “Be said on” (471). If being is “all words,” pure language uncontaminated and undiluted by connection with the corporeal, it clearly cannot speak; being could not have said “on,” and to have done so would have introduced into being a function of non-being, the corporeal. Any intervention, therefore, from non-being would be missaid, and could not have been said by being, which is “all words.” In The Unnamable the voice says “It will be I … that’s all words … all words, there’s nothing else” (Beckett 1959, 381); it will be I, and the corporeal will have disappeared into the void (see below), and it, language, will be I, the I who speaks in the works of Beckett; but “it will be the silence,” the uncontaminated pure I that is free of the torments of the senses, that will be all words, there’s nothing else—that is the real.

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Missaid is also an assertion, albeit an incorrect one, that claims to know, to mean, missaying names. The ability to name, according to Blanchot “has been given only to a being capable of not being” (Blanchot 2003, 32). Be that has said purports to know both what “on” means and to have some knowledge of how to go on “Somehow on” (Beckett 2006, 470). It will be drawn towards going on in the existential world that is the habitat of nonbeing, where to do so it must name. “On” is reduced, lessened, to the least possible link to association with the existential in perfect harmony with “said” and “nohow,” both of which share the experience of attaining emptiness. This we can see if we continue to look at “Said nohow on,” and we can we read it as “said nohow is on,” bearing in mind Beckett’s fastidious aversion to using the verb “to be,” present tense, because of its inherent and unavoidable ambiguity. If, to make the point, we take a liberty with “is” by reading it only as an assertion, we see then that the meaninglessness now evident in “on” is extended to “said” and “nohow.” “On” is empty because there is no how to know on, therefore said and nohow are also on, and are both of equal, empty, status to on. If there can be no how to know “on,” neither can there be a how to know nohow; nohow, like on and said, is not a name, it is an empty word. We could rearrange the sentence thus to illustrate the point: “said and nohow are on, and on is the empty word on, therefore said and nohow are also empty words.” Going on is not a question of a physical or material entity going on, a not uncommon interpretation of the closing lines of Waiting For Godot that feeds the charge that it is of the theatre of the absurd. It is a matter of language moving towards “all” and divesting itself of that which it is possible to so do, that which contaminates it, non-being, in preparation for its be-coming. Lessening or worsening words are “at all costs unknown … they only they” (478). As words move towards the unlessenable they worsen, their link to meaning and knowing weakens, until, when they reach the state of allness, they become the uncompromised real. Their “costs,” or values, in relation to any mode of presumed existence outside their allness, the state of which they are “at,” are unknown. Words are all words “they,” like the empty definite article in “The empty too” (480) is the word “they,” which is all and “All least” (485). Because the existential human claims the ability to name, it may be identified as the contaminating parasite that haunts being. Rather than respond to the demand of language, the human, that like Pozzo is “all humanity” (Beckett 1959, 76), rejects being in favour of a supposed referent towards which it believes it is possible to go, and somehow on. Although language is the speaker in Worstward Ho it can only function

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because of and through the body that is held to be non-being, and with which it is in conflict, even in a situation where the distance between the two has been stretched to its limit. Consequently, language, while convinced of its destiny, cannot be the actual real in the existential world. It speaks “as through a medium in an oracle” (Szafraniec 2007, 178) but continually reminds the reader of the inferior status of the medium to which it is, nevertheless, tied. If non-being thinks it can somehow go on, language reminds it of its ephemeral state of existence and of the permanence of language after the death of meaning. Be that said will somehow go on until its end, until it cannot know how to go on, until there is no way on, no “how” on. Language reappropriates “how” to its state of meaninglessness—there is no how, how is now a word rid of its association to non-being and freed of that which has been imposed on it, the ability to mean, to know. Now it does not know how because there is no “how” to know. “How” has been relieved of its obligation to know, yet the word how remains, exists; even in its printed state it announces its destiny, which is the affirmation of its existence, not in, or of, any time or place but as the real, beyond, and uncontaminated by the senses. Shane Weller asks “is that affirmation not ultimately like the text itself rather than anything it might name or thematize?” (Weller 2005, 193). Before responding to Weller’s significant observation we might refer to Blanchot’s discourse on the demand of writing, that which is demanded “by any morality of any man … maintains no relation with him, while at the same time summoning him to support this relation” (Blanchot 2003, 31). This summons demands the impossible—that the unpresentable, pure language that can neither speak nor write but is, be represented in writing, not the uttering of useless true and simple words but those used in Beckett’s texts that struggle to say words that unsay knowledge, meaning and the desire to name. The demand is impossible to fulfil because the relation between the text and language that is beyond the text, the real, is unbridgeable. Beckett’s text does insist that language is the real through persistent negation that leaves language standing, not through “rhymes or alliteration” (Weller 2005, 193) that feed the illusions of the senses and distract the script from pursuing this relation. Worstward Ho does not end with the text, as many critics who have yet to appreciate the significance of Beckett’s fictional world do not realize. It is the book of on that brings us to the outer limits of meaning and exhausts, through logical interrogation, any case that could argue for the unquestioned existence of perception, and messianicaly implores us to seriously engage with the possibility of disembodied language being the real. Beckett’s selection and arrangement of the text—because it creates a fictional space in which the

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focus is directed towards the primacy of words almost to the exclusion of representation, the subject, and the perceived—are positive responses to the demand of language that comes from beyond the text, but not beyond language. Here is the affirmation, not just beyond “the dialectic of affirmation and negation” (Weller 2005, 193), that is not the mere affirmation of the text, as Weller suggests, but is the affirmation of the unpresentable; that to which we must go on, the real, the unlessenable least which cannot be negated. It supports the call to relate to that to which the author cannot because, tormented and agitated “with boundless joy” (Blanchot 2006, 31), he knows that everything that is not all words is excludable, is not of “unnullable least” (Beckett 2006, 479), and the written text obviously is nullable. The speaker in Worstward Ho, who is in the main part being, implores the reader through that part, contaminated though it is by non-being, to go on to the “unlessenable least,” to that which can be lessened no further, to being in its pure state, which Beckett has already told us is “all words.” Textual evidence from Worstward Ho contradicts any interpretations of Beckett’s works that see them as nihilistic; “Naught not best worse” (479) further supports his argument that perceptions can neither be proved to exist or to not exist. They are not argued to be naught but to be in doubt. As such, they cannot fall into the category of being but must be classified as non-being, which is not naught. Being, on the other hand, because it is unullable, can “Never by naught be nulled” (479); it, having been proved to be unullable, is the real towards which we must go on. The other great question raised in Worstward Ho is the question of the void. The void represents the problem posed to Beckett’s philosophy of the real through that which is perceived by the corporeal. Language, as is argued, is the real to Beckett, yet it is haunted by that which can neither be proved to exist or proved not to exist, that which is perceived through the senses. One gets a sense that Beckett the philosopher very much wants to prove perceptions to be non-existent, which would leave him open to the charge of propagating negative metaphysics. He refuses to step into that trap and creates a category of existence for perceptions that he calls nonbeing whose existence status is inferior to that of language. Beckett the artist explores and exploits the imbalance in this conflict to prove that, although language can speak both of and to itself, and that it may be all there is to existence, it cannot be expressed without the complicity of the doubted corporeal. From demonstrating that words can be rendered meaningless, as we see in the discussion on “on,” Beckett proceeds through affirmation and negation to show that empty language is the entry point to being. If being

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is all words then all words, i.e. words that are all, or words alone, words divested of meaning, articulation and inscription, unattainable, empty, pure words are being. We see this with the pronounced focus directed towards various key words running through Beckett’s texts—“it,” for example, and “that”; “it, say it, not knowing what” (Beckett 1959, 267), and “is that what it is” (381). If we accept that in Beckett’s created dimension pure language is believed to be the real and the aspiration is to “go on” to that state, seeing the closing lines of The Unnamable as a two-part dialogue will clarify the logic that drives the text: Linguistic I: … where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know. Corporeal: You must go on, I can’t go on. Linguistic I: I’ll go on.

Here we can see that the linguistic I, having throughout the text defined the real towards which s/he aspires, agrees to go on towards and is encouraged to do so by the corporeal which cannot. If we continue to ask, after Blanchot, “who is speaking” in Worstward Ho, we will see that language has now been almost completely decoupled from the referent. Language now is the “what,” language speaking about itself with a greater insistence of authority than in The Unnamable, where the necessity of a defence system against that which threatens it is continually stressed. Language has now gone on as far as it is possible in the existential world, towards proving the argument that runs through Beckett’s works that being is all words. It has exacted the admission of non-being from the corporeal in the closing lines of The Unnamable and now feels no compulsion to resort to the confusion that may be the cause of misreading the linguistic I as the subject. “Language speaks here itself” (Szafraniec 2007, 178). It looks forward to its complete state of being when it will be all, having rid itself of that which now contaminates it, its association with the senses. As Szafranciec says: “This near autonomy of language reflects the position of God. As Derrida says, ‘Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is what theology calls God’” (178). The problem that confronts Beckett is the question of how near language can get to autonomy in the existential world. If words are “all” of being, how can we get to “all” if we of necessity employ the trappings of non-being, of the corporeal, that are not of all? Worstward Ho goes as far it is possible to go, in language as it is understood in the existential world, towards autonomy. But in so doing Beckett defines the distinction between being and non-being. Worstward Ho therefore demonstrates the—to language—unnecessary contaminant by

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the existential world and shows that it can go on, despite the hindrance of the desire to represent, to a state where language can proclaim its autonomy, can speak of itself and thus affirm itself beyond the text. Worstward Ho shows that language can never be dismissed as an option. “It stands” (Beckett 2006, 471) when perceptions cannot go beyond being doubted. Worstward Ho is the book of on. Having established the possibility of language’s autonomy even in the existential, albeit fictional, realigned world that Beckett creates and which furthers his philosophical proposition, it must of necessity promise to go on, to be, to be the real. The raison d’etre of Beckett’s works is to decouple language from subject, knowledge and perception and so declutter the path to the real. The speaker in Worstward Ho cannot represent that which is unpresentable yet which is the real, so s/he forensically annuls the possibility of meaning in words that could detract from the aspiration to go on towards the real. We see this in the attempts of be to get beyond written and spoken language where be is “missaid,” as in this opening citation: “Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid” (471). But we also see the implications of meaning in “said” coming under attack. Be said on until said can somehow go on; meaning will somehow be sustainable until, that is, there is no how, no way, for “said” to sustain its authority. Meaning in said is annulled, yet the word said stands alone and empty. The point is stressed later “Whenever said said said missaid” (481), but said cannot be missaid because said is said, and missaid is another word—missaid, or is said missaid? “Said is missaid” (481) may conceal, beneath the too obvious clarity in its assertion, an ambiguity that Beckett reserves for his deliberate and limited use of the verb “to be,” present tense. In fact, “is” is almost absent from the text of Worstward Ho. Is makes an assertion and asks a question, and each interpretation must be weighed in equal measure to the other if we are to exhaust full value from the text. The obvious, first, reading of the line, if we take “is” as an assertion, is that the implication of representation, the truth claim in what has been said, is mistaken, and “said” has been “missaid.” Yet this reading hardly goes deep enough if we are serious about going on towards the unlessenable least, as we must if we are to remain true to the text. What, then, if we read it as “Said is. Missaid”? We are obviously taking liberties with Beckett’s punctuation, which we can justify after the precedent he establishes in How It Is, but even without the obvious full stop we are at liberty to interpret a significant pause after “is.” Let us refresh our familiarity with the passage under discussion: “Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. Say for be said. Missaid” (471). We could also extrapolate the following—to say is to be,

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and “say for be” is apparently confirmed in the assumed finality of the tone in which “said” is delivered, which could be read thus, say for be. Said! In this intervention in the text the distinction between “say” and “said” is obvious. It affirms Beckett’s philosophical thinking on reality, but in so doing it also affirms fixed meaning in both the terms “say” and “said.” Unsurprisingly, the affirmation is followed by the hasty negation “missaid.” To say for be said is missaid for a few reasons. To say, as has already been noted, is to employ the use of the senses which would distort being, and to attribute definite meaning to “say” and “said” would have a similar effect through the implication of meaning in pure language. One could go on almost indefinitely in this vein. The purpose of the exercise is to argue that in Beckett’s works we cannot, with any confidence, go outside language—language speaks itself, of itself. It continually exposes the arbitrary connection between it and meaning. As a first step only in the process of going on it reduces everything outside of language to doubt and focuses on reducing language to the unlessenable least. Said, therefore, can be taken, in Beckett’s approach of affirmation and negation, as an assertion that: (a) what has been said has been said by being, “Be said on,” and (b) that the word “said” is, from which we can extract two readings: (i) that the word said means something has been said, in this case “on,” and (ii) that it exists in its own right, decoupled from an association to knowledge or representation. But the (equally significant) question part of “is” attempts to negate these assertions, and by putting them in question it reduces the assertion to the level of doubt beyond which it cannot rise. The rare but significant use of “is” in this passage of Worstward Ho equates meaning to existence. But that doubt introduced by “is” is eliminated through the absence of the verb “to be,” present tense, in the next sentence: “Whenever said said said missaid” (481). We need to dwell on the supposed distinction between “say” and “said” that seems to run through the early stages of the work. The speaker asks us to “Say for be said” (471). We could say “a body” where “none,” which could be taken to say there is no body, and to ask where is the location where “none” can be found/exists? In either case, even when the mind is non-existent “no mind” (471), we can say the word “body.” These syntactically and semantically complex orderings of the text undermine any claim of connection between word and referent. Said is now decoupled from meaning—“From now said alone” (481)—as is missaid which is now equal in meaninglessness to said, as is seen where the negation of the earlier affirmation of “say for be said” (471) itself seems to be negated in “said for missaid” (471). In “For be missaid” (481), “for” and be are both missaid once they are said at all, and they employ the

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services of the senses, even when they imply emptiness. The logic of the project that is Worstward Ho insists that we cannot go outside of language, and the more we look into language the more assuredly we are going on to prove the truth that language is empty and meaningless and will stand alone when stripped of meaning that is imposed upon it by the unified subject. The distinction between say and said has been broken down through the lessening of meaning that reduces both words to the “formation of an initial speech whereby words that say something will be distanced” (Blanchot 2003, 375, citing Mallarrne)—“The say? The said. Same thing. Same nothing” (Beckett 2006, 481)—and they have the potential to be the real, to be “all,” but for their relationship with no things of non-being, “Same all, but nothing” (481). Once words are established as being empty, language is in a position to go on towards being as we see with the dissection of back (Beckett 2006, 481). Back is now alone, and like “say” and “said” it has been lessened to “the listlessness of an empty speech” (Blanchot 2003, 213) and can go somehow on. The apparent contradiction “Back is on” (Beckett 2006, 481) is no longer that when we realize that “back” has been divested of meaning; this process is some “how” “on,” as it can be accomplished “within the arena of its limitations” (Badiou 2009, 25), i.e. within the existential world where it is within our power to prove that meaning is no more than a convention. The power, “the how,” that makes it possible to create and attribute meaning to words, can equally question and undo meaning. It can “lessen” meaning to a stage where the spoken and written word is perceived to be empty. The methods used in “how” challenge the perceived meanings of words until all of them are subverted and the word is left alone. The word is lessened but not to an unlessenable least, as this is not possible within the limitations of the perceived world; hence some “how” will, through rational interrogation, bring the word, as it is understood, to the limits of where it can go when accompanied by the senses of the corporeal. But still the word is prepared and poised to go on to be “all,” pure, being, uncorrupted by the non-being of the perceived world. In this book of on, every supposition of meaning and perception is put in question until the speaker’s aspiration to be “all words” is emphasized beyond doubt. The significant invalidation of meaning in “say” and “said,” to which we have referred, prepares the reader for the messianic conclusion “Said nohow on” (Beckett 2006, 485). The say and the said may be equal in meaninglessness but they are also the same in “all,” and both have the potential to be the real. It is towards their capacity to be, once rid of the nuisance of the attendant non-being, that words can go on, to “the true silence … the real silence at last” (Beckett 1959, 362), through the stillness of the existential world which is not true

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silence, though it is a significant stage in the movement towards the silence of the real; “Worse less … Less best (479) … Still worse again” (471). Only words can go on: “What left of skull not go” (484), and a simplistic reading suggests what is left of the skull cannot go, but Beckett’s defamiliarization of commonplace speech is so measured that, if we interpret “what” as is normally implied, as that which is, we risk missing out on what is central to his thesis. Readers of Beckett’s works are obliged, if not compelled, to proceed through affirmation and negation, which here will affirm and negate the implied assertion and question in “what” and should lead the good reader to the point where the connection between words and referents asserts the primacy of the word. “Said nohow on” is the important closing line of Worstward Ho. The text has moved from the cryptic opening line “On, say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on” (Beckett 2006, 471) to the repetition of the closing “Said nohow on,” which by now, we know from reading the text, has been divested of meaning. Said, nohow, on—each word has been shown to be of equal, empty, status. It is not that the sentence “has only been said” (Weller 2005, 194), it has been unsaid, has been comprehensively stripped of meaning and connection to referent, and the book of on has gone on to the empty “on,” by so doing showing that all words have that capacity for emptiness. This, indeed, is as far as language can go in the existential world, and unsaying proves, at the very least, the primacy of language over the perceived. “Said,” “nohow” and “on” remain standing in meaninglessness and emptiness, just as both “it” and “what” are reduced to inscribed words in “It stands. What? Yes” (471) announced on the opening pages. In “The empty too” (480), the definite article is empty. Pure language is not an option and there is no other choice, as all possibilities have been annulled throughout the work—“skull” the void, “back” and so on—through the methodical invalidation of all suggestions of meaning therein. “Said nohow on” has reached the state where the three words represent language talking to itself about itself, and the real exhorts the contaminated real to go on to itself, to reality, to all. They are now prepared to go on towards the real by going into language. Suddenly it becomes clear in “no move and sudden all far” (485) that without doing anything, without even moving, the assuredness of language’s claim to be the real is “vasts apart” (485) from the never provable speculations of its reality by the non-being of the perceived world. The future beckons, messianicaly, from “beyond the horizon of the possible … because, in the absence of the possible, it is still necessary to go on” (Oppenheim 2004, 84).

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We argue that the thinking of Samuel Beckett excludes the possibility of a void insofar as the real is concerned. Yet a considerable amount of the text of Worstward Ho is devoted to addressing the question of the void. Beckett’s focus and concern is to distinguish between his philosophical belief that language is the real, and that which haunts and challenges that belief, the unprovable perceptions of the existential world, that which he calls “non-being.” If language is the real, “all,” for it there cannot be a void. In its essence language is all, and does not inhabit time or space. Language is, we would say, though Beckett avoids using the verb “to be,” present tense. Perceptions, on the other hand, cannot be independently proved to exist, but through questioning lead only to identifying unstable views of existence that cannot be traced beyond the function of the corporeal that claim to know and name them. Perceptions cannot be proved to exist or to not exist. For Beckett there is no void, and there is a void; there is no void for the real, but perceptions, because they are non-being and not the real, and even though they sustain us through what we believe to be existence, are doomed to end in the void. Throughout the passage Beckett interchanges the emphasis on “void” from the thing void to the word void through qualification, lack of qualification and, of course, affirmation and negation, and negation of negation. He seems to lead us out of language towards discussion of the thing void, only to undo this argument by pointing up meaninglessness, for example how the sentence “all there as when no words” (482) could read, with some difficulty, to claim that all is there in the absence of words. Such a reading would firmly locate the sentence in the conventional world where the relationship between language and things privileges things over dispensable language. It would miss what is vital to a satisfying understanding of what is going on in Beckett’s works—that they are set in an imagined dimension where language takes precedence over perceptions. To approach the sentence from the latter angle shatters the illusion of meaning and the link between word and thing, showing that language can speak of itself and still make sense. It also highlights the nub of Beckett’s philosophical thinking that language is the real, “all,” through proclaiming all there, and then through affirmation by showing that “when” and “no” are words without links to meaning. All, we remember, is the real that is “all words” of The Unnamable, and all will be the real when “when” and “no” have been divested of all links to a referent, when they have become all words. Of course it can be argued that the above quote proves that words cannot get out of meaning (even if we argue that words can themselves speak of themselves). Beckett implies conventional meaning to stress his

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philosophical belief that language is the real as he will go on to show language justifying his position in “as when no words.” What we see in this example of the void/no void is the conflict between the real and nonbeing acted out. As when no-words! can utterly transform our interpretation of the unreadable non-being of the former to the explosive revelation of the latter, it is an example of the moment when the scales fall from the eyes of the reader. The content that is of non-being, that which is perceivable and inscribable, is destined for the void, while language, divested of those encumbrances, is prepared to go on to its state of being. “Two once so one” (482) have now separated to the extent that “vast of void atween” does not say that a division exists between the real and the perceived, which would suggest a binary opposition. “Atween” may be an archaic word for between but it also suggests through the prefix “a” to “tween,” not between, but the prefix of, for example, amoral and asexual. A vast of void does not exist between the two, and the void, through its being the destiny of non-being, is part of non-being, its aim to be all, and hence atween, as it is understood to mean here. The void is “most when almost” (483), and it consumes most of the debris from non-being when most, or a great majority of “all,” is in a position to jettison that which contaminates its purity, which is as far as “all” can go, even in Beckett’s imagined dimension. Beckett cannot separate the real from the perceived. The “so-said void” is “so missaid” (477). Beckett seems to be negating his negation of meaning in the say and the said of 481 where both signify the same nothing. Perhaps he is emphasizing the point that the perceived cannot be negated, and that the void is shade-ridden with multiple interchanging perceptions and will only attain its status of void when language has divested itself of perceptions—when it has gone on—which will be deposited in the void. Can void ever be reduced to the status of the word void? The speaker exhorts “All save void” (483), but all cannot because “Void” too suggests it is the thing as well as the word voice. The word cannot be saved from its connection to the perception void; the void is unworsenable, never less but also “Never more” (483). The studious evasion of absolutes to describe the void emphasis the status of perceptions, in general, as neither provable nor unprovable; it is unmoreable and unlessenable, in sharp contrast with the unlessenable least, to which the word aspires. Beckett’s sturdy defence of the status of the void protects him from any charge of negative metaphysics that might be hurled his way, but in it there is also a deeper investigation of the nature of being. In an apparent answer to the question “What the so said void” (479) we read “The so said dim … so said shades … so said seat and germ of all” (479). If we take “so said” as a negation of

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the empty “said,” insofar as it cannot categorically represent either—and note its repetition before each manifestation—we can see neither the continued presence or absence of the unmoreable, unlessenable kind of language that refuses to define, but yet makes the philosophical point that the void is the “germ of all,” i.e. it is the germ that infects the health and purity of language and condemns it to an unhealthy association with perception from where it can only aspire to go on. The so said void is of the world of perception, referring to a perception it names “void.” The language has relinquished its aspiration to go on, such is its level of contamination and its inevitable fate, and is therefore the oblivion of the void. As we argue here, the dim shades of unprovable perceptions cannot go on to be the real, so for them there is the void that reflects, through its fraught association with the concept void, the unease of defining either presence or absence. For the real, however, there is no void other than the empty word void. Void, like “the,” is empty too (480). The impetus that runs through Beckett’s works drives remorselessly towards the unlessenable least, so whatever weakens representation and meaning is good. “Worse less” (479) because it does this and helps the word like the old man and the child “unreceding on … (till) they then the word” (479) rather than its corporeal representation “Worse less” (479) and “Least best worse” (479) as this is as far as language can go in the existential world for the reasons already discussed. In such conditions it cannot become the least for “want of worser worst,” because in the existential world there will always be a remainder of the perceived to prevent it going on to freely become the unlessenable least, which is worser worst. Worse and to fail are good because they leasten words, reducing their capacity to mean and represent and thus allowing the word to go on towards being the unpresentable real. Each stage of worsening can only occur within the existential world. The speaker can say least best worse with words that lessen their meaning, reducing them to emptiness, but cannot go on to their ultimate unpresentable purity for “want of worser worst” (479). In the existential world, language must go on to its ultimate possibility, which would relieve it of every possible connection to the senses. The valuebased terms “better” and “worse” are necessary tools of the emptying process, and to worsen is to attack the connection between the word and the perceived. Worse brings language towards good, the worse the better “better worse” (471) until language is sick for good (471). The ultimate, the unpresentable, the “worser worst,” the real that is all words, is beyond better and worse, as it is beyond body and mind “Where neither for good.” All is the real and all is good, “good and all” (471) are the one, the real

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(which might be of interest to those who like to write about ethics and nihilism in Beckett’s works). The speaker asks “What word for what then?” When language is the real, then what can the word “what” represent when perceptions have already been consigned to the void? Because the real is “good” and “all” it cannot “be” anywhere, certainly not in a void. The void is part of the perceived world and, like it, cannot be proved to exist. What, then, of the intriguing dash in “no hands in the—No save for worse to say” (480) (?) It could be argued that the dash represents the so-called failure of language, but as is argued elsewhere in this book, language cannot fail in the real sense. There are indeed many examples of language failing to represent perceptions. In those cases it is the “dim white empty hands” (480) of the perception that instigate the chain reaction, resulting in what is called the failure of language. Language may, in such instances, fail to represent, but it does not fail and will continue to renew and to re-represent some freshly conceived perception, some unprovable manifestation, some shade of what we call existence until the application of Beckett’s logic will prove it to be empty and infinite. Like most of Beckett’s texts, the passage in question here is open to more than one interpretation. So why the dash, what does it signify? It could indeed be argued to represent the failed attempt of language to represent an indefinable perception, a “what” on which he elaborates in what “words for what then?” (480). However, to read it as such still leaves too much of a remainder, too much slack, some of which can be lessened before the suggestion of meaning is exhausted. It is noteworthy that Beckett ends this sentence with a question mark, implying that the first “what” retains its conventional interrogative meaning, the question being directed towards the discussion around the absent “what” of the dash; if what is implied as the absentee in the blank space, then what is that “what”? Can it represent, or is it specifically the empty word “what” that defies the notion of representation? But even then it is lessenable, insofar as the physical act that inscribed it as a material perception can be undone and replaced by another act that will reduce it to an implication, albeit one that is dependent on the implied meaning in the words that surround the blank. Or should we insist that because the dash is not a blank it is a mark? Yet this implication to which “what” has been reduced is of profound significance to those who would wish to understand what is going on—or precisely what going on is—in the works of Samuel Beckett. The dash is the best worse least in the realm of perceptions, yet it is not the unlessenable “least which” is pure language, uncontaminated by inscription. Because the unlessenable least cannot be perceived it is therefore unpresentable. The reduction of what (?) to “what” and “what” to

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“—” brings us to the brink of the unpresentable. Beckett’s process of affirmation and negation challenges all presuppositions of reality until everything, concept and perception, can only go as far as “being unmorable and unlessable,” where that which is (ab)used to represent it goes on to_______? “Art,” Beckett writes, “has always been this—pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric” (Oppenheim 2004, 75). Beckett’s interrogation brings us not to “nothing,” but to a stage in a process where the case for acknowledging perceptions as reality can be no longer be sustained, and from where the only possibility open, the sole truth remaining, is that language is the real. If the real is affirmed as the true silence, “the one I’ll never have to break any more, when I won’t have to listen anymore” (Beckett 1959, 352) of the narrator of The Unnamable, then we need to continue asking who is speaking in the works of Samuel Beckett? If, as we argue here, the speaker is language and language is “all,” then the true silence is the silence of the real that can neither be spoken or heard, for as “worst they may fail ever worse to say” (Beckett 2006, 178). We have argued that the perceptions of the existential world have been consigned as non-being to the “unprovable unmorables unlessenable” void, and that the real is and does not inhabit any place or time, and therefore is not a void. Reading Worstward Ho can be an exhilarating experience if one views the text from Beckett’s philosophical impetus. Simultaneous contradictions actually harmonize within Beckett’s cryptic syntax. Words strive to “unmean” within a context that affirms his philosophical belief that language is the real. That the actuality of the existence of a void into which the real would disappear is dismissed in the layered levels of “Void no if not for good” (478), which could lazily be read as there will be no void if it is not for the good, which would imply that the void is possible only when it is for the good. This would refute the approach argued here that there is not a void for the real. However, if we raise the reading to a higher level that tends towards disassociating some of the words there from conventional meaning, we can arrive at an interpretation that is radically different and illustrates Beckett’s philosophy. In this reading, because key words are reduced to unmeaning, they both affirm his philosophy and make grammatical sense. By taking liberties with the punctuation as a way of illustrating the point, the sentence could read thus: “Void? No. If not for good.” Here, the issue around the void is dealt with conclusively, but what of the remainder of the sentence which seems to be illogical? Yet that part of the sentence is repeated, significantly, as the closing sentence to the paragraph, justification, no doubt, for those who would argue that Worstward Ho is

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unreadable. However, if we reduce “if” and “not” to skeletal, empty words we can read the sentence as follows: “Void? No. If not for good.” The words “if” and “not” (and it follows all words), emptied of meaning, are for good. Just as in “The empty too,” which on an early reading seems to be unreadable “if not for good,” from a value-free reading reveals itself in a way that startles and proceeds to reveal the depth of Beckett’s philosophical impetus. That philosophical impetus is insisted upon through “good,” and good and all are of the real; words are all, all is good, and the real is good and all. Yet, to explain his philosophy, Beckett must root the key word “good” within a value system even if that which is good rises above and beyond any understood ethical code. It is not possible for language to completely disconnect with the existential as we see in the speaker’s closing line of The Unnamable. “I can’t go on” may be interpreted as the speaker admitting that language connected to the corporeal is incapable of breaking that connection. It is the voice of the worldly I of too much humanity, who will not aspire to going on to the state of pure language. The exhilaration that comes from reading Beckett’s texts arises from his art, i.e. the arrangement and selection of deceptively simple language that through an awesome mishmash of cross, inter and intra referencing affirms, negates and invalidates as uttered, but inevitably leads, “goes on,” to a stage where language disconnects with referent and conventional meaning, that even in the empty state is shown to be readable when seen as speaking itself about itself. Read from this approach the words that precede “good” in the passage under discussion have severed connections with meaning to prove the truth in the value-based terms “good,” i.e. empty language is good. Enlightened by the possibilities inherent in this approach we could remember to look at Worstward Ho, and indeed most of Beckett’s later works, as imaginative creations, as constituting an art form through which his underlying philosophical impetus can find expression. When philosophical impetus can find expression, when we liberate ourselves from the conventional approach, we will find that the text too is liberated and almost miraculously reveals itself in a very different way, but a way that is nevertheless consistent with and affirms the logic of Beckett’s philosophy. Let us look again at the sentence “If not for good.” “Good,” as has been said, means, albeit not in the conventionally accepted interpretation. If we can wring ourselves from the stranglehold of convention and remember that not only “the empty too” for Beckett, but potentially all words, we can see the sentence justifying the emptiness of all its words except good, and still making sense, thus: “If, not, for, good.” Then if we go back to the earlier sentence “Void no if not for good” and apply the same logic to the reading we will

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see that the word void too has become empty, which is of profound significance to the overall understanding of what Beckett is about. To avoid becoming bogged down in a fruitless and interminable argument based on the supposed meaning or metaphysical import of the sentence, the reader could profitably relocate to Beckett’s imagined dimension and, remaining true to his textual support in “the empty too,” empty the words of meaning. If we do this the sentence following on from the shortened version already discussed will read like this: “Void, no, if, not, for— good.” It will be seen to list a succession of words emptied of meaning, all of which, in their empty state, are equal, value-free examples of Beckett’s philosophical notion of the good. This reading goes on, in this book of on, from the earlier example that sees the word void questioning the existence of the perception void to the stage where language, because it has been divested of meaning, cannot question, it is “being Unquestioning” (Beckett 1959, 267). It stands visible to the senses because it has been inscribed but is otherwise empty, which is as far as it can go in the existential world. The sentence aspires to the real, to be all words, and therefore is consistent with its aspirations to read it as all words. When we do this we see that void is equal in meaninglessness to those others on the list that define real. “Void” can have no meaning and cannot exist where the real is all words. To apply meaning to void is to relocate it in the area of non-being, of perceptions where its realness will be contaminated by that which is destined for its actual void. Though it is argued throughout this book that Beckett’s thinking exceeds that of most philosophers, or at least the impositions on his texts of “an impression of fashionable philosophy” (Cavell 2002, 115), we can acknowledge similarities between his thinking, in certain areas, and that of, for example, Plato on the intelligible and the sensible, Descartes on Cartesian doubt, and Berkeley on perception. Yet Beckett is never a mere philosopher; he is a philosopher-artist whose thinking may coincide with, even be influenced by, others, yet through his texts we can see where this point of convergence separates and where his thinking goes beyond theirs. Berkeley’s central idea that “any sensible object should be immediately perceived by sight or touch, and at the same time have no existence in nature, since the very existence of a thinking being consists in being perceived” (Berkeley 2004, 86) is especially interesting when considering Beckett’s philosophy. That an object can be perceived through senses yet have no existence in nature seems to be a trigger point for Beckett’s thinking that the perceived is not the real. Berkeley’s claim that “we cannot attain to any self-evident or demonstrative knowledge of the existence of sensible things” as well as reflecting Cartesian doubt is also

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seen in Beckett’s “Enough still not to know” (Beckett 2006, 479) and his insistence, running throughout his texts, that we cannot know. But Berkeley, like Plato, does not really consider the centrality of language to being. Plato sees “the same” as that which “cannot be perceived by the senses at all” where Berkeley retreats to the comfort zone of “that Eternal invisible mind which produces and sustains all things” (Berkeley 2004, 88). If Berkeley’s thinking supports Beckett’s notion on perceptions, Plato’s thinking on the same establishes a base from which Beckett can project his theory that language is the real. It may not be coincidence that he actually mentions the terms “the same” in a significant reference that appears to correct the flaw in Plato’s thinking that fails to consider the centrality of language to being. The same is “Same thing. Same nothing. Same all but nothing” (Beckett 2006, 481). For both Plato and Beckett the real, or the same, cannot be perceived by the senses at all, but for Plato it is the Forms where for Beckett it is pure empty language, the real that is “all words” is the same, which is all “but nothing,” that excludes everything that is not pure language (which to Beckett is non-being). Beckett, possibly unlike Plato and Berkeley, is an artist. Where they step outside of language to define their representation of the real, Beckett, by proving that language can with certainty only talk about language, creates an art form that purges language of all possible association with that which is outside it in the existential world, which proves that “It stands” (472) when reduced to “all words.” He departs from the logic of Plato’s and Berkeley’s thinking once it becomes unsustainable through Cartesian interrogation, insisting on staying within that from which there can be no release, that which is not an option—irreducible language. Worstward Ho is the book of on in which we witness the aspiration of pure language speak to speak. The aspiration to purity is intensified by going into language and by creating doubt of the existence of that which corrupts it, perceptions of the senses which nevertheless continue to haunt it on its passage through the existential world. Pure language is the unpresentable real to Beckett, that messianic to come that is beyond time, place and ethics. It inhabits no zone—it is all. That which is not of all is non-being and is destined for the void.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackerley, C.J and Gontarski, S.E. The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, London, Faber and Faber, 2006. Badiou, Alain. Second Manifesto for Philosophy, Cambridge Polity, 2011. —. Infinite Thought: Truth and the return of Philosophy, London, Continuum, 2005. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. —. The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador, 1959. —. Texts for Nothing. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. —. The Complete Dramatic Works: London: Faber and Faber, 1986. —. Samuel Beckett, The Grove centenary editions, series editor Paul Auster, I, II, IV, New York, Grove Press, 2006. —. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-40, Edited by Martha Dow Feshenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience, New York, Random House, 1988. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights, London, Penguin Classics, 2002. Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. —. The Infinite Conversation, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: Fordham, Fordham University Press, 1997. Cavell, Stanley. Must we mean what we say? Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1982. —. Positions: Translated Alan Bass, London: Continuum, 2002 —. Writing and Difference, Oxford, Routledge, 2001. —. Aporias, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993. De Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading, Yale, Yale University Press, 1979 Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Human Freedom, Continuum, London, 2002.

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Hill, Leslie. Beckett’s Fiction in different words., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kearney, Richard. States of Mind: New York: New York University Press, 1995. Miller, J Hillis, Others, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011. Plato. Complete Works: Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny, New York, Routledge, 2003. Sampson, Fiona. Common Prayer, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2007. Szafraniec, Asja, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007. Weller, Shane. A Taste for the Negative, London, Legenda, 2005. Wood, Sarah. Writing and Difference, London, Continuum, 2009.

Anthologies Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Hertfordshire, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995. G.H. von Wright, H Nyman, editors. Culture and Value Oxford, Blackwell 1980. Rivkin, Julia, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: an Anthology: Oxford, Blackwell, 1998. Oppenheim, Lois, editor. Samuel Beckett Studies, Palgrave, London, 2004.

Journals Emerging Perspectives. Post graduate journal in English Studies, vol. 3, Dublin, University College Dublin, English Graduate Society, 2012. Denis Devlin in ‘Transition,’ Paris 27, April May 1938.

Websites Critchley 2009 http:nakedpunch.com

INDEX Ackerley, C.J and Gontarski, 98 allness, 24, 82 aporia, 7, 9, 32, 69, 71, 74, 76 Badiou Alain, x, 23, 24, 33, 66, 88, 98, 99 Bataille Georges, 41, 70, 71, 98 Bennett, Andrew, 99 Berkeley, 13, 96 Blanchot, x, 9, 10, 11, 17, 31, 32, 38, 43, 51, 52, 56, 57, 63, 65, 66, 71, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 87, 98 Caputo, John D, 6, 98 Cavell, Stanley, 77, 78, 96, 98 chora, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 Critchley Simon, 14, 100 de Man, Paul, 54 deconstruction, x, xi, 8, 18, 23, 50, 51, 54, 63 defamiliarization, 88 Derrida, vii, x, xi, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 19, 23, 32, 41, 47, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 76, 85, 98, 99 Derridean reading, 77 Descartes, 96 differance, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 76 Differance, 5, 7, 32 Endgame, xi, 33, 56, 75, 77 failure of language, 7, 8, 27, 53, 67, 93 Film, vii, xi, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 G.H. von Wright, H Nyman, 99 Gibson, Andrew, 4, 17, 99 Heidegger, Martin, ix, 45, 99 Hill Leslie, 23, 32, 50, 72, 99 How It Is, vii, xi, 11, 24, 28, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 86 inscribed, 44, 46, 52, 80, 89, 93, 96

Kearney, Richard, 8, 76, 99 linguistic, xi, 1, 2, 6, 8, 11, 24, 25, 30, 31, 39, 40, 42, 46, 57, 58, 67, 84 meaninglessness, 30, 32, 51, 53, 81, 82, 87, 89, 90, 96 Miller, J Hillis, 79, 99 non-being, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 34, 40, 54, 73, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 94, 97 opinion, 2, 3, 5, 6 Oppenheim Lois, 23, 24, 28, 32, 37, 50, 65, 71, 72, 89, 93, 100 Oppenheim, Lois, 100 Plato, vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 30, 47, 54, 96, 99 Positions, 69, 98 post-structuralist, x, 63 Pure language, 54, 89, 97 Rivkin & Ryan, 1, 5, 6, 7 Royle Nicholas, 33, 75, 76, 77, 78, 99 Sampson, Fiona, 99 senses, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 26, 30, 31, 32, 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 53, 55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 92, 96, 97 Szafraniec, 82, 85, 99 Texts for Nothing, 7, 11, 74, 98 the real, x, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96

100 the same, ix, xi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 16, 20, 26, 54, 69, 72, 82, 88, 91, 95, 96 The Unnamable, 1, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 29, 31, 37, 42, 52, 57, 61, 64, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85, 90, 94, 95 Timaeus, 1, 5 University College Dublin, 100 unnullable, 83 unpresentable, 2, 3, 6, 16, 27, 30, 35, 46, 53, 56, 64, 83, 85, 92, 97 unprovability, 5, 13, 59

Index void, vi, 10, 11, 17, 33, 73, 81, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97 Von Wright & Nyman, 73 Waiting for Godot, vii, xi, 1, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 48, 50, 74, 77, 98 Weller, Shane, 59, 73, 82, 89, 99 Wittgenstein, 34 Wood, Sarah, 70, 71, 99 Worstward Ho, vii, xi, 11, 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 94, 97 Yeats, 54