This hell of stories: A Hegelian approach to the novels of Samuel Beckett 9783111343198, 9783110991697

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DE P R O P R I E T A T I B U S L I T T E R A R U M edenda curat C. H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

Series Practica, 63

THIS HELL OF STORIES A Hegelian Approach to the Novels of Samuel Beckett

by

H A N S - J O A C H I M SCHULZ Vanderbilt University

1973

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-94504

Printed in Hungary

For Norbert Fuerst

PREFACE

This study of Beckett's novels does not attempt to 'revolutionize' Beckett criticism but systematically to loosen up the prevailing rigid conception of Beckett as 'absurdist'. The 'system' of the approach has been borrowed from Hegel whose own 'rigidity' hides a dynamism that is as frequently overlooked as is Beckett's. My thanks go to Professor Norbert Fuerst for his patient, invaluable guidance and to my colleague Professor Phillip H. Rhein for his numerous suggestions. Excerpts from the works of Beckett are reprinted with the permission of Grove Press, Inc. Murphy, © First published in 1938 Watt, All Rights Reserved Molloy, All Rights Reserved Malone Dies, © 1956 by Grove Press, Inc. The Unnamable, © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. How It Is, © 1964 by Grove Press, Inc. Stories and Texts for Nothing, © 1967 by Grove Press, Inc. H. S. Vanderbilt University.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface Introduction I. The Novels of Samuel Beckett II. Beckett and Descartes

7 11 16 31

III. Stubborn Paradoxes

37

IV. The Dialectic Battleground

46

Y. Dying and Killing

59

VI. The End of Art

77

VII. The Artist as the Guilty God

98

Bibliography

112

Index

116

INTRODUCTION

To live through this process of opposition, contradiction and the resolution of contradiction is the higher privilege of living beings; what is and remains merely affirmative, is and remains without life. Life proceeds to negation and its pain; and only through the resolution of opposition and contradiction will it gain its affirmation. If, however, it should remain in contradiction without overcoming it, then it will perish in it. (A, i, 104)1

An artist or a philosopher of any time may look upon the history of human efforts as a vast canvas of confusions and contradictions, as a history of always proving wrong what once was almost right. He may detect in it an unbroken rhythm of attainment and disillusionment, the merciless rounds of a wheel crushing the hopeful and arrogant inventions of the human mind. From this view of the ideological history of man may emerge a picture of the individual, born and dead and risen again, who endlessly acts out the comedy of life, a comedy changing in appearance but remaining basically the same; man's convictions may change, his ideologies, religions, his 'words', but he lives, lives on, lives on as long as he can, perhaps with the hope of reincarnation, fearing death. Whatever his convictions - who he is, why he lives and for what - his failure lies in his having convictions, often veiled well in words, whose illusion and claim is the attainability of meaning beyond the instant, beyond the accidents of time and space, beyond even the understanding. The comedy will be acted out, over and over again. And in the confines of the human voice his fumbling thought will be mocked, as in Beckett's Unnamable, by the 1

The titles of Hegel's major works have been abbreviated in the text as follows: Ph = The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London and New York, 1966); my adjustments are based on Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952). All other translations from Hegel are my own. A = Ästhetik, ed. F. Bassenge, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1951). Lo = Wissenschaft der Logik, vols. IV-V of Sämtliche Werke, ed. L. Boumann et al. (Stuttgart, 1949-65). Sy = System der Philosophie, vols. VIII-Xof Sämtliche Werke. GP — Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. XVIIXIX of Sämtliche Werke.

12

INTRODUCTION

'real', laughing voice of human history: whatever your ideas, whatever your toys, they will break; you have been wrong, you are wrong, you will be wrong again. This picture of man and his history may be as old as man himself. It gave birth, time and again, to new dreams of truth, as those of the mystics, truth to be worshipped from afar. This truth would be wordless and boundless, would abandon life for another existence, for an existence outside of time, space and reincarnation, an existence that would not bear the contamination by words and the concepts which make up the 'contrivance' man. But man will build a bridge to his truth, he will name it, explain it, discuss it. Instead of fading out into his dream, he will possess it. He will drag it into the old comedy of human existence and make it one of its plots. Or, trying to keep it pure of words, he will say, enumerate, chant what it is not. He will point to the confusions of life and thought and words as the negative of what the supreme existence, I, God, Brahman, Nirvana, Nothing is. But here too he is caught in the old tangle of vipers which makes u p the human mind. Little experience with reflective thinking will already lead to the phenomenon that once we have determined something as positive and proceed from this basis, it will directly change into something negative, just as the negative turns into the positive; reflective thought becomes confused and contradictory. Not fully understanding this phenomenon, we call this confusion a mistake that should not have happened and ascribe it to a subjective error. (Lo, i, 541) This logical situation constitutes the basic paradox from which the mystic often proceeds and to which he must return. Out of its many manifestations the novels of Samuel Beckett are 'reluctantly' spun. It is the same paradox which the Hegelian philosophy casts into the light of a day which has fearfully awakened from a Renaissance dream of progressive perfection. This paradox Hegel's Begreifen tackles - not through evasions and a return to seemingly unassailable positions, b u t through a submission to its disparity and its pain. The Beckett characters, however, reject the paradox as an error; and so the reasoning will start again. But even for the superficial thinking it is a simple reflection that, for one, the positive is not something directly identical, but is the opposite of the negative and that only in this relation lies its meaning. Therefore the negative is of its essence. At the same time, it is the negative of its simple being as the positive [blosses Gesetztsein] as well as of the negative, and therefore the positive is the absolute negation in itself. - In the same way the negative... has its meaning only in this relation to its opposite [sein Anderes] which therefore is contained

INTRODUCTION

13

in its idea [BegriffJ. But the negative also has substance outside of its relation to the positive, it is identical with itself; and in that it is what the positive is supposed to be. (Lo, i, 541/2) This allows the paradoxical conclusion: "The positive and the negative are identical." (Lo, i, 541) - "A simple reflection"? Much of the rhythm of the Beckett novels is that of the movement of the negative into the positive (and vice versa), shunning and succumbing to the above paradox; and the protagonist is forever in search of his logical error. The mystic, with whom the Beckett characters have much in common, may turn toward himself in search of a self free of any concern but that with his pure I. Like the ascetic, the Buddhist or the Advaitin, he may attempt to wean his consciousness of things and the concepts that crowded the soul of the man-in-the-world. He may turn in disbelief from objects, interests, fellow-humans and try to struggle free from the non-essential superstructure that his own history and that of his kind have imposed on him. He may deny his memory and time, he may refuse identity with an I that constantly changed in the flux of its history and casts a huge shadow on the walls of the history of man (the walls of Beckett's cultural claustrophobia). He may deny his birth and his death. His gestures of negation may be humble or pregnant with the vanity of subjective negativity; or he may live in the nagging doubt of their being both. The last consequence of the denial of life, suicide, he will often not draw. He will exhibit the familiar "self-interference" (to use Kenneth Burke's term) that will hold him back on the brink of nothing, living in words, in revenge of life. But words, of course, will turn against him and once again inflict the old notions upon him. They will not be banished by a silence, the 'wrong silence' of Beckett's Unnamable, a silence that preys, dialectically, upon words. From Hegel's Phenomenology too man's history emerges as a progression of contradictions and losses and alienation, constantly expanding and deepening the realm of human failure, forever exploring the forms of man's arrogance and humility, hope and dejection - from which, ultimately, not pessimism but a courage that comes from a better knowledge of the enemy derives: man's evasions of himself and of world. Pessimism and cultural nausea are not moods unique to our time. They are the milestones on Hegel's road of history. Man has said no before, in vain. Today, as before, he plants his fragile flag of words in the kingdom of negation, revels in an apotheosis of despair, flings himself over the limit of endurance - and bounces back for more. The atom bomb is new,

14

INTRODUCTION

but death is not. The moderns' experiments in hell are no more radical than Hegel's 'unhappy consciousness', and the assertion of an 'end that will last' will no more escape the verdict of history than did Hegel's skeptic. Man has stripped himself before, of world and words and mood and consciousness and stared at himself in the mirror of death. And he returned to tell, or to forget, or to play, to inflict upon the world a death that is ultimately his own and forces him to live on, to search. In recent years Beckett's work has been investigated extensively. Beckett is now hailed as one of the supreme masters of the art of the absurd. Since the existence of a valid notion of absurdity is generally taken for granted, a comparison of his works with those of the 'idealist' Hegel has not been attempted. There are no indications in Beckett's writings that he has read and been 'influenced' by Hegel.2 Furthermore, to compare Hegel, Geistesgeschichtler and prophet of 'absolute knowledge', with the central figure of a movement which is past all philosophical optimism this could apparently serve no purpose other than that of elaborating on a well-known contrast. But the purpose of this comparison is not chiefly that of systematizing the opposition of certain views. Its purpose is two-fold: to attempt to clarify, in the light of Hegel, what the 'absurdism' of Beckett's novels is, how absurdity reveals itself here and how it 'moves', and to show that it is curiously like the Hegelian dialectic in that it is not a pure negativity, a negativity that is not, in the Hegelian sense, uninfected by itself, i.e., a negativity above a doubt of itself. This criterion, applied to various forms of the Beckett paradox, e.g., the 'absurdity' of the self, of time, of art, may help to show Hegel's relevance to modern prose where it seems most unlikely and is most significant: at its seeming end. For this purpose we place our emphasis not on the 'idealist' and system-builder Hegel but on the advocate of an existential 'thinking' which bears the paradox, endures the doubt of things and of the self with a courage 'unto death'. (Similarly, our presentation of Beckett's fiction relegates to the background aspects secondary to our concern, such as style, the structure of self-citation and repetition within a hypothetical closed field, the careful mirroring of words, sentences, gestures, ideas, characters and scenes in the total work, the comic devices etc. - aspects fully and admirably discussed 1

See Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N. J., 1962), 4-5; John Fletcher, "Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers", Comparative Literature, XVII (1965), 43-56.

INTRODUCTION

15

by such 'vice-existers' of Mr. Knott Beckett in the realm of paraphrase as Hugh Kenner, Josephine Jacobsen^ William R. Mueller, Ihab Hassan, and others.) The Beckettian character greatly favors a flat statement of the absurdity of his existence, as do many critics. But no statement of total absurdity can quite escape its own absurdity. This is the reason why the heroes in Beckett's fiction do not come to a rest, to an end of their negations. As in Hegel's mode of thinking, negation here assails the very 'positive' nature of negation. Hegel's Zweifel am Zweifel (doubt of doubt) intrudes into the Beckett absurdity. Amidst his endless negations, the Unnamable, as his colleagues, is always aware that " . . . doubt is present, in this connexion, somewhere or other . . . " (Un, 142/3)3.

The titles of Beckett's novels (in the New York, Grove Press editions) have been abbreviated as follows: Mu = Murphy (1957), Wa = Watt (1959), Mo = Molloy (1955), Ma = Malone Dies (1956), Un = The Unnamable (1958), How = How It Is (1964).

I

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

Here, then, there is a struggle against an enemy, victory over whom really means being worsted, where to have attained one result is really to lose it in the opposite. Consciousness of life, of its existence and action, is merely pain and sorrow over this existence and activity; for therein consciousness finds only consciousness of its opposite as its essence - and of its own nothingness. CPA, 252)

Samuel Beckett's prose works have not yet gained him the attention and popularity that the playwright achieved through Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krappes Last Tape. With their externalization of the loneliness of modern man, their shrewd, almost classical economy of word and act, their almost fugue-like variations of the futile act, and with their familiar clownish celebration and stylization of failure, these plays seem to be more accessible, or more 'enjoyable', than his ponderous, painful prose. The novels do not provide the chess-board dramaturgy of the plays, nor the plasticity, visibility of the Beckettian stage character, nor do they, for any length of time, grant the illusion of 'person', a fellowbeing, that the human on the stage creates, whatever his abstractness and anonymity. Nor do they benefit from the physical and reassuring presence of stage-time and stage-place and the resulting illusion of lucidity.1 But much of the popularity of the Beckett plays may be due to a misunderstanding of their 'meaning'. The often insubstantial discussion which arose around Godot is perhaps an indication of the extent to which the Beckettian language has to be learned before it can be 'understood'. The process of learning the language of the later Beckett, if we believe him and his critics, would involve an un-learning of the language of civilization 1 See Jean-Jacques Mayoux, "Beckett und die Grenzen des Ausdrucks", in Über Beckett (Frankfurt/M., 1966), 11. - To the question, "Was bedeutet Ihnen das Theater?", Beckett once replied: "Theater ist für mich zunächst eine Erholung von der Arbeit am Roman. Man hat es mit einem bestimmten Raum zu tun und mit Menschen in diesem Raum. Das ist erholsam." Michael Haerdter, "Samuel Beckett inszeniert das Endspiel", in Materialien zu Becketts Endspiel (Frankfurt/M., 1968), 88.

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

17

and finally of language as such. The Beckett novels constitute that process ; through them primarily the Beckettian 'un-language' can be acquired. Only after Malone Dies did Beckett reach the sureness of design, the degree of emptiness of language, necessary to let it speak for itself on the stage. If we have difficulties in understanding the plays, it is the novels we have to consult. While his drama constitutes an achievement more rounded and finished than his prose, it is in the fiction that Beckett's world develops. The novels contain the entire Beckettian world in flux, while his drama constitutes finished, stylized expressions of the 'unmaking' which Beckett has achieved. The novels, if they may be called that, are neither units in themselves nor do they make up a consistent whole. While their endings (always in view of the succeeding novels) are discovered as temporary, as 'present formulations', are soon overcome, discarded or reformulated in the next work, we find only a minimal and 'hypothetical' unity of time, characters and plot, a unity which the novels attempt to do away with altogether. While time's motion is perpetually grinding to a halt, characters appear and vanish without much ado. Yet, the more the novels are perused, the more the reader will be tempted to agree with Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller that there emerges, revealed more and more clearly with every mask dropped, a central consciousness, a central source of the fictions, a 'final' protagonist of the novels.2 But the difficulties of reading Beckett's prose are not greatly relieved by this discovery, for this consciousness is, on the one hand, the negation of all the fictions, on the other, is their only source. This tension mounts with every successive attempt. It is a tension which irrevocably opposes and ties together the protagonist in search of silence and the protagonist as constant source of a voice, as voice. Thus the 'final protagonist' does not emerge, does not become visible, formulated - but he seems to exist and we are still in search of him, as of silence, in the late 'novel' How It Is. He is there, on every page, "asexual, indistinct, unlocated, omnipresent"; 3 temporarily he becomes settled, more or less distinct, becomes approximations of a self in 'legends', time and the language of certain problems, approximations which are tried, pondered and dropped, dropped emphatically but never fully. What are these approximations ?

* Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller, The Testament of Samuel Beckett (New York, 1964), 5. 3 Jacobsen and Mueller, 8.

18

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT M U R P H Y : ' S E E D Y SOLIPSIST'

Beckett's first novel and second extensive prose-work (after the 1934 collection of stories More Pricks than Kicks), published in 1938, seems to foreshadow only little of what was to come, yet its traditional make-up hides the basic predicament that all subsequent heroes will share. Thoroughly comic, exploiting all devices of plot, dialogue and author intrusion, Murphy creates the impression of a brilliant cynic's detached exercise. There is elaborate punning throughout; the very texture of the piece is made prickly with carefully wrought paradoxes and a stilted erudition that trips over itself.4 Even the brutality of some of Beckett's jokes does not jar the overall elegance of style and narrative. Around Murphy, the central figure, Beckett arranges a group of 'puppets', caricatures, who - with the exception of Celia - have little of his sympathy and few human qualities that are not part of the satirical service they perform around Murphy. Identified with their main comic tag, such as Cooper's unwillingness to speak and inability to sit down, they gravitate around Murphy, needing him in one way or other, him who needs no one in the end.5 Among them only Celia, Murphy's temporarily reformed prostitute girl-friend, is genuinely concerned with the hero. She tries to build him bridges to his fellow-beings, particularly by getting him to work, something to which he is allergic. She fails and goes back to her old profession. Murphy himself is the dualist who has achieved a separation of the closed world of his mind and the 'big' world. His achievement is put forth in the sixth chapter, the most serious and celebrated of the novel, which describes his mind as "a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without" (107), containing "three zones, light, half light, dark". In the first, "pleasure was reprisal, the pleasure of reversing the physical experience", there "the whole physical fiasco became a howling success". ( I l l ) While this is the zone of creative revenge, the half light zone is that of contemplation and dream. In both Murphy is 'free'. It is in the third zone that freedom, which is an assertion of the will, gives way to a "will-lessness" (113) that submits to "the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line". (112) Sharing the mystic's problem of describing the indescribable, Beckett says of this state that it was 4

Most of Beckett's comic devices are catalogued in Cohn, 51-63. Vivian Mercier suggests that Murphy represents one side of an equation, all other characters the other. When Murphy dies, all others become "equal to zero". "The Mathematical Limit", The Nation, CLXXXVIII (1959), 144. 6

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

19

"So pleasant that pleasant was not the word". (113) But this state of almost final dissolution Murphy cannot maintain for long; he will float up again to the surface of a life in which various gentlemen and a Miss Counihan are pursuing him, and Celia threatens to break up their idyll unless he acquires a position. It is, ironically, the job he finally accepts at a mental institution that frees him from Celia and eventually frees him completely. Here Murphy comes across a breed of humans "of that self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world which he had chosen for himself as the only felicity and achieved so seldom". (168) Mr. Endon, with whom he plays chessgames of mutual retreat, is the very incarnation of the superhuman indifference that the 'normal' Murphy could not lastingly achieve. In an attempt to stare his way into Endon's eyes and Endon's secret, into some kind of communion with him, he meets in Endon's "cornea, horribly reduced, obscured and distorted, his own image", "stigmatised". (249) Murphy, condemned to sanity, dies in his garret by accident. The 'approximation' is dismissed but returns in echo-like shreds in the subsequent novels, and finally even 'in person' in The Unnamable.

WATT-KNOTT: COMEDY OF PARADOX

The opening pages of Watt (written between 1942 and 1944 but published only in 1953) continue the satirical manner of Murphy. But soon the style begins to reflect the hero and becomes hesitant, self-modifying to the point of meaninglessness, with glimmering paradox and occasional flashes of lyric intensity. While Watt's physical appearance is described with a few snatches of his clownish incongruity, next to nothing is said concerning his past. We follow Watt, who accepts a mysterious offer of employment, to the house of a Mr. Knott who employs him to replace Arthur; as Watt is inevitably, upon completion of a scheduled round of services, to be replaced by someone else and to leave the house. His services there are unimportant, unless we consider his being witness to Mr. Knott's 'needing nothing' an important service. When his successor arrives, Watt proceeds to the train station where, after a short loss of consciousness, he buys a ticket to the "end of the line". We meet him again, through Sam, the narrator, in an asylum of sorts where he, further deranged, contemplates the futility of his quest. That Watt is engaged in a quest is obvious, but what he is searching for is difficult to determine. It is not 'meaning', for Watt does not, iron-

20

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

ically, care about what happens and what is. His struggle is with words. Although he often falls "into this old error, this error of the old days when, lacerated with curiosity, in the midst of substance shadowy he stumbled" (227), Watt's concern now, is that of converting incidents into words, logical possibilities, objections and solutions. In this logical exercise the question of what was and what is the right explanation loses its significance, the "most meagre, the least plausible, would have satisfied Watt". (73) Yet, the incidents resist his verbal magic, because things and their words come apart, and Watt has to try them on like a woman tries on hats. None ever fully fit. Torn from their meanings they become sounds. And the old errror, the attempt to restore them to meaning, restores Watt to his former curiosity and to the paradoxes of life. This is the comedy which Watt acts out. Watt, with pedantic stubbornness and epic patience, applies his verbal charm to all "incidents of note". It is the paradoxical nature of these incidents, their seeming meaninglessness, which attracts him. Thus the principle of selection is one of meaning and the paradoxes persist. The incident of the two piano-tuners and their meaningless dialogue, the question of how Mr. Knott's left-overs get to the dog, the problem of who rings the bell that summons Erskine - all this is dissolved into long pages of almost suffocating logical ramblings, whose inconclusiveness and boredom are a well-calculated device of the author. But what interests Watt most is Mr. Knott whom he has come to serve or to understand. If the incidents, by their nature as processes, had a tendency to outgrow the static frame of logic that Watt tried to impose on them, Mr. Knott more than any other phenomenon eludes Watt's grasp. He is a Proteus whom he cannot hold. Not only does he dress light in winter and in furs in searing heat, but his very appearance, height and circumference also change constantly. Unlike Watt, who tries to reason himself above need and fails, Mr. Knott truly needs nothing. If Watt's mission was to become like Knott, the 'master', to extricate himself from the slavery of needs (be it just the need to assert himself against the world and become its magicianmaster), then Mr. Knott stands in mockery of Watt's quest. As Endon's eyes in Murphy, Knott's reflect nothing but Watt. If Knott is the master to Watt, Watt is no servant to Knott who needs nothing. This pattern of a one-sided master-slave relationship runs, often dialectically ambiguous, through all subsequent novels, offering itself sometimes neatly to a religious interpretation, and reaches a tone of urgency in The Unnamable and How It Is.

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21

Murphy is a tightly composed, concentrated, 'elegant', balanced novel. Watt, although highly satirical at points and retaining the essentials of plot, is a stagnant, rambling tale of often unbearable tediousness which only by virtue of its philosophical depth and its incongruous, grotesque beauty keeps the reader from losing heart. It prepares him well for the novels to come. While the "seedy solipsist" retired into the closed world of his mind, Watt tries his hand at ordering the world at large. Murphy turned from the paradoxes of life; Watt attempts to still them, soften them into a logical and verbal material he can knead into form, perhaps silence. Both fail. But Watt's predicament and his failure get us one step closer to the form, 'formulations' and intensity of the problem as it emerges in the 'trilogy' Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,6

MOLLOY/MORAN: THE PENSUM

Murphy was a physically fit, if lazy, fellow who preferred the motion of his rocking chair to moving himself. Watt had trouble walking, because of his peculiar gait and his shoes that did not match. Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable are condemned to immobility and words when we meet them: Molloy and Malone are in bed, the Unnamable's location is uncertain (while the protagonist of How It Is crawls). From a present of immobility the past of action and wandering is considered and refuted. Molloy's memoirs are primarily an account of his growing impairment (as are his pursuer's, Moran's). The novel consists of two parts, or novels, the first being Molloy's account of his wanderings, the second, Moran's report on his pursuit of Molloy. The Molloy part opens with the statement: "I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there." The whole section can be read as a search for his mother, the account of which breaks off without his apparently having met his goal, and with a myste6 "Beckett himself speaks of the three novels as a trilogy, according to Barney Rosset of Grove Press." (Cohn, 320). These novels were, unlike Murphy and Watt, first written in French (Paris, 1951, 1951, 1953) and later translated into English by the author (in the case of the first in collaboration with Patrick Bowles). Between Watt and Molloy, Beckett experimented, in French, with many of the themes of the trilogy in the stories "The Expelled", "The Calmative", "The End" [revised English versions in Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York, 1967), 9-72], Particularly the themes of expulsion, of wandering toward a minimal abode and existence, of death and a life that is kept at bay in stories (and returns in them), mark these stories as finger-exercises for the great novels.

22

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

nous voice promising help: "Don't fret Molloy, we're coming." (123) What happened to his mother? Did he meet her before her death (if she died)? Who are the helpers? These may be interesting questions to the curious reader; but to the "incurious seeker" which Molloy professes to be, they are "ludicrously idle questions for a man in my position, though", he adds ironically, "of undeniable interest on the plane of pure knowledge". (123) This "plane of pure knowledge" is what Watt, rather unsuccessfully, had tried to establish, maintain and transcend; and here too, in Molloy and the following novels, the reader participates in a continuously renewed attempt to transcend this plane for a better sphere, the world of silence. Thus the plot of Molloy is only of instrumental significance, and we may be tempted to read this, as the other novels, on two levels: that of pure fact, and that of the heroes' reactions to it. However, this separation would be purely theoretical (more so than in other first-person narratives), since Molloy is not interested in pure knowledge, and his account has to be read with a grain of salt. He may stop his tale, because he contradicted himself, with a "Never mind". Molloy assures us that the reason for his wanderings is to find his mother, of whom he gives a disgusting description, but why he wants to find her, he does not remember. It is only through hints in subsequent novels that this possible explanation emerges: to undo his birth and, if that fails, to "kill her" (see Chapter V). However, not only does he lose sight of his goal, but he does not even remember where she lives, and he is not sure of her name. He watches two strangers meet and depart, proceeds on his bicycle into a town (perhaps his native town), has a confrontation with the police, meets a shepherd with his flock (as Moran does later), and manages to run over a dog and kill him. The owner of the victim, Mrs. Loy or Lousse, takes him into her house and tries to make him, the cripple, submit to her care. But Molloy, after a short sojourn, proceeds, minus his bicycle, undergoes a half-hearted, abortive attempt on his own life, and kills a man in a forest. In this forest his capabilities of locomotion finally desert him; both legs stiff, he crawls to the end of the forest where help is announced. How he got into his mother's room, in which he is writing his memoirs, is not clear, to him no less than to the reader. Who is Molloy? That would be a question of his past which he carefully keeps in cherished oblivion. He is an educated bum, judging from his sly juggling of Biblical references and other pieces of erudition. He has a penchant for obscene talk, claiming "'tis my muse will have it so." (107) Why does he write his memoirs? Not because he wants to

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23

master his past, but because he wants to earn his death, to eliminate himself from the world of his past and that of a "forgotten" pensum, one of words, of meaning: A l l I k n o w is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a h a n d s o m e little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the wellbuilt phrase and the long sonata o f the dead. A n d truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. Y o u invent nothing, y o u think y o u are inventing, y o u think y o u are escaping, and all y o u d o is stammer out your lesson, the remnants o f a pensum o n e day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. T o hell with it anyway. (41)

It has been suggested that the two parts of Molloy should be read in inverted order. This then would create a certain continuity, because Moran, at the end of his search for Molloy, has almost become Molloy. Thus Molloy's account would be a continuation of Moran's. We would then see the protagonist who, with reservations, lived the life of a respected Catholic bourgeois, leave his milieu of superficial answers and stumble into an existence which, he hopes, will extract him from answers and questions. But the fact remains that the second part follows the first. The reason for this 'contrapuntal' structure is not apparent; perhaps the question is not important. 7 The sequence provides, in any case, the world of the bum with a point of departure, the source of its echoes, a frame of reference in which the heroes' negations are to be understood. This retrospective pattern is, after all, more or less that of the entire trilogy. Moran's story concerns his order from Youdi, a mysterious master, to seek out Molloy, his growing physical deterioration, and his final return home where he writes his report. He is on the verge of a Molloy existence, that of outwandering the world and his life. He is hopeful: "They will be happy days. I shall learn." (240) This statement, at the end of Molloy, retrospectively sharpens the novel's irony that one cannot "learn to 7 I agree with Edith Kern, "Moran - Molloy: The Hero as Author", Perspective, XI (1959), 189, in that the sequence Molloy - Moran adds suspense to the novel, but I doubt very much that this was Beckett's predominant motive for 'switching' the parts. Cecily Mackworth, through error or superior insight, takes Molloy's and Moran's identity for granted, "French Writing To-day: Les Coupables", Twentieth Century, CLXI (1957), 463, an identity that David Hayman tries to establish in a remarkable tour de force, considering most characters of both parts as elements of a single personality. "Quest for Meaninglessness: The Boundless Poverty of Molloy", in Six Contemporary Novels, ed. W.O.S. Sutherland (Austin, 1962), 90-112.

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forget", that one cannot learn to finish the "pensum". Moran's confidence is dimmed in Molloy, but it represents a further 'approximation' of the 'final' Beckettian protagonist of silence: the bum who finishes his incomprehensible task, of telling his senseless story to the end (avoiding and distorting his past) in order to be released into peace, who gives in to the damnation of being voice, words, stories - and waits till the voice has emptied itself of meaning and comes to a rest. But the stories go on. They are prowling around their authors, their victims, to devour them. But this Molloy and Moran do not face. They give way to Malone.

MALONE: LIFELESS STORIES

Malone's first sentence seems to indicate that he has succeeded inMolloy's quest for an end: "I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all." If Molloy's and his predecessor's mistake had been eagerly to thrust their egos toward the promised land of silence, thus preserving and perpetuating it, Malone promises himself to be on his guard. "I shall be neutral and inert". He will be on his guard against his "little fits of impatience". "I shall be neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid, without enthusiasm". (1) How can he endure the time till his death without once again becoming subject to impatience, enthusiasm and despair, the "old error" ? While waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I can. They will not be the same kind of stories as hitherto, that is all. They will be neither beautiful nor ugly, they will be calm, there will be no ugliness or beauty or fever in them any more, they will be almost lifeless, like the teller. (2)

Molloy's and Moran's stories had been, in spite of distortions, themselves. This mistake Malone will not repeat. "This time I where I am going, it is no longer the ancient night, the recent Now it is a game, I am going to play." (2) But Malone knows the bilities of failure.

about know night. possi-

I shall never do anything any more from now on but play. No, I must not begin with an exaggeration. But I shall play a great part of the time, from now on, the greater part, if I can. But perhaps I shall not succeed any better than hitherto. Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark, without anything to play with. Then I shall play with myself. To have been able to conceive such a plan is encouraging. (2/3)

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25

To play alone, with himself - will not this be a return to the ego that the stories are to bury? "I feel I am making a great mistake." (5) He makes plans. He is going to tell stories about a man, a woman, a thing and an animal. These plans do not materialize. The beginning of his first story promises the lifelessness Malone is striving for. The man's name is Saposcat. Like his father's. Christian name? I don't know. He will not need one. His friends call him Sapo. What friends? I don't know. (9)

But the story does not retain this pallor. In spite of Malone's assurances that Sapo bears no resemblance to himself, he soon realizes that he is talking about himself again and changes his hero, from Sapo to Macmann, which is a change of names only. The new story, that of Macmann, of his wanderings and his stay at an asylum, of his love affair there with an old hag, again is abandoned for a new hero: Lemuel. But Lemuel too resembles Malone, he too comes close to him, demanding, as all the others, reaching for his past. Malone's last words never there he will never never anything there any more (120)

- in anguish and fear try to make sure that Lemuel will die with Malone. He is more than a fiction, he 'is' Malone. His survival would mock Malone's death, perpetuate his existence in words. Did he die with him? The Unnamable is the negative answer. Malone Dies continues the fiction of a master, of an outside agency and its servants directing the fate of the Beckett heroes. Malone is being fed by a mysterious hand, he has a visitor who awakens him with a blow on the head. But no communication is established between them. The mud-caked boots of the visitor seem to indicate his employment along the mud road that the protagonist of How It Is travels. Besides looking through his window, listening to the dimming sounds of the outside world and holding on to, losing and recovering his pencil stump, Malone exhibits one obsession which seems, "for a man in his position", absurd. As Molloy had already planned and to some extent carried out, he is intent on making an inventory of his possessions, postpones it, again begins to do so, but never completes it. Molloy angrily demanded the contents of his pockets that had been taken away from him in Lousse's house, as Macmann shouted for his in the asylum. The tender-

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ness which they extend toward these worthless things, their hats, a bicycle bell, a broken pipe, pebbles, may be explained with the innocence of these objects; for of the living Malone says: "So long as it is what is called a living being you can't go wrong, you have the guilty one." (88)8 But most of them relate to a past they want to forget or turn into lifeless stories. They establish a continuity between the protagonists which they themselves deny. The silver knife-rest which Molloy stole from Lousse is found in Macmann's pocket. These objects represent the past, but at least they do not talk. They do not move and slip out of the narrator's hand who wants to hold them far from himself. These mute witnesses of the past symbolize what Malone wants to become : a mute, indifferent, forgetful witness of his past. Molloy had proclaimed: "To restore silence is the role of objects." (16) But perhaps Malone suspects that, if the inventory is made, they will speak the language of their otherness and of his past, thus mocking his proud timelessness and unity.9 Molloy had already realized the need for stories, but he told his own, trying to finish the pensum. Malone attempts to avoid his own and instead invents lifeless stories, waiting for his death. But if to live is to invent, to invent is to live: the stories return to the maker and claw at his integrity, demanding his recognition of his past, of himself as alive. From an attempt to empty one's history of meaning, we have come to a new 'approximation' - lifeless stories to capture the moment, finalize it and bury the past - an approximation that disintegrates as the stories come to life and mock the end that Malone's death was to bring.10 And, in the words of the Unnamable: "Then I resurrect and begin again." (149) 8 See Jean-Jacques Mayoux, "Samuel Beckett et L'Univers parodique", in Vivants Piliers: Le Roman anglo-saxon et les symboles, (Paris, 1960), 288. 9 "Great love in my heart too for all things still and rooted." Beckett, From an Abandoned Work (London, 1958), 9. - "The stool, for example, dearest of all. . . . At times I felt its wooden life invade me, till I myself became a piece of old wood." "The End", Stories and Texts for Nothing, 49. - Perhaps the Beckett heroes are among those modern artists of whom Sartre says that "ils aiment les choses pour elles-mêmes, ils ne veulent pas les diluer dans le flux de la durée". Situations I (Paris, 1947), 119. - The role of objects in Beckett has puzzled the critics, and their opinions vary. William York Tindall, "Beckett's Bums", Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, II (1958), 12, finds that Malone "prizes these artifacts for their solidity in alien flux". Melvin Friedman sees in Molloy's pebbles a parody of the "sacred stones" which - in Mircea Eliade's words possess "the irreducibility and absoluteness of being". "Molloy's 'Sacred' Stones", Romance Notes, IX (1967), 10-11. ToGeraldine Cmarada, "Malone Dies: A Round of Consciousness", Symposium, XIV (1960), 202, the objects are remnants of a world of order, while J. Robert Loy, "Things in Recent French Literature", PMLA, LXXI (1956), 33, goes so far as to claim that "The whole motivation for Beckett's writing... seems precisely a need to talk, and to talk about Things." 10 The hero of "The Calmative", after his "death", decides to "try and tell myself

THE NOVELS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

27

THE U N N A M A B L E : THE LONELY VOICE

The Unnamable may well be the last of the tribe. While all his predecessors held out hope, had plans and, at least initially, proceeded rather confidently toward the longed-for end, the Unnamable's tortured existence is never sustained by hope for any length of time. His existence is the untotalled sum of all other failures, which remain unresolved and are forever repeated. But the Unnamable brings a lucidity of self-analysis to his 'stories' that gives this seemingly incoherent, breathless torrent of positions and negations, exclamations, curses, hushed prayers and stories a frightening, haunting ingenuity and a philosophically traceable rhythm that puts the book far above the Joycean and Woolfian stream-of-consciousness experiments. These 177 pages of a "dialectical flow of introspection" 11 sum up not only all preceding novels of Beckett but also much of the doubting, the humility and the pride of an age of lonely poets, forever forced to create something new and deploring the death of tradition and myth, rejoicing in their freedom and being unable to bear its burden. The Unnamable, heir to several generations of creative Beckettian bums, is also heir to a hectic art that has created itself out of substance. The forms are there: as has often been remarked, 12 this novel, more than Malone Dies, is poetry - torn, with jarring rhythms, but singing out and desperately searching for a melody that will lift the Unnamable, last of the Beckett bards, above the 'clinking' and dying of things, men and words. The novel is there: the Unnamable gives us a caricature of the novel, two pages of storytelling that mock a hundred novels (167/8) and the very idea of a "return to the world of fable". (169) He gives his creation (and his situation) the form of the theater and assigns the reader a role similar to his own: . . . in the anguish of waiting, never noticed y o u were waiting alone, that's the show, waiting alone, in the restless air, for it to begin, for something to begin, for there to be something else but you, for the power to rise, the courage t o leave, y o u try and be reasonable, perhaps y o u are blind, probably deaf, the s h o w is over, all is o v e r . . . (132/3) another story, to try and calm myself". He wonders whether "it is possible that in this story I have come back to life, after my death?" He reassures himself in Malone's fashion: "No, it's not like me to come back to life, after my death." Stories and Texts for Nothing, 27. 11 Charles Glicksberg, "Samuel Beckett's World of Fiction", Arizona Quarterly, XVIII (1962), 42. 12 Jacobsen and Mueller, 4. - "Beckett... perhaps he is principally a poet." Anthony Hartley, "Samuel Beckett", Spectator (Oct. 23, 1953), 459.

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The Unnamable's language is deeply mythological, but there is no consistent and coherent myth, healing the divisions of his world. Myth too, in shreds and cast-away, tumbling symbols, re-enacts the chaos of notions, beliefs and arguments which suffocate the nameless artist. The myth of God, the master, deity of a pensum "long forgotten", is treated here more explicitly than elsewhere (there is an elaborate portrait of the master on 33-5). Parody - whose function as a literary device has been elevated to the dignity of a primary artistic attitude, in Thomas Mann for instance, and in Joyce - pervades all utterances of the Unnamable. Not only the parody of the novel, of drama and poetry,13 of God and those who continue to re-create him is here, but also the parody of the artist himself and all his creative and re-creative attempts. And here too the 'literary device' entangles the hero in the paradox: the parody turns against the parodist, does not free him from the old forms of life or his existence as an artist, an existence of words spun into stories. For this reason, parody here is unstable. The things rejected forever return. 14 No derisive laughter, no curse and no gesture of dismissal will create the vacuum, the artistic nothingness which the Unnamable wants to achieve. This idea of a vacuum, dangling before a Tantalus without name,15 faintly approximated in stories, images and words "on the brink of silence" (173), constantly proves the impossibility of its 'incarnation'. Life is twisted into stories, the stories are cast into the void, to finish the "pensum". Yet the stories return, accumulate and "shed their light" on the artist, thicken and intensify into "this hell of stories". (130) The predominant metaphor of the book, and the Unnamable insists that it is only a metaphor (52, 83), is that of the voice. The protean protagonist, who tries to change himself out of form and substance, has reduced the world, his past, himself to a voice, a voice speaking and telling stories, creating 'negative myths'. He has become an artist, and finally 'art' ; but an artist in an age without a God, without a soul and therefore without an art. Here the comic tone of the earlier novels has almost totally given way to a tone of genuine desperation: The Unnamable is not only

13

The book, as the others, is also "la parodie du journal ìntime et de la confession orale". André Marissel, "L'Univers de Samuel Beckett: Un noeud de complexes", Esprit, XXXI (1963), 242. 14 From this point of view one cannot agree with Ihab Hassan that "immaculate parody rules supreme". The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York, 1967), 130. 16 See Kenneth Hamilton, "Negative Salvation in Samuel Beckett", Queens Quarterly, LXIX (1962), 107.

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29

a critique of the earlier Beckett novels but also the vision of an age that has been 'reduced' to art and is unable to create it. The Unnamable is an artist and he is not. His inventions are art and they are not. The voice is dying, but forever so; " . . . it's an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me" (175), accusing the artist of an existence between art and silence, achieving neither. Murphy's solipsism, Watt's magic of logic, Molloy/Moran's excorcising memoirs and Malone's lifeless stories are now reduced to the image of an empty universe, a bodyless I and a voice that attains no message but its endless droning: go on, go on. In view of a silence that never happens, the final question of what the protagonists were the 'approximations', at the end of The Unnamable remains hauntingly unanswered; 1 " but the reasons for this are clear: art can only approximate silence, never achieve it. The reduction, in The Unnamable, to the artist's existence 'between words', denying the validity of all forms of literature and of language itself, seems to be the logical end of the Beckett existences and of the Beckett novels. If silence were achieved, it would be nothing but the absence of the artist and we would not 'hear' it; it would be meaningless to us. There is the possibility of a return to art, the word, sentence, story, time, but this return Beckett apparently does not attempt. Beckett himself felt that with The Unnamable the end of the road had been reached. "No 'I', no 'have', no 'being'. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There's no way to go on." 17 While on the stage silence could be further approximated with the Acts without Words, in prose Beckett has published only further variations of his themes. 18 Of these, How It Is formally constitutes the most elaborate example of the Beckettian 'anti-novel'. Cut up into short (breathlong) paragraphs (which are arbitrary and at best lyrical units of content), with no punctuation of any kind, no definable beginning or end, the 'ancient voice', apparently further away from an 'I', pants on. The 16 Vivian Mercier's suggestion that the novels of the trilogy may reflect the three zones of Murphy's mind does not help much in establishing the 'progress' of the novels since all of Beckett's heroes continually become entangled in all of them. "Beckett and the Search for the Self", The New Republic, CXXXIII (1955), 21. 17 Quoted by Israel Shenker. "Like a hunted animal, Beckett paced the floor in his Paris apartment. 'L'Innommable', he complained, 'landed me in a situation that I can't extricate myself from.' " "Moody Man of Letters", New York Times (May 6, 1956), 1 & 3, col. 2. 18 See John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London, 1964), 218. - "The very

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book once more sums up the predicament of the Beckett artist, with the laconic title "how it is". There is no escape from 'literature'; the voice, reduced to exhausted parody, goes on quoting itself, killing time.19 It is its special emphasis on time we will have occasion to look at later on; but on the whole this study is concerned with the curve described by the five novels from Murphy to The Unnamable. An evaluation of the Beckett novels cannot confine itself to a discussion of their themes. If indeed the end of Western art is celebrated here, as is generally held, then we will have to ask the questions: what is Beckett's concept of art? Can we accept the Beckettian indictment? Is it final ? The temporary formulation these questions should perhaps take is: why do the Beckett artist-bums want silence, why do they not achieve it, why do they not die? To show the importance of these questions to the Beckett novels, to show that they enter us into a dialogue with Hegel which will expose their timeless nature, this is the purpose of the following chapters.

last thing I wrote - Textes pour rien - was an attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration, but it failed." Shenker, 3, col. 2. - These texts add no new themes to Beckett's fiction but rework, in short, dense vignettes, the material of the novels. 19 "Beckett's way of making progress is like that of the man in How It Is ... varying nothing except the programme of the mute imprecations and dragging after him everything he has had since he started." Hugh Kenner, "Progress Report, 1962-65", in Beckett at 60: A Festschrift, ed. John Calder (London, 1967), 61.

II BECKETT AND DESCARTES

. . . a so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is yet none the less false just because and in so far as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. (Ph, 85)

The great story of turning from a world of dubious things and beliefs to oneself in search of an indubitable fulcrum which Beckett seems to have cherished more than any other, more than that of Asian mystics, is the story of Descartes. Not only is he the hero of the early, prize-winning Whoroscope (1930), not only is he mentioned several times in Beckett's works, but a comparison of the Cartesian Discourse on Method and the Meditations1 with Beckett's fiction will show parallels close enough to enable us to view the Beckettian series of novels as a partial re-enactment of the Cartesian 'story'. And we will see the parallels diverge where the twentieth-century Cartesian cannot perform the great leap of faith toward a God who cannot deceive nor finally accept the unchanging truth, "I am because I doubt". This is the point at which the Cartesian line of optimistic, 'self-confident' argument with Beckett will drop off into a fluid immensity of doubt, of a doubt engulfing the once-proud ego. Much has been said about Beckett's Cartesianism, and we have a brilliant discussion of this aspect in Hugh Kenner's Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study2 on which I would not attempt to improve. Yet, a short survey of the Descartes-Beckett parallels seems necessary here since it is the Cartesian dilemma as it emerged fully in eighteenth-century philosophy which has to be the basis of our understanding of both Beckett and Hegel. Hugh Kenner says that "Beckett would seem to be the first to have read the Discours de la Méthode as what it is, a work of fiction."3 In this 1 Both in A Discourse on Method, tr. John Veitch (London and New York, 1960); referred to as D and M. 2 New York, 1961. 3 Kenner, Beckett, 81.

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Beckett followed Descartes' own hint when he claimed that "this tract is put forth merely as a history, or, if you will, as a tale". (5) Not only do we find the bare argument of the philosophical tract in Beckett's novels, he also has carefully selected, repeated, re-arranged, ironized and distorted much of the 'character' of Descartes and his story. Like Descartes, the Beckettian characters were, as far as they can or will remember, diligent but selective students of the philosophers. Murphy was a theology student. Of Watt's qualities the Nixons are in "Utter ignorance" (21) except that he is a "university man, of course" (23), as all of Beckett's main characters must have been judging by their erudition that sinks more and more into a carefully manufactured oblivion, now and then absurdly emerging in the form of Latin, Italian, German phrases, a great number of names and concepts. Like Descartes they travel, not as actors in the "theater of the world" but as spectators (£), 23). Molloy in the shadow of a rock - watches nameless pedestrians meet and part, Macmann sits motionless for hours, "his face . . . towards the people" (Ma, 56). The Unnamable maintains that in whatever existences he may have been, he was there merely as a spectator. And their "courses of inaction " (Mu, 38) are justified for they never contemplate "anything higher", in Descartes' characteristic terms of humble hybris, "than the reformation of [their] own opinions, and basing them on a foundation wholly [their] own." (D, 13) Murphy in his rocking chair, other heroes in bed, repeat Descartes' famous Oblomov existence, in being cooped up in a room, thinking and writing in bed ; the tranquility and security of their inner selves seemingly established, they feel the temptation to again seek "intercourse with mankind" (D, 23), the temptation of companionship. Murphy, for instance, is in need of a "brotherhood" (176), Malone speaks of a "want of a homuncule" (52), the Unnamable wishes for a "congener" (127), and in How It Is the creatures on the mud road crawl longingly from a meeting with the torturer to loneliness to a meeting with the victim.4 The Unnamable's world is besieged by a throng of creatures and events who claim to be his memories and clamour for his soul. He too is aware that his "liberty" may be but a dream which "dreads awakening, and conspires with the agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged". (M, 84)

4

T h e ninth chapter of Murphy, which describes the hero's futile search for companionship in the asylum, is prefaced by a quotation from A n d r é Malraux: "II es difficile à celui qui vit hors du monde de n e pas rechercher les siens." (156)

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33

In his search for a metaphysical Archimedian fulcrum (M, 85), the Cartesian develops a peculiar suspicion of anything taken for granted in his former life among men and things. While in Descartes these suspicions may be largely hypothetical, in Beckett's novels they become psychological phenomena of haunting and accumulating intensity. The nearest object of suspicion, of course, is the body. Descartes found it useful to imagine himself without a body, a place or a world (£>, 27),5 or to suppose that his body was a machine (£>, 44),6 and repeatedly assures us that 'he' has none of the attributes of the body (e.g., M, 88/9), and he only hesitantly 'adopts' it. With the exception of Murphy who was capable, as often as not, of putting his body to sleep by means of his rocking chair, Beckett's heroes must suffer a gradual deterioration of the body which in the case of Moran is heralded by Descartes' pain in the foot (M, 140) - transferred to the knee. (Murphy is warned in his horoscope against pains in the neck and feet, 33.) They cherish this disintegration and follow its development tenderly. The fact that "I extend this hand" (M, 81) does not prove that it is "mine": Malone's feet "are leagues away". (61) He discovers that his body, "my stupid flesh", "my witless remains" (9), has a mind of its own. (22) Descartes' long explanations of the mysterious "conjoining" of body and mind (Af, 132) (Murphy's "partial congruence", 109), of how the body receives and carries out messages of the mind, for Malone is "that little space of time, filled with drama, between the message received and the piteous response". (15) Murphy accepted this "partial congruence of the world of his mind with the world of his body as due to some such process of supernatural determination", as does Descartes; however, "The problem was of little interest". (109) But the Beckettians after him are intent on ridding themselves of the body entirely. While Descartes can imagine the "bodyless I", the Beckett heroes have to "dwindle" (Un, 60) and thus live out this process. These bodies of people happily moribund slowly deteriorate toward the Unnamable's total paralysis. Malone wishes his creature Macmann a "general paralysis" (73), Moran dreams of the "great classical paralyses" and their perhaps "unspeakable satisfactions", of muteness, deafness and blindness into the bargain. (192) But since "a state of dependency is manifestly a state of imperfection" (D, 29) on whatever level it exists, the separation of body and mind, the 6

See Hassan, 152. • For extensive descriptions of the human machine, see D, 37-43; The Passions of the Soul, sections IV-XVI.

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overcoming of the self as a res externa, is not enough. The dependence of the changing mind on time, "that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation", 7 will have to be severed. Therefore the Unnamable claims to be insensitive to the seconds that jerkily bang into him, sets aside "once and for all, at the same time as the analogy with orthodox damnation, all idea of beginning and end" (144) and proudly announces: "I understand nothing about duration" (169) and that "time is one thing, I another". (144) Similarly Descartes is capable of explaining "the nature of duration" only in terms of a continuous re-creation (i.e., conservation) of substance by "a being different from myself". (M, 107/8) But this axiomatic explanation and theoretical acceptance of time the Beckett heroes cannot endorse. They are bent on totally ridding themselves of the notion, or rather of that form of time-dependence which they fear and loathe most, that of memory, personal history, history. Descartes, although not fully negating the value of studying history, characteristically maintains that "when too much time is occupied in travelling [into other ages], we become strangers to our native country". (.D, 6) He holds that even the "most faithful histories" are suspect (Z), 6/7) and insists that a civilization grown through the centuries is inferior to one constructed in one sweep. (D, 11) At the beginning of the Discourse he complains: "I have often wished that I were equal to some others in promptitude of thought, or in clearness and distinctness of imagination, or in fullness and readiness of memory." (3) With Beckett's central characters the consequences of Descartes' ahistorical attitude are carried to their logical conclusion. Molloy confuses past and present, 8 memories are increasingly called "inventions" (e.g., Mo, 92), and the history of man exists only in shreds floating to the surface in moments of weakness (caricatures, it seems, of Proust's celebrated 'involuntary memory'). Thus Watt's memories seem to "belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten". (74) Against the activity of the world, Descartes asserts the activity of the mind (D, 4) in which objects attain the stability and truth of mathematics which "scarcely inquire whether or not these are really existent". (M, 82) Thus the Unnamable, ironically, finds that there is "nothing more restful 7

Beckett, Proust (New York, 1957), 1. "It is the mythological present, don't mind it." (34) - The hero of "The Calmative", in the "distant refuge" of a lasting present, tells his story "in the past none the less, as though it were a myth, or an old fable, for this evening I need another age, that age to become another age in which I became what I was." Stories and Texts for Nothing, 28. 8

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35

than arithmetic" (141), and Watt is interested not in the meaning of the event of the piano-tuners but in its "great formal brilliance". (74) The Beckett people are, as the old philosophers were (Z), 22), more or less beyond the desire of objects other than their own thoughts, which are the only things "absolutely in our power". (D, 21) They have left the world of interest and the "petty cash of current facts" (MM, 178) and have truly become "thinking things". The fourth principle of section II of the Discourse, "in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted" (16), is carried to monstruous extremes in Watt and with Molloy's sucking stones (93-100). But while with Murphy we admire the "dim geometry" of the linoleum in his room (63), "the dream of Descartes linoleum" (140), by the time we come to Malone and the Unnamable, this bliss, an existence essentially of concepts and words, has become the last and everlasting agony amidst swarming words, "hasty, indifferent, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, too light to leave a mark". (Un, 94) If the self-contained "closed system" (Mu, 109) of thought, wrenched away from time, space and memory, could exist in purity, God, whose existence had been "proved" by Descartes (M, 108),9 will thus be approximated. As he imaginatively re-enacted God's creation (D, 34), so Descartes feels that God's "faculty of will" is no greater than his, "considered in itself formally and precisely", that he enjoys the same free will to "affirm" or "deny", to "pursue" or "shun". (M, 115) This absolute I is indivisible (M, 139): the Unnamable speaks of "the soul being notoriously immune from deterioration and dismemberment". (60) It is immortal (D, 47): he discovers that "I alone am immortal". (134) But how can one be sure it is one's own ? Is it enough to take care "lest perchance I inconsiderately substitute some other object in room of what is properly myself"? (M, 86) Molloy tells us: " . . .it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger". (56) The Unnamable's "I, say I. Unbelieving" (3) signals a long futile search for the I. Outside of time, space and memory, are we not nothing? Descartes' final assurance comes through a God who is incapable of deception (e.g., D, 32; M, 111/2). However, in the case of

9 This proof is dimly reflected in Watt's predecessor's speech in which it is said of Mr. Knott that, while for others "the coming is in the shadow of the going and the going is in the shadow of the coming", "yet there is one who neither comes nor goes". (57)

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the Beckettian 'naked I' trying to grasp itself and feeling nothing but the time-space ghost, the ghost of beginning and end, in its role of memory and words, the distance toward either the deceitful or the undeceiving God is equally far: I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my p o w e r . . . and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false... (M, 84)

This supposition is lived out in the 177 tortured pages of The Unnamable, the "master" acting through a "college of tyrants" (31), the victim fighting back with his ratio and with words, but his words are "loaded". One cannot open one's "mouth without proclaiming them [i.e., the world], and our fellowship." (51) In the neat pre-Hegelian logic of Descartes, nothing is "at an infinite distance from every sort of perfection", i.e., God - who is "a certain negative idea of nothing". (M, 112) For the Beckettian hero, nothingness is the ultimate perfection, or the ultimate perfection is nothing, silence, absence. The Cartesian who imagines himself placed between God (existence) and nothing (non-existence) (M, 112), sharing in both and moving toward the latter in Beckett's novels learns that perfection, ultimate (non-) existence, does not 'live', that its stasis defies definition and attachment. And at this point the proud rock of the old rationalist will sink into a shoreless sea. 'Indifferent' religious fervor will turn into the mystic's anxiety, into the Beckettian vacillations between satire and suicide, prayer and curse, beginning and ending, playing and living, art and silence.

Ill STUBBORN PARADOXES

. . . it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true - a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth. (Ph, 133)

Samuel Beckett shares the position of those modern artists who view our age and all its former ideals of Bildung as philosophically bankrupt. And he seems to reduce the life of the individual, his reasoning and his fumbling for meaning, his interests in and commitments to other individuals, family and society, his 'involvements' in the past, to the meaningless acts of the clown who performs meticulously a senseless ritual of action. He turns life's absurdity into a formal, comic act - the last movements of the pendulum of a clock whose works are broken. From this angle, the acts, feelings and indulgences of the will of the Beckett people seem to extend, as an image, Descartes' report on those "whose arm or leg had been amputated, that they still occasionally seemed to feel pain in that part of the body which they had lost". (M, 131) They are people who have lost a world but who still feel pain or other human emotions in it. We have seen that this turning from the world took its form from the Cartesian doubting unto the I; but it avoided the orthodoxy of the seventeenth-century philosopher who 'invents' axioms that enable him to 'return'. We will see later that it is with Cartesian logic that the Beckett paradox, already at the root of Descartes' thinking, is laid bare - a paradox which is equated with the paradox of modern man. This is a logic which, confronted with its "eternal tautology", yes or no (Mu, 41), admits defeat. It is here that our first connection with Hegel will have to be made, because it is this 'paradox' which constitutes the turning point, the punctum saliens, of Hegel's way of thinking, his spekulatives Denken.

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HEGEL ON DESCARTES

Before we enter a discussion of what the concept of "speculative thinking" entails, we will look at the way Hegel evaluates Descartes. Hegel's criticism, as will be apparent, is largely born out by Beckett's novels. For Hegel, Descartes heralds a new phase in European philosophy, characterized by an awareness "that self-consciousness is an essential factor of truth" (an awareness basic to Hegel himself) whose principle is "thought based on itself". (GP, iii, 328) This is "a new beginning of philosophy". (329) Its motivation is "a basic concern with freedom; what is acknowledged as true must have the function of preserving our freedom in thinking". (338) However, this new beginning of philosophy bears the stamp of abstraction. It has the "form of a raisonnement" (365), it is "formal, without depth". (353) "Descartes aims at ideality; he is far above the reality of sensory qualities, but he does not proceed to a particularization of this ideality." (361) Since his "I means thought, not the particularity of consciousness" (338), the truth of his thinking is similarly abstract. " . . . if we take this being [i.e., thought] as truth, then this truth would be without substance, and substance is our concern". (345) The freedom that Descartes attains, by means of abstraction, is a freedom in thought, one of self-reliance; but this thinking is formal, endures only in a meticulously kept, often reiterated distance from "substance", the particular, the sensual stuff and time. Its world is one of the divine, proud, abstract selfreliance of mathematics. Descartes "was astonished that foundations, so strong and solid, should have had no loftier superstructure reared on them" (D, 7) and hurried to make up for the oversight. Cartesian relationships are the fundamental necessities of the rational 'Enlightenment'. . . . they may be reliably explained by a supervisory science, mathematics. Geometric figures are the pure outlines of substance, and in themselves they describe the perfect nature of a rational universe.1

But a universe transformed into its "pure outlines", loses its "substance". Hegel turns against a philosophy that is determined by the abstractions of mathematics. One could further conceive of philosophical mathematics which would derive from concepts what the ordinary mathematical sciences deduce from fixed

1

Frederick J. Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self (Carbondale, 1962), 62.

STUBBORN PARADOXES

39

quantities after the method of ratiocination. However, since mathematics is the science which deals with finite magnitudes which remain identical and valid in their finiteness, it is therefore essentially a science of ratiocination. (Sy, ii, 84)

To put it in terms of the Beckett dilemma, mathematics, as a "science of ratiocination", perpetuates the paradox. This discovery is enacted in the novels, but never transcended and left behind.

THE FORMAL SANCTUARY

As we have seen, the Beckettian character develops the Cartesian dependence on mathematics into an indifferent 'mania for symmetry'. The processes of mathematics offer themselves to the Beckett protagonists as a bridge into number's realm of the spectrally perfect, where enmired existence may be annihilated by essence utterly declared.2

The process of transferring a given problem of experience to the level of formal reason, where it does not matter whether an object exists or not, can only be achieved if the interest in the experience can be overcome. The process itself may be the very exercise of stilling this interest. The fact that Murphy preferred the ginger cookie and disliked the "anonymous", reduces the number of sequences in which he may eat his biscuits to a "paltry six". But if he could overcome his "prejudice" and his "infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways!" Murphy was so "Overcome by these perspectives", he "fell forward on his face on the grass . . . " (96/7) Two piano-tuners come to Mr. Knott's house and tune the piano (or not). " . . . Watt did not know what had happened. He did not care, to do him justice . . . " (74) "What distressed W a t t . . . was . . . that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness . . . with all the clarity and solidity of something." (76) " . . .he .. .could not bear it. One wonders sometimes where Watt thought he was. In a culture-park?" (77) While for Murphy the freedom of indifference was an 'overwhelming' achievement, for Watt it is something he cannot bear unless he can "saddle" it "with meaning, and a formula" (79); and his "meaning" is the formula. He has to overcome the dilemma that "the only way one can 2

Kenner, Beckett, 109.

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STUBBORN PARADOXES

speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something". (77) This is the Beckettian problem: "something" partakes of the imperfection of a-rational existence, of meaning, so the "semantic succour" (83) Watt turns to, his 'explanations', do not constitute a search for what happened or what is (for he does not care), but "to explain had always been to exorcize, for Watt". (78) In a sense, this parodies the Hegelian contention that "thought is essentially the negation of the directly [unmittelbar] existing". (Sy, i, 57) To get rid of meaning is Watt's magic aim, to lift what happens, or might have happened, onto a level of mathematical possibilities, reason it out and close the circle. What is perfect is right, what imperfect wrong. Within this circle right and wrong will not lead the disorderly life of cohabitation, of fusing and transforming each other, as in life.3 So when he is confronted with the problem of what happens to Mr. Knott's leftovers, he tackles the problem with a mania for symmetry and perfection, going, as do old logical exercise books, through all possible 'objections' and 'solutions', till a puzzling actuality has been transformed into the peace, the completeness and roundedness of a cosmos of all possibilities which is right. Which one of the solutions applies, of course, he does not care. The discrepancy between the object and the effort strikes only us, the imperfect, as comic. But the troubled seas of his mind are never calmed for long by a few drops of Cartesian oil, the sanctuary continues to be invaded, and his story peters out in puzzled contemplation of the lost ideal, Mr. Knott. 4 Similarly Molloy, for many pages, considers all possibilities of sequence of sucking his sucking stones one after the other. But in his case make no mistake about his concern, it comes and goes: " . . . deep down it was all the same to me." (100) It is a gratifying formal experiment. In the end he throws away all stones but one, the last one he loses.

THE CONSCIOUS PARADOX

Watt was the victim of paradox without ever achieving full and lasting knowledge of his adversary. Although they often forget and repeat Watt's futile logical rituals, the Beckett people grow increasingly aware 3

This circle Hugh Kenner calls a "closed system of possibilities". Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston, 1962), 81. 4 "So in Watt the acid of experience dissolves the verbal c h a i n . . . and leaves man face to face with the thing." Alvin Greenberg, "The Death of the Psyche: A Way to the Self in the Contemporary Novel", Criticism, VIII (1966), 14-5.

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41

of the nature of their 'logical' problems, as the above example from Molloy indicates. They learn that system, a devotion to the principles of right and wrong, on whatever level, subjects them to the paradox. That catches up with them wherever they wander and finally threatens to engulf their last incarnation, the Unnamable. Often, therefore, they turn against this their Cartesian weakness. In a footnote in Watt the narrator says: "The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous." (104; italics mine) Molloy voices the suspicion that the "dutiful confusions" of his "little world" may not be so different from "all that between two suns abides and passes away". (18) He even goes so far as to consider the possibility that "all that is false may more readily be reduced, to notions clear and distinct, distinct from all other notions. But I may be wrong." (110) His pursuer Moran speaks of the "falsetto of reason". (147) The thought, the formula, the pure word, shadow of substance, says Molloy, "in the end is no better than the substance" (33) itself. Malone had already realized that "thought struggles on . . . It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found". (9) But it is the Unnamable who rejects and uses reason, fully conscious of his contradiction. While he cannot help performing the act of reason over and over again, he will claim that he does not, "really", then admit that he does, and periodically indict that which has turned his existence into a helpless paradox. "Ah yes, the bliss of what is clear and simple." (77) He has realized that it was his rationality that led him into the logical trap out of which he cannot reason himself. This becomes to him - who, in his Wattian days, had tried to dehumanize himself into a Cartesian paradise of reason - the very essence of humanity. And vainly, because paradoxically, he fights his memories and the creatures of his imagination who want to lure him "back" into a rational existence and thus throw him to the wolves of life. With bitterness he realizes that "they" have "reduced" him "to reason", want him to live out his rational existence, logical step, "plop", by logical step, "plop". (70) He sees through their aim to make him a "normal person". "And in no time I'd be a network of fistulae, bubbling with the blessed pus of reason." (92) And in a clear indictment of Descartes' proud and aloof chose quipense, the Unnamable rejects the presumption of becoming (again) "thinking flesh". (92) Yet, with the failure of their thinking firmly established in their minds, the Beckettian has nothing but this thinking. He despairs of it but has to return to it. Therefore, "thought, despairing to solve the contradiction it got itself into, returns to those solutions and evasions which the

42

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spirit called its own in other of its forms". (Sy, i, 56) But the old forms have been infected with the paradox and reject the chess-player of life.

THE PROBLEM OF THE PAST

With their re-enactment of the Cartesian story, with its unending unhappy ending, the Beckett characters not only re-enact a phase of European ideological history but also fall victim to the timeless personal temptation of freezing the confusions of life into formulae and sorting them out according to abstract notions of'right' and 'wrong'. One of the most poignant forms this rationality and its failure takes in the Beckett novels is that of the characters' attitude toward memory, their past. Critics have often pointed out that Beckett and Proust have in common a concern with memory. But while Proust is intent on recapturing the past in a timeless understanding, free from the obscuring walls of habit, that assure him a continuity of existence, the Beckett novels, at least seen from their predominant angle, seem to be a series of complete rejections of past existences. Their instinctive and utter mistrust of memory seems to point in the direction of Hegel's contention that cognition and memory are substantially related: "Therefore the mind posits the perception [Anschauung] as its own, permeates it, internalizes it, remembers itself in it, gains in it its present (and presence) and thus its freedom." (Sy, iii, 328) This, obviously, is not the formal, defined, lifeless freedom the Beckettians are after. It is particularly the Unnamable who fights a running battle against his memory, against the "inventions", against "them", the creatures he has been, because they are "of him", mutilating them, he hopes, beyond recognition. Because they are different from what he is now, the hopefully liberated, they are false. This reflects an attitude toward history, and not only their own, which to Hegel is a "mathematical", a Cartesian one. Seen from the latest stage of the development, previous stages are false and therefore to be rejected. They have been "nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result." (Ma, 61) Malone, at least at times, is still confident that he is succeeding in ridding himself of the past. Of the Lamberts, after Sapo's departure, he says: Then, as people do when someone even insignificant dies, they summoned up such memories as he had left them, helping one another and trying to agree.

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43

But we all know that little flame and its flickerings in the wild shadows. And agreement only comes a little later, with the forgetting. (43)

Therefore he considers the idea of writing his memoirs funny (6) and finds that "I benefit by a hiatus in my recollections". (5) The purpose of his stories he states unambiguously: " . . . I vaguely remember a forest. All that belongs to the past. Now it is the present I must establish, before I am avenged." (6) This pride of rejection asserts itself clearly and distinctly. The life he led among men and things, a life of believing that he was this rather than that, is the great "ignorance", tempting and never quite forgotten, "the call of that ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery". (12) But are not the stories the dying Malone is telling himself, to 'kill' the time till his death, an attempt to make this end the end of something? He is aware of this 'weakness' and warns himself time and again. "All the stories I've told myself, clinging to the putrid mucus, and swelling, swelling, saying, Got it at last, my legend." (51) The assertion of the pure I, unadulterated by a past that is wrong, for Hegel is a legitimate, necessary and in various forms recurring attitude of philosophical man. But the error often committed is that of confusing mathematical right and mathematical wrong with the validity and nonvalidity of values in life. (This distinction corresponds to that between Richtigkeit and Wahrheit.)5 In the mathematical conceptions of the Beckettian characters, who are unable or unwilling to understand duration and therefore development, growth, the previous stages of their lives have disappeared, are nothing, are wrong, because they are different from what they are now. This attitude is similar to that which discards previous philosophical systems, because the previous phases in the lives of Beckett's heroes represented different systems of thought and value. The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more it is accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. (Ph, 68)

The static 'finiteness' of mathematics leads away from an understanding of process.

5

Sy, i, 372-3.

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Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them. Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used. (Ph, 98) 6

The way the characters took to the end of their road has become irrelevant, if not a bother and a shame, once the destination is reached. How I arrive at a mathematically correct result is unimportant as long as it is correct - not so with philosophical knowledge or the knowledge of the self. "The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development." (Ph, 81) The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. Yet, their fluid nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely d o not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and only this equal necessity of all moments constitutes the life of the whole. (Ph, 68) 7

This is an idea of their own history which the Beckett people reject in horror. To accept it would mean to become "normal", to have a "legend", to be of flesh and blood. It would establish a kinship with those who had to leave Eden and enter a world of birth and death, disparity and incongruity, a world of change which is, to the Beckettians, nothing but a series of errors. But beneath their pronouncements of disgust, beneath their pride of not being of the world, that world calls, "the old fog" (Ma, 4), which they left perhaps not out of courage but "poltroonery". They have lived and groped, they have become old, they have reached a place. But with the roots of their memories only "deep in the immediate past" (Mo, 102), with their past shut out, they cannot know what the result of it all is. They have reached the end and cast aside the "means". But

• This metaphysical attitude Hegel calls "dogmatic". "What is properly dogmatic is that one-sided concepts of ratiocination are held on to in such a way that their opposites are excluded. This is the strict either-or..." (Sy, i, 106) 7 See Sy, i, 366-7.

STUBBORN PARADOXES

45

the real subject matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in its execution; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of its becoming. The purpose by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization; and the naked result is the corpse which has left its guiding tendency behind. (Ph, 69) "The naked result": the Unnamable would probably find this term appropriate to his condition. The Beckett people gradually, but never finally, realize that their proud, mathematical transformations of living matter into self-reliant 'systems' of logic are invalidated as a philosophy of life, because of the "poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its material" (Ph, 102) and because of its lingering paradoxes. Consequently that is now to be shunned which is 'clear and simple' and will not exorcise the 'meaning' and therefore the disparity out of words and the memories which they refuse to recapture, or at least consider consciously, in order to place the 'errors' of their existences into the living totality into which they belong and in which they may make sense; doing now what they failed to do while they lived. They remain, immobilized and suspicious, in that admittedly unstable haven of abstraction that constantly threatens to fall into the pieces of their past: "My l i f e . . . at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?" (Mo, 47) Hegel has another calm to propose: . . . process . . . includes, therefore, within it the negative factor as well, the element which would be named falsity if it could be considered one from which we had to abstract. The element that disappears has rather to be looked at as itself essential, not in the sense of being something fixed, that has to be cut off from truth and allowed to lie outside it, heaven knows where; just as similarly the truth is not to be held to stand on the other side as an immovable lifeless positive element. Appearance is the process of arising into being and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but is per se, and constitutes reality and the life-movement of truth. The truth is thus the bacchanalian revel, where not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached than it eo ipso collapses straightway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent unbroken calm. (Ph, 105)

IV THE DIALECTIC BATTLEGROUND

. . . it has to be said of being and nothing that there is nothing in heaven or on earth that does not share in both. (Lo, i, 91)

" . . . spirit [mind] is . . . absolute disquietude, pure activity, the negation or ideality of all fixed elements of ratiocination" (Sy, iii, 12-3). In a cunning way, as we will see, the mental existence of the Beckett logicians bears witness to this statement by Hegel, even to its last part. But the process "of elevating the certainty of the self to the level of truth" (Sy, iii, 260) with them resulted in a loss not only of an ordered past and a meaningful world, but also of identity, of the "certainty of the self". What they are left with is the "disquietude", the negations, the lonely, motionless, suspicious listening to the alien voices of a universe haunted by the God of paradox. If, indeed, we are confronted, as rational beings, with the impossibility of fusing the now and then, truth and untruth, of becoming the organic whole and truth of what we have been through all our forms, errors and onesided commitments, it would take a different kind of thinking that would face, incorporate and overcome the rational paradox of concepts and values changing and becoming their opposites. Can there be a thinking that does not perish in contradiction, this seems to be the question of the Beckett novels? According to Hegel there is. His spekulative Logik centers in contradiction and difference as much as the thinking and existing of the Beckett characters does. It seems as if they are looking with disbelief in the direction of this logic, un-Cartesian and "courageous", that rises out of the very paradox in which they seem to be drowning.1

1 "The fundamental idea behind Beckett's fiction may be termed an affirmation of the negative. This paradoxical artistic undertaking becomes an investigation, an exploitation of opposites." Raymond Federman, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), 6.

THE DIALECTIC BATTLEGROUND

47

THE FLUIDITY OF OPPOSITES (DIALECTIC)

Descartes saw his achievement in the attainment of a freedom of the thinker who may remain outside of and untouched by what he thinks about. In Murphy this is aptly reflected in the indifferent way Mr. Endon plays chess. But with thinkers of incurable sanity, such as the tribe of Beckettians, the fluidity of such concepts as positive and negative, external and internal, 2 continues to interfere with a thinking game whose pieces must be solid, must represent immutable functions. For this reason the Beckettian player finally wants to give up. He cannot play with fluid pieces unless he becomes fluid himself. Developing, he would not play any more, he would 'live'. His logical world is based on the 'simple judgment' : A is B: Malone is young. Whether young or old or middle age, he is still Malone (or rather a nameless I); subject and predicate lead an independent existence. The judging subject may place them together or not. 'Grammatologically' speaking, this then is a question of the meaning and function of the copula 'is', which in non-dialectical logic usually stands for 'has'. T h e copula 'is' derives f r o m the nature of the concept to remain identical with itself in its externalization; the particular and the universal are, as its m o m e n t s , such determined ideas which cannot be isolated. The old fixed ideas o f ratiocination also have the relation to each other, but their connection is only that o f having, n o t of being . . . (Sy, i, 365)

To reduce all thinking to this subject-predicate relation of having or not having, according to Hegel, is nothing but raisonnement. It is "the freedom from all content, and conceited superiority to it" (Ph, 117), a staying outside of the essential relation (Wesensrelation) that exists between concepts and between concepts and thinker and that is essentially negative.3 The secure and static position of the 'definer' must give way to a participation in the 'movement of the idea'. In the raisonnement the position of the subject remains unshaken; but when thought tackles what the 2

See Sy, i, 313-9. "The concept of negativity virtually assumes the function of prime mover in Hegel's mode of philosophical reasoning." Helmut Rehder, "Of Structure and Symbol: The Significance of Hegel's Phenomenology for Literary Criticism", in A Hegel Symposium, ed. D. C. Travis (Austin, 1962), 131. - "Die Negativität ist selbst der Motor der Bewegung in der Phänomenologie des Geistes." W. Ver Eecke, "Zur Negativität bei Hegel", Hegel-Studien, IV (1967), 215. 3

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Cartesian tramps of Beckett tackle, then it should be 'shaken'. 4 It should become fluid in the process of Begreifen. It should leap, a corps perdu, into the "immanent rhythm of ideas". (Ph, 117) The vanity of the old logic consists in its n o t realizing that it has the negative in the positive, and vice versa. In the following statement Hegel seems to sum up the situation of the Beckettian Cartesians, from Murphy o n : In that this reflection does not gain its own negativity as content, it is not inside actual fact at all, but forever away outside it. On that account it imagines that by asserting mere emptiness it is going much farther than insight that embraces and reveals a wealth of content. {Ph, 118) Spekulatives Begreifen or dialectical thinking, then, in its most general definition, applicable to Plato's Parmenides as well as to Hegel, 5 can be defined as a thought process which is based on the assumption that concepts, when they enter into relation with others, change in substance; that, as a matter of fact, their life derives from their participation in an organic whole o f meaning, from process.'' Hegel further sharpens the process, because in his dialectic, concepts frequently develop into their opposites. The dialectic, with its antithetical rhythm, has "accepted the irrational . . . into the very essence of reason" 7 and culminates in the statement: Since the concept or notion is the very self of the object, manifesting itselt as the development of the object, it is not a quiescent subject, passively supporting accidents: it is a self-determining active concept which takes up its determinations and makes them its own. In the course of this process that inert passive subject really disappears; it enters into the different constituents and pervades the content; instead of remaining in inert antithesis to determinateness of content, it constitutes, in fact, that very specificity, i.e. the content as differentiated along with the process of bringing this about. Thus the solid basis, which ratiocination found in an inert subject, is shaken to its foundations, and the only object is this very movement of the subject. {Ph, 118/9) To explain what has been said by examples let us take the proposition 'God is Being'. The predicate is 'being': it has substantive significance, and thus absorbs

4 See Johannes Flügge, Die sittlichen Grundlagen des Denkens: Hegels existentielle Erkenntnisgesinnung (Hamburg, 1953), 36. 6 Hermann Gauss, "Über die Bedeutung und Grenzen des dialektischen Prinzips in der Philosophie (Piaton und Hegel)", Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, V (1951), 322. - See Lo, i, 53. 6 See Gauss, 322-3. 7 Nicolai Hartmann, Hegel [part II of Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus] (Berlin, 1960), 389.

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the meaning of the subject within it. Being here is meant to be not predicate but the essential nature. Thereby, God seems to cease to be what he was when the proposition was put forward, viz. a fixed subject. Thinking [i.e. ordinaryreflection], instead of getting any farther with the transition from subject to predicate, in reality finds its activity checked through the loss of the subject, and it is thrown back on the thought of the subject because it misses this subject. Or again, since the predicate has itself been pronounced to be a subject, to be the being, to be the essential reality, which exhausts the nature of the subject. thinking finds the subject directly present in the predicate too: and now, instead of having, in the predicate, gone into itself, and preserved the freedom characteristic of ratiocination, it is absorbed in the content all the while, or, at any rate is required to be so. (Ph, 121)8 (This example of the fluidity of subject and predicate is, incidentally, not without relevance to the God-image in Beckett's fiction. See Chapter VII.) In this reasoning, which does not proceed from the safe standpoint of a definitely defined subject from which we may 'pick up predicates', but is itself "soul and substance of the content", 9 the Cartesian fulcrum is sacrificed to a submission to contradiction and difference, 10 to the growth of ideas, which is similar to that of the artist. 11 Opposed to the idea of deduction (Descartes' method), it is a "mode of experience", 12 comparable perhaps to the idea of intuition. 13 What we have here is more than a difference in methods, it is a difference in 'involvement', for, as we said before, the judging subject is not safe here: 14 " . . . everything depends on grasping and expressing truth not as substance but as subject as well". (Ph, 80) 15 The speculative individual leaps, a corps perdu, into the antithet-

8

For a paraphrase of the above, see Walter Biemel, "Das Wesen der Dialektik bei Hegel und Sartre", Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, II (1958), 276. 9 See Justus Schwarz, "Die Denkform der Hegeischen Logik", Kant-Studien, L (1958/9), 37-76. 10 See A. J. Bergsma, "Der Übergang vom rationellen Denken zum dialektischen Denken im Sinne Hegels", Verhandlungen des dritten Hegelkongresses (1934), 25-36. 11 Hartmann, Hegel, 378. 12 Nicolai Hartmann, "Hegel und das Problem der Realdialektik", Blätterfür deutsche Philosophie, IX (1935/6), 8. 13 Hartmann, Hegel, 385. 14 "Dialektik spricht aus, dass philosophische Erkenntnis nicht dort zu Hause ist, wo das Herkommen sie ansiedelte; wo sie allzu leicht, gleichsam ungesättigt mit der Schwere und dem Widerstand des Seienden, gedeiht, sondern dass sie eigentlich erst dort anhebt, wo sie aufsprengt, was dem herkömmlichen Denken für opak, undurchdringlich, blosse Individuation dünkt." Theodor W. Adorno, "Erfahrungsgehalte der Hegeischen Philosophie", Archiv für Philosophie, IX (1959), 84. 15 See Sy, i, 404/5.

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ical uncertainty that life, experience and the 'becoming' of truth and of concepts is. His participation in the growth of the ideas is his own growth, experience, Bildung.16 And it is the Beckettian Cartesian who attempts to sustain himself as the subject of the 'logic of ratiocination': 'clearly defined', as "pure being", he "shuns, pursues", rejects and accepts predicates: "I am this boy of fifteen", but that does not alter the integrity of the one who says so. If it should threaten his integrity, he will reject it, as Malone rejects Sapo: Nothing is less like me than this patient, reasonable child, struggling all alone for years to shed a little light upon himself, avid of the least gleam, a stranger to the joys of darkness. (Ma, 17)

But he does not live. He clings to his unity in anguish, for he fears process and with it disparity, because a submission to life, to the past, is a submission to disparity, to the positive as well as the negative, to paradox: how can you be this and that at the same time? The tenor of The Unnamable is that a submission to life is a submission to death, for only through the death of his free, unified, abstract, proud 'being' can he attain life. . . . so it is, so be it, don't fret, so it will be, how so, rattling on, dying of thirst, seeking determinately, what they want, they want me to be, this, that, to howl, stir, crawl out of here, be born, die . . . (Un, 138)

In spite of his protestations he knows that the death of a rejected life will not produce the essential I. Yet, from his standpoint, a submission to life would be the step from Zweifel to Verzweiflung (doubt to despair) that Hegel demands - to the Cartesians a step into madness. "Go mad, yes, but there it is, what would I go mad with." (Un, 135) This last step he does not take. The vanity of his god-like position and of his doubt is too precious to the Beckett hero. But his unity is one of "poverty of substance". He is the saint who goes into the desert, away from the temptation of the world that calls him to find himself in it. In the desert he finds "nothing". He is aware that "disparity is a necessary factor of life which eternally develops through opposition", but he refuses to accept that "the highest totality of life is only possible through a resurrection from

16

See Willy Moog, "Der Bildungsbegriff Hegels", Verhandlungen des dritten Hegel' kongresses (1934), 167-86.

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the highest disparity". 17 To give himself over to 'what he is not' would mean the death of his Cartesian ego. He does not live, and, he knows, therefore he cannot die; he wants to die but not live. The knowledge of the intimate co-existence of life and death often finds merely ironical mention, e.g., when Murphy mistakes a mortuary for a nursery (MM, 165), or when Malone wishfully contends: "I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression" {Ma, 114); but the 'sedative' of wit and irony does not 'calm' the Beckettian and his world for long. From Murphy to the Unnamable, their dreams do not wrench life away from the time-twisted confusions of reality, for "the life of the mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being". (Ph, 93)

IDENTITY A N D N O N - B E I N G

The Hegelian dialectic is not a method that can be defined as thesisantithesis-synthesis,18 it, according to Nicolai Hartmann, not only defies definition, but no two of its actual forms are identical.19 But all its forms reflect the following basic logical process: A is not B: A's relation to B is one of negation, opposition, difference since A is non-B, and B non-A. But at the same time, A is constitutively dependent on B, and B is defined through its relation to A. A has become the 'meaning' of B, and vice versa. They have become 'identical'. But they are identical only insofar as they are different, "since difference is the condition of their relation which mediates the identity".20 Neither A, then, nor B is the 'whole truth', which rather lies in their relation. The relation of A to B is diference (or opposition) and at the same time identity. The truth, then, is the "identity of identity and nonidentity". 21 17

Hegel, Aufsätze aus dem kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Schriften aus der Jenenser Zeit, volume I of Sämtliche Werke, 46. 18 See Gustav E. Mueller, "The Hegel Legend of 'Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis' ", Journal of the History of Ideas, XIX (1958), 411. 19 Hartmann, Hegel, 375; also Mario Rossi, "Drei Momente der Hegeischen Dialektik: Ihre Entstehung, ihre Formulierung, ihre Auflösung", Hegel-Jahrbuch, II (1961), 19. 20 See Emerich Coreth, Das dialektische Sein in Hegels Logik (Wien, 1952), 28-9. 21 In the "Systemfragment von 1800", Hegel says that life is a "connection of connection and non-connection", "a being outside reflection". The unity of unity and dis-unity of love he still calls a "miracle" in c. 1797. Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, ed. Hermann Nohl (Tübingen, 1907), 348, 377.

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To clarify this puzzling contention, let us look once more at the dialectic of being and nothing. The Beckettian protagonist tries to carry his reductio beyond the Cartesian thinking but does not succeed in reaching either pure being or nothing; his reductio proves to be one ad absurdum. He may pride himself on not being a "stranger to the joys of darkness" {Ma, 17); he may go, as in Murphy's "dark zone", through a sort of mystical fruitio dei, being a "mote in the dark of absolute freedom" (Mu, 112); but this unity of a 'darkness' without the "tiny changes due to the customary cycle of birth, life and death" (Mo, 69) may turn upon him and he may, in a moment of almost Hegelian recognition, lament the "want of need in which" he is "perishing". {Mo, 45) His is an attempt to attain pure, absolute, attributeless being, or nothing: he does not know which. He wanted nothing and is something; or perhaps he wanted pure being and finds nothing. "Pure being", "without any further particularization and fulfillment" (Lo, i, 73), as "Ich-Ich" (I-I), as "the absolute indifference or identity"''' {Sy, i, 203), is a legitimate 'definition' of the absolute; but "this pure being is pure abstraction and therefore the absolute negative which is in turn, taken directly, nothing.'''' (Sy, i, 207) It can therefore also be said: "Nothing is, as that which is identical with itself, also reversely the same as being." {Sy, i, 209)22 (This paradox, contradicting the ancient ex nihilo nihil fit,23 appears ridiculous, of course, as soon as we leave the level of indefinite being.)24 If being and nothing are said to be identical, it has also to be said that they are not, for if they were nothing but identity, our former idea of them as opposites would merely have been revealed as an illusion. But this is not the case. For if the one unmediated (unmittelbar) concept depends on the other to attain meaning or "logical existence", the other has to be different. The paradox is worse than before. We have identity and nonidentity "at the same time". If the full, speculative concept (Begriff) of Hegel's is one that arises out of the mediation and Aufhebung of the two unmediated opposites, then Hegel has to give us this identity of identity and non-identity: "The truth of being, as of nothing, is therefore the unity of both; this unity is becoming." (Sy, i, 209)25 Here the two "moments" are aufgehoben ("one "

See Lo, Seeio, 24 See Lo, 26 See Lo, Philosophie, 23

i, 88-9. i, 90; Sy, i, 213. i, 92-3; Sy, i, 207-11. i, 88-9; W. Sesemann, "Zum Problem der Dialektik", Blätter für deutsche IX (1935/6), 33/4.

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of the most important concepts of philosophy"): 26 contained, mediated, preserved, elevated, transfigured into a higher form, but not annihilated. ("What is aufgehoben, does not thereby become nothing.") 27 From pure being and nothing we have proceeded to a higher form and a unity. "Being, as one with nothing, just as nothing is one with being, are in becoming as disappearing elements; becoming attains its unity through the contradiction which it resolves." (Sy, i, 215)28 This example of Hegelian logic is, of course, more than incidental. For the philosopher of development, of a fluid logic,29 this is the basic paradigm. And it is for our purpose: "But becoming by itself is still an abstract notion which has to gain depth and fulfill itself. One such fulfillment is life . . . In a higher form we have becoming in the spirit [or 'mind']." i, 215) As we will see, the Beckett characters become increasingly aware of the necessity of becoming and try to do the trick, since all becoming is also a dis-becoming, by a continuous dis-becoming of world and stories and voices.

THE FREEDOM OF INDIFFERENCE

To the Beckett heroes who ostentatiously refuse any form of becoming, the paradox of being and not being looms large and informs every twist and the very diction of their verbal and verbose existence. As Beckett's total work is concerned with the above all-encompassing paradox so most statements tend toward or constitute echoes small and large of it, through which the fundamental one shines more and more clearly. Great is the number of their paradoxical statements celebrating and hopefully anticipating the freedom of indifference, which is the emotional stepbrother of the old 'freedom of ratiocination', joyfully celebrating an exorcising of the will.30 This indifference, which they never fully achieve, 26

27 28 29

Lo, i, 120; see S>, i, 229. Lo, i, 120.

SeeLo, i, 118.

"The concept [Begriff] does not, as ratiocination maintains, rest stagnantly by itself, rather, as infinite form, it is constantly active and, so to speak, the punctum saliens of all life and therefore differentiates itself from itself." (Sy, i, 366) 30 The echoes of Schopenhauer in Beckett have been indicated frequently. Beckett gives sufficient hints in his Proust. Schopenhauer's rhapsodic evocations of the ceasing of world and the will-centered self suggest rather temptingly a Schopenhauer-oriented reading of Beckett's novels. Just as Watt remembers fragments of Holderlin's poem about the perpetual falling of man in the waterfalls of time, so Schopenhauer considers man's existence in time "a constant falling of the present into a dead past, a prolonged

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constitutes an attempted transcendence of the stubborn paradox of trying to be without being. It is a characteristic departure from Descartes' thinking, for the seventeenth-century rationalist believer still maintained that this indifference was "the lowest grade of liberty". (M, 115) Thus Molloy dismisses the question "What shall I do ? What shall I do?" as that "rumour rising at birth and even earlier". (11) While Malone promises himself to be "neutral and inert", and to guard against his little "fits of impatience" and wishes for "a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing" (107) and speaks of the "blessedness of absence" (48), the Unnamable assures us again and again: "I'll speak of me when I speak no more." (147) But in Watt the question is already asked: "Who may . . . [weigh absence in a scale] mete want with a span." (247) They are measuring and thus are not pure, blessed absence. What they like most is to be on the border-line of being and nothing - seeing, feeling, hearing things crumble and disappear. Here absence becomes, here they can still "measure". And it is the old paradox again: to have absence, you need presence; you have them both in the "tranquillity of decomposition". (Mo, 32) : 31 "To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me . . . " (Mo, 33) Why, the Unnamable more and more anguishedly asks, is there no end? The end of 'his' book, "I can't go on, I'll go on" (179), gives the answer: there cannot be an end to the paradox unless he dies and lives. Malone had already said: "I knew I would arrive, I knew there would be an end to the long blind road. What half-truths, my God." (4) The loving care with which they often finger the vanishing world, caress and re-envoke it, runs like a muted, joyful basso continuo through the grumbling strains of the novels, often reaching the intense eloquence of poetry. Murphy's dark world is "nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into fragments of a new becoming". (112) Molloy is partic-

d y i n g . . . a retarded death that endures...", and "the stirrings of our minds a form o boredom constantly postponed". Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Sämtliche Werke (Darmstadt, 1968), vol. 1, 427. Undoubtedly Beckett's philosophers (not Beckett himself) would share Schopenhauer's opinion of Hegel, that he is far from an understanding of world and man since he views Being as Becoming: "Werden oder Gewordensein oder Werdenwerden..." (vol. I, 378). 31 "But it's to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, loved anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images." "The Calmative", Stories and Texts for Nothing, 29-30.

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ularly taken by it. He loves the "dear sound of that which goes and is gone" (34) and listens intently to the voice which is "of a world collapsing endlessly". (53) He loves old men "tenderly, as those on the brink of a better earth". (113) The most intense description of this joy of disbecoming is in Malone. He speaks of the "hearing of my boyhood", which was so acute that "still nights too, still as the grave as the saying is, were nights of storm for me, clamorous with countless pantings". The sounds he heard "were things that scarcely were, on the confines of silence and dark, and soon ceased. So I reason now, at my ease. Standing before my high window I gave myself to them, waiting for them to end, for my joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy." (31) Indifference and a love of ceasing, vanishing, "dis-becoming": this form of the paradox haunts the world of the Beckettians, whatever angle they adopt, whatever level they move to.

THE PARADOX OF LANGUAGE AND SILENCE

The paradox lives also in the paradise-hell that language is to the Beckett protagonists. Language to them constitutes the means of expressing and sustaining their subjectivity as well as the threat, as Hegel says approvingly of language, of an "intrusion" of the objective into their "total" subjectivity.32 While they all discover that "all language" is "an excess of language" (Mo, 159), they need it to celebrate silence, the "true silence", need it to make silence "audible", for the silence to become - "words, open on the silence". (Un, 173) And on this brink of silence they stop, cling to it with the desperation of the cognition that their very existence may be one of words: "I'm in words, made of words, others' words." (Un, 139) While the Unnamable realizes that it "all boils down to a question of words. ...words pronouncing me alive" (66), he still hopes to fool "them" by acting like Descartes' (D, 45) parrot: "A parrot, that's what they are up against, a parrot." (67) He still clings to the paradoxical hope that there may be an end without death. "The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse [j/c] to continue." (15) He still hopes that "the statement" will "begin that will dispose of me" (19), yet he is "afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again". (20) Occasionally his hope will turn M

Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Stuttgart, 1936), 262.

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into a lament that seems to admit defeat: "If only I were not obliged to manifest." (10) "Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere." (116/7) But hope always returns in images that refract the paradox in yet another way: your words too, far apart, no, that's an exaggeration, apart, between them would be the place to be, where you suffer, rejoice, at being bereft of speech, bereft of thought, and feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that would be a blessed place to be. (122)

But the place between words will only make sense as long as the words are there: "It's a lucky thing they are there . . . to bear the responsibility for this state of affairs." (122) In language, as in everything else, he depends on the rejection and acceptance of 'what he is not'. This paradox this Cartesian, of course, knows and he turns accusingly to "them": "I too have the right to be shown impossible." (123)

END AND BEGINNING

To taste of the 'joy of ended joy', the Beckett heroes have to endure the world, life, at least in its forms of 'decomposing' memory. And the doubt arises, time and again, that therein lies a temptation, perhaps of their own making, to turn the end into a (new) beginning; and it is the intensity of their denial that often sounds false. Although Watt was not "alarmed" by them, "unduly" (29), the inner voices from which they all suffer to them are "a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence". {Mo, 119) Malone complains about "all this ballsaching poppycock about life and death" and says that "nothing was ever about anything else to the best of my recollection". But he reassures himself: "It's vague, life and death" (51), as he reassures himself about what his last outpourings of "misery, impotence and hate" are with a bon mot whose polished irony hides a Hegelian truth: "The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness." (21) Sometimes, though never lastingly, the ramblings of the Beckett heroes crystallize into a statement of dejection. Of the 'dead' Malone the Unnamable says that he is "one who is not as I can never not be". (16) Why can he not be like Malone is not, why does he continue to play with the 'vagueness' of life and death? "Can it be I am the prey of a genuine preoccupation, of a need to know as one might say ?" This would bring

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about "change" and "here all change would be fatal and land me back, there and then, in all the fun of the fair". (8) Change would be fatal to his post-Cartesian ego, but can he avoid it in the end?: "all change to be feared, incomprehensible uneasiness". (9) Moran already looked forward to a "long anguish of vagrancy and freedom" {Mo, 181), and the anguish turns out to be that of finally seeing a world crumbling away and laying bare the pure being of the hero, and of this pure being, notoriously unstable, crumbling into life again. For the Unnamable this is a "temptation" which comes from "them", but "they" are his "inventions". Thus, passages like the following are anguished self-analysis: . . . I alone am immortal, what can y o u expect, I can't get born, perhaps that's their big idea, to keep o n saying the same oíd thing, generation after generation, till I g o mad and begin to scream, then they'll say . . . he's saved, we've saved him, they're all the same, they all let themselves be saved, they all let themselves be born . . . (134/5)

"Their big idea"! If the same old thing, the assertion of his unchangeable nothingness or pure being, has been chanted long enough, its hidden, feared, felt and often stated contradiction might come to bloom, might shatter his existence into a new beginning. Then the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothing would be fully borne out: the identity and nonidentity of being and nothing, that the Beckett characters awake to again and again,33 between their stories, between their curses or between one breath and another - to Hegel this is also the dialectic of beginning. There is still nothing, and something is to become. T h e beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to originate. Therefore being is also an element o f the beginning. Consequently, the beginning contains both being and nothing, is the unity of being a n d nothing - or is nothing which is also being, and being which is also nothing . . . T h e analysis of beginning therefore yields the unity of being and nothing . . . This idea could b e considered the first, the purest, i.e., m o s t abstract definition of the absolute. (Lo, i, 78)

33 The ambiguity of being and nothing in Beckett is reflected in the labels of critics. Christine Brooke-Rose says, "If Sartre is the philosopher of l'Etre, Beckett is the poet of le Néant." "Samuel Beckett and the Anti-Novel", London Magazine, V (1958), 43. Georges Bataille finds "ce que Molloy expose n'est pas seulement réalité, c'est la réalité à l'état pure". "Le Silence de Molloy", Critique, VII (1951), 387.

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The purest, most abstract form of the absolute, this is what the postCartesians set out to achieve in their battle against time, becoming, birth and death. At the brink of success they look into an abyss of becoming. They have concluded a circle. And, of course, as usual, the Beckettian is not far from the Hegelian truth. Speaking of the eventual freeing of the great beginner of humanity, Prometheus, the Unnamable, anti-Prometheus and great ender of humanity and unsavable one, says: "for between me and that miscreant who . . . obliged humanity, I trust there is nothing in common. But the thing is worth mentioning." (20) Molloy, with the cynicism of a rationalist come to grief, speaks of "a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began", and he adds: "is it clear enough?" (53)

V DYING AND KILLING

Yet he who demands that nothing exists which bears the contradiction in itself (as identity of opposition), demands at the same time that nothing living exists. (A, i, 125)

We have seen a re-enactment of the optimistic Cartesian rationalism fade into the transparent abstraction of a freedom without substance. The search for a meaning of this freedom becomes entangled in the 'ancient' paradoxes ('errors') which resist the charm of words. The more the Beckettians explore the terrain of their memories, in search of an escape, in search of a center of meditative and playful indifference, the more they find their life returning to them, in limping stories, a battleground of paradoxes, of dialectic fluidity. To the anxious diagnosticians of themselves, the pains of making an end to things and themselves therefore often appear as the symptoms, the labor-pains of a new beginning. The dialectic tension, whether they will be 'born into death' or 'die into life' informs all turns, gestures and lyric vibrations of the novels. The peculiar parallel of Beckett's fiction to Hegel can be followed, to some extent and, of course, mutatis mutandis, through certain stretches of the Phenomenology,1 particularly the chapter on the "unhappy consciousness".

THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS

A process toward an inner freedom through doubt which finds, in its very completion, disunity in the unity hoped for,findsthe unrest of paradox in itself and cannot escape, as we have it in Beckett's novels, is described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind in the chapter on "Freedom of Self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness". 1

For a skelletal summary of the Phenomenology see Paul Hossfeld, "Zur Auslegung der Phänomenologie des Geistes", Philosophisches Jahrbuch, LXV (1957), 232-44.

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As the Phenomenology shuttles to and fro between the forms of consciousness of the individual and those reflected in history,2 so the individual may repeat this historical 'upward' movement and remain at any particular point. (See Ph, 89/90) Although its artistic form is unique, Beckett's world is not. Nor is it the outgrowth of an idiosyncratic mind or a sick obsession with paradoxes which exist only in the darkness of the solipsist. It is a philosophical attitude that has its validity not only because of its frequent recurrence but also, according to Hegel, because it is for the individual a necessary re-enactment of a historical phenomenon he has to overcome. The Beckettians' short formula of this mutual permutation of individual and general history seems to be "the ancient night, the recent night". (Ma, 2) In establishing this parallel, we do not apply the stages of the Phenomenology in the chronological-historical order which they reflect. Rather we intend to deepen the historical scene to include its pre-Cartesian, perhaps more timeless, forms of the paradox. In Beckett, as we will see, ideology does not "develop" from "consciousness" to the Cartesian phase and beyond as it does in the Phenomenology; rather, it deepens and widens and gathers 'earlier' forms of the paradox into its mounting intensity. While the Cartesian dilemma is the Beckettian's point of departure, it is not that of the Phenomenology. Furthermore, our interest is predominantly in the individual as he appears in Hegel's work and in Beckett's novels.3 (Our rather radical reading of the Phenomenology in 2

The precise nature of the relationship between "individual forms" and historical forms in the Phenomenology is difficult to ascertain. Ernst Bloch sees "a mere series of human fates on the levels of 'consciousness, self-consciousness, reason' ", "actual history" on the level of "spirit" and "comprehended" (begriffene) history on the level of "absolute knowledge". "Das Faustmotiv der Phänomenologie des Geistes", HegelStudien, I (1961), 163. - Jacob Loewenberg is far more cautious: "With local and dated phenomena the author... is not concerned; his themes are generic ideas freely extracted from specific contexts in which they may or may not appear completely embedded or embodied." Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of Mind (La Salle, 111., 1965), 202. 3 The developmental phases of the Phenomenology appear as Gestalten, while in the corresponding sections of the Logic they appear as Begriffe. Each of the forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology is a "complete individual Gestalt, and is fully and finally contemplated only so far as its determinate character is taken and dealt with as a rounded and concrete whole; or only so far as the whole is looked upon in the light of the special and peculiar character which this determination gives it". (Ph., 90) Each of these Gestalten has a tendency to remain inert and to resist disintegration, becoming a "moment" in the progress of thought and consciousness. See Herrmann Schmitz, "Der Gestaltbegriff in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes und seine geistesgeschichtliche Bedeutung", in Gestaltprobleme der Dichtung, ed. Richard Alewyn (Bonn, 1957), 316-7.

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terms of the philosophical individual may disturb some of those whose understanding of the work is based entirely on an historical emphasis; its justification must come through our very approach to the Beckett heroes.)4 We will therefore also forego the attempt to apply the largely religious background of the Phenomenology to the Beckett novels, since the surprisingly dense religious imagery in Beckett does not seem to be symptomatic of a "suppressed" or "negative" religious system of historical orthodox theology. Hegel's chapter on the "unhappy consciousness" treats the consciousness that has left desire and action behind and asserts its independence as an "independent self-consciousness." Independent self-consciousness partly finds its essential reality in the bare abstraction of Ego. O n the other hand, when this abstract e g o develops further and forms distinctions of its own, this differentiation does not become an objective inherently real content for that self-consciousness. Hence this selfconsciousness does not become an ego which truly differentiates itself in its abstract simplicity, or o n e which remains identical with itself in this absolute differentiation. (Ph, 242)

This is a "new mode of consciousness", "a type of consciousness which takes on the form of infinitude, or one whose essence consists in pure movement of consciousness. It is one which thinks or is free selfconsciousness." (242) Pure mental movement, executed with indifference, in a sphere uncontaminated by time with its hydra-heads of beginning and end - this is the dream of the Beckettians. Here, the notion is for me eo ipso and at once my notion. In thinking I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in touch with myself; and the object which for m e is m y essential reality, is in undivided unity m y selfexistence; and my procedure in dealing with notions is a process within myself. (Ph, 243)

As with Murphy and the others who felt that their minds were "bodytight" (MM, 109), the dualism of world and I has ceased to "interest";

4

The title Hegel originally planned for the Phenomenology was "Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins". The emphasis on "experience of consciousness" is particularly strong in the earlier parts, including the section culminating in the Gestalt of the unhappy consciousness. See Otto Pöggeler, "Zur Deutung der Phänomenologie des Geistes", Hegel-Studien, I (1961), 289.

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of interest is "solely that distinction which is a thought-constituted distinction, or which, when made, is not distinguished from me". (Ph, 244) Their achievement is "to be free . . . throughout all the dependence that attaches to its individual existence, and to maintain that stolid lifeless unconcern which persistently withdraws from the movement of existence, from effective activity as well as from passive endurance, into the simple essentiality of thought". (Ph, 244) To retain his lifelessness, to remain "neutral and inert", this is what with Malone they set as their supreme goal, "to endure a world unsullied by my presence". (Ma, 12) But this is an "abstract reality"; it is "merely the notion of freedom, not living freedom itself". (Ph, 245) With this attitude the individual has reached the stage, the Gestalt of the stoic. While Murphy was proud of his basic stoicism, he still continued to accept the world, to live and make love, to search in it. But his successors go beyond this stage, though never finally; to them, gradually, everything that they, now, here and in the freedom of themselves are not, becomes "unessentiality and unsubstantiall y " . (Ph, 246) The multitude of experiences, of forms of the self and the world, the "inventions", is cast away, annihilated; "Thought becomes thinking which wholly annihilates the being of the world with its manifold determinateness." (Ph, 246) This is echoed in the Unnamable's words: "A few puppets. Then I'll scatter them to the winds, if I can." (4) " . . .and the negativity of free self-consciousness becomes aware of attaining, in these manifold forms which life assumes, real negativity" (Ph, 246): "let us go on as if I were the only one in the world, whereas I'm the only one absent from it." (Un, 161) This new stage, skepticism, "is the realisation of that of which Stoicism is merely the notion, and is the actual experience of what freedom of thought is; it is in itself and essentially the negative, and must so exhibit itself." (Ph, 246) These two stages, stoicism and skepticism, are never quite separate in Beckett. It is one of the 'weaknesses' of the characters to attribute the paradoxes they suffer, in spite of their self-containment, to the 'big world'. "Dialectic as a negative process, taken immediately as it stands, appears to consciousness, in the first instance, as something at the mercy of which it is, and which does not exist through consciousness itself" (Ph, 247/8), or, in the Unnamable's words, into which it has been brought "under duress". (Un, 53) But they are also aware that the puzzling dialectic of their situation results from a

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moment of self-consciousness, which does not simply find its truth and its reality vanish, without self-consciousness knowing how, but rather which, in the certainty of its own freedom, itself makes this other, so claiming to be real, vanish. {Ph, 248)

This conflict produces the "absolute dialectic restlessness" (Ph, 248) which the Unnamable calls "a principle of disorder already present." (Un, 8) The result, if the conflict is not resolved, is "the giddy whirl of a perpetually self-creating disorder". (Ph, 249) (This statement beautifully characterizes much of Beckett's fiction.) From even a furtive reading of the Beckett novels, the impression arises of a sharp discrepancy between the supreme indifference, the proud selfreliance and freedom, the existential concern with an ultimate on the one hand, and on the other the endless series of irrelevant, casual, incoherent dealings with the petty, the unimportant and singular. To Hegel, this discrepancy is characteristic of the "unhappy consciousness". " . . . a consciousness which is empirical, which is directed upon what admittedly has no reality for it, which obeys what, in its regard, has no essential being, which realizes and does what it knows to have no truth". (Ph, 249) After pages of rambling, the Unnamable may stop, for a second that renders no relief, the inessential fictions that enslave him: "Idle talk, idle talk" (Un, 35) or "enough of this nonsense" (50), but he will stay their victim, for he is made of them. From this self-identity, or rather within its very self, it falls back once more into that contingency and confusion, for this very self-directed process of negation has to do solely with what is single and individual, and is occupied with what is fortuitious. . . . It finds its freedom, at one time, in the form of elevation above all the whirling complexity and all the contingency of mere existence, and again, at another time, likewise confesses to falling back upon what is unessential, and to being taken up with that. (Ph, 249)

This description aptly applies to the world of the Beckett novels. The pursuit of the irrelevant, as for instance Molloy's and Malone's need to count their belongings, dismissing them proudly from their empire and going after them again, shows the paradoxical truth that their sublime negativity "has to do solely with what is single and individual". Theirs, then, in terms of one chapter of the Phenomenology, is a contradictory self-consciousness: This new attitude consequently is one which is aware of being the double consciousness of itself as self-liberating, unalterable, self-identical, and as

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utterly self-confounding, self-perverting; and this new attitude is the consciousness of this contradiction within itself. In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the bare and simple freedom of itself. In Skepticism, it realizes itself, annihilates the other side of determinate existence, but, in so doing, really doubles itself, and is itself now a duality. . . . Thus we have here that dualizing of self-consciousness within itself, which lies essentially in the notion of mind [spirit]; but the unity of the two elements is not yet present. Hence the Unhappy Consciousness, the Alienated Soul which is the consciousness of self as the doubled and merely contradictory being. (250/1)

Such a 'duplication of self-consciousness' provides the tension of the Beckett novels, reinforced with almost every statement. Here we have the self-consciousness as the 'fictions', the memories, the unborn existences perhaps to come, and there the unified consciousness of a self macrocosmically and transcendingly large, of an "enormous history", or microcosmically small, defying all shape and the grasp of time. This unhappy consciousness, whenever "it thinks it has attained to the victory and rest of unity" in one of its elements, "must be straightway driven out" of it. (Ph, 251) All attainment is illusory: "it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not." (Un, 65/6) Thus, in the end, the characters' 'divine' creative loneliness (in which everything is the invention of idle, empty hours), their self-elevation above that which is individual and changes, slowly emerges as what it really is: . . . this elevation is itself this same consciousness. It is, therefore, immediately consciousness of the opposite, viz. of itself as single, individual, particular. The unchangeable, which comes to consciousness, is in that very fact at the same time affected by particularity, and is only present with this latter. Instead of particularity having been abolished in the consciousness of immutability, it only continues to appear there still. (Ph, 252/3)

Therefore the Unnamable's silences are nothing but the "wrong silences": "It will be the same silence, the same as ever . . . as of one buried before his time. Long or short, the same silence. Then I resurrect and begin again." (Un, 149)

THE ILLUSION OF DEATH

In the Phenomenology, the chapter on the unhappy consciousness occupies

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the developmental stage prior to Vernunft, which corresponds to the Beckett characters' position in the being and nothing paradox and which forces them to the brink from where, according to Hegel, the leap into "speculative thinking" and "becoming" is necessary. To further clarify the relevance of this 'logical' situation to the world of the Beckettians, let us focus our attention on one of the many paradoxes through which the fundamental one acts, that of death and life. As we have said before, the Beckettian will not 'die into life', he will not suffer the destruction of his 'immutable' I into life, memory, any form of change and disparity. He refuses death because it is nothing but the end of a life he disavows; with it he would "sign his life-warrant". (Un. 98/9) With life he must refuse death, "dry, natural death", turn from "this empty story and quintessence of everything external".5 "Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything except breathing." (Ma, 76) "The last step! I who could never manage the first." (Un, 63) Yet he wants and intensely strives for an end to the life in which he still seems to have a part. "It's for the whole there seems to be no spell. Perhaps there is no whole, before you're dead." (Mo, 35) He wants death. The form this paradoxical wanting and not wanting takes is that of dying, desperately prolonged, avoiding the end; for dying is the 'dis-becoming' in which life and death have a part. The Beckettians are rarely saying: "I am nothing", because that does not have an understandable meaning and therefore is 'unstable'. They prefer to describe what they are, as the mystic might describe God, via negationis: "First I'll say what I'm not." (Un, 53) This is the rhythm from Murphy on: "here is something. What is it? I don't know, I don't care, for it is not I." But are not all the "I am not this" judgments subsumed in the "negative-infinite judgment", "the total disparity of subject and predicate" ? (Sy, i, 374) "In the same way, then, death too is a negative-infinite judgment" (Sy, i, 375); but this "logical" consequence they cannot accept. They prefer a prolonged process of dying, for "Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all." (PA, 93) To want death and not to have the strength to die: although the Beckett people know this their weakness, they will not go long without tasting the bliss of an ending of their own making. And if we survey the many examples of killing in the Beckett novels as suicides by transference, the paradox we are here concerned with may appear in a clearer light. Through 8

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, volumes XV-XVI of Sämtliche Werke, ii, 180.

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the novels there runs a strain, sometimes muted, sometimes explicit, sometimes in short remarks, that here a kind of scape-goat ritual is enacted, the killing or dying of a sacrificial substitute for the self. But the bliss is temporary for them who 'kill' endless time: "I resurrect." 6 Murphy In this early novel, in which the paradox is often merely verbal and witty, the only death that occurs besides Murphy's own accident, the butler's suicide, passes unnoticed by Murphy himself. But it is later claimed by Malone with great relish, along with four others. (63) It is Murphy's mistress, who slowly learns to appreciate his 'Cartesian' rocking chair, who seems to have anticipated the suicide of the butler and finally insists on moving into the dead man's room. Murphy's burial, his conversion to ashes and the end of his remains scattered on a barroom floor, are to be taken as the irrelevant end of an absence (creating a similarly irrelevant presence), the complete death in terms of this novel ; but Murphy too will resurrect and join the throng around the Unnamable. Watt While in Murphy death is irrelevant, to Sam and Watt killing becomes a ritual of religious intensity. They, who are utterly apathetic and beyond action, pursue and kill birds, and " . . .larks' nests, laden with eggs still warm from the mother's breast, we ground into fragments, under our feet, with peculiar satisfaction . . . " (155) But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such titbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morcels of gristle, and we brought them also bird's eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouserlegs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative. It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God. (155/6; my italics)7 6

"Mais, des Molloy, on peut observer qu'en effet la cruauté métaphysique est une fable inventée par l'homme dans l'état d'abandon ou il est, une projection de luimême. .. " Mayoux, "Samuel Beckett et L'Univers parodique", 272. ' To Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller this scene in Watt is "the polar opposite of the beatific vision... and the apotheosis of violent destruction rather than

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The last phrase sums up what killing means to the Beckett protagonist: not only to share in the powers of a demon-god to arbitrarily destroy, but above all to share, for the short instant of making an end to something living, in the eternal end of all things that to them God should be. This negative reflection of God the creator they themselves are striving to become. To attach yourself to something means to give it of yourself; and if you kill it, you kill of yourself. This is a suicide by transference. Molloy

The pace set by Watt and Sam is followed by the subsequent Beckett novels. Molloy, the one who loved old men because they are close to death, "tenderly, as those on the brink of a better earth" (113), is the only one who actually makes an attempt on his own life. I took the vegetable knife f r o m m y pocket and set about opening m y wrist But pain s o o n got the better o f me. First I cried out, then I gave up, closed the knife and put it back in m y pocket. I wasn't particularly disappointed, in my heart of hearts I had not hoped for anything better. S o m u c h for that. (82) 8

This is no more than a formal experiment whose result was known beforehand. To kill yourself, to end your life, would mean that you are not beyond that life, but that you are 'it'. "So much for that" form of killing but not the other. Molloy gets his chance to do unto another what he could not do unto himself. In a forest he meets a stranger. "He was all over me, begging me to share his hut, believe it or not. A total stranger. Sick with solitude probably." (113) Here is an incarnation of that Molloy who does need communion - in moments of weakness, as when he stays with Lousse for "no reason at all", a stay significantly followed by the abortive attempt at suicide. And as Watt and Sam answer the kind of affection out of which their own longing for affection seems to speak with killing, so does Molloy.9 "So I smartly freed a crutch and dealt him a good dint on the skull. That calmed him . . . I got up and went on." (113) But he has not tasted enough the shattering of his own divine redemption". (110) This view comes closest to our interpretation of death and the image of God in Beckett's novels. - According to Germaine Br6e we have here a parody of Leibniz's God, one which is "rather suggestive of Schopenhauer's dangerous destructive will". "Beckett's Abstractors of Quintessence", French Review, XXXVI (1963), 574. 8 See the futile contemplations of suicide in Waiting for Godot. 9 Some critics debate whether Molloy's victim was actually killed or not. A final diagnosis is not given in the book and seems of little relevance.

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face in the mirror. He goes back to the victim and "Seeing he had not ceased to breathe I contented myself with giving him a few warm kicks in the ribs, with my heels." (113/4) He turns his cruelty into a prolonged formal ritual, swinging between his crutches "in an ever-widening arc" (114) on one side of the body. When he falls down, he picks himself up to perform it on the other side, because "I always had a mania for symmetry". This is the old Cartesian speaking, covering up for the new man. For "Where did I get this access of vigour? From my weakness perhaps." (114) What weakness? "I might have loved him, I think, if I had been seventy years younger." (112) He might have loved him, for he still represents life, his own old weakness. He sums up the paradox in his own, knowing, cynical fashion: "an incident of no interest in itself, like all that has a moral". (115) When his haunting reflection in the past, Moran, speaks of suicide, he does not even want to give it a name. If it is pleasant to "make away" with Gaber, the messenger, and Youdi, the master, could I have denied myself the pleasure of - you know. But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. (147)

But Moran too gets his chance "to end". While pursuing Molloy he suffers from suspicions and doubts as to what it is that pushes him on. And it is again in a forest that he meets a reflection of himself: a man in search of another man. His face "I regret to say vaguely resembled my own." (206)10 And this search he ends by killing the searcher; his own search is ended too, he is soon ordered to come home, "instanter". After the deed he asks himself: "How did I feel?" and finds: "Much as usual." The question "How was this to be explained?" remains unanswered. (211) How did he kill him ? He does not say. For, and this sounds like an indirect stab at Molloy's, Malone's and the Unnamable's 'bloody' fictions, "it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature". (207) His successors do. 10

The possibility that the man pursued by Moran's victim might have been Molloy re-enforces the suicidal nature of the killing. Since both Moran and Molloy are on their way to Molloy's native town, there is also reason to believe that both do their killing in the same forest. The fact that, the only time Moran's and Molloy's paths seem to cross, it happens in the shadow of killing, further emphasizes the theme of death in Molloy. An ingenious, 'anticipatory' variation of the pattern would result if we believed Malone's vague recollection that "I was stunned with a blow, on the head, in a forest perhaps..." (6)

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In the flash of a vision that monstrously extends the stage of killing, he asks: "What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?" (229) Malone Dies Malone does not write his 'memoirs', not on the surface at least, as Molloy and Moran did. He is waiting for his death. "I could die today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort." Why does he not make this effort? Because he has to maintain the fiction of his indifference. " . . . if I could wish, if I could make an effort". (1) Once this fiction is established, we are made to believe that the stories he is telling are not about himself, that the deaths he conjures up have nothing to do with him. Yet the fiction is of 'the living', and therefore unstable, because of the living he says "I watched them come and go, then I killed them, or took their place, or fled." (18) Suicide he will not commit: "If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window. But perhaps it is the knowledge of my impotence that emboldens me to that thought." (44) In this novel we find one of the most striking versions of the story of killing. Tugged away in the description of an incidental, if not ridiculous, figure, it gives a clear portrait of the Beckett narrator as knife-wielding priest of 'ending' whose contours and colors are usually blurred by the rippling waves of a hectic indifference: Big Lambert was, officially, less than a regular butcher, but in his heart he was more, for there he prepared himself for the killing season as for the climax of the year. He lost his calm and "for days afterwards he could speak of nothing but the pig he had just dispatched". (24) "But once March was out Big Lambert recovered his calm and became his silent self again" (25),11 till the season came around again. He resembles the Beckettian narrators whose silence is broken by words ending people, animals, things and words. What makes this story remarkable are the overtones which give it, ironically or not, a religious dimension. His great days then fell in December and January, and from February onwards he waited impatiently for the return of that season, the principal event of which is unquestionably the Saviour's birth, in a stable.

11

Madden, who was a "butcher's boy" and set fire to the farm of his foster-parents, says of himself: "The only branches of husbandry in which I can boast myself to have, I do not say excelled, but at least succeeded, were the slaughter of little lambs, kids and calves and the emasculation of little bulls, rams and bucks, provided always they were tender and innocent." Beckett, [two excerpts from] "Merrier and Camier: I. Madden", Spectrum, IV (1960), 4.

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Then he would be on his way to "where all was in readiness for his coming". (24) Christ, the saviour, took death upon himself, for others, and reached eternity.12 Lambert is but a saviour in time who causes death and through whom, the invention, Malone can reach but a faint, disturbed and temperary taste of relief. The expectation of a birth has turned into the expectation of a death. Malone denies any resemblance to his creature Sapo; but not only does he look like Malone might have looked in his 'forgotten' past, he also seems to share Malone's vision of death. Watching the burial of Lambert's mule, which took so long to die, "A great calm stole over him. Great calm is an exaggeration. He felt better. The end of a life is always vivifying." (37) It is always "vivifying" to Malone, but great calm is an exaggeration, for it does not last long, and the sacrificial act has to be performed again. Since Malone gradually realizes that Sapo is developing into a reflection of himself, that he is creating "my little one" for "want of a homuncule," he makes this promise : " . . . . a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say. And seeing what a poor thing I have made, or how like myself, I shall eat it." (52) The French version adds: "comme j'ai mangé les autres". A little later he changes the character's name from Sapo to Macmann (son of man), a killing of sorts. But since the killing cannot be confined to people, although they do best, it is extended to things and to words. Malone had always been attached to small things, a stone, a piece of wood "which sometimes gave me the impression that they too needed me". (75) Of his pebbles he says that they "stand for men and their seasons". (63) They too will have to suffer being killed. He laid them "where they would be at peace forever", a peace he cannot himself reach. "Or I buried them, or threw them into the sea . . . But many a wooden friend too I have sent to the bottom, weighted with a stone. Until I realized it was wrong of me", for eventually, the string rotted, they would come up again, and the symbolic act would be painfully accurate. Malone concludes this passage half aware of its meaning. "That's the style, as if I still had time to kill. And so I have, deep down I know it well." (76) Only the Unnamable will fully know that their time of killing, or their "time to kill", is endless. It is puzzling that Malone's attention shifts, for no apparent reason, to a new 'hero', Lemuel. Is he a better priest of the ritual? He apparently 12 This is a 'success' which the time-weary Malone cannot quite forgive him. Of a glorious Easter week-end he claims that it is "spent by Jesus in hell". ( I l l )

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is. He has devised a way to perform suicide, over again, en miniature. He, too, of course, is not capable of the great leap although "on countless occasions he could have thrown himself in perfect safety out of the window if he had been less weak-minded". ( I l l ) Instead he strikes himself with a hammer on various parts of the body. "But the part he struck most readily . . . was the head . . . the seat of all the shit and misery." (97) Lemuel introduces himself to Macmann, to whom he develops a curious attachment, with the command: "Here is your porridge. Eat while it is boiling." (96) It is Lemuel who, "Flayed alive by memory" (97), turns the end of the book into a massive orgy of killing, not without having set the tone for it by dealing "himself a few smart blows on the skull, with the heel, for safety". (117) When Malone envisions his death and the time he has till the end, he looks forward to "Visit, various remarks, Macmann continued, agony recalled, Macmann continued, then mixture of Macmann and agony as long as possible." He concludes with the supreme wish that "all may be wiped out at the same instant is all I ask". (99) In the end, in his last gasping phrases, he makes anxiously sure that Lemuel will not survive: never there he will never never anything there anymore (120)

Of the "aerial surf that is my silence", Malone says that it may be "the sudden storm . . . drowning the cries of the children, the dying, the lovers, so that in my innocence I say they cease, whereas in reality they never cease". (47) Therefore, as if pointing to the Unnamable, he sadly says: "This club is mine . . . It is stained with blood, but insufficiently, insufficiently." (77) The Unnamable Malone is 'dead', long live the Unnamable. And because he lives on, all live on with him: "I believe we are all here." (6) They are resurrected to be "scattered to the winds". But perhaps the suicidal fictions will turn upon himself and in the end he will "smother in a throng"? "No, no danger. Of that." (5) He will live on to kill. His creature Mahood, whom it took years to reach his family, comes home too late. They have already died of poisoning. But before he departs again, "I . . . completed my

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rounds, stamping under foot the unrecognizable remains of my family, here a face, there a stomach." (49/50) What the narrator has already killed, his creature stamps totally out of recognition: family, the context of a past, the demand of a past to return. The novels' 'central anecdote' could not be more clearly told. In The Urmamable the language of killing is pervasive. Words are mouthed so that they may obliterate each other, "by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later". (3) The Unnamable is also more aware than all his predecessors of what this obsession to kill means. His long broken tale, his frantic puzzled search, at bottom is he voice that begins to fumble again, without knowing what it's looking for . . . for a sign of life, for some one to betray himself . . . the little cry that frogs give when the scythe slices them in half, or when they are spiked, in their pools, with a spear, one could multiply the examples . . . (119)

"One" does multiply the examples: to have death you must have life; and to gain life the Unnamable would have to die, accept a name. To enact this through substitutes does not suffice: "I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of a fifty-first, to close the circuit." (71) " . . . we'll always be short of me." (72) "I've drowned, more than once, it wasn't I, suffocated, set fire to me, thumped on my head with wood and iron, it wasn't I . . . " (170) It is not true then what he "always" tells himself: "You've been sufficiently assassinated, sufficiently suicided, to be able now to stand on your own feet, like a big boy." (63) No, "they" are still after him; but they will perhaps give up their efforts one day, "for such a paltry kill". (71) The Unnamable cannot give in to such hopes for long; he knows that they still "want to catch me alive, so as to be able to kill me". He sadly realizes the uselessness of dreaming of "people" who are "lucky" with a minimal life, are nothing but "a sperm dying, of cold, in the sheets . . . born of a wet dream and dead before morning". (129) However close he comes to telling himself the mortifying truth, he will cast it aside, attribute the "lie" to "them", who are his inventions, who howl: "be born, die". (138) The killing goes on. He claims to have discovered the reason for Molloy's seemingly inexplicable quest for his mother "I am looking for my mother to kill her." (146) His occasional lapses into acting like a living one he can take back, claiming they were to "fool" them. "They" seem to be taken in.

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It's usually with sticks they put me out of their agony, the idea being to demonstrate, to the backers, and bystanders, that I had a beginning, and an end .... Knowing perfectly well they have to begin me all over again. (64)

He, that is, has to begin all over again, despite his growing knowledge that it is life only that can 'save' him from a freedom that feeds on 'insubstantiality'. With resignation he records: "I shall no doubt be launched again . . . against the fortress of mortality." (81) The Unnamable more than any other Beckett protagonist explores the possibilities of ending the things that form the world of which he is, and is not, a part, a world which calls him to an existence in time, through death, life and death. Only half-heartedly does he claim that all those stories that make up his world of 'fable' are not his: " . . . depart into life . . . find the axe, perhaps it's a cord, for the neck, for the t h r o a t . . . it was never I, I've never stirred." But since there is nobody but the Unnamable and his inventions, they must be his: "all these stories . . . all are mine." (176) The "bliss of coma" (51) does not end. An existence stripped down to a voice, a "dying voice accusing, accusing me" (175), it is stripped of all "bliss", for the voice goes on, is never killed, because only the death of the speaker will silence the voice. But "I shall never be silent. Never." (4) The killings in Beckett's novels are without lasting consequence, weightless, therefore "the moon where Cain toils bowed beneath his burden never sheds its light on my face". {Ma, 47)13

THE GRAVE OF LIFE

The gestures of killing in the Beckett novels do not offer a ready possibility of 'structuralization'. They occur and re-occur without regularity or apparent reason; and only a book-by-book survey as the above may show the frequency, similarity and diversity of these occurrences. They take place on all levels of the fictional world of the Beckettians, on that of divinity, of people, of animals and milieu (notice the frequent occurrence of slaughter houses),14 of time and memories, of symbols and words 13

The voice in Eh Joe speaks of his "Throttling the dead in his head", of "Mental thuggee", and asks: "What it'd be if you ran out of us... Not another soul to still." "That old paradise you were always harping o n . . . No Joe... Not for the likes of us." Eh Joe and Other Writings (London, 1967), 17. 14 The protagonist of "The Calmative" kisses the stranger on the forehead. "I turned away and looked across the street. It was then I noticed we were sitting opposite a horse-butcher's." Stories and Texts for Nothing, 43.

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and finally, explicitly, of art. The protagonist of How It Is, at the end of the book, reveals his report as a fiction and wipes it, along with God, out of existence with a curse. Many critics of Beckett have not noticed the importance of killing in his novels, or have listed this phenomenon with the vulgarity of the Beckett clowns, as a "cruelty . . . beyond and above the pressures of necessity."15 André Marissel suspects that "le ressentiment et la haine" of the Beckett character is "une des faces de son tourment", 16 without pursuing the point any further. However, he offers a phrase that aptly sums up the cruelty of the Beckettians: "L'écrivain universalise son masochisme."17 But this leaves open the question of what this "masochism" means. Geraldine Cmarada does not explain her statement that Malone is brutal "because his fundamental alienation from others demanded such violent abandonment". 18 Anthony Hartley says of Lemuel that he can "kill people because he is the one responsible for them - like a god or a novelist", 19 without raising the question why he would kill. Some critics, however, have noticed the important role death plays in Beckett's novels. Huguette Delye finds that "La mort lui semble une apothéose" and "une étrange source de volupté"; 20 but she does not explain satisfactorily why. Richard Coe sees the problem most clearly: "Thus death becomes the main subject of the Trilogy, but not in any ordinary sense."21 F o r either death just simply annihilates - in which case it abolishes the problems of life without solving them; or else life continues indefinitely beyond death, in which case the problems remain unsolved. 2 2

The deadly world of the Beckett novels is best summed up in Jean Selz's phrase : "L'herbe ne pousse plus depuis longtemps sur la terre où vivent les héros de Samuel Beckett."23 The preceding pages seem to take us a little further toward explaining what cruelty and death mean in the Beckett novels. We have seen that a comparison of the "unhappy consciousness" section of the Phenomenol15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Jacobsen and Mueller, 10. Marissel, 242. Marissel, 254. Cmarada, 206. Hartley, 459. Samuel Beckett, ou La Philosophie de /'absurde (Aix-en-Provence, 1960), 66. Richard Coe, Samuel Beckett (New York, 1964), 59. Coe, 60. "L'Homme finissant de Samuel Beckett", Les Lettres Nouvelles, V (1957), 120.

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ogy and the Beckett novels illuminated the situation of the Beckett people. The 'movement' of their paradoxical dilemma of an empty freedom, a 'duplication' of the consciousness and a dependence on that which has been declared inessential, Hegel sees as a 'three-fold' movement : In one form consciousness comes before itself as opposed to the unchangeable essence, and is thrown back to the beginning of that struggle, which is, from first to last, the principle constituting the entire situation. At another time it finds the unchangeable appearing in the form of particularity; so that the latter is an embodiment of unchangeableness, into which, in consequence, the entire form of existence passes. In the third case, it discovers itself Xo be this particular fact in the unchangeable. (Ph, 253)

Whatever certainty of the self can be maintained, is at best a "broken certainty of the self" (259), that of "them" and the "I" in The Unnamable. The Beckettian bum, chewing his life, his fictions, objects and words, is "merely a personality confined within its narrow self and its petty activity, a personality brooding over itself [literally, hatching itself], as unfortunate as it is pitiably destitute". (264) Death, for these impoverished knights of absolute freedom, becomes the great lure, a source of volupté. But it reveals itself as just another form of the eternally returning paradox. If it is the empty end, the "wrong silence", then the Beckettians will have none of it. But if it is the only end of their bare existence which promises meaning, then they might try it, revengefully, not on themselves but on all available substitutes. They cannot continue without means to define, abuse, limit, 'feel' their existence. They have to lift something, no matter what, out of the past or even the future, into the 'present' of their consciousness. Consiousness, therefore, can only come upon the grave of its life. But because this is itself an actuality, and since it is contrary to the nature of actuality to afford a lasting possession, the presence even of that tomb is merely the source of trouble, toil, and struggle, a fight which must be lost. But since consciousness has found out by experience that the grave of its actual unchangeable Being has no concrete actuality, that the vanished particularity qua vanished is not true particularity, it will give up looking for the unchangeable particular existence as something actual, or will cease trying to hold on to what has thus vanished. Only so is it capable of finding particularity in a true form, a form that is universal. (258/9)

The last part of this Hegel statement indicates a direction in which the Beckettians often find themselves traveling. But in the end they always revert, with laments, but also with a touch of 'masochistic' glee, to the

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world of their fictions, a temporary grave of the world of time, memories, of a past and a future of life. Yet never are they very far from a realization of what their killing, their ending, this avoiding of an 'empty' life means. Molloy sums it up in his characteristic sarcastic fashion: For death is a condition I have never been able to conceive to my satisfaction . . . Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe it or not, if it wasn't a state of being even worse than life. (Mo, 91)

Theirs, then, is a condition which "dread[s] death like a regeneration". (Mo, 192)

VI THE END OF ART

The progress and end of romantic art is the inner disintegration of the material of art, which dissolves into its elements, sets free its parts... (A, i, 551)

A comparative study such as this may succeed in paralleling two types of 'terminology' but fail to bridge them and to make one grow into the other. As is probably evident by now, the fundamental terms of both Hegel and Beckett complement each other. But to understand the 'modernity' of Hegel's thinking out of the paradox through the timelessness of the Beckettian paradoxes, and vice versa, one has to overcome the barrier that new terms and conventions have placed between Hegel's time and ours. New terminologies have grown since Hegel's time, and we often take for granted that not only his problems have disappeared with 'idealism' but also that our solutions are solutions; or to speak the language of the absurdists, that our elimination of the very concept of solution is better than an attempted solution. Not only through the decline of Hegel studies during the era of the so-called Neo-Kantianism but even today, many men of letters pass over Hegel (and leave his rediscovery to John Crowe Ransom). In his Ästhetik he is said to speak a language which we have outgrown, that of the eighteenth century and Romanticism. Hegel is said to have declared the end of all art, which would make a reading of the Ästhetik worthwhile primarily for those who happen to agree with him. Worst of all, the legend of Hegel's formal rigidity still persists with many, despite the elaborate proofs to the contrary since the thirties. Since the 'historical approach' to art has suffered a certain setback especially in the United States, Hegel, this Geistesgeschichtler par excellence, has become even more suspect. The purpose of this study is not to broaden the field of investigation to include all of the above aspects. But a complementary use of the 'terminologies' of Hegel and Beckett should take a short account of the criteria which operate in much of Beckett criticism and which move Beckett's novels far from the concerns of the 'idealist' Hegel.

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Beckett criticism has reached a few peaks, but it is generally cluttered with the terms and generalities that place Beckett too narrowly into the contemporary 'movement' of absurdism or view him principally as an heir to the Joycean esthetics. Furthermore, he has been celebrated too much for something that, in terms of his works, he has not succeeded in creating, namely the total destruction of human values, the 'nihilistic' vacuum. We have begun with a discussion of basic 'dialectical' problems which served to establish an area of ideological overlapping and relevant disagreement. There remains to treat, as much in Hegelian terms as possible, the Beckett works as art, or novels (not only as philosophical tracts), and to treat them as putting forth a concept of the artist which again lends itself to a Hegelian interpretation. In order to do this, we will have to detach the novels from an understanding which relies too heavily on the all-too ready terms of an age of suicidal art and a servile esthetics.

ARTISTS OF NOTHING?

Beckett himself, in his few theoretical remarks about art, seems to have set the pace of much Beckett criticism. Particularly to the "Three Dialogues" (on the painters Tal Coat, André Masson and Bram van Velde) much of the terminology and many of the basic concepts of Beckett criticism can be traced. But first of all, we should guard against confusing Beckett's experiments in theory with his work; secondly, we should not take Beckett's statements here at face value. 1 The "Dialogues", obviously, are not "genuine" dialogue, but the semi-serious comedy of a pseudo-dialogue acted out for the purpose of the incongruous whole. However, the creed of the artist of nothing, as put forth here, seems to furnish a compelling way of looking at the Beckett novels. Asked by D. what he prefers to the "plane of the feasible", B. replies: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. 2 1

Similarly, there seems to be a tendency in recent Beckett criticism to view his study of Proust as a prelude to his creative work. While the essay abounds in generalising asides, and is obviously sympathetic towards Proust's treatment of time, memory, habit, intellectualism, its main concern is the explication of Proust's work, not the announcement of Beckett's. 2 Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, "Three Dialogues", in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1965), 17.

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Is not this the 'predicament', or even the absence of a predicament, in which the Beckett clowns of nothing labor? But why do they labor? Why "submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms or, if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms", 3 why submit as artist? B. does not answer this question. The Beckett artists too cannot answer it. Convinced of the futility of their creative eagerness, they continue to create, under "dictation", under the incomprehensible pressure of a "hypothetical imperative". {Mo, 117) Although Beckett is, of course, conscious of this paradox (as are his characters), he refuses to discuss it in theoretical or rational terms, here or elsewhere. This open question makes a handy peg on which to hang the label of absurdism. But the novels of Beckett should be read as an attempt to give an answer to this question, in the process of which the very question will change. " . . . to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living." According to the B. of the dialogues, even this 'admission' of the possibility of an art of failure should not give rise to "a new occasion, a new term of relation". That would return art as "an expressive act, even if only of itself", 4 to the "task" of interpretation, the task of searchingly participating in the relations of life. This would reduce art to its old state, that of involving itself in the "farce of giving and receiving".5 The true, last, supreme art, then, is that of utter, final failure. It takes a certain naïveté to carry inviolate into an experience of the Beckett novels this logical cardhouse. This is not, and cannot be, a "sufficient, general statement on the role of incompetence in the arts". 6 It is an artistic ivory tower of predetermined failure, which turns failure into 'success' simply by declaring it to be the artist's aim. Malone gives us ample warning when he calls the difference between a life that attempts to succeed and one that attempts to fail one of "nuance". (19) As we have already seen, the proud integrity of the failing artist too may fail; or he may sense and fear this failure. A no flung into the world, the past, may turn upon the naysayer. He may fail to fail, he may begin, once again, to create an art which searches for "a sign of life". The "Dialogues" appeared in 1949, the 'trilogy' between 1951 and 1953. In the former, B. says : 3 4 6 6

"Dialogues", 21. "Dialogues", 21. "Dialogues", 18. Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 75.

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There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented, as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred.'

Then the trilogy came out, "through faintness of heart". This faintness of heart, the 'mystic self-interference' we spoke of in the Introduction, is an old conception. The mystic of Advaita Vedanta who has reached salvation (moksha), has ceased to be, keeps one foot in the maya world of 'relations', of nothing hidden in the fiction of life, to there preach, express what cannot be expressed. This mystic paradox echoes that of the Beckettian character who does not want to create, but creates, who wants 'pure expression' and tells about life. To the Indian mystic he is known as the jivan-mukta, the 'saved man', i.e., the man who is and is not a man. However, the philosophical system of Advaita Vedanta does not know the dialectic. Therefore it does not allow us, as Beckett does, to interpret the phenomenon of self-interference as a recognition that with life you lose that which enables you to 'anti-live', that with it you lose the dimension of your no and perhaps the promise of a new beginning. In this 'mystical' situation, yes 'is' no. The idea of an artist who strives for an art of nothing, has nothing to say, and nothing to say it with, very temptingly establishes a basic thought out of which the critic may develop and explain the many variations, the many comic performances and re-enactments that Beckett's fiction seems to offer. With this key in hand, the puzzling,.frightening and ludicrous world of the Watts and Malones appears merely as a field of invalid games and therefore seems to become fully accessible to the critical understanding. And the body of criticism based on this idea does indeed illuminate Beckett's work. We do have ten (or more) types of Sprachzerfall.8 We have almost all imaginable forms of a Weltzerfall, a disintegration of time, memory, value, a disintegration of man. We have an artist who is about to make an end to the world of man and an end to art, to the very meaning of meaning. But this end never comes. If we were convinced that the end had been 'said', shown, explained, performed and understood, Beckett's work, to us living, would peter out in a chilling tedium of unbearable un-intensity. It does not have that

"Dialogues" 20-1. Nikiaus Gessner, Die Unzulänglichkeit der Sprache (Zürich, 1957), 71-2.

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effect. The tedium of his novels is "exuberant". 9 Is it because we never tire of the clown whose serious nonsense we laugh off? Or rather, do we not stay with the dying "picaresque saints" 10 of Beckett because we hopefully, and perhaps ardently, wait for the end to come and blossom into a new beginning? Do we not hope for the malady to cleanse itself in a crisis, for the cynicism to devour itself? The "incomprehensible damnation" of the Beckett people to "manifest", out of 'nothing', for nothing, into nothing, would indeed be incomprehensible, if their existence were not less an attempt to end manifestation than a quest for the reason why they manifest, pronounce themselves alive and continue to manifest. It is a quest for the reason of their need to express, to 'order', to communicate nothing, of their need to communicate at all.11 The writing heroes, from Molloy to the Unnamable, are artists. Their existence is one of words and stories. The stilling of their worldly selves - is it not the initiation into the existence of the artist, who has to free himself from an interest-bound life, so that he can, like Hegel's philosopher, "contemplate the subject as it actually is in itself and for itself" (Ph, 141)? Perhaps we can view the disintegration of a conventional world of thought and behavior in Beckett, not as a final recognition of the invalidity of word and art, but as a gradual, painful, 'courageous' breaking out of a stagnant, cold, conceptual and conventional existence, into the everpresent, eternally-undisturbed, 'original' paradoxity that is alive, that is life, that is T . This is the I which the Beckettians are trying to contain and unify, after having freed it from the conventional illusion of a "pre-established harmony". {Mo, 83) Thus they tackle a paradoxity which is, which has always been, the object and the source of the novel. With this idea the B. of the "Dialogues" would, of course, not agree.12 9

Northrop Frye, "The Nightmare Life in Death", Hudson Review, XIII (1960), 447. - It is easy to imagine that the novels were written, as Beckett says himself, "avec élan, dans une sorte d'enthousiasme". Gabriel d'Aubaréde, "En attendant... Beckett", Nouvelles Littéraires (Feb. 16, 1961), 7. 10 Melvin Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Beckett: An Amalgam of Joyce and Proust", Comparative Literature, XII (1960), 55. 11 The Unnamable mocks his own awareness of a need to communicate: "oh you know, who you, oh I suppose the audience, well well, so there's an audience..." (132). 12 In the few published interviews, Beckett emerges much less rigid than in the "Dialogues". (See Shenker) Of the new "form" of his art he says that "it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else" - certainly a thought whose "shape" (to use a favorite Beckett term) is comparable to the Hegelian idea of dialectic. Similarly, of the church of Madeleine he says: "This is clear. This does not allow the mystery to invade us." And Beckett may have had those critics in

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THE END OF ART JOYCE A N D THE JOYCEAN RENEGADE

At this point in our discussion, a look at James Joyce may prove helpful. Due to their personal association, and due to certain superficial resemblances of their works, Joyce and Beckett have often been viewed as master and disciple. Reducing Beckett, who is ferociously original even in his parodies and unconcerned with movements,13 to a technician of the novel who chiefly aspires to develop further the Joycean stream-of-consciousness method - this is usually the point of departure of this kind of Beckett criticism. " . . . his literary 'form', the stream-of-consciousness device which most young British writers wouldn't dream of using nowadays for fear of being thought quaint, derives from his years as secretary to James Joyce." 14 The similarities between Beckett and Joyce cannot be denied, but to view them in terms of the more significant differences between the two, will help to understand Beckett and his relation to the Hegelian existential paradoxes.15 The Beckettian characters are in search of an inner stasis, an 'absolute' creative freedom from value, from the weight of things and men. Murphy sometimes achieved a detachment from reality and value which left the world behind, but it was Watt who became truly creative in his freedom, although he remained always puzzled. Words, like balloons whose strings have been torn from their hold, weightless and without resistance, were woven into endless tapestries of 'logical' permutations against an empty sky, woven into a little weightless cosmos which was all Watt's. Here Watt was God, here he could, the job done, look on it with (never lasting) satisfaction, "paring his fingernails". Is notthis Beckett's, the "disciple's", satirical version of the Joycean, divine, creative freedom exposed for what

mind who celebrate his work as the expression of unbroken negativity when he said: "If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable. "Tom F. Driver, "Beckett by the Madeleine", Columbia University Forum, IV (1961), 23. 13 See particularly the chapter on "The Dimension of Poetry" in Jacobsen and Mueller, 35-58. 14 Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade (London, 1964), 46. 15 One of the 'similarities' exploited in this connection is the fact that both have written portraits of artists. See Nathan A. Scott, Samuel Beckett (New York, 1965), 61; Tindall, 10. This, of course, proves very little, since this concern they share with Henry James, Thomas Mann and André Gide and many others. To account for the differences between Joyce's portrait and Beckett's Molloy, Tindall arrives at the ingenious conclusion that "Molloy is a parody of Ulysses". (10) This is, as we will see, much truer of Watt.

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it is: a non-existential, abstract, barren freedom of frail beauty? As has been said, Beckett's and Joyce's personal relationship cannot be denied, nor the enthusiasm for Joyce that is apparent in Beckett's essay "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce." 16 But between this learned essay with its smart style and the later Beckett who has 'renounced' his erudition, the Beckett of the trilogy, there is a difference of artistic attitude. Joyce anchored his esthetics in St. Thomas Aquinas at three important points: that "three things" were "needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance" (integritas, consonantia, claritas),11 that "those things are beautiful the apprehension of which pleases",18 and that the artist should be outside his creation, "refined out of existence".19 Maneuvering shrewdly around the question of how far the "quidditas"20 of the objects shown by the artist, the objects "epiphanised",21 relates to what it means to the artist, and essentially bypassing the whole question of the relation of truth to beauty, Joyce goes abuilding. Ulysses is a cosmos whose validity cannot be asserted by reference to anything outside the book (unless it be learned articles about it). It can be asserted only in terms of the principles of order that it contains itself (most of which are inaccessible without instruction). Here the single word, single sentence, idea or act is not valid in itself, but only in terms of its function(s) within the relations with others and the totality of relations. Ideas are transformed into motifs within an order whose principles are 'incidental', such as the parallel to the Odyssey (loose in the essentials, tight in particulars),22 or the organs of the body, or the developmental stages of the embryo.23 With Joyce language disintegrates into the vast possibilities of punning. And it is put together again into the esthetic whole of the poem Ulysses, is lifted above the frailty of a disorderly human existence of values and meanings into a whole that revengefully, and beautifully, mocks an earthly, confused life of futile search for order. Here order is created and goes unchallenged. No matter what it means! It "means" nothing, it is! 16

In Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York, 1939), 3-22. 17 Stephen Hero (New York, 1959), 212-3. See A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (New York, 1967), 479-80. 18 The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York, 1959), 147. See Portrait, 474. 19 Portrait, 483. 20 Stephen Hero, 213; Portrait, 480. 21 Stephen Hero, 211. 22 "Parallels that never meet." Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk, Conn., 1960), 71. 23 See Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (New York, 1952).

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Its 'apprehension' pleases. It is beautiful. In Ulysses the individual character progressively gathers, as the book, operational significance; he is inflated with all 'symbolic' possibilities - not with reference to the 'outside', but to the work. The individual is dehumanized into the stature of an (esthetically conceived) everyman. The work is as tightly self-contained as can be achieved: "the book as a closed system."24 With the author, the world has been refined out of existence. In Joyce's esthetics and in Ulysses, as in Finnegans Wake, the true freedom has been achieved for the artist. Here he is God. He dismisses time from his concerns; and with this dismissal, he also dismisses the novel. In the field of fiction Joyce has become the hero of a critical movement that looks in art not for "truth" but for "poetry", for a "harmonizing" of "connotations, attitudes and meanings",25 for a "pattern of resolved stresses" or of "resolutions and balances and harmonizations" 26 as in music. This criticism waives the question of ("scientific") truth for "a principle curiously like that of dramatic propriety" 27 and achieves the resolving of paradoxes not in terms of statement or logic but through an equilibrium of poetic emphasis. Like Watt, this critical philosophy looks for a magic power of the word (as Ransom complained)28 and quite consistently ends in or starts with the flat statement of a separation between the referential or "scientific" use of language and that of art, an "emotive" use,29 or a musical one, whose aim is the inner equilibrium of forces. This is a criticism that believes to have eliminated the paraphrase. Beckett's relation to this art illuminates his own predicament. While to Joyce the formulation of his creative freedom seemed enough to act according to it, the Beckettian artists, through all the novels, comically but desperately fumble and reason for, create toward, a similar freedom. To them Joyce is the Cartesian who has 'got it made', whose creations beyond value and 'meaning' do not collapse every time he turns around to look at the world and at himself. Watt's 'transcendant' creations, his attempts to turn quidditas into claritas, are short-lived. The paradox of life pierces the bubbles, as the 24

Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 72. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure ofPoetry (London, 1949), 178. 26 Brooks, 186. 25 Brooks, 142. 28 John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: I. The Formal Analysis", Kenyon Review, IX (1947), 438. 29 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York, 1959), 267. 25

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bubble of a divine creative freedom is burst, again and again, by the old questions, by time, by individuality.30 Joyce expands to include all, by trying to make the individual characters superhuman types. Beckett tries to achieve this, and 'fails', by stripping his people down to their essence. The "ego is stripped of all individuality and is seen merely as a representative of all of its kind". 31 But while Joyce achieves his aim in a quasi-mythological stasis, Beckett's artists fail and fight their battle against their forever returning individuality, their life, 'their time'. While Joyce succeeds in the attempt to attain freedom and rest in words, in Beckett's novels it is words that drag the tortured stoics out of their peace and inflict upon them again a human existence. Joyce can create a new esthetic world 'once and for all', the Beckettian bums have to try again and again. The 'magic' of words is but a fraud; they are 'with the world', they are 'referential'. And an existence, or art work, of silence is "nothing". The Joycean playing, that Malone and the Unnamable want to do, always turns into living. The logical paradoxes of life can only be solved in life, if at all; to turn them into lyrical tensions does not still them, but ignores them. Poetologic will not free from logic or life. Joyce's esthetic freedom realizes itself in two supreme, enormous poems that contain 'everything'. They take the silence of the world, of time, value and 'meanings' for granted. Beckett's novels constitute an existential search for this very 'axiom' of Joyce's, a search for the silence of the world, of the human being, a search for Joyce's creative paradise, for nothing. Their failure to deny themselves and their 'loaded' words intensifies into a horrified awakening from a Joycean dream of containment, aloofness and beauty. From Joyce to Beckett the 'influence' is one of an art pushed back to the brink of life. The ironic triumph of Joyce has collapsed into an existential despair of the artist. It is certainly a gross underestimation of Beckett's critical powers and the existential concern for his art to claim that "He still seems to be in the uncomfortable position of the imitator [of Proust and Joyce] looking frantically for a way of escape."32 Beckett does not take either way of escape from his "nothing", silence or esthetic verbosity. Although they 30

It is therefore far too 'optimistic' to establish the following connection between Beckett and Joyce: "Silence, as much as it is possible in literature, is finally restored and the narrator is almost totally, in Joyce's words, refined out of existence." Melvin Friedman, "Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman", Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, I (1960), 28. 31 Frye, 445. - See Hassan, 114. 32 Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Beckett", 57.

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are "in reality poles apart",33 the negative 'influence' or conscious rejection may have been of great importance.34 It certainly would not be enough to say that Joyce did not 'influence' Beckett. Beckett himself put the difference between himself and Joyce in these terms: " . . . Joyce was a superb manipulator of material - perhaps the greatest . . . He's tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance."35 To Hegel, this Joycean omnipotence and omniscience, among humans, is that of "absolute, abstract freedom". It is to him entirely an achievement of the Verstand (finite reason). In Joyce's Ulysses, its most striking manifestation is the all-encompassing symmetry. It is then not surprising to find that Hegel denies symmetry a primary role in the art-work. As far as regularity and symmetry is concerned, it cannot exhaust the nature of an art-work even with regard to its external aspect - being mere unliving unity of ratiocination . . . Kept in its abstraction, it destroys life . . . (A, i, 243)

Into this "life" the Beckettians 'unwillingly' return, and here they fight their battles.36

THE 'ANTI-BILDUNGSROMAN'

In what way may this comparative look at Joyce help us to clarify Hegel's relation to the Beckett novels? We may formulate it this way: while in poetry time tends to be stilled, the novel comes to life essentially in the element of time. Hegel's thinking too does not rest in a secure logical position of stasis, of aloofness from history, but 'comes to life' in it, in the growth of men, of their ideas and their history. Outside of time (as Beckett proves), 'logic' is but a game. It has been remarked that in Hegel's writings there is a peculiar poetic quality.37 Hegel himself stresses the affinity of "speculative thinking" 33

Coe, 12. Alan Brick, "The Madman in His Cell: Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and the Stereotypes", The Massachusetts Review, I (1959), 45, finds that Beckett "takes Joyce's world view and removes all possibility for consoling illusions". - See also Otto Friedrich Bollnow, "Samuel Beckett", Antares (June 1956), 43. 35 Shenker, 3, col. 2 36 Beckett speaks approvingly of Proust's "work of art as neither created or chosen, but discovered, uncovered, excavated, pre-existing within the artist, a law of his nature". (Proust, 64) 37 See Ernst Hirt, "Hegels Geschichtsphilosophie und der Geist der Poesie", in 34

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to the artistic imagination. (A, ii, 342)38 We could go so far as to look at the Phenomenology as a work of the imagination, as a kind of novel, a Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman is essentially defined as the description of the development of an individual, of his search for an ideological place in his world. It deals with the development of his ideas through which the growth of a period of history may shine. It enables a view at an epoch through individuality, individual errors and failures, a view at man as he appears in an epoch, and as through him the dreams, disillusionments and achievements of that epoch appear. Here, as in the Phenomenology, we are not dealing with an order erected on a static ideological basis, but with a submission to the growth of ideas and their flux. Here we do not take anything for granted, here we do not start with a premise, here we do not end with nothing but the 'result', here we are confronted with, and as readers re-enact, the whole organic process of development. The philosopher may state; the novelist develops. So does Hegel in the Phenomenology. Joyce himself wrote a Bildungsroman, the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the story of an adolescent who develops toward his 'mission' as artist. What followed it were compositions in which time was suspended. Joyce's "disciple" again writes a series of novels that show a sort of development. But this development is not one of growth, accumulation and rounding, but one of undoing, 'dis-becoming', return; a process of going, not from beginning to result, but from result to beginning and, hopefully, beyond it. The Bildungsroman traditionally starts with the relative ignorance of youth and fulfills itself in relative maturity. In Beckett's Bildungsromane, maturity (a full knowledge of the world and man, and a 'final' conclusion drawn from it) is the starting point from which we journey back to the womb, to innocence and ignorance, paradise, nothing. It would therefore be justified to call this series of novels an 'inverted Bildungsromari. 'Inverted' because we go backward; Bildungsroman because, as we have seen before, becoming and 'dis-becoming' (EntwerdenJ39 are two aspects of the same process: for something to become, something has to 'dis-become'. Here, in other words, freedom Dichtung und Forschung: Festschrift für Emil Ermatinger, ed. Walter Muschg and Rudolf Hunzicker (Leipzig, 1933), 138-61. 38 Hermann Schmitz finds Goethe's Gedankenwelt and Hegel's Phenomenology the two cases "wo sich zwei menschliche Grundfunktionen, Denken und anschauliches Bilden, bisher am engsten berührt haben". "Der GestaltbegrifF in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes etc.", 315. 39 'Entwerden' sounds as unusual in German as 'dis-becoming' does in English.

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from becoming 'becomes' - individually and universally. But this may not be more than a bit of sophistry. One may look at this question in another way. In a Bildungsroman, as defined in terms of Hegel's concept of conscious experience,40 it is necessary not to let the old static logic intrude through the author, making the novel a tractate hidden in the guise of fiction and individuality. The leap into life, the submission to its paradoxes, the assertion and re-assertion of the individual's right and duty to master on his own the 'knowledge' of man, thus reliving the expanse of ideological history to some extent in the short span of his life - this necessity never ceases to confront man: "The phenomenology of the mind is fundamentally an eternal task of philosophy", 41 and of the artist. History to Hegel is an organic development. It is not a series of mathematical operations, one surpassing the other and leaving it behind: "The whole is the truth". The novelist then ought to be the last person to accept the mere 'findings' of a culture, stated, formulated and conceptualized, and make them the basis of the world-view in his art. Disintegration of world, values, language, the emerging of a pervasive sense of 'absurdity' - are not these the 'findings' of our cultural age ? Who lives according to these findings ? We hardly do; but in art we tend to accept them, because they are 'known'. This is our apathy, our 'secure' position before we create or 'appreciate' art. This is where we anchor ourselves ideologically (as artists and readers), so that we may not be asked for more than to represent, watch and recognize what is 'known'. Beckett too is often said to have done nothing but play endless variations on that stringless instrument of the 'fact' of absurdity. Much of the literature of today lays claim to such profundity. A waving aside of the responsibility of developing, bringing to life whatever 'truth' he may propound, Joyce takes his truth for granted and turns instead to 'art'. 'Absurdity' is never doubted in Ionesco. But what claim to knowing more securely - that nothing may be known, nothing be shown and communicated - can the artist of today assert against the artist of the past? However, the term is not without its tradition. Thus the seventeenth-century Silesian mystic Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler) uses it in his Cherubinischer Wandersmann in a context which echoes Watt's experience of Mr. Knott as it reflects the diminishing of reality in Beckett's novels: "Gott ergreift man nicht: / Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier: / Je mehr du nach ihm greifst, je mehr entwird er dir." Sämtliche poetische Werke (München, 1952), vol. III, 10. 40 See Martin Heidegger, "Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung", in Holzwege (Frankfurt, 1963), 105-92. 41 Hartmann, Hegel, 324.

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His humility of 'ignorance' - is it not the guise of a hybris that feels it is beyond knowledge, and with it beyond the individual and his perspective, his being in time and therefore beyond the 'devices' of the novel 'of yesterday'? Is his despair not rather the pride of a skeptical doubt without responsibility ? The artist of today feels compelled to turn against 'conventions'. But what are conventions? Not necessarily what the past believed. These beliefs are part of an organic development of which our own attitudes are the consequence. The apple has not proven the blossom false. Conventional is a knowledge that is taken for granted, which is 'familiarly known' (bekannt) but not properly known (erkannt). Walter Kaufmann has said that Hegel's Phenomenology is informed by the Goethean idea of spiritual acquisition: "What from your fathers you received as heir / Acquire if you would possess it!" 42 Here lies the center of the Phenomenology and of Hegel's dialectic: "What is 'familiarly known' is not properly known, just for the reason that it is 'familiar'." (Ph, 92) In this respect culture or development of the mind [Bildung], regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him [what is 'familiarly known'], in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself. {Ph, 90) 4 3

To accept absurdity and to make it the axiomatic basis of one's art, this is what today makes an art conventional. The artist has no business with axioms. His talent, his imagination is that of Hegel's philosopher. This means to be free of conventions, to submit to, endure and relive, as an individual and in individual terms, in terms of (a) time, the life that we live.44 That is a life which extends back beyond our birth; not only in history books but also in art, particularly the novel. The process of Begreifen in Hegel and the creative process of the artist are closely related. Such a process does not consist in a doubt of things 42

Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), 117. This idea of the Phenomenology is even more precisely anticipated, as Ernst Bloch points out (156), in a passage already contained in Goethe's Urfaust: "Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugeteilt ist, / Will ich in meinem innern Selbst geniessen / . . . Und so mein eigen Selbst zu ihrem Selbst erweitern." - See also Rehder, 132/7. 44 Convention, of course, is a form of habit. Hegel would agree with Beckett (in Proust) that habit is a "minister of dullness" and "agent of security", a screen to spare us the "spectacle of reality" (10) which, when, lifted, exposes us to the "suffering of being" (8) and, when restored, "will empty the mystery of its threat - and also of its beauty". (11) 43

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and beliefs alone. It comes to life when the artist doubts his theoretical self and thus submits to his world wherever he may come out. Complacent doubt, fashionable as it is, does not get us far, for . . . if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science [ Wissenschaft]... it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error . . . (Ph, 132)

The path of doubt [Zweifel], then, becomes a "path of despair" [Verzweiflungj; "this thoroughgoing skepticism" {Ph, 136) is the full, living dialectic of the individual. This the former Cartesians of Beckett know and refuse to submit to. Our concern in this study is not to decide whether the world is absurd or not. 'Absurd' is only a word. It is in such words that art may suffocate. In Beckett's comedy of words we have an artist who laments and shows the emptiness of words. What words? Those "of others". (Un, 36) But words, as ideas, are not (Hegel insists) static units that are either good or bad, rather they are living possibilities, a human tissue that grows with the artist. Joyce is a chaser of words who delights in rustling their 'timeless' petticoats of lexicographic meaning in an exercise in 'etymology' that may well be ultimately meaningless.45 For him words are 'full', for Beckett they are said to be 'empty'. Both attitudes reflect a similar detachment from language, an unartistic aloofness, a fear of dirtying one's hands in the business of becoming, erring and perhaps failing. Both artistic attitudes are 'conventional'. The above lumping together of Beckett and Joyce as conventional artists is only justified, of course, if we view Beckett with the sole concern of finding forms and variations of absurdity. Then we are likely to ignore Malone's warning: "There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle." (19) We have also seen that time is not absent from these novels; time is present in a rhythm of attraction and repulsion; and as for the 'plot', it is present as the negative force of disbecoming. We have called Beckett's series of novels an 'inverted Bildungsromari - we might call it an 'anti-Bildungsroman', as the impatient non-creators and creators by weakness have been called 'anti-artists'. We should not take anybody's word for it, not even Beckett's, that Beckett's works constitute examples of pure 'anti-art'. Their subjection 46

See Hassan, 115.

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to a Hegelian suspicion of stasis has shown us, I hope, that in Beckett we are dealing with more than a variation of the theme, or 'truth', of absurdity. In these novels we do not have, at least not in terms of our Hegelian analysis, a certainty of nothing made the basis of whatever esthetic or anti-esthetic games are played. Nor do we have a doubt, frozen into certainty, that, in the form of Joycean irony, laboriously fingers the world into the breathless void of a composition of Valenciennes lace of words. Here the proud Cartesian doubt of yester-year, with the capers and antics of the clown who hides himself, has embarked on a journey beyond Descartes' destination, a journey of doubt that becomes the path of despair. Who could, in terms of these essentials, confuse Joyce or lonesco with Beckett? The Beckett novels, as 'inverted Bildutigsromari, are a series of rejections of 'unacceptable' existences. Sought after is a paradise "With no way in, no way out, a safe place. Not like Eden." (Un, 85) Why are the existences rejected? Because they mean nothing. Why do they mean nothing? Because the central character, or the 'last one' (without a name), has not found a name in them, has not found a lasting existence, is not in them. And yet they are 'incomprehensibly' his. Here absurdity takes on a concrete meaning within the novels, that of the dichotomy between man and his past, of his incapability to 'understand', to be (in) time. The rejections then, performed and pondered in spite of self-injunctions, in typical dialectic fashion, turn out to be a search. Not the individual existences, which float to the Beckettian through the half-lit labyrinth of his memory, are the objects of the search, but a form of unity at all costs. Whether he searches for the organic whole of all his existences, or a unity outside of them - of this the Beckettian is in tortuous doubt. What ostentatiously is rejected in Beckett's novels, with the gesture of the modern, nauseated, nihilistic mysticism of nothing, returns again and again and disintegrates "nothing". For Hegel it is to be accepted, existentially, with the courage of death. To mystics, as to many modern authors, this has become a faded conviction of the past: it is the Hegelian Erkenntnis that truth is not to be found outside man, but in and through his individuality, his individual perspective, his time (large and small), his 'loves', his errors. Many modern novels imply the invalidity of the individual perspective. They deny the validity of the time sequence and of change. They deny the conveyability of meaning through words, and with this denial, they deny the 'old' novel. 'Outside' of it many contemporary novelists strive to create 'novels', anti-novels, which parody the 'devices' of the traditional novel. These efforts find their densest, most impenetrable, but

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also their most consequential exponent in Beckett. However, in contrast to much of modern fiction, in Beckett the rejection is not taken for granted, as many critics suppose, but is being tried and never successfully carried out. The parody of 'life' here develops into a parody of the parodist who, beneath his lofty disdain, continues to live. Here 'doubt of this doubt' develops. The Beckettian artists systematically, and with great tenacity, attack the very foundations of fiction, and in the process they become hopelessly dependent on it. Theirs is so intense a (negative) concern with the individuality of man that the closer they maneuver themselves to death, the more clearly they recognize their enemy. At the end the hopelessly sharp either-or is established, death or life, which (for the artist) also means 'literature' or silence. With Beckett we have to be sure not to apply criteria such as nothingness, absurdism, parody and anti-novel without giving a full account of a negativity which pervades all - including these concepts. Only when these concepts, and the attitudes behind them, are also seen to disintegrate in Beckett's novels, can a criticism do justice to Beckett's achievement. And it is this negativity which feeds on the idea of its opposites, the ideas of man living his time and of a novel that submits to life. Only when freed from the one-sided and therefore static criteria of a criticism which is surer of itself than Beckett is of his novels, can the dialectic of Beckett's fiction be appreciated in its full Hegelian impact. Beckett's 'anti-Bildungsromari, in terms of this dialectic, is Bildungsroman and its opposite "at the same time". Approaching Beckett's novels, as all good fiction, we will truly have to suspend our beliefs and accept the "pensum!' which Moran discovers to be the writer's. For it is one of the features of this penance that I may not pass over what is over and straightway come to the heart of the matter. But that must again be unknown to me which is no longer so and that again fondly believed which then I fondly believed, at my setting out. (Mo, 182)

IN SEARCH OF ARTISTIC PROSE

This chapter, as our entire comparison of Beckett and Hegel, would be incomplete without a look at the Hegelian Ästhetik, the Hegel work most frequently used in Hegelian interpretations of art. The Hegelian evolution of ideas which we have to some extent followed in the Phenomenology, is reflected in such works as the Geschichte der

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Philosophie, Philosophie der Geschichte and the Ästhetik. In the latter again, many formulations are applicable to the creative process in which the Beckettian artists are caught. We learn here that the attempt at "spiritualization" (Vergeistigung) is a particularly artistic one. "The ideal of art is to be found in this return of external reality into the realm of the spiritual, becoming the latter's revelation." (i, 158) Hegel's final definition of art, at least in part, reflects the goal which the Beckettian artist vainly tries to reach: "For in art we deal . . . with the freeing of the spirit from the content and form of the finite - with the presence and reconciliation of the absolute in the finite and the world of phenomena." (ii, 586) This ideal fully concretizes itself only in a time whose idea of the absolute, unlike Descartes', finds an adequate expression in the unmediated external world, i.e., ideally only in Hegel's second period of the history of art, the classical. Art after that, as the art of his time ('romantic art'), to Hegel is characterized by its "subjectivity" (Innerlichkeit). The fundamental principle of romantic art is this elevation of the spirit to itself, through which it gains its objectivity which formerly it sought in the external and sensuous world. In this it knows its unity with itself, (i, 499) 4 0

The subjectivity of the artist does not find adequate material for its expression in the concrete, limited world. The romantic artist, then, who carries this subjectivity to an extreme, will be reduced to the Beckettian voice. In this condition, subjectivity, carried to an extreme, is the externalization beyond the external which invisibly only perceived itself. It is . . . a tone ringing out over a world which, with its heterogeneous phenomena, can only mirror and echo this subjectivity, (i, 508)

His empty inner world will be contrasted, as we have seen in chapter V, by an empirical world of irrelevance, indifference and accidence. " . . . the realm of the external . . . released from its unity with the spirit, now becomes mere empirical reality in whose content the soul is not interested", (i, 507/8)

46

Hegel himself points out that the section of the Phenomenology which deals with 'morality' corresponds to that on stoicism, skepticism and the unhappy consciousness on a 'later' level. The section on morality not only deals with romanticism in general, but according to Emmanuel Hirsch, among its Gestalten are reflections of such actual Romantics as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. "Die Beisetzung der Romantiker in Hegels Phänomenologie", Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, II (1924), 510-32.

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We find that the "abstract exuberance" (i, 161) of Beckett's humor and the heroes' artistic self-destructions point to Hegel's definition of romantic irony. This-1 is . . .on the one hand the negation of all particularity, determinateness and content, for all substance perishes in its abstract freedom and unity - on the other hand, all content exists only when posited and acknowledged by this I. What is, is only through the I, and what exists only through me, I can destroy at will, (i, 72)

The calm, the harmony, the silence for which the voice in The Unnamable fumbles, corresponds to Hegel's description of the impossibility of this stillness and weakness to find satisfaction - it does not want to act, it does not want to touch anything so that it may not have to give up its inner harmony. And although it stays pure, it remains unreal and empty in all its longing for substance and the absolute . . . (i, 74)

It is not suprising, then, that - ironically - we find Beckett and Hegel seemingly in agreement on the impossibility of a meaningful art to exist in our time. If art is conceived of as "the absolute spirit which is free in itself, then it can no longer realize itself completely in the external world", (i, 297) Nothing but approximations remain, infected by abstract uncertainty. Beckett's artists try their stories, their memories on like old, worn suits. None fits, and they are cast away. The crawling creatures of How It Is are finally naked, but this is a symbolism that is not borne out, for they as all the others cling to their voices and what these say. To Hegel, the poetry of the classical era had given way to the 'prose' of his age. Art had, in its history, concluded a development from the 'symbolic art' of Asia to the classical art which in turn broke up into the indifferent external and the free 'subjectivity' of the romantic art form. Eventually, speculative philosophy would become the only adequate spiritual form of the absolute for man; and Hegel's 'absolute idea' would leave behind and 'contain' art and religion. What does Hegel mean by 'prose' ? "The prosaic approach is concerned not with the sensuous but with meaning as such." (ii, 369) For prose, the primary object is not the concrete world of objects, acts, time, but 'meaning'. As the Beckett artists hope to have achieved, the concrete has been reduced to a means. Expelled from the artist's subjectivity, this world is at the mercy of the "arbitrariness of prose", (ii, 473)Itis 'alienated' as the artist himself. Romantic art is therefore essentially lyrical, or

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musical (or "structural") and has a tendency to split itself into lyricism and abstract, conceptual thinking. Much has been written in protest and defense of Hegel's assertion of the 'death of art'. We will not deal with this controversy, because we think that it is, primarily, a question of differing definitions of art. If we followed Hegel's definition, which is basically a definition of 'artistic beauty' (see i, 13), we would have to agree with him that only an accepted mythological totality of world view could produce an art that contains it in a concrete "totality of essential differences", (i, 295) What Hegel asserts is the death of classical art. 47 Whether we can create a new art and accept it, an art whose primary aim is not the identity of Erscheinung (phenomenon) and Geist, this is still our task. It is, because Hegel's "absolute" has not convinced us of an alternative to the prose of our age; on the contrary, more than ever are we in need of and searching for a prose that will express our mythless time. It is Beckett's fiction perhaps more than that of others which carries this-search relentlessly to its limits, to the very foundation on which our and the artist's attitude toward a world of things, men and time rests.48 Beckett's heroes have exposed as arbitrary and meaningless two elements of their former world of Bildung, the concrete world of time and space, and the philosophical power of the human mind, man's conceptual attempts to contain it. Neither can stand by itself. The Joycean way out they finally reject too. Their lamentations of a metaphysical hangover do not offer any tangible, positive suggestions. Yet no modern fiction exhibits a "dialectic disquietude" as does Beckett's. We have more here than Murphy's taste for verbal paradoxes. We have here a language that is ultrasensitive to its contradictions, to its fluctuations between the concrete and the abstract. While in such novels as Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Broch's Die Schlafwandler and Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften fiction has branched out into story and commentary, into an 'essayistic' genre of hypothetical or no unity, in Beckett's prose, particularly in The Unnamable, language, constantly suspicious of itself, departs, probes, returns, begins again and purifies itself through literally hundreds of negations and thus intensifies a growing awareness of itself and of a pale but con47

See Willi Oelmiiller, "Hegels Satz vom Ende der Kunst und das Problem der Philosophie der Kunst nach Hegel", Philosophisehes Jahrbuch, LXXIII (1965), 75-94. 48 It "reaffirms the spiritual needs which forced literature into its recent extremeties". Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (New York, 1970), 215.

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sistent unity. The most astounding fact about Beckett's prose is its very existence, its ability to hold a reader 'in spite of itself'. Beckett's torrents of words and images, in which the remnants of past fiction seem to be drowning, is more than "affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered". (Un, 3) We have here an artist creating a purgatory for himself and his language. The dialectic of being and nothing, of life and death, lives in the very texture of this prose of voice and silence. Not only on the philosophical level but also on that of diction, it does not "cripple the mind"49 but brings us to the closest realization of the paradoxity of its simple being. And again, the Beckettian 'disbecoming', in its negativity, points to a new prose (which may never come) that would have to live with its never being finished. It points, with laments and cynicism, to a fact that it incorporates, the fact that art has ceased to be static and finished, that it has to submit to and become the paradoxity, the constant questioning and abandoning of answers, of a mythless age. Beckett's novels, to a large extent, answer Hegel's description of the metaphysical background of'romantic' (i.e., modern) art and of its plight. They answer his definition of prose. But Hegel's prediction of the coming of the final art of the mind, of speculative thinking, has not fulfilled itself. Instead, the "art of prose", to Hegel a contradictory term, has become a sovereign domain, and perhaps has become one only in our postHegelian era of the novels of the nineteenth century to the Bildungsromane of Thomas Mann. Even its own most vehement and intelligent attempts at suicide, Beckett's novels, prove that it is here, with our questioning, forever self-modifying prose, we have to continue: it goes on, it does not achieve silence, but through its very negations, its disparities perpetually lived, it regains substance, readies itself for a new beginning.50 And this is an era that may learn again to read Hegel's own prose which, although bare of elegance and artistically 'undeveloped', may, in its basic dialectic flexibility of conceptual and concrete thinking, help make prose, and the novel, 'possible again'. Certainly, of Beckett's prose it cannot be said, as well we might of Joyce's, that it has ended "with the creative power of artistic subjectivity over all content and form", (i, 551) On the contrary, it lives relentlessly (though not without evasions) toward some kind of fulfillment of Hegel's "

Hassan, 166. "And that is why the dead end of Beckett is so fecund a beginning. It is fecund even in Beckett's own hands... It may prove incredibly fecund at the hands of successors we cannot dream of." Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 106-7. 60

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deal "not only to carry the contradiction of the manifold but to endure it and to remain in it faithful to and identical with oneself", (i, 236) And even the "fable", so the Unnamable "fears", is perhaps within the reach of this prose. He sees himself "slipping, though not yet at the last extremity, towards the resorts of fable". (28)

VII THE ARTIST AS THE GUILTY GOD

. . . therefore it has now to be observed t h a t . . . the principle of dialectic corresponds to the idea of God's power. (Sy, i, 193)

An appreciation of Beckett's fiction will suffer greatly if approached with the determination of finding a particular philosophical 'result' or resolution there. His novels demand of the reader an unusual degree of objectivity, open-mindedness, suspicion of modern labels and a sensitivity to their tensions of philosophical content. We have found the Hegelian idea of dialectic a suitable tool to 'conceptualize' the Beckett novels. At the same time we have found that Hegel's abstractly worded discussion of the dialectic took on a peculiar, concrete urgency with Beckett. After a discussion of basic forms of the dialectic and its futile rejections, such as those of abstract freedom and death, we have turned to the problem of viewing the Beckett novels as going beyond the criteria often applied to them, criteria such as the Joycean stasis, 'absurdity', the end of art and the end of the novel. We found these criteria deficient, because they did not fully account for a dialectic dimension in which they too, as everything in Beckett, live on their opposites. As a final step of our Hegelian investigation of Beckett's fiction there remains for us to treat one more form of the fundamental paradox, the dialectic of the artist. This problem merges with one of the most arresting phenomena in these works, that of time, guilt and God. We began our discussion of dialectic with the paradox of being and nothing. Here we come back to it, namely to its most interesting and esthetically relevant from.

THE GOD-IMAGE

Beneath the Beckettian's proud rejections of all 'responsibility', there runs a current of suspicion that it would take only a step to conjure "away the chief too and regarding myself as solely responsible for my

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wretched existence". {Mo, 147) The Unnamable lives in a world of 'lies', or fictions, all of his own making. This world is the result of a quest for a freedom that is not enough if only 'formulated'. The Beckettians insist on an existential, lonely freedom, on the brink of which they shy back to lament and 'play'. The 'lament' is only possible, for any length of time, if the idea is maintained that the hero is not of the world, that the world is 'finished' and that the Beckettian artist has nothing to do but turn away from it, To maintain this fiction, a source of responsibility has to be found or posited which is independent of the Beckett artist. He can only not be if 'being' is attributed to a source different from himself. (This 'Cartesian' weakness, of needing a God as axiom of their freedom, they do retain.) In other words, the lament, the parody, the pride of rejection can only be maintained as long as its object can be understood as being outside man, as long as, somewhere, somehow, the true freedom and responsibility of man making himself can be hidden beneath the old idea of man's destiny, man's essence ('convention') being imposed on him. One important aspect of the Beckettian is that of the artist who accuses the world and a maker more powerful than himself, of the artist who therefore turns away from life (experience) and the novel and asserts his negative freedom. In Beckett, hidden to those who take for granted the Godlessness of his world, this weakness of man's abstract liberty, to have the culprit somewhere else, is apparent. This world is not without a God nor without a need for him. And what this God means in these novels is, almost parable-like, put forth in Watt. Watt, as we have seen, is strangely interested in Mr. Knott, because to understand him may mean to understand his mission in the Knott 'household', or in other words, to make sure who is responsible for the existence into which he felt 'called'. That Mr. Knott constitutes a God-figure for Watt can hardly be doubted. 1 His servants who come, following a mysterious call, and go, following a mysterious dismissal, come with "premonitions of harmony . . . of imminent harmony" (40) and are "eternally turning about Mr. Knott in tireless love". (62) They approach him as his creatures, who need him and are needed by him: "With what sudden colours past trials and errors glow, seen in their new, their true perspective, mere stepping-stones to this! Haw! All is repaid, amply repaid" 1

In the inverted speeches of the third part of the novel (here returned to normal), Watt speaks of "These emptied hands. This emptied heart. To him I brought. T o the temple. To the teacher. To the source. Of nought." (166)

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(41); and they are repelled by an incarnation of perfection that 'needs nothing' outside itself. Watt circles around him with questions of an "anthropomorphic insolence" (202), gathering, as his predecessors did, a "quite useless wisdom". (62) He does so as one for whom even "the notion of the arbitrary could only survive as the notion of a pre-established arbitrary" (134), as the human seeking an altar upon which to place the responsibility of his being. The "anthropomorphic insolence" is that of the concept of a God as creator, of one who, out of need, out of imperfection, had to create man and world and thus is responsible to man for a meaning of his destiny; one who has to be concerned, interested in him, has the compassionate duty to shoulder his burden of freedom: "I was always content, knowing I would be repaid. There he is now, my old debtor." (Ma, 2) Much of the passive searching, the waiting, in these novels could be viewed as a waiting for "grace". But Mr. Knott does not "need" man, he needs nothing, is nothing, is perfection. Under the scrutinizing eyes of Watt he is, for moments, everything imaginable (see 147 and 209-11). There is "Erskine's Mr. Knott, Arsene's Mr. Knott . . . Watt's Mr. Knott". (126) In the end, Watt has understood the absence of Mr. Knott. "And Mr. Knott, needing nothing if not, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing, of himself knew nothing. And so he needed to be witnessed. Not that he might know, no, but that he might not cease." (202/3) With Watt's "witnessing", Mr. Knott himself would cease, for Watt. Watt's seemingly indifferent reaction to this 'discovery' should not deceive us. As for Arsene, "something" has "slipped" (42) for Watt, an event compared by the former (in another allusion to Leibniz, Voltaire and Candide) to the earthquake of Lisbon: in comparison, "the impressions of a man buried alive in Lisbon on Lisbon's great day seem a frigid and artificial construction of the understanding". (43) Watt, as his fictional brothers, will turn revengefully against this God who will not be the scapegoat. A scene in Watt reminds us of the envious tone with which the gods, the indifferent, needless sleeping babes, are spoken of in Holderlin's "Hyperion's Schicksalslied". One day Watt surprises Mr. Knott in the garden, apparently bent over something on the ground that holds his attention. Here, through his interest, he seems accessible. But as Watt came closer, he, "looking up, saw that Mr. Knott's eyes were closed, and heard his breathing, soft and shallow, like the breathing of a child asleep". (146) A hundred pages later, when Watt, after a violent encounter with a door, awakens and from his subconscious shreds float up of the

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troubled man beneath the carefully performed indifference, a partial reference to the humans of Hölderlin's poem completes this literary echo. von Klippe zu KJippe geworfen Endlos ins hinab. (239)2

The Beckett protagonists are not beyond God, 3 they are "God-obsessed".4 Although they deny it, they depend largely on a language, and on notions, deeply and 'negatively' religious. Such terms as sin, damnation, blessedness and salvation abound: Molloy says of his journeying that it is a "veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion". (105) But this 'religiosity', as we have said, this attempt to find or posit a God, is an attempt to deny a freedom of responsibility. All characters in Beckett's fiction have a similar need for and resentment against their God. Moran says about Molloy that "His life has been nothing but a waiting for this, to see himself preferred, to fancy himself damned, blessed, to fancy himself everyman, above all the others." (151) Moran's own concern with damnation and salvation is more of the formal kind. His catechism of unanswered questions contains such defiant ones as: "How much longer are we to hang about waiting for the ante-christ?" (229) Some problems are of particular interest to the Beckett hero who seeks divine stillness, an interest that betrays the doubt beneath his fictions of ending. Thus the expectation of a worldless superiority may be pierced by suspicious questions: "What was God doing with himself before the creation ?" {Mo, 229) or "Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?" (229) Malone is very descriptive of his hardly supressed God-image of a monumental alter ego: And I must say that to me at least and for as long as I can remember the sensation is familiar of a blind and tired hand delving feebly in my particles and Jetting them trickle between its fingers. And sometimes, when all is quiet, I feel it plunged in me up to the elbow, but gentle, and as though sleeping. But soon 2

The Hölderlin stanza reads: "Doch uns ist gegeben, / Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhn, / Es schwinden, es fallen / Die leidenden Menschen/Blindlings von einer / Stunde zur andern, / Wie Wasser von Klippe / Zu Klippe geworfen / Jahrlang ins Ungewisse hinab." 3 In view of the importance of the God-image in Beckett's novels, it is surprising to find critics who, in line with an 'absurdist' approach to Beckett, take for granted that "There is no God in Beckett's trilogy". Carol Hamilton, "Portrait in Old Age: The Image of Man in Beckett's Trilogy", Western Humanities Review, XVI (1962), 163. 4 Richard N. Coe, "God and Samuel Beckett", in Twentieth Century Interpretations

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it stirs, wakes, fondles, clutches, ransacks, ravages, avenging its failure to scatter m e with one sweep. (50/1)

It is, as with most questions, in The Unnamable that the scope of yesand-no is most fully and poignantly explored. The Unnamable states his negative belief in God: " . . . my creator, omnipresent, do not imagine I flatter myself I am privileged" (55), but he admits that he is still dependent on him: " . . . I have stopped praying for anything. No no, I'm still a suppliant". (68) He may ironically say: "My master. There is a vein I must not lose sight of" (31), but in a moment of knowing impatience he exclaims:"... for all the other things that happen to me and for which someone must be found, for things that happen must have someone to happen to, someone must stop them". (145) Someone must take the responsibility, someone must give them life, must give them himself, they will not stop as long as you stay out of them or God does not take them back. Hegel says of the unhappy consciousness that it is: the tragic fate that befalls certainty of self which aims at being absolute, at being self-sufficient. It is consciousness of the loss of everything of significance in this certainty of itself, and of the loss even o f this knowledge of certainty o f s e l f - the loss o f substance as well as of self; it is the bitter pain which finds expression in the cruel words, "God is dead". (Ph, 752/3)

To this the Beckettian attitude, on the one hand, answers. "Yes, God, fomenter of calm, I never believed, not a second." (Un, 23) But at the same time the Beckett heroes cannot bear the burden of their self-inflicted freedom and invent a God "as a comfort to existence",5 and a God who can be accused. This is the point where, in moments of weakness, they direct the "accusing voice" at "a sporting God to plague his creature". {Un, 71)6 The Beckettians, then, have a double image of God, as they have of themselves, as dead and as cruelly alive. Between these two 'inventions' they sway.

of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, ed. J. D. O'Hara (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 91-113. 5 Milton Rickels, "Existentialist Themes in Beckett's Unnamable", Criticism, IV (1962), 142. G It is therefore not quite true that their blasphemies "have lost their accent of anger", as Charles Glicksberg claims. (36)

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AN INNOCENCE LOST IN TIME

The dialectic tension, then, is between a God guilty of the world and the Beckettian dilemma - and a God who is dead or never existed. In the latter case the Beckettian, "unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said" (Un, 91), bears all responsibility and is guilty. The question of guilt and sin, therefore, appears time and again. The Unnamable, as we have seen, plays with his analogy to Prometheus, defier of the gods; he speaks of his condition as bearing a "distant analogy" to hell. (10) The idea of sin is found increasingly in the novels. The Unnamable finds that "all here is sin". (164) This awareness shows itself in Moran's question: "Is it true that Judas' torments are suspended on Saturdays?" (229) All reflections on this problem are infected by the ambiguity, the dia-r lectic of yes and no, to the point of reversing the causality of guilt and punishment: The idea of punishment came to his mind . . . And without knowing exactly what his sin was he felt full well that living was not a sufficient atonement for it or that this atonement was in itself a sin, calling for more atonement, and so on, as if there could be anything but life, for the living. And no doubt he would have wondered if it was really necessary to be guilty in order to be punished but for the memory, more and more galling, of his having consented to live in his mother, then to leave her. And this again he could not see as his true sin, but as yet another atonement which had miscarried and, far from cleansing him of his sin, plunged him in it deeper than before. And truth to tell the ideas of guilt and punishment were confused together in his mind, as those of cause and effect so often are in the minds of those who continue to think. (Ma, 66/7)

Moran, the former Catholic, asks, with the cunning of someone trying to outfox God: "Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell?" (229) Deep down, their convention of a 'guilty' God cannot give them lasting consolation. It cannot alleviate the oppressive presence of a being, in time and life, that is incomprehensibly theirs. Nor can the artist who shuns an experience that demolishes a pre-conceived order, stay out of it; for the composition above life that he, the esthetic God, may conjure out of words will not resist the flood of life. He may drown this his timely being, it will float up again. While Beckett's works are comic, his sad clowns themselves are incapable of Joyce's Homeric laughter beyond the things: 7 " . . . ah if I could laugh . . . but I can't do it . . . perhaps it's '

It seems to be Joyce (Youdi) who, in Molloy, is rubbing his hands, saying: "life is a

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one of those gifts that can't be acquired". (Un, 165) "I was born grave as others syphilitic". (Ma, 18) At best they may be capable of the "risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh". (Wa, 48)8 Their concern with sin and guilt is not as incidental as they themselves sometimes want to believe. Beckett's bums were striving for heights above life that are God's, if He exists. And, in analogy to Aristotle's tragic hero, because they proceed so high (or low, mystically speaking these are interchangeable terms), their fall is terrible or inspiring and perhaps cathartic. This fall does not happen once, but is, nightmarishly, prolonged as if never ending ("I can't go on, I'll go on"). What they leam through it, in flashes hastily wiped away, is that the guilty God, for whom they search to crucify him, upon whom they want to foist all changing existence, will only be found in themselves. They are guilty, they are the guilty gods. The artist's amorality is not a paradise of unconcernedness beyond evil and good, beyond guilt. But rather, as with Thomas Mann, guilt is in man's very living: and the artist, seeker of truth, who in his imagination lives more intensely the life of man, will more intensely become guilty. To be, to be in life and experience, to live, to act, is to be guilty. A participation in life is also a participation in guilt. This fact, the subtle, comic, self-deceiving, wandering moralists and Christians-turned-upsidedown know and forget: "in the toils of that obscure assize . . . to be is to be guilty". 9 Because life goes on, and art cannot still it, they must find their God, to hand Him back His guilt, namely life. But their own 'reasoning' closes circles, tighter and tighter, around the fact that they are 'alone, abandoned', that they are the guilty ones, or rather must again become guilty, guilty in and of life. The artist has awakened from his dream of an art without values, an art of superlife and stasis. He has to be born, spiritually, of his own will.10 The Beckettian artist, then, views the leap into a participation in the living paradox, to the brink of which his Cartesian failures have pushed him, as a step into guilt. This idea, on a general level, corresponds to the nature of action which Hegel finds exemplified in Sophocles' Antigone: thing of b e a u t y . . . and a joy for ever", and Moran's anguished, unheeded question characteristic of the post-Joycean artist: "Do you think he meant human life?" (220) 8 "One daren't even laugh any more." Waiting for Godot (New York, 1954), 8. "Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more." Endgame (New York, 1958), 19. 9 Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York, 1967), 95. 10 Malone calls himself an "old foetus". (51)

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. . . in that it is a self to itself, and proceeds to act, it lifts itself out of the state of simple immediacy, and itself sets up the division into two. By the act it gives up the specific character of the ethical life, that of being pure and simple certainty of immediate truth, and sets up the division of itself into self as active and reality which is over against it and therefore negative. By the Act it thus becomes Guilt. . . . the act is itself this diremption, this affirming itself for itself, and establishing over against this an alien external reality. That such a reality exists is due to the deed itself, and is the outcome of it. Hence, innocence is an attribute merely of the want of action [nonaction], a state like the mere being of a stone, and one which is not even true of a child. (Ph, 488)

(Here, in part, may be the explanation of their life-long love for 'pebbles'.) God may have made man and given him paradise, but it was man who gave himself life beyond the 'garden of animals' by picking the fruit of knowledge and thus acquiring his 'original sin', a concept which looms so large in Beckett's novels.11 As we have seen, not even death can bring the dream of an 'Eden without exit'. Man is pictorially represented by the religious mind in this way: it happened once as an event, with no necessity about it, that he lost the form of harmonious unity with himself by plucking the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was driven from the state of innocence, from Paradise, from the garden of animals, and from nature offering its bounties without man's toil. Since this self-concentration on the part of the existent consciousness has straightaway the character of becoming discordant with itself, Evil appears as the first actual expression of the self-concentrated consciousness. And because the thoughts of good and evil are utterly opposed, and this opposition is not yet broken down, this consciousness is essentially and merely evil. (Ph, 770/1)

For Hegel life and guilt are inseparable, and the courageous step into experience is one into guilt. While for him an attainment of the absolute can only come through a giving up of innocence, the Beckettian 'incurious seekers' try to reach or retain an innocence that they know is not theirs in this life. This life, the only one conceivable to the Beckettians, is a being in flux, becoming, time. Thus their denial of life, as artists and men, is a denial of time. While on Bloomsday "time stood still",12 triumphantly, these latter-day Joyceans cannot stem the flow of time which threatens to wash them from their Cartesian rock of indifference into the shoreless 11

"The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his 'soci malorum', the sin of having been born." Beckett, Proust, 49. 12 Levin, 132.

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sea of life.13 Time, the 'double-headed monster', is also the monster of life and guilt. While those who feel damned want to hand back this damnation to God, 14 they link it with "all idea of beginning and end". (Un, 144) Only half-heartedly they maintain the illusion of having eliminated themselves from time: " . . . the new yearsays nothing new". (Wa, 132/3) The Unnamable claims that "Years is one of Basil's ideas" (28), then again hopes "that time ends its meal and pain comes to an end" (131) and again asserts that "today is the first day". (159) The inconceivability of an existence outside time takes on frightful dimensions in The Unnamable, but it is in How It Is that the immeasurability of an existence without time takes on the vast proportions of Hegel's "bad infinity" (schlechte Unendlichkeit).15 Since the Beckett metaphysicians cannot accept beginning and end, the continuity of their existence, their "instant without bounds", can only be conceived of as a progression of empty seconds for "all time". This "eternity is itself, as bad infinity, an imagined time without end"; it is only an "eternity of reflection". It is a product of the "metaphysics of ratiocination", 16 a product of the Cartesian who will not let go fully of the old logic. the question may be asked, off the record, w h y time doesn't pass, doesn't pass f r o m you, w h y it piles u p all about y o u , instant o n instant, o n all sides, deeper a n d deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, others' time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries y o u grain by grain neither dead n o r alive, with n o m e m o r y o f anything, n o h o p e o f anything, n o knowledge o f anything, n o history and n o prospects, buried under the seconds . . . (Un, 143)

This "eternity" is the Beckettian's substitute for a transcendence of time

13

Beckett's novels are a curious response to Proust's artistic intention (as translated by Beckett) to "describe men, even at the risk of giving them the appearance of monstrous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater place than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure, because, like giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their lives - so far apart in Time." (Proust, 2) 14 "there's a god for the damned". (Un, 159) 15 See Dieter Wellershoff, Der Gleichgültige: Versuche über Hemingway, Camus, Benn und Beckett (Köln and Berlin, 1963), 121: "ein unaufhörlicher Progressus der Negationen, ein dauerndes Sterben in der von Hegel so bezeichneten 'schlechten Unendlichkeit' ". This is the only substantial reference to Hegel I have come across in Beckett scholarship. 18 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ii, 253.

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through time.17 True rest therefore remains unattainable. " . . . this eternity remains part of an unattainable beyond insofar as it remains mere progress without end". (Lo, ii, 97) How close Beckett and Hegel at times come is evidenced in the following coincidence of examples. While the Unnamable rejects the parallel to Prometheus, because he was finally saved and thus escaped his almost endless suffering, Hegel sees in this same "measurelessness" of Prometheus' suffering an example of "bad infinity". (A, i, 450) In How It Is the protagonist calculates with vast numbers (142-53) and repeatedly gasps at the "vast tracts of time" into which his life has vanished (e.g., 20). Now and then he fishes a "good moment" out of his eternity to hold, to feel time. Of a moment lived in his past and relived in his fiction, he says: "that must have lasted a good moment with that I have lasted a moment" (31), or he will "drink deep of the seconds delicious moments and vistas". (59) But the delicious moments soon drown in "monster silences vast tracts of time perfect nothingness". (80/1) Whatever moments the indifferent imagination seizes, it will create no sense of time lived. " . . . millions of times each time the first". (133) Without a past, the future too becomes an "atrocious spectacle on into the black night of boundless futurity" (137) : 18 this is the "empty abyss of the Absolute". (Ph, 803) So, after every moment feebly felt, the nameless protagonist has to "find something else to last". (32)19 From this perspective, the central concern of How It Is is that of time and the feeble attempts to regain it. This may indicate a turn of Beckett's fiction. God too is associated with time here, whether in terms of salvation or damnation, is undecided. curse G o d n o s o u n d m a k e mental note o f the hour and wait midday midnight curse G o d or bless him and wait watch in hand but the dark but the days that word again what about them with n o m e m o r y tear a shred from the sack make knots or the cord t o o weak (40) " " . . .erst wenn die Untrennbarkeit von Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit sich als ihr [i.e., Endlichkeit] eigentlicher Sinn erwiesen hat, ist die wahre affirmative Unendlichkeit geboren." Christa Dulckeit-v. Arnim, "Die Dialektik der drei endlichen Seinsbereiche als Grundlage der Hegelschen Logik", Philosophisches Jahrbuch, LXVI (1958), 73. 18 The "dialectical movement" which the Beckett characters deny their allegiance "reveals reality as a present which is situated between a past and a future, or, in other words, as a synthesis which unites the identity of the past with the negativity of the future". Alan B. Brinkley, "Time in Hegel's Phenomenology", Tulane Studies in Philosophy, IX (1960), 6. 19 The time-scape of Beckett's plays too is clearly that of "bad infinity": "Vladimir: That passed the time. Estragon: It would have passed in any case. Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly." Godot, 31.

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In the five novels we are discussing, however, the heroes are more confident of their being above a need for time, as confident, at times, as Schopenhauer and his Indian philosophers.20 But these assertions will not hide the truth: "yes, they've inflicted the notion of time on me too". ([/«, 52)

"They" have inficted the notion of damnation, and with it of salvation, but above all the notion of time. It is through life only, a submission to time, change, growth, that paradise, the absolute, be it hell, heaven or 20

Access to Indian philosophy and art was, of course, rather limited in Schopenhauer's time. However, a more detailed knowledge would have provided Schopenhauer with additional reasons for his enthusiasm. Thus, the Indian philosopher and artist are characterized by a profound indifference to historical interest and a tendency toward a stasis that is emphasized by repetition, variation and a circular presentation of his material: not unlike Schopenhauer and Beckett himself. A more profound parallel could be drawn between Beckett's prose and some implications of Indian art theory. On one level of comprehension Beckett's novels could be said to attempt a stilling of the world of time, space and causality (and the self imprisoned therein) by a presentation in which one of its aspects cancels the other, leaving an elusive sense of the Void. Or, in less absolute terms, that the difference between life and art is that between participation ('giving and taking') and contemplation. This difference is expressed by two terms of Indian esthetics, bhava and rasa. The former denotes the specific, individual, dynamic, interest-bound emotion portrayed, in a drama for instance; the latter, the corresponding 'sentiment' in the ideal audience which is universal, static, disinterested, generic, contemplative, repose: a "will-less" and "pure act of understanding", as Beckett describes the Proustian stasis (Proust, 70). All incidents and individual emotions enter into the central rasa as aufgehoben. This sentiment can, according to some estheticians, approximate a 'beautiful' sense of void in varying degrees, an idea which recalls Schopenhauer's contention (regarded with sympathy by Beckett) that all art aspires toward the condition of music as a condition preliminary to the extinction of self and world. In the Mandukya-Upanishad consciousness is divided into four states which bear a 'distant analogy' to Murphy's mind: wakefulness (experience of life in all its duality and conflict irreconciled), dream (in which a 'new world' is fashioned by the liberated will), deep or sound sleep (in which all duality is reconciled in the suspension of consciousness), and finally the actualization and permanence of deep sleep, the achievement of oneness of self and world in the Void. It is this latter state of consciousness, or nothingness, which the awakening of rasa as the 'true nature of the self' may adumbrate or point to, a sentiment too elusive for the time-hounded Beckettians to hold. - Hegel too was interested in and knowledgeable of Indian art and philosophy. But, characteristically, his evaluation is diametrically opposed to Schophenauer's and much more in tune with the frustrations of Beckett's heroes. For Hegel Indian art is characterized by an unbridled tendency toward abstraction on the one hand and an extreme concern with the physical aspect of life on the other, a discrepancy which the works of Indian art leave unreconciled. The Indian's notion of time is abstractly negative and dismisses life into the measurelessness of bad infinity, which accounts for the 'Masslosigkeit' of such works as the Mahabharata. Hegel sees in Indian art a helpless fluctuation between the contracted form of essence, atman (man stripped to his essential nothingness) and the expansive form, brahman (the All beyond all illusion of maya). Both concepts are abstractions from time and becoming, and therefore empty and incapable of artistic representation (see especially A, i, 326-46).

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nothing, can be reached. Time and the absolute are not entities 'eternally apart', but dialectically, paradoxically one - this is above all Hegel's 'contradictory' truth in the Phenomenology: T i m e is just the n o t i o n definitely existent, a n d presented to consciousness in the f o r m of e m p t y intuition. H e n c e spirit necessarily appears in time, a n d it appears in time so l o n g as it does n o t grasp its pure n o t i o n , i.e., so long as it does not annul time. T i m e is the p u r e self in external f o r m , a p p r e h e n d e d in intuition, and n o t grasped and understood by the self, it is the n o t i o n apprehended only through intutition. W h e n this notion grasps itself, it supersedes its time character (conceptually), c o m p r e h e n d s intuition, and is intuition c o m p r e h e n d e d and comprehending. T i m e therefore appears as spirit's destiny and necessity, w h e r e spirit is n o t yet c o m p l e t e within itself . . . (800)

The imperfection of becoming to the Beckettian artists meant an impaired freedom. Finding their freedom empty, and finding that only through becoming could their freedom come to life, they invented a G o d on Whom to blame this inescapable paradox. He is the creator, He is guilty of an innocence thrown into the stream of time. For Him they search, by searching for their own true being. For it is they alone who have created a world for themselves which is vast and empty and never ending, a world where G o d is dead. They cannot find G o d , the guilty and the saving one, because He is in time, their time. Eden, the 'unmediated', timeless landscape of innocence has moved and been transformed, by man, seeker of truth, into a timescape of guilt. Man of time, who reared his head above life and time and guilt into a realm of divine indifference, of unlimited creative freedom or just of perceptive absence, re-creating a paradise beyond value and death, has realized that dreams do not outlast life: art does not free from life, but is of living man, of time. If he is to assert his godliness, his creative and perceptive participation in the absolute, he has to accept humanity and his life. A s the Beckett people retrace a senseless life to its origin, they become fully aware that this 'end' is still their origin, a call for a beginning, the leap. 'Dis-becoming' is also 'becoming'; with the 'dis-becoming' of an empty life, perhaps the beginning of a new one has come. If man is G o d , he will have to realize this potential, as man and artist, not outside of the object of Begreifen, negative or positive, outside of life, but through it. Outside is nothing - unstable, abstract, word-contaminated, human nothing: "an abstract, unmediated idea". The Cartesian, mystic G o d of abstract dreams will have to take life

110

THE ARTIST AS THE GUILTY GOD

and guilt upon himself. Coming from his adventure with timeless, inarticulate, 'essential', abstract Mr. Knott, the artist in a Godless age stands again on the brink of art, of an art that is, without relief, a praying, probing, rejecting and embracing of human life above the conventions of nihilism. His accusing voice accuses himself. The paradoxes of life are his. "All here is sin": all here is life. He, the artist, more intensely than others, and forever prophetically, is the guilty God. Beckett's world is populated by bums, down-and-outs, ill-washed, illclad, stumbling ghosts, parodies of man's ambitions. The Beckettians are ill of hearing, ill of sight and memory. They are cruel. Lady McCann, in understandable indignation, threw a stone at Watt. But the Ladies McCann have a habit of throwing stones at criminals, fallen women, philosophers and prophets alike. And philosophers the Beckettians are, and prophets of silence. Reliving the Cartesian retreat to the I, and not finding an assuring God, they find themselves on the brink of an incurable either-or, the world of time, their past, and an empty 'now' squeezed in between the days gone and those to come. In search of a means to decide the alternative, and finding themselves 'reduced to' logic, to the word, they discover that the alternative too is unstable; they discover that everything 'is' its opposite. Whatever they cast away, to be themselves, returns as a form of the self. In terms of Hegel's thinking, they have discovered the instability of human reflection, the paradox, the dialectic of being, and the necessity of a Begreifen which is itself dialectic. But throughout the novels, the Beckettian refuses to accept what he knows; and he also refuses to ignore it. The paradox of being and nothing is reflected in what he strives for, to be nothing. This paradox we have seen active in several of his concerns, above all that of art. It is in the freedom of the artist, in the imagination liberated from causality and time, that the Beckettians seek to attain their rest, their absolute. Here they seek to attain nothing and the stature of a God who has no need to create. But the dialectic of being and nothing informs all manifestations of the Beckett dilemma. In order to be, they have to become. Whatever form of becoming they chose, 'becoming' or 'dis-becoming', they become 'guilty'. They are alone, sole masters of their art, God, but their existence also depends on that other form of negation, the negation of the self, so that they may continue to be. Under the rags of the Beckettian wanderer, a frustrated God fights for his kingdom. His inch-by-inch 'dis-becoming' brings him close to the dialectical Umschlag (reversal) of a new beginning. He has isolated himself

THE ARTIST AS THE GUILTY GOD

111

from the universal becoming of human Begreifen, the history of man as from his own history. But he finds that there his being lies, that he is human, "Spirit externalized and emptied into Time". (Ph, 807) It is in the memory of what he was that he must find himself. The 'distant laughter' at the confines of his voice is his other knowledge: that his frantically pursued 'dis-becoming' will not create silence, innocence. . . . it's like a confession, a last confession, you think it's finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don't come, the words fail, the breath fails, no, it's something else, it's an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me . . . (Un, 175) . . .the wild and desert waste of content with its constituent elements set free and detached, as also the thought-constituted personality of Stoicism, and the unresting disquiet of Skepticism - these compose the periphery of the circle of shapes and forms, which attend, an expectant and eager throng, round the birthplace of spirit as it becomes self-consciousness. Their centre is the yearning agony of the unhappy despairing self-consciousness, a pain which permeates all of them and is the common birth-pang at its production - the simplicity of the pure notion, which contains those forms as its moments. (Ph, 755)

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Brooks, Cleanth, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London, 1949). Cmarada, Geraldine, "Malone Dies: A Round of Consciousness", Symposium, XIV (1960), 199-212. Coe, Richard, Samuel Beckett (New York, 1964). - , "God and Samuel Beckett", in J. D. O'Hara, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1970), 91-113. Cohn, Ruby, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N. J., 1962). Coreth, Emerich, Das dialektische Sein in Hegels Logik (Vienna, 1952). Delye, Huguette, Samuel Beckett, ouLa Philosophie de 1'absurde ( Aix-en-Provence, 1960). Descartes, René, A Discourse on Method and Meditations, in A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (London and New York, 1960). -, The Passions of the Soul, in Descartes: Selections, ed. Ralph M. Easton (New York, 1927), 361-403. Driver, Tom F., "Beckett by the Madeleine", Columbia University Forum, IV (1961), 21-25. Dulckeit-v. Arnim, Christa, "Die Dialektik der drei endlichen Seinsbereiche als Grundlage der Hegeischen Logik", Philosophisches Jahrbuch, LXVI (1958), 72-93. Ecke, W. Ver, "Zur Negativität bei Hegel", Hegel-Studien, IV (1967), 215-18. Federman, Raymond, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965). Fletcher, John, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London, 1964). - , "Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers", Comparative Literature, XVII (1965), 43-56. Flügge, Johannes, Die sittlichen Grundlagen des Denkens: Hegels existentielle Erkenntnisgesinnung (Hamburg, 1953). Friedman, Melvin, "The Novels of Samuel Beckett: An Amalgam of Joyce and Proust", Comparative Literature, XII (1960), 47-58. - , "Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman", Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, I (1960), 22-36. -, "Molloy's 'Sacred' Stones", Romance Notes, IX (1967), 8-11. Frye, Northrop, "The Nightmare Life in Death", Hudson Review, XIII (1960), 442-48. Gauss, Hermann, "Über die Bedeutung und Grenzen des dialektischen Prinzips in der Philosophie (Piaton und Hegel)", Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, V (1951), 321-42. Gessner, Nikiaus, Die Unzulänglichkeit der Sprache: Eine Untersuchung über Formzerfall und Beziehungslosigkeit bei Samuel Beckett (Zurich, 1957). Gilbert, Stuart, James Joyce's Ulysses (New York, 1952). Glicksberg, Charles, "Samuel Beckett's World of Fiction", Arizona Quarterly, XVIII (1962), 32-47. Glockner, Hermann, "Die Ästhetik in Hegels System der Philosophie", Verhandlungen des zweiten Hegelkongresses (Berlin, 1932), 149-67. Greenberg, Alvin, "The Death of the Psyche: A Way to the Self in the Contemporary Novel", Criticism, VIII (1966), 1-18. Haerdter, Michael, "Samuel Beckett inszeniert fas Endspiel", in Materialien zu Becketts Endspiel (Frankfurt, 1968), 36-111. Hamilton, Carol, "Portrait in Old Age: The Image of Man in Beckett's Trilogy", Western Humanities Review, XVI (1962), 157-65. Hamilton, Kenneth, "Negative Salvation in Samuel Beckett", Queens Quarterly, LXIX (1962), 102-11. Hartley, Anthony, "Samuel Beckett", Spectator (October 23, 1953), 458-59. Hartmann, Nicolai, Hegel [Part II of Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus] (Berlin, 1960).

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Moog, Willy, "Der Bildungsbegriff Hegels", Verhandlungen des dritten Hegelkongresses (Tübingen and Haarlem), 1934, 167-86. Mueller, Gustav E., "The Hegel Legend of 'Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis'", Journal of the History of Ideas, XIX (1958), 411-14. Oelmüller, Willi, "Hegels Satz vom Ende der Kunst und das Problem der Philosophie der Kunst nach Hegel", Philosophisches Jahrbuch, LXXIII (1965), 75-94. Pöggeler, Otto, "Zur Deutung Ant Phänomenologie des Geistes", Hegel-Studien, 1(1961), 255-94. Ransom, John Crowe, "Poetry: I. The Formal Analysis", Kenyon Review, IX (1947), 436-56. Rehder, Helmut, "Of Structure and Symbol: The Significance of Hegel's Phenomenology for Literary Criticism", in D. C. Travis, ed., A Hegel Symposium (Austin, 1962), 115-137. Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924). Rickels, Milton, "Existentialist Themes in Beckett's Unnamable", Criticism, IV (1962), 134-47. Robinson, Michael, The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (New York, 1970). Rossi, Mario, "Drei Momente der Hegeischen Dialektik: Ihre Entstehung, ihre Formulierung, ihre Auflösung", Hegel-Jahrbuch, I, 1 (1961), 11-23. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Situations I (Paris, 1947). Schmitz, Herrmann, "Der Gestaltbegriff in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes", in Richard Alewyn, ed., Gestaltprobleme der Dichtung (Bonn, 1957), 315-34. Schopenhauer, Arthur, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vols. I—II of Sämtliche Werke, ed. W. v. Löhneysen (Darmstadt, 1968). Schwarz, Justus, "Die Denkform der Hegeischen Logik", Kant-Studien, L (1958/9), 37-76. Scott, Nathan A., Samuel Beckett (New York, 1965). Selz, Jean, "L'Homme finissant de Samuel Beckett", Les Lettres Nouvelles, V (1957), 120-23. Sesemann, W., "Zum Problem der Dialektik", Blätter für deutsche Philosophie, IX (1935/6), 28-61. Shenker, Israel, "Moody Man of Letters", New York Times, May 6, 1956, 1, 3, col. 2. Silesius, Angelus [Johann Scheffler], Cherubinischer Wandersmann, vol. III of Sämtliche poetische Werke, ed. H. L. Held (München, 1952). Tindall, William York, "Beckett's Bums", Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, II (1958), 3-15. Wellershoff, Dieter, Der Gleichgültige: Versuche über Hemingway, Camus, Benn und Beckett (Köln and Berlin, 1963). Wiese, Benno von, "Das Problem der ästhetischen Versöhnung bei Schiller und Hegel", Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, IX (1965), 167-88.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 49 Alewyn, Richard, 60 Allsop, Kenneth, 82 Angelus Silesius, 88 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 83 Aristotle, 104 d'Aubarède, Gabriel, 81

Duthuit, Georges, 78

Baillie, J . B., 11 Bassenge, Friedrich, 11 Bataille, Georges, 57 Beckett, Samuel, passim Benn, Gottfried, 106 Bergsma, A. J., 48 Biemel, Walter, 48 Bloch, Ernst, 60, 89 Bollnow, Otto, 86 Boumann, Ludwig, 11 Bowles, Patrick, 21 Brée, Germaine, 67 Brick, Alan, 86 Brinkley, Alan B., 107 Broch, Hermann, 95 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 57 Brooks, Cleanth, 84 Bruno, Giordano, 83 Burke, Kenneth, 13

Federman, Raymond, 46 Flaubert, Gustave, 40 Fletcher, John, 14, 29 Flügge, Johannes, 48 Friedman, Melvin, 26, 81, 85 Frye, Northrop, 81, 85 Fuerst, Norbert, 7

Calder, John, 30 Camus, Albert, 106 Cmarada, Geraldine, 26, 74 Coat, Tal, 78 Coe, Richard, 74, 86, 101 Cohn, Ruby, 14, 18, 21 Coreth, Emerich, 51 Dante Alighieri, 83 Delye, Huguette, 74 Descartes, René, 31-6, passim Driver, Tom F., 82 Dulckeit-v. Arnim, Christa, 107

Ecke, W. Ver, 47 Eliade, Mircea, 26 Ellmann, Richard, 83 Ermatinger, Emil, 87 Esslin, Martin, 78

Gauss, Hermann, 48 Gessner, Niklaus, 80 Gide, André, 82, 95 Gilbert, Stuart, 83 Glicksberg, Charles, 27, 102 Goethe, Johann W., 87, 89 Greenberg, Alvin, 40 Haerdter, Michael, 6 Hamilton, Carol, 101 Hamilton, Kenneth, 28 Hartley, Anthony, 27, 74 Hartmann, Nicolai, 48, 49, 51, 88 Hassan, Ihab, 28, 33, 85, 90, 96 Hayman, David, 23 Hegel, G. W. F., passim Heidegger, Martin, 88 Hemingway, Ernest, 106 Hirsch, Emmanuel, 93 Hirt, Ernst, 86 Hoffman, Frederick J., 38 Hoffmeister, Johannes, 11, 55 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 53, 100, 101 Hossfeld, Paul, 59 Hunzicker, Rudolf, 87

INDEX

Ionesco, Eugène, 88, 91 Jacobsen, Josephine, 17, 27, 66, 74, 82 James, Henry, 82 Joyce, James, 27, 28, 40, 81, 82-6, 88, 90, 91, 96, 98, 103, 106 Kaufmann, Walter, 89 Kenner, Hugh, 30, 31, 39, 40, 79, 84, 96 Kern, Edith, 23 Leibniz, Gottfried W. v., 67, 100 Levin, Harry, 83, 105 Loewenberg, Jacob, 60 Loy, J. Robert, 26 Mackworth, Cecily, 23 Malraux, André, 32 Mann, Thomas, 28, 82, 96, 104 Marissel, André, 28, 74 Mason, Ellsworth, 83 Masson, André, 78 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 16, 26, 66 Mercier, Vivian, 18, 29 Miller, Henry, 28 Moog, Willi, 50 Mueller, Gustav E., 51 Mueller, William R., 17, 27, 66, 74, 82 Muschg, Walter, 87 Musil, Robert, 95 Nabokov, Vladimir, 86 Nohl, Hermann, 51 Novalis, 93 Oelmüller, Willi, 95 O'Hara, J. D„ 102 Plato, 48 Pöggeler, Otto, 61 Proust, Marcel, 34, 42, 53, 78, 81, 85, 86, 89, 105, 106 Ransom, John C., 77, 84 Rehder, Helmut, 47, 89 Rhein, Phillip H., 7 Richards, I. A., 84 Rickels, Milton, 102 Robinson, Michael, 95 Rosset, Barney, 21 Rossi, Mario, 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26, 48, 57

Schlegel, Friedrich, 93 Schmitz, Hermann, 60, 87 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 53, 67, 108 Schwarz, Justus, 48 Scott, Nathan A., 82 Selz, Jean, 75 Sesemann, W., 52 Shenker, Israel, 29, 30, 81, 86 Sophocles, 105 Sutherland, W. O. S., 23 Tindall, William York, 26, 82 Travis, D. C., 47 Veitch, John, 31 Velde, Bram van, 78 Vico, Giovanni, 83 Voltaire, 100 Wellershoff, Dieter, 106 Woolf, Virginia, 27

DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edited by C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Series Practica 1. Robert G. Cohn, Mallarmé's Masterpiece: New Findings. 1966. 144 pp.

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23. Elisabeth Th. M. van de Laar, The Inner Structure of Wuthering Heights: A Study of an Imaginative Field. 1969. 262 pp.

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24. Bernard L. Einbond, Samuel Johson's Allegory 1971. 104 pp.

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27. Richard Vernier, 'Poesie ininterrompue'et la poétique de Paul Edward. 1971. 180 pp.

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28. Hugh L. Hennedy, Unitiy in Barsteshire. 1971. 144 pp.

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35. Roman Jakobson and Lawrence G. Jones, Shakespeare's Verbal Art in Th'Expence of Spirit. 1970. 32 pp.

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