The New Samuel Beckett Studies 1108559336, 9781108559331

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The New

SAMUEL BECKETT Studies

Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

THE N EW SAMUEL BECKETT STUDIES

This collection explains developments within Beckett Studies and why he has emerged as one of the most iconic writers of the twentieth century. It also proposes a new interpretive framework that explores both the expanded canon, which has doubled the volume of his works in the last ten years, and the new methods used to approach it. This book covers all the most recent approaches to the study of Beckett, such as archival research, queer theory, mathematical readings of literature, neuro-scientific approaches, translation studies, and disability studies. These new approaches are shown to be relevant and necessary to provide a renewed understanding of the lasting value of Beckett’s works. jean-michel rabate´ , is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, a curator of Slought Foundation, an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, former President of the Samuel Beckett society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited forty books on art, modernism, psychoanalysis and philosophy. His recent publications include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), and the edited volume After Derrida (2018).

twenty-first-century critical revisions This series addresses two main themes across a range of key authors, genres, and literary traditions. The first is the changing critical interpretations that have emerged since c.2000. Radically new interpretations of writers, genres, and literary periods have emerged from the application of new critical approaches. Substantial scholarly shifts have occurred too, through the emergence of new editions, editions of letters, and competing biographical accounts. Books in this series collate and reflect this rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical energies, and wide varieties of revisionary scholarship, to summarize, analyze, and assess the impact of contemporary critical strategies. Designed to offer critical pathways and evaluations, and to establish new critical routes for research, this series collates and explains a dizzying array of criticism and scholarship in key areas of twenty-first-century literary studies.

Forthcoming Books in This Series Michelle Kohler The New Emily Dickinson Studies Joanna Freer The New Pynchon Studies Mark Byron The New Ezra Pound Studies Matt Cohen The New Walt Whitman Studies Jennifer Haytock & Laura Rattray The New Edith Wharton Studies Kirk Curnutt & Suzanne Del Gizzo The New Hemingway Studies Douglas Mao The New Modernist Studies

THE NEW SAMUEL BECKETT STUDIES edited by JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ University of Pennsylvania

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314– 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108471855 doi:10.1017/9781108559331 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Rabate, Jean-Michel, 1949– editor. title: The new Samuel Beckett studies : Volume 1 / edited by Jean-Michel Rabate. description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Twenty-first century critical revisions | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2018061319 | isbn 9781108471855 (alk. paper) subjects: lcsh: Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989 – Criticism and interpretation. classification: lcc pr6003.e282 z781727 2019 | ddc 848/.91409–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061319 isbn 978-1-108-47185-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors

page vii viii 1

Editor’s Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté

17

i. the expanded canon 1. Digitizing Beckett

19

Dirk Van Hulle

2. “All the Variants”

36

Mark Nixon

3. Beckett’s Letters: The Edition and the Corpus

48

Dan Gunn

4. The Evolution of Beckett’s Poetry

65

Marjorie Perloff

ii. new contexts and intertexts 5. Beckett’s Critique of Literature

85 87

John Bolin

6. Beckett, Political Memory, and the Sense of History

103

Emilie Morin

7. Samuel Beckett as Contemporary Artist

118

Judith Wilkinson

8. Beckett, Radio, and the Voice

134

Llewellyn Brown v

Contents

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iii. new hermeneutic codes 9. Beckett’s Queer Art of Failure

155 157

Calvin Thomas

10. “Que voulez-vous?” Beckett, Nerve Theory and Literary Form

175

Ulrika Maude

11. Beckett’s Disabled Language

195

Laura Salisbury

12. Beckett and Mathematics

215

Baylee Brits

13. Beckett’s Bilingual Explorations

231

Nadia Louar

14. Waiting for Godot among the Prisoners

248

Lance Duerfahrd

Index

261

Figures

1.1 Synoptic sentence view in the Beckett Digital Manuscript page 23 Project, enabling the comparison of all the (English and French) versions of any selected sentence (in this case, sentence 186). 1.2 On-the-fly result of the CollateX tool, integrated as 24 a “collation engine” in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. 1.3 “Statistics” tool of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, 28 showing the percentages of deleted and added words in several of Beckett’s works, written in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s, www.beckettarchive.org/stats.jsp 1.4 Development of the ratio of deleted and added passages in 29 both the French and English manuscripts and typescripts, www.beckettarchive.org/stats.jsp

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Contributors

john bolin, a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, has published articles on Flaubert, Coetzee, Surrealism, Eleutheria, and the links between Murphy and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. His book Beckett and the Modern Novel (2013) surveys Beckett’s French readings. baylee brits has completed a dissertation on the mathematics of the transfinite (Cantor) and texts by modernist authors at the University of New South Wales. In 2016, she coedited Aesthetics after Finitude with Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland. Her book Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction was published in 2018. llewellyn brown teaches French literature at the Lycée international of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. His latest books are Savoir de l’amour (2012), Beckett, Lacan and the Voice (2016), Marguerite Duras, écrire et détruire: un paradoxe de la création (2018). He directs the “Samuel Beckett” series for publisher Lettres modernes – Minard (Paris). lance duerfahrd has taught at Yale, Columbia, Amherst College, and Purdue University. He is the author of The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis. He is currently making a documentary on Rick Cluchey titled Was I Sleeping. dan gunn is a novelist, critic, and translator, as well as being one of the editors of the four-volume Letters of Samuel Beckett and editor of the Cahiers Series. He is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris where he directs the Center for Writers & Translators. In 2017 he was designated as editor of the letters of Muriel Spark. nadia louar, Professor of French literature at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, specializes in Beckett Studies, with an emphasis on translation studies and literary bilingualism, and on Women’s viii

List of Contributors

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Studies. She is the author of Figure(s) du bilinguisme beckettien (2017), the guest editor of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui special issue on bilingualism (2018) and of the forthcoming Black Men, White Gals: Sexual and Racial Stereotypes in Contemporary Women’s Writing in France. ulrika maude is Reader in Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She has published on modernist literature, perception, medicine, and the philosophies of embodiment, including Beckett, Technology and the Body (2009). She has co-edited Beckett and Phenomenology (2009), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (2015), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature (2018). emilie morin, a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York, is the author of Beckett’s Political Imagination (2017) and Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (2009), and the editor of Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (2014) and Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable (2015). mark nixon is the director of the Beckett International Foundation and the University of Reading’s Beckett Fellow. He has been the President of the Samuel Beckett Society (2013–2015) and is the director of the Beckett International Foundation. His numerous essays, edited collections and books include Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 (2011). He edited Samuel Beckett: Echo’s Bones (2014). marjorie perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University. Her many books include The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment: AvantGarde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986), and Unoriginal Genius (2011). Her 21st-Century Modernism (2002) offered a reconsideration of the modernist canon. jean-michel rabate´ , is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, a curator of Slought Foundation, an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, former President of the Samuel Beckett society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited forty books on art, modernism, psychoanalysis and philosophy. His recent publications include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), and the edited volume After Derrida (2018).

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List of Contributors

laura salisbury is Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on literary modernism and Samuel Beckett, including Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). She also has publications on the relationship between modernism, modernity, and neuroscience, including the co-edited volume Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems (Palgrave, 2010) and a forthcoming book on modernism, aphasiology, and the materiality of language. Her current book project is a cultural history of waiting in modernity. calvin thomas, Professor of English at Georgia State University, has published on gender, sexuality, and the body, with an especial interest in straight responses to queer theory. He is the author of Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing (2013), Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (2008), and Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (1996). He is also the editor of Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology (2019) and Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (2000). dirk van hulle, Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp, is the editor of the new Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015). With Mark Nixon, he supervise the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He has published Textual Awareness (2004), Manuscript Genetics (2008), and Modern Manuscripts (2014). He coauthored Samuel Beckett’s Library with Mark Nixon (2013). He has edited Beckett’s Company (2009) and the first modules in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. judith wilkinson is a Researcher in Contemporary Art at Tate. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, The Guardian, Tate Etc., Afterall, Apollo, Black Dog Press, Canadian Art and the Journal of Beckett Studies, among numerous other academic and contemporary art publications. Her forthcoming book Samuel Beckett: Contemporary Artist (Bloomsbury 2019) examines Beckett as a practicing artist working in sound, moving-image, performance and installation art.

Editor’s Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté

It is an understatement to say that we have a “new Beckett” on our hands. Indeed, the corpus of Beckett’s works that we read today has little in common with the Beckett canon of just a decade ago. In less than ten years, a textual revolution has taken place and it is still going on. It combines the discovery of unpublished notes and manuscripts, their digital editions, and new critical approaches attempting to take stock of a fast-evolving corpus. The publication of the four volumes of the Letters of Samuel Beckett1 that began in 2009 has brought a host of hitherto unknown details about Beckett’s readings, meetings, loves, and interests. Daniel Gunn has calculated that Beckett wrote an average of one letter a day during his active career, and he condenses in this book’s pages the many lessons one can derive from them. The genetic version of texts like The Unnamable,2 published in 2014 as part of the “Beckett Digital Manuscript Project,” has modified our interpretation of this difficult but groundbreaking novel. The 2012 publication of the Collected Poems3 has doubled the number of poetic texts available, whether by adding drafts, unpublished texts, or different versions of some poems in two languages. Marjorie Perloff, who has defended for a long time the idea that Beckett was primarily a poet, will examine these lyrical treasures in a new key. Mark Nixon gave us a detailed analysis of the German Diaries1936–19374 in 2011, covering Beckett’s fateful trip to Nazi Germany. Here, he covers a broader array of unpublished texts. In 2014, the rejected short story “Echo’s Bones” was made available, and indeed, given its intertextual riches and semantic opacity, it has changed our sense of how Beckett had progressed and created a specific English prose style just before he shifted to French in the writing of poems and short stories. We now have access to notes in Latin culled from Arnold Geulincx, which helps us peer into the complex philosophical references of many texts, and thanks to the enormous archive kept in the Library of Trinity College we understand better Beckett’s lasting fascination for 1

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psychoanalysis, which was not limited to Bion, his analyst, but included Freud, Jung, Jones, and other psychoanalysts. In 2011, eager readers were granted access to Beckett’s entire library; just by browsing in it, we can assess more accurately the impact of his readings of Pascal, Hölderlin, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Pinget, and many others, and thus comprehend both the role played by literature for Beckett, whose importance John Bolin shows, and take a closer look at the bilingual corpus of a writer who switched codes so easily – an original aspect of his oeuvre explored here by Nadia Louar. What creates this Beckettian revolution is not simply the augmentation of the corpus. Some of the unpublished texts had been known for some time to specialists, to scholars willing to research and decipher Beckett’s quasi-illegible handwriting at Reading University, where most of the manuscripts are kept, and in other archives like those in Dublin, Dartmouth, Austin, and Saint Louis. In fact, the expansion of the textual canon has triggered approaches that are both more text-based, and thus, perhaps, more “scientific,” but also more daring and exploratory in their borrowings from philosophy, literary criticism, recent Irish and European history, the neurosciences, and even mathematics, as we see in essays by Laura Salisbury, Ulrika Maude, and Baylee Brits. What is now happening in the field of Beckett studies repeats an evolution that was perceptible in the James Joyce studies of the 1980s. With Joyce, the combination of a new archive of drafts and first versions published by Garland and of methods inspired by critique génétique and post-structuralism revitalized the interpretation of texts that had been published before Joyce’s demise in 1941. Beckett’s death in December 1989, just after the Berlin Wall fell, gave rise to some pathos because of Beckett’s stature as a saintly man of modernism, while allowing for a loosening of the strict interpretation of his testament concerning editorial matters. This made possible a broader spectrum of publications, as Dirk van Hulle and Mark Nixon explain. Today, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to understand why Beckett turned to the theater when he wrote Waiting for Godot halfway through his first trilogy (Molly, Malone Meurt, and L’Innommable), creating the play that made him famous, without having read Eleutheria. The original French text of this entertaining farce was published by Editions de Minuit in 1995, but only because unauthorized English translations had been circulating. We are still waiting to have access to unfinished plays like Le Mime du Rêveur from 1954, not to speak of innumerable drafts, aborted sketches of plays, and abandoned prose texts. Even the minimalist style of some later

Editor’s Introduction

3

texts seems to be belied by their earlier drafts or typescripts. Thus, for instance, one can make better sense of the opaque and enigmatic Fizzles, those short dense texts of maximum three pages in their final version, if we know their first versions, when they were typed with lots of spaces on more than twenty sheets in the special collection at Dartmouth. In the same manner, the first drafts of Murphy and Watt make us share the personal crises, follow the false starts and probe the mental convolutions of the author, while throwing light on the numerous literary and philosophical allusions contained in these early novels.

* This undeniable success story in terms of publications, general interest, and hyper-productive scholarship leads to one central question: Why has Beckett become so popular today, when it seems that his work remains aloof, cynical, disabused, and is often deemed too “pessimistic” or downright nihilistic? What has Beckett to say to our shrinking world, to a global village marked by unprecedented technological development but also by widening discrepancies between the rich and the poor, a world riven by religious radicalism, ethnic intolerance, and exploding migrations, or to our recent urban and suburban culture in which gender fluidity is encouraged while short-term encounters can be arranged by swiping a thumb across a screen, this overheated planet in which environmental disasters loom large while many political regimes regress to archaic populism or drift to totalitarianism? Despite being very much work of the late twentieth century, Beckett’s texts, his later plays above all, remain relevant today in a way that cannot be rivaled by modernist predecessors like Joyce, Proust, and Woolf. True, these innovators were instrumental in ushering a revolution in literary language, but they died before World War II. Beckett’s life spanned a long period marked by two world wars and the independence of the Irish Free State, ending just when the Berlin Wall had fallen; he was one of those who knew of mass barbarism in the Holocaust (his close friend Péron died on May 1, 1945, after being held at Mauthausen concentration camp, in which brutal treatment and malnourishment destroyed his health), and he later objected to the widespread use of torture by the French army during the Algerian War of Independence. What is more, his work was able to respond to these moments of drama or catastrophe in a manner that was both historical and stylized or abstract, which avoided the danger of being trapped in local controversies or topical discussions. It has kept an indubitable appeal for situations that he could not foresee, like the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) or the destruction of parts

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of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina (2005), two dire moments in which human resilience was tested and performances of Waiting for Godot gained a new purchase. Let us take a closer look at Waiting for Godot, the play that made Beckett famous overnight. It is still today the most referenced and performed modern play. In the 1950s, the philosopher and essayist Günther Anders gave a prescient explanation of why this play was to become such a classic. In a thoughtful essay, Anders rejected the then dominant allegorical or religious interpretations. For him, Beckett’s negative parable presents characters who remain our contemporaries because of the very negativism exhibited by the plot and the dialogues. Vladimir and Estragon risk at any moment being swallowed by an absence of meaning, but this absence would be wrongly interpreted as pertaining to the “absurd.” Such a term was used and abused by early commentators, who tried to make sense of the play in the wake of Albert Camus and Sartrean existentialism. In fact, as Anders notes, if Didi and Gogo barely stay alive, in fact they no longer share a “world,” which means that they do not own a universe that coheres. In response to that, Waiting for Godot presents itself as a farce in which our two “paralyzed clowns” renounce any action as futile. From the start, there is “Rien à faire,” or “Nothing to be done,” which means that Didi and Gogo understand the primacy of the principle of “Nothing doing,” and will make sense of this nothingness creatively. Going on with their pointless activities, they assume that by dint of waiting they can prove that it was worth waiting, for any waiting is a waiting for something or someone. As Anders asserts, Didi and Gogo are “metaphysicians” in Heidegger’s sense: they still believe in meaning; they pay homage to meaning, a meaning left to an always postponed revelation. Here is no absurdity, even if the tramps appear to survive outside nature, time, and history. Because they embody a concept of “Being without Time,” their desultory antics offer a pointed satire of Heidegger’s first philosophy as deployed in Being and Time. This point was not lost for Adorno, who applied themes from Anders to his reading of Beckett’s Endgame.5 Anders goes further for, as he sees it, the irruption of the second couple made up of Lucky and Pozzo has the effect of an interpretation: the pair of new characters takes on a “deciphering function.”6 Indeed, Lucky and Pozzo, after they rush on the stage to break the tedium, embody the couple of the master and the slave with a vengeance. What happens is the splicing of two male couples, a “pseudocouple” and its darker double, which looks more like a “perverse couple.” Both are compared by Anders with the maris imaginaires (fictional husbands) prevalent in French fairy tales (BWT, 144).

Editor’s Introduction

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The abstract “pseudocouple” made up of Vladimir and Estragon meets the historically over-determined couple of the Master and Slave, a perverse couple occupied by games of power and subjection, of domination and abjection. The powerful allegory of alienation takes its full meaning once it is spliced with the paradigm of survival and mutual assistance displayed by Didi and Gogo. Beckett had worked with the concept of the “pseudocouple” when he wrote Mercier et Camier in French two years before he composed Godot. He was revitalizing Flaubert’s unforgettable couple of Bouvard and Pécuchet, one of the male pairs that launched literary modernism.7 If Mercier and Camier constitute Beckett’s first identifiable “pseudocouple,” it is because they function less as a symbiotic couple than as two stooges who, like Laurel and Hardy, create comedy by never reaching full synchronicity: Mercier and Camier “would arrive simultaneously at often contrary conclusions and simultaneously begin to state them.”8 Thus, anticipating Didi and Gogo, Mercier and Camier often try to get away from each other but without success, as in this typical passage: I’m off, said Camier. Leaving me to my fate, said Mercier. I knew it. You know my little ways, said Camier. No, said Mercier, but I was counting on your affection to help me serve my time. I can help you, said Camier, I can’t resurrect you. Take me by the hand, said Mercier, and lead me far away from here. I’ll trot at your side like a little puppy dog, or a tiny tot. And the day will come—.

(MC, 33)

This co-dependent banter interrupted by the author’s whimsy sets the tone for later “pseudocouples,” Moran father and Moran son in Molloy, Didi and Gogo of course, Hamm and Clov in Endgame, Pim and the narrator of How It Is, and so on. Meanwhile, the other couple made up of the Master and Slave follows a different logic. When Lucky and Pozzo enter with a bang, we discover a master all too pleased with himself accompanied by a slave apparently as satisfied with his fate: Lucky enjoys his servile condition because he does not have to worry about freedom any longer. What Hegel and Marx presented as the engine of history, the mechanism of exploitation and alienation moving steadily from Antiquity and the Middles Ages to the age of capitalistic production, is suddenly projected on the stage of Waiting for Godot as a delirious farce. A bitter farce, indeed, that brings back to mind a sense that history has a meaning, if only by

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reminding us that slaves can want to be enslaved, as we learn from theoreticians ranging from Etienne de La Boétie to G. W. F. Hegel. Thus historical or allegorical meaning appears only when it seems about to be denied. Anders analyzes this cogently: Since the early thirties when Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s theory of the class struggle began to fascinate French intellectuals, the famous image of the “master and slave” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was so deeply engraved in the consciousness of the generation born around 1900 that it occupies the place that the image of Prometheus held in the nineteenth century: it is now the image of man in general. Sartre is the main witness of this change. If in the Orestes of Les Mouches he presented a typical Promethean figure (as had Goethe, Shelley, Byron, and Ibsen’s Brandt) he then replaced the symbol by the Hegelian image. What is crucial in this new symbol is the alliance of “pluralization” and “antagonism”: Man in the singular becomes a pair of men; the individual (who, as a metaphysical self-made man, fought a Promethean struggle against the gods) is now replaced by men who fight each other for domination.9

This is why Didi and Gogo, surprisingly at first, seem to envy the other couple before being revolted by the extreme form of alienation it represents. They cannot help longing for the old times that Lucky and Pozzo incarnate; indeed, there were happier times when Lucky could sing and dance, whereas now he can only “think,” which means spout delirious gibberish; besides, this new time is spent in sadomasochistic games. In Anders’s reading, Waiting for Godot is saved from nihilism because of the systematic clowning of all the characters, survivors, and tormentors alike; having successfully integrated the two couples in a single orbit, Beckett taps the tradition of anarchist comedy invented by Charlie Chaplin. His play’s apparent indifference to meaning, hence to metaphysics and religion, allows audiences to rediscover the most basic ethical virtues, the bedrock of the human without humanism. Godot is not the name of God, but of what remains after God has vanished, as we can gauge in the powerful performance from the 1970s re-staged in the spring of 2018 by Ilan Ronen at the Jaffa Theater near Tel Aviv, in which the four actors spoke alternatively in Hebrew and Arabic. These four characters are thus less God’s clowns than the clowns who appear at the end of metaphysics, the paradox of Nietzschean clowns capable of offering some hope for peace. As Anders puts it: the character who earned most gratitude in our century was the woeful figure of the early Chaplin. Apparently farce became the last refuge for compassion, the complicity of the wretched our last comfort. Although the

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mere tone of humaneness which springs from this barren soil of meaninglessness offers only minimal comfort, although the comforting voice does not know why it comforts or who is the Godot it takes as an object of hope – it proves that warmth means more than meaning and also that it is not the metaphysician who has the last word, but only humanity’s friend.10

Beckett thus replaces the image of the suffering individual, who could still be identified with a suffering Christ, with his endlessly open dialectical pseudo-couples. Such a turn to human duality makes room for the possibility of sharing if not viable action, at least a “world.” There is a world of compassion even when the concept of “world” has disappeared. Compassion is not incompatible with the most hilarious satire of contemporary illusions. Precisely because of an apparent cynicism couched in verbal techniques marked by repetition letting alienation and nihilism shine forth, Beckett makes the values of courage and fraternity come alive in spite of all. These values impose themselves forcibly and without any trace of the humanist features that Heidegger’s philosophy of Being and Time had tried to invalidate or bypass. Beckett accomplishes Heidegger’s negative program without needing the convoluted and regressive “jargon” (as Adorno had it) that accompanied his first ontology. In spite of the repetitive nature of the texts and plays – famously, when it was first staged in Paris, En attendant Godot was described as a play in which nothing happens – twice, a description that keeps its purchase for Happy Days, Beckett never repeated himself in his successive creations. This attitude of constant innovation appeared as well when he directed his plays. His notebooks testify to an inquisitive and inventive spirit. Even with a play that ended up defining the hopeless hope of a whole generation, Beckett was not satisfied with the first staging when he returned to it twenty-two years later. One important sign is this: the 1975 Berlin production of Godot that Beckett directed lasted only two hours, whereas the Paris Godot lasted three hours. One can speak of “Godot 1” and “Godot 2,” as Thomas Cousineau has done.11 We have direct proof of Beckett’s obsessive work on the movements and stage props for his Berlin production of Warten auf Godot at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin in 1975. On January 1, 1975, he wrote to Jocelyn Herbert: “I have decided I must stop this theatre. The way I go about it means I can think of nothing else.”12 But then he conceded that the result was “not too bad,”13 which, coming from Beckett, was the equivalent of a loud shout of triumph. While directing, Beckett wanted to control the most minute details of his production and stylize the actors’ very movements and diction. This controlling attitude – an attitude shared by most contemporary visual

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artists who insist on creating specific effects, as Judith Wilkinson reminds us – has generated fruitful contradictions and revealing equivocations. A superb actress like Billie Whitelaw explained how urgently Beckett forced her to pay attention to the difference in length of time measured by two or three dots in her wonderful production of Not-I, whereas a French actor and director, Pierre Chabert, described the freedom allowed to him by Beckett, who did not mind the French actor’s reluctance to deliver certain sections of La Dernière Bande, and accordingly deleted entire sections from the text.14 A similarly original and conflicted attitude can be observed when we look at Beckett’s practice as a self-translator, here analyzed by Nadia Louar. At times, Beckett remained close to the first version, as when he translated his first trilogy of novels beginning with Molly. At times he took enormous liberties, as when he rewrote Mercier et Camier in English, giving a version of his novel that is less a translation than a new text. The English Mercier and Camier is one third shorter than the original; it is a toned down and minimalist version from which many delirious or bawdy passages have been excised; this corresponds to an “art of undoing” well analyzed in these pages by Dirk van Hulle. What stands out is the idea of rewriting a text more than a decade later as if it was a new staging of its effects, as he did with the 1975 Godot. Beyond Godot’s ethical and farcical critique of Heidegger, other reasons can be adduced for Beckett’s durable appeal. Adorno gives us a valuable hint when he notes that Beckett’s texts had been banned in Greece by the fascist junta of colonels despite their apparent absence of political meaning. This is a sure sign that Beckett would keep his political impact even when he did not explicitly engage with politics: “Greece’s new tyrants knew why they banned Beckett’s plays in which there is not a single political word.”15 Beckett would exemplify a spirit of artistic resistance facing barbarism. Such resistance can be efficient even if it remains oblique, as Adorno states in Negative Dialectics: “Beckett gave us the only fitting reaction to the situation left by concentration camps – a situation never called by name, as if it were subject to an image ban. The world is, he says, like a concentration camp. Once he spoke of a lifelong death penalty. The only hope would be that nothing survives. But this too, he rejected. Out of the clash of contradictory theses there emerges the image of the Nothing taken as Something, an image that firmly anchors his poetry.”16 In Adorno’s reading, the particular negativity deployed by Beckett does not create a pure “nothing” because it retains historical and dialectical properties. Like Paul Celan,

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but with different strategies, Beckett provides an answer to Adorno’s quandary: how can one write poetry after Auschwitz? Paradoxically, Beckett’s alleged “nihilism” ends up negating the nihilism of history. Beckett deploys his nihilism only when he aims at debunking the restoration of spurious values in which one cannot believe any longer. When Adorno reads Endgame, what strikes him is the theme of the “abortion of death.” Its pathos derives from the sense that even after all is over, one will have to go on. This is fitting in a post-holocaust situation, a time when the mechanization of death in extermination camps has increased the sense of trauma and the unspeakable. In this reading, Hamm’s speeches do not betray a fear of death but a terror that “death could miscarry.”17 The play has less to do with the Cold War or the possibility of an atomic bomb annihilating humanity than with Auschwitz, an event so traumatic that it cannot be named directly: “The violence of the unspeakable is mirrored in the fear of mentioning it. Beckett kept it nebulous. About what is incommensurable with experience as such one can only speak in euphemisms, the way one speaks in Germany of the murder of the Jews.”18 Indeed, Adorno’s formulations in Aesthetic Theory announce Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” the systematic reduction of human life to animal survival. Adorno writes that Beckett’s novels “present the reduction of life to basic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in extremis” (AT, 30). Beckett’s main lesson is: “Il faut continuer,” the conclusion of Beckett’s The Unnamable, condenses this antinomy to its essence: that externally art appears impossible while immanently it must be pursued” (AT, 320). The modernist art of Beckett sticks to its own “plane of immanence” (as Gilles Deleuze would put it) just to show that Reason has become indistinguishable from Unreason. However, Adorno may not have given us the last word on Beckett, as evinced by the work of Stan Douglas, which is discussed here by Judith Wilkinson. Douglas, a black Canadian artist born in 1960 and based in Vancouver, has worked with Beckett since 1988 when he organized an exhibition on the Teleplays at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Since then, he has produced films, photographs, reenactments, and videos based on Beckett’s later work. “Vidéo,” an 18-minute video loop from 2007, with a French cast, shot in a housing project near Paris, splices Beckett’s Film with Franz Kafka’s Trial and with Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. In this superb work, Douglas proposes a different view of Beckett’s art, while pointing to its present relevance in the sense that it parts ways with a certain modernism.

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Mixing Beckett, Kafka and Godard, Douglas means to go beyond the idea of the power of great texts or epoch-making films while rewriting them. Beckett is instrumental in an attempt at debunking a previous generation’s trust in a monumentalized modernism, which is still discernible in Adorno’s essays. Douglas rejects such “ahistoricity, closure and the affirmation of a masculine academic canon,”19 reminding us that what interested Beckett above all was a treatment of ignorance and impotence. Douglas’s essay quotes a passage from Adorno that he finds problematic because all too emblematic of high modernist bias. Adorno speaks of Hamm, Endgame’s main character as exposing “the lie concealed in saying ‘I’ and thereby exhibiting substantiality, whereas Adorno believed that the “I” has lost its “truth content” (Adorno is quoted by Douglas in GPH, 92–93). For Douglas, such an analysis calls up a post-war philosophy trying to recapture a Romantic subjectivity prevalent in Beethoven’s times. It blames its inevitable demise on the rise of the “culture industry,” understood as a mystification of late capitalism, a period when “humanity [. . . ] has become an advertisement for inhumanity,” as Adorno puts it. Douglas admits that such a judgment partly captures the ethos of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, but feels that Beckett moved on to produce work in different modes and media, totally unclassifiable work that troubled the division between spectators and actors, between prose, poetry, and play-acting. Beckett’s importance for our times is thus equated with his being able to “articulat(e) the mendacity of ‘they’ as an equivalent to the ‘lie concealed in saying ‘I’” (GPH, 93). More radically, it means that Beckett has shifted “from describing to inhabiting situations.” In the end, the point is that “. . .both audience and author are asked to admit their complicity in the visibility of the spectacle, and distanced judgments or interpretive ‘explanation’ becomes an uneasy pretense” (GPH, 93). Douglas’s metamorphosis of Film into Vidéo can appear disrespectful; however, the transformation is achieved knowingly in order to avoid the complacency of the critical theory promoted by Adorno in the name of Beckett. In parallel, Douglas avoids a facile recourse to identity politics and direct representations of oppressed or excluded minorities. Douglas rejects all at once a post-war existentialism, a postmodernist return to conflicting fictions, and the high modernist cultural critique in a bold artistic departure: “In contrast to Beckett’s persistently insufficient first persons, the philosophical existentialists and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school often claimed for themselves a rhetorical self through which they could speak as the last instance of a subjectivity soon to be extinct. An ideal self. A victim of history who speaks with a tacit nostalgia for some

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presumed wholeness, describing, in minute detail, all that the historical moment refuses him – ignoring the way in which that history persists in himself, and ignoring as well all that has been left out of his dialectic” (GPH, 93). For Douglas, Beckett is successful because he also debunks the “pathetic heroism” of the artist (GPH, 93), a heroism concerned with a melancholic identity and tending to be always male, white, bourgeois, and of European descent (GPH, 98). In his work, modernist nostalgia is both harnessed and undermined until it serves a broader perspective. Douglas retains Beckett’s “persistent distrust of discrete self-identity” while rejecting the “potentially authoritarian subject that lies behind any such identification” (GPH, 98). If an exhausted Buster Keaton is replaced by a young black woman forced to commit suicide at the end of Vidéo (echoing the ending of Kafka’s Trial), it produces a superposition of Beckett and Kafka similar to the identification of the two writers which underpinned Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett, but then this is done in an urban context evoking Godard: here is not a belated Adornian joke, but an unleashing of cultural and artistic dissonances. Douglas alludes to a contemporary French scene dominated by unrest stemming from homeless African people or other refugees called sans-papiers (those devoid of any ID) in the suburbs of Paris. He brings Beckett closer to the context of social trouble widespread in the French banlieues, showing himself faithful to a process of decentering and hybridization. His meditation on torture, abjection, and subjection links Beckett and Kafka more powerfully than via the metaphysical issues outlined by Adorno. As Emilie Morin reminds us in this volume, a single look at Rough for Radio II, written in French in the late 1960s, or What Where, a television play from 1984, can testify to Beckett’s constant interest in denunciating torture. Thus Douglas links Beckett with the Marquis de Sade, albeit pointing to a crucial difference: “unlike the Sadean libertine who in self-satisfied egoism is content to catalog the limits of his world, Beckett admits that the limits of his culture are not the limits of possibility. An unfortunate consequence of the Sadean method is that it is often only capable of replicating, in inverted form, the authority that it had intended to criticize – maintaining as it does a theological notion of center or hierarchy which appropriates certainty for its blasphemy and authority for the blasphemous subject. The difference in Beckett is that, in place of this closed world (which had been invented in order to be mastered), he imagines an uncertain one: the residence of an even less certain subjectivity” (GPH, 92).

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This “residence” is therefore a form of resistance, as Adorno understood it, but in a different conceptual grid. Douglas perceives the centrality of Beckett’s role as direct heir of high modernism and as a critic of the “failed utopias” of modernism. Indeed, Beckett can be called a “late modernist.” At least, he never abandoned one of modernism’s central features: its exploratory and experimental nature. More importantly, he creates an art of the “interform” capable of giving voice to the broader multiculturalism of today. He critically revisits his modernist heritage while giving a lesson of courage and resistance without relying on a stable “I.” The idea of a “hope without hope” was a virtue that Beckett never kept out of sight. Emilie Morin’s essay mentions that Beckett praised Nadezda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, her moving memoir evoking the deportation of her husband Osip Mandelstam to the Kolyma, calling it “a book that gives courage.” Douglas reminds us that what distinguishes Beckett from Adorno is his unyielding ethical position of resistance, but that it is then allied with an art of the low, with wild guffaws that spare nothing, including oneself. This becomes all the more relevant if we consider Beckett’s work from the angle of queer sexuality, as Calvin Thomas does in these pages, or from the point of view of a decentered subject mediated via Lacan’s Other, as Llewellyn Brown has done. Thomas sees the power of Beckett’s language as an ability to desublimize monuments of intellect that language itself attempted to erect. He develops Leo Bersani’s insight that the process begins with writing so as to destabilize the self; he does not stop there and includes sexual morality and even the entire realm of aesthetics, a domain that, as Jacques Rancière reiterated in his books, begins with perception, vision, and hearing, space, and time, to end with social rules and the “police,” which brings us back to politics. Morin’s excellent book on Beckett’s politics20 investigates Beckett’s reaction to anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in the Irish Free State, his critical analysis of Nazism in Germany, his measured response to the anticollaborationist purges in the aftermath of World War Two, and above all his involvement in the anti-war protests during the Algerian War of Independence in Paris. She focuses on the Kravchenko affair to show that Beckett’s writing has always been historical, which means fundamentally concerned with history. Beckett was fascinated by the Algerian war, in which the issue of torture loomed so large. After all, several members of the Gloria network he belonged to during the war had been tortured and executed. The fact that Beckett’s works keep talking to current issues, even the recent and burning ones, has been made brilliantly by Michael Coffey

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in Samuel Beckett Is Closed.21 This is all at once a novel, a memoir, and a critical essay on Beckett, in which we move from the latter’s inability to understand the rules of baseball to his recurrent denunciation of the evil created by the military logics of torture. Samuel Beckett Is Closed splices excerpts from the interrogations and tortures by the American Army at Abu Ghraib and Beckett’s aborted text, Long Observation of the Ray. In this abandoned prose work from 1975 to 1976, series of images revolving around a ray of light probing a hermetic sphere are repeated in sequences all redistributing similar elements. This enigmatic fragment became too abstract and intractable; it had to be abandoned until Coffey gave it an unexpected new life. Samuel Beckett Is Closed concludes with a play within the novel focusing on David Warrilow, one of Beckett’s favorite actors. Here, Warrilow is seen dying of AIDS in Paris and New York in the mid 1990s, rambling along and reminiscing about his encounters with Beckett as a friend and director. Like Coffey’s Warrilow caught in his rambunctious death throes, most of Beckett’s characters eke out a bare living despite impending death, disease, or paralysis, or they are destitute migrants, expelled ex-students with little money, drop-outs who somehow manage to survive after sexual traumas as in Not-I, witnesses of ecological catastrophes, as in Endgame, or direct political torture as in Catastrophe and What Where, which is why his appeal for extreme situations and times of crisis (New Orleans, Godot staged by Paul Chan) has been crucial and durable, and why Beckett is still popular with captive audiences that are forced to live in jail, as Lance Duerfahrd has shown in his book on The Work of Poverty.22 Here, in the final essay, he argues that it is when performed on makeshift stages in front of criminals surrounded by guards bearing rifles, that Beckett’s plays find their true address and authentic site.

* Thus if we can indeed hold in our hands all the volumes of Beckett’s oeuvre, we sense not only that more material will be forthcoming, but also that some radical displacement is at work, which requires new strategies and may call upon us to continue this open-ended process. In 2006, for the first time, we had Beckett’s Collected Works in English, an elegant boxed set of four volumes edited by Paul Auster and published by Garland Press. The same is not true of the French versions: we still have to buy them one by one from Editions de Minuit. In 2018, Beckett’s collected works have been translated into Chinese, in a beautifully produced set of ten books. The Chinese translation of the four volumes of letters will soon be

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out. In spite of these remarkably converging signs of Beckett’s global appeal, his impact is not limited to these volumes, in whatever language they are. It would be an illusion to believe that one can hold the entire Beckettian corpus in one box or display it on a single library shelf. New texts, drafts, and letters keep appearing; they force us to go back to the archive and explore it differently. Given this vertiginous proliferation and challenging conceptual shifts, the ambition of this collection is to map out a “new Beckett” in order to help readers, whether they are beginners or more seasoned, to find an entry and a passage in what can look like an impenetrable maze. Some of the best Beckett specialists from several countries have written specially commissioned essays about the most engaging and productive aspects of this canon, and envisage it according to its recent expansion. Their essays are organized in three sections, “The Expanded Canon,” in which specialists take stock of the current configuration of the corpus, “New Contexts and Intertexts,” in which Beckett’s works are placed in the contexts of French colonial history, politics, art, and technology, and “New Hermeneutic Codes,” in which authors bring the texts in line with recent approaches like the sociology of marginal groups, disability studies, queer studies, bilingualism studies, or mathematical studies of literature. A last essay by Lance Duerhfahrd documents Beckett’s appeal to disenfranchised audiences like prison inmates or survivors of catastrophes. If Joyce’s ideal reader was a studious avant-gardist afflicted by an ideal insomnia allowing an infinite time to read and re-read Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s ideal reader is closer to Rick Cluchey, an ex-convict who was serving a life sentence in San Quentin for armed robbery when he crossed paths with Godot. Like many other rightfully or wrongly accused inmates, dropouts, or survivors, Cluchey describes that life-changing encounter in terms that keep a universal ring: “I was always waiting for Godot, only I didn’t know it.”23 The ambition of this volume is to make us want to know why and how we are still waiting for our Godot.

Notes 1. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 4 vols., eds. George Craig, Dan Gunn, Martha Fehsenfeld, and Lois Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 2011, 2014, and 2016. 2. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable, Dirk van Hulle and Shane Weller, Antwerp, UPA and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

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3. Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems, eds. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, London, Faber, 2012. 4. Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, London, Continuum, 2011. 5. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” Notes to Literature, vol. i, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 241–275. 6. BWT, 149. The German text has: “. . . weil das Paar selbst eine Dechiffrierung ist,” italics in the original. 7. Mercier et Camier was written in 1946 but only published in 1970, and then translated into English by Beckett in 1974. When the narrator of The Unnamable considers giving a “companion” to Malone, he says: “I naturally thought of the pseudocouple Mercier-Camier.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: Three Novels, New York: Grove Press, 1995, 297. The term of “pseudocouple” is discussed in those pages by Daniel Gunn. The idea that Beckett followed Flaubert is developed in Hugh Kenner’s groundbreaking Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett: The Stoic Comedians, Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. 8. Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, New York: Grove Press, 1975, 17. Hereafter MC and page number. 9. BWT, 149–150; “Sein ohne Zeit,” 228. I have modified the translation. 10. BWT, 151; “Sein ohne Zeit,” 231. I have modified the translation. 11. Thomas Cousineau, “The Manole Complex: Staging Movement in Waiting for Godot,” talk delivered at Cluj international conference “Historicizing Modernism,” Friday May 4, 2018. 12. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV, 1966–1989, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 384. 13. Ibid., 385. 14. Pierre Chabert and Billie Whitelaw confronted their radically diverging experiences of working with Beckett during a three-day conference on “Beckett and the Theatre” at the University of Delaware (October 9–11, 2003). 15. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 234. Hereafter abbreviated as AT and page number. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970, 371–372. I have modified the English translation of Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 380–381. 17. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” op.cit, 369–370. 18. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 245–246. 19. Stan Douglas, “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat,” in Scott Watson, Diana Thater, and Carol J. Clover, eds., Stan Douglas, London: Phaidon, 1998, 92. I refer to this text as GPH and page number.

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20. Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination, Cambridge University Press, 2017. 21. Michael Coffey, Samuel Beckett Is Closed, New York, Foxrock Books, 2018. 22. Lance Duerfahrd, The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis, Columbus: Ohio State University, 2013. 23. See the last chapter, in which Duerfahrd quotes an unpublished interview with Rick Cluchey from October 2015.

i

The Expanded Canon

chapter 1

Digitizing Beckett Dirk Van Hulle

In the “Proteus” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus famously ruminates on the ineluctable modality of the visible and the audible, mentioning the notions of the “nebeneinander” [side by side] and the “nacheinander” [one after the other]1 Joyce’s source was probably Otto Weininger,2 who may, in his turn, be alluding to Lessing’s Laocoon.Lessing’s distinction between the Nacheinander of poetry and the Nebeneinander of visual arts was challenged in Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake. Beckett recognized this even before the Wake was published and noted in his German Diaries that he had had a Long discussion about theatre and film, which Eggers condemns, calls at the best intellectualism. Won’t hear of possibility of word’s inadequacy. The dissonance that has become principle and that the word cannot express, because literature can no more escape from chronologies to simultaneities, from Nebeneinander to Miteinander, tha[n] the human voice can sing chords. As I talk and listen I realize suddenly how Work in Progress is the only possib[le] development from Ulysses, the heroic attempt to make literature accomplish what belongs to music – the Miteinander and the simultaneous.3

The young Beckett clearly admired this facet of Joyce’s writing and later on he seems to have found his own ways to give shape to the Miteinander. This essay investigates to what extent the digital medium can help us discover the ways in which Beckett’s works challenge and resist literary criticism’s impulse to narrativize his work and arrange it in an orderly Nacheinander.

Digital Performance The digital medium invites young directors to take Beckett’s avant-garde theatrical experiments to another level. A good example is the performance 19

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of Play by the Arts Technology Research Laboratory and the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, presented during the Beckett Summer School 2017 in Dublin. The performance, directed by Nicholas Johnson, consisted of an “Intermedial Play” and a “Virtual Play,” both of them explicitly called “experiments.” The first experiment made use of a Pan-Tilt-Zoom robotic teleconferencing camera and control unit. Partly inspired by Anthony Minghella’s film interpretation of Play, produced for Beckett on Film (2001), the team made the teleconferencing camera play the role of the light beam as the technical device that decides who of the three characters-in-urns is allowed to speak. Like Goethe, who was the first to write a “meta-sonnet” by calling it simply “Das Sonett,” Beckett wrote a meta-reflection on theater and the situation of the actor on stage, calling it “Play.” Minghella’s interpretation of this metareflection, replacing the light beam by the camera, is subtly pushed into the digital age, the age of omnipresent surveillance cameras and social media pressure. As the program booklet notes, “the technological reinterpretation of the script addresses the new cultural subjectivities imposed on humans by the technologies of presence in digital culture.”4 A notable difference vis-àvis Minghella’s version is that this “Intermedial Play,” captured in a dance studio, was screened in real time in front of a live audience at a different location, creating the Skype effect of teleconferencing. If this can be seen as an intermedial Miteinander it is not an embracement or celebration of social media and digital togetherness. If anything, the play brings out an aspect that is already part of the script, but that stands out more strongly thanks to the digital intermediality: the striving for the Miteinander – both the literary aim of simulating simultaneity and the human wish to truly live together – turns out to be a painful realization of our fundamental Nebeneinander-ness, living next to, rather than with, each other, everyone in her/his own urn. Thus the three characters in Play are forced to keep playing and repeating the banality of their love triangle in eternity. While experiment 1 explores the possibilities of technologies of presence and simultaneity, experiment 2 ventures into Virtual Reality (VR). In “Virtual Play,” yet another complication is added: Lessing’s Nebenand Nacheinander are turned into a Durcheinander: whereas so far the light beam/camera was not autonomous but controlled by the author (since Beckett’s script determines the order of the characters’ speech interventions), this power is now conveyed to the spectator. Armed with VR goggles, the user is placed in the centre of a virtual space and surrounded by the three characters in their urns. By looking left, straight ahead or right, s/he determines who can speak, thus effectively shuffling the author’s order into a Durcheinander of speech interventions. The experience of both

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empowerment and immersion is even enhanced by the possibility of pulling back or coming closer to the characters and thus making their speech sound fainter or louder. The consequences are quite radical from a narratological point of view. VR is totally different from traditional narrative worldmaking. The Nacheinander of nineteenth-century novels, from which modernists like Joyce and Faulkner tried to break away (on paper), is now determined by the spectator. As in literary experiments like Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) or B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, the reader determines the order or disorder of events and plays an active role in the narration. Whether readers actually want to be empowered in this way is another matter. The limited success of experiments with hyperfiction, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, suggest that what most readers appreciate in literature is precisely its linearity, its Nacheinander-ness, and the comfort of being guided by a reliable narrator. But, evidently, Beckett is Beckett because he kept challenging the literary status quo. And of all of Beckett’s works, Play is arguably the piece with the most suitable title to explore the potential of his oeuvre in virtual reality. VR is made for games and for playing. In the digital age, this experiment with Virtual Play is the most consequential reading of the question: “All this, when will all this have been . . . just play?”5

Digital Poetics In terms of temporal dimensions, another Nacheinander that is becoming more accessible thanks to digital media is the so-called avant-texte, the manuscripts, notes, and other documents preceding the publication of Beckett’s works. The publication of Play was preceded by more than a dozen versions, most of which are held at Washington University in St. Louis, with copies at the University of Reading, the archive to which Beckett donated most of his manuscripts. Preserving and giving one’s manuscripts to a university archive is part of the author’s “self-presentation,” as it is called in Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s narratological model of “cultural negotiation,” a balancing act of negotiation between the reader’s own dispositions, the author’s self-presentation, the text and the context.6 At the same time, it is also part of Beckett’s poetics – “poetics” in the sense of the author’s view of his own work as an “oeuvre in progress,” unfinished by definition, ending as it does in the middle of a sentence with the words “comment dire” or “what is the word.” In discourse analysis, poetics is

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defined from the readers’ perspective, as the readers’ opinions and presuppositions of what literature is, what it does or what it should do. From a structuralist point of view, Jonathan Culler gave yet another definition to the notion of “poetics”: “Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they are achieved. [ . . . ] Hermeneutics, on the other hand, starts with texts and asks what they mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations.”7 Culler’s structuralist approach focuses on the finished product (the text as it was published). Genetic criticism, the study of written invention and creative processes, adds a temporal dimension to poetics; its answers to Culler’s question “how they are achieved” involve traces of the creative process (such as notes, drafts and other manuscripts). This kind of “poetics” goes back to the etymological sense of the word, derived from the Greek poiein, [to make]. Genetic criticism starts from the basic assumption that knowing how something was made can help us understand how it works. It is in this sense of the word “poetics” that the digital medium can be of great help. Studying the way a literary work was made by means of digital tools is a form of “digital poetics,” implying that digital scholarly editing is employed for the purposes of genetic criticism, not the other way round. Manuscript research has always been part of textual criticism, but textual criticism used to be at the service of scholarly editing. One of the merits of genetic criticism is that it has emancipated manuscript research as a discipline in its own right. The digital medium enables us to present aspects of Beckett’s works that used to be known to only the lucky few who were able to travel to the Beckett archives across the world. If one wished to study the writing process of, say, Krapp’s Last Tape, one had to travel to various places in the US and the UK. By scanning these manuscripts, we were able to digitally reunite the dispersed manuscripts in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), which has been available online since 2011.8 It is up to the user whether it functions as a digital archive or as a scholarly edition, depending on how s/he uses it. As a digital archive, the BDMP enables users to work with the digital facsimiles and transcriptions of all the manuscripts, search for doodles of a particular shape, for dates, for calculations or diagrams, or for intertextual references. As an edition, it can be used to zoom in on any sentence in a given work by Beckett and visualize all the other versions of that sentence in a synoptic sentence view, which arranges these multiple versions underneath each other in chronological order. Every sentence of a particular text is numbered, so

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Figure 1.1: Synoptic sentence view in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, enabling the comparison of all the (English and French) versions of any selected sentence (in this case, sentence 186).

that its evolution can be traced and studied across versions, even across languages. For instance, the illustration above (see Figure 1.1) is an example of a “continuity error” in one of Beckett’s works (Krapp’s Last Tape). In all Faber and Faber editions, Krapp listens to an old tape about his mother, “a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity” (emphasis added); he winds back the tape, and then hears “a-dying, after her long viduity” (without “in the late autumn”), which is clearly an error. In addition to this bilingual version comparison, the BDMP enables users to collate sentences in either French or English manuscripts and editions, by activating the automatic collation tool powered by CollateX (developed by Ronald Haentjens Dekker), which compares the sentences and highlights all the variants between them (see Figure 1.2). In the case of the continuity error mentioned above, the digital collation clearly shows the moment in the genesis where the error occurred.

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Figure 1.2: On-the-fly result of the CollateX tool, integrated as a “collation engine” in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

Spotting differences between versions of a text seems like a job a computer should be able to do quite easily. In practice, however, in most cases an apparatus created automatically by the collation software currently available (CollateX, Juxta, Multi Version Documents or the TEIComparator) does not yet match up to an apparatus created by hand by an editor. This is especially the case with modern manuscripts as they contain “in-text variation” (additions, open variants). There are conflicting opinions on how best to encode these texts with a view to collation,9 as well as on the scholarly validity of automatic collation output. However, the model proposed in the BDMP does not only use CollateX as a tool for the editor to make a critical apparatus; it offers CollateX as a tool for the user to highlight variants. In a similar way as a search engine (which appeals to users’ search ingenuity), it functions as a collation engine: it takes our transcriptions as input and performs a service for users, who can leave certain witnesses out of the collation if they so choose. At this moment, the results of automatic collation may not yet be perfectly identical with a critical apparatus produced by a human being, but the results of, say, a search engine are not always perfectly relevant either and yet, with a minimum of digital literacy and search ingenuity, the vast majority of the population makes use of search engines on a daily basis.

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The integrated CollateX module thus appeals to users’ ingenuity in a similar manner as a search engine appeals to users’ search ingenuity. In this way, instead of turning the critical apparatus into the least palatable part of a critical edition, a digital archive can offer automatic collation as an alternative tool to help users discover complex and therefore interesting textual instances in the manuscripts and other textual versions. This is particularly relevant to Beckett studies, because Beckett – in his capacity as both a self-translator and director of his own plays – continuously kept changing his texts, not only before but also after publication. Again, Play is a good example. After having been asked several questions by directors and actors regarding the repetition of Play, Beckett added a note on the “Repeat,” giving a degree of freedom to the director: “The repeat may be an exact replica of first statement or it may present an element of variation.”10 This note was not yet included in the Faber and Faber first edition (1964), which only contained notes on the lighting, the urns and the chorus. In principle, the note on the “Repeat” could have been incorporated in the next publication, the second volume of the trilingual edition of the Dramatische Dichtungen (Suhrkamp, 1964).11 But Beckett had written to Suhrkamp that he wanted all notes to be removed from the text.12 One month later, however, the Evergreen Review edition came out, this time including all notes.13 All the other notes, cut from the trilingual edition, were reinstated in the Evergreen Review edition, and the note on “Repeat” was added. There are also minor variants in the body of the text, implying that digital collation may be usefully employed to compare the different versions, both before and after the first publication. The development and integration of CollateX is a good example of the mutual benefit that characterizes collaboration in Digital Humanities at this moment. It is not just a tool made by an IT developer in isolation and implemented in the humanities. Genetic Beckett studies, in their turn, also contribute to the collaboration, because the digital facsimiles and transcriptions of the BDMP serve as test cases for the further development of Information Technology. The complexity of Beckett’s manuscripts proves to be an excellent testing ground for automatic collation because it challenges and thus helps improve the algorithm behind the automatic collation. Beckett’s manuscripts are also used to develop new steps in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), the computer-assisted transcription of complex manuscripts, in collaboration with the Transkribus platform through READ, an international consortium working on the “Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents.” It is possible that this type of close

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collaboration between IT developers and humanities scholars is only of a temporary nature, because Digital Humanities is such a young discipline. But the energy generated by the fusion of different disciplines at this moment is impressive and invigorating. Every year, one new module (one work or a cluster of shorter works) is added to the BDMP. It also comprises the Beckett Digital Library, which offers facsimiles and transcriptions of all the pages in Beckett’s personal library that contain reading traces. This makes it possible to establish links between certain passages in the books that Beckett is known to have read and the manuscripts of his works in which these sources resurface, sometimes at a much later date. A digital infrastructure for Beckett’s works thus offers tools that enable new ways of interacting with the documents and foster the study of intertextuality in ways that were impossible before, making it easier to grasp how literary invention works or at least manifests itself materially. At this stage the digital dimension of the research may seem limited to mainly technical and mechanical problem-solving. But the medium also opens up new avenues in terms of methodology. It is still early days, but when in a few years’ time the majority of Beckett’s manuscripts are digitized and made searchable, this will constitute one of the largest corpora of searchable manuscript data by a single author in twentiethcentury literature. The BDMP is already part of ModNets (Modernist Networks), the consortium of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies (coordinated by the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University, Chicago), which peerreviews digital projects in modernist literature. Especially in the case of Samuel Beckett, whose oeuvre is marked by numerous intratextual and intertextual references, the BDMP’s search engine is and will increasingly become a useful tool to detect patterns of reuse.

Digital Reading: New Interpretive Strategies To some extent the detection of patterns and the first, modest forms of ‘distant reading’ are already being practiced. The XML (eXtensible Markup Language) encoding of the transcriptions makes it relatively easy to extract statistical data about developments in Beckett’s writing technique. For instance, Beckett tended to compare his writing method to Joyce’s. Whereas Joyce was always adding, Beckett’s method consisted of undoing – as he claimed in an interview with James Knowlson: “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only

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have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding.”14 Thanks to the XML encoding (using the and tags) it is possible to check whether and to what extent Beckett’s statement corresponds with the textual reality. For each transcribed document, the BDMP offers a pie chart indicating the percentage of passages in the text that remained stable, how many were deleted and how many added (see Figure 1.3). So far, at first sight, the evidence seems to confirm Beckett’s statement: on average, he generally deleted more than he added. But there are also exceptions: in Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape the ratio is equal (5 percent deleted versus about 5 percent added passages), and so the digital tools not only serve to confirm what we already knew, but also nuance Beckett’s statement. What the results so far also show is more textual instability towards the end of Beckett’s career than in the years shortly after World War Two. For Molloy, the total result of the statistics is an average of 5 percent of deleted text against 2 percent of additions. The genesis of L’Innommable/ The Unnamable is marked by an average of 8 percent of deleted text and 3 percent of additions. The detailed statistics show the evolution of deleted and added passages in the course of the writing and revision process (see Figure 1.4). Whereas the ratio in the earliest French manuscript of L’Innommable is half (6 percent added words, 12 percent deleted), the ratio in the English translation is 2/7. Towards the end of his career, the trend becomes even more outspoken: Stirrings Still/Soubresauts shows an average of 14 percent deletions versus 5 percent added text on average, and Comment dire/what is the word 15 percent deletions versus 5 percent additions. So, whereas the ratio remains relatively stable (with, on average, one added word for every three deleted passages), the results so far show more textual instability towards the end of Beckett’s career than in the years shortly after the Second World War. In other words, the increasing experience as a writer does not necessarily lead to more self-assurance and determination. If anything, Beckett’s writing praxis seems to become increasingly hesitant. For any other writer this might seem a surprising result, but in Beckett’s case it accords with the motto from his late text Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”15

Distant Reading Beckett’s oeuvre is relatively small (in quantitative terms) and therefore not immediately conducive to distant reading,16 but it does allow us to do some

Fin de partie

En attendant Godot Total words: 23234

Total words: 131796 added w. 4855 deleted w. 7108 modified w. 1330

added w. 562 deleted w. 1717 modified w. 19

7% 2% 0%

4% 5% 1%

3% 7% 1%

90%

90%

plain text 119150

89%

plain text 20975

Molloy

plain text 106870

L’lnnommable

Krapp’s Last Tape

Total words: 257558 added w. 8097 deleted w. 16760 modified w. 1609

Total words: 199654 added w. 4319 deleted w. 10492 modified w. 1306 5% 2% 1%

3%

Total words: 34960 added w. 1593 deleted w. 1783 modified w. 273 5% 4%

6% 1%

1%

90%

92%

plain text 183946

90%

plain text 31535

plain text 232062

Stirrings Still

Comment dire

Total words: 21914

Total words: 1613

added w. 1070 deleted w. 3144 5% 14%

added w. 141 9%

modified w. 263

15% 0%

1%

deleted w. 245 modified w. 3

76%

80%

plain text 17716

Malone meurt Total words: 119378 added w. 3319 deleted w. 8896 modified w. 609

plain text 1237

Figure 1.3: “Statistics” tool of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, showing the percentages of deleted and added words in several of Beckett’s works, written in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s, www.beckettarchive.org/stats.jsp

French Manuscript (FM1–2) Total words: 64587 added w. 3595 deleted w. 7686 6% 12% 0%

modified w. 155

English Manuscript (EM1–3) Total words: 63735 added w. 997 deleted w. 4647 modified w. 18

Total words: 369 added w. 13 deleted w. 17

7% 2% 0%

82%

4%

91%

plain text 53531

MS-HRC-SB-5–10 (ET1) Total words: 63476

5%

added w. 3107 deleted w. 3728 modified w. 910

6% 1%

MS-HRC-TQ-2–18–1 (TQT1) Total Words: 2105 added w. 8 deleted w. 17 modified w. 14

Total words: 2085 modified w. 1

MS-HRC-TQ-2–18–2 (TQT2) Total words: 2074 modified w. 6

0%

98%

100%

plain text 2067

MS-HRC-TQ-2–18–3 (TQP)

92%

1% 0% 1%

88%

plain text 56113

5%

plain text 339

plain text 58244

plain text 2068

MS-WU-MSS008–3–71 (ET2) Total words: 59127 added w. 377 deleted w. 665 modified w. 505 1%

0%

1% 1%

100%

97%

plain text 2084

MS-UoR-1227–7–9–1 (FLS)

plain text 57616

total Total words: 257558 added w. 8097 deleted w. 16760 modified w. 1609 6% 3% 1%

90%

plain text 232062

Figure 1.4: Development of the ratio of deleted and added passages in both the French and English manuscripts and typescripts, www.beckettarchive.org/stats.jsp

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interesting quantitative research. We recently employed computational techniques to try and solve a problem in Beckett studies regarding the periodization of his works. Although his oeuvre is often periodized, there is neither consensus about the number of periods nor about the borders between them. John Pilling defines “Early Beckett” as the part of Beckett’s work that comes before his decision to write in French.17 Usually this moment is said to coincide with the end of World War Two, but as James Knowlson has shown, Beckett had already started writing poems in French in 1937–1938.18 He even experimented with texts in German, writing for instance a dramatic fragment called “Mittelalterliches Dreieck” as early as 1936. Still, during the war, he did write his novel Watt in English, so Pilling sees the post-war works as separate from “early Beckett”: “Eventually, though it took a long time to emerge, it became easier for Beckett to insist upon a break between his pre-war writing and his post-war writing [ . . . ]. By abandoning his native English, the line became easier to draw.”19 The drawing of this line can be and has been interpreted very literally as the line drawn underneath the first half of the manuscript of ‘Suite’ (which even became La Fin/The End). This first half was written in English. The horizontal line, drawn on March 13, 1946, separates this English version from his recapitulation and continuation in French. Ruby Cohn regards La Fin as “a radical new departure in Beckett’s fiction.”20 In Constructing Postmodernism, however, Brian McHale suggested a break between Molloy and Malone meurt/Malone Dies, between modernism and postmodernism, characterized by “the distinction between the cognitivist and the postcognitivist Beckett.”21 In Diary Fiction, H. Porter Abbott in his turn saw a “key divide” in Beckett’s oeuvre “between Malone Dies and The Unnamable,”22 but twelve years later, in Beckett Writing Beckett, he suggested the demarcation line was to be situated after The Unnamable, when Beckett wrote his Textes pour rien: “Watt, Mercier et Camier, the Nouvelles, and the ‘trilogy,’ all conform to the quest structure, despite the manifold incompetence of the questers,”23 whereas Textes pour rien (1955) “marks a pause in the story of the oeuvre,”24 characterized by the “willful shredding of narrative linearity within the Texts [for Nothing].”25 Comment c’est (1961) is also generally regarded as another pivotal work and its title as a “pun on beginnings (comment c’est is commencer),”26 marking the start of the late period. In spite of the differences in demarcation, most periodizations work with three periods (early, middle, late). But Chiara Montini works with a four-phase division, based on linguistic criteria;27 and Ann Banfield sees a different four-phase evolution towards “tattered syntaxes,” which find

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their expression in four kinds of titles: (1) the inventive wit of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks; (2) the proper names (Murphy, Watt, Mercier et Camier, Molloy); (3) the definite noun phrase as in The Expelled or The Unnamable; and (4) titles without specific semantic content, like Enough, Still, All Strange Away.28 The abundance of different opinions suggests that periodization is just a subjective way of dealing with a human urge to organize literary works into a narrative Nacheinander, and then divide this chronological Nacheinander into separate categories, neatly Nebeneinander, turning them into a plot. Peter Boxall duly problematizes these periodizations, but he also recognizes their pragmatic value. He therefore proposes this basic plot: “from the Joycean extravagance of his early, mannered work, through the comic agony of frenzied becoming in his middle period, to the bleached impossibility of his later prose.”29 With the caveat that periodizations entail the danger of doing injustice to the singularity of each separate work and to the “continuing incompletion”30 of Beckett’s oeuvre, the digital media may offer us possibilities to find out whether these periodizations are merely subjective products of a need to “humanize time”31 or whether there is anything objective about periodizing. We therefore digitized all the published prose fiction and applied techniques of stylometry to discern changes in style.32 Stylometry is a form of artificial reading used notably for authorship attribution and stylistic analyses, such as John F. Burrows’s pioneering book Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (1987). Within stylometry, the subdiscipline of “stylochronometry”33 studies a text’s writing style as a function of its date of composition, applied for instance to the works of Henry James34 or W. B. Yeats.35 Since all the “human” periodizations of Beckett’s works focus on conspicuous features, we chose to use a method that focuses on inconspicuous “function words” – a small set of usually short words, such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns, which can be easily identified by computer algorithms, both in French and in English. In this context, John Burrows parodies Austen to note: “It is a truth not generally acknowledged that, in most discussions of works of English fiction, we proceed as if a third, two-fifths, a half of our material were not really there.”36 Authors use these words unconsciously, as research in authorship attribution has shown. The advantage of working with these function words is that this method can detect stylistic patterns that are not deliberately constructed. Since Beckett scholars’ periodizations also differ in terms of the number of periods, we made the program look for more than one periodization. For

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the four-phase periodization, the three turning points were Watt, The Unnamable and From an Abandoned Work (for the English texts) and Premier Amour, L’Innommable and D’un ouvrage abandonné (for the French versions). We even obtained results for a five-phase periodization, which added Worstward Ho as the last turning point for the English texts and Comment c’est for the French. It is interesting to see that, from a digital stylometric point of view, Beckett’s English oeuvre differs from his French oeuvre in terms of stylistic developments. It is also remarkable that Worstward Ho emerges as a watershed, implying that, as a nearoctogenarian, Beckett managed to write a text that was stylistically so innovating that the computer regards it as a pivot, no matter how short the subsequent period was. The results emerging from the analyses show a few interesting deviations from the general “plot.” One striking result is that the border between the middle and later periods is consistently placed before, rather than after, The Unnamable, for both the French and the English works. So, although the “three novels” Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable belong together, a major fault line runs through this unit, and it seems appropriate that Beckett preferred not to call it a “trilogy.” A surprising result was that From an Abandoned Work/D’un ouvrage abandonné also emerged as a watershed in both languages. In Beckett studies, the critical analysis of this work – “what little there is”37 – drowns almost unnoticed in the flood of studies devoted to his other works. This raises the question whether we have perhaps unduly been neglecting a pivotal work in Beckett’s oeuvre. But before we suddenly start revering this text as the forgotten masterpiece, we should also investigate whether the marked difference in style, detected by computational means, should be interpreted as a turning point marking the beginning of Beckett’s later, experimental works, or rather a “re-turning point,” indicating a sort of temporary relapse into the idiom of the Nouvelles. This would imply that stylistic evolution does not necessarily imply a linear progression. The results regarding the end of the early phase were relatively hazy (indicating Watt as a turning point in English and Premier amour in French), but the fuzziness of that result may be significant in and of itself, as it suggests that the decisive stylistic turning point is not indisputably linked to the decision to write prose fiction in French. This decision certainly did play a role, but its full impact was only noticeable with some delay, for the most striking fault line lies between Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable. And indeed, when asked to indicate only one turning point (to make a two-

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phase periodization), the program indicated The Unnamable as the watershed.38 And when Beckett tried to write in English again for the first time, it seems as if he somehow (possibly inadvertently) reverted to the style of the Nouvelles and needed the process of translating L’Innommable into English to gradually reconnect to its style and continue with Comment c’est/How It Is. This suggests that translation, and more precisely the act of self-translating, may have played more than a secondary role in the composition of Beckett’s works. These experiences in digital Beckett studies are relatively recent, so it is a bit early to draw definitive conclusions. But a few preliminary patterns do seem to emerge. In general, these digital explorations of Beckett’s works indicate that quantitative literary studies do not necessarily lead to unequivocal answers. We still need to interpret the results. So there is a need for “digital hermeneutics.” And starting from attested meanings and effects, there is also a need for “digital poetics” to find out how these effects are achieved. What the context of the Digital Humanities can bring to Beckett studies is an enhanced awareness of the apparent academic urge to narritivize our interpretations in a neat Nacheinander. This does not necessarily imply that we should not narrativize; it just means that it may be useful to employ digital tools for tasks that computers are better at than humans in order to check, nuance and fine-tune those narratives. In other words, the digital is intrinsic to Beckett studies of the twenty-first century, where empirical scholarship and literary criticism do not function Neben-, but Miteinander.

Notes 1. James Joyce, Ulysses, eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfgang Steppe, and Claus Melchior, London: Vintage, 1986, 31. 2. Wim Van Mierlo, “The Subject Notebook: A Nexus in the Composition History of Ulysses—A Preliminary Analysis,” Genetic Joyce Studies 7, 2007, accessed November 14, 2017, www.geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS7/GJS7mierlo .html. 3. Notebook 6, March 26, 1937. Samuel Beckett, qtd. in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997, 258. 4. Program booklet, Samuel Beckett Summer School 2017, August 1, 2017, Intermedial Play/Virtual Play: Experimental Beckett in Digital Culture (in partnership with the Arts Technology Research Lab, Dublin). 5. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays. Preface by S. E. Gontarski, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 60. 6. Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “The Implied Author: A Secular ExCommunication,” Style 45, no. 1, 2011, 12, 19. See also Herman and

34

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

dirk van hulle Vervaeck, “Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation,” Narrative 17, no. 1, 2009, 111–129. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009, 84. See Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Last modified 2017. www .beckettarchive.org. See Barbara Bordalejo, “The Encoding System,” in The Commedia of Dante Alighieri: A Digital Edition, ed. Prue Shaw, Saskatoon: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2010; Peter M. W. Robinson, “Towards a Theory of Digital Editions,” Variants 10, 2012, 105–131; Desmond Schmidt and Robert Colomb, “A Data Structure for Representing Multi-Version Texts Online,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67, no. 6, 2009, 497–514; Desmond Schmidt, “The Role of Markup in the Digital Humanities,” Historical Social Research 37, 2010, 125–146. Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays, 66. Samuel Beckett, Dramatische Dichtungen in drei Sprachen, vol. ii. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964. See the correspondence of Samuel Beckett to Barbara Bray, April 27, 1964 (while being heavily involved in the Paris rehearsals): “Finished revisions for Suhrkamp. All notes to be removed from edited Play text and relegated to an aide-mémoire à l’usage de théatres.” MS TCD 10948/1/272r2. Samuel Beckett, Play, in Evergreen Review 34 (December 1964), 43–47; 92. On August 28, 1964, Beckett had sent the note on the “Repeat” to Fred Jordan and told him that he was free to include it or not. The cover letter reads as follows: “Dear Fred Jordan, herewith corrections to Faber text of PLAY. Also a note on Repeat which you may use or not as you wish. I should be grateful if you could have a copy sent to Alan [Schneider].” Syracuse University Library, Grove Press Collection, Box 857, Evergreen Review. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 352. Samuel Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 1. I use the term distant reading in the sense of Franco Moretti’s definition, paraphrased by Kathryn Schulz as “understanding literature, not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.” See Kathryn Schulz, “What Is Distant Reading?” New York Times, June 24, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-wha t-is-distant-reading.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 John Pilling, “Early Beckett,” in Dirk Van Hulle, The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 28. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 293. Pilling, “Early Beckett,” 28. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001, 128.

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21. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, 34. According to McHale, the cognitivist Beckett is “still preoccupied with modernist issues of reliability and unreliability of narrators, radical subjectivity, and multiplicity of perspectives, as in Watt and Molloy” (34). The “postcognitivist Beckett,” however, “focuses instead on the status of fictional worlds, the power (and impotence) of language to make and unmake worlds, and the relationship between fictional being and elusive ‘real’ being, as in Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and many of the later short texts” (34). 22. H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984, 184. 23. H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, 89. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 90. 26. Ibid., 102. 27. Montini’s four phases are: (1) le monolinguisme plyglotte (1929–1937); (2) le bilinguisme à dominance anglophone (1937–1945); (3) le bilinguisme à dominance francophone (1946–1953); (4) le bilinguisme mixte. Ciara Montini, “Sinking in the Mud: From an Abandoned Work et le difficile retour à l’anglais,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 20, 2008, 65. 28. Anne Banfield, “Beckett’s Tattered Syntax,” Representations 84, no. 1, 2003, 17. 29. Peter Boxall, “Stirring Stills,” in Dirk Van Hulle, ed., The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, Cambridge University Press 2015, 34. 30. Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett, 20. 31. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford University Press, 1967, 45. 32. See Dirk Van Hulle and Mike Kestemont, “Periodizing Samuel Beckett’s Works,” Style 50, no. 2, 2016, 172–202. 33. Constantina Stamou, “Stylochronometry: Stylistic Development, Sequence of Composition, and Relative Dating,” Literary, and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 2, 2008 181–199. 34. David L. Hoover, “A Conversation among Himselve: Change and the Styles of Henry James,” in David L. Hoover, Jonathan Culpeper, and Kieran O’Halloran, eds., Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama, New York and London: Routledge, 2014, 90–119. 35. Richard S. Forsyth, “Stylochronometry with Substrings, or: A Poet Young and Old,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 14, no. 4, 1999, 467–478. 36. John F. Burrows, Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels, Oxford University Press, 1987, 1. 37. John Pilling, “From an Abandoned Work: All the Variants of the One,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 18, 2007, 173. 38. Van Hulle and Kestemont, “Periodizing Samuel Beckett’s Work,” 191.

chapter 2

“All the Variants” Mark Nixon

In the first typescript of the play Footfalls, Samuel Beckett tells the story of Haddon the general practitioner, who will be “dead soon after.” Unhappy with this formulation, Beckett corrected this to “soon to die.” Subsequently, he noted three further expressions of Haddon’s impending demise: “with not long to live” crossed out, then “long past his best,” before finally reverting to “not long to live.”1 Furthermore, Beckett noted an addition in the left margin of the typescript, “Made rather a mess of it,” a remark that could refer to both Haddon’s exercise in dying and Beckett’s attempts at inscribing it. This struggle between textual and fictional ending can be found in many manuscripts’ drafts. Especially in his late prose, that is to say from the mid-1960s up until his death in 1989, Beckett negotiates the thresholds, the vulnerability of artistic creation, which is constantly threatened by erasure. Beckett inscribes the tension between textual completion and failure in the compositional process itself. In a letter dated September 26, 1971, Beckett told the critic Lawrence Harvey that “I seem to have abandoned more work than I ever finished.”2 Yet Beckett did not always equate “abandoned” with “unpublishable,” as titles such as “From an Abandoned Work” (1954/1955) or “Abandonné” (1972) indicate. Moreover, as Richard Admussen states: One problem often encountered in dealing with manuscript material is that of drawing the line between texts which are truly abandoned and those which can be recognised as early variant versions of works which ultimately find their way into print.3

Indeed, one could go further and say that, more often than not, abandoned material reappears in different guises in subsequent compositions. This compositional strategy can be observed throughout Beckett’s writing career, from the way material from the unpublished novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women was recycled in More Pricks than Kicks, the thematic and formal correspondences between the “Kilcool” manuscript and Not I, 36

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to the renegotiation of the “Verbatim”/“The Voice” fragments within Company. Nearly fifty years of criticism have addressed the many ways in which images, themes, words and intertextual references are refracted across different texts, as “all the variants of the one,” to cite From An Abandoned Work. As such it is tempting to view Beckett’s entire oeuvre as a work in progress. Or rather a “work in regress,” as Beckett described his compositional method in a letter to Ruby Cohn dated January 9, 1972.4 As Rosemary Pountney noted, Beckett’s writing process “may be seen as a microcosm of the development of Beckett’s oeuvre as a whole, a refining and scaling down of the text.”5 If it is difficult to distinguish clearly where one text ends and another one begins, and if the difference between abandoned and published texts is a distinction that teeters on its own fragility, then we might want to situate Beckett’s writing beyond boundaries of public and private, without or within the archive. The increasing availability of archival material – manuscripts, notebooks, letters, library, and so forth – allows us to explore the entire map of Beckett’s creative endeavors, from source material to “final” product. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which is publishing all of Beckett’s manuscripts in facsimile and in transcription, in particular enables us, forces us, even, to think differently about the entire canon. By re-uniting drafts that are physically scattered across various holding institutions in an electronic environment, the interconnectedness of Beckett’s compositions becomes increasingly apparent. And this textual and formal dialogue takes place across media, genres, and languages. The fragile distinction between drafts, abandoned writing, and “final” text can be illustrated by a study of the texts “Faux Départs” (1965), “Imagination morte imaginez”/“Imagination Dead Imagine” (1965), and All Strange Away (1976). This cluster of texts allows us to see just how fluid these distinctions are in reality, in that Beckett published “work in regress” – the “Faux Départs” – before the text reaches some kind of final shape. When the short text “Imagination morte imaginez” was published in French in the Lettres Nouvelles in October 1965, and then in an English translation as “Imagination Dead Imagine” in the Sunday Times on November 7, 1965, readers were rather startled by the new direction Beckett’s writing had taken. The text is difficult, experimental, minimal, poetic, yet stark in language and imagery. It also had a remarkably complex genesis. “Imagination Dead Imagine” was generated from the textual ruins of the abandoned All Strange Away, and Beckett referred to it as the “residual precipitate” of the earlier text. All Strange Away was eventually

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published in 1976. Further textual material – four distinct passages, three in French, one in English – belonging to the compositional process of these two works was published by Beckett under the title “Faux Départs” in the inaugural issue of the German journal Kursbuch in June 1965, that is to say before “Imagination Dead Imagine” appeared. The task of unraveling the precise textual evolution of these three publications is made easier by material evidence that has only recently become available. In particular, my focus will be on the manuscript notebook containing the first drafts of all three of these texts – “Faux Départs,” All Strange Away and “Imagination Dead Imagine” – a notebook acquired in 2004 by Trinity College Dublin.6 These texts contain shared thematic and formal orientations. They concentrate on the workings, and failings, of the imagination to construct geometrically confined “closed spaces,” in which human figures and objects are arranged and rearranged with mathematical precision. The texts deliberate on the conditions within these spaces – cubes or rotundas – paying detailed attention to temperature, lighting, and dimensions, as well as to the relationship between sounds and silence, different shades of whiteness and so forth. All of these texts are also very selfreflexive, inscribing the compositional process within them, and they also thematize, self-referentially, the concepts of imagination and fancy. The earliest indication that Beckett was working on this material can be found in a letter that Beckett wrote to Judith Schmidt at Grove Press on August 17, 1964, where he noted that he was forcing himself to write, but with little success.7 This is also the date inscribed on the very first page of the TCD manuscript notebook. Over the next seventeen pages, Beckett proceeded to draft several texts, distinct yet interrelated, at this point concentrating on the way in which the imagination creates. They are written in both French and English, revealing the complex bilingual origins of the two larger works, All Strange Away and “Imagination morte imaginez” that follow. These drafts correspond, sometimes verbatim, to the first three French texts that make up the “Faux Départs” as published in 1965, although several passages remain unpublished. Indeed, on the second page of the notebook, Beckett wrote the German word Fehlauszuege, which translates roughly as “False extracts,” probably after he was asked for a contribution to Kursbuch. Beckett struggled most with the third fragment, which he shaped into a poetic structure based on the number of syllables in each line. In the original draft Beckett inserts metric stresses across the words in order to achieve the right rhythm.

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In a letter to Barbara Bray dated August 21, Beckett summarized his first attempts at writing this new text with the words “Work quite hopeless. Thirty abortive beginnings,” before going on to cite the opening lines of what would become the first of the “Faux Départs.”8 By August 29, he felt sufficiently encouraged by the results that he sent a typescript of the first draft of the first fragment in the notebook to Bray, with the usual disparaging comment: “But for your entertainment abortion, which I’d be obliged if you wd. Destroy” – fortunately she did not do so.9 At some point in late August 1964, Beckett inserted a line across page 17 of the notebook, and started a longer prose text in English, which begins as follows: His refuge now is a kind of cupboard in a wall. He talks to himself – of himself – that always! – in the third person, he says, He has now taken refuge in what seems to be a wall cupboard. Let it measure four feet in width by six feet in depth by five feet in height.10

This is the first step toward what eventually will become All Strange Away, draft material for which occupies pages 17 to 83 in the manuscript notebook. There are numerous false starts, corrections, deletions, and additions throughout these pages, all of which are fully crossed out by Beckett, who was clearly uncertain of how to proceed. Saying that, already on September 1, 1964, Beckett sent two further typescripts to Bray with the words “here are two more gasps [. . .] I’ll go quite mad if it goes on much longer.”11 It appears as if Beckett spent most of September struggling with this new text, All Strange Away. It is here that Beckett’s correspondence with Bray becomes important; not only did he send her draft material, as we have seen, but he also gave regular updates on the compositional progress. These letters show just how intractable the material was proving to be. On September 8, 1964 he noted that he had done no further work on the piece, then four days later: “Got about a page and a half now that may develop, don’t know yet.” On September 14, “Work at breaking-down point again. What the hell, no hurry, it has to keep me going till I drop,” and again four days later: “‘Work’ at a standstill.”12 By September 22, 1964, however, he appears to have got a step further, writing to Bray that he now had “3 pages shit to my credit. Going to pull chain on now.” Moreover, Beckett also incorporates a sentence from the work in this letter, “Out now prowl out soon prowl stumble unseeing glare lifetime of,” as well as a sketch of the way the body is positioned in the space.13 Within the draft material toward All Strange Away in the TCD notebook, Beckett appears to start anew at least three times. It is only gradually

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that the idea of the opening phrase, with variations, of “Imagination dead imagine” emerges: Imagine a place and someone in it, imagine that again.14 Imagination spent imagine a place with someone in it, that again. Crawl out of the frowsy deathbed & drag it to a place to die in, that again.15 Imagination dead imagine a place, then someone in it. That again. Never ask another question.16

However, to confuse matters considerably, Beckett proceeded to write, starting on page 37, a clear draft of a text that synthesizes all the previous material in the notebook. This is essentially a clean copy (with the last seven sentences omitted) of the fourth “Faux Départ”as published in Kursbuch, the only one in English. Immediately after writing down this fourth “Faux Départ,” Beckett returned to All Strange Away, and the first complete, final draft begins on page 41, with the heading “Opening 4.” This draft is dated “Ussy 30 September 1964,” and on that same day Beckett told Barbara Bray that he had “started puking & poking at work again this morning.”17 Numerous differences between this final draft and the published version are discernible, but several central ideas are meticulously revised and reworked. The most notable of these is the position of the two bodies in relation to the enclosure and to each other – the relevant sections of the text contain numerous deletions, insertions, and revisions, as well as sketches and diagrams. There are also several editorial “reminders,” such as one with the heading “Frequencies”: light-dark memory with sorrow & sigh sleep – longed for & dreaded murmur eye squeezed ball slip of left hand18

This last of the four full drafts of All Strange Away, begun on September 30, appears to have been completed by latest October 18, 1964, when Beckett told Dick Seaver: “Did about 4000 words of horrible new prose at Ussy but don’t know if it will go on.”19 On the same day he registered his inability to complete the text in a letter to Henry Wenning, telling him that he was “absorbed by failure to continue writing.”20 Beckett continued to be absorbed by this failure, but his attention was diverted at the end of

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the year by the Royal Court production of Waiting for Godot in London. On January 2, 1965, however, he told Hugh Kenner that he intended to turn his back on theater in order to return to his prose project: ‘Off to Ussy next week to inspect the wreck yet again.’21 It is difficult to locate this new, renewed attempt to keep All Strange Away going in the manuscript note book – unhelpfully, Beckett does not give a date as he had done when he made a fresh start. What is clear, however, is that he must have given up on the text in early January, and proceeded to write Come and Go very quickly – a first version was completed by January 21, 1965. When he returned to the prose text, Beckett decided to abandon everything that went before, and start again, this time in French. This is yet another remarkable instance in which Beckett used a change of language in order to keep going. On January 23, 1965 – this date is in the notebook – Beckett began, again in the notebook, a new prose text in French, “Imagination morte imaginez.” As he told Lawrence Harvey on January 30, 1965, he had “started again for the 20th time, this time in French again, on what will not be written. Imagination morte imaginez.”22 The drafts of this new text, which absorbs and expands material contained on the previous eighty-three pages of the notebook, are written on the only pages that have not been crossed out by Beckett. We can call this, roughly speaking, Beckett’s fourth attempt to generate something more substantial out of this particular nexus of ideas, but as before, the composition is marked, after a burst of clarity, by hesitation. However, on March 14, 1965, Beckett must have felt that he had finally come to some kind of compositional conclusion, telling Avigdor Arikha: “J’ai bouclé la rotonde. Pour en être délivré. 1000 mots. 6 mois de ratures” [I have finished with the rotunda. To be rid of it. 1000 words. Six months of erasures].23 Beckett’s summation is rather apt; taking into account the ninety-plus pages of the manuscript notebook, and then the six typescripts of “Imagination morte imaginez” now held at Washington University Library in St. Louis, the text that finally saw the light of day was a radical distillation of Beckett’s verbal and thematic imaginings. As if to materially commemorate this “work in regress,” Beckett wrote, on the first page of the notebook, “Imagination morte imaginez / 1000 mots / Fini 19.3.65.” And as his letters to John Calder show, the translation of the text into English was nearly as troublesome as the original composition, although it was finally completed, swiftly, in Courmayeur between July 4 and July 8, 1965. During this period Beckett told Barbara Bray that he had translated half of the story: “Putting in plenty of gallicisms. Reads weird.”24

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As noted earlier, the complex genesis of this cluster of texts extends to their publication history. Beckett’s decision to allow Kursbuch to publish material that was clearly unfinished, or rather abandoned, under the title “Faux Départs” is rather remarkable, though it is a step anticipated, for example, by the inclusion of the “Addenda” in Watt. Indeed, Beckett had already in 1954 envisaged the publication of abandoned work when he told Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit on January 20, 1954 that “tous les faux départs par exemple (pas à confondre avec les textes pour rien)” “[all the false starts for example (not to be confused with the texts for nothing)]” could form, together with Mercier et Camier, a volume entitled “Merdes Posthumes.”25 Beckett was probably here referring to the four prose texts that he wrote in 1951–1952, immediately after the completion of the Textes pour rien (“Au bout de ces années perdues,” “Hourah je me suis repris,” “On le tortura bien,” “Ici personne”).26 Equally interesting is Beckett’s decision to publish All Strange Away, eight years after it was ostensibly abandoned. Beckett released the text in support of Jack McGowran’s family after his death, in a publication by Gotham Mart illustrated by Edward Gorey. The story of this particular venture is recorded in letters between Beckett and the publisher Andreas Brown: All I can find to offer is the unfinished text herewith. It was written 1964 on the rocky road to Imagination morte imaginez and then laid aside. It has never appeared anywhere in whole or in part. Apart from a few cuts and corrections of detail I have made no effort to improve it. The title remains to be found. All proceeds from your edition and from eventual foreign editions and subsidiary rights would go to the MacGowran fund.27

The text was eventually entitled All Strange Away, and was finally published in 1976.28 It is worth noting that the manner in which “Imagination morte imaginez/Imagination Dead Imagine” and All Strange Away were published anticipates the publication history of Le Dépeupleur/The Lost Ones. Having abandoned this text in 1966, Beckett reworked its opening fourteen paragraphs in the “fizzle” “Se Voir/Closed place” two years later, before completing and publishing Le Dépeupleur/The Lost Ones in 1970. The genesis of the “Faux Départs,” “Imagination morte imaginez/ Imagination Dead Imagine” and All Strange Away, as well as their publication history, is marked by mutability and vulnerability, whereby textual material always represents a possibility, rather than inherently containing a teleological destination. That is to say, the compositional dead-ends in Beckett’s writing process always lead to the possibility that another way can

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be found – it is a process that mirrors the attempts of the figures in the late prose to find a way out, as in Stirrings Still, for example: “In a strange place blindly in the dark of night or day seeking the way out. A way out. To the roads. The back roads.”29 As we have seen, the task of charting the full narrative of this genetic process is facilitated by further archival material, such as Beckett’s letters. The availability of the four volumes of Beckett’s correspondence is thus a vital aid in genetic criticism, and the editors are to be congratulated on negotiating the difficult task of selecting and editing Beckett’s letters for publication. By necessity, however, the simple fact that we are reading a selection of letters results in the fact that we are reading Beckett’s work, and the genesis of that work, through a particular lens. The challenge faced by the editors of The Letters of Samuel Beckett was not only one of meeting Beckett’s criteria that only letters that relate to his work are included, but also of having to choose – for reasons of space – between all the letters that do have a bearing on the work. It is to state the obvious to say that four different editors will most probably have made a different selection. Depending on their research interests, scholars will place a different value on particular letters. To mention only one example: a large number of letters that pertain to the minutiae of the business of publishing are excluded from the published volumes, and these letters would be of great interest to book historians. As the above discussion of the “Faux Départs,” “Imagination Dead Imagine” and All Strange Away reveals, the tracing of the complete writing and publication history necessitates the consultation of unpublished letters, most of which are available in public depositories. We are fortunate to have access to a further vital archival resource in its entirety. In 2016, Beckett’s library was made fully available within the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Thus we can see, for example, how Beckett’s reading resonates within and informs the compositional process of the cluster of texts surrounding “Imagination Dead Imagine.” Within the TCD manuscript notebook, the phrase “Fancy is his (or her) only hope” recurs frequently. Indeed, the deleted title on the cover of the notebook, undoubtedly written some time after Beckett had actually begun work on the new text or texts, is “Fancy Dead Dying.” Beckett’s thinking on Imagination and Fancy, as Romantic concepts,30 was undoubtedly influenced by his reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria not long before he commenced work. A two-volume edition of the Biographia survives in Beckett’s library, which he read in 1962, ‘without much pleasure.’31

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Another intertextual influence on the writing of these texts is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is not clear whether Beckett had Shakespeare’s play in mind before writing the works in question, or whether a similar concern occurred to Beckett during the writing process. But on page 22 of the manuscript notebook Beckett recorded four lines from Shakespeare’s play, which can be read as a remarkable summary of All Strange Away and, perhaps more obviously, Imagination Dead Imagine: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes & gives to airy nothing A local habitation & a name32

Shakespeare’s lines anticipate Beckett’s investigation of the imagination’s workings, in particular in giving shape to a body in a particular space (“habitation”). Beckett’s library contains several copies of Shakespeare, which reveal his life-long engagement with Shakespeare’s work. Our understanding of Beckett’s oeuvre continues to be shaped by the publication of archival material, though much work still needs to be done to make it accessible. In terms of Beckett’s notebooks, only the “Dream” Notebook (edited by John Pilling) and Beckett’s theatrical notebooks (under the general editorship of James Knowlson) have been made available. Some of Beckett’s notebooks are more interesting than others; the most interesting are undoubtedly the “Whoroscope” (1930s) and the “Sottisier” (1976–1984) notebooks.33 Both of these notebooks contain richly diverse material that generated and informed Beckett’s thinking and writing. Most of the other notebooks, while of interest, consist mainly of verbatim quotations from a variety of literary and non-literary books.34 The forthcoming publication of Beckett’s “German Diaries,” a record of his six-month journey through Nazi Germany in 1936–1937, will undoubtedly also reshape the way in which we view his work.35 These diaries give a unique insight into Beckett’s thinking at the time about aesthetics, culture (especially the visual arts and sculpture), politics and the everyday. They can also be seen as avant-textes if we think about the way Beckett integrated his description of a visit to the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg in late 1936 in the prose text Premier amour/First Love. Beckett acknowledged the fact that scholars would be interested in the complexities of the compositional process, and actively supported manuscript research conducted by academics such Ruby Cohn, Colin Duckworth, Raymond Federman, John Fletcher, Lawrence Harvey, and

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James Knowlson by providing them with unpublished draft material. He donated manuscript drafts of his works as well as notebooks and abandoned fragments to Trinity College Dublin in 1969 and then to the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading from 1971 until his death in 1989. Further material found its way into US University archives via Beckett’s dealings with Jake Schwartz and then Henry Wenning.36 Beckett’s correspondence reveals just how aware he was of the fact that his manuscripts would be of interest to scholars. When John Fletcher and Raymond Federman were compiling their bibliography of Beckett’s work (published in 1970), they suggested including a section entitled “Studies in Variants,” which would concentrate on “L’Expulsé” and “La Fin”; Beckett responded by saying: Ok for variants idea. But I could let you have I think more interesting material. For example there are 9 or 10 versions (not all conserved) of the very short new text I have given to Lindon and translated for Calder (in French PING, in English BING). I could let you have one or two preliminary & the final. Atrocious stuff of course.37

In fact, Beckett acknowledged the fact that it is precisely the “MS fumbling and blundering,” that is to say the revisions and the dead-ends, that will allow an understanding of how his works were composed.38 Beckett’s notebooks, manuscripts, letters, and diaries do not constitute an alternative canon to the published works, or even a “grey canon” (as Stan Gontarski puts it), but are an integral part of Beckett’s canon. Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s unpublished FOOTFALLS Typescript; IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE Notebook; and from his letters to Barbara Bray of September 8, 14, 18, and 30, 1964; Dick Seaver of October 18, 1964; Henry Wenning of October 18, 1964, and to Hugh Kenner of January 2, 1965 are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London.

Notes 1. Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, typescript, UoR MS 1552/2, 3, Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading. 2. Samuel Beckett, letters to Lawrence Harvey, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. 3. Richard Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: A Study, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979, 99. 4. SB to Ruby Cohn, January 9, 1972, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (henceforth LSB) iv: 1966–1989, eds. George Craig,

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

mark nixon Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 279. Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–76, Gerrards Cross/Totowa, NJ: Colin Smythe/Barnes and Noble Books, 1988, 195. “Imagination Dead Imagine,” manuscript notebook, TDC MS 11223, Trinity College Dublin. Beckett had given the notebook to Avigdor Arikha and Anne Atik in June 1965. Samuel Beckett, letters to Judith Schmidt, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. SB to Barbara Bray, August 21, 1964, in LSB iii: 1957–1966, 617. SB to Barbara Bray, August 29, 1964, in LSB iii, 618–619. TCD MS 11223, 17; qtd. from the identical typescript, LSB iii, 623. SB to Barbara Bray, September 1, 1964, in LSB iii, 622. TCD MS 10948/1. SB to Barbara Bray, September 22, 1964, in LSB iii, 628. In the third volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, this sketch is mistakenly attributed to Beckett’s work on Le Dépeupleur. TCD MS 11223, 23. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 33. TCD MS 10948/1. TCD MS 11223, 76. Samuel Beckett, letters to Richard Seaver, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Samuel Beckett, letters to Henry Wenning, Washington University Library, St. Louis. Samuel Beckett, letters to Hugh Kenner, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. SB to Lawrence Harvey, January 30, 1965, in LSB iii, 651. Qtd. in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, 532. SB to Barbara Bray, July 4–8, 1965, in LSB iii, 670. SB to Jérôme Lindon, January 20, 1954, in LSB ii. For a discussion of these abandoned prose texts, and of Beckett’s unpublished canon in general, see my essay “Beckett’s Unpublished Canon,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski, Edinburgh, 2014, 282–305. SB to Andreas Brown, June 27, 1973, in LSB iv, 336. In terms of print errors, All Strange Away has undoubtedly fared worse than all of Beckett’s prose texts. All six subsequent reprints introduce variants and errors, beginning with the version published in the Journal of Beckett Studies in 1978, which omits entire parts of sentences. The editions published by Grove Press and John Calder also contain several errors. An attempt at clearing up

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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the text was in the Faber edition, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–76, London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Samuel Beckett, Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 108. See Michael Rodriguez’s insightful essay on All Strange Away: Michael A. Rodriguez, “Romantic Agony: Fancy and Imagination in Beckett’s All Strange Away,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 18, 2007, 131–142. SB to Mary Hutchinson, June 11, 1962, qtd. in Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 26. TCD MS11223, 22. UoR MS3000 and UoR MS2901. Beckett’s “Whoroscope” Notebook is currently being edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, and will be published by Oxford University Press. An edition of Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes” is currently being prepared by David Addyman, Matthew Feldman, and Steven Matthews for Oxford University Press. Beckett’s “German Diaries” will be published in a critical edition by Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany in 2019, edited by Mark Nixon and Oliver Lubrich. For a discussion of Beckett’s attitude toward his own manuscripts, and the way they found their way into public collections, see my essay, “Beckett’s Manuscripts in the Marketplace,” Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4, 2011, 823–831. Qtd. in Van Hulle and Nixon, “ ‘Holo and Unholo’: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project,” 316. SB to Henry Wenning, March 29, 1965, qtd. in Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, ‘“Holo and Unholo’: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 18, 2007, 316.

chapter 3

Beckett’s Letters The Edition and the Corpus Dan Gunn

“I am a poor hand at this form of communication,” wrote Samuel Beckett in a letter to Lawrence Shainberg.1 This was by no means his sole apology for what he perceived to be his inadequacy as a correspondent. Yet by the time he claimed this, he had already written something in the order of fifteen thousand letters – over a long life, certainly, but with a frequency nonetheless of something like one letter (or lettercard or picture postcard) per day, every day of his adulthood (excepting the years of World War II). It took the four editors working on his correspondence, of which team I was the youngest member, some thirty years to assemble what Beckett wrote to friends, colleagues, publishers, theater directors, academics, actors, admirers; and then, from this corpus, to select the approximately 20 percent that would become the four volumes of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Now that this task is complete, and these letters are in the world in a form their author could hardly have imagined, it is not inappropriate to ask what place they have – the edition and behind that the corpus – in their author’s oeuvre. In suggesting some possible answers to that question, I shall first examine the relation of the letters to Beckett’s published texts (which for convenience I shall call the “literature”). In a second move, I shall explore what work remains to be done – it is considerable – to bring Beckett the letterwriter even more sharply into focus. Perhaps inevitably, given my decadeslong involvement with the letters, working often in contact with those to whom they were addressed, this will be a rather personal attempt to place the letters, and to suggest some of what they may have to offer to the future of Beckett studies. Beckett himself was ambiguous, even ambivalent, about the relation between the two sorts of writing, literature and letters. What was common to both was his sense of his own inadequacy, a sense exacerbated in the case of the latter, and particularly so in the last four decades of his life when he 48

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became famous. His apprehension was that however hard he labored, he never could rid himself of the backlog – the word “avalanche” is one he used to describe the quantities of mail he received – by which he was “destroyed.”2 Habitually, he proposed letter-writing as a hurdle he had to vault before settling down to the real work; yet never was the burdensome letter the one he was writing at that moment. From his cottage outside Paris at Ussy-sur-Marne, origin of a significant percentage of his missives, he wrote: “work indoors and out and try & catch up on mail which is a real burden.” To which he instantly added: “I don’t mean personal letters.”3 Yet any search for letters that might properly be judged impersonal is likely to draw a blank. To take the example of what would conventionally be a professional relationship, even what he wrote to his publishers John Calder, Jérôme Lindon, and Barney Rosset tended to be enlivened by a pun or a turn of phrase that served to remind his addressee that he too was special, never the recipient of mere drudgery. The avalanche of mail was never originating with this interlocutor; and, of course, even in the act of responding, Beckett was guaranteeing that the avalanche would continue. Only as a young man, up to, say, 1940, did he commonly initiate an exchange of letters. Subsequently – and the more famous he became, the more this was the case – he nearly always and only responded. He characteristically wrote to X, while complaining of correspondent Y – Y remaining almost invariably unnamed. (A rare exception appears when he signals: “Card from a German name of Norbert ostensibly last act before self destruction but with home address very legible.”4) Beckett’s assiduity as a correspondent, which ensured he answered practically every letter he received, is not merely the reason behind the corpulence of the corpus: it is the key witness to the fact that practically every day of his adult life, until the final two or three years when the sheer physical act of writing and posting a letter became onerous for him, his first writerly gestures on any given day were likely to be those which led him to correspond with someone. What he makes abundantly clear in his letters is that letters come first: they are the priority, at least in that quotidian sense that he feels uneasy and even inhibited in writing literature if he has not first ensured that the network of his letter-readers is in place and up to date. It may be tempting to attribute this assiduity to scrupulousness or even to old-world courtesy. But neither concept goes far enough. It took me twenty-five years of work on Beckett’s letters, and the writing of the introductions to all four volumes of our selection, to summon the courage to dare say it: Beckett’s letters are, in some way that remains to be defined, the necessary preamble, the preface, the precursor, the predicate even, of

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the literature. Indeed they are, or so I have come to believe, the sine qua non of the literary achievement. To prove this would be even harder than to claim it. Beckett’s diligence in responding to those who wrote to him – who wrote to him – was so ingrained that it partook of the necessity that informed his commitment to literary writing: less a vocation than a compulsion, less a calling than a condition of life itself – what led him to respond to the question “Why do you write?” with “All I’m good for.”5 It was not for him, in his letters or elsewhere, to articulate, still less theorize, the relation between the two differently projected forms of writing. The one was directed towards an unknown, largely invisible, and certainly unnameable audience.6 The other was directed towards a single nameable other (or occasionally a couple, as in the case of Avigdor Arikha and Anne Atik or Henri and Josette Hayden), and almost invariably in a way, through words attentive to the other and the other’s concerns and preoccupations and languageworld, designed to make that other feel special, even unique. In both cases, whether the writing was for the unspecified or for the localized other – and it is worth stating this precisely because it is so obvious – the requirements were in most crucial respects the same: a modicum of peace and quiet, solitude therefore; a pen in the hand (the great majority of the literary works and the letters were handwritten); paper (or card) on a desk or solid support; sufficient eyesight to trace the words (not a given when Becket was suffering from cataracts in the early 1960s); and patience, to allow the words, the right words, to emerge. What would decide him to permit an inner prompting to give rise to words intended for one or the other sort of reader on any particular morning or afternoon: this is the whole question posed by the corpus of Beckett’s letters and by the fact, now unavoidable in its 5.5-kilo heft, of the four-volume selection made of them. Moments do emerge, of course, illustrating clear confluence between the literature and the letters. These can take the form of adumbrations, as when Beckett recounts a visit to Kensington Gardens in London. In rapt fascination, he watches elderly men flying their kites. Amidst all the travails of a particularly troubled era in his life, with his father not long deceased and his psychoanalysis not yet over, an era that produces principally tortuous self-lacerating missives, his prose when describing the kite-flyers is almost as limpid as the sky welcoming the kites. “My next old man,” he writes, “or old young man, not of the big world but of the little world, must be a kite-flyer.”7 The interval between the intention and the act is unusually short, given that the novel Murphy, completed less than one year later, concludes with a scene of kite-flying. On other occasions, an

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anticipation can be as brief as a pair of words. Beckett ends a letter of condolence to Barbara Bray: “Work your head off and sleep at any price and leave the rest to the stream, to carry now away and bring you your other happy days.”8 The third of his long plays which starts life, two years later, as “the imbedded female solo machine,” by the time it enjoys its premiere, has the words “happy days” thoroughly attached to it, though larded now with irony.9 And not only adumbrations – examples must be legion, waiting to be uncovered – but also hesitations: hesitations that elucidate how even the steps that subsequently appear preordained could have led in quite different directions. There may be no twentieth-century play more canonical than Waiting for Godot; so canonical, indeed, that it is often hard for enthusiasts to accept that the original title was French. What the letters reveal is that even the French was in doubt. Beckett writes to his great friend of this period, Georges Duthuit, to discuss his title with him, citing as a source of his hesitation a play containing the name Godeau in its title, by Marcel Jouhandeau.10 Having received no response, he returns to the subject, saying, “You did not give me an answer on the Godeau–Godot question. I think I shall just have to leave it, but I should like to have your view.”11 Such hesitations, and the changes they commonly imply, could be seen to be the proper domain of, and be adequately recorded by, what is commonly called genetic criticism. What the letters do is usher affect into what can, at least to the unspecialized reader, appear a jejune list of permutations and modifications. It mattered to Beckett that he not be seen to be echoing, still less calquing, Jouhandeau; it mattered to him that his friend should reinforce his confidence in his choice of title. The traffic – if the passage of ideas, phrases, insights, and names from letters to literature may be considered a traffic – is not unidirectional, as a single example may serve to illustrate. From early in his writing life, Beckett had a fondness for failure, or for resignation before the burden of success, a fondness personified by his incorporation into his youthful work of Dante’s figure of Belacqua. Decades later, he embodied something of the attitude in the protagonist of Krapp’s Last Tape, who looks back in old age at the years while avowing, “I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now.”12 And, after he was devised in 1958, Krapp started to stalk his deviser’s letters. In one from 1983, six years before his death, to the widow of his cherished Irish actor Patrick Magee, who had premiered the role, Beckett writes: “Near the end of the road now I can agree with old Krapp that I wouldn’t want it back.” He adds: “In spite of good moments on the way.”13 No need to be a strict Freudian to apprehend in this repudiation (this Verneinung), as in Krapp’s before it, the secreted contrary wish to

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summon the past. In the difference between the effects of Krapp’s utterance and of Beckett’s may be sighted the crucial pointer to the literature/ letters bifurcation. When Krapp issues his renunciation, his “farewell to love,” he does so to nobody, unless to himself; when he listens to and is enraptured by the moment with his lover on the punt, memory is luminescent for him alone. When Beckett writes Krapp reliving his past, he is fully aware that his protagonist’s solitude will be mitigated, when the play is produced, by the presence of its audience. This presence serves to attenuate Krapp’s brittle anality through wry smiles or chuckles and through the deliquescence experienced in the silence beyond the play’s final denial. And when Beckett likens himself to Krapp in a letter? When he does this, he indicates that he is – or would be – akin to his avatar; but in the very act of writing to a specific named other, he proves that he is not, or not wholly. In his countless protestations in letters about how painful writing is for him, or how poor a hand he believes himself to be at it, Beckett is not being insincere. Yet the avowal itself is countermanded by the extraordinary energy, inventiveness, and rigor of his statements – statements which will be read, and read imminently; his implicit claim for kinship with Krapp will have crossed the space that separates him and his words from this trusted other. In the early years, Beckett did send letters that were barely comprehensible – those to Nuala Costello surely top the list. Yet even in letters that were of an artfulness and self-conscious erudition that would surely have horrified their author twenty years later – the peacock parades for Costello were presumably intended to seduce – there is a letting go: not just of his vanity or pretentiousness, but of his almost desperate wish to be heard – heard as it were beyond, or over, even against his recondite effusions. Beckett was, from a young age, fascinated by bicycles and bicyclists. Letter after letter alludes to the pleasure he is deriving from the Giro d’Italia or the Tour de France. If writing is, as he frequently stresses in his letters, an almost intolerably solitary and even self-defeating act, then perhaps it may be compared to the demanding, lonely, and intensely pressured striving of the long-distance competitive cyclist. If this analogy is permissible, then letter-writing corresponds to the advice requested, the spare tyres and water bottles accepted, the encouragement received from the support team: before the slog begins, when the hills are at their steepest, and, once the race is over (of course it is never won), when the cyclist, dismounting, tries to walk again on his own two effort-stiffened legs. By no means did Beckett expect all his correspondents to be readers of his literature. A letter such as the long one included in our edition’s

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Volume III to his cousin Molly Roe, with its minute awareness of family concerns, demonstrates how attuned he was to worlds far beyond those of his potential readers or viewers. For his Uncle Jim and Aunt Peggy he would find words of consolation when Jim’s legs were amputated, then condolences for his widow when Jim dies.14 It is not – or not only – that the range of his epistolary style (or styles) was a training-ground for what he would later attempt in his literary writing, although of course certain letters or sequences of letters do seem to herald a style or tone that would emerge only years after, as the letters to Pamela Mitchell sent in 1954 from the bedside of his dying brother appear to announce the tone of a play such as Footfalls. Rather, it is that by reaching out to his interlocutors and creating – and thereafter strenuously sustaining – a web of readers, he produced the conditions which made the solitary escapades – the cyclist’s échappées – almost tolerable. Naturally, this is another thing I can not prove. I can only state my belief: that, to take a further example, scholars will be inspired to read the text on whose creation Beckett comments most abundantly, not only in the light thrown by the letters, but also as emerging from the place that his letters permitted him to create and then maintain for the duration required for completion. That text, Comment c’est, is one that he ventured to write while being acutely aware how far he would be going out on a limb, pedaling – to overdo the cycling analogy – far beyond what could be assured by his supply of oxygen, glucose, and stamina. The letters to Barbara Bray of this period (they are numerous), or to Avigdor Arikha or Robert Pinget, should be considered not only as offering vital titbits of information to the Beckett scholar, or even a rich purse of evidence to genetic critics; rather they should be considered as creating that modicum of security – he is, despite asseverations to the contrary, not completely lost – required (to modify the metaphor to another sport adored by the author) for such a plunge into the uninviting, certainly unprepossessing, and quite possibly toxic depths. It is not just in his search for consensus over the title of Godot that the relation between the literature and the letters becomes instructive, during the most productive period of Beckett’s life. Nothing quite matches, in intensity and disinhibition, the letters he addresses to Georges Duthuit between 1948 and 1952. The work which emerges from the two men’s exchanges is the “Three Dialogues.” But the relation is more fertile than this. The sentences hurtle on in Beckett’s letters, leaping from topic to topic with few paragraph breaks, in a style not just reminiscent of the Trilogy; not even – or only – in a style that may anticipate the Trilogy.

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The sentences, the syntax, the swerves of attention, the sudden lyrical bursts followed by unrestrained abstraction – cumulatively, these provide something akin to a parallel text to the Trilogy. Literature and letters do not merely comment upon one another, but set out together, occasionally supporting each other, on other occasions racing against one another, sustained by their companionability, their interdependence, their shared determination to get said what can not be expressed in words. Beckett concludes a letter of September 10, 1951, which itself is in the form of a single uninterrupted paragraph: I am expecting the proofs of Malone any day, they are promised for the 15th of October. Let’s get on to L’Innommable, that is the only thing that interests me at all now. I am writing a tiny little bit, little fly-splashes against the window, when hoeing and weeding permit. [. . .] Yes, a tankard with you, beneath any sign you like, those are the moments, too brief, that matter to me. And feeling that affection which needs no words and is stronger than those I do spew out in all directions.15

Beckett’s friendship with Duthuit has been one of the abiding mysteries in my own work on the letters, as so little in temperament or background seems predestined to have drawn these two together. A mystery, too, surrounds the parting of their ways: for they do part ways, in a manner almost without parallel, given Beckett is someone for whom once-a-friend is then always-a-friend; no meetings or letters were exchanged between them for more than fifteen years, until Duthuit reached out from what would prove to be his deathbed. Elsewhere, I have speculated on what may have brought them together, and what pushed them apart; as his son Claude told me, it is probably the case that Duthuit felt envious when Beckett was able, with the rising tide of support for his work, to emerge from under his patron’s aegis.16 But might there be another way of thinking this friendship? Could it have been not just that Beckett’s success piqued Duthuit, but also, or as much, that his own role in his protégé’s writing had become redundant? Unlike most of Beckett’s major friendships, where letters were a supplement to that friendship, in the case of Duthuit the friendship appears to have been, if not exclusively, then principally epistolary. And when L’Innommable was completed, the role of Duthuit and his letters, the role of that particular support system, that novel relation to the French language – for though Duthuit had adequate English, all the letters to and from him are in French – that ear for the inexpressible, was perhaps no longer essential. The friendship faded, along with the greatest era in Beckett’s writing life. It is an era which saw Beckett

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develop one of his most characteristic tropes, which he named the “pseudocouple”: that pair of individuals attached to one another through mutual need, dependency, and underlying resentment (Mercier and Camier, Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky . . .). What would be the consequences, for how we read the literature and the letters, of adding to this list, even just by way of experiment, the figures – the writing-figures – of Beckett and Duthuit?

* Readers of the letters to Duthuit, collected in Volume II of our edition, may try this experiment with most of the evidence to hand, from the Beckett side at least, for practically every letter he sent Duthuit is included there. This is a testament to the importance we editors accorded to this torrent of words, but also, indirectly, to its cessation; for had the torrent continued, it would have risked drowning out other letters that merited inclusion. In the case of the great epistolary relation of the first half of Beckett’s life, with Tom MacGreevy, the majority of the letters to him were included for the 1930s, but at a lower ratio after that. In the case of the third great epistolary relation of his life, with Barbara Bray, a still smaller percentage of letters was included. What I am admitting here is that my argument, which is that much is to be learned from reading Beckett’s literature and letters together (or, to revive the cycling analogy for an instant, in tandem), contains a barely conscionable specimen of special pleading. For the source of my conviction as to the potential of the tandem derives not from any specific instance, such as when Beckett communicates freely while plunging into Comment c’est, or when he turns Georges Duthuit into the one who might hear his newfound French fluency and apprehend the endpoint of its onrush. Rather, it derives from my sense – a sense which persists almost undimmed from 1929 to 1989 – of the dailyness of the literature-letter relation: the sense that, on practically any of the 25,000-odd days on which he was thinking about writing literature, Beckett was also thinking about writing letters (with the obvious exception of the war years, during which letter-less period he nonetheless did produce the very odd novel that is Watt); the sense, indeed, that literature-andletters might also be a pseudo-couple. This much can be gleaned, I trust, from the selected letters. But in my own case, contact with the corpus that we editors gathered, transcribed, translated (where necessary), annotated, and selected, was what hardened the impression into a conviction. To enunciate a conviction rooted in unpublished material is hardly warrantable, academically. And this is partly why I have judged that it may be

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helpful, in the second half of the present chapter, to consider those very stages by which the corpus was established, then reduced, then reconstituted into what is now known in Beckett bibliographies as The Letters of Samuel Beckett.

Gathering The vast majority of Beckett’s letters now reside in the libraries and archives that are acknowledged in our edition. A reader wishing to consult these letters, having first obtained the permission of the Beckett Estate, will either travel to one of the repositories or be emailed scans of the letters, enabling these to be read on a computer screen.17 This too is the “New Beckett”: the uprooting of text from the context in which it was intended to be read; a context which, in most cases down to its fine details, Beckett could visualize, and into which he wrote. The very ease of access, when linked to the vividness that digitization permits, may encourage scholarly amnesia as to how utterly alien, even inappropriate, this new setting is. (We editors were often one step less alienated, in that at least the collections were often consulted in the homes of the letters’ addressees.) No letter-box need be opened or concierge mollified; no neighbour’s child need be rewarded on the stair of the immeuble with the promise of an exotic postage stamp (numerous are the envelopes whose stamps have been removed); no envelope is asking to be slit open; no speculation is required as to where this missive is going to leave one in relation to its author – invited closer, held at a distance, left behind . . . The assembling of Beckett’s letters in archives, then their transferal into the umpteen filing-cabinets employed by us editors, constitutes the abrogation of elements that were crucial to the material, but also the textual and semiological reality of these letters. The studies the letters will engender, and even require, will in no small measure be attempts – I hope! – to push against this abrogation. They will involve the summoning of an absence – and not only one – since, for a start, the corpus we editors established, while enormous, is missing significant limbs. Two flagrant examples of these absences may stand for several others. We found no letters from Beckett prior to age twenty-three, though it is inconceivable that he did not write some. And we found not a single letter to his wife Suzanne, though surely he must have written to her, as they were often apart; the chance that she would not have kept his letters, given her faith in his work and status, is slim. In the forensic parlance of scholarship,

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such gaping holes are conveniently labelled lacunae. But is that term adequate? I have frequently imagined Beckett returning to the flat he shared with Suzanne at 38 Boulevard St-Jacques, days or at most weeks after her death (therefore weeks or months before his own), entering her bedroom, opening the drawer in which she stored his letters. And then what? Burning them? Submitting them to what he called his “Occam’s Razor”?18 The lineaments of my imagining – my speculation; for that is all it is, almost indecent in its intrusiveness – form my own attempt to flesh out the bare bones of that term lacunae. Perhaps, in time (though I doubt it), the letters to Suzanne will turn up. But even if not, their absence needs somehow – this too is the job of scholarship – to become more of a presence. The task of gathering, in at least two senses of this word – gathering as collecting; gathering as understanding – is in fact far from over.

Transcription One aspect of the experience that today’s archive readers of Beckett’s uncollected letters do share with the missives’ original destinataires is a degree of appalled insecurity when faced with the graphic notations on the page – an impression only aggravated if the highly legible envelope has been saved. Beckett was keenly aware of the strain under which he was placing his readers, often apologizing for his “foul fist,” promising to do better, and occasionally explaining words that were illegible in a previous letter; he was aware, certainly, that only a percentage of what he wrote would become text. By relieving his subsequent readers of the strain of deciphering Beckett’s handwriting, we editors believed we were performing a service to the Beckett community. Faced with patience and several sets of eyes, nearly every squiggle yielded a consensus on the word transcribed; this was the work not of hours or days or months, but of years, when of course Beckett never imagined being read so painstakingly. One of our transcription team, Gérard Kahn (translator into French for Gallimard of our Volumes III and IV), remains convinced that the letters to Barbara Bray, to take just one example, from whom Beckett seems to have been perpetually retreating ever after she moved to Paris in 1961, were purposefully inscrutable (purpose conscious or unconscious, it hardly matters). I myself have observed that the closer Beckett came to exposure of his intimate feelings, towards any of the numerous women with whom he was involved, the less legibly he wrote, as if that crucial word which might fuel

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hope or extinguish it were itself, quite literally, un-inscribable. If I am correct in suggesting that any contribution to an understanding of Beckett made by his letters will need to account more fully for his and his correspondents’ contexts than our edition was able to do, then this too will count: the frustration experienced as scratchings on the page refuse to coalesce into recognizable words; the anxiety that, even when the word has been deciphered, it might in fact be something else altogether – might even be in another language. And there are aspects to Beckett’s missives that even more patently resist “transcription.” As even the most cursory reading of his letters must make evident, Beckett was immensely invested in and knowledgeable about art. For him, the visual was of crucial importance. His first great correspondent, Tom MacGreevy, was himself deeply learned in art history, and went on to become Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in his late years. His second major correspondent, Georges Duthuit, was a profound, if maverick, thinker and writer on art, as well as being Henri Matisse’s son-in-law. It was when discussing Cézanne or Jack B. Yeats, more than literature or drama, that in the 1930s Beckett most clearly articulated the horizon of what would be his own writing; while later, after World War II, it was in the work of Bram van Velde that he most eloquently located his dream of a non-expressive art. These examples could be multiplied. And what of the visual dimension of his own correspondence? It would require a facsimile edition to demonstrate his aesthetic of the page: his choices of paper (color, size, texture), of pen, of ink, of format – and occasionally of image. In 1981 he sent a picture postcard to his childhood friend Mary Manning, who had recently lost her husband, the Harvard academic Mark Howe.19 As the text of this card was not judged to be one of his most noteworthy attempts at consolation, it was not selected for our edition. Yet, taken as it surely will have been received, verso and recto, the card leaps alive. The image is of a painting by an artist inimical to Beckett’s usual taste (he prefers cards showing paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Mantegna, or Rembrandt): a full-length portrait of an aristocratic lady in her finery and wig by Thomas Gainsborough. The lady’s name provides the visual pun: Mary, Countess Howe. One is left to imagine what the Mary receiving this card may have felt, behind a probable wry smile: appreciation, perhaps, that her friend (and former lover) should have gone to the effort of finding this particular card, one so at odds with his usual aesthetic? So excited was he by Caravaggio’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist in Malta that Beckett sent a postcard of it to at least six different friends, and later reported the painting as being one of the sources of Not I. What this

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extraordinary image becomes in “transcription,” however, is an arid archival note. Of the more than 1,200 picture postcards which we are aware he sent, the majority are of sights, views, buildings, chosen for their approximation to what he was encountering while far from Paris. When he sent a touristic postcard showing the hotel where he was staying – in Courmayeur or Alghero or Stuttgart, in all of which he tried to work; there was scarcely a place where he did not try to work – he was extending another thread in the web that would sustain him. Here I am, he seems to announce, and there you are; while neither quite here nor there is the text on which I am working; the image I am sending you of here relieves me of doing more to be present there (just as the very postcard form, with its word limit, constrains my expression), even as it obliges me, qua tourist, to be more than mere tourist . . .

Translation To Barbara Bray, Beckett wrote predominantly, though not exclusively, in English, passing into French, German, or Italian where these languages afforded him le mot juste. Bray was herself, of course, an accomplished linguist and a major literary translator. In our edition we chose to publish all the letters in their original language (a choice not followed by the French, German, or Italian editions), along with a translation; George Craig’s renderings of Beckett’s French are so extraordinarily well pitched that I know many a French reader who reads his versions too. If the move to inspect Beckett as working between (at least) two languages is not a new one, the letters enlarge the field, since in them languages trip over one another as they vie for currency. Naturally, this is most notably the case with those among Beckett’s correspondents who were themselves multilingual. It can be no coincidence that most of his major correspondents were precisely that: MacGreevy, George Reavey (who translated from Russian), Bray, Jacoba van Velde (his Dutch translator), and of course Avigdor Arikha, who may have been the only one fluent in even more languages than Beckett himself. With such correspondents there was of course a dominant shared language, but that could be circumvented on occasion.20 If one conceives of his chief correspondents, even provisionally, as in some ways his ideal readers (they are after all those to whom he wrote most, and most freely), then the language in which he regularly wrote to them was a hybrid of the European languages in which he was versed. As early as 1931 he mixes tongues to capture the precise flavor of his anomie: “This vitaccia is terne beyond all belief.”21 Beckett’s literary texts are of

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course peppered with words and names foreign to their principal language – all those Irish names in the Trilogy, for instance. But close attention to the play of languages in the letters, when Beckett could be confident of his interlocutors’ ability to follow him, will surely open other perspectives on his inter- and intra-glossal aspiration.

Annotation I suggested above that, in certain of his early letters, Beckett’s bravura entailed his being only partially understandable. The abundant explanatory notes appended to such letters as those sent to Nuala Costello are, therefore, a sort of contre-sens – comparable perhaps to a laborious explanation of irony or a joke. While parading his learning, the young Beckett was also demonstrating his superiority; if he wished to be understood, it was at one remove – as just this unassailably and seductively clever. It is striking how little there is of such parade in the post-war letters, where he really does seem to expect his readers – Duthuit is recipient of the most intellectually challenging of these – to follow his every twist and turn, his every corner cut, his every astonishing condensation. In 1975, he writes to Bray from Tangier where he is re-reading Dante.22 I think of myself as having more than a passing familiarity with the Divine Comedy, and on my bookshelves stand six different editions of Inferno. Yet reading a letter like this one, I found myself stuck – as stuck as Belacqua is in Paradiso’s spots of the moon (in Beckett’s early story “Dante and the Lobster”). I had to draw, not for the first time, on the expertise of my former teacher and friend Lino Pertile, one of the world’s leading Dantisti, and even he had to think long and hard before assisting me towards an understanding. Our annotations, this is to say, are a measure of the capacity of Beckett’s chosen readers – here, Barbara Bray – and of his confidence in their powers of comprehension. It has of course been debated, whether we editors over- or under-indulged in annotation, a debate that centers upon the readership envisaged for our edition. Either way, every addition of a footnote, if it is a testament to fadings – of familiarity, background, savoir – inevitable with the passing of time, is a testament also to the language community, the intellectual confederacy, into which Beckett was projecting himself. It is not, therefore, that any individual reader should today be embarrassed to be found wanting: how could anyone be expected to know of Molly Roe’s second cousin twice-removed and of Silver Phil? Rather, it is that our very grasping for a context, a reference, an elaboration, signposts the ways in which Beckett expected to be heard.23

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Selection In conversation during festivities to celebrate her eightieth birthday, Barbara Bray informed me that she had been told by Beckett that he “didn’t give a damn” if his letters were published, so long as this happened after his death. The posthumous injunction accords with what I personally believe to be his principal reservation over publication of his letters during his lifetime, a reason he gave to Ruby Cohn: “Don’t like quotes from letters because it makes you cagey.”24 In the absence of clear instructions or lines of authority, a note to Martha Fehsenfeld became of exaggerated importance, stating as it did that she should publish only letters or passages “having bearing upon my work”; it was an instruction that would be interpreted differently by everyone who subsequently read it. The reason I say “exaggerated” is because, while he was a staunch lifelong opponent of censorship, Beckett exerted a considerable degree of caution, even of selfcensorship, in his letters; the other side of the coin of his ability to find the words intended to make his correspondent feel unique was his awareness that these words, this letter, could be over-read by another. So, for example, when he had something very private to communicate to MacGreevy in Ireland, he would sometimes choose to write it in French, judging it improbable that MacGreevy’s entourage would understand it (even if they penetrated that first layer of defense constituted by his handwriting). He frequently informed his correspondents that a matter would need to be discussed “in person,” and with the women in his life he commonly pleaded not to be required to wear his heart on his sleeve – his epistolary sleeve. Given his probity, his generosity, his political perspicacity, his devotion to his craft, and given there really are no letters – or none that I have seen – that seriously challenge this view of the man and his reputation, selecting the letters that best represent him should have been easy. Some of the reasons why this did not prove to be the case are outlined in the General Introduction to Volume I (and to subsequent volumes); they are significant here only in so far as the letters which were excluded for reasons other than their quality amount to a mere handful, of which for me the most significant are several of those sent to Pamela Mitchell in early 1954 (which are in any case quoted liberally in James Knowlson’s authorized biography Damned to Fame). Which is not to say that another individual or team would have made the same selection we made, of course; but if different, then I believe not so very different, if constrained as our project was by the imperative to fit within four publishable volumes.

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It is not, then, that I believe our edition omitted any particular highlights or indispensable insights, but rather that it modified – I suspect inevitably – the basic texture of the correspondence, starting with the winnowing of what I have called its “dailyness.” The texture is altered also by the fact that our edition, for reasons of space and because Beckett did not keep letters he received, is a one-sided affair, with the letters out but not the letters in (except occasionally in extracts in footnotes). We chose only occasionally to show how on a single day Beckett could write about the same issue to several people, varying the terms in which he did so – the bombing of Jean-Jacques Mayoux’s Paris apartment in 1962, for example. And underlying the other transformations that our edition brought about, there is especially – so obvious that it may be easy to overlook it – the fact that the corralling of Beckett’s correspondents within the covers of a volume required a radical compression; it enforced a type of promiscuity that Beckett spent much of his life avoiding, keen as he ever was to keep his interlocutors discrete, even apart from one another – not just his lovers but also his various groups and types of friends and acquaintances. (One of our chief problems in compiling our edition was the jealousy felt by many of Beckett’s friends when they realized just how wide his acquaintance really was.) Our volumes erode distances: geographical (all that is implied by the postage stamp) and temporal (the time, of which Beckett regularly complains, that a letter takes to arrive and elicit a response). The job of the postman is elided; the primordial fact that letters, with their play of absent-presence, suited Beckett, in a way the telephone never could. So, just as Beckett himself is the ideal antidote to today’s celebrityseeking culture, his letters are the antidote to the ubiquitous “reply all” or “cc” of email (not to speak of the gregariousness of social networks). There is something almost grotesque in finding all of Beckett’s friends, acquaintances, actors, publishers, lovers, mashed up together in such tight proximity. The job of scholars who seek to put his letters to future use will no doubt include that of unpacking this mish-mash, returning materiality and texture to the hugely unpredictable yet in retrospect fantastically consistent body of words that Beckett committed to the mail. What will thereby be restored is not just breathing-space for Beckett’s correspondence, but also the urgency of human breath and life, to what is implied in that very word: corpus.

Notes 1. Letter of July 15, 1979, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett (henceforth LSB) i: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 506.

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2. See, for example, April 22, 1981 to Alan Schneider, in LSB iv: 1966–1989, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 550; and May 20, 1981 to Anne Madden and Louis Le Brocquy, ibid., 553. 3. Letter to Barbara Bray, May 6, 1959, Trinity College Dublin Library (MS 10948/1/31). 4. Letter to Barbara Bray, June 1, 1970, in LSB iv, 234. 5. SB’s original, “Bon qu’à ça”: in a letter to Mathieu Lindon of February 24, 1985, in LSB iv, 652. 6. Or barely an audience at all, as was the case during much of his career. The great post-war years that produced the kernel of his oeuvre, the Trilogy of Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’Innommable, as well as En attendant Godot, were a period when he had no publisher and no prospect of ever seeing his play staged. 7. Letter of September 8, 1935 to Tom MacGreevy, in LSB i, 274. 8. Letter of March 17, 1958, in LSB iii:1957–1966, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 119. 9. Letter to Barbara Bray of October 10, 1960, in LSB iii, 365. 10. Letter probably from the end of December 1950, in LSB ii: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 201–211. 11. “Tu ne m’as pas répondu pour la question Godeau-Godot. Je crois que je n’ai qu’à le laisser, mais j’aimerais bien avoir ton avis.” Letter of January 3, 1951, in LSB ii, 215, 217. 12. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol iii: Dramatic Works, ed. Paul Auster, New York: Grove Press, 2006, 230. 13. Letter to Belle McGee of December 16, 1983, Trinity College, Dublin, Library (MS 11313/39). 14. Letter to Molly Roe of February 6, 1959, in LSB iii, 199–203; letters to Peggy and Jim Beckett, e.g. June 11, 1968, in LSB iv, 128; April 22, 1971, in LSB iv, 252–253. 15. “J’attends d’un jour à l’autre les épreuves de Malone, promis pour le 15 Octobre. Vivement L’Innommable, c’est tout ce qui m’intéresse un peu encore. J’écris un tout petit peu, de petits coups de mouche contre la vitre, lor[s]que binage et désherbage m’en laissent le loisir. [. . .] Oui, une chopine avec toi, à l’ombre de n’importe quelle enseigne, ce sont les moments, trops [for trop] courts, qui m’importent. Et sentir cette affection qui se passe de paroles et est plus forte que celles que je vomis à tort et à travers.” LSB ii, 293, 295. 16. See Dan Gunn, interview by Rhys Tranter, The Quarterly Conversation, March 4, 2013, http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-dan-gunn-interview. 17. My fellow-editor Lois More Overbeck is currently establishing an electronic finding-aid to the complete corpus of Beckett’s letters.

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18. Beckett uses the expression to explain why he has no copies of letters sent to him, in a letter of August 1, 1951 to Georges Duthuit, in LSB ii, 273, 274. 19. Postcard of May 22, 1981, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin (TxU, Beckett Collection). 20. An exception, again, is Duthuit: though he did have English, having spent the war years in New York, barely a word of English appears in the letters to him; Beckett’s delight at testing his writer’s voice in French ran roughshod, as it were, over his polyglot tendencies. 21. Letter to Tom MacGreevy of February 24, 1931, in LSB i, 68. 22. See in particular letter of July 17, 1975, in LSB iv, 405–406. 23. In a letter to Barbara Bray from June 23, 1975, while he is reading Dante near Tangier, Beckett jokingly refers to Filippo Argenti from Inferno Canto VIII as “Silver Phil.” LSB iv, 402. 24. Letter of June 11, 1969, University of Reading (BIF MS 5100).

chapter 4

The Evolution of Beckett’s Poetry Marjorie Perloff

I am starting a Logoclasts’ League [. . .] I am the only member at present. The idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude, like a hernia.1

The opening poem of Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), the only volume of poems in English that Beckett published as a distinct collection,2 is “The Vulture”: dragging his hunger through the sky of my skull shell of sky and earth stooping to the prone who must soon take up their life and walk mocked by a tissue that may not serve till hunger earth and sky be offal3

Beckett himself told friends that his poem alluded to Goethe’s famous “Harzreise im Winter,” whose opening five lines were “for ever in my head.”4 That stanza reads: Dem Geier gleich, Der auf schweren Morgenwolken Mit sanften Fittig ruhen Nach Beute schaut, Schwebe mein Lied.

Translated into English, “Like the hawk, its soft wings resting on heavy morning clouds, that watches for prey, let my song take flight.”5 In the German of Goethe’s time, the noun Geier referred to any bird of prey – hawk, falcon, vulture – the point being that in Roman mythology, such birds were the companions of the ancient gods. The vulture, for that matter, has often been taken to symbolize the cleansing and renewal of

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the earth of the dead. And indeed, “Harzreise im Winter,” is a Romantic ode, calling on the gods to grant the poet the energy to transform his everyday world, even as he recognizes the negative forces that threaten his success. From its opening suspended line with its strong alliteration and assonance, Goethe’s quest poem, complex and conflicted, looks to the natural world for sustenance. Beckett turns Goethe’s melodious ode inside out: his three uneven and unrhymed couplets present creativity as a vulture gnawing at the poet’s skull, “mocked by a tissue” that dissolves into mere offal. Indeed, here inner (the skull) and outer (the “shell of sky and earth”) are one and the same, nature providing no more than what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “carrion comfort.” To transmit this sense of waste, Beckett uses contorted syntax, curious nominal apposition, as in “till hunger earth and sky,” and intentionally grating rhythms. The author of “The Vulture” as well as the Provençal-inspired albas, enuegs, sanies, and serenas of Echo’s Bones,6 was a deeply learned and deeply unhappy young man, writing in defiance of what we might call, following Charles Bernstein, “official verse culture” – the culture of his Irish Protestant family and community. In his early work, such contra-diction took the form of subversion: the task, whether in the novel Murphy or in the early poems, was to deconstruct the established poetic and fictional modes of the day by using inappropriate, even shocking language, as in “Exeo in a spasm/tired of my darling’s red sputum” (“Enueg 1”) or “like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum” (“Sanies 1”). Beckett’s early letters, especially those to his great friend Thomas McGreevy, express, at every turn, this stance of tough sarcasm, for example: The abominable old bap Russell [the Irish poet George Russell, whose pseudonym was AE] duly returned my MSS with an economic note in the 3d person [. . .] I would like to get rid of the damn thing but I have no acquaintance with the less squeamish literary garbage buckets.7

Or, to the editor Samuel Putnam, “How are things? Must try & arrange a proper booze before I return – like a constipated Eurydice to the shades of shit.”8 As for his own poetic efforts, he was given to intense self-criticism: Nothing seems to come off [. . .] I began a poem yesterday [. . .] a blank unsighted kind of thing, but looking at it is clear that it can never turn out to be more than mildly entertaining at the best. The old story – ardour and fervor absent or faked so that what happens may be slick enough verse but not a poem at all.9

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“Slick enough verse but not a poem at all”: what Beckett doesn’t quite say and neither do critical discussions of Echo’s Bones, my own included,10 is how traditional these would-be oppositional poems really were. “The Vulture” may well be a dark parody of Goethe’s expansive ode, but it respects the prescribed norms of lineation and stanzaic structure (as do the enuegs and serenas and sanies) and adopts the compact Symbolist mode of Beckett’s forebears (some of whom, like Rimbaud, he was translating at the time) so as to create a neatly framed construction of images.11 The publication of Beckett’s correspondence, especially the first volume (1929–1940), has given us a whole new sense of what a slow starter Beckett was. The letters make painful reading: from his twenty-third year, when he sends James Joyce the corrections for his forthcoming essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . .Joyce,” commissioned for transition12 to the outbreak of World War II ten years later, Beckett, however learned, precocious and brilliant, was essentially an author in search of a subject and method. Making It New via send-up and scatology could take him only so far. Indeed, his relationship to his precursors – English, French, Italian, and Classical – was characterized by an acute anxiety of influence. Augustine and Dante, Spenser and Milton, Yeats and Joyce (the former to become the hero of his later years, the latter, his early mentor): where could an astonishingly well-read, deeply literary young Irishman, teaching French in Dublin and Paris, find his own place? How to make the leap from a poetry he himself knew to be excessively mannered to what we have come to know as the Beckettian vision? Here two letters, both of them often cited but difficult to parse, are germane. The first, to McGreevy, thanks his friend for praising one of his poems, but then goes on to say: my feeling is, more and more, that the greater part of my poetry, though it may be reasonably felicitous in its choice of terms, fails precisely because it is facultatif [optional]. Whereas the 3 or 4 I like [. . .] do not and never did give me that impression of being construits. I cannot explain very well to myself what they have that distinguishes them from the others, but it is something arborescent or of the sky, not Wagner,/not clouds on wheels; written above an abscess and not out of a cavity [. . .] There is a kind of writing corresponding with [. . .] fraudulent manoeuvres to make the cavity do what it can’t do – the work of the abscess. I don’t know why the Jesuitical poem that is an end in itself and justifies all the means should disgust me so much. But it does – again – more and more. I was trying to like Mallarmé again the other day, & couldn’t, because it’s Jesuitical poetry, even the Swan & Hérodiade. I suppose I’m a dirty lowchurch P. even in poetry, concerned with integrity in a surplice. I’m in

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marjorie perloff mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.13

This passage is seemingly contradictory. If poetry is excessively construit (constructed), how can it, at the same time, be facultatif, which is to say arbitrary? And what are those “fraudulent manoeuvres” that try to make the “cavity do what it can’t do – the work of the abscess”? If we take the word “cavity” to refer to a given poem’s chosen genre and verse form, its lyric container, whether Provençal alba or Mallarméan sonnet (like “Le vierge le vivace, et le bel aujourd’hui” which Beckett refers to above to as “the Swan”), the meaning of “abscess” becomes clear. Poetic constructions that are facultatif – what Beckett here calls “clouds on wheels” – are “fraudulent manoeuvres” because, although arbitrarily assembled, they are not designed to allow for surprise – the unanticipated reality which is unnamable – in Beckett’s words, the “pendu’s emission of semen.” The reference here is to poetic difference – “the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind” – which is a perfect example of what Duchamp calls the infrathin.14 Poetry, Beckett is implying, cannot be constrained by genre. To think in terms of the individual lyric poem with its subgenres – ode, elegy, alba, epigram – is, he suggests, to privilege the “cavity” over the “abscess,” which is the matter of the poem: namely its language. In attacking the “Jesuit poem that is an end in itself and justifies all the means,” even when its proponent is the Mallarmé of the famous sonnets, is, to use Classical terminology, to subordinate poiema (a thing made, the poem) to poiesis (the making of poetry) and poietike (poeticity), the latter the favored term of such Russian Formalists as Roman Jakobson. Contemporary theoreticians of the lyric like Jonathan Culler or Virginia Jackson,15 continue to focus on lyric poem as the object of inquiry, but Beckett’s own unease with the designation anticipates the work of twentieth and twenty-first century poets. From Eliot’s Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos to the present, the lyric no longer seems to furnish the most appropriate system of classification, there being, after all, no “dramatic poetry” (replaced by “drama”) and barely any poetry that is predominantly narrative. Beckett himself increasingly shifted from the dominant genres to radio and television play, dance piece, and especially what he called texts (as in “Texts for Nothing”) or pieces – short “prose” compositions that defy traditional classification. And here the second important letter comes in – Beckett’s letter to his friend Axel Kaun, originally composed in German:

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It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to my like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. [. . .] To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer. Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word, that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved?16

If the deconstruction of genre is the first step, the second is the deconstruction of “Biedermeyer” (mid-nineteenth century, heavy and dark furniture of the bourgeois household) style and syntax – what the Romantics had dismissed as Poetic Diction– familiar phraseology, cliché, circumlocution, stale metaphor. The other arts, Beckett recognized, were way ahead of literature in this regard, painting, for example, long having given up “realistic” representation in favor of Expressionist, Cubist and then Surrealist distortions. Much as Beckett adored Yeats, and later came to incorporate passages from his poems in works of his own, he understood that the “high” style of Yeatsian lyric was exhausted. Nor could Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word,” as Beckett explains to Kaun later in his letter, serve as a model for the desired breakthrough of the “word surface.” Indeed, “Gertrude Stein’s Logographs come closer to what I mean. The fabric of the language has at least become porous, if regrettably only quite by accident.” Beckett evidently took the view that Stein’s was automatic writing, but he sensed that she alone was “On the road toward this, for me, very desirable literature of the nonword.”17 But what would the “literature of the nonword” look like? Six months after formulating his critique of the “language veil,” on the night of 6 January 1938, Beckett, while walking home from a Paris café late at night with friends, was accosted by a stranger and stabbed.18 The knife wound barely missed the heart: after two weeks in the hospital, Beckett, recovering in his hotel room and still in pain, wrote McGreevy, enclosing the following “poem” that “dictated itself to me night before last”:

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marjorie perloff they come different and the same with each it is different & the same with each the absence of love is different with each the absence of love is the same19

This little poem has an interesting publishing history: “I sent,” Beckett tells McGreevy a few weeks later, “‘they come’ [mistranslated by Alfred Péron as the masculine “ils”] viennent’!] to Ireland To-day, where the great purity of mind & charity of thought will no doubt see orgasms where nothing so innocent or easy is intended, and reject the poem in consequence.”20 Rejected it promptly was, but after the war, it appeared in English in Peggy Guggenheim’s memoir Out of This Century (1946) and then in French – translated by the poet this time – in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes (November 1946): elles viennent autres et pareilles avec chacune c’est autre et c’est pareil avec chacune l’absence d’amour est autre avec chacune l’absence d’amour est pareille21

The “elles,” according to the editors’ note (CP, 375), referred to the three women – Suzanne, Peggy, and Adrienne Bethell – with whom Beckett was entangled at the time of writing; the poet himself describes this and his other new poems (thirteen in all) published in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes) as “French anacreontics,” short poems in the manner of Anacreon, in praise of love or wine.22 “They come/elles viennent” may look slight, but it is certainly, as the editors of the CP note, the product of “a deliberate simplification and refinement of means and method, reducing if not wholly abandoning) allusions, [and] exploring the self-sustaining subtleties of syntax.”23 One poet who perceived this was John Cage, who chose this particular “Anacreontic” as the source of his own minimalist poem, a thirteen-word mesostic.24 In “they come,” as in the other Poèmes 37–39, Beckett does not yet abandon lineation – the texts still look like poems – but the removal of the “veil” he talks about in the letter to Kaun is the result, not merely of “simplification” but, more precisely, of mystification.25 There is not a word in “they come,” that a reader must look up, and yet what is the poem saying? The opening line can indeed, as Beckett tells McGreevy, refer to orgasm, but it can also mean literally that the unspecified “they” come to see the

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speaker. We know nothing about circumstances or the women’s feelings, and Beckett avoids the first-person pronoun entirely, presenting the poem’s statement as impersonally and anonymously as if we were looking at the procession of figures on a Greek vase. Yet the repetition of abstract nouns and adjectives is carefully designed to imply that the difference which is sameness, or sameness which is different is the manifestation of the poet’s “absence of love.” The English version has thirty-one words, the first eight being “different,” and the rest all the same except for the new word “love” in lines 4–5. In the French, the ratio is slightly different (twenty-four words, the first eight different) and then “amour” introduced in line 4 and repeated in l. 5. Syntax and repetition thus enact the very meaning itself. “They come” was first written in English, but Beckett’s close brush with death proved to be a watershed, transforming the tone of his personal letters and somehow, perhaps partly because of his new relationship with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who was to become his wife, triggering his shift to French as his literary language – a turn that would become definitive after the war. The new Beckett is no longer the angry young man of the previous year. “Everyone has been incredibly kind,” he writes McGreevy from the hospital six days after the stabbing;26 he forgives his assailant, as “more cretinous than malicious,” and, as for his mother, with whom he has always had such a difficult relationship, “I felt great gusts of affection & esteem & compassion for her when she was over.”27 After May Beckett’s departure, “Mother is a marvel. She sat up all the way from Euston to Dun Laoghaire.”28 Released from the hospital and back in his Paris hotel, Beckett writes McGreevy, “How lovely it is being here. Even with a hole in the side. A sunlit surface yesterday brighter than the whole of Ireland’s summer.”29 The mood of contentment would not, of course, last, but the turn to French prefigures what is to come. By early April, Beckett is writing McGreevy, “I wrote a short poem in French but otherwise nothing”30 and two weeks later, “A couple of poems in French in the last fortnight are the extent of my work since coming to Paris.”31 By October 1938, he tells George Reavey, “I have ten poems in French [. . .] mostly short. When I have a few more I shall send them to [Paul] Eluard. Or get Duchamp to do so.”32 It is interesting that Beckett is thinking of applying to Duchamp, in many ways a kindred spirit, whom he had come to know through their mutual friend Mary Reynolds.33 But the war intervened, and the poems in question were not to be published until 1946. Poèmes 37–39, newly edited for the Collected Poems, includes such pieces as the following:

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marjorie perloff musique de l’indifférence coeur temps air feu sable du silence éboulement d’amour couvre leurs voix et que je ne m’entende plus me taire the music of indifference heart time air fire sand of silence the landslip of loves cover their voices and let me no longer hear myself be silent34

Here, as in “they come,” the obscurity is not one of allusion, as in Echo’s Bones, but of ellipsis: all we can really deduce is that somehow “the music of indifference” has given way to a desire to end things, to silence both the voices of his “amours” and his own. “Coeur temps air feu sable” (“Heart time air fire sand”): a whole love story might be contained in this allusive catalog of appositional nouns, but we only know that it ends in “éboulement” – a landslip or total crash. What Beckett refers to in the letter to Kaun as the dissolution of the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface” here takes place before our eyes. The language, in other words, is left open enough to suggest any number of scenarios without giving in to realism on the one hand or to surrealist excess on the other. Indeed, although Beckett evidently enjoyed translating André Breton and Tristan Tzara, his own poems avoided the shock effect of Surrealist metaphor in favor of suggestive abstraction – a mode, we shall see, more Wittgensteinian than Freudian.35 It was, in any case, only after the war – the real watershed in Beckett’s career – that the poet’s language came fully into its own. “Something crucial, if hard to describe,” writes Dan Gunn, the editor of Volume II (1941–1956) of the Letters, “has changed when in 1944 Beckett returns from his years of hiding in Roussillon in the Free France Zone: less in the strength of ambivalence felt toward his own activities than in a new absence of hostility and recrimination, a lack of grievance toward the world and its inhabitants.” As Gunn explains it: A subtle shift has occurred in the prevailing tone of the letters: Just when one might expect umbrage or infuriation – at the years spent in hiding, at the loss of numerous friends deported and dead, at the disastrous conditions in the ruins of the bombed Normandy town of Saint-Lô where he works for the Irish Red Cross – what one in fact finds is resignation and

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reticence; gone, or almost, are the fizzling tirades of the early years, the selfpity, the rancor, and the occasional self-indulgent displays of cleverness, as if so much suffering witnessed had put the cap for ever on a merely personal expression of disadvantage or misprision; as if, perhaps, the sight of so much brutal activity had confirmed him for ever in his inclination to a – however paradoxically rigorous and positively charged – passivity. Not once does Beckett, who being Irish and therefore neutral in the War, rue his engagement with the cause of the French Resistance or regret what it has cost him: not once, indeed, does he even mention it. Very rarely does he voice resentment, as if bitterness had been transmuted into something more deeply reflective: not an acceptance of horror or injustice, but an awareness of the communality of loss and the reversibility of roles of victim and persecutor.36

I cite this passage at length because it is as relevant to Beckett’s postwar poetry as it is to his correspondence. The shift is one from “merely personal expression of disadvantage” to “an awareness of the communality of loss.” In the course of the war and his work in the Resistance, Beckett found not only his subject but also his language, which had, at least for the present, to be French. Beckett was always reluctant to account for the shift to French and often declared that he had no idea why he had made it. But in a letter to the German editor and critic Hans Naumann, who had written to Beckett, speculating that perhaps the French turn was prompted by “the impossibility of launching an Irishlanguage work beyond the borders of that small country,” Beckett responded: Since 1945 I have written only in French. Why this change? It was not deliberate. It was in order to change, to see, nothing more complicated than that, in appearance at least. In any case nothing to do with the reasons you suggest. I do not consider English a foreign language. It is my language. If there is one that is really foreign to me, it is Gaelic [. . .] I myself can half make out several [reasons] now that it is too late to go back. But I prefer to let them stay in the half-light. I will all the same give you one clue: the need to be ill-equipped [le besoin d’être mal armé].37

Art must, in other words, contend with difficulty; it must pose a challenge that makes the poet drop all preconceptions and comfortable habits. Finding it difficult to write on the painting of Bram van Velde, Beckett remarked to Georges Duthuit that “It is perhaps the fact of writing directly in English which is knotting me up. Horrible language, which I still know too well.”38 It is precisely because Beckett was so well-educated, so wellversed in English literature, that the need was great to find new worlds to

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conquer. He was always, as he told Naumann, “on the look-out for an elsewhere” [à l’afflût d’un ailleurs]. And later, when he begins to translate his French works into English, the process proves to be even more difficult.

A Few Little Turds On the look-out for an elsewhere: in his new incarnation, Beckett wrote few lyric poems, although those he did write, like the condensed and mysterious “je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse”/“my way is in the sand flowing,” whose French and English versions were published on facing pages in transition (1948) are striking.39 But, except in his translations, whether of Apollinaire’s Zone, or of such contemporaries as René Char, the Beckett of the postwar could no longer be constrained by lineation and “poetic diction.” The dyad “Grammar and style!” so ardently rejected in the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, surely included sound and rhythm as well. Having reinvented narrative in Molloy and Malone meurt, both published in 1951, and with the third member of the Trilogy, L’Innommable [The Unnamable] – a long prose monologue – completed, Beckett turned to short pieces. In April 1951, he writes to Maria Peron: “In Paris I still have a few little turds to show you, same kind as the two you have already seen. How to go on after L’Innommable? These are little textsoundings, trying out something different.”40 And in September, in response to a request from Georges Belmont, “I don’t think I have any other poems, apart from the two given to 84. There will certainly not be any more, and that will be no misfortune. [. . .]And I have ten or so little texts, written recently, the afterbirth of L’Innommable and not be approached directly.”41 This could hardly be a clearer statement of Beckett’s farewell, at least in the interim, to the lyric poem in favor of the genre called text, or here, textsounding. Not many Parisian critics or editors seem to have been enthusiastic about these odd pieces, but Jerôme Lindon, who published Nouvelles et Textes pour rien in November 1955, pronounced the book Beckett’s “finest, with L’Innommable.” 42 And Beckett himself, so often selfdeprecatory, remained partial to the Texts for Nothing. When the second edition, with drawings by Avigdor Arikha appeared in 1958, Beckett wrote his new American editor–publisher Richard Seaver, that he was planning on translating the Texts himself, “they being in the idiom more or less of L’Innommable which I have just finished translating. My idea was for the book to appear with you figuring as translator of the stories [Le Calmant, L’Expulsé, La Fin] and me as translator of the Textes.”43 What this suggests is that, whereas the three “stories” of Nouvelles, written in the late 1940s, retained elements of plot and traditional narration – and hence could be

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left to Seaver to translate – Beckett recognized the Textes as something different, demanding his own particular reinvention of the English language. The thirteen short Texts for Nothing have always confounded readers, who assume that they are “short” fictions or narratives and, as such, unsatisfactory in what H. Porter Abbott has referred to as their “Absolute frustration of structural ‘onwardness.’” “If the trilogy,” he notes, “is not impeccably linear, if it enacts a gradual progress of unraveling and disembodiment rather than the triumphant arrival at a goal, it nonetheless collaborates in its progressive disembodiment with the linear orientation that the mind craves in narrative.”44 But Texts, it seems, no longer satisfies that “craving”: Alain Badiou has argued that “these texts tell us the truth of a situation, that of Beckett at the end of the fifties: what he has written up to that point can’t go on. It is impossible to go on alternating, without any mediation whatsoever, between the neutrality of the grey black of being and the endless torture of the solipstic cogito.”45 The assumption behind such responses – and they are widespread – is that these texts aim to be narrative – that, like the stories that precede them in both the French and English editions (1965), they are would-be fictions and hence unsatisfactory given that nothing happens. Yet Abbott does go on to give us a useful hint when he adds to his stricture above that in Texts for Nothing, Beckett “exchanged the narrative genre of the quest for the broad nonnarrative genre of the meditative personal essay,” including “the rich romantic tradition of associative lyrical meditations ranging from Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire to Coleridge’s Conversation Poems.” Indeed, “Much of the ambience of the Texts echoes that of the meditations of the English Graveyard Poets.”46 Precisely, although the conversation poems of Coleridge or Night Songs of Edward Young seem too narrow a context for Texts for Nothing. Rather, if we read the texts in the light of Beckett’s statements in the letters to McGreevy and Kaun, their mode can be seen as a move toward the dissolution of what Beckett called the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface.” Here he is, in Text #8, “drill[ing] one hole after another into [that surface] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through”: Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased. If I were silent I’d hear nothing. But if I were silent the other sounds would start again, those to which the words have made me deaf, or which have really

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marjorie perloff ceased. But I am silent, it sometimes happens, no, never, not one second. I weep too without interruption. It’s an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. But I speak softer, every year, a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too, every year a little slower. Perhaps. It is hard for me to judge. If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears. I confuse them, words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth. I should hear, at every little pause, it’s the silence I say when I say that only the words break it. But nothing of the kind, that’s not how it is, it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives the meaning to words. What right have you then, no, this time I see what I’m up to and put a stop to it, saying, None, none. But get on with the stupid old threne and ask, ask until you answer, a new question, the most ancient of all, the question were things always so.47

Like all of the Texts, this one is a single long paragraph, punctuated, and technically written in prose. I say technically, because many of the “sentences” are fragments and exploit speech rhythms: they fall readily into linear units: But I am silent, It sometimes happens No, never, not one second.

Or But I speak softer, Every year a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too every year a little slower. Perhaps.

Is Text #8 then to be read as a coherent monologue in the present tense, a meditation on speech and silence, life and death, being and non-being? Just when we think so, when we decide that we are overhearing the narrator’s or a character’s speech, the poet introduces learned or archaic words into the discourse, as in “Get on with the stupid old threne,” a threne being an archaic form of threnody or lament. Or again, later in the passage, the curious locution “my past has thrown me out” is followed by the histrionic phrasing of “its gates have slammed behind me.”48 Or the semi-articulate speaker suddenly shifts gears and announces “I’m a mere ventriloquist’s dummy,” and on the final pages of the piece, he cites the Place de la République, the Bastille, Père Lachaise [cemetery], and “the

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noble bassamento of the United Stores” [in Dublin], so that we cannot determine where the subject is located or who is present. Such shifting of linguistic registers is familiar to readers of The Unnamable, but here, since there is no narrative at all, it becomes a radical distancing device. As in the case of a lyric poem, we witness what is said from the perspective of the first-person speaker: “I” and its cognates “my,” “mine,” “me” appear in almost every sentence. It’s as if Beckett is submitting the poet’s lyric contract with the reader to elaborate parody. Consider the system of repetitions: Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased. If I were silent I’d hear nothing. But if I were silent the other sounds would start again, those to which the words have made me deaf or which have really ceased. But I am silent, it sometimes happens, no, never, not one second.49

Like a refrain, this sequence of repetitions lulls the reader into agreement, or at least complicity: it takes a moment’s reflection to realize that the repeated phrases are in fact contradictory or falsely posed. “If I were silent I’d hear nothing” is not true: if the narrator were silent he might hear a lot more of what he later calls “for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless.” But neither is it necessarily true that “if I were silent,” the “other sounds would start again.” And the final sentence above directly contradicts itself: “it sometimes happens, no, never, not one second.” Again, as in much lyric poetry (but hardly in a contemplative essay), the syntax is at once “simple” (no long non-restrictive clauses) and deeply ambiguous. “I confuse them, words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth”: this can either mean that my “words” are equivalent to my tears, my eyes, and my mouth, or that words are to tears as eyes are to mouth. The syntax allows for both constructions; in either case it is not clear what the analogy is. But then the whole text is characterized by a curious indeterminacy, the diction, simple and “normal” as most of it seems, being almost impossible to pin down. Two-thirds of the words are monosyllables, as in “it is hard for me to judge,” or “What right have you then, no, this time I see what I’m up to and put a stop to it” – and these monosyllables are largely pronouns, function words, auxiliary verbs, and interjections. Any native speaker would know what each word means: indeed the passage often recalls Basic English. At the same time, the language game, to use Wittgenstein’s term, being played here, seems to be one of context deficiency. If “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” as Wittgenstein

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has taught us, the ability to exercise that basic use-function here seems to have been lost.50 This was already true in Watt, Beckett’s last pre-war novel, but in Texts for Nothing, where the narrative function of the Trilogy has been eliminated, the verbal texture becomes even more enigmatic. Words, silence, sounds, tears – what are all these things? When, for example something “ceases,” what happens? Later in the text, the narrator asks, “But whom can I have offended so grievously, to be punished in this inexplicable way,” only to continue, without stop, “all is inexplicable, space and time, false and inexplicable, suffering and tears, and even the old convulsive cry, It’s not me, it can’t be me. But am I in pain, whether it’s me or not?” It is a Wittgensteinian question: what is pain? If you tell me you’re in pain, do I understand what you mean? And how do I know you’re telling the truth? Toward the end of the poem, certain becomes an ironic key word: “But I’m here, that much at least is certain, it’s in vain I keep on saying it, it remains true. Does it? It’s hard for me to judge. Less true and less certain in any case than when I say I’m on earth.” And as the poem moves to its finish, every attempt to cling to a reality like the poet’s location in “Place de la République at pernod time,” dissolves quickly into the shadows, moving, in the end to “another dark, another silence.” Beckett, we recall, had told his friend Tom McGreevy that he wanted his poetry to avoid the construit by capturing “the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.” In the language games of Texts for Nothing, with their elaborate structures of repetition, structures within which the most common words like pain, time, space, and dark are deprived of a reasonable context, we rely on sound and syntax to carry us forward: “I confuse them, words and tears, my words and my tears, my words are my tears.” The poeticity of such a sentence is that we cannot paraphrase it, even as its rhythm speaks: I confuse them words and tears my words and my tears my words are my tears

Here primary stress shifts so that each time a different particle is stressed: the passage moves very subtly from generality to the claim for possession and only then to the predication which is never really explained, thus letting us witness “confus[ion]” at work. As Jean-Michel Rabaté summarizes it in a discussion of Beckettian translation, “the force of certain

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word combinations chosen for their formal qualities overrides the thought contained in them.”51 It may be asked: if lineation clarifies the language game in process, why didn’t Beckett simply lineate the text to begin with, designating it as a “poem”? Because, I would argue, he is burying his markers in the sphere of the ongoing composition so that we must, so to speak, bite into the apple and take it apart. The text looks like an ordinary paragraph and it is the reader who must create – and hence understand – the breaks beneath the veil. The poetic process is absorbing precisely because, like our response to life itself, we must constantly shift perspective and conclusion. Such poeticity was to become the paradigm of Beckett’s poetry from the mid 1950s to the 1970s and includes such central Beckett texts as Imagination Dead Imagine, Lessness, Enough, Ping, and Fizzles.52 But during the last decade of his life the poet’s “need to be ill-equipped” which marks the turn to writing in French begins to decline. The poetry of Yeats, once kept at a distance, given its grand theatrical rhetoric, now returns as a model: in her memoir, Anne Attik notes that Beckett knew many Yeats poems by heart and would regularly recite them after dinner.53 And in his radio play Words and Music (1962) as well as the late television play “but the clouds . . .” (1977), whose very title comes from Yeats’s “The Tower,”54 Beckett repeatedly alluded to passages like “Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman won or woman lost?” in “The Tower,” and composes short runs in the trimeter of “Easter 1916 or Part III of “The Tower.” In the end – and we see this in the late aphoristic Mirlitonnades as well – the Irish Romantic tradition, indeed the larger English literary tradition from Spenser and Milton to Yeats, was no longer a threat: Beckett could now acknowledge his roots with equanimity.” At the same time, these were afterthoughts. Beckett’s great poems, I would maintain, are the “text-soundings” he begins to produce in the late 1950s in a form that has become increasingly central in the poetry of the twenty-first century. He understood, as did few poets of his day, that the distinguishing mark of poetry is not genre – he would have scorned our academic discussions of what is lyric? – but its concentration on remaking poetic language. “Only the words break the silence.” But what are words? what is silence? and what does it mean to “break” something? No other poet of our time has posed these questions as daringly, insistently, and consistently, as has the Beckett who insisted “there would not be any more poems.”

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Notes 1. Samuel Beckett to Mary Manning Howe, July 11, 1937, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. i: 1929–40, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 521, note 8. Subsequently cited as LSB, followed by volume number in Roman numerals. 2. See The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, a critical edition, eds. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, New York: Grove Press, 2012, xv, 259–261. This monumental critical edition (subsequently cited as CP) adds many previously uncollected poems, drafts, and translations, and reproduces the 1935 edition of Echo’s Bones, thus superseding the chronologically arranged Grove Centenary Edition, vol. iv, Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, ed. Paul Auster, New York: Grove Press, 2006, which follows the order and arrangement of the 1977 Grove-Evergreen text of Beckett’s Collected Poems in English and French – the edition used by Beckett’s readers for the prior three decades. On Echo’s Bones, the editors tell us, “Sales of the 327 copies . . . were so poor that SB could tell A. J. Leventhal that he still had ‘a fat pile’ of them in his possession more than twenty years later.” (Beckett, CP, 260). Reviews, almost non-existent, were tepid at best. 3. Beckett, CP, 5. 4. Ibid., 261. 5. The CP references the translation by David Luke in Selected Poems of Goethe, New York: Penguin, 1964: “Like a hawk poised, with scarce-quivering wings on lowering morning clouds, watching for prey, let my song hover” (261). My own is more literal. 6. An enueg is a Provençal genre; its title, from the Latin inodium, literally meaning “vexation,” is a variant on the planh (complaint), taking up the trifles and serious insults of life, usually without continuity of thought. Sanie refers to noxious discharges of bodily fluids; serena is an evening song, longing for the reunion with one’s lover. See Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic, Princeton University Press, 1970, 80–81, 85, 109. Harvey’s book remains the definitive exposition of Beckett’s poems. Cf. my “Beckett the Poet,” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Samuel Beckett, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 211–227. 7. SB to Thomas McGreevy, summer 1929, in LSB i, 10–11. 8. SB to Samuel Putnam, September 9, 1930, in LSB i, 47. 9. SB to Thomas McGreevy, September 13, 1932, in LSB i, 121. 10. For a very informative recent set of essays on Echo’s Bones and some of the later poems, see “Fulcrum Feature: Samuel Beckett’s Poet,” Fulcrum, 2006, 442–624. Cf. Perloff, “Beckett the Poet,” 211–215; cf. Marjorie Perloff, “The Space of a Door: Beckett and the Poetry of Absence,” The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Princeton University Press, 1981, 200–247, “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry,” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, New York: Grove

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12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Press, 1986, 191–206, “ Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms: Metrical ‘Choice’ and Historical Formation,” Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998, 132–140. For Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” see Beckett, CP, 64–67 and the Notes, 358–361. In “Beckett, McGreevy and the Stink of Joyce,” Fulcrum, 484–499, Sean Lawlor shows that Beckett was also influenced by his close friend’s way of writing poetry. See September 23, 1929, in LSB i, 7. SB to Thomas McGreevy, August 18, 1932, in LSB i, 134. See Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 114–120. Beckett’s “eyelid” example is very similar to Duchamp’s “Infra thin separation between/the detonation noise of a gun/ (very close) and the apparition of the bullet/hole in the target” (115). Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015; Virginia Jackson, “Lyric,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn., Princeton University Press, 2012, 826–34. (Hereafter, EPP.) SB to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937, LSB i, 518. Ibid., 519–520. See SB to Thomas McGreevy, January 12, 1938, note 1, in LSB i, 584–585; and James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 259–262. The stranger was identified – and forgiven – by Beckett himself as a professional pimp named Prudent. SB to Thomas McGreevy, January 27, 1938, in LSB i, 596. Ibid., note 11, 597. Beckett, CP, 91. See SB to Arland Ussher, January 12, 1938, LSB i, note 11, 597; CP, 375. According to the CP note, when Peggy Guggenheim first published the poem, she changed the last line to read, “With each the absence of life is the same.” Beckett, CP, 373–374. See Marjorie Perloff, “John Cage as Conceptualist Poet,” South Atlantic Quarterly 77, nos. 1–2, 2014, 14–33. See Beckett, CP, 91–102. SB to Thomas McGreevy, January 12, 1938, in LSB i, 583. Ibid., 589. Ibid., 595. SB to Thomas McGreevy, January 12, 1938, in LSB i, 596. SB to Thomas McGreevy, April 3, 1938, in LSB i, 614. SB to Thomas McGreevy, April 22, 1938, in LSB i, 620. SB to George Reavey, October 1938, in LSB i, 645. Mary Reynolds, a good friend of Beckett’s via Peggy Guggenheim, had a long liaison with Marcel Duchamp. In the late 1930s, Beckett sometimes played chess with the artist, but they were not close. Beckett, CP, 96. My translation. On the relation to Wittgenstein, see my Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, University of Chicago Press, 1996, 115–124.

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36. Dan Gunn, Introduction to LSB ii: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2011, lxv–vi. 37. SB to Hans Naumann, February 17, 1954, in LSB ii, 461–465, 466n3. 38. SB to Georges Duthuit, June 28, 1949, in LSB II, 168, 170. 39. On “je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse,” see my Poetics of Indeterminacy, 244–247. 40. SB to Maria Peron, April 1951, in LSB ii, 241. 41. SB to Georges Belmont, c. September 28, 1951, in LSB ii, 300. As to the disposition of the poems sent to 84: Nouvelle Revue Littéraire, see SB to Marcel Bisiaux, March 22, 1951, in LSB ii, 230, n.1. 42. LSB ii, 557–558. 43. SB to Richard Seaver, March 5, 1958, in LSB iii: 1957–1965, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 113. I discuss the three short stories in “In Love with Hiding: Samuel Beckett’s War,” Iowa Review 35, no. 2, 2005, 76–103. 44. H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996, 89. 45. Alain Badiou, On Beckett: Dissimetries, eds. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003, 15. For interesting readings of subjectivity and trauma in the Texts, see Jonathan Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject: Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing,” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3, Fall, 2004, 332–350; Christopher Langlois, “The Terror of Literature in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing,” Twentieth-Century Literature 61, no. 1, March 2015, 92–117; Daniel Katz, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1999, 125–156. 46. Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett, 89–90. 47. Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing, New York: Grove Press, 1967, 111. Texts for Nothing is reproduced in vol. iv of the Grove Centenary Edition, New York: Grove Press, 2006, 295–339. The extract from #8 is on p. 320. The original French text (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955) reads as follows: Seuls les mots rompent le silence, tout le reste s’est tu. Si je me taisais je n’entendrais plus rien. Mais si je me taisais les autres bruits reprendraient, ceux auxquels les mots m’ont rendu sourd, ou qui ont réelement cessé. Mais je me tais, cella arrive, non, jamais, pas une seconde. Je pleure aussi, sans discontinuer. C’est un flot ininterrompu, de mots et de larme. Le tout sans réflexion. Mais je parle plus bas, chaque année un peu plus bas. Peut-être. Plus lentement aussi, chaque année un peu plus lentement. Peut-être. Je ne me rende pas compte. Les pauses seraient donc plus longues entre les mots, les phrases, les syllabes, les larmes, je les confounds, mots et larmes, mes mots sont mes larmes, mes yeux ma bouche. Et je devrais entendre, à chaque petite pause, si c’est le silence comme je le dis, en disant que seuls les mots le rompent. Eh bien non, c’est toujours la même murmure, ruisselant, sans hiatus, comme un seul

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mot sans fin et par consequent sans signification, car c’est la fin qui la donne, la signification, aux mots. Alors de quell droit, non, cette fois je vois venir, et je m’arréte, en disant, D’aucun, d’aucun. Mais le poursuivant, le vieux thrène stupide, je me pose, et jusqu’au bout, une nouvelle question, la plus ancienne, celle de savoir si cela a toujours été ainsi. 48. Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing, 112. 49. I take the negatives – nothing, no, never, not – as one entity. 50. See Marjorie Perloff, “Witt-Watt: The Language of Resistance/The Resistance of Language,” Wittgenstein’s Ladder: The Strangeness of the Ordinary, University of Chicago Press, 1996, 115–144, and passim. 51. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Formal Brilliance and Indeterminate Purport: The Poetry of Beckett’s Philosophemes,” Fulcrum 6, 2007, 530–550. 52. For a reading of the Fizzle “Still,” see my “Light Silence, Dark Speech: Reading Johns’s Images, Seeing Beckett’s Language in Foirades/Fizzles,” Fulcrum, 2002, 83–105. Here, I argue, visual prosody, important to the late Beckett, is also at play, “Still” being almost a concrete poem. 53. Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett, Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005, 60–61. 54. On the Yeats citations in Words and Music and but the clouds, see my “’An Image from a Past Life’: Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn,” Fulcrum 6, 2007, 604–615. The passage in question from “The Tower,” begins with the poet’s assertion, “Now shall I make my soul,” and vows to defy death, letting its very threat “Seem but the clouds of the sky/When the horizon fades,/Or a bird’s sleepy cry/Among the deepening shades.”

ii

New Contexts and Intertexts

chapter 5

Beckett’s Critique of Literature John Bolin

Far from being celebrated, literature in Beckett’s texts represents something to be avoided at all costs. “But it is not at this late stage of my relation,” Moran asserts near the end of Molloy, “that I intend to give way to literature.”1 What is this thing that Moran, not unlike his “vice-exister” Malone, must be “on [his] guard” against – and that he invokes like a disbeliever muttering a blasphemy?2 A negative definition of sorts: in this narrative on the verge of self-cancellation, literature would be a clear statement of relation, an account of “how this result was obtained”; specifically, it would relate how the “dim man” whom Moran encounters in the Molloy country comes to be discovered “stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp” – by the speaker who has presumably bludgeoned him to death.3 And it would provide an experience of a certain value and pleasure: “it would be something worth reading.”4 The Beckettian text’s (staged) failure to concretize, explore, or to teach us how to affectively recognize the sorts of relations that literature’s defenders have often claimed for it – for instance, causal, ethical, historical, or socio-economic relations – is not confined to the novels. Consider another instance, this time under the signature “Beckett,” in “La Peinture des Van Velde’s” description of Geer van Velde’s images: Everything ceases, without cease. This looks like the insurrection of molecules, the inside of a stone a millionth of a second before it disintegrates. This is literature [C’est ça, la littérature].5

Rather like Moran’s report (conspicuous for what it does not give us), literature here only provides an “order” which, to use the word favored in this text, is actually “impossible.”6 Like Moran’s imagined reader, the viewer here asks for enjoyment from a van Velde painting, but regrettably “The impossible is made to keep him from it.”7 Given such instances it might appear sensible to categorize Beckett as a writer of “anti-literature,” a committed critic of the literary – that is, if 87

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“critique” in his lexicon were not even more execrable than “literature” itself. Capping the list of insults (and the subset of parasites within it) thrown back and forth by Vladimir and Estragon, “Crritic!” – spat out “with finality” by the decisive winner, Gogo – indicates at least one secure limit in their world.8 But one need look no further than the above essay on the van Veldes to glimpse Beckett’s own appraisal of the activity he was involved in at the moment of writing these words: “Let us not speak of critique in the strict sense of the word. The best, that of a Fromentin, a Grohmann, a McGreevy, a Sauerlandt, is Amiel all over again. Hysterectomies with a trowel. [. . .] Can they only cite?”9 The connection is obvious: even the “best” critique is like “literature” in that it turns us from alterity back to the already-known. Rather than repeat this error, it seems preferable to “Beckett” here to comically fail to critique: to openly “give oneself over to disagreeable and confused prattle.”10 Such utterances are far from marginal comments, and we should include within their number Beckett’s various writings of the later 1940s on the art of non-relation, not to mention his most famous gesture toward the disconnect between criticism and the art object in Three Dialogues (1949). And such ironic, negative maneuvres and the rift they stage – between “literature,” “critique,” and an “impossible” reality – are not confined to overt commentary either; they indicate a comportment toward literature and our strategies for its appraisal that inform Beckett’s fiction, especially, at the deepest level. Finally, this critique of literature, idiosyncratic as it may appear, was of course not singular to Beckett, and it points us toward interlocutors and contexts whose importance to his work has not yet been fully explored. One of the longest-standing of all doxa in Beckett studies is the primacy of Joyce, Proust, and Dante on his thinking about literature. But these influences cannot account for the Beckett indicated above, nor the negative energies animating his treatment of form in particular – energies that were nowhere trained with greater concentration than on literature itself. To plot the theoretical coordinates from which Beckett’s critical attitude toward literature proceeded is to re-encounter the context of the modern, French experimental theory which he imbibed as a student. And it was this particular French context of critique that permeated his 1930 lectures on the modern novel, and remained an abiding influence as he approached his major fictions up to and including Three Novels. Confronted with The Unnamable, it was Adorno who picked out the defining influence in this context, sensing the presence of an author whose prose style is worlds away from the dark and ferocious hilarity of Beckett’s mature fiction, but who had retained his relevance for the mature Beckett

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in the realm of form: André Gide.11 Gide’s relevance for Beckett has remained virtually unremarked, however, with the exception of John Pilling, who has pointed out that Beckett cultivated “a staged unconcern [. . .] designed to mask the real interest he had in Gide” – a strategy that for years threw even Beckett’s most dedicated readers off the scent.12 In this chapter, I will touch on Beckett’s early fascination with Gide – who is likely the last major literary influence on Beckett’s formation to be put in place. But to trace key roots of Beckett’s critique of literature to a reading of Gide’s modern French “classicism” and the critique that targeted not only classical “unity” but the literary edifice itself is not solely a matter of delineating debts and legacies, or of revealing that a “Continental” or “French Beckett” was present from the beginning. It is to grasp more fully the relation between literature and the negative in Beckett’s writing in ways that promise to shift his position within modernism, and remind us of the limitations of periodizing the postmodern.

“Refusing to abdicate as a critic even in [the] novel” It is insufficiently remarked upon that Beckett’s most memorable essay of the early period – his encomium of “direct expression” – borrowed its now famous phrase and many of the values it defends from an antithesis Beckett received largely at the hands of the critic who taught him Proust and Gide, set him up for the 1930 lectures, and “tremendously influenced” his take on literature: Thomas Rudmose-Brown.13 “Direct expression” was part of a bundle of artistic valences “Ruddy” identified with the shorthand “classicism” and served as a terminological salvo within the anti-romantic diatribe he vociferated with such consistency that even as Beckett prepared to take up his appointment at Trinity he was ducking his old tutor and his impromptu lectures on the topic.14 But of course “Ruddy’s” account of the essential, even ahistorical agon between the “Romantics” (and their “dying outburst” in the Symbolists15) with their “abstraction,” “egotism,” and “obscurity,” versus the “direct expression,” “scientific” rigor, “mathematical precision,” and “objectivity” of their “classical” opposites was not original; nor was it, obviously, native to the English literary tradition.16 In Rudmose-Brown’s case it derives from a strand of French “classicism” propounded by writers like Valéry, Suarès, Ghéon, and Gide – arguably the founding fathers of La Nouvelle Revue Française (a journal that Beckett read and later published in twice). This modern “classicism” targeted Romanticism, Symbolism, and Naturalism, along with other forms of classical revivalism (for instance, the politically conservative circle around

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Action Française) with whom it shared these bêtes noires, and defined itself not through a national, periodic, or political alliance, but fundamentally through its call for severe expressive economy. And this is precisely what Rudmose-Brown praises as “direct” or “precise” – and that is particularly characteristic of the view, as “Ruddy” points out, espoused by Gide: whose classicism was “the art of expressing the most by saying the least.”17 Beckett could not resist sending up his tutor’s bombast in Dream (begun in earnest in late winter of 1932) yet a familiar dichotomy shimmers through “Dante’s” alliances in 1929. Thus we find, on one hand: the art of “distillation,” the “actual” and “concrete”; a “scientific,” “empirical,” “utilitarian,” or “detached attitude”; “Poetry” as “the antithesis of Metaphysics” and “a statement of the particular,” while Joyce’s work displays “direct expression” and the “savage economy of hieroglyphics”; on the other hand we are shown: “Metaphysics,” “allegory,” “abstraction,” the “disembodiment of the spiritual,” the “mystical,” “universals,” “subjectivism,” and “metaphysical generalization.”18 With regard to the “unity” that Beckett claims lies at the heart of the Joycean artwork there is another influence here that has not often been noted: Joyce’s own early classicism attempted to join a scientific methodology with literature in accord with what Anthony Ward describes as “the directing principle of Hegel’s thought as it was received by Pater’s contemporaries”: “the search for unity, for a principle of perception to which the differences and contradictions in experience might be reduced.”19 Likely by way of Croce rather than Joyce’s own early “classical” engagement with neo-Hegelianism (and despite Beckett’s avowed preference for Hegel’s rival, Schopenhauer), “Dante’s” description of “sensuous suggestion” valorizes a theory that obtains its fullest expression in the Aesthetics’ art of “immediate and therefore sensuous knowing [Wissen] in the form and shape of the sensuous itself.”20 Coincidence of contraries indeed. A young critic who playfully spun out a Joycean–Hegelian classicisme thus emerges already shadowed by the French critique of form that would resurface in force in his lectures the following year – where Gide’s “modern novel” was teamed up with that master of the époque classique: Racine. As this context for even Beckett’s earliest published essay suggests, it was not through a “noo style,” classical or otherwise, that Gide would impact Beckett (this was of course Joyce’s significance), but as a ruthless and ironic practitioner of critique: “All my books are ironic books; they are books of criticism. Strait is the Gate is the critique of a certain mystical tendency; [. . .] the Symphonie pastorale, of a form of self-delusion; The Immoralist, of a form of individualism.”21 It is essential to grasp that Beckett’s Gide of

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1930 was neither the early Symbolist nor simply the “classical” writer intent on formal perfection; it was the Gide of Dostoïevsky (1923) who, in Beckett’s account, was capable of turning back on these prior selves and deploying the formal knowledge they had obtained for oppositional ends: those of “abnegation” and “incoherence.”22 It is in this sense that Beckett’s praise of Gide for “refus[ing] to abdicate as a critic even in [the] novel” and as the “most self-conscious, self-critical of [French] artists” should be understood.23 Complexly, this very spirit of critique was itself born of an impulse which Gide shared with Valéry: “Classical is the writer who bears a critic within himself and who intimately associates him with his work.”24 It should therefore not surprise us that Beckett used Gide and his Dostoevsky to critique not only what he termed the “European novel” (which included a range of targets including Balzac, Dickens, Austen, and Goethe) but his other early masters: the Joyce and Proust he had so recently valorized. If Joyce – the “biologist in words” – represented a “scientific” rigor and the pursuit of “unity” and coherence, Beckett’s Gide insists there are forms of “thought [which go] further than science,” evidences a fascination with the “gulf,” the motiveless act (“acte gratuit”), and “chance” in the novel.25 Gide’s critique of Symbolism, and his theoretical counter to the Mallarméan ideal of the absolute “book” (that is, Gide’s notion of opening the artwork to “chance” considered against Mallarmé’s ambition to create a work in which “le hasard ” would be eliminated at every level), thus reappear in Beckett’s account of the modern novel in a way that could not have been more opposed to the Joycean model – in which, as “Dante” suggests, the ideal of classical mastery requires the justification of each syllable. As for Proust, what is perhaps most remarkable is that in positioning Gide as a foil to the Proustian ambition to unite the “ideal” and the “real,” Beckett described a “different need” from any he had hitherto expressed for the artwork: “preserving [the] integrity of incoherence.”26 Beckett’s later critical pronouncements and specifically his gestures toward an art of non-relation and failure (presented, as in Three Dialogues, through an enactment of failure in the critical exercise itself) thus have a taproot in a particular Continental model of critique and the crisis it perceived in the authority of literature. From Beckett’s 1930 notion of “preserving” “incoherence” to the 1934 recognition of a “rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object, and then Three Dialogues’ 1949 call for an art that recognizes the “increasing anxiety of the relation” between the artist’s “means” and his “aliment,” the lineage is clear.27 Literature, rather than exploring “expressive possibilities,” or “enlarging its repertory,” must submit “wholly to the incoercible absence

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of relation, in the absence of terms, or [. . .] in the presence of unavailable terms.”28 Viewed in this context, it is unsurprising that the post-war Beckett deploys the language of “the impossible,” since even in 1930 one of Beckett’s students had recorded his account of the “modern” problem Gide had confronted head-on with the following shorthand: “Artistic statement – extractive of essential real. Reality – unavailable.”29 For this reason Gide’s mature texts also refuse what Beckett called the “classical answer,” whereby “conflict” in the work’s presentation of the world would be resolved; in fact, Les Faux Monnayeurs (1925) and other novels were, in Beckett’s view, marked by their “inconclusive” or interminable quality – they fail to “end.”30 Writing instead becomes in no small part the ironic inhabitation of received forms with the aim of activating what Beckett termed their “dehiscence.” As David Walker puts it of Gide, “The received notion of artistic perfection gives way to the search for the aesthetic structure which encompasses – indeed cultivates – uncertainty, and reveals holes in the fabric of conventional constructions.”31

The Integrity of Incoherence There is likely no more evident realization of the paradoxical, Gidean strategies through which Beckett began writing long fiction than Dream’s “composition”: an attack on unity at the level of character, style, narration, and particularly form. The only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity.32

For the reader familiar with Beckett’s early writings, “composition” here signals a staged act of writing by which “Mr Beckett” distances himself and his author from a certain Mr Joyce: that artist whom Beckett had of course praised as a master of a “temporal as well as a spatial unity,” and whose own artist surrogate – the Stephen of Portrait – described a Flaubertian classicism whereby the writer would be “refined out of existence,” hovering far above the work’s cosmos.33 But if Dream’s insistence on what Beckett termed a “statement” of the author’s struggle in the fiction was an implicit attempt at endowing the novel with Beckett’s “own odours,” it was also a highly Gidean strategy aimed squarely at literature as a cultural institution.34 And of course the chief literary construct in Beckett’s sights in the 1930s was precisely that “Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect” “[w]hich is more or less [. . .] what one gets from one’s favourite novelist.”35

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This attack (on an admittedly soft target) is only a preliminary stage in Dream’s critique – an ironic counter that then had to be turned on Dream’s own critical structure and the inevitably artificial order of its author’s means. As the notes taken on the 1930 lectures indicate, Beckett knew that real disunity is impossible to achieve in an artwork – “chance,” despite Gide’s gymnastics, cannot enter the novelistic world. And it was precisely the notion of classical composition that would be brought into play at this level of Dream’s meta-critique – a Gidean ambition (and a Joycean one) to fit every word into the overall pattern of the completed form itself.36 Dream would surrender to this principle only to generate a more highly “composed” form of “disintegration.” As in Murphy later, Beckett parodied the self-reflexive strategies he had absorbed, not least from Gide, by means of a classically rigorous playing at disunity.37 If, recalling Moran, “literature” provides the reader with a certain statement of relation (for instance, a “chain-chant solo of cause and effect”), then we might quickly sketch Dream’s composed attempt at decomposition by noting its obsession with the figure of the bridge. Of course, at one level, the multiplication of bridges in this text corresponds to the novel’s setting in Dublin; but at the level of a topos the bridges that span Dream also figure Beckett’s nascent theory of gulfs and ruptures: the notion, parroted by Belacqua and “Mr Beckett,” of an artwork of “intervals” preoccupied with “the dumb-bell’s bar” or the “hyphen of passion.”38 In this sense the bridge is a fitting analog for the novel’s stylistic disjunctions in its frequent use of dashes and its prominent treatment of conjunctions – which both break up and link together the fragments of this book at the micro level of syntax and the macro levels of paragraph and chapter – as in “UND.” At the level of character, Dream’s “bridge” serves an apt countermetaphor to the tradition which imagined the novel as a comprehensive “web” of relations (the most prominent examples in French and English, respectively, being Balzac’s Comédie Humaine (1799–1850) – Beckett’s explicit target – and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872)): the nonlinks between Dream’s marionettes involve not only a failure to coincide or even to meet, but finally to exist in the same world, or to exist at all. For instance, consider how the bridge is deployed in the depiction of Nemo, a doppelgänger for Belacqua. It seems unlikely that a character whose name means “no one” will serve as an exemplary figure of relation, so it should not surprise us that when Nemo appears in Dream’s Dublin, rather than positively exemplifying anything or being anywhere he is “curved over the . . . parapet” of a bridge: neither here nor there.39 To emphasize this

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point, the sections of the novel in which Nemo appears are conspicuously fragmented off from the rest of the text by blank space. Nemo’s text, then, is itself suspended – in a comic literalization of the highly abstract theory Belacqua toys with – “between the phrases.”40 There the wind was big and he was wise who stirred not at all, came not abroad. The man, Nemo to be precise, was on his bridge, curved over the western parapet. High over the black water he leaned out.41

Similarly, at the level of plot, the operation of “bridging” operates in accord with the narrator’s fascination with complicating endings. So we learn that Belacqua’s double, whose “most valued possession is a superb aboulia of the very first water” – aboulia meaning a pathological “lack of will” – meets his end by falling off his bridge: this is decidedly not suicide, but an acceptance, as it were, of his “lack of relation” to said bridge and world.42 Belacqua naturally discovers this fact through coming across Nemo’s death in a newspaper by “chance.” Within the plot that joins these characters – again, who never meet – by an apparently random principle, the final (non-)connection between Nemo and Belacqua becomes evident at the close of the narrative when we realize that Belacqua, too, meets his “end” on a bridge of a double sort: the novel finishes with its protagonist “marooned on [a] bridge” . . . in a chapter fittingly titled “AND.”43 Parodying not only the unity of a classical work, then, but Gide’s attempt at thoroughly demolishing this very principle (Gide’s novels, we remember, “don’t end”), Beckett’s text ironically stages a multiple failure: despite the theoretical emphasis on “dehiscence,” the book reveals an inevitable coherence through its very mechanics of disjunction.44

An Interminable Critique Retelling the story of Beckett’s artistic trajectory as involved, from the beginning, with an experimental French context in which literature was placed under a paradoxical erasure, reminds us how far removed his project was from the formal or stylistic ambitions of those modernists whose context of revolt was fundamentally “English” or “realist” (such as the Woolf of “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” for instance). “Literature,” as I have been using the word, should be positioned within a frame not unlike that which Roland Barthes sketched for it after World War II, when he described the authority of an institution, traceable roughly to the seventeenth century, whose “mystery” and “dogma” were the opposite of self-

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conscious for they were embodied in a language that was merely “transparent” – and whose deployment was now “a fundamentally problematic activity.”45 It was through the disintegration of this construct that innovative authors could become “writers without Literature,” even, Barthes claimed (using a phrase Beckett himself had deployed) practitioners of a writing “without style.”46 Yet if for the early Barthes, like his interlocutor, the Sartre of What Is Literature?, it was history that called for necessary changes in modern writing, as far as the Beckett up to and including Three Novels was concerned, it was less that reality had shifted (for in that case a different means or form might more adequately address the “modern”) than that a fundamental recognition was required. No “method” could manipulate form into “making the modern world possible for art” (to borrow Eliot’s contention about the Joyce of Ulysses) since for the Beckett who combined a Gidean fascination with the impossibility of evading literary artifice with what Shane Weller has described as a “taste for the negative,” there was chiefly a confrontation with impasse and disintegration to face: reality was “unavailable” to form.47 If the critique whose origins I have sketched above must be sited within a specific set of historico-theoretical considerations, as the reference to Barthes indicates, this also means that Beckett’s writing remains a challenge for all those working in the shadow of the major post-war philosophical and theoretical engagements with the valuation of literature. Most apparently, Beckett’s writing might be read anew within what Paul Sheehan calls the “prehistory of French theory”48 – a lineage which reached one culmination in Derrida’s claim in Acts of Literature that his silence on Beckett (as a critic, as a commentator) was a result not of difference but of “identification”: an intuition premised on the reading that Beckett’s texts “operate a sort of turning back, they are themselves a sort of turning back on the literary institution.”49 What were the particular literary influences that fed into the evolution of “theory”? Simply put: there remains work to be done in re-contextualizing Beckett’s importance as a writer influenced by and influencing in turn philosophy’s re-reading of literature’s relation to the negative in the later twentieth century and beyond. Such a Beckett would bring into sharper focus often occluded allegiances still driving the valuation of literature in and outside the academy. If one were to follow the lines of Beckett’s early critique into the postwar, three names would immediately appear with regard to his deepening interest in the impossible in the late 1940s and into the 1950s: Bataille, Blanchot, and uniting them, Sade. And of these three it is arguably Bataille who brings the terms of the above paradox into the starkest relief:

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“The impossible is literature.”50 Long neglected, Beckett’s relation to Bataille is only now emerging into sharper focus with three major additions to Beckett scholarship: Jean-Michel Rabaté’s excellent Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human, the publication of the Letters (vol. ii), and Van Hulle and Nixon’s intriguing Beckett’s Library. One example from the holdings at 38 Boulevard St. Jacques must serve to gesture toward what may lie ahead: In the preface to Madame Edwarda, a text heavily scored in Beckett’s copy, Bataille invokes terms – “the unbearable,” “silence” – that had long circulated in his writing, crystallized in his review of Molloy, and are here shadowed by the thought of a “final laugh” that remains to be uttered, beyond “convention,” “god,” and “obloquy.”51 It seems it was not only Bataille’s interest in literature’s relation to “the unbearable” that attracted Beckett, but how the negation opened up by laughter in Bataille is in fact never final, for it is precisely the revelation of the interminable. And this is why Bataille, writing of Beckett, described literature as that which, being destroyed (“a deserted castle whose gaping cracks let in the wind”), can never vanish in the face of what for Beckett, too, was total “silence.”52 Thus Bataille would have recognized in Beckett, and vice versa, a logic whereby the exorcized – “literature” (or “god,” or the “human,” to raise two other objects of their “critique”) – returns under the sign of a devastating negation (a “laughter”) that yet erodes and invokes the object in the same instant. If so, re-reading these authors side by side will yield more than a “new Beckett”: it will challenge dominant notions of the trajectory of the novel in the twentieth century.53 This fascination with the interminable, visible in the critique of critique already at work in Dream’s non-ending, is also a point of connection with Blanchot. And as Beckett’s critical utterances diminished into elliptical, comic genuflections toward the unknowable until they finally vanished altogether, they echoed the “pure affirmation” of critique – the task to “becoming transparent” – whose most eloquent advocate remains Blanchot.54 Beckett’s admiration for Blanchot was based on works like Lautréamont et Sade (1949) and its Preface, “What Is the Purpose of Criticism?”, where Sade’s most compelling reader (according to Beckett) suggests that critique’s task might be “the task of [. . .] liberating thought from the notion of value.”55 Blanchot here argues that Sade’s potential, inseparable from the reality that his worlds are impossible and unbearable (not unlike that of Bataille’s Molloy), could thus be “to modify the bases of all comprehension” – a notion that would have resonated with a Beckett familiar with Gide’s claim that his work sought only “to disturb” [inquiéter]. Read through Blanchot’s Sade, Beckett’s Sadism might

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therefore return us to an attempt at valuing literature that is paradoxically not based in its recuperation of specific values – beyond that of the displacing power of the negative itself. If so, it is unsurprising that Beckett’s most attentive readers have registered the strange resistance of his texts to the “ethical,” even as others have expressed their disgust with his apparent failure to provide a rounded, moral world that would provide the pedagogic, ameliorative function of literature they require.56 The fact of this resistance should not papered over with new systems but considered further.

Toward Re-evaluation This Beckett requires us to modify the consensus around his defining influences in the novel, as well as some of the conclusions that are drawn from such accounts. Longstanding notions of Beckett as the “last modernist” (Anthony Cronin) or suggestions that his novels, beginning with Murphy, figure “the end of modernity” (Richard Begam) will need adjustment, not least because Beckett’s fictions can no longer be neatly defined, if only negatively, by the achievement of “literary modernism” represented by Proust and Joyce.57 But the Beckett whose critique of literature begins with turning on not only these exemplars but Gide’s own critical nemeses in the titans of French Naturalism also enables us to more sharply position him against new accounts of modernism. For instance, Beci Carver’s recent description of Beckett as a “granular modernist” – a strategy within modernism that she describes as carrying “Naturalism beyond the limits it prescribes for itself ” – complements what we now know were Gidean techniques, outlined in Beckett’s lectures, for demolishing Naturalist treatment of character and form.58 And Carver’s term could usefully be expanded to re-read the mediation between anti-literary strategies and the exhaustion of Naturalist procedures in the fictions at least up to and including Malone Dies. Other markers applied to Beckett’s work, and the stability of such categories themselves, are also impacted. Brian McHale’s description of a move from modernism to postmodernism between Molloy and The Unnamable as the shift toward a “fundamental ontological discontinuity between the fictional and the real” should be reconsidered, not least because an insistence on this “gulf” was at the core of Beckett’s fictional theory and practice from the early 1930s onward.59 But even as the definition of the postmodern has changed, the facts surrounding Beckett’s critique remind us how limited the utility of periodization can be.

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Postmodernism now often signifies a view of the other-determined nature of “the subject,” the provisionality of meaning, and a penchant for ironic play with a constructed “reality.” Yet if, as recent attempts at redefinition have it, the literary postmodern is decidedly a post-war phenomenon, we should not ignore the fact that many of its favored literary devices – such as the self-conscious deployment of popular genres (like detective fiction), the overt treatment of fictional characters and/or narrators as characters, the use of mirroring devices and mise en abyme – were not only present in Beckett’s pre-war fiction, but in key sources for such devices: those considerably earlier texts, like Paludes (1895) or Les Caves du Vatican (1914), written by the artist who coined the term mise en abyme.60 Finally, Beckett’s critique of literature requires us to reconsider the divisions within the modernist novel, and his place in “late modernism.” There is a long-running strategy, deployed since Benjamin’s “Crisis of the Novel” (1930), of delineating two lines within modernist fiction: first a line marked by the quest for mastery, purity, involution, and unified form (Benjamin’s prime example here being Gide); and second, a view of art that aspires to heterogeneity, deploys montage, and aims at the absorption of everyday life (Benjamin’s Alfred Döblin). This division was developed in Peter Nicholls’s notion of “divergences,” and most recently put into play by Tyrus Miller, who describes a “late modernism” in the late 1920s and then the 1930s, whereby writers envisioned such a split as part of a critique of modernism itself.61 For Miller, those “mainstream” modernists seeking unity and mastery form a cadre – Gide, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, etc. – against which those in search of instability, and the practitioners of avant-gardeism, set themselves: Beckett, Breton, Stein, and so on. Beckett’s early reading of Gide as the “modern” novelist par excellence and his deployment of this author’s techniques, especially in the formative years of the 1930s, indicate that Benjamin’s and Miller’s Gide and their accounts of modernism are, at the least, not Beckett’s. Beckett instead requires us to account for a tradition, hard to define, that is finally less about artistic convention, period, or strategy than an insistence on the power of the negative, and that ruthlessly questions the authority of literature and “unity” of all kinds. It was not chiefly an attention to either heterogeneity or everyday life that Beckett described as truly important. Nor did he aim primarily at an attack on “modernism” itself (or “romanticism” or “classicism”). Rather, he delineated a “modern” canon defined by its opposition to the very “European tradition” of literature from which its writers (with the exception of Dostoevsky, himself understood as an outsider to Europe) had emerged. Armed with Gide’s example of self-critique,

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whereby a vision of “incoherence” arose from the very heart of “classicism,” Beckett began self-consciously inhabiting literature through an art whose shifting gambits – aiming at interminability, registering a rupture in the lines of communication, painting the impasse, submitting to the absence of terms – were always versions of confronting “the impossible.”

Notes 1. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, New York: John Calder, 1994, 152. 2. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, 189. 3. Ibid., 152. 4. Ibid. 5. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, London: John Calder, 2001, 128. 6. Beckett, Disjecta, 127. 7. Ibid., 120. 8. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber, 1990, 70. 9. Beckett, Disjecta, 118. 10. Ibid., 119. 11. I thank Shane Weller for pointing out Adorno’s note to me; it is Weller’s translation which I use in the following sentence from Adorno’s notes on The Unnamable as published in “‘Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn’: Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lecktuere,” in Frankfurter Adorno Blaetter III, Munich: edition text+kritik, 1994, 18–77: “Die clownhaften Reflexionen aufs Werk selbst erinnern an Gides Paludes, ueberhaupt vieles – es ist ausser Kafka die wichtigste Brueke.” (“The clownish reflections on the work itself recall Gide’s Paludes to a considerable degree – besides Kafka, that work is the most important connection.”) Beckett lectured on Paludes in 1930, and as John Pilling has noted, in Dream Beckett referred to Dublin’s “paludal heavens” See Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, London: John Calder, 1993, 111. 12. John Pilling, A Companion to Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004, 90–91. 13. Beckett, Disjecta, 25; James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, 51. 14. See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 120–121. 15. T. B. Rudmose-Brown, A Book of French Verse from Hugo to Larbaud, Oxford University Press, 1928, 103. 16. See T. B. Rudmose-Brown, “The Present Day,” in George Saintsbury’s Primer of French Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929, 141–163. 17. “One is tempted to add.” Rudmose-Brown notes, “that Romanticism is the art of saying least in most words; but even the Romantics when they achieved a short story, a form not particularly congenial to them, became classical.”

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18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

john bolin Thomas Rudmose-Brown, Introduction to French Short Stories, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925, xx. Beckett, Disjecta, 19–33. Anthony Ward, Walter Pater: The Idea in Nature, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966, 67. Beckett, Disjecta, 27; G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 1–101. Samuel Beckett, “Home Olga,” in Collected Poems in English and French, New York: Grove Press, 1977, 8. André Gide, “Feuillets,” Oeuvres Complètes, vol. xiii, Édition augmentée de texts inédits, établie par Martin-Chauffier, Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1932–1939, 439–440. “Notes on Samuel Beckett’s lectures,” taken by Rachel Burrows: MIC60, Beckett Manuscript Collection, Trinity College Dublin Library, 23, 37. Hereafter cited as MIC60. Ibid., 31, 41. Paul Valéry, ‘Situation de Baudelaire,’ Oeuvres, vol. i, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1957, 604. Beckett, Disjecta, 28, 31. Joyce’s aesthetic, as Jacques Aubert puts it, thus centers on the “tabulation, computation, [and] the extraction of an intelligible structure [. . .] from the formless, the nonsensical, the accidental.” Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, 28; MIC60, 14. MIC60, 37, Burrows’s emphasis. Ibid.; Beckett, Disjecta, 70; Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder, 1999, 124. Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, 120, 121, 125. MIC60, 105. Beckett’s comments on the classical answer are in his review of Albert Feuillerat’s book on Proust (Disjecta, 63). The remark about Gide is found in Leslie Daiken’s student notes on Beckett: “The essential difference between the psychological realist of the 17th and of the 20th centuries is that [in] the first, the mind [. . .] can become unified, and can attain a state of awareness in consciousness. But Gide’s has no end. His novels don’t end. He cannot see anything seriously, with a sense of finality.” Leslie Daiken, “Student notes,” held by the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. Unaccessioned holding; Daiken’s emphasis. David Walker, André Gide, London: Macmillan Publishers, 1990, 180. Beckett, Dream, 133. Beckett, Disjecta, 28; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Penguin Books, 1992, 181. SB to Charles Prentice, August 15, 1931, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. i, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 81; MIC60, 39.

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35. Beckett, Dream, 10. 36. “Classical perfection implies [. . .] the submission of the individual, his subordination, and that of the word in that sentence, and the sentence on the page, and the page in the whole work.” André Gide, Morceaux choisis, Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921, 453. 37. For a reading of Beckett’s decidedly anti-realist stance in Murphy see John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 43–61. 38. Beckett, Dream, 27. 39. Ibid., 55. 40. Ibid., 138. 41. Beckett, Dream, 55. 42. Ibid., 184. 43. Ibid., 241. 44. For the comments on Gide’s interminability, see Daiken, “Student notes.” 45. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 3; Susan Sontag, preface to Roland Barthes, Writing, xv. 46. Beckett, Dream, 48; Barthes, Writing, 61. 47. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, London: Faber and Faber, 1975, 175–178. See Shane Weller, A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism, London: Legenda, 2005. 48. Paul Sheehan, “Images Must Travel Further,” in Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, 19, 2006, 113–122; 115 49. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992, 60, 42. 50. Georges Bataille, Romans et Récits, eds. J. -F. Louette et al., Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2004, 1218. 51. Georges Bataille, Preface to Madame Edwarda, in Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, New York: Penguin, 2012, 124. 52. Georges Bataille, “Le Silence de Molloy,” Critique, May 1951: 387–396; reprinted and translated in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, 55–63. Bataille also wrote of Molloy that it was the expression of an urge “to make literature into a façade [. . .] that would possess the authority of ruins.” Bataille, “Le Silence de Molloy,” 57. 53. See, for instance, Vincent Pecora’s recent claim: that the Weberian “secularization thesis” buttressing the account of the novel’s development told by Ian Watt and his many inheritors begins to crumble when read in relation to a complex movement in Beckett’s writing that involves not a straightforward “atheism” or secularism, but a “peripetetic wandering, errant process” that summons the return, in altered form, of the religious repressed. See Vincent Pecora, Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, 22.

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54. Blanchot argues that “Whatever commentary might be, it will always, in regard to the poem, remain superfluous, and the last, most difficult step of interpretation is the one that leads it to become transparent before the pure affirmation of the poem”; he goes on to posit that “Critical discourse has this peculiar characteristic: the more it exerts, develops, and establishes itself, the more it must obliterate itself,” Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall, Stanford University Press, 2004, 2; my emphasis. This “penchant for self-effacement” reaches one limit in Beckett’s last works of “criticism” in particular when, in homages or homage-like pieces he moved beyond both literature and “critique” altogether in deictic utterances literally “dedicated” to the works themselves. In “Homage à Jack B. Yeats” the speaking voice concludes “Merely bow in wonder” (Beckett, Disjecta, 149); in “Pour Avidgor Arikha,” the writing, like the artwork, is merely aiming to “show” (Beckett, Disjecta, 152). 55. Blanchot, Lautréamont, 6. 56. For one of the most sophisticated responses to the discussion around Beckett and the ethical see Shane Weller’s Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity, New York: Palgrave, 2006. For one of the most well-known attacks on Beckett in the above regard see Martha Nussbaum’s “Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love,” Ethics 98, no. 2, 1988: 225–254. 57. Begam, for instance, reads Beckett’s protagonists as “parodic versions of Marcel and Stephen,” Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1997, 6. 58. See Beci Carver, Granular Modernism, Oxford University Press, 2014, 1. 59. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, London: Routledge, 1987, 13. 60. For a recent redefinition of the postmodern see Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden, eds., Postmodern/Postwar and After, University of Iowa Press, 2016. 61. See Peter Nicholls, “Divergences: Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard,” Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3, 1991, 1–18. See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, And the Arts between The World Wars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 16–17.

chapter 6

Beckett, Political Memory, and the Sense of History Emilie Morin

In 1937, the young Beckett, freshly returned from Nazi Germany, conceded to Thomas MacGreevy that his friend had been right all along: the “sense of history” was precisely what he was sorely lacking.1 His letter affirms an absence of feeling for history, just as it summons the very phrase deployed by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche to represent the formation of modern nations and the human spirit. It is tempting to take Beckett’s comment as a declaration of cultivated ignorance: he has frequently been portrayed as a writer severed from the political concerns shared by his contemporaries, absorbed in a peculiar internal world of his own making. Yet, increasingly, the consensus around Beckett’s apparent insensitivity to history and politics does not accord with the wealth of evidence available. Over the past decade in particular, the historicist turn in Beckett studies has yielded a very different picture of Beckett as a prolific letter-writer, an attentive diarist, and a careful reader of historical texts, who integrated fragments from his readings into his work, wrestled with historical narratives, and offered sharp commentaries about the making and unmaking of modern Europe. Scholarship on this new, historically and politically aware Beckett also emphasizes the work’s enduring capacity to speak to circumstances marked by war, conflict, and suffering. Nonetheless these connections are frequently thwarted by the apophatic mode honed in Beckett’s writing. History poses severe challenges to thought, action, and articulation in his texts, and his characters make implausible political subjects: they have seen too much, yet understand too little. This chapter examines how the work articulates its own sense of history precisely as it dismisses the very possibility of historical narrative. I pay particular attention to motifs of internment, starvation, and forced labor residually strewn across Beckett’s post-war texts, and to their propensity for suggesting connections between different forms of misery and exploitation. In this facet of the work, I trace a response to wider controversies about the memory of war and the 103

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endurance of penal and concentrationary structures that shaped the political contexts in which Beckett worked. The referential terrain deployed by Beckett mines fractious questions that erupted with great force in the late 1940s and 1950s in France and across Europe. One does not need to look very far to discern allusions to wartime collaboration, resistance, and deportation, to the fear of a nuclear holocaust, and indeed to a long history of famine, displacement, forced labor, and colonial subjugation. The narrator of “The Calmative” recalls his former life with “these assassins, in this bed of terror.”2 The narrator of “As the Story Was Told” half-remembers a torture scene that echoes testimonies and reports published during the Algerian War of Independence. Rough for Theatre I presents characters posted at a street corner in ruins and begging to remain alive, trapped in a situation experienced by many in Germany, Poland, Italy, or France in 1944 and 1945: A and B inhabit a world in which “[t]here are things lying around” and stench dominates “everywhere”; some of those who have disappeared “may return again.”3 Elsewhere, particularly in the novel trilogy, history manifests itself as anachronism, in juxtaposed non-sequiturs that are often inscribed in divergent national and cultural histories. Although the Unnamable and Malone venture a guess that they might share affinities with Toussaint L’Ouverture and Terence MacSwiney, the possibility of a genuine association recedes as soon as its prospect is entertained. Read along the historical lines residually present in the work, Beckett’s characters emerge as the sorry dregs of a political history that once thrived upon enshrined privilege and exploitation but appears to have suddenly turned against itself. Of this bygone history they only know deep solitude and banishment. In a sense, Beckett wrote against his own political sensibilities: the tensions that he witnessed – notably, in Ireland during the 1930s and in France in the aftermath of World War Two and during the Algerian War of Independence – were frequently what inspired him to write in the first place, yet he consistently avoided direct representation, working instead through allusion. Some of his manuscripts reveal how history – that which explains, contains, and makes situations of abandonment, isolation, oppression, and deprivation intelligible – affords a series of creative triggers that are subsequently removed over the course of the drafting process. An elderly man called Lévy, manifestly Jewish, became Estragon; Hamm and Clov’s predecessors were the sole surviving residents of a house in the north of France, partially destroyed by a catastrophe that raged from 1914 to 1918; and in early drafts of Comment c’est, the narrator was engaged in

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a military enterprise dimly recalling the French mission of ‘pacification’ in colonial Algeria during the 1950s. Even texts that appear devoid of landmarks were informed by historical perspective: Beckett initially thought of Film, for example, as being set in “[a]bout 1939,” rather than 1929 as the published text indicates.4 The interchangeability that he perceived between 1929 and 1939 is not insignificant, and refracts the widely accepted view that the economic strife of the Great Depression prepared the ground for Hitler’s political success and for German rearmament. Such a sense that political crises belong to a continuum and never erupt independently of one another bears testament to imaginative faculties attuned to their time. Scholars of French intellectual history have shown how the ability to make political crises speak to one another has shaped French political discourse since the Dreyfus affair. Michel Winock has situated the events of May 1968 as the culminating moment in a series of singular yet closely interrelated constitutional crises starting with the 1871 Paris Commune.5 Henry Rousso evokes the capacity of politicians, journalists, and writers to discern the unresolved legacies of the French Revolution in the Dreyfus affair, the legacies of the Dreyfus affair in the Vichy regime, and the legacies of the Vichy regime in the conduct of the Algerian war.6 Anne Simonin notes how, in the aftermath of World War Two, the conservative Right rendered the events of 1945 as a repeat of 1815 – a year that saw the departure and return of both Louis XVIII and Napoleon, and the eventual restoration of Louis XVIII – in its attempts to both elude accusations of treason levied through the anti-collaborationist trials and evade discussions of the war’s political magnitude.7 In a more general sense, the memory of one conflict does not simply revive the memory of another; rather, as Michael Rothberg has shown in his study of the ties between Holocaust memory and decolonization, political memory is multidirectional, shaped by a variety of competing narratives, whose troubling and challenging intersections constitute the very fabric of historical perspective.8 Beckett’s writing, with its sustained and challenging ties to war and trauma, offers some tantalising reminders of how political memory is made and remade. In his counter-history of liberalism, Domenico Losurdo points to the necessity of envisaging political events in the longue durée, approaching liberalism as a political doctrine intimately tied to slavery, colonial expansion, war, and forced displacement.9 Beckett was attuned to the necessity of looking to the remote past to understand the political present: he became aware of this necessity as soon as he began to reflect on the history of Ireland during the 1930s, as his notes on the Plantation of Ulster, the

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Williamite Penal Acts, and the Great Famine reveal.10 His own political memory worked with and within the longue durée, and many of the anecdotes that captured his imagination during the formative interwar years continued to inform his later thinking. Notably, his interest in the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which shaped his preparatory notes for Dream of Fair to Middling Women, emerges again in the margins of the work when the end of a certain kind of history comes into view. In “Suite” (the text that became the first part of “The End”), the narrator, physically marked by an experience of hardship recalling deportation, summons the memory of Exelmans – a hero of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, who was banished after the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleonic sediments surface in Fin de partie too, from the “régiment de dragons” or regiment of dragoons that Hamm discerns in Clov’s footsteps to the stage set itself, which recalls a vignette from Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, which Beckett had mined when preparing his first novel.11 The stage – initially configured around Hamm, who sports a dressing gown and a blood-stained handkerchief over his face – recalls the description of Napoleon’s last days offered by Bourrienne, who portrays marking traits in Bonaparte’s character, including his fondness for morning gowns. In a section relating Bonaparte’s exile to St. Helena, Bourrienne cites the description of Napoleon’s “bedchamber” offered by his Irish surgeon, Barry Edward O’Meara – a square room with two small windows looking onto an army camp, furnished with portraits and remnants of past glory, in the midst of which “Napoleon reclined, dressed in his white morning-gown, white loose trousers and stockings all in one, a chequered red handkerchief upon his head, and his shirt-collar open without a cravat.”12 These were precisely the kinds of details that Beckett was chasing during the 1930s. His Dream notebook transforms Napoleon’s rise and fall into a series of jottings that evade the set linearity of military history, rendering names, places, citations, and life habits as isolated fragments, without giving them a historical form. Beckett was always a historical writer of sorts: the first available account of his artistic interests, which appeared in 1931 in Samuel Putnam’s anthology The European Caravan, inscribed his work into a new historical literature concerned with the “after-War chaos” and the “economic chastening” of the Great Depression.13 This new literature was the work of writers who, although they may not have fought in the trenches, were producing work that “still bears the indelible impress of the War” and repudiates “pre-war aesthetics [and] ante-bellum social and political systems.”14 Beckett is presented as an important contributor to the

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anthology, and as a writer unambiguously indebted to Proust’s realism and to “the historic method.”15 The latter term deserves attention: the historic method was a mode of historical investigation formulated by the Ecole Méthodique, a school of historians which emerged in France in the late nineteenth century in response to the development of scientific approaches to history in Germany.16 Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s Introduction aux études historiques (1898) attributed a specific role to the historian: that of collecting traces of history in order to understand broad historical movements as well as their influence on individual psychological states, but without attempting to diagnose original causes. Historical facts, they noted, are distinctive by virtue of their capacity to be known indirectly, through their traces upon artefacts, monuments, museums, libraries, and archives. Later, Seignobos took this line of reasoning further, describing history as a process resting upon residual memorialization and the “imaginary analysis of imaginary objects.”17 As such, the description of Beckett as a disciple of the historic method connects him to longstanding and virulent debates about positivism that shaped intellectual culture at elite French institutions such as the Ecole Normale Supérieure, to which Ernest Lavisse and Ecole Méthodique historians had many ties as alumni and staff. When Beckett joined the Ecole Normale Supérieure as lecteur, however, the figure with whom he had conversations about his scholarly future was Célestin Bouglé (a prominent scholar who was connected to the Annales School, which had emerged as an antidote to the Ecole Méthodique), who thought little of Beckett’s plans to pursue doctoral study on Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s subsequent turn to writing was bolstered by an assiduous reading of historical memoirs, lives, literary histories, and surveys of military history; he showed a predilection for accounts of the French Revolution and nineteenth-century imperial expansion.18 In parallel, he reflected on the pitfalls of naturalism and discerned serious flaws of intent within the historical novel: the lecture notes recovered from his classes on nineteenth-century French authors at Trinity College Dublin deride the “snowball act” invented by those who seek to attribute neat causes to each event, and dismiss Balzac’s work as an attempt to deliver a “determined, statistical entity, distorted, with total reality not respected” to a world that makes such pretensions ridiculous at best.19 The tenets of the historic method resonate in such statements. Likewise, the idea that history can only be pieced together from recovered traces and fragments reverberates in Beckett’s diary of his travels across Nazi Germany in 1936 and 1937, at a time when he considered writing a kind

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of memoir. He noted, once again, his distaste for the “ ‘unification’ of the historical chaos” and for “the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos,” stating his preference for “the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths”: “I say the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery and venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them.”20 The same sensitivity to the indomitable traces of history expresses itself in the narrative details that drive allusions to incarceration, internment, and forced displacement in his work of the 1940s and 1950s. The first post-war texts published in English marked a sharp turn towards another kind of historical writing: these were the poems “Dieppe” and “Saint-Lô,” which appeared in the Irish Times in 1945 and 1946, typeset in a black frame and reshaped as war poems, as “DIEPPE 193?” and “SAINT-LO 1945.” These poems are cryptic in the characteristic Beckettian way, yet the devastated towns that they invoke – Dieppe and Saint-Lô, widely associated with the Battle of Normandy, as well as Vire, a town in Calvados also bombed to the ground in 1944, and the name of the river crossing Saint-Lô – vindicated an all-too-real proximity to military warfare. Their form resonates with the ellipses that Beckett embraced when talking about the war with friends and family, with whom communication seems to have been challenging at best. His letters to Georges Duthuit portray the difficulties he encountered when attempting to discuss recent events while in Dublin, merging memories of Berlin in the 1930s with the recent appointment as Head of Government of André Marie, a former Resistance member who had survived deportation to Buchenwald and had led some of the anti-collaborationist trials in a previous ministerial post. Beckett portrays himself as seized by a strange kind of delirium, feeling as though he is falling into a black hole of idiocy when speaking to friends and family.21 In the Irish Times, “SAINT-LO 1945” was greeted by bewilderment: a reader renamed as “Bewildered” wrote to the editor of the Irish Times to complain about the difficulty of modern poetry and to inquire about the meaning of “Vire.”22 Subsequently, H. O. White, Professor at Trinity College Dublin, sent a letter objecting that Beckett’s poem “is a commentary on a tragic moment in history, not a label on a pot of jam.”23 The following year, “Dieppe” reappeared as an untitled French-language poem in Les Temps Modernes, a review then dedicated to documenting the war’s political, ideological, and material aftermaths. These two poems and their transformations illustrate particularly well the manner in which Beckett’s elusive handling of historical place names has granted to his

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work different positions in diverse national debates about the remit of literary representation. The French-language novellas, plays, and novels that followed appeared at a peculiar historical intersection, when testimonies by concentration camp survivors yielded a fuller picture of the atrocities that took place in the Nazi labor and concentration camps; when human rights laws and conventions passed by the United Nations attempted to preclude the repetition of genocide; and when numerous testimonies originating from the Soviet Union, Indochina at war, and Franco’s Spain left no doubt concerning the continued use of internment and forced labor. These issues were discussed in particular depth in Les Temps Modernes, which became one of Beckett’s favored outlets for his French-language work precisely when the subjects of discussion revolved around the most fractious legacies of Nazism and Fascism. The issue featuring “Suite,” for example, included a detailed account of proceedings at the Nuremberg trial.24 The Indochina War was surveyed with particular anxiety, and the periodical’s budding anti-colonial campaign criss-crossed with other expressions of concern marked by the memory of Nazism. In December 1946 (Beckett’s “Poèmes 38–39” were published in the previous issue), an editorial by Jean Pouillon argued that, in Indochina, the French had become both executioner and victim in a scenario reminiscent of what they had just endured, warning that France and its army were like “Germans without a Gestapo and without concentration camps” – “or at least we can hope as much,” he concluded.25 In his view, the journal’s attempt to uncover the truth was the continuation of the struggle begun in wartime Resistance movements. In a subsequent piece, Maurice Merleau-Ponty reiterated these parallels, denouncing a situation in which a seemingly pure morality was often invoked as a facile alibi to avoid confronting unpalatable realities.26 Others, too, were determined to see historical truths recognized; in this respect, the appeal published in November 1949 in Le Figaro littéraire by David Rousset proved immensely important. Rousset – author of important testimonies of the Nazi camps published in 1945 and 1946 – proposed the formation of an independent commission composed of Nazi concentration camp survivors, in order to investigate the use of labor camps in the Soviet Union.27 Rousset described the Nazi concentration camp system and the deportation of dissidents in the Soviet bloc as historical equivalents and, like Victor Kravchenko two years previously, he was accused of falsification and invention in Les lettres françaises. He established the veracity of his claims during the high-profile libel trial that ensued. The stance taken by Les Temps

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Modernes reflected a wider unease: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty confirmed the existence of mass deportations in the Soviet Union, while disavowing Rousset’s approach and accusing him of offering a distorted and propagandistic interpretation of the Soviet corrective labor code.28 Ultimately, from these debates emerged, in 1951, the International Commission Against Concentration Camp Regimes, representing former Nazi camp detainees from across Europe.29 The commission, headed by Rousset, led investigations into the experiences of Soviet inmates, publishing by 1954 some additional accounts of the penitentiary system in Spain, concentration camps in Greece, and political detention in Tunisia; the judges, who were survivors of the Nazi camps, stated that their aim was “to fight against the concentration camp regime wherever it exists at present and wherever it may exist in the future.”30 This context, marked by an attempt to fight against obscured historical facts, illuminates the political dimension of the poignant – and sometimes bizarre – equivalences that Beckett’s work pursues so keenly around displacement, starvation, torture, death, and forced labor. “There are so many terrible things,” says Clov; “No, no, there are not so many now,” says Hamm.31 Their dialogue recalls Rousset’s memorable lines about the historical revelations that still needed to take place, which captured the attention of Hannah Arendt among others: “Normal men don’t know that anything is possible. Even if testimonies force their intelligence to admit this fact, their muscles don’t believe it. Those who have been interned in the camps know.”32 The short prose texts that Beckett wrote and discarded between December 1951 and June 1952, when the Indochina War was still raging, tentatively press upon such historical intersections and feature characters who appear to be situated at different ends of the corrective labor spectrum. One of these fragments, entitled “Au bout de ces années perdues” [At the end of these lost years], presents an itinerant camp set up in a deserted landscape, staffed by men collecting information; the narrator ventures a guess that he may meet the same fate as those elderly settlers who died at the hands of assistants requisitioned from the indigenous non-white population.33 Another, entitled “On le tortura bien” (we tortured him well), deals with torture and the collection of information in a more direct fashion, presenting techniques reminiscent of those used in Indochina by the French; the narrator, who controls the work done by his assistant and a wayward scribe, is haunted by memories of the Great Famine and the death of his father from starvation.34 In their own idiosyncratic ways, these fragments reveal a preoccupation with the deployment of torture to fulfil political ends, long before Rough for Radio II, Rough for Theatre II, and

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Comment c’est, where torture is again a central motif, reconceived along new lines that parallel precedents set during the Algerian war. Here, as elsewhere, political imperatives are severed from particulars of place and time, exposing in bare form the logic that ties together systems of internment, torture, and forced labor. The early absurdist plays, notably, create troubling and imaginative political syntheses through the actions and words of Pozzo and Hamm, who are both animated by the same desire to exploit and exterminate. Pozzo is, he says, on his way “to the fair,” where he hopes to get a “good price” for Lucky.35 His words – “The truth is you can’t drive such creatures away. The best thing would be to kill them”36 – connect the form of servitude experienced by the roped-up Lucky to what appears to be a Beckettian obsession: the circumstances in which servitude and death are the only available options (Molloy, for example, states that he has “always preferred slavery” over summary execution, or “being put to death”).37 The “knook” (knouk in the French text) that Pozzo once “took”38 recalls the knout, the term designating both the whip and the type of punishment used in the Katorga, the Russian tsarist system of penal labor which provided the foundations for the Gulag. The Katorga would have been known to Beckett through his reading of René Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia in early 1933, a book that describes the Katorga in some detail.39 Those who wrote about the Gulag included some of his acquaintances: Marc Slonim, George Reavey’s close collaborator, published a book denouncing the deportation of the Russian bourgeoisie to concentration camps in 1921,40 and, in 1929, a few months before meeting Beckett, Reavey published a translation of a short story by Vsevolod Ivanov describing a macabre expedition to a remote place littered with corpses and close to an early Gulag set up for the Russian bourgeoisie. The story exposes the ways in which “mounds are formed” after mass executions have occurred, presenting a narrator who once enlisted local peasants to bury corpses (without success: the ground is frozen). Eventually, he decides to requisition the “imprisoned bourgeois” to transform a nearby pit into a mass grave, with tragic and gruesome results.41 Beckett’s correspondence shows that he read about the Gulag in the early 1970s, and that he admired Nadezda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, which recounts the deportation of Osip Mandelstam to the Kolyma in the late 1930s (“a book that gives courage,” he observed).42 Like Pozzo’s comments about “the knouk,” the mysterious place called Kov invoked in Fin de partie, Endgame, and Endspiel provides an insight into the sinister history that has both affected and spared Beckett’s

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characters. Kov emerges as the sole remnant in an archipelago of death, darkness, and misery; it is the only place that Hamm remembers when attempting to craft his “chronicle.” “Plus un chat. Bon bon,”43 he says in the French text (literally: not a cat in sight, or no one there), before learning that a rat has returned on his side of the gulf. His lines suggest connections between lethal events in Kov and the unnamed disaster that makes the world smell of corpses and renders it impossible to ponder burying the dead. History has given a new twist to the play’s topography: the KVO was the cultural and education department set up for Soviet concentration camps between 1934 and 1953, which published propaganda bulletins and directed cultural activities and theater performances.44 Others have read, in these facets of the play, allusions to the unburied corpses of the Irish Famine and its starving laborers, and to penal labor as used in the British Empire in Ireland and Australia.45 Nowhere do the connections between Beckett’s creative taste for historical synthesis and the marking political debates of his time emerge as forcefully as in Fin de partie. The title used in early drafts, “HAAM,”46 suggest that Beckett toyed with a parable of another kind, revolving around the curse that Noah placed upon Haam’s son Canaan and the political myths that had bolstered slavery. Noah’s curse – “a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers” – was widely utilized, particularly in the antebellum American South, to uphold the belief that God had cursed Black Africa with eternal slavery.47 Beckett’s collaboration with Nancy Cunard on her Negro anthology exposed him to this history: an essay on Brazil (part of a series including Beckett’s translation of an essay by Benjamin Péret) describes how “that most infamous of all trades,” “that of the men suffering from the curse of Ham,” came to be established, and an essay by Léon Pierre-Quint translated by Beckett portrays anti-segregationist and antislavery campaigns as a defense of “the unhappy sons of Ham.”48 Work on Fin de partie began in early 1954 – a year marked by French capitulation in Indochina, a move towards independence in Morocco and Tunisia, and the emergence of new forms of political organization in colonial Algeria. The shadow of French colonial practices looms large upon the characters’ tastes and belongings: when times were good, Clov wore babouches and Nagg ate rahat loukoum [Turkish Delight]. Here as in En attendant Godot, the memory of war surfaces in benign details, and many of the lines subsequently elided in the English text belong to the realm of the political joke. Clov’s line “Le fanal est dans le canal” [the beacon is in the canal], for example, recalls the coded rhymes issued as signals by Resistance networks on the BBC’s Radio Londres.49 Yet

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a fundamental uncertainty surrounds the characters’ capacity for resistance and secrecy; they seem only too happy to side with whichever order is prevalent – in this instance, large-scale elimination. As part of his attempts to monitor starvation and engineer death, Hamm exhorts Clov to “condemn” the lids of Nagg and Nell’s bins and to “exterminate” the rat in the kitchen and the human being that Clov sees outside (“Fais ton devoir,” he says: do your duty).50 To secure Clov’s continued servitude, he promises one biscuit per day, perhaps a biscuit and a half. The lines about a phantom supply of “biscuits classiques,”51 too hard for the toothless Nagg to eat, probably made some of Beckett’s French spectators and readers shiver as much as it made them laugh. The hard biscuit (biscuit dur) is a classic military supply, discussed and scrutinized in military manuals since the days of Napoleonic rule. There appear to have been plenty of hard biscuits left over from the French defeat of 1940, so much so that army supplies lasted until 1945.52 Beckett’s English translation – Spratt’s medium, a brand of dog’s biscuit – introduces a concealed nod to the enriched biscuits distributed to ward off malnutrition among children under the Vichy regime, known as “biscuit de chiens” or dogs’ biscuit.53 The spectral place named Kov is part of a wider topography of suffering: Nagg and Nell recall, notably, that they lost their legs in the Ardennes, outside Sedan, in a tandem accident.54 The twinned mention of Sedan and the Ardennes is the play’s only concession to historical realism, reconfiguring their amputation as a literal political metaphor. Sedan and the Ardennes, where loss of legs and lives was once likely, are sites of extraordinary military importance which came to crystallize French fears of military defeat and occupation at turning points during the interwar period. The Ardennes region was occupied by German armies in 1870, 1914, and after 1940. The 1870 Battle of Sedan, a turning point in the Franco-Prussian war, was remembered as a massacre of unimaginable scale in Camille Lemonnier’s Sedan (Les charniers) (1881) and Emile Zola’s La Débâcle (1892). In 1914, Sedan was taken over by the German army, after another resounding French defeat. While the town was submitted to a ruthless system of rationing, its citadel – renamed “the penal colony” – was used as a site of imprisonment, forced labor, and execution.55 The town eventually returned to French hands in 1918 after another battle. After the Munich accords, the threat of “another Sedan” galvanized political debate around German re-armament. Sedan, invoked across the political spectrum as a symbol of the risks that Hitler’s Germany posed to French sovereignty, represented “the dismemberment of France,” in the words of Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party, while, for the

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industrialist François de Wendel, “Waterloo, Sadowa, Sedan, Munich” was the clear trajectory leading to another French defeat.56 Their fears were well-founded: in 1940, through Sedan, the German army bypassed the Maginot line and entered France via the Ardennes. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, the political logic according to which French defeat during the Franco-Prussian war drove World War One and French victory, and German defeat ignited World War Two and French defeat in 1940, had lost its shine in intellectual circles concerned about the war in Indochina and the ferments of conflict in French colonies. Beckett, reluctant to endorse Gaullist narratives of national heroism, would have shared the viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty and others at Les Temps Modernes, for whom the most pressing issue was to reflect on the course of history in light of colonial practices and experiences of the Nazi regime. His work reflects pervasive anxieties about the repetition of historical atrocities and their ties to silencing and accusations of falsification. Read on these terms, Fin de partie emerges as a pivotal work for reasons other than commonly assumed. Here, Beckett’s writing reimagines a world bolstered by myths of historical continuity which collapse as soon as they are invoked. For Nagg and Nell, their amputation outside Sedan is a matter for laughter, but just about: the idea of being outside Sedan, once upon a time, and remaining alive is as obscene a joke as that of the tailor who believes that he can keep the desolation of history at bay with a pair of well-crafted trousers.

Notes 1. Quoted in James McNaughton, “Beckett, German Fascism, and History: The Futility of Protest,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 15, 2005, 106. 2. Samuel Beckett, Three Novellas, London: Calder, 1999, 24. 3. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber, 2006, 227, 229, 231. 4. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett III: 1957–1966, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 539 (hereafter LSB); Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 324. 5. Michel Winock, La fièvre hexagonale: Les grandes crises politiques 1871–1968, revised edn., Paris: Seuil, 1995. 6. Henri Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours, revised edn., Paris: Seuil, 1990, 12. 7. Anne Simonin, “1815 en 1945: Les formes littéraires de la défaite,” Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’histoire, 59, 1998, 48–61.

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8. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, 2009. 9. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2011. 10. TCD MS 10971/2, Trinity College Dublin. 11. Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, Paris: Minuit, 1957, 77; John Pilling, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999, 7–11. 12. M. de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, vol. iv, London: Richard Bentley, 1836, 250. 13. Samuel Putnam, ed., The European Caravan: An Anthology of the New Spirit in European Literature, New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1931, vi. 14. Ibid., v. 15. Ibid., x, 475. Beckett scholars have often assumed that Beckett wrote this biographical sketch himself, whereas Lois Overbeck and Martha Fehsenfeld ascribe authorship to Jacob Bronowski in the first volume of the Letters. However, the Harry Ransom Center’s George Reavey collection features many examples of the same hyperbolic style, which suggest that Reavey had an input. Reavey was meant to contribute to the anthology a subsequent section on Russian literature, which failed to appear. 16. See Pim Den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914, Princeton University Press, 1998, 196, 281, 295–300; Isabel Noronha-DiVanna, Writing History in the Third Republic, Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010, 139–143, 186–196, 208–221. 17. Charles Seignobos, La méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901, 118–119. 18. See John Pilling, “A Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: Beckett’s ‘Dissonance of Ends and Means,’” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Samuel Beckett, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010, 63–72. 19. S. E. Gontarski, Martha Fehsenfeld, and Dougald McMillan, “Interview with Rachel Burrows. Dublin, Bloomsday, 1982,” Journal of Beckett Studies, 11–12, 1989: 5, 15. 20. Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, 244. 21. SB to Georges Duthuit, August 11, 1948, in LSB ii: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 95, 99 n. 6. 22. “Bewildered,” “Saint- Lô – 1945,” Irish Times, June 27, 1946, 5. 23. H. O. White, “Saint Lô – 1945,” Irish Times, July 3, 1946, 5. 24. Jean Pouillon, “A propos du procès de Nuremberg,” Les Temps Modernes 10, 1946, 146–156. 25. Pouillon, “Et bourreaux, et victimes,” Les Temps Modernes 15, 1946, n. pag. 26. Pouillon, “Indochine S.O.S.,” Les Temps Modernes 18, 1947, 1040. 27. David Rousset, “Au secours des déportés dans les camps soviétiques. Un appel aux anciens déportés des camps nazis,” Le Figaro littéraire, November 12, 1949.

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28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

emilie morin Reproduced in Michel Surya, ed., David Rousset, spec. issue, Lignes 2, 2000, 143–160. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Les jours de notre vie,” Les Temps Modernes 51, 1950, 1153–1168. See Surya, David Rousset. International Commission against Concentration Camp Practices, The Regime of the Concentration Camps in the Post-War World 1945–1953: Four Investigations Conducted by the International Commission against Concentration Camp Practices, trans. Annette Michelson and Bernard Frechtman, Paris: Centre International d’Edition et de Documentation, n. d., 3. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 144. David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946, 181[literal translation]. Samuel Beckett, University of Reading, UoR MS 1656/1, f. 3, 4. UoR MS 1656/3, f. 11. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 32. Ibid. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, London: Calder, 1994, 68. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 33. See my Beckett’s Political Imagination, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 57. Marc Slonim, Le Bolchévisme vu par un Russe, Paris: Brossard, 1921, 71. Vsevolod Ivanov, “Mounds,” trans. George Reavey, Experiment 2, February 1929, 47–48. SB to Josette Hayden, September 29, 1972, in LSB iv: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 310. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 70. Jacques Rossi, Le manuel du Gulag: Dictionnaire historique, Paris: Editions du Cherche-Midi, 1997, 156. Julieann Ulin, “‘Buried! Who Would Have Buried Her?’: Famine ‘Ghost Graves’ in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” in George Cusack and Sarah Goss, eds., Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006, 197–222; Nels C. Pearson, “‘Outside of Here It’s Death’: Co-Dependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett’s Endgame,” ELH 68, no. 1, 2001, 222. Until late September 1956. John Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 132–133. David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Princeton University Press, 2003, 1; see also Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 17–49, 14 135–165; David M. Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery,

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

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Farnham: Ashgate, 2009; Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery, Oxford University Press, 2002. Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, “The Negroes in Brazil,” trans. V. Latorre-Bara, and Léon Pierre-Quint, “Races and Nations,” trans. Samuel Beckett, in Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro: Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931–1933, London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co., 1934, 515, 578–579. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 45. Ibid., 38, 73, 101. Ibid., 18. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life, London: Granta, 2000, 108. Serge Kastell, Dictionnaire du français sous l’Occupation: Les mots de la Résistance, de la Collaboration et de la vie quotidienne, France-Belgique (1940–1945), Paris: Grancher, 2013, 71. This exchange is a joke on their own immobility and evokes the Sedan chair and the Sedan automobile, just as the tandem recalls both a type of bicycle and a plane. See Jos Schramme, Au bagne de Sedan du 20 novembre 1917 au 21 mars 1918: Contribution à l’histoire du régime allemand en pays occupé, Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer & Co., 1919; Henry Rouy, Sedan durant la guerre de 1914 à 1918: 52 mois de prison à Sedan (1914–1918), Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1919; Philippe Nivet, La France occupée: 1914–1918, Paris: Armand Colin, 2011. Maurice Thorez, Œuvres choisies, Vol. ii: 1938–1950, Paris: Editions Sociales, 1950, 95; de Wendel quoted in Gaston Palewski, “Propos,” La revue des deux mondes, September 1976, 642.

chapter 7

Samuel Beckett as Contemporary Artist Judith Wilkinson

From October 2009 to April 2010 a 30-metre long, 10-metre wide and 13metre high grey steel sculpture resembling an enormous freight transport container occupied Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The structure was entirely fabricated out of raw steel and was raised above the gallery floor on a series of ten 2-metre high stilts. Visitors could either walk underneath the structure or around it. They could also choose to enter the vast interior via a 10-metre wide steel loading-ramp that extended downwards to the gallery floor and had low steel walls running up its sides. The entrance to the structure was an impenetrably black vertically oriented rectangle that spanned the entire height and width of the container. At the threshold to the structure visitors often hesitated before going in. Once inside the container viewers were submerged in complete and total darkness. Deepening the visitors’ disorientation, the walls of the container were lined with a thick black velvet material, which acted as a sound barrier, absorbing ambient noise and violently disconnecting the sculpture’s silent black interior from the light-filled bustling exterior of the Turbine Hall. Visitors to the work had their sense of sight and hearing almost entirely erased and were forced to rely on other forms of bodily awareness in order to navigate their way through the space. The only sounds audible were those of other participants as they attempted to breathe, move, steady themselves, or feel their way along the velvet walls of the container to try and find an exit. Tate commissioned the work described above as the tenth annual Turbine Hall commission. Over three million people visited the installation during the six-month period it was at Tate Modern. The work, created by Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka, is entitled How It Is (2009) and takes its title from Beckett’s 1964 experimental novel of the same name.1 How It Is by Balka is just one prominent example of the frequency with which Beckett is being referenced by contemporary art. Many other highprofile artists have also responded to Beckett’s work in the last ten years. 118

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Some notable examples are Gerard Byrne, A Late Evening in the Future (2016), Ugo Rondinone, Breathe Walk Die (2014), Brian O’Doherty Hello, Sam (2011), Joseph Kosuth, “(Waiting for-) Text for Nothing” Samuel Beckett, in Play (2010) and Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007). However, despite the accelerated pace of Beckett’s influence on contemporary art, a cogent and comprehensive art historical and/or critical discourse investigating these art practices has yet to emerge. The primary reasons for this, I would argue, are twofold. Firstly, the diversity of the responses in contemporary art has made trying to unify these artists into any singular category impossible. Byrne, for example, is engaged in a broad sweeping analysis of Beckett’s evolving populist cultural legacy and uses multiple mediums to express that interest including performance, film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Kosuth, conversely, has isolated a single series of Beckett works, Texts for Nothing (1950–1952), and is focused entirely on a close reading of their linguistic structures. Secondly, until recently there have been relatively few critical contributions to the field of Beckett Studies from art historians, curators, and/or practicing artists. Those voices therefore, which could potentially provide the much needed art historical context for these complex and divergent practices along with a critical insight into the specific working methods of these artists, have been regrettably overlooked. Contemporary art has always had its own specific dialogue with Beckett. It’s a form of connection that stands apart and is distinct from the relationship with Beckett commonly held by Beckett Studies. Put quite simply, rather than positioning Beckett as a literary reference who acts as source material for artists, contemporary art considers Beckett as an active peer in the field of making. This essay will attempt to shed light on the deeply nuanced and multi-faceted significance of Beckett’s working relationship with contemporary art. It will do so by first documenting Beckett’s technical skill and knowledge of the various forms of media that he employed in the making of his works, including sound, film, television, text, and performance. The essay will simultaneously chart how Beckett’s use of such media developed his thinking around technology and the possibilities of contemporary art more broadly. Evidence that Beckett’s approach, methods, and conceptualization of his artworks far more closely align his interests with those of contemporary art, rather than the traditionally held preoccupations of modernist literature (as is the standard perception), will also be documented and presented. Finally, in a bid to demonstrate how far-reaching and multi-faceted Beckett’s relationship to contemporary art has become, this essay will discuss two unique themes

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that frequently reoccur in contemporary art’s response to Beckett: the text as a material for contemporary art and the viewer-activated experiential artwork. These themes are so ubiquitous in contemporary art’s thinking that their connection to Beckett may be overlooked. This essay will trace the development of these themes in Beckett’s work and their subsequent dissemination and advancement in the practices of two artists who have a profound and sustained engagement with Beckett, Jenny Holzer and Miroslaw Balka. As indicated earlier, Beckett produced works in multiple media forms including sound, television, film, text, and performance. And much like his peers in contemporary art he often worked across multiple media platforms simultaneously developing and refining his ideas depending on the specific capabilities of the individual medium. The idea of Beckett as hands-on practitioner collaborating with a team of technicians in the studio is not one that is generally circulated. However, documentation exists in the form of archival imagery, letters, recordings, and interviews that show him hard at work throughout his career in sound studios, on film and television sets, and in art galleries and performance spaces. Beckett worked tirelessly and directly with artists, filmmakers, designers, engineers, directors, actors, light, audio, and camera technicians to achieve the precise results he wanted for his projects. His production notebooks contain detailed entries and diagrams that demonstrate the meticulous consideration he gave to each of the technical and formal aspects of his works. Any perception therefore still lingering from the first wave of Beckett criticism in the 1950s, that understood Beckett (largely due to the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre) as a reclusive, taciturn, socially inept modernist writer who had little interest or ability in forming productive collaborative working relationships with his artistic peers and colleagues, is rather misleading. Between 1957 and 1989 Beckett made six experimental sound pieces specifically for the medium of radio, seven moving-image works for television, two 35 mm black-and-white films for cinematic distribution, and an experimental sound recording for Claddagh Records. The previous list does not include the performance- or stage-based works that Beckett personally adapted and reconceptualized for the mediums of film or television, or those works which Beckett wrote specifically for radio, film, video, or television, but never had the opportunity to realize in their intended media. In addition, the works that Beckett produced for the medium of theater, it can also be convincingly argued, are much closer to multimedia artworks than traditional theater pieces.2

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The move that Beckett made from writing text-based works such as Texts for Nothing (1950–1952) and Watt (1953) to producing theater in 1953, with his first staging of Waiting for Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, represents a greater transition in his development as a contemporary art thinker than has previously been acknowledged. Beckett worked for the first time with the physical manipulation of space, light, sound, and the human form in the construction of a theatrical experience, and the impact that this would have upon his future work is inestimable. On the rare occasions that Beckett spoke about Godot, it was invariably in terms of the images and visual effects he wanted to produce for it. Simple entries in his production notebooks such as, “Estragon is on the ground; he belongs to the stone. Vladimir is light; he is oriented towards the sky. He belongs to the tree,”3 allude to the importance of the few spare elements Beckett selected to construct his stage visuals. And the detail, “long enough for empty stage to carry,”4 gives us insight into how he structured the temporality of the work so there would be sufficient time for the audience to also register the empty set as an image. The staging of Godot in 1953 represented Beckett’s transition from the written page to the visual and auditory medium of theater and would mark the beginning of his experimentation throughout the next several decades with numerous different media forms. Beckett’s interest in sound recording, editing, and transmission technologies would next be expressed. Beckett’s first attempts at working with the medium of sound came in the form of a series of works he produced for radio between 1957 and 1976. Like other early practitioners of sound art, such as La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, Beckett was extremely aware of the specificity of the new medium in which he was working. His approach to the creation of his auditory projects differed radically from the playwrights of his generation who were also writing for radio. Dylan Thomas, for example, produced several texts for radio, but had little or no involvement in their sound production or design. Beckett’s surprisingly advanced understanding of the mechanics of radio was immediately noted by BBC’s Third Programme controller John Morris in an early meeting regarding Beckett’s first sound work entitled All That Fall (1957). “I saw Samuel Beckett in Paris this morning,” Morris reported, “He is extremely keen to write an original work for the Third Programme and has, indeed already done the first few pages of it. I got the impression that he has a very sound idea of the problems of writing for radio and I expect something pretty good.”5 Beckett’s letter to his friend Nancy Cunard from the same period also illustrates how from its inception the particular sound he wanted to

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create for All That Fall was at the forefront of his thinking, rather than the plot or narrative structure as would conventionally be the case for a playwright commissioned to write a play for radio: “Never thought about Radio play technique [. . .] but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something.”6 When working with the BBC Beckett was insistent that he retain full control over the audio production of his works and demanded that he liaise directly with the sound engineers to achieve the results that he wanted. Beckett’s ideas for sound were so advanced, however, that the BBC engineers did not yet have the capacity to produce them. Beckett’s attention to each auditory detail and his awareness of how all these sonic elements might come together to create a completely immersive sound environment helped stir the BBC to set up an entirely new studio equipped with state-of-the-art machinery. This facility became known as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and went on to produce some of the most influential and pioneering works in the history of British electronic music and sound art. Beckett’s sound works had been almost entirely unavailable to listen to until the British Library released Samuel Beckett: Works for Radio – The Original Broadcasts in 2006.7 However, such is the draw of Beckett for contemporary art that artists and curators have continuously and determinedly sought out these works. Copies have been shared on Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb artists’ repository, for example, and through various other unofficial channels. As a result, a generation of artists have emerged listening to Beckett’s highly experimental sound works and the evidence of his influence is palpable in the haunting dislocated voices and sonic distortions of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Opera for a Small Room (2005), Janice Kerbel’s Nick Silver Can’t Sleep (2006), Christian Marclay’s REPLAY (2007) and Susan Philipsz’s Lowlands (2010), to cite just a few examples. The availability of Beckett’s moving-image works has been similarly frustratingly restricted. Before Wulf Herzogenrath and Rudolf Frieling’s 2006 exhibition entitled 40 yearsvideoart.de : digital heritage : video art in Germany from 1963 to the present, which published excerpts from Beckett’s German television works on DVD as part of its exhibition catalog, the public were unable to access Beckett’s works in an unrestricted decentquality viewing format. Prior to Herzogenrath and Frieling’s exhibition the only way to see Beckett’s television pieces was to watch low-resolution pirated copies online, view deteriorated VHS tapes at institutions such as the British Library, the British Film Institute or the University of Reading, which held versions in their collections, or visit the archives of the

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television stations where the works were made, such as the BBC in the UK or SWR Sü dwestrundrunk (formerly SDR) in Germany. Beckett’s two 35mm black-and-white films, Film (1965) and Comédie (1966), made for cinematic distribution have also been almost impossible to view until relatively recently. A select number of university libraries with an emphasis on Beckett in their collections held copies of Film as it was available to purchase on VHS from Evergreen Productions in New York. However, the majority of artists I interviewed said that they either encountered Beckett’s moving-image works in an exhibition context, or after reading them tried to access them through specialist film and television archives. The importance of Beckett’s relationship to lens-based contemporary art is reinforced by his continued influence on artists working with film and video. Contemporary works by Bruce Nauman, Steve McQueen, Duncan Campbell and Stan Douglas, for example, adopt Beckett’s granular images, closed spaces, and fear of the interrogatory eye. Often paying explicit homage to Beckett, they pose questions concerning problems of perception and attempt to address the overwhelming presence of image capture and playback technologies. One of the most sustained engagements occurs in the work and writings of Canadian artist Stan Douglas. In 1988 Douglas curated an exhibition of Beckett’s television works at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition toured to Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa, The Power Plant in Toronto, and Alberta’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, providing rare public access to these productions. To date, Douglas’s exhibition remains the only one of its kind – no other curator in the intervening thirty years has been daring enough to present Beckett’s moving-image pieces as an independent exhibition. Douglas testifies that the inspiration for the curatorial project grew out of a “simple desire to finally see the work that [he] had previously only been able to read,” and because he had recently begun studying Beckett and found, “a very different artist from the one [he] had been taught to expect.”8 Douglas’s unique sensitivity towards Beckett’s moving-image works stems from his background as a practicing film and video artist, and his particular orientation is evident in the way the exhibition is organized. Rather than being allocated a supporting role to other artists’ projects or treated as the marginal output of a non-professional filmmaker, Beckett’s pieces are assigned their proper status as works of art. The catalog which Douglas produced for the exhibition is also significant – containing production stills, photographs of Beckett working on set, and pages from his notebooks illustrating his attempts to resolve specific technical issues as they arose during shooting –

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it provides future scholars with a radically revised image of Beckett, one in which his technical skill and proficiency as an artist working with visual media are clearly demonstrated. It is also important to note when discussing Beckett’s moving-image works that his projects in film and television media parallel, chronologically, technically and thematically, the earliest video- and film-based works being produced by contemporary artists such as Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman in the mid to late 1960s. Paik began using video in 1963, for example, Beckett made Eh Joe in 1966, and Nauman created Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) in 1968. One does not often think of Beckett as a contemporary of Nauman and Paik, and even less as a peer who was also making pioneering moving-image works investigating the aesthetic possibilities and political implications of this new medium. However, Beckett’s preoccupations during this period, such as the use of handheld technologies as extensions of the human body (the camera in Film is referred to as “E” or “Eye”), the aggressive expansion of surveillance technologies (O in Film, Joe in Eh Joe and W1, W2 and M in Comédie, are all subjected to ongoing and invasive surveillance), and the search for alternative forms of production and display in contemporary art (instead of being shown in traditional gallery spaces, Beckett’s moving-image works were broadcast on British and German television and screened at international film festivals), directly mirror the interests of his artistic contemporaries.9 As the dates clearly indicate, Beckett was, along with Nauman and Paik, at the forefront of the technological and aesthetic advances related to video art. Beckett, like these other artists, continued experimenting with these technologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Beckett’s final movingimage work, Was Wo was made in 1986 at SWR Sü dwestrundrunk in Germany, only three years before his death in 1989, and just two years before Stan Douglas’s Samuel Beckett: Teleplays in Vancouver, which included the work in the exhibition. As mentioned earlier, Beckett’s dialogue with contemporary art manifests itself in diverse and multiple forms and this is perhaps one of the reasons why the magnitude of his influence on current art practices is not always recognized. This essay will now turn to Jenny Holzer, an American conceptual artist whose work is deeply indebted to Beckett. Holzer is part of a group of conceptual artists emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were interested in the use of text, language, and the public forum, as materials for contemporary art. The pioneering British collective Art and Language and American artists Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, could

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also be included in this group and notably both Art and Language and Kosuth explicitly acknowledge an ongoing dialogue with Beckett within their practice. Holzer’s project revolves around the graphic presentation of phrases and text through a variety of media platforms. Drawing on traditions of architecture, design, theater, and literature, her work is stark, minimalist, and often unsettling in its delivery. Posters, T-shirts, LED lights large-scale outdoor projections, stone benches, and more recently paintings, have all been sites of inscription for the artist. Originally intent on becoming a writer, Holzer gave up this ambition when she realized that she was no longer interested in the classical narrative structures of literature. “I couldn’t quite figure out how to be contemporary and use a narrative,” she observed to Seth Cohen in a 1990 interview, “I couldn’t see my way. I couldn’t write anything longer than a paragraph without completely falling apart.”10 The writing Holzer has done since serves primarily as source material for her visual works. “Then two things happen,” she explained to Cohen, “first it’s put in some kind of physical form, even if it’s as slight as on a piece of paper or a poster; and second it’s put in some kind of public space, outside or on television or something.”11 More recently Holzer’s works have included text garnered from found sources. Redacted war documents have been utilized, but more often the artist draws from texts produced by the authors she admires – writers whose concise, clear, visual style suits appropriation into the graphic forms of media display Holzer employs within her works. The artist is keen to emphasize that she considers the works she produces with these writers’ texts as collaborative artworks: “I’ve spent a fair amount of time alone on my work,” she explained to the documentary art series Art: 21 in 2008, “and so it’s with real joy that I go to other people to make something larger than I could have solo.”12 Holzer has worked with Beckett’s texts on several different occasions and in a variety of forms. For example, in 1993 she created a virtual world entitled World I as part of the group exhibition Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium at Guggenheim, New York which was inspired by Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1971) and in 1998 she selected Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) for the Artist’s Choice section of her Phaidon Contemporary Artists monograph. Holzer’s most sustained engagement with the work of Beckett undoubtedly comes, however, in the form of a group of large-scale outdoor projections she was invited to create for the cities of London and Dublin in 2006 as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival. In Dublin Holzer projected The Lost Ones (1971),

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Company (1979), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), and a number of other late Beckett texts onto important historical landmark buildings such as Dublin Castle, Gate Theatre, Trinity College, and The General Post Office. In London Holzer’s selection of Beckett’s writings were interspersed with texts from other authors including Wislawa Szymborska and Adam Zagajewski. The texts were projected onto similarly prominent architectural sites such as City Hall, St. Paul’s, Senate House, Barbican Sculpture Court, and Somerset House. Holzer’s fascination with Beckett emerges predominantly from her encounter with his late prose, and when I interviewed her in 2010 she explained to me that she sees images when she reads her favorite pieces, such as Lessness (1969) and Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), but more importantly she noted, she experiences a very particular quality of light.13 The artist also described her relationship to reading and to Beckett more specifically in her earlier conversation with Cohen: “I’m always surprised that people think there is a conflict between the visual and the verbal. I even find reading a kind of visual activity. It is literally,” she stated, “I’ve always seen reading and I always imagine things or visualize them in my mind as I read. I find a lot of writing imagistic.”14 So what is it about these particular late texts by Beckett that drives Holzer to repeatedly return to them within her works? As discussed earlier, Holzer favors a succinct, highly visual style of non-narrative prose – the kind of minimalist writing that communicates well when edited down, projected, and/or displayed in the compact textual sequences that Holzer programs into her LED sculptures. In Holzer’s collaborations with Beckett, however, there appears to be more at stake than just the appealing malleability of the older artist’s writing. Passages such as, “Palest blue against the pale sky. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light,”15 which was projected on to Trinity College, Dublin as part of the Beckett Centenary series point towards Holzer’s sensitivity to Beckett’s skillful calibration of light in his works. Here we have Beckett’s words describing and evoking light, in this instance literally consisting of light and projected onto his alma mater. Holzer not only makes Beckett’s text the subject of her artwork, it is also its primary material. When asked how much she lets herself be influenced by the writers that she reads such as Beckett, Holzer responded: “It’s a pleasure to be controlled by Beckett. If you’re going to surrender to someone or be controlled by anyone at least it’s someone with a brain.”16

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Whereas Holzer’s works are concentrated on the possibilities of text and the act of reading as materials for contemporary art, the installations of Miroslaw Balka are engaged in an exploration of the sentient human body and the viewer’s role in completing the artwork’s meaning. The question of how experience might be understood as an artistic medium emerged in contemporary art in the late 1960s, when artists such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt began producing room-sized installation works that deliberately disrupted what scholars Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried defined as the limits of modernist sculpture. Robert Morris explained the critical shift in his perspective in 1967 in the following terms: “What is to be had from the work is no longer located strictly within it” and the experience of minimalist installation is derived from the position of the objects within a total situation, one that necessarily includes the beholder.17 The viewer’s experience is undeniably the focus of Balka’s work, and the architectural and quotidian materials which he employs such as salt, soap, ash, wood, stone, and steel are designed to illicit sensation, trigger memories and intensify the subject’s awareness of their body in the space of the artwork. Soap, as Balka observed in a 2016 interview, is both something that is used on our bodies when we are born and also when we die. Moreover, it is a substance that most people have an intimate daily connection with throughout the course of their lives.18 References to the history of Poland, and the destruction of its Jewish community during the Holocaust also figure prominently in Balka’s work, and the artist often uses the measurements of his own body to demonstrate the universal vulnerability and limitations of the human form. In addition to referencing his own body, or more often its absence, within the works, Balka also plays with the viewer’s faculties – sometimes by heightening a sense of smell or at other times by cutting off recourse to a specific function entirely, such as sight. To further concentrate the viewer’s attention on the work’s dimensions and its materials, Balka also employs what he refers to as “nonliterary” or “non-metaphorical” titles. The artist’s most iconic work is entitled Soap Corridor (1993), for example. In this work the walls of a long narrow white corridor, measuring approximately the artist’s height and width of his arm span (190 cm), are coated with a translucent layer of pungent-smelling low-cost soap called White Deer, enormously popular in the 1960s Poland of the artist’s childhood. “The first thing you encounter is the very strong smell of the soap,” Balka explained, “not the visual dimension of the work, as it’s just a slight yellow coating on the wall.”19 Similarly, 196 x 230 x 141 (2007) is a work composed of a dark vertical hollow steel

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coffin-like structure flanked by two imposing upright steel panels at its opening. Inside the bare metal chamber a singular electric light bulb hangs from a cord and is triggered if the viewer is brave enough to enter. The entire structure stands, as the work’s title, 196 x 230 x 141 suggests, at approximately the artist’s height of 190 cm. In a 2009 conversation with art critic and historian Paulo Herkenhoff at Tate Modern, Balka identified Beckett’s radical foregrounding of embodied experience as the principal reason for his ongoing preoccupation with the older artist’s work: “Beckett is very much about experience. As I said before, about simple experience, experience of life, without too much colour, just it’s very concentrated. The basic functions you know? Sitting, standing, walking, talking, listening to the silence. So, every gesture has its own weight. And for me also the gesture in art has its own weight.”20 As previously discussed, Beckett’s move from text-based works to staging Godot, marked a significant transition in the manner in which he approached the making of his works. No longer restricted to the images and experiences he could engender using text and typeface on paper, Beckett progressed to exploiting what Balka calls (referring to all five human senses) the “five dimensions” of contemporary art.21 Beckett, like many artists who began to import theatrical tropes into their practice during the late 1950s and early 1960s, realized the significance of the structural and experiential dynamics associated with the performance medium. Just as minimalist painters and sculptors drew the viewer’s attention to the signifying power of the pedestal, the canvas, and the gallery, Beckett highlighted what it means to place a group of figures on a stage, dim the lights, and allow an audience to observe them. He also, like early installation and performance artists, was interested in the durational possibilities of the theater. Playing with notions of temporality and endurance, Beckett allowed his stages to remain empty for extended periods of time and deliberately silenced his actors. The experience of such unconventional theater proved unnerving for its audience, but it increased their awareness of the physical and affective register of theater and also of the presence of other spectators in the space. Beckett made theater into an act of collective witnessing, the audience forced to confront, as he put it: “this last extremity of human meat – or bones [. . .] thinking and stumbling and sweating under our noses.”22 Despite the traces of humanity that cling to Beckett’s figures, he reduced his actors to the same status as the other material components that made up his works. Manipulating performers’ voices and bodies with the formal objectivity he applied to the other artistic

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elements at his disposal, such as sound, light, costume, environment, and set-design, Beckett continually asked his actors for “less colour” and told them explicitly not to “act.”23 Significantly, Beckett also took full directorial control of his projects in the 1960s in order to realize his artistic goals more effectively. His relationship to traditional theater grew even more distant as he progressed with his creative and directorial ambitions. When asked by Colin Duckworth in 1965, “What do you think the theatre is for?” Beckett responded: “I don’t know. I am not interested in the theatre,” and “I simply produce an object. What people think of it is not my concern.”24 The effects of Beckett’s reorganization of theater conventions and the affinity of the late stage works with installation art practice can best be seen through a closer examination of Breath (1969). In 1969 Beckett created a work for stage that could perhaps be considered his most radical. Breath, a 25 second piece, includes only the pre-recorded sound of an inhalation and exhalation, book-ended by two identical birth cries. The entire sequence or “action” of the work is encapsulated in six brief sentences, demonstrating what is possibly the most striking example of Beckett’s incomparable precision. The stage, Beckett specified, is to be “littered with miscellaneous rubbish,” that should include “no verticals” and be arranged “scattered and lying.”25 The cries, each one an “instant of recorded vagitus,”26 must be identical, and switched on and off in strict synchronicity with light and breath. Describing exactly how the light and sound should function in unison, Beckett’s text advises potential producers of the work: “If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.”27 In Breath, Beckett exploits brilliantly the inherent experiential potential of the traditional theatrical space, treating it not as a neutral backdrop but as an environment laden with signification. Built into this location are a stage, a curtain, a lighting rig, a sound system, and tiered rows of seating to accommodate an audience. The space of the theater is also conventionally blacked-out, and the immensity of its darkness separates it entirely from the outside world. Like contemporary installation artists who respond to the preexisting characteristics of individual sites (Gregor Schneider – Victorian row house, Mike Nelson – minicab office, Miroslaw Balka – Turbine Hall), Beckett generates meaning through the symbolic association of the material and structural properties of the theater. Beckett re-configures each of these elements (actor, stage, light, sound) and, thwarting viewer expectations, he interrupts our trained and habitual responses to the theatrical event. By far the most striking aspect of Breath is the fact that Beckett has removed the central component of any theatrical event, the actor, from the stage. Instead of the usual charismatic figure that immediately enchants the audience with their captivating gestures and carefully rehearsed dialogue, the viewer is presented

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with bare boards, a single spotlight and some strewn rubbish. Raising the theater’s heavy curtain, Beckett holds the viewer’s attention for a full five seconds of silence before the soundtrack commences. This moment of suspense and anticipation, as we wait for a cast to appear, draws our awareness not only to the enigmatic chasm of the empty stage, but also to the fundamental features of the environment that surrounds us. In allowing darkness to fill the stage, Beckett cleverly collapses the space between the subject and object. Both stage and audience are enclosed in a single environment with no discernible borders. With its complete absence of actors, the locus of performance shifts in Breath from the stage to the viewers and the embodied form of experience activated by the wordless play. As is true of installation art, everything about Breath is designed with the viewer’s experience in mind. Beckett is keenly aware that the process of entering the theater, finding a seat, acquiring a program, and all the other rituals associated with attending a theatrical performance, will take far longer than the 25–second duration he has allotted to his piece. In this way not only does the ceremonial behavior of the theatrical audience become part of the meaning of Beckett’s work, but the sounds of the spectators’ shuffling feet, seats being lowered, and in some cases, exasperated sighs, also enter directly into Breath’s aural composition. While exercising total control over the 25 seconds of stage time that constitutes Breath, Beckett triggers an audience experience without pre-determination. There simply was no precedent for Beckett’s radical stage experiment and thus no way of predicting its reception or the reactionary processes it would initiate. Although unfamiliar terrain for theater, this relationship between environmental control and experiential openness is, as we have seen, a foundational characteristic of installation art. In an interview with Tate Media given by Balka just prior to the opening of his Beckett-inspired Turbine Hall commission, the artist slowly and deliberately enunciated each individual word of his work’s short title, How It Is. Punctuating the adverb, pronoun and verb with exaggerated and expectant pauses, the artist simultaneously drew a closed square with his hands. Balka’s performative and totalizing gesture appeared designed to convey to the viewer that nothing is required, beyond the experience of the work itself, to understand his sculpture. “The inspiration came from Samuel Beckett,” he stated. “The story of Pim who is crawling in the mud. The mud is a kind of purgatory. In my sculpture darkness will hold the function of purgatory. People can walk in it. Slowly step-by-step you’ll start to touch darkness.”28 Darkness also features prominently in Beckett’s experimental novel from 1964. Including its translation from French to English, Beckett worked on the text for a period of approximately five years

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and according to scholar Ruby Cohn, the project was “insuperably difficult” to complete.29 The six notebooks that contain Beckett’s drafts for the work are among his most densely populated with drawings, diagrams, and calculations and clearly demonstrate how expressly visual his approach to the conceptualization and realization of his work had become by the 1960s. In a 1960 letter to Donald McWhinnie, Beckett described How It Is in the following uncomplicated, but strikingly imagistic terms: “A ‘man’ lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him.”30 The work, Beckett explained, is in three parts: “the first a solitary journey in the dark and mud terminating with discovery of a similar creature known as Pim, the second life with Pim motionless in the dark terminating with the departure of Pim, the third solitude and motionless in the dark and mud.”31 During the period in which Beckett was developing his experiential novel, he was also creating a number of immersive sound, moving image, and theater projects such as, Embers (1959), Words and Music (1962), Film (1965) and Comédie (1966), which all similarly aimed to activate the audience’s senses in unexpected ways. Notions of perception, hallucination, interior monologue, repetitive storytelling, darkness, and the sentient body are all played out in these works. It is precisely these elements of sensory manipulation or even deprivation that drew Balka to Beckett in a work like How It Is (2009). Rather than a simple literary reference, Beckett’s presence in Balka’s installation forms part of an ongoing dialogue between the younger and older artist about the nature of the experiential. As has been demonstrated, the field of contemporary art has long embraced Beckett as one of its own, and artists since the 1960s have recognized in Beckett’s project a set of comparative aesthetic concerns and practices. This essay claims that the importance of Beckett’s innovations in sound, moving image, and installation, often dismissed as marginalia by conventional textual scholarship, can only be understood retrospectively through the critical lens offered by contemporary art. As we continue to witness the rapid proliferation of artworks exhibitions and performances inspired by Beckett we might consider what this visual and aural body of interpretation has to offer in terms of better understanding his late experiments in text, sound, moving image, and theater. Contemporary art’s engagement with Beckett is as varied as it is frequent and this essay has focused on but two artists whose work encapsulates a set of unique themes that frequently reoccur in response to Beckett – the materiality of text and its potential as a medium for contemporary art and the experiential artwork. Like so many artists,

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Jenny Holzer and Miroslaw Balka’s relationship to Beckett is both sustained and intimate. It is a kinship and intuitive bond expressed by Balka in the following way: “I didn’t have to read too much Beckett to get close to Beckett, because I think he’s the kind of brother in the field of art. Honestly, I didn’t spend time analyzing Beckett. I just read him and I felt a very emotional relation with him, but as a brother, you know? Somebody who has similar thoughts.”32 Balka’s statement brilliantly captures the feelings and attitude of the many artists I have interviewed throughout the course of my research. And the relationship that these artists hold to Beckett’s work is one that continues to deepen and expand with each new artwork, exhibition, and performance which pays homage to Beckett’s pioneering multi-media artistic practice.

Notes 1. Originally published in French in 1961 as Comment c’est, Beckett’s English translation, How It Is was published by Grove Press, New York in 1964. 2. See my forthcoming Samuel Beckett: Contemporary Artist, London: Bloomsbury, 2019 for a more expansive discussion of this subject. 3. Samuel Beckett. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, eds. Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson, New York: Grove Press, 1993, xiv. 4. Samuel Beckett in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, eds., Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, London: John Calder, 1988, 9. 5. John Morris in Martin Esslin, “Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting,” in Martin Esslin ed., Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media, New York: Grove Press, 1982, 127. 6. Samuel Beckett in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 2004, 385. 7. Samuel Beckett, Works for Radio: The Original Broadcasts, London: British Library Publishing Division, 2006. 8. Stan Douglas in Stan Douglas, ed., Samuel Beckett: Teleplays. Exhibition catalog, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988, 9. 9. Please see my forthcoming Samuel Beckett: Contemporary Artist, London: Bloomsbury, 2019. For a detailed analysis of contemporary art’s campaign for a means of production and display that was external to the traditional gallery system. Beckett’s use of the commercial television studio and broadcast technologies directly parallels the activities of early video artists such as David Hall and Peter Campus, who were also utilizing these resources to create and transmit their works. 10. Jenny Holzer and Seth Cohen, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 15, 1990, 151–152.

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11. Ibid., 152. 12. Jenny Holzer, “Collaboration,” Art: 21 2007, YouTube video, 1:21, published by Art: 21, October 16, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeVkHU4tfd8 13. Jenny Holzer, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” interview by Judith Wilkinson, unpublished, DHC/ART, Montreal, June 29, 2010. 14. Holzer, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” 155. 15. Samuel Beckett, Company. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels, New York: Grove Press, 1995, 17. 16. Holzer, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” 150. 17. Robert Morris in Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968, 125. 18. Miroslaw Balka, “How It Is, Miroslaw Balka, Anja Rubik,” interview by Anja Rubik, June 6, 2016, Soho House, Istanbul. Istanbul International Arts and Culture Festival, Istanbul, Turkey, 2016. YouTube video, 1:16:52, published June 10, 2016 by Istanbul ’74, www.youtube.com/watch? v=zMMzEfAn2tU 19. Ibid. 20. Miroslaw Balka, “Miroslaw Balka in Conversation,” interview by Paulo Herkenhoff, Tate video, 1:36:12, published October 20, 2009 by Tate, www .tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/miroslaw-balka-conversation 21. Balka, “How It Is, Miroslaw Balka, Anja Rubik,” 2016. 22. Samuel Beckett in Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, Åbo: Åbo Akademie, 1976, Title Page. 23. Billie Whitelaw, Who He? An Autobiography, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995, 120. 24. Samuel Beckett in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, New York: Touchstone, 1993, 577. 25. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber, 2006, 371. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Miroslaw Balka, The Unilever Series: Miroslaw Balka. Video, 19:54, published November 4, 2009 by Tate, www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/v ideo/unilever-series-miroslaw-balka 29. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, 254. 30. Samuel Beckett in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 2004, 413. 31. Ibid. 32. Balka, “Miroslaw Balka in Conversation,” 2009.

chapter 8

Beckett, Radio, and the Voice Llewellyn Brown

Beckett’s voices are heard diversely: described as elements of characters’ existence in Molloy, they structure the narration of How It Is, and acquire an increased degree of reality in the author’s encounter with technology. The radio was of crucial importance in this respect during the period extending from 1956 (All That Fall) to around 1963 (Esquisse radiophonique). It is recognized that the elaboration Beckett undertook influenced other works written at this time – such as How It Is and Krapp’s Last Tape – as well as those that came later.1 The radio voice is striking in its evacuation of any visual reference, since any verbal images that it engenders are fundamentally evanescent. At the same time, they embody a positive insistence, as in the feeling of bodily intimacy suggested by Beckett’s evocation of the origin of his first radio play, All That Fall: “Never thought about Radio play technique but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something.”2 What Beckett evokes here, before technical considerations, is that the experience of voices is distinct from that of articulated language. What he reveals as the starting point of his radio creation involves both the pain of existence as experienced in bodily effort, and the exclusion of the comfort provided by visible reality, which allows for situating perceptible goals and itineraries. This context includes the mortifying feeling caused by darkness as the “dead” of night. Finally, as regular outbursts of breath, the “puffing and panting” evoked in the quote evidence a binary scansion – sound and silence – that highlights the ambient silence perceptible in the intervals. Beckett’s radio drama focuses on producing realities that are specific to the voice in a much wider sense than the domain of vocality and audibility, and are far removed from the aim to confine this dimension within a realistic context. We could state that Beckett’s radio plays create a rhythm which conveys the voice as enunciation: scansion, links, and 134

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ruptures. What insists however, through these aspects that belong to the realm of the perceptible, is the voice as the ultimate silence that neither creator nor auditor can recover: one that is not simply materialized in syntactic gaps, but is situated at the heart of language itself. As a technological device, the radio set embodies a radical barrier that heightens the reality of this silence. The present study aims to give its full importance to the specific qualities of the voice, which appears as both an incessant presence lying beyond the visible and, paradoxically, as productive of vivid images; it will also be seen as being fundamentally anchored in solitude and silence. The following developments lean on some crucial elaborations offered by the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan, which define the voice as being not simply linked to oral expression and audibility, but as an object inextricably bound up in language and speech.

Language: Splitting and the Silent Voice Working from the definition of humans as speaking beings, Jacques Lacan postulates that we are subject to an all-invading imperative voice that is not broken up by syntax, and that cannot be ascribed to an identifiable source. This is illustrated by the impossibility of closing one’s ears, contrary to one’s eyes. By contrast, to speak is to create a breach in this voice, allowing subjectivity to manifest itself, albeit by seemingly banal repetition: “I say it as I hear it.”3 Such expression, however, never ceases to engender a “remainder” that is the cause of further saying. What comes to light thus is less a “subject” than a “speaking being” (parlêtre) who “ex-sists,” in a Heideggerian term put to use by Lacan: an inaccessible part – absolute zero4 and ultimate silence – that will never be included within words. Were Beckett’s radio plays to accentuate the reproduction of coherent, recognizable reality, they would smother this dimension. But insofar as they do not duplicate the familiar mechanisms of stage plays – they do not simply produce audible drama – they put to work the specific quality of the voice as ultimately belonging to silence. Indeed, listening to radio means being receptive to this dimension that inhabits utterances: to the way they resound against this silence. The breaks arising between phrases cause the auditor to perceive silence as being what drives the speaker to formulate his audible utterances, and the silence that ensues as the only response forthcoming, particularly in a play such as Embers, that makes extensive use of monologue. Rather than being able to restore continuity by leaning on the register of meaning, and mobilizing his own personal and internal reading

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voice, the auditor is surprised by a voice that is foreign to him, and whose rhythm escapes the fluidity afforded by purely intellectual comprehension. Moreover, in their use of technology, these radio plays present a marked contrast with present-day electronic media, which, conveying limitless quantities of information and invading every moment of our lives, propagate invasive and seemingly inescapable voices. Beckett introduces a breach in universal chattering, since his use of technology is at variance with this logic of total connectedness, leading us to examine more closely the nature of this artificial medium.

Radio as Technology Technology may seem to be a strange choice on the part of a creator, insofar as science instigates an abstracting process, as evidenced in Descartes’s cogito, which is founded by the exclusion of both subjective and sensible reality, with an aim to ground thinking in pure logic. Lacan confirms this, asserting that “science is an ideology of the suppression of the subject,”5 since it subordinates the latter to the category of the universal. Technology thus participates in a double movement: on the one hand, the unlimited extension of the universal produces a proliferation of the voice as detached from embodied, personal, sources. On the other hand, unfathomable subjectivity is brought to the fore in so far as each one finds himself alone, faced with the question of the voice’s enigmatic impact on him. Working with the medium of radio therefore involves finding a means to counter the overwhelming dehumanising tendency of technology: producing a breach capable of giving form to subjective singularity. Indeed while Beckett felt ill at ease with the “mechanistic age,”6 he discerned a positive effect in “the deanthropomorphizations of the artist,” which allow the individual to feel himself “more & more hermetic & alone.” The listener experiences this solitude through the empêchement7 at the heart of Beckett’s creation: for instance, in Rough for Radio I, the woman cannot “go and see”8 the voices and, when they are dying, the man is powerless to intervene. Such a distinction between seeing and hearing is already evident on a generic level, since the spectator of Beckett’s plays can imagine he commands the visible stage set; the auditor, however, is deprived of any such stability, as the words come, then fade away. In the example from Rough for Radio I, Beckett accentuates the subject’s radical separation from any graspable object: as she is unable to “see” the voices, the woman cannot find reassurance by embracing them visually; as for the

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man, he immediately experiences the impossibility of obtaining a hold on the voices, which never cease to escape him since they immediately fall into silence. As a technological device, radio intensifies the basic exteriority of language, revealing what is usually hidden to “the normal subject” who, as Lacan states, “places himself in the position to not take seriously the larger part of his internal discourse[,]”9 that is to say, his own voices. In the same way as the camera lens peels off the husk of familiar reality, radio reveals phantoms whose existence was unimagined, and whose silence remains the medium of their continued presence. What is brought to light is an underlying reality that belongs to the subject’s intimate existence: “fundamental sounds”10 that are not supported by rational justification. The radio gives effective existence to these voices as embodying incessant language that cannot be objectified by being set at a distance, and that arise outside of any context that might be provided by the visual register. These voices are not invasive since they are born of silence and give substance to the latter, thus inspiring intense listening.

Breaking Down of Visibility By mobilising the voice, radio excludes the visible: “speaking is not seeing,” Maurice Blanchot underscores.11 Speaking and hearing belong to darkness, where one advances empirically, unaware of what may come next. As Marjorie Perloff states, “the listener is challenged to take [the sounds] in, one by one, and construct their relationships.”12 Indeed, the voice as such embodies the silence of the lost object. While seeing comforts the illusion that one can approach the object that is presented, the voice fades away into silence, making one strain to catch the slightest trace of sound that may subsist. Thus, rejecting the idea of staging All That Fall, Beckett stated that “to ‘act’ it is to kill it,” since its quality “depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.”13 However, seeing cannot be totally dissociated from saying, leading us to consider the visibility produced by the Beckettian voice. Of Footfalls, Beckett surprisingly stated: “The pacing is the essence of the matter. [. . .] The text: what pharmacists call excipient.”14 Paradoxically, this “excipient” occupies the larger part of these radio plays, whose content can be associated with audible sound, while the voice comes to the fore at the point where verbal intelligibility and empirical sound break down. Indeed, Erik Porge explains that sonorising is a way of giving consistency to the voice:15 it offers “a substitute or a reparation where the cause of desire is unspeakable.”16

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Nonetheless, the Beckettian “excipient” remains essential, and requires to be read in the dynamic relationship it constructs with its contrary. All That Fall, Beckett’s first radio play, offers an excellent example of the collapsing of the referential function. As Chris Ackerley has shown, when creating for a new medium, Beckett “recycled” elements from earlier works.17 Thus, All That Fall adopts the “quest” structure of novels such as Molloy: Maddy Rooney, in a very Irish setting, heads for the railway station at “Boghill,” then accompanies her blind husband Dan back home. This “realistic” dimension allows the auditor to situate the action in “traversable space,”18 and creates the impression that the characters are representative of a microcosmic society. The use of double enunciation reinforces this illusion, as in Mr Tyler’s explanation, informing us that he is mounted on a bicycle: “Pardon me if I do not doff my cap, I’d fall off.”19 However, our conviction that “seeing is believing” blinds us to the fact that the signified involved is no more than “the bastard progeny”20 of the signifier and, thus of the voice. Beckett reveals this contrived nature of visibility by caricaturing it. Winnie’s “Another heavenly day”21 is echoed in the catch-phrase: “Nice day for the races”22 and the sound effects – suggested by Donald McWhinnie23 – are manifestly artificial. Thus we are not listening to the sounds of reality, but to those of the radio voice. This is also particularly clear when the play is invaded by a plethora of machines, in the cacophony when the “up” and the “down” mail trains pass one another: “Immediately exaggerated station sounds. Falling signals. Bells. Whistles. Crescendo of train [. . .]”24.Such a profusion of metallic noises is both a climax of reality and its destruction, echoing Mrs Rooney’s desire to witness a collision25 or “to be in atoms.”26 Indeed, the disintegration of reality is specifically centerd on Mrs Rooney, who desires to achieve a disembodied and immobile state outside of empirical reality. Critics have already noted that what is not heard on the radio has no existence for the auditor, and such is periodically the status of Mrs Rooney: “I do not exist. The fact is well known.”27 Let us add that what is not perceived nonetheless ex-sists – extracted from the whole – as the silence at the heart of the voice. Mrs Rooney exemplifies the spectral status of radio characters, whom we hear, but who provide no tangible evidence of their existence, since we usually consider that only visible reality is sufficient to evidence the stability of being. Indeed, the woman in the house – listening to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden – and Miss Fitt – who is “not really there at all28” – converge in their attempt to efface themselves and ultimately reach silence.

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Marked by its linear movement, All That Fall works to undercut the referential function. Written shortly after this play, Embers pushes this process much further, since it combines several levels. There is no longer any suggestion of a society, only the relationship of Henry to his past: the reality evoked is thus immediately intimate. The levels involved can be outlined as follows. Henry opens, speaking to his father, who does not reply: he may or may not be present. His wife Ada comes and speaks to him, but makes no bodily sound; and while Henry (like the auditor) hears episodes involving their daughter Addie, Ada perceives neither them, nor the hooves he conjures up.29 Thus, one level of reality melts into another: the voice – fundamentally impenetrable silence – places them all on the same plane, independently of any visible or topographical localization. The voice impresses itself directly onto us, and the various dimensions are all endowed with the same degree of reality both for the auditor and for Henry.

Invisibility and the Continuum Beyond the constant undercutting of visual representations, All That Fall reveals duration as a voice bordering on silence. While the fictional dimension acquires density through the presence of characters, dialogues, and actions, Beckett gives substance to the intervals, which appear as a scansion marking the implacable passage of time: duration inhabited by a bodily suffering that cannot be put into words. Indeed, the piece as a whole is punctuated by the insistent sound of Mrs Rooney’s painfully “dragging feet”; 30 the latter also form the conclusion, following the revelation of the death of the child under the train. Sounds evoking nature, alternating with dragging feet, appear as a fundamental rhythm. As such, they have a human function, marking the characters’ constant and determined effort to imprint a limit on the invasive voice that threatens them with mortification.31 As such, they are inscribed in the substance of an imperturbable movement that “is taking its course,”32 pointed to by Mrs Rooney’s ironic remark: “Are you going in my direction?/I am, Mr Slocum, we all are.”33 The incessant voice echoes the silence present in the unspoken cause of the child’s death, which leaves Maddy Rooney – and the auditor – speechless. Such background sound acquires primary importance in Embers, where the constant presence of the sea is “still faint, audible throughout.”34 Clas Zilliacus considers that the sea has “the dignity of dramatis persona,”35 as it seeps through the over two hundred pauses. Thus the voice, no longer

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dissimulated within discrete and identifiable entities by means of words and nameable sounds, is revealed to be in a continuous flux.36 Far from creating a breach, speech is constantly impelled by it: words and the incessant voice form the same Möbian band. Thus the very same substance, through an aquatic metaphor, describes Henry’s efforts “to drown it.”37 Henry’s flight to the stability of common “traversable space” – Switzerland38 – cannot assuage the torment, since the voice permeates his entire existence: his father condemned him as a “washout”39 – upon his refusal to leap into the water – before committing suicide by drowning himself. Behind the father’s scorn for his son lies his inability to inscribe his own existence within symbolic transmission. Since his body was never found, his disappearance is impossible to assume for Henry, whence his reappearance as a totally mute phantom: “My father, back from the dead, to be with me. [Pause.] As if he hadn’t died.”40 If the Bolton story is indeed a fictional transposition of his father’s past, we can see that his own supplications received no answer. It is therefore no wonder that Henry can never bring his stories to a conclusion: “everything always went on for ever.”41 His desperate fight to silence the uncontrollable “sucking” drives him to seek sounds that will resonate, and create an effective silence: “Thuds, I want thuds! Like this! [He fumbles in the shingle, catches up two big stones and starts dashing them together.] Stone!”42 This stone appears comparable to Lacan’s analysis of the ram’s horn (shofar) that, sounded on Yom Kippur, serves to remind the God who demands human sacrifices that he is dead.43 We can compare it to Croak’s club, which produces an inaugural silence – permitting words and music to unfold – and also imposes a final punctuation.44 But more precisely, it testifies to the wish to abolish all representations, in an effort to find some rock-solid foundation to existence. Henry thus calls on a prehistoric past capable of standing in for his father: “A ten-ton mammoth back from the dead, shoe it with steel and have it stamp the world down!”45 Faced with an insuperable breach in his existence, Henry seems to seek a response to the terribly mortifying condemnation expressed by his father.46 While the voice appears here as incessant slipping, sucking, Beckett’s play produces silence by means of what Gilles Deleuze terms “exhaustion.”47 If, according to Ada, Henry has “worn out” his father, and continues to wear out his mute ghost, it is because of the symbolic debt that he feels incapable of assuming, as a result of his father’s own refusal. In a structural echo to the silence following the announcement of the child’s death in All That Fall, we find an absence of words between

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Holloway and Bolton. The former will not, or cannot, give in to Bolton’s pleas, which seem to concern more than the administration of a temporary calmative. Indeed, no one can respond to Henry’s final supplications, and the play concludes with the ultimate demise of words: “Plumber at nine? [Pause.] Ah yes, the waste. [Pause.] Words.”48 The absence of sound and the presence of “nothing,”49 both point to the state of exhaustion that brings the play to the verge of inexhaustible silence as its ultimate product.

Enunciative Reality Thus the realities described in All That Fall prove to be determined by their function as voice, not by the aim to produce an effect of verisimilitude. The more distinctly meta-poetical nature of the other plays leads us to consider the way the invisible voices are inscribed and take on substance for a speaking being. The radio voices require therefore to be dissociated from their metaphorical and restrictive location within the characters’ “head,” and considered as being bound up in the concrete dimension of enunciation. Here, “the essence of the matter” allows us to apprehend the construction of these pieces as somewhat distinct from their “excipient” content. One virtue of technology is that the autonomous existence of the voices cannot be denied, insofar as the auditor perceives their very real presence in the radio set. It is true that, on the level of the fable, they are situated in the characters’ “head”: such is also the case for the action of All That Fall, as Jonathan Kalb notes.50 However, such a diagnosis remains misleading, as shown in Ada’s reductive view of Henry’s voices: “There’s something wrong with your brain.”51 Enthusiasts of neurosciences claim as much; however, this position reduces existence to technicalities destined to be treated by science, which, by definition, ignores our fundamental status as speaking beings. It says nothing of each subject’s inimitable response to the signifiers that structure his existence. Asserting that each speaking being is determined by language, Lacan specifies that the latter is coextensive with discourse outside.52 Thus the metaphor of the head in Beckett’s work points to the dimension in which one is totally given over to language, as the latter irremediably constitutes the body, beyond any composed, unified, and fixed image, such as the one captured in the mirror.53 The reductive, physical conception of the voices is called into question in overtly self-reflexive plays – Rough for Radio I and II, Cascando, Words and Music – in which the radio voice explicitly constitutes the theme, without calling on a full fictional structure. In Cascando, Opener54 sets out

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to demonstrate the reality of the voices, rejecting those – literary critics – who resort to an explicative discourse, and declare the voices to be a purely mental phenomenon: “They said, It’s his own, it’s his voice, it’s in his head. [. . .] No resemblance.”55 Indeed, the voice as such arises at the structural point where “resemblance” no longer operates. Cascando has the auditor confront himself with the reality of these voices that resound without, but which, at the same time, escape contemplation or inspection. Rather than being confined within, these voices compose a problematic chiastic register involving a continuum between within and without: like John Donne’s tolling bell, the voice resounds for each one, singularly. Thus any supposedly objective judgment fails to reach its mark: “They don’t see me, they don’t see what I do [. . .]”56 The auditor can only concur: there is no way to see Opener, nor to imagine one could understand him. In spite of the temptation to describe the characters, the scene, and the action, the deictics I and here prove to be equivocal. In fact, the voices cannot be located anywhere else other than in the here and now of speech: the suppression of visible space means that we are deprived of any objective coordinates. This is pointed out ironically in All That Fall, in terms that echo Clov’s insistence in Endgame, on the disappearance of objects: “Sit down on what?/On a bench, for example./There is no bench./Then on a bank. [. . .] There is no bank.”57 While the woman visitor in Rough for Radio I can “squat on this hassock”58 and points to “a Turkoman,”59 nothing further comes of these referential notations. On the other hand, she learns that it is impossible to “go and see” the voices, and her host refuses her request for “a little light.”60 The voices escape any attempt to depict them: “One cannot describe them, madam.”61 Indeed, here the auditor too is faced with the “unthinkable,”62 the “unimaginable” and the “inconceivable,” since he has no idea of what the two characters are speaking of, until the second part of the play, when the woman experiments with the radio set.63 The same basic principles apply to Rough for Radio II and Words and Music, where there is no real knowing what the scene resembles. Thus, with regards to the radio voices, the “within” is an exteriority, not an enveloping: the voices are a reality whose nature cannot be controlled, but whose unimaginable quality the radio serves to make present enunciatively. Radio enunciation also pertains to the way these plays are addressed to the auditor, which is a decisive factor for appreciating the material quality of the genre. This operates in a mode similar to that where the Beckettian narrator (I) often describes and contemplates himself from without (he), the latter appearing as a fundamentally unknowable object.64 In Cascando,

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for example, the auditor is invited to occupy a position analogous (but not identical) to that of the creator. The latter calls on his double, Opener, to represent him faced with a radio set. Ostensibly, this character has no creative powers but, in turn, he gives access to the twin entity Voice/Music, charged with embodying the dynamics of creation. Next, contrary to Music, Voice is subject to the dividing power of words: he is therefore in turn split into “soi” and “histoire,”65 creator and creature (Woburn). Finally, obeying a self-reflexive logic, the articulation of these agents is submitted, as a whole, to the auditor, who is invited to confirm, within himself, the author’s experience. The self-reflexive quality of radio creation was suggested in All That Fall, by the artificial nature of the sound effects. In Embers, Henry addresses the auditor (as well, perhaps, as his “un-present” father), explaining: “That sound you hear is the sea [. . .] we are sitting on the strand.”66 Embers appears as a transitional work, from this point of view. In Rough for Radio I, however, the position of the auditor is reflected in the female visitor to whom the man explains the functioning of the radio. Significantly, the radio set is treated not as a familiar household appliance67 but as an unusual object that requires explaining. This confirms its self-reflexive dimension within an allegory of the voice. In this spirit, the music manifests – literally and figuratively – the incessant quality of Beckettian voices, since it “goes on all the time.”68 As a result of the woman’s limited conception of the voices, the auditor encounters their reality. Clas Zilliacus points out that Opener is not a creator, since he is “incapable of influencing the content of these exposures,”69 adding that the “silences which he effects need not be mistaken for thought processes.” Thus radio is propitious to the suppression of any suggestion of psychology, which would only deprive the voice of its specific reality: Opener has a function – an artistic or subjective one – he does not embody any personal history. His fundamental position in the Beckettian construction allows the latter to circumscribe the voice as silence, as the ungraspable outside. Opener shows that he has nothing – no depths or interiority – to “express,”70 declaring: “There is nothing in my head.”71 In turn, the “hole”72 in Woburn’s head reflects that of Opener, as an echo of: “Profonds of mind. [. . .] Of mindlessness.”73 Listening to his “selves” as others, Opener has no privileged access to them: neither controlling nor understanding them, their existence reverberates within him. The radio voice resounds against the utter opacity that the creator has no access to, other than by constructing a creation that reveals it both as an ineffable cause, and as a product, circumscribed, but not caught or grasped.74

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The self-reflexive aspect of radio is more allusive in Rough for Radio II – composed earlier in 1959–1960 – since the operating mechanism takes the form of a fictional set-up. Two characters – Animator and Stenographer – give orders to Dick who, in turn, lashes Fox with a bull’s puzzle, in order to drive him to speech. The cruelty of this situation echoes somewhat that of Catastrophe (1982), as well as the one described in The Unnamable, where Worm, situated in the centre of a circular space, is manipulated by tormenting voices so he will be drawn to the wall, seized and forcefully integrated into “their language”75. Through the multiplicity of these eminently imaginary – and comical – motifs, the voice in Rough for Radio II is presented in its imperative dimension (as superego). Creation appears as bodily torment: the “[s]wish”76 of Dick’s bull’s pizzle showing how a persecuting voice drives the Beckettian narrator to “go on.” The conditions of constraint aim at mastering Fox’s moments of speech. Thus, between sessions, complete silence must reign: Fox is bound up with a “hood,”77 a “gag,” a “blind” and “plugs”; and his operators impose “rigid enforcement of the tube-feed, be it per buccam or be it on the other hand per rectum.”78 Fox is thus completely “neutralized,”79 reduced to a uterinelike state, where no saying or knowing is possible. Once he is liberated however, Fox is seized by an apparatus destined to extract coherent discourse from him. An anonymous committee gives instructions to ensure the exclusion of “animal cries,”80 and the strictly neutral noting of every single word uttered: “the meanest syllable has, or may have, its importance.”81 While Fox develops a narration somewhat similar to that of Voice in Cascando – progression through tunnels and among stones – Animator and Stenographer indulge in trivial banter. They seek to make his words fit into his previous accounts; and Animator associates his fragmented narrative with bookish mentions of Dante,82 and talks to Fox “[a]s to a backward pupil.”83 References to established discourses are intended to filter Fox’s words and make them acceptable. But according to the logical distribution of functions, the physical power exerted over Fox precludes any understanding of his words. In this configuration, an incommensurable breach thus appears, revealing a silence that remains forever unknown: the action represents the means by which the creator seeks to communicate this impenetrable part – to which he himself has no access – to the auditor.

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The Words–Music Duality While the voice as such arises at the point where words and meanings break down, music is often considered as conferring a palpable form on the silence situated beyond words. The two expressive forms thus entertain a conflicting relationship, as can be seen in two plays – Cascando and Words and Music – whose dramatic structure revolves around this opposition. A hierarchy appears where one register seems destined to prove superior to the other. Indeed, Beckett himself declared: “Music always wins,”84 but Chris Ackerley considers that in Words and Music, music can scarcely match the emotion of the poetry; and Catherine Laws emphasizes the importance of their union.85 However, by presenting them as two distinct characters or agents – and in accordance with his fundamental aesthetic choices – Beckett shows their relationship to be problematic, revealing the insuperable breach that gives concrete form to the voice. We can also note that one risk is the difficulty of perceiving Music as a specific “character,” since such a notion inevitably calls upon the dimension of visualization denied by radio. Indeed, for the auditor, music inevitably appears as accompaniment, serving to create a rhythm with words on the scale of the play as a whole. In these plays, words and music are shown to be irreconcilable, since the former remain anchored in the differential nature of the signifier. Words can be broken down, to reveal the voice but, as Worstward Ho, for example, shows in its intense work on equivocation, meaning persists in the very effort to eradicate it. On the other hand, while music necessarily excludes meaning, it remains one aesthetic response to the way language defines us as speaking beings. It also appears as invocation to the Other: “Music is a fiction that responds to a desire [. . .] to be heard beyond words.”86 In reference to language, it appears as a supplement, miraculously intervening at the point where words fail. Thus, Zilliacus also sees Music (in Words and Music) as leading his verbal counterpart beyond the latter’s limits.87 However, Christian Vereecken explains, more fundamentally, that music, belonging to the register of the voice, is capable of releasing the melancholic from his dangerous identification with nothingness.88 In Words and Music, Croak appears as a “sound editor” who directs the other two characters, and desires to be emotionally affected by the resulting creation.89 Proclaiming his preference for “the light of day,”90 Words rejects the confinement (of the radio) and darkness associated with Music: “How much longer cooped up here in the dark? [With loathing.] With you!”91 Words clutches onto the reassurance he finds in meaning and

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in his own “[o]rotund” voice: his plethoric discourses develop definitions of sloth, love and old age.92 His “audible groans and protestations” reveal his fear of Music: the voice that escapes his mastery.93 However, by finally trying to sing, Words gives in to Music. Indeed, singing is related to enunciation, which requires incorporating the alterity of language.94 For Lacan, enunciation is not the simple fact of giving audible form to one’s thoughts, since paradoxically our message comes not from ourselves but “from the Other.”95 That is to say that speaking involves a movement of anticipation whereby – beyond any specific topic spoken of, or empirical interlocutor – the subject is fundamentally formulating a demand,96 the basic meaning of which is “Who is I?”97 as if the Other had already addressed to him the very same question. However, such an interrogation remains unanswerable, because the Other – in spite of also being called the “treasury of the signifier”98 – does not know: the word that “may be it”99 simply does not exist in language. This means that the latter is other – also called “unconscious” – and that a subject is not “master in his own house.” Far from being able to attain some harmonious mode of existence, he finds himself subjected to a fundamental and inescapable disharmony, to the point that Lacan calls speech a “parasite.”100 Thus it is that in this play, Words has to abandon his declamatory eloquence – where he imagined he could master the meaning of his discourse and its effects on the auditor – and espouse lyricism, which touches on the dimension beyond words and meanings. This conversion succeeds to the point that once Croak has gone off, he implores Music to continue.101 In Cascando, written two years later, the division produced by language is heard in the double identity of “Voice,” who contains both speaker (soi102) relating his desperate efforts to bring his story to a conclusion, and the content of his story about Woburn (histoire). Such an irreconcilable split evidences the presence of the voice, and is heard as enunciation. The divided Voice debates with himself: “–story . . . if you could finish it . . .103” His desperation is also perceptible in his syntax broken by panting: as if his inadequate words were striking against an invisible obstacle (Lacan’s a object), necessitating a physical response in order to push forward. His constant speaking is caused by the incessant – but inaudible – voices with which he is struggling. Syntax offers a thread in the form of Voice’s pursuit of Woburn: “I’m there . . . nearly . . . Woburn . . . it’s him . . . it was him . . . I’ve got him . . . nearly–”104 “I’ve seen him . . . I’ve got him . . . ”105 Voice is desperately attempting to catch up with his invented character, in order to achieve a nomination that constantly eludes him. Here sight provides a certain illusion of mastery –

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offering an elusive goal that nourishes desire – while the voice embodied by Woburn never ceases to escape him. The story of the pursuit is less that of two characters than that of its very enunciation – articulating the agents I and he – and which composes the substance of the final part of the play, as Clas Zilliacus points out.106 Opener identifies with this creation of the story, duplicating Voice’s spatial metaphor – “We have not much further to go. Good.”107 – and exhortation: “Come on! Come on!”108 In Cascando, Music is double since, as a character, it is an equivalent of Voice. But it is also heard in relation to both aspects of the latter: it serves as a counterpoint to the story of Woburn, and accompanies the story-teller. However, their treatment diverges, since when Voice is speaking to himself and telling his story, Music is only situated in an alternation. By contrast, with the teller, Music appears to be destined to compliment and complete it, as Zilliacus explains.109 Thus Music would seem to be both a collaborative force, and the horizon of the voice in this play, marking “the only road that leads”110 to their hypothetical union. While Beckett chose to work constantly with this disjunction inherent in the signifier, Music here would seem to offer something comparable to the function Lacan ascribes to the Apollinian function of painting: if the latter, as a “gaze-tamer,”111 calms the impression of constantly being subjected to the “savage eye”112 of the Other, music can assuage the endless torment of the voice.

“Do the Image” If silence constitutes the embodiment of the voice – the “essence of the matter” – the audible text as the radio plays’ “excipient” works to produce vivid images. 113 In spite of the apparent hierarchy established between the two dimensions by Beckett’s metaphor, their relationship proves to be complex, allowing for no resolution. Thus, the association of Words and Music, in the eponymous play, is designed to achieve the evocation of “the face” of the woman once loved in two poems. The first, a three-part sonnet, opposes the image of the “hag”114 – concerned only with bodily needs – and the spectral coming of the woman, the latter being initially reduced to a face (or mask). The second poem obeys a Medieval form,115 where the poet lets his gaze descend the female body as far as he dares. It would however be an error to reduce these evocations to their erotic overtones, since the sexual dimension is undercut by equivocation. Indeed, the former image derives from Krapp’s Last Tape – which Beckett denied was sexual116

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– and the second leads to a state comparable to Murphy’s dark “third zone”: a source (“wellhead”117) of poetry. The progression of Cascando leads Opener to forge the idyllic image of the “outing,”118 where the union of the two heterogeneous dimensions remains tenuous: “From one world to another, it’s as though they drew together.”119 There is no union or fusion; rather a contingent encounter,120 contrary to Mr. Kelly’s dream of grasping the point where “seen and unseen met.”121 Indeed, three strands are present, since Opener joins the other two: in the duplicated I/he scission, the play achieves a form of community that is not identity. In Embers, too, the strikingly dramatic and imaged quality of the Bolton/Holloway story contrasts with the spectral quality of the scenes linked to the motif of the sea. Necessarily invented – Henry could not have been present – this story gives substance to what has never – and can never – be named. Indeed, not only does the scene compose a tense, dramatic atmosphere dominated by images of fire, snow, and darkness, but the room itself assumes the form of an eye or a camera obscura, where Bolton causes the aperture – in the form of the curtains – to oscillate. Thus if the radio plays involve closing one’s eyes in order to give free rein to the voice, the latter works not only to make itself heard, but also to bring forth an image that can be apprehended only in the dark. Indeed, these images come in lieu of a failure inherent in language: the woman lost,122 for want of speech necessary to form a living relationship; the father’s powerlessness to assume any symbolic transmission and Holloway’s stern refusal (Embers), or the “impossible”123 presence of a twin brother124 to be given birth to. Beyond the empirical words therefore, the image conjured up constitutes one way of seeing the voice of silence: “Listen to the light now [. . .]”125 Indeed, the constructed image localizes the voice, supplementing the absence of visibility. It is offered up to the Other, in the same way as the religious icon – set in the upper vaults of a church, and scarcely discernible for the congregation – is destined to be contemplated by the divinity.126 If limiting a creation to the production of the voice can be understood as a way of drilling “one hole after another”127 into language, then what appears is both the “nothing” of silence and the “something” of the image.

Prayer and Solitude One narrator declares: “words have been my only loves, not many.”128 As voices, these words keep one “company,” not as soothing music, but

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rather the place where the speaking being finds his concrete existence, his torment, and his fundamental solitude. Thus what may have been seen, in All That Fall, as an apparently negative process – the collapsing of referential reality – gives access to the voice insofar as it embodies the bedrock of existence in language. The solitude involved is problematic in Rough for Radio I. The first part of the play shows the apparent intrusion of a woman, whom the man “suffers”129 to come. She is astonished that Voice is alone, and the man confirms: “When one is alone one is all alone.”130 During all this time, the man appears “troubled,”131 and in “need” of his voices. In the second half of the play, the short question/answer pattern gives way to addressed speech: the man telephones the doctor because his voices are fading. They sound terribly identical: “what are all alike? . . . last what? . . . gasps?”132 The character seems to find himself in the situation evoked in All That Fall: “All is still. No living soul in sight. There is no one to ask,”133 or in Embers: “The time will come when no one will speak to you at all, not even complete strangers. [Pause.] You will be quite alone with your voice, there will be no other voice in the world but yours.”134 In the final part, the future is evoked in the promise of birth, but it is situated only in the present unfolding of the man’s speech: as if the repetition of the words he hears enables him to bear his solitude. It is not a messianic future, simply a suspension of the play’s movement, where the man is left weighing up what the words “tomorrow noon” may mean for him. This use of language anchored in the enunciation of the speaking being can be associated with the Beckettian conception of creation considered as “prayer,”135 but, Malone would add: “the true prayer that asks for nothing.”136 In other words, invocation makes an Other exist, but in speech alone, coming back to the speaker as a vital silence. What insists therefore, through the empirical dimension of Beckett’s radio plays, is the voice as an ultimate silence that neither creator nor auditor can recover: as a technological device, the radio set represents a barrier that gives form to this silence.

Notes 1. See Matthew Feldman, “Beckett’s Trilogy on the Third Programme,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 26, 2014, 42–43. 2. Beckett to Nancy Cunard, July 5, 1956, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (henceforth LSB) ii: 1941–1956, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

llewellyn brown Lois More, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 631. Samuel Beckett, How It Is, New York: Grove Press, 1964, 7. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre xxiii, Le Sinthome, Paris: Seuil, 2005, 121. Jacques Lacan, Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001, 437. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, September 8, 1934, Samuel Beckett, LSB i: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 223. “Impediment” is a key concept in “Peintres de l’empêchement.” See Le Monde et le pantalon suivi de Peintres de l’empêchement, Paris: Minuit, 1990. Samuel Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, London, Faber and Faber, 2006, 267. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre iii, Les Psychoses, Paris: Seuil, 1981, 140. Letter to Alan Schneider, December 19, 1957, in Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 24. “Parler, ce n’est pas voir” is the title of a chapter in Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini, Paris: Gallimard, 1986, 35. Marjorie Perloff, “The Silence That Is Not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Embers,” in Lois Oppenheim, ed., Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999, 249. To Barney Rosset, August 27, 1957, in LSB iii: 1957–1965, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 63. February 19, 1976, qtd. in Billie Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw . . .Who He?, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 139. Erik Porge, Voix de l’écho, Toulouse: Érès, 2012, 80–81. See also Christophe Fauré, “Marque de l’incorporel et fonction du trait unaire,” L’Enje lacanien, 25, December 2015, 138. Porge, Voix de l’écho, 40. See Chris Ackerley, “Éléments recyclés dans Words and Music/Paroles et musique,” in Llewellyn Brown, ed., Samuel Beckett 2: “Parole, regard et corps,” Caen: Lettres modernes Minard, 2011, 57–76. Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, in Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, New York: Grove Press, 1995, 111. Samuel Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 174. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, 692. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 138. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 172. Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama, 1956–1976, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988, 176. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 187. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 177.

Beckett, Radio, and the Voice 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Ibid., 179. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 183. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 257. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 172. See Llewellyn Brown, Beckett, Lacan and the Voice, Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2016, 217 sqq. Beckett, Endgame, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 98. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 177. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 253. Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo Akademi, Åbo, in Acta Academiæ Aboensis, Ser. A Humaniora 51, no. 2, 1976, 89. As in Texts for Nothing: “this farrago of silence and words, of silence that is not silence and barely murmured words.” Beckett, Texts for Nothing, “Text 6,” 125. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 254. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 261. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre x, L’Angoisse, Paris: Seuil, 2004, 282. Lacan comments on Theodor Reik. See also Jean-Michel Vivès, La Voix sur le divan: musique sacrée, opéra, techno, Paris: Aubier, 2012, 80–101. Beckett, Words and Music, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 288. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 253. A link needs to be made to the episodes involving Addie, who suffers immensely from being “trained.” Also, mortification is implied since the father too is petrified in the end, before he disappears, drowned: “Perhaps just the stillness, as if he had been turned to stone.” Ibid., 262. “L’Épuisé,” in Samuel Beckett, Quad [. . .] suivi de “L’Épuisé” par Gilles Deleuze, Paris: Minuit, 1992. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 264. Ibid. Jonathan Kalb, “The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays, and Film,” in John Pilling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 127. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 260. “This so-called interior monologue is in perfect continuity with the external dialogue, and it is for this very reason that we can say that the unconscious is also the discourse of the other.” Lacan, Les Psychoses, 128. Thus, Lisa Dwan explains how, in performing Not I, she has to divest herself of the specular image – or consciousness – of her body, which can only encumber her and distort the way the text draws on her most disturbing experiences, her “wounds.” Reading University lecture, November 2, 2016.

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54. This term would seem to be a Gallicism, destined to pursue the (bodily, perhaps) metaphor of opening and closing. 55. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 302. 56. Ibid., 300. 57. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 192. 58. Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 267. 59. Ibid., 269. 60. Ibid., 267. 61. Ibid., 269. 62. Ibid., 267. 63. The play can be divided into the four parts determined by its classical dispositio; exordium: the woman enters; narratio: the woman experiments with the radio, then leaves; confirmatio: the man calls the doctor; peroratio: the secretary calls him back and announces birth. 64. This is the case, for example, in Texts for Nothing. See Ackerley and Llewellyn Brown, Samuel Beckett, Textes pour rien/Texts for Nothing: Annotations, Paris: Lettres modernes Minard, La Revue des lettres modernes, Série “Samuel Beckett,” no. 5, 2018. 65. Beckett qtd. in Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 129. 66. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 253. 67. It is difficult to understand why there are separate “knobs” for Voice and Music. 68. Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 267. 69. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 168. 70. Beckett, “Three Dialogues,” in Disjecta, London: John Calder, 1983, 139. 71. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 300. 72. Ibid., 298. 73. Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 448. We can hear the equivocation: lessness of mind. 74. “got that”: a phrase found to this effect in Texts for Nothing : “full stop, got all that.” Texts for Nothing, “Text 5,” 118 and in Catastrophe, 460: “There’s our catastrophe. In the bag.” 75. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable in Three Novels, New York: Grove Press, 1965, 318. 76. Samuel Beckett, Rough for Radio II, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 275. 77. Ibid., 275. 78. Ibid., 276. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 278. 83. Beckett, Rough for Radio II, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 281. 84. Beckett qtd. in Ackerley, “Éléments recycles,” 68.

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85. See Catherine Laws, Headaches among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/ Beckett in Music, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013, 325. 86. Christian Vereecken, “La voix, le silence, la musique,” Quarto, 54, CD version, 51. 87. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 112–113. 88. Vereecken, ”La voix, le silence, la musique,” 52. 89. Which leads to what Enoch Brater sees as his “defeat.” See Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 35. 90. Beckett, Words and Music, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 292. 91. Ibid., 287. 92. Ibid., 288. 93. Ibid. 94. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre x, L’Angoisse, 318, 320. 95. Lacan, Écrits, 9. 96. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre xvi, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris: Seuil, 2006, 87. 97. Ibid., 88. 98. Lacan, Écrits, 806. 99. Beckett, Rough for Radio II, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 276. 100. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre viii, Le Transfert, Paris: Seuil, 1991, 290; Lacan, Le Sinthome, 95. 101. Beckett, Words and Music, 294. 102. Details provided by Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 129 sqq. 103. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 297. 104. Ibid. 105. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 300. 106. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 136. 107. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 301. 108. Ibid., 302. 109. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 136. 110. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 303; Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 137. 111. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre xi, Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1973, 100. 112. Beckett’s word for the lens of the cinema camera is qtd. in Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 203. 113. The expression “Do the Image” is used at the end of “The Image,” in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 168, modified in the equivalent passage of How It Is, 31. See Brown, Beckett, Lacan and the Voice, 225 sqq. 114. Beckett, Words and Music, 291. 115. Ackerley, “Éléments recyclés,” 71. 116. In James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London and New York : Bloomsbury, 1997, 451. Words’ shocked exclamation could

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117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

llewellyn brown be interpreted as an expression of the same misinterpretation as that of the Censor of Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett, Words and Music, 293. Beckett, Cascando, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 303. Ibid., 301. We find the same theme noted by Beckett with regards to his friendship with Bram van Velde in LSB ii, 126, 304, or Georges Duthuit, LSB ii, 472. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 174. “Who loved could not be won/Or won not loved.” Beckett, Words and Music, 291. Beckett, Rough for Radio II, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 280. Ibid., 279. For a more detailed analysis, see Brown, Beckett, Lacan and the Voice, 228–233. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 253. The icon is intended to “arouse the desire of God.” Lacan, Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux, 103. This aspect can be developed with regards to the short plays, such as That Time. Beckett, LSB i, 518. Beckett, “From an Abandoned Work,” in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 162. Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 267. Ibid., 268. Ibid., 269. Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 271. Beckett, All That Fall, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 192. Beckett, Embers, in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 262. Beckett, Disjecta, 68. Beckett, Malone Dies, in Beckett, Three Novels, 270.

iii

New Hermeneutic Codes

chapter 9

Beckett’s Queer Art of Failure Calvin Thomas

The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.

– Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure1

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail. Failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. – Beckett, Disjecta2

Ever tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. – Beckett, Worstward Ho3

Worstward Ho’s injunction to repeatedly but somehow amelioratively fail has shown up in a number of scenes of writing since the last time I trotted it out as an epigraph to one of my own discursive failures.4 The words are tattooed on the inside left forearm of Swiss tennis champion Stan Wawrinka, for example, and they appear as part of the title of a recent book by the American Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön.5 Perhaps more pertinently, Worstward’s words twice grace the pages of Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, “a book about failing well, failing often, and learning, in the words of Samuel Beckett, how to fail better,”6 a book that engages a number of queer artists with its admirably “low theory” but that recurs to the peppily animated character SpongeBob SquarePants more frequently than to any of Beckett’s barely animated “gallery of moribunds,”7 and a book that, perhaps intentionally, fails even to cite Beckett properly, assigning the “fail better” line to Murphy rather than to Worstward Ho. But what matter where the line appears? What concerns me here, once again, is the question of what’s “queer” about Beckett’s “art of failure,” how Beckett’s artist’s daring failures can “be located within that range of political affects that we call queer.”8 I’ve written “once again” above 157

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because, as already indicated, this isn’t the first or even the second time that I’ve taken up the question, and in what follows I’ll be repeating and updating – not to mention “lessening” and, if all goes well, “worsening” – some previous poubellications.9 I don’t know if I’ll be failing any better with this exertion, but I do have every faith that I’ll be failing once again. I first ever tried/ever failed to raise the question of what’s queer about Beckett by considering his place in the work of Leo Bersani. To begin again the way I’ve begun twice before, I ask(ed): How should we account for Beckett’s appearance on the final page of Bersani’s 1995 book Homos? What links Beckett with the three “Gay Outlaws” – Gide, Proust, and, most proximately, Genet – whose writing is the main subject of Bersani’s concluding chapter? If he wasn’t exactly a “gay outlaw” (any more than yours truly is exactly a “queer theorist”), how does Beckett’s appearance at the tail-end of Homos mark a productive tension in Bersani’s argument, if not a constitutive collapse of exaction in “queer theory” itself? If Beckett was not “literally” homosexual but nonetheless produced writing that could be considered a literary “vehicle” for Bersanian “homo-ness,” how does that writing help lubricate Bersani’s project of “bringing out, and celebrating ‘the homo’ in all of us”?10 How does what Bersani calls Beckett’s “determination to fail” or “cult of failure,” as well as his participation in “a radical modernity anxious to save art from the preemptive operations of institutionalized culture,”11 align him with that “anticommunal mode of connectedness”12 that Bersani tags as the anti-essential essence of “homo-ness”? How might Beckett’s determined “art of failure” allow the aforementioned “all of us” to resist the compulsorily heterosexual norms that subtend institutionalized culture’s regnant definitions of “success”?13 While Bersani’s inclusive phrase “all of us” would seem to gesture towards what Madhavi Menon has recently called a “queer universalism” that “can only ever be indifferent to difference,”14 and even though Bersani himself is in a way a noted champion of such indifference, in Homos we find Bersani warning “all of us” against the threats of despecification and desexualization posed by the proliferation of term “queer” in the early 1990s. Citing Michael Warner’s appeal, in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, to “queerness” as an aggressively generalized “resistance to regimes of the normal,”15 Bersani writes, “This generous definition puts all resisters in the same queer bag – a universalizing move I appreciate but that fails to specify the sexual distinctiveness of the resistance.”16 But Bersani himself has already suggested that “If homosexuality is a privileged vehicle for homo-ness, the latter designates a mode of

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connectedness to the world that it would be absurd to reduce to sexual preference.”17 Thus the problem arises: if what Bersani calls “homo-ness” designates “a mode of connectedness” that can only absurdly be reduced to sexual preference, if homo-ness can even be made “relevant to love between the sexes,”18 involving a “mobility” that “should create a kind of community [. . .] that can never be settled, whose membership is always shifting [. . .] a community in which many straights should be able to find a place,”19 then what constitutes the sexual specificity of homo-ness? What distinguishes homo-ness – as a model for connection, community, and communication – from the overly generalized and seemingly desexualized “queer”? Bersani asserts that it is ébranlement – or jouissance as experiential “selfshattering” – that is “intrinsic to the homo-ness in homosexuality.” Homoness, he writes, is “an anti-identitarian identity”20 involving “a beneficent crisis in selfhood.”21 Bersani writes that he calls “jouissance ‘self-shattering’ in that it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries”22 and “works against the narcissism of a securely mapped ego.”23 Repeatedly figuring jouissance as “self-loss,”24 “self-divestiture,”25 and “the joy of self-dissolution,”26 Bersani suggests that the “self-impoverishing self-expansions” of jouissance “block the cultural discipline of identification,”27 and thus subvert the formation of the “self” as “the precondition for registration and service as a citizen.”28 Since citizenship is currently defined and produced not only heteronormatively but within an ideologically naturalized system of private property relations, ébranlement provides a model for an eroticized annulment of private property at the level of subjectivity itself, for “this self-divestiture is enacted as a willful pursuit of abjection, a casting away not only of possessions but also of all the attributes that constitute the self as a valuable property.”29 Thus, writes Bersani, “if a community were ever to exist in which it would no longer seem natural to define all relations as property relations (not only my money or my land, but also my country, my wife, my lover), we would first have to imagine a new erotics. Without that, all revolutionary activity will return, as we have seen it return over and over again, to relations of ownership and dominance.”30 Jouissance, then, becomes for Bersani what Fredric Jameson calls “a figure for the transformation of social relations as a whole.”31 Given such a politically salutary edge, however, we might wonder why Bersani seems to connect the anti-identificatory self-shattering of jouissance with the homo-ness and not the sex of homosexuality. Indeed, in his jab at the desexualized overgeneralizations of queer theory on the one hand, and his elaboration of homo-ness as “an impersonal sameness ontologically incompatible with analyzable egos”32 on the other, the problem Bersani

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faces, again, involves locating sexual specificity while at the same time avoiding an “absurd” reduction to sexual preference. What more or less solves the problem is that for Bersani the sexual most specifically is the selfshattering – what Bersani values in sex, and in art, is the capacity of both to shatter any coherent self. Nothing is more crucial to Bersani’s project than his emphasis on the self-shattering capacities of both sexual and aesthetic experience. Tracing Bersani’s understanding of the self-shattering propensities of sex and art, I turn to The Freudian Body. There Bersani joins Freud in arguing that “the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement occurs when the body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those compatible with psychic organization.”33 Bersani posits sexual experience as “that which is intolerable to the structured self” and argues that “the distinguishing feature of infancy would be its susceptibility to the sexual. The polymorphously perverse nature of infantile sexuality would be a function of the child’s vulnerability to being shattered into sexuality.”34 Sexuality, then, is, as Bersani puts it, “a tautology for masochism.”35 Bersani even suggests that in its earliest incipience the self is called into being for the very purpose of its shattering, that the self is initially constituted so that sexuality would have a structural coherence to dissolve. In Homos, however, Bersani is at pains to separate the masochistic eroticizing of self-dissolution from honest-to-God death. He challenges us to imagine “a nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject” and “to dissociate masochism from the death drive.”36 This dissociation is crucial to what Bersani, in The Culture of Redemption, calls his “general ethical-erotic project” of allowing sex and art to provide sites of resistance to “the tyranny of the self,” a provision made in the interests of “non-violence.”37 Understand that the “redemption” in Bersani’s title is not what saves us from violence but what seriously and “morally” impels us towards it, for the culture of redemption, which depends on “fundamental assumptions about authoritative identities, about identity as authority,”38 is complicit if not identical with “the culture of death,”39 with a will towards mastery which negates or even destroys “life” in the name of “truth.” As Bersani writes: “A redemptive aesthetic based on the negation of life (in Nietzschean terms, on a nihilism that invents a ‘true world’ as an alternative to an inferior and depreciated world of mere appearance) must also negate art.”40 For Nietzsche, as is well known, negating art amounts to negating life because for him life fundamentally (and amorally) is art. Thus a “corrective” will to truth that devalues art or (much the same thing)

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attempts nihilistically to enlist art in its service is for Nietzsche motivated by “a principle hostile to life and destructive,” by “a concealed will to death.”41 As Irigaray observes in her book on Nietzsche, “Life is never identical to itself, but death is.”42 – an insight that returns us to the question of identity’s authorization vs. its ethical dissolution in Bersanian sex and art. For just about everywhere in his writing Bersani privileges and celebrates a masochistic jouissance in which “the self is exuberantly discarded.”43 This “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self”44 disrupts narratives of cultural authority which not only depend upon but produce identities and maintain “the person as an object of cultural surveillance.”45 Instances of jouissance provide “micro-dissonances, micro-points of resistance,”46 sites of unavailability to institutional culture’s “legitimizing plots,”47 and such provision is inseparable from “the appeal of powerlessness”48 that is inherent in ébranlement. For “in this self-shattering, the ego renounces its power over the world.”49 The ethical crux of jouissance, then, involves its potential to overthrow the thanatical formation of the hyperbolic self by means of an anti-identificatory eroticism. Clearly, however, the ethics in question here are not produced by virtue of the individual’s conformity to a prescribed system of laws governing thoughts or behaviors: all that would be morality. Rather, Bersanian ethics are the secondary and largely unintentional result of an involuntary engagement with libidinal energies that have no teleologically narrativizable purpose whatsoever. And yet the ethical effect – non-violence – is produced. Thus we are invited to exuberantly discard our identities and willfully pursue self-abjection both for no reason at all and for a very good (or perhaps, in the Nietzschean sense, noble) reason – because it is precisely “the sacrosanct value of selfhood [that] accounts for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements.” The self, writes Bersani, “is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence.”50 Despite, then, the generally somber quality of his writing (I’ve never found it very funny), Bersani’s main object of ethico-political hostility is the deadly seriousness of identity, of sociality – indeed, of meaning itself. This de-meaning, anti-social, anti-identificatory, pro-Nietzschean rancor against rancor against life is what motivates Bersani’s valuation of sex as self-shattering. For if sex – specifically for Bersani a man’s participation in receptive anal eroticism – is “demeaning” (because from the perspective of the dominant culture it figures the participant in a position of abject powerlessness traditionally reserved for women), then we should value

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sex all the more precisely because “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it.”51 Moreover, Bersani’s emphatic valuation of the “de-meaning” capacities of sex extends to art as well, or at least to those works of art that don’t work, refuse to work, resist institutional culture’s imperative that they attempt to dominate life and redeem history. For Bersani, this imperative involves both a “tendency to think of cultural symbolizations as essentially reparative” and “the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience.”52 In a crucial passage in The Culture of Redemption, Bersani explicitly hooks up a sex that is inimical to culturally produced personhood with an art that refuses the reparations of institutional morality and truth. Sex is selfinimical for Bersani because the very notion of the self as an autonomous unity is made possible only through anti-sexual sublimations and repressions. Thus sexuality is consecrated as violence by virtue of the very definition of culture as an unceasing effort to make life whole, to repair a world attacked by desire. A fundamentally meaningless culture thus ennobles gravely damaged experience. Or, to put this in other terms, art redeems the catastrophe of history. To play this role, art must preserve what might be called moral monumentality – a requirement that explains, I believe, much of the mistrust in the modern period of precisely those modern works that have more or less violently rejected any such edifying and petrifying functions. Claims for the high morality of art may conceal a deep horror of life. And yet nothing is perhaps more frivolous than that horror, since it carries within it the conviction that, because of the achievements of culture, the disasters of history somehow do not matter. Everything can be made up, can be made over again, and the absolute singularity of human experience – the source of both its tragedy and its beauty – is thus dissipated in the trivializing nobility of a redemption through art.53

As Yeats puts it in one of his more anti-monumental moments, “Nothing has life except the incomplete.”54 In the name, then, of experiential singularity and (human) life’s constitutive failure and incompletion, Bersani values those daring and damaging artists of impoverishment who “defy us to take them seriously” and who “won’t let us believe that they have been successful artists or told us some important truths.”55 These last quotations come from that final page of Homos, and the references are, again, to Beckett and Genet, to the former’s aforementioned “cult of failure” and the latter’s “scatological aesthetic” or “cult of waste.” One could argue that these two “cults” are equally valuable for Bersani in terms of their potential to “shatter” aesthetic

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monumentality and hyperbolic personhood. Or, to tease or squeeze out the shat in “self-shattering,” one could at least note the slippage between failure and waste marked by the German word Durchfall, which, as per Klaus Theweleit, simultaneously signifies failing an examination, falling through or collapsing, and “involuntarily emptying the bowels.”56 Guy Hocquenghem, in a chapter of Homosexual Desire called “Capitalism, the Anus, and the Family,” limns what’s at stake in our fear of Durchfall-ing when he notes the way “personal hygiene” lays the foundation of “successful” (that is, hetero-capitalist) personhood. Hocquenghem writes that “Anal cleanliness” [is] the formation in the child of the small responsible person; and there is a relation between “private cleanliness” and “private ownership” [propreté privée and propriété privée] [. . ..]. Control of the anus is the precondition of taking responsibility for property. The ability to “hold back” or evacuate faeces is the necessary moment of the constitution of the self. “To forget oneself” is the most ridiculous and distressing kind of social accident there is, the ultimate outrage to the human person. [. . .] “To forget oneself” is to risk joining up, through the flux of excrement, with the nondifferentiation of desire.57

Beckett, for his part, pretty consistently risks joining up with the nondifferentiation of desire, leading his closest readers not towards the seriously sun-kissed kingdom of “important truths” but into the comically darkest “territories of failure, forgetfulness, stupidity, and negation.”58 Note how in a moment of “self-impoverishing self-expansion” he has his mouthpiece Malone remember forgetting himself here: In the meantime nothing is mine any more, according to my definition, if I remember rightly, except my exercise-book, my lead and the French pencil, assuming it really exists. I did well to stop my inventory, it was a happy thought. I feel less weak, perhaps they fed me while I slept. I see the pot, the one that is not full, it is lost to me too. I shall doubtless be obliged to forget myself in the bed, as when I was a boy.59

What doubtless obliges us to link Beckett’s self-forgetful Durchfälle with Genet’s invitation to view works of literature not as “epistemological and moral monuments” but rather as “cultural droppings”60 is precisely the “scatontological” status of both Genet himself as “gay outlaw” and the Beckettian figure of the “hero” as the outcast, the abject, the expelled. And for Bersani this radical and rectally inflected “pursuit of abjection,” this “casting away not only of possessions but also of all the attributes that constitute the self as a valuable property,”61 inscribes an ethico-political value, for “in a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of

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sociality itself, only what that society throws off – its mistakes or its pariahs – can serve the future.”62 Or, to bring Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure chiasmatically back into the mix, not only can failure in general “be located within that range of political affects that we call queer,”63 specifically Beckettian failure can also be located within that range of queer affects that we call political. As for Bersani, his emphasis on the intrinsic self-shattering of sex and art helps explain his repeated formulations of homo-ness as both “selfdivestiture”64 and indifference to the “personhood” of the other. Similarly, Bersani’s insistence that oppression is not only structural to “our” society but “constitutive of sociality itself” helps explain his emphasis on “the anti-relationality inherent in all homo-ness,”65 on homo-ness as “failure to accept relation with any given social arrangement,”66 as “a potentially revolutionary inaptitude – perhaps inherent in gay desire – for sociality as it is known.”67 All of these emphases help position Beckett’s writing as a “vehicle” for Bersanian “homo-ness” – perhaps not a “privileged vehicle,” or, given the aggressive supination of Beckettian bodies, even a particularly mobile one, but vehicular, vehicular, nonetheless. For I can imagine few pieces of “straight white male” writing more indifferent to difference, more forgetful of personhood, than Beckett’s. Nor can I envision many “persons” more radically socially inept than Beckett’s abject, expelled figures. As “characters,” they arguably display a more profound, more stupid, more constitutive inaptitude for sociality than the homosexual Nazi soldiers from Genet’s Funeral Rite upon whom Bersani dwells, Nazi soldiers who have accepted “given social arrangements” at least to the point of having become Nazi soldiers. It’s difficult to imagine, say, Beckett’s Molloy ever taking identity seriously long enough to perform that particular feat of sociality. Bersani writes that through various rectal shenanigans Genet’s Nazis enact “a revolutionary destructiveness which would surely dissolve the rigidly defined sociality of Nazism itself.”68 And yet that dissolution is achieved only after the fact of their already completed inscription into and complicity with that particular form of social rigidity, whereas, again, it would be difficult to imagine Beckett’s “gallery of moribunds,” who never experience any specific moment of ébranlement but are seemingly “shattered” from the get-go, ever being so inscribed. It could even be argued – and such, I believe, is Adorno’s take on Beckett’s negativity – that the (ref)use value of Beckett’s resistant writing lies in its discursive unavailability to fascism: “the unnameable” is finally and thoroughly the unenlistable.69

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Moreover, though Beckett may not consistently figure this socially inept and unenlistable self-divestiture in terms as conspicuously sexual as Genet’s in the descriptions of ass-fucking and rimming that Bersani cites, Beckett does often trundle out the anus as a site of both self-shattering and indifference to personhood, making conspicuous the link between his cult of failure and what Bersani considers an ethically salient aesthetics of waste. Beckett, that is, in his determined Durchfall, serves the future by virtue of his very refusal to serve the future, by his defying us to take him seriously – a refusal and a defiance that he repeatedly figures rectally. Bersani himself marks Beckett’s anal emphasis in The Freudian Body, where he writes that thought in Beckett is irresistibly drawn to that part of the body which seems most accurately to reflect its own dilemma. I refer of course to the anus which, like the mind, expels from the body substances which the body both produces and treats like waste. Thought, far from providing a guarantee of being in this radically non-Cartesian world, is the excrement of being. Anonymous and limitless, it passes through a mind which, however, can resist the fluency of the thought which it receives, block its passage, by an almost pedagogical demonstration of mind’s affinity with the body. [. . .] [In Beckett’s writing] the forms of rationality are constantly being “disformulated” by the corruptive power of what might be called a carnal irony.70

What strikes me about this passage is how closely the anonymous infinity that Bersani ascribes to Beckett’s excrementalization of being answer to some of his descriptions of homo-ness (and, more specifically, of cruising) in Homos; or again, how closely the dis-formulating and corruptive power of Beckett’s carnal irony resembles the “de-meaning” capacities of Bersanian sex. Indeed, as I think should be evident by now, Bersani values Beckett’s writing in much the same way and for much the same reason that he thinks “all of us” should value sexuality: both demean the seriousness of our efforts to redeem them. This demeaning carnal irony dispenses with or disformulates both the sanctity of personhood and the social imperatives of culturally viable art. Carnal irony refuses to dominate life or redeem history and by that very refusal fails to provide any sanction for violence. Two passages from Molloy serve to exemplify this disservice. In the first, the narrator, who thinks his name is Molloy, has been “hailed” by a policeman, who asks to see some identification papers. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers. Now the only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper to wipe myself, you understand, when I have a stool.

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calvin thomas Oh I don’t say I wipe myself every time I have a stool, no, but I like to be in a position to do so, if I have to. Nothing strange about that, it seems to me. In a panic I took this paper from my pocket and thrust it under his nose.71

Now, although there is no textual indication one way or the other, nothing either way, it’s always been my pleasure when reading this passage to imagine that the paper Molloy thrusts under the policeman’s nose is soiled. It would, after all, be quite unlike Molloy to leave such paper behind simply because he’s used it to wipe his own behind. In any case, if Genet in Bersani’s estimation “defiantly [. . .] addresses society’s interpellations of him,”72 Molloy’s defiance here is cast in terms highly redolent of the very theoretical “scene” from which the word “interpellation” in its Althusserian sense derives. But Molloy’s failure to produce on demand a clean and proper proof of identity, his refusal to establish personhood before the law, is rather a far cry from that 180 degree turn in docile response to a policeman’s hailing that Althusser so famously describes.73 Rather, Molloy carnally ironizes “the pleasure of the text” by showing his behind to the political father.74 Of course, what Molloy “shows” the policeman here is not his behind but rather (at least, in my desired reading) its horrible product, which is itself smeared upon, to the point of being conflated with, a specific sort of social discourse: newspaper print. But this conflation shouldn’t signal some high cultural disdain for journalism that would equate mass cultural inscription with shite; rather, Beckett is revealing one of the most important lessons he learned from Joyce: the way analized desublimations of language subvert the (predominantly phallic) monuments of intellect that language itself attempts to erect, thus facilitating what Bersani elsewhere calls “the destabilization of self initiated by the act of writing.”75 If “thought in Beckett is irresistibly drawn to that part of the body which seems most accurately to reflect its own dilemma,”76 then the attraction is the dilemma: “thought” is drawn towards an abject corporeal opening the sublimating closure of which is the very condition of possibility for thought itself. Thus the self-sufficiency of “thought” is always threatened by the abject materiality of any written trace that would inscribe it. When Beckett, in the passage cited above, juxtaposes the words “to wipe myself” with “you understand,”77 he effectively foregrounds the constitutive tension between “understanding” and that which understanding must abject in order to be understanding, a juxtaposition echoed in Malone Dies by the name “Saposcat,” which joins the Latin sapere, “to be wise,” with the root of the word “scatology.” Beckett’s writing scatontologically pushes epistemology to the brink of its radical Durchfall.

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The second passage that draws my thoughts, like moths to the flame of the solar anus, occurs later in the novel. Molloy is musing on a past sexual encounter with a woman named Lousse, and he begins to wonder whether she were, in fact, a woman at all: “Lousse was a woman of an extraordinary flatness, physically speaking of course, to such a point that I am still wondering this evening, in the comparative silence of my last abode, if she was not a man or at least an androgyne.” After considering all the evidence he can muster, which of course is neither abundant nor conclusive, Molloy grows impatient and exclaims “Don’t be tormenting yourself, Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter?”78 Molloy then recounts his first sexual encounter, with a woman named Ruth, or maybe Edith: She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. [. . .] Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it.79

One well might ask how this fairly feeble liebestod qualifies as jouissance. It certainly seems demeaning enough, but it falls noticeably short of any exuberantly sexual self-discard. Indeed, Molloy seems pretty much divested of self well before having arrived at Ruth’s rectum. And this pre-selfdivestiture may mark a tension between Bersanian and Beckettian selfshattering. For Bersani, ébranlement as “beneficent crisis in selfhood” may be said to depend upon a specific moment of sexual practice or erotic exuberance, whereas for Beckett any sexual moment, such as the one with Edith, only underscores a dissolution of self that has always already taken place. Just as Molloy could not easily be imagined “getting himself together” enough to don a Nazi uniform, so we might have trouble imagining him gathering, conjuring, or “getting up” enough of a coherent ego to be able to discard or disperse that “package” via sex. This tension between Bersanian and Beckettian self-shattering may trouble the concept of a homo-ness that, if it can only absurdly be reduced to sexual

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preference, would still seem indentured to a specific and specifically sexual moment. Foregrounded is the discrepancy between homo-ness as literal and homo-ness as literary or metaphorical, a discrepancy also brought into relief by Bersani’s use of the word “vehicle,” itself the latter half of metaphor’s standard definition. But perhaps the recourse to metaphor resolves the tension, for if the Bersanian tenor is anti-redemptive, antimonumental self-divestiture, then both literal and figurative homo-ness, both sex and art – as well as different versions of sex in art (Genet’s rimming soldiers as opposed to Molloy’s toiling and moiling) – can serve as vehicles for that tenor. What matters is that Molloy’s indifference to sexual difference (note how he continues to use feminine pronouns even after providing Ruth/ Edith with a set of balls) does effectively refuse to reproduce personhood or sociality – since in culture as presently institutionalized both personhood and sociality are predicated on sexual difference – and that it does so in terms relevant to, or redolent of, Bersani’s ethical–erotic project (apologies to the late Kurt Cobain, but it sure smells like queer spirit to me). Moreover, this “indifference to difference” leads us to one strain of Bersani’s argument in Homos that I’ve yet to discuss: his suggestion that homo-ness is “relevant to love between the sexes” and that “a good degree of homo-ness in heterosexuality could go far to calm the fears that nourish misogyny.”80 Bersani proposes that “universal homo-ness can allay the terror of difference, which generally gives rise to a hopeless dream of eliminating difference entirely. A massively heteroized perception of the universe gives urgency to a narcissistic project that would reduce – radically, with no surplus of alterity – the other to the same.”81 Opposing this heteroized, hyperbolicized narcissism that attempts to abolish a traumatizing otherness, Bersani advocates a “self-effacing narcissism” that “tolerates [. . .] difference because of its very indifference to [. . .] difference.”82 He suggests that “New reflection on homo-ness could lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome (a view that, among other things, nourishes antagonistic relations between the sexes), but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness.”83 Granted, one could argue from a feminist perspective that Molloy’s indifference, and perhaps even Bersani’s, simply masks an unadmitted underlying traumatization at the very thought of feminine sexuality. Indeed, a point to stress concerning Bersani’s “anti-personalism” is that shatterings of personhood and abrogations of citizenship have a salutary political valence largely if not only for those to whom the dominant culture

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has long afforded the highest privileges of personhood and citizenship. Politically, the idea that the hyperbolically heteromasculine or phallocentric self should be exuberantly discarded in the name of an ethical–erotic project of non-violence is attractive enough. However, for those who have historically been denied or excluded from the position of autonomous subjectivity, there may be somewhat less cause for exuberance. Indifference to the agential personhood of women has long been integral to the ways powerful men have had sex and made art. Bersani himself has remarked upon the tensions between theories of gay male desire, including his own speculations, and feminism, noting particularly the way such articulations sometimes necessarily leave women out of the picture. If, however, it is arguably “better” from a feminist perspective to be excluded or ignored than to be the subject of the aggressively heteroizing search-and-destroy campaign Bersani describes, perhaps he’s correct to assert that a non-threatened indifference to sexual difference is preferable to a fear-driven impulse to eradicate it, and thus that a degree of homo-ness could work to assuage the anxieties that nourish misogyny. In any case, the Beckettian voice, though in no discernible way feminist, does seem relatively unconcerned with, unthreatened by, and hence tolerant of, any number of possibilities: that he had entered Ruth’s, or Edith’s, vagina, or that he had actually entered a man’s rectum, that Lousse had actually been a man, or even that Molloy himself might be a woman, for the last sentence can be inflected or repunctuated to suggest just that: “Don’t torment yourself—Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter?”84 But another question might be posed here: Samuel Beckett, homo or no, what the hell does that matter? Well, if Bersani is right in asserting that to “put into question sociality itself . . . may be the most radical political potential of queerness,”85 then it hardly seems irrelevant – indeed, it might even still seem urgent – to keep asking in what ways otherwise heterosexual writers (and theorists) can participate in queerness, can help “make the world queerer than ever,”86 can help “celebrate the ‘homo-ness’ in us all,” precisely by questioning sociality and its constitutive categorical unit, the person. If Beckett’s de-meaning carnal ironies are valuable weapons in Bersani’s attack on institutional culture and its corrective will, Beckett’s self-forgetful Durchfälle are indispensable tools in his dismantling of the value of personhood and of the violently heteronormative societal regime that the successful reproduction of personhood both leans upon and supports. If “failure is the ideal of nearly all of Beckett’s characters,”87 then we might call

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failure to reproduce “the person” the underlying, endlessly collapsing bedrock of that ideal, perhaps the queerest component of Beckett’s “impoverishing” art. He was, so to speak, a non-breeder in more ways than one – which to this pretty “low theorist” means that, in its determined indifference to difference, Beckett’s universally queer art of failure helps “all of us” engage in a discursive unavailability not only to fascism but also to heteronormative culture’s most pervasive “legitimizing” plot: the “reproductive futurism” to which Lee Edelman lays waste in his incomparably negative critique No Future.88 But the strictures of “lessening,” not to mention “worsening,” prohibit my ill-saying anything more about Edelman’s no-futurism here, so I’ll abruptly and ambiguously end with a few more queerly vehicular lines from Worstward Ho: Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. [. . .] No future in this. Alas yes.89

Notes 1. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, 88. 2. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, New York: Grove, 1984, 145. 3. Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, New York: Grove, 1980, 89. 4. The last time, the last failure, was “Cultural Droppings: On Bersani and Beckett,” in my ill-titled book Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 73–92, while the time before that was “Cultural Droppings: Bersani’s Beckett,” Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 2, Summer 2001, 169–196. 5. Pema Chödrön, Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown, Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2015. 6. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 24. 7. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, New York: Grove, 1958, 137. 8. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 89. 9. Poubellication is Lacan’s term mixing “publication” with garbage disposal (poubelle is French for waste basket). For “lessening” and “worsening” as subversive discursive strategies in Worstward Ho, see Alain Badiou, “Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept,” Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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University Press, 2005, 89–121. See also Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou,” Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016, 134–157. As for “lessening” and “worsening” in this latest poubellication of mine, while I choose to remain uncertain as to what I mean by “worsening,” by “lessening” I literally or mathematically mean no more than bringing the thing down to within the editorially prescribed 6K word-limit. Leo Bersani, Homos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 10. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 10. Halberstam writes: “Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems. What Gramsci terms ‘common sense’ depends heavily on the production of norms, and so the critique of dominant forms of common sense is also, in some sense, a critique of norms. Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope. Other subordinate, queer, or counter-hegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive lifestyles, negativity, and critique” (89). Even though Halberstam, again, mentions Beckett’s “fail better” only in passing in The Queer Art of Failure, I appropriate that book’s title here to better fail making the case that Beckett’s art helps “all of us” resist “heteronormative common sense” and never fails to do its “vehicular” part in what Halberstam calls “the practice of stalling the business of the dominant” (88). Madhavi Menon, Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 18. Menon writes that “queer universalism undertakes the refusal of identity outlined by Lee Edelman [in No Future, cited below in note 26] when he notes that ‘queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one’ (17) . . . . Indeed, what is universally queer is the ontological impossibility of selfidentity. Everything is queer because no-thing – peoples, events, desires – can achieve ontological wholeness” (19). Michael Warner, Introduction to Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, xxvi. Bersani, Homos, 71. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 9. Bersani, Homos, 101. Bersani as quoted in Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” October 82, Fall 1997, 3. Bersani, Homos, 101. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 128.

172 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

calvin thomas Ibid., 97. Ibid., 125. Ibid. Ibid., 126. Bersani, Homos, 128. Fredric Jameson, “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” The Ideology of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Vol 2. Syntax of History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 74. Bersani, Homos, 125. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 38. Bersani, The Freudian Body, 38. Ibid., 39. Bersani, Homos, 99. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, 3, 4. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1974, 282. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 41. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 25. Ibid., 25. Bersani, Homos, 145. Ibid., 74. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 4. Bersani, Homos, 95. Ibid., 94–95. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 4.; Bersani, Rectum, 30. Bersani, Rectum, 29. Emphasis not mine. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 7. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 22. Qtd. in Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Anthology, Boston: Bedford, 1997, xi. Bersani, Homos, 181. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Vol i: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 397. See also Christian Hite’s excellent essay “After the Shat in Shattering: Endnotes on ‘The Expelled’ (Beckett and Bersani),” Keeping It Dirty, 2012, keepitdirty .org/after-the-shat-in-shattering-endnotes-on-the-expelled-beckett-bersani/ not to mention his editor’s Introduction to Derrida and Queer Theory, Punctum Books, 2017. As for “After the Shat,” I still can’t believe that I, of

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57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

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all people, didn’t catch the “past participle of shit” in Bersanian self-shattering until I saw Hite press the point in print. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor, London: Allison, 1978, 84–85. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 25. Beckett, Three Novels, 255. Bersani, Homos, 181. Ibid., 126. Bersani, Homos, 180. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 89. Bersani, Homos, 128. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 171. Ibid., 76. Bersani, Homos, 171. See Rabaté, “Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou.” Bersani, The Freudian Body, 9. Beckett, Three Novels, 20. Bersani, Homos, 161. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review, 1971, 121–176. My reference here is of course to Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Noonday, 1975, 53: “The text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.” Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 12. Bersani, The Freudian Body, 9. Beckett, Three Novels, 20. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 56–57. Bersani, Homos, 147. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 7. A pertinent passage from Menon’s Indifference to Difference: “All movement is marked by desire, no matter where that movement might go. And all movements of desire depend on an indifference to difference. This is why desire cannot be used to undergird an ontological notion of difference—because it does not stick around long enough to give identity its imprimatur. Desire moves universally; it is indifferent to bodies and colors and genitalia, not because one cannot be . . . attracted to specific bodies but because those specificities do not add up to an identity. It is getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between a dildo and a penis, a vagina and an asshole, a man and a woman, and even if it were not, one would rarely pass a blind test that mapped desire onto a specific body” (19).

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85. Bersani, Homos, 75. 86. Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvii. 87. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 11. 88. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 89. Beckett, Nohow On, 90, 91.

chapter 10

“Que voulez-vous?” Beckett, Nerve Theory and Literary Form Ulrika Maude

In a striking letter of October 18, 1932, the twenty-six-year-old Samuel Beckett, highly uncertain about his poetry, wrote to his friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy: “I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.”1 In the letter, Beckett draws a distinction between conscious, agential events (the brain knowing of grit in the wind) and reflex actions – the emission of semen in a hanged man [pendu], and the eyelids coming down without the engagement of the conscious mind. It is this tension between the conscious, agential subject, and automatic bodily events, that comes to constitute a key concern in Beckett’s writing, which dedicates meticulous attention to those bodily functions that fall between intentional and non-intentional events, such as sexual reflexes, breathing, peristalsis, habitual actions, and even, at times, the production of speech itself. In staging this tension, Beckett is in search of a literary form to accommodate an emerging understanding of the self that has its origins in a fundamental finding of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century neurology: the discovery of the autonomous nervous system as independent or near-independent from the conscious, intentional subject. By addressing the evolving understanding of subjectivity, Beckett’s work constitutes part of a wider formal and conceptual shift in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature that reaches its culmination in his late modernist writing. The late eighteenth century saw a radical transformation in the emerging discipline of brain science. Writing in 1765, Robert Whytt (1714–1766), the Scottish physician and early neurophysiologist, contended that the nervous system was governed by the brain: “The nerves are those small cords, which rising from the brain and spinal marrow, are distributed to every part of the body,” he argued, and appear to be “no more than 175

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continuations of the medullary substance.”2 By 1777, however, John Augustus Unzer (1727–1799) had made the discovery that “external impressions [. . .] excite a whole chain of apparently volitional acts, without one of them being felt, or any conception whatever excited.”3 In 1784, the anatomist, Georg Prochaska (1749–1820) took Unzer’s discovery a step further, by demonstrating that a nerve severed from the brain “is still able, if irritated, to cause the muscles to contract as if its connection with the brain were entire.” He argued that “the decapitated frog, if pricked, not only withdraws the punctured limb, but creeps and leaps, which cannot be done without the consensus of the sensorial and motor nerves.”4 These studies proved that seemingly volitional movements could occur without the involvement of the brain; they were detectable even in organisms that did not possess a brain. The methods of experimental psychology revealed that the nerves operated regardless of intention, and continued to operate even when their connection to the brain had been severed. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), who had worked and collaborated with Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) – the first physician to localize mental functions in the brain, in the process inaugurating modern neurology – proposed that the so-called vegetative nervous system functioned independently. By the 1820s, Spurzheim was able to assert that the nervous system “is not an unit, but consists of many essentially different parts, which have their own individual origins, and are mutually in communication.”5 In this way, the nerves acquired an autonomous status which was further consolidated by experiments in reflex arcs, which confirmed that the nervous system responded to external stimuli, rather than to the governance of intention or will. These experiments revealed that much of what had previously been considered intentional action did not in fact require consciousness, even while operations such as peristalsis or the blinking of the eyelid were essential for the organism’s survival. The nerves were now revealed to have an organic intentionality, which was in many cases primary to and more crucial for the subject’s functioning than mental consciousness. Furthermore, evolutionary theory, which had its origins in the turn of the nineteenth century, well before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), suggested that consciousness was a late evolutionary development whose functioning was secondary to the organism’s survival. This new understanding of consciousness differed rather drastically from the Cartesian dictum, “I think therefore I am,” which had seen the rational mind as the defining attribute, the sine qua non, of the human. The work of Darwin and his predecessors declared mental consciousness to be a mere by-product of the body and its various functions.

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In Beckett’s letter to McGreevy, it is precisely reflex action, here the blinking of the eyelid and the pendu’s emission of semen, that is associated with the notion of integrity, which is itself a central preoccupation of the missive. The somatic concerns are metonymic of literary ones, for Beckett complains that his poetry is all “frigged up,” that it is “failing to say what I imagine I want to say,” reducing the writing to a form of “stutter[ing].” It fails not in its “choice of terms,” but ‘because it is facultatif’: optional, like intentional actions, willed and deliberate rather than the result of a “spontaneous combustion.”6 The notion of integrity also extends to the valorization of Beckett’s literary predecessors, Homer, Dante, Racine, and Rimbaud. Integrity, from the Latin integritās (meaning “wholeness, entireness, completeness, integrity, chastity, purity,” both of material and moral quality) might strike one as an odd preoccupation for Beckett, since his writing seems to treat any conception of fullness or of essence with deep, unrelenting suspicion, depending as it does on a notion of self-identity that seems perpetually unachievable, divided against itself. But the word also carries the meaning of something “unimpared” or “uncorrupted,” which may go some way towards clarifying Beckett’s notion that the representation, or even performance, of non-intentional or not fully intentional actions contains an “integrity” that mere conscious and volitional actions leave wanting.7 Beckett’s early novel, Murphy (1938), a philosophical, or more precisely Cartesian parody, humorously stages a number of these concerns. In the novel, Neary, who has been Murphy’s instructor, “could stop his heart more or less whenever he liked and keep it stopped, within reasonable limits, for as long as he liked.” What is an autonomous function is in the figure of Neary transformed into an intentional, volitional one, while Murphy’s own uncontrollable heart, which races at night, is ‘like Petrushka in his box’; the narrator describes it as “irrational,” in a nod to, and joke on Descartes.8 Murphy is similarly unable to contain his sexual urges, and seeks, through his rocking chair, to make his mind “bodytight,” for “The part of him that he hated craved for Celia,” his girlfriend, while “the part of him that he loved shrivelled up at the thought of her.”9 By the time Beckett wrote Murphy (completed in 1936), he had read a number of books on medicine, psychoanalysis, and experimental psychology – as the references to these disciplines in the novel attest – all of which, in various ways, seemed to cast the Cartesian agential subject into question.

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Sexual Reflexes In the summer of 1931, after a trip to Kassel to visit Peggy Sinclair, and a bout of pleurisy that followed, Beckett came across Pierre Garnier’s book, Onanisme seul et à deux sous toutes ses formes et leurs conséquences, in the library of Trinity College Dublin. The book was published in at least ten editions in the 1880s and 1890s; the title, Onanisme, originates in Genesis, in the story of Onan, “who spilled his seed upon the ground rather than into the wife of his dead brother and was struck down.”10 As Beckett observes in his “Dream Notebook,” Onan is the son of Judah and Shuah, and Beckett gives Belacqua, in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), the surname, Shuah. Onanisme was part of the Garnier brothers’ (Librairie Garnier Frères) “Hygiène de la Génération” series, which also included volumes entitled Le Mariage; Le cèlibat et les célibataires and Impuissance physique et morale. Garnier was a physician at the Asile de Bon-Secours in Paris, and his writings are in line with other sexological and antimasturbation publications of the period, which preoccupied themselves either with the detrimental effects masturbation was believed to have on the constitution, the nervous system, and the intellect, frequently resulting in insanity, or were associated with the social purity movement, which insisted on the corrupting effects of masturbation on normative notions of sexuality and character development. Both of these views were to an extent represented in the UK by William Acton’s book, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, first published in 1857. Like Garnier’s book, Acton’s ran into many augmented editions, and the sixth one, of 1875, contained an entire chapter on “self pollution.” Unlike their eighteenth-century predecessors, which tended to treat masturbation as “wilful self-abuse,” what characterized all of these texts was the pathologization of the act through discourses of degeneracy and nervous or mental disorder with, consequently, an emphasis on the loss of agency in the habitual and addictive nature of what was frequently referred to as masturbatory disease.11 At stake in these debates is precisely the evolving understanding of subjectivity, for masturbation formed a threat to the rational, agential subject that now appeared at least partly driven by, and at the mercy of, sexual drives and reflexes. The verb, “masturbate,” is of obscure etymology, but possibly originates in the Greek mazdo, virile member, and turba, disturbance. The OED also suggests an “older conjecture,” in which the verb has its origins in manu, hand, and stuprare, to defile. In Beckett’s work, as his letter to McGreevy, with its reference to his own poetry as the product of “the heat of friction” attests, writing is often suggestively associated with

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masturbation, and the “older conjecture” seems to allow for this reading, occupied as it is with the self-interested, mind-ridden, facultatif “defiling” of a clean sheet through the manipulation of a phallic object. Garnier’s book, Onanisme, contains chapters on the origin, mechanism, causes, effects, prevention (prophylactic), and treatment of masturbation, as well as chapters dedicated to masturbation presenting in children, women, and men and between members of the same and different sexes, all of which bespeak a cultural anxiety associated with the act, and a fervor to contain it. Garnier’s stated aim in Onanisme, by his own account, was to alert the reader to the fact that masturbation, whether practiced by men or by women, was the most frequent and the most fatal impediment to procreation – something that no doubt served to recommend the act to Beckett, and an attitude that was diametrically opposed to that of his major influences, Mani, St. Augustine, and Schopenhauer, all of whom condemned procreation as the perpetuation or origin of suffering.12 Garnier himself seemed almost embarrassingly blind to the very obvious titillation his subject seems to have aroused in him, for the edition Beckett read spanned almost 600 pages, and contained such detailed accounts of various forms of masturbation in men, women, and children that Beckett reported in a letter to Thomas McGreevy, of August 1931, that he felt “soiled” by the reading experience.13 John Pilling has identified fifty-two entries from Garnier’s book in Beckett’s “Dream Notebook.” The entries could be grouped into three rough categories, containing, firstly, curious words or phrases that would have fascinated Beckett for their sound qualities alone, including “glabrosity,” stemming from glabréité and meaning “smooth-skinned,” used for instance in Echo’s Bones for “a Gypsy Rondo, glabrous but fecund.”14 Secondly, Beckett was amused, perhaps, by the various narratives of sexual conduct that feature prominently in Garnier’s book, such as a Languedoc story of a “shepherd-boy, idle young herd” that Beckett made a note of, and that found its way into Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The third category of words and phrases concerns the mechanical nature of sexuality, particularly what could be termed hypersexuality: sexuality that not only problematizes will or agency (as most expressions of sexuality do), but which seems to operate outside of its realm as a form of obsession or compulsion. In Beckett’s early work this encompasses most expressions of autoeroticism, which tend to be compulsive, while in the mature work, autoeroticism is more akin to habit, the “human” variant of instinct. As the narrator of “The End” (1946) puts it, “One can masturbate up to the age of seventy, and even beyond, but in the end it becomes a mere habit.”15

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The entries from Garnier that Beckett copied into his “Dream Notebook” foreground the mechanical nature of sexuality, as well as the manual aspect of autoeroticism, and include words such as “Manustupration,” “mastupration,” “manualization,” “manual vice,” “chiromania” and “manual onanism” as variant names for masturbation, and terms such as “Incubus satyriasis,” “Succubus nymphomania,” and “clitoridian (exuberance)” to refer to gendered variants of hypersexuality. “Erethism” (irritation) and “prurience” (the condition of itching), in turn, denote the consequences of uncontrollable hypersexual urges.16 As John Pilling has shown, a good number of the terms find their way into Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ‘Echo’s Bones’ (1933), More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy, but they also appear in later works such as The Unnamable (1953/1958) and How It Is (1961/1964). In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, completed in 1932 but published only posthumously, Beckett’s protagonist, Belacqua, is presented as a compulsive masturbator, tormented by his sexuality, which in the narrator’s words functions as a “demented hydraulic that was beyond control.’17 Yoshiki Tajiri has drawn attention to the mechanization of sexuality in the novel, particularly the machinic imagery associated with sexuality in Dream and in Beckett’s early work more generally, where “pistons, cylinders and switches” function as tropes for masturbation.18 In Tajiri’s reading, these machinic descriptions owe much to the avant-garde – the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists – and their “mechanomodernism.”19 But they are also Bergsonian in the sense that they foreground the unease that Bergson clearly feels in the face of any suggestion of automatism, and that also drives his theory of humor, which arises from “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.”20 Beckett read Bergson’s book in or about 1930, and would have come across the following passage: I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.21

In Bergson’s Cartesian thinking, the body, which belongs to the realm of matter, has a propensity for machinic comportment, while the spirit that animates it guards the body against rigidifying automatisms. Laughter, belonging in Bergson’s thinking to spirit, similarly protects the subject from the mechanical, but as he himself puts it above, “involuntarily

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I laugh.” Genuine laughter escapes intention and is by its nature convulsive; as such, it is more akin to automatism than to an agential act. In Beckett’s work, masturbation, triggered by the sexual instinct, is significant because it humorously stages Bergson’s concern over loss of agency and even performs it in inducing the reader to involuntary, convulsive laughter. For while masturbation is intentional, the act is performed under an agency of drives and reflexes rather than the agential, autonomous self. Here, the mind fails to be “bodytight,” but the body is similarly not “mindtight,” in a refutation of Cartesian dualism. It is akin to what the Unnamable, in a sly double entendre, calls “the manual aspect of that bitter folly,” the work of “the Prince of Extravas,” as Beckett once called himself, in another term he found in Garnier’s book.22 “Extravasion,” which refers to the leakage of fluid from its container, also appears in Echo’s Bones, in the figure of Baron Extravas;23 it is a repudiation of the “continence” or “regulation of the sexual feelings” that anti-masturbationists such as Acton so fervently advocated.24 For like the blinking of the eyelid or a peristaltic movement, sexual urges can only temporarily be suspended; in machinic manner, they demand eventual “exoneration” – to use yet another term Beckett adopted from Garnier.25 Beckett’s concern over the “integrity” of writing is for a form and style that can accommodate the complexity of the frequently conflicting forces at work in this emerging notion of the self. The narrator of Beckett’s curiously baroque story, “Assumption,” first published in transition in 1929, opens with a “voice” the protagonist desires to contain and simultaneously to expel, which “dramatises the tension between the libidinal flow and the ego’s efforts to dam it up,” while also suggesting a connection between enunciation and sexual urges.26 Lawrence Harvey has argued that the sexually loaded story stages “the relationship between love, mysticism and artistic creation,” which are, to a surprisingly explicit degree, conflated in the text.27 The narrator describes the urge the protagonist feels as a “Power” which denies him “the conscious completion of the merest mongrel.”28 “The process was absurd, extravagantly absurd,” the narrator says, “like boiling an egg over a bonfire.” Beckett reveals his knowledge of the past history of anti-masturbation discourses as forms of “wilful self-abuse” in the narrator’s comment that “in his case it was not a wilful extravagance [. . .] it tore at his throat and he choked it back in dread and sorrow [. . .] and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied.” In the story, the protagonist’s behavior of withdrawal, secrecy and physical wasting, exemplified in the narrator’s observation that “he scarcely left his room, scarcely spoke,” follows the classic

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symptomatology of the masturbator as it is presented in nineteenthcentury anti-masturbation literature.29 The narrator draws an analogy between the artist who must by default be “partly illusionist,” and the protagonist who, in another double entendre, is referred to as a “prestidigitator” (meaning “conjurer,” from the Italian presto and Latin digitus, “nimble-fingered”), and must, therefore, by default, also be “partly artist.”30 In doing so, he alerts the reader to the consonance in the story between masturbation and literary production. Masturbation, as Paul Stewart has argued, is “a manipulation of the real and mental worlds within a confusion of cross-contaminations”;31 put in physiological terms, the sexual reflex can be triggered directly, through physical stimulation, or indirectly, through imagination or emotion, and tends to involve physco-psychic incitements. In Beckett’s early story, however, sexual drives are referred to as “flesh-locked”; they function as distractions and impediments to “conscious completion,” which may in part explain why sexual acts are frequently described in graphically physical terms in Beckett’s work, as Molloy’s toiling and moiling sexual encounter with Ruth/Edith, suggests.32 The scene is also curiously literal, in response, no doubt, to the intensely and often comically metaphorized representations of Romantic and Victorian literature, but the precision in the representation also serves to foreground the curiously mechanical nature of the sex act itself, which renders it equally comical. The figure of the hanged man’s “emission of semen,” returns in Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953). Responding to Estragon’s suggestion that the tramps hang themselves, Vladimir’s comment that “It’d give us an erection!” is immediately supplemented by the lines, “With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow.”33 The hanged man’s ejaculation is a solely “mindtight” form of climax, for it is pure reflex, uncontaminated by the follies of consciousness, and hence considered in Beckett’s letter to McGreevy as an event of prized “integrity,” akin to what in the same letter Beckett calls the “work of the abscess.”34 For while sexuality is mostly represented as a mechanical act in Beckett’s early writing – as tropes such as “hydraulic,” “pistons, cylinders and switches” attest – it is by necessity not only marred by the complications of mind and hence tainted and corrupted, but is itself something that disrupts and intervenes in the artistic aspirations of the protagonists. This also in part accounts for the hostile and often misogynistic representations of the heterosexual act in works such as “First Love” (1946/1973). The narrator of the novella complains that “man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too.” Sexual reflexes render one “no

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longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself.”35 As phrases such as “at the mercy of” or “no longer oneself” attest, it is the loss of agency triggered by sexual drives and reflexes that the narrator objects to, but that in Beckett’s late-modernist writing comes to act as a marker of integrity.

Non-Propositional Speech or Language as Reflex Early in his career, Beckett was aware that speech, too, could be nonagential and escape intention. In Proust, published in 1931, he makes the following, striking observation: In extreme cases memory is so closely related to habit that its word takes flesh, and is not merely available in cases of urgency, but habitually enforced. Thus absence of mind is fortunately compatible with the active presence of our organs of articulation.36

Beckett is here making an observation about non-propositional speech that is premised on repetition and acquired responses that do not require the involvement of the intentional mind. By contrast with propositional speech, which is volitional and requires mental effort, what neurolinguists call “ready-mades” operate automatically, and Beckett’s work frequently foregrounds this other of speech. The discovery of non-volitional speech was made in 1864 by the British neurologist, John Hughlings Jackson, whose research unveiled that cardiovascular disease was sometimes accompanied by the loss of “expression of ideas [. . .] as distinguished from the mere utterance of words by the lips, tongue and palate.”37 This was a result of a blockage to an artery, which had caused damage to the ventroposterior region of the frontal lobes, the language-area in the brain. The prolific utterance of non-propositional speech has in psychiatric practice, in turn, been considered a marker of psychosis, but the utterance of “ready-mades” such as greetings, oaths, curses, and other interjections, nursery rhymes, proverbs, and prayers, is in fact a prominent feature of all speech, everyone’s speech. In this category of utterance, Hughlings Jackson included swearing, which, he argued, is not “strictly speaking [. . .] a part of language,” but a habit that adds emotional force “to the expression of ideas.”38 Interjections and other ejaculations, he argues, belong to the same category of non-verbal utterances, for they “have become easy of elaboration by long habit, and would require but slight stimulus for perfect execution.” For Hughlings Jackson, “the explanation of the way in which these phrases are so to speak manufactured is that they are a reflex.”39 In showing how such reflexes

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underlie or inhabit all speech, he seems to suggest that they constitute the other of language production: both not-speech and the very substance itself of speech. By the time Beckett wrote The Unnamable (1953), his work had come to look far less “frigged up” than the early work. Instead, the Unnamable’s voice often explicitly escapes intention, and bears a far closer resemblance to non-propositional automatisms and the vagaries of reflex action. Voice in the novel functions in the manner of a conditioned reflex that the narrator cannot undo: “It issues from me from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, [. . .] with this voice that is not mine, but can only be mine, since there is no one but me.”40 In the affirmative clauses, the subject is the Unnamable’s voice (referred to as “it”), rather than the Unnamable himself, which foregrounds his lack of agency or volition, while in the negative clauses, it is the “I” of the Unnamable, the subject itself that “can’t stop” the voice, “can’t prevent it,” is powerless, has “no voice and must speak.” The novel repeatedly suggests an affinity between voice and tears which, the Unnamable states, “stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes.” The tears continue to stream although “There is nothing saddening here.”41 Crying, as Darwin put it, is one of the “special expressions of man”; like language, it is species-specific, and like most reflexes, it can be involuntary or involve a degree of volition.42 In this, it is akin to the representation of speech in Beckett’s work, for while his writing is carefully crafted, it often represents speech that is automatic, devoid of propositional content, functioning like a conditioned reflex in the manner of weeping or the salivation of Pavolv’s dogs, and even a bodily function or emission, like the pendu’s ejaculation of semen or Mouth’s scatological outpour in Not I (1972), which appropriately takes place in the “nearest lavatory.”43 In Waiting for Godot (1953), which Beckett completed in 1949 and wrote between Malone Dies and The Unnamable, propositional speech recedes into the background, while the tramps’ dialogue consists for the most part of repeated phrases and idioms: estragon: Que voulez-vous? vladimir : I beg your pardon? estragon: Que voulez-vous? vladimir : Ah! Que voulez-vous. Exactly. [Silence.] estragon: That wasn’t such a bad little canter.44

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The tramps are here exchanging ready-made phrases rather than ideas – idioms or tags that function as phatic communication or noise that passes the time. Something similar occurs when Estragon makes the suggestion: “let’s abuse each other.” The tramps utter a series of vacuous insults, including “Moron!”, “Vermin!”, “Abortion!”, “Sewer-rat!”, “Curate!”, and “Cretin,” and it is only the word “Crritic!” that takes effect, for Vladimir “wilts, vanquished, and turns away,” affronted and uttering “Oh!”. Estragon makes the suggestion, ‘Now let’s make it up.’45 The tramps then go through another set of habitual utterances. As Bergson acknowledged, these “ready-made formulas and stereotyped phrases” induce laughter.46 But it is of course Lucky’s monologue that most acutely brings automatic utterances to the fore, and critics have read in his speech the markers of shell-shock, aphasia and schizophrenia, all conditions in which non-propositional speech can feature prominently. His language is rife with academic idioms: as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labours of men that as a result of the labours left unfinished of Testew and Cunard it is established herein after but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattman it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labours of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown, of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation is seen to waste and pine waste and pine47

Pozzo tells the tramps that Lucky “used to think very prettily once [. . .] Now . . . [He shudders.]”48 Phrases such as “as a result of the labours,” “it is established beyond all doubt,” “in view of the labours left unfinished,” or “as a result of the public works” do not, indeed, reflect ideas. They add no propositional content to the thought that man “is seen to waste and pine.” They are formulaic phrases, “rhetoric reduced to habit,”49 uttered automatically, now stripped of semantic content. Lucky’s utterance is also lacking in conjunctions (such as “and,” “but” or “if”) that would establish the relationship between the jumbled clauses, and is therefore an example of so-called telegraphic speech, a symptom of neurological disorders such as aphasia. It also makes a prominent appearance in works such as The Unnamable, Happy Days, and Not I. A number of the names Lucky utters – “Testew,” “Fartov” and “Belcher” – have mutated into nearobscenities or forms of abuse; they are no longer words in any conventional sense. And he stutters: “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry,” which

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brings to mind Deleuze’s observation that in certain writers, it is not only speech but language itself that begins “to scream, stutter, stammer or murmur.” These writers, Deleuze argues, are inventing a “minor use” of a major language, carving out “a foreign language within [their] own language.”50 Beckett’s work, I want to argue, does precisely this: his focus is on the other of language, which he awakens within his own, turning this underside of language into what in Derridean terms would constitute a signature. Lucky’s comportment mirrors his utterances, as can be seen in his quivering responses to Pozzo’s commands: “Up pig!”, “Up hog!”, “Back!”, “Stop!”, “Turn!”, “Dance, misery!”, “Encore!” and “Think, pig!”.51 In the early 1930s Beckett read Max Nordau’s book Degeneration, which had been translated into English in 1895 from the German original, Entartung (1892). He took reading notes on what was first known as “maladie de tics de Gilles de la Tourette,” and later as Tourette’s syndrome: “Gilles de la Tourette has coined the word ‘coprolalia’ (mucktalk) for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and obscenities which characterize a malady described most exhaustively by M. Catrou, and called by him ‘disease of convulsive tics.’ M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree.”52 There is a suggestion of coprolalia in Lucky’s use of names, and the “voice” that the protagonist of “Assumption” cannot contain seems distinctly Tourettic. Beckett also took notes on Nordau’s observations on echolalia, another prominent symptom of Tourette’s syndrome: “the weak-minded [. . .] hears a word, and feels compelled to repeat it, once or oftener, sometimes to the extent of ‘Echolalia’; or it calls into his consciousness other words similar to it in sound, but not connected with it in meaning, whereupon he thinks and talks in a series of completely disconnected rhymes; or else words have, besides their similarity of sound, a very remote and weak connection of meaning: this gives rise to punning.”53 What is most striking about Nordau’s emphasis on the sound qualities and disconnected rhymes of echolalia and other “weakminded” word associations, as he puts it, is their close proximity to poetic language: to polysemy, rhymes, rhythms, and punning. In Not I (1972), Mouth suffers from mutism, but once a year, “always winter some strange reason,” she begins to spew out language, as we have seen, in the “nearest lavatory”:54 . . . whole body like gone . . . just the mouth . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . never . . . what? . . . tongue? . . . yes . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . tongue . . . never still a second . . . mouth on fire . . . stream of words . . . in her ear . . .

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practically in her ear . . . not catching the half . . . not the quarter . . . no idea what she’s saying . . . imagine! . . . no idea what she’s saying! . . . and can’t stop . . . no stopping it . . . she who but a moment before . . . but a moment! . . . could not make a sound . . . no sound of any kind . . . now can’t stop . . . imagine! . . . can’t stop the stream . . . and the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain . . . begging the mouth to stop . . . pause a moment . . . if only for a moment . . . and no response . . . as if she hadn’t heard . . . or couldn’t . . . couldn’t pause a second . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop.55

Mouth’s speech escapes intention (“no idea what she’s saying!”) and becomes scatological, a form of logorrhoea. This non-propositional, automatic, convulsive aesthetic extends to the very texture of Beckett’s language. In a letter of October 1972, sent to Alan Schneider, the foremost American director of his plays, Beckett writes that in Not I he is making a distinction “between mind & voice,” which recalls, even in representational terms, Hughlings Jackson’s distinction between “expression of ideas” and “the mere utterance of words by the lips, tongue, and palate.” He adds that Mouth’s speech is “a purely buccal phenomenon without mental control or understanding, only half heard.” He defines it as “Function running away with organ.”56 Beckett picked up this idea from his reading in 1934 of Karin Stephen’s book, Psychoanalysis and Medicine: A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill (1933), and his “Psychology Notes” on Stephen’s book contain the line: “The sheer terror of being run away with by a bodily function.”57 Language in Beckett, then, far from performing the self often seems to speak itself. Something similar is at stake in Happy Days (1961), which opens with Winnie’s “inaudible prayer,” and its audible closing words, “For Jesus Christ sake Amen” and ‘“World without end Amen.”58 S. E. Gontarski points out that “Winnie never hears her prayer. It is simply part of her morning ritual, her habit,” while for Ruby Cohn it is “automatic.”59 When Winnie sees an emmet carrying an egg, and exclaims “God,” she is invoking “deity as a mere expletive.”60 One of Beckett’s problems in writing the play, as he put it in a letter to Alan Schneider in December 1960, was “how to have [Winnie] speak alone on the stage all that time, without speaking to herself or to the audience.”61 In another letter, of August 1961, Beckett instructed Schneider, who was directing the American premiere of the play, to maintain “same tone throughout polishing mechanically, no emotion . . . In a word I am asking here for vocal monotony and relying

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on speech rhythms and speech-gesture complexes.”62 In 1971, when Beckett was directing Eva Katharina Schultz as Winnie in Glückliche Tage in the Schiller Theater in Berlin, “he wanted something close to a chant for the literary quotations.”63 Throughout the play, Winnie indeed cites her classics thoughtlessly, in a chant-like manner, as rhythm and sound pattern. Gray’s lines from “Ode to a Distant Prospect of Eton College” become “something something laughing wild amid severest woe.”64 Winne’s refrain, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, is repeated by Willie, “Fear no more.”65 In the play the works of the English-language canon are stripped of their content and reduced to their sound qualities, bringing to mind Bergson’s comments on aphasia in Matter and Memory (1896, trans. 1911): In cases of dementia, we sometimes find that intelligent answers are given to a succession of questions which are not understood: language here works after the manner of a reflex. Aphasics, incapable of uttering a word spontaneously, can recollect without mistake the words of an air which they sing. Or again, they will fluently repeat a prayer, a series of numbers, the days of the week, the months of the year.66

Speech has here become a bodily function, operating in the manner of a reflex, for as we have seen, Beckett had an early awareness of the fact that automatisms underlie speech – not merely pathological speech, but all speech. In Happy Days, even Winnie’s classics have become the readymades of non-propositional speech. Through frequent repetition, their content has been lost, and the lines of verse have eroded, altering their form. It is this carefully crafted representation of that other of speech that Beckett sought to stage, and that became his signature.

Reflex Beckett’s writing also demonstrates an abiding interest in other forms of habitual action, which present a challenge to our received understanding of what it means to be human, because they seem to entail an absence of thought, reflection, and intentionality, and, like sexual reflexes or non-propositional language, appear closer to a form of automatism. For William James, writing in 1890, habits, like other nervous events, are “mechanically, nothing but a reflex discharge”. The most complex habits, he argues, consist of “concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths”.67 Habit is therefore antithetical to what we value in ourselves: critical reflection, intentional actions, and an Aristotelian capacity for wonder. For this reason, habit features prominently in the work of a number of

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philosophers, many of whom view it with suspicion. However, there is an alternative line of thinking that can be traced back at least to the work of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, whose essay, Of Habit, from 1838, influenced anti-rationalist writers and thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Gilles Deleuze. Ravaisson, who was Bergson’s tutor at the École normale supérieure, identified two categories of habit: one that was mechanical and consisted in simple repetition. Here one could give the example of Winnie enumerating the contents of her bag or voicing her “classics,” or of Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) eating too many bananas and drinking too much, which are habits he tries to break, without success. The second category of habit originates in an intentional act, such as learning to play a musical instrument, or to dance, or to practice a sport, which initially requires effort, but eventually becomes routine, an acquired or second nature. This aspect of habit includes the notion of grace, which comes from its unselfconscious quality: movement and behavior become automatic rather than premeditated, as in the “muscle memory” of professional dancers or vaudeville performers. Although Beckett’s early writing, especially Proust, treats habit in exceedingly negative ways, as “a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence,” the grace that comes with habit also constitutes a central aspect of Beckett’s oeuvre.68 In fact, it comes to occupy an increasingly significant part of the late work for the stage and the screen. Beckett, who had a fondness for Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre,” from 1810, had a deep appreciation for this variety of grace. Beckett owned a copy of Űber das Marionettentheater, Aufsätze und Anekdoten,69 which had been gifted to him by the German actress, Nancy Illig, with whom he had worked on Spiel and He, Joe.70 In a letter to Barbara Bray, of October 3, 1969, Beckett referred to Kleist’s essay as “extraordinary” and in another letter to her written ten days later he made reference to the “marvellous essay on Marionetten theatre with unforgettable anecdote of duel with bear.”71 The book was in Beckett’s library at the time of his death, and he had marked the following passage of the essay: Und der Vorteil, den diese Puppe vor lebendigen Tänzern voraus haben würde? Der Vorteil? Zuvörderst ein negativer, mein vortrefflicher Freund, nämlich dieser, daß sie sich niemals zierte. – Denn Ziererei erscheint, wie

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Kleist argued in the essay that self-consciousness destroys gracefulness in humans, for it produces “affectation.” His account of the marionettes and the fencing bear exemplify how, “in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, the natural graces within emerge ever more radiant and supreme.”73 Kleist’s influence can be seen clearly in Beckett’s work as a director, for he paid meticulous attention to the rhythm, grace, and precision of both gesture and enunciation, to the point where these appeared, in finished productions, habitual and automatic. He was far less concerned, if at all, with the actor’s “understanding” of his work. This can be detected in his repeated instruction to Billie Whitelaw not to “act,” because “acting,” which implies self-consciousness, would take away from the graceful gesture and posture of habitual, mechanical action and enunciation that Beckett trained his actors to achieve. When Beckett was rehearsing Eva Katharina Schultz for the role of Winnie in Glückliche Tage in Berlin, he focused on “the rhythm, pace, pitch, and volume of her voice and the rhythm and timing of her movements.” In Beckett’s view, “precision and economy would produce the maximum of grace,” and he quoted Kleist’s essay to make his point.74 Similarly, some years later, in 1976, when Beckett was rehearsing the BBC production of the television play Ghost Trio at the Ealing film studios in London, he referred both the actor, Ronald Pickup, and his biographer, James Knowlson, to Kleist’s essay, in order to clarify his point about “the relations between economy and the grace and harmony that he wanted to see in the movements of the protagonist.”75 This economy, grace, and harmony arise precisely from the implication that F, the male figure in Ghost Trio (1975), has been performing the same actions for so long that they have become second nature, or, to use a different term, an unaffected habit. The choreography of . . . but the clouds . . . (1976) displays its own peculiar grace: the exact number and precise direction of M’s movements, five steps to and from north, east, south, and west shadow, is meticulously prescribed. A similar emphasis on habitual, mechanical movement can be seen in all of the late plays. In Footfalls (1975), M’s nine steps and reel appear as if controlled by a clockwork mechanism, and Beckett in fact advocated that the rocking of W’s chair in Rockaby (1980), should be “Controlled mechanically.”76 In Quad (1982), four players, who for preference have “Some ballet

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training,” complete a strictly choreographed set of permutations, always avoiding the “danger zone” at the centre of a quadrangle.77 What Where (1983), Beckett’s final play, is marionette theater, albeit with real actors on stage. The movements and enunciations of its “players” – Beckett no longer called them characters or even actors – are machinic and mechanically regular, as their permutations seem to suggest. Beckett’s work, then, insists on acknowledging the other of the rational, agential, and intentional self. This non-agential self includes the often humorous, at times agonising, and frequently also graceful functions of reflex action, minor language, and habit. These are also the faculties that are frequently retained in circumstances of loss: extreme old age, dementia, and brain damage. In this, they seem to constitute a more profound sense of ontology than the agential self, which may explain why Beckett found in them the uncorrupted and unaffected “integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen” or of “the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.”

Notes 1. SB to Thomas McGreevy, October 18, 1932, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (henceforth LSB) i: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 134–135. 2. Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Those Disorders Which Have Been Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric: To Which Are Prefixed Some Remarks on the Sympathy of the Nerves, Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1765, 1. 3. John Augustus Unzer, Principles of a Physiology of the Proper Animal Nature of Animal Organisms, trans. Thomas Laycock, London: The Sydenham Society, 1851, 241. 4. Georg Prochaska, The Principles of Psychology by John Augustus Unzer; A Dissertation on the Functions of the Nervous System by Georg Prochaska, trans. Thomas Laycock, London: The Sydenham Society, 1851, 397, 430. 5. Johann G. Spurzheim, The Anatomy of the Brain with a General View of the Nervous System, trans. R. Willis, London: S. Highley, 1826, 14–15. 6. SB to Thomas McGreevy, August 18, 1932, in LSB i, 133, 134. 7. “Integrity,” in Oxford English Dictionary, 2e, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 8. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays, London: Faber, 2009, 4. 9. Ibid., 70, 7. 10. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, New York: Zone Books, 2003, 15.

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11. Antimasturbation literature exhibits a confusion between cause and effect, for brain injury and various neuro-degenerative diseases can be the cause of hypersexuality. 12. Pierre Garnier, Onanisme seul et à deux sous toutes ses formes et leurs conséquences, Paris: Libraire Garnier frères, 1890s, 1. For an extended discussion of the influence of Mani, St. Augustine and Schopenhauer on Beckett’s views on reproduction, see Paul Stewart’s Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 13. Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling, Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999, xvii. 14. Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones, ed. Mark Nixon, London: Faber, 2014, 11. 15. Samuel Beckett, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End with First Love, ed. Christopher Ricks, London: Faber, 2009, 51. 16. Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, 65, 62, 64. 17. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992, 41. 18. Yoshiki Tajiri, “The Mechanization of Sexuality in Beckett’s Early Work,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 12, 2002, 195. 19. Ibid., 193. 20. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, New York: Macmillan, 1921, 49. 21. Ibid., 32. 22. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor, London: Faber, 2010, 11. Beckett refers to himself as the “Prince of Extravas” in a letter to McGreevy of December 12, 1932, cited by John Pilling in Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, 68. 23. Beckett, Echo’s Bones, 21. 24. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life, London: Churchill, 1857, 9. 25. As Yoshiki Tajiri points out, the verb “exonerate” is “seemingly innocent,” but Garnier associates it with ejaculation. See “The Mechanization of Sexuality in Beckett’s Early Work,” 202, n. 2. See also entries numbered [447], [458] and [466] in Beckett’s Dream Notebook, 63, 65, 66. 26. Tajiri, “The Mechanization of Sexuality in Beckett’s Early Work,” 198–199. 27. Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, 287. 28. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press, 1995, 4. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. “Prestidigitator,” in Oxford English Dictionary. 31. Paul Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work, 35. 32. Beckett, The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, 5, 4. See also Samuel Beckett, Molloy, ed. Shane Weller, London: Faber, 2009, 56. 33. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber, 1990, 18. 34. SB to Thomas McGreevy, August 18, 1932, in LSB i, 134.

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35. Beckett, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End with First Love, 66. 36. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: Calder, 1999, 31. 37. J. Hughlings Jackson, “Loss of Speech: Its Association with Valvular Disease of the Heart and with Hemiplegia on the Right Side,” in J. Hughlings Jackson, “Reprint of Some of Dr. Hughlings Jackson’s Papers on Affections of Speech,” Brain 38, 1915, 30. For the first discussion of Hughlings Jackson and Beckett’s work, see Laura Salisbury and Chris Code, ‘Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language’ in Beckett, Medicine and the Brain, eds. Elizabeth Barry, Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury, special issue of Journal of Medical Humanities 37:2 (2016): 205–222. 38. Ibid., 40. 39. Ibid., 41. In 1879, Hughlings Jackson further clarified that “phrases, which have a propositional structure, have in the mouths of speechless patients no propositional function.” J. Hughlings Jackson, “On Affections of Speech from Disease of the Brain,” in Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson, Volume Two, ed. James Taylor, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932,171–183 (174). 40. Beckett, The Unnamable, 18. 41. Ibid., 3. 42. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray, 1872. 43. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays, London: Faber, 2009, 92. 44. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 60. 45. Ibid., 70. 46. Bergson, Laughter, 112. 47. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 42. 48. Ibid., 39. 49. Charles R. Lyons, Samuel Beckett, London: Macmillan, 1983, 33. 50. Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 109, 110. 51. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 24, 25, 39, 41. 52. Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse, Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, 499. 53. Nordau, Degeneration, 65. 54. Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays, 92. 55. Ibid., 89–90. 56. Samuel Beckett, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 283. 57. Samuel Beckett, “Psychology Notes,” TCD MS 10971/7/2. The connection between Beckett’s note on Karin Stephen’s book and his 1972 letter to Alan Schneider was first made by Salisbury and Code, in ‘Jackson’s Parrot’, 211.

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58. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, London: Faber, 2010, 5. 59. S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, 74; Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973, 179. 60. Cohn, Back to Beckett, 179. 61. Beckett, No Author Better Served, 77. 62. Ibid., 95. 63. Cohn, Back to Beckett, 189. 64. Beckett, Happy Days, 18. 65. Ibid., 15. 66. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, London: Macmillan, 1911, 99. 67. See William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1918), pp. 107–108. 68. Beckett, Proust, 18–19. 69. Heinrich von Kleist, Űber das Marionettentheater, Aufsätze und Anekdoten., Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1968 [1954]. 70. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 97. 71. Ibid. 72. Heinrich von Kleist, Űber das Marionettentheater, Aufsätze und Anekdoten, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1968, 8. The English translation reads: “And the advantage such a puppet would have over a living dancer? The advantage? First a negative gain, my excellent friend, specifically this: that such a figure would never be affected. For affectation appears, as you know, when the soul (vis mortrix) locates itself at any point other than the center of gravity of the movement.” Cited in Nixon and Van Hulle, 238, n. 26. 73. Heinrich Von Kleist, On a Theatre of Marionettes, trans. Gerti Wilford, London: Acorn Press, 1989, 11. 74. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, 584. 75. Ibid., 632. 76. Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays, 126. 77. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 453.

chapter 11

Beckett’s Disabled Language Laura Salisbury

“My wound existed before me,” wrote poet Joë Bousquet: “I was born to embody it.”1 Bousquet was injured by a bullet in 1918 and he lived with paraplegia and the pain it caused him until 1950, composing poems infused with opiated imagery. Samuel Beckett never had a similarly life-changing wound, though he experienced considerable ill health and a serious injury. Still, there remains an uncanny sense that he too found in the crevices of physical and mental suffering, and then in the frailties that came at the end of his long life, flashes of linguistic possibility for which his writing had always been searching. In late life, Beckett struck up a friendship with writer Lawrence Shainberg, who was exploring neurological dysfunction in his work. As Shainberg recounts, Beckett showed an unusual level of interest in this, suggesting that “With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence – what you, for example, might call ‘brain damage’ – the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express [. . .].” Of course, he knew that this was not a new project for him, only a more extreme version of the one he’d always set himself [. . .] It was always here, in “the clash,” as he put it to me once, “between can’t and must” that he took his stand.2

As Beckett’s letter to Shainberg of July 15, 1979 affirms, there remained a “preposterous conviction, formed long ago, that here in the end is the last & by far the best chance for the writer. Gaping into his synaptic chasms.”3 In the experiences of old age and bodily and cognitive decline, in the inevitable ruptures in ideas of an empowered, whole, fully intending, and independent subject, it seems that Beckett found shapes and forms for which his writing had always been waiting. In 1949, when Beckett was merely forty years old, he published with art critic Georges Duthuit “Three Dialogues” on the subject of contemporary painting. There he set out 195

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a series of aesthetic (im)possibilities on which Beckett Studies leaned for many years, in the absence of other materials: I speak of an art turning from [the plane of the feasible] in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able [. . .] [T]here 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.4

The “grey canon” of Beckett’s letters and notebooks helps us to see the persistence of Beckett’s attention to this impossible obligation to express. But most significantly it casts a reflected light on Beckett’s key statements about art by showing the continuity of his commitment to finding shapes and containers for his work not in standard aesthetic models or ideas, but in accounts of language drawn from neurology and psychology that demonstrate its compact not with the “higher faculties” of cognition, conation, and intention, but with a recalcitrant, wayward materiality. For those interested in how Beckett mined psychological and neurological language pathologies to form his concerns with the limits of expression, the opening up of the “grey canon” of notebooks, notes, and letters has provided detailed materials that anatomize Beckett’s resources for compulsively evoking a “vox inanis” (an empty voice).5 Such sources help critics track, with valuable precision, how Beckett used the particularly embodied qualities of language to deform and extend the generally accepted limits of human speech and writing; they also enable criticism to place him in relation to literary traditions bent on disturbing the smooth relations between idea and expression. And yet, for all Beckett’s assertions that language is not a smoothly transparent medium that communicates without altering a world of ideas that sits behind it, for all his emphasis on the compulsive qualities of speech and writing which drain off the security of subjective intention, and for all his insistence on the diverse resistances to be eked out from bringing different languages into contact, the critical use of these materials sometimes invokes a relationship between sources and literary texts that implies the neat identifications Beckett warned of in one of his earliest critical essays.6 We might say, then, that despite the content of Beckett’s statements on language, the archive itself is frequently taken to function in a linguistically normative fashion – as a receptacle for contents that can then be found scattered across the oeuvre. This chapter therefore seeks to explore the ways in which the “grey canon” helps us understand the influences that brought themselves to bear on Beckett’s work, while recognizing the notion that this material “must” offer a key

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that unlocks texts’ needs to be held against the specific “can’t” adumbrated over and again in the writing. In exploring his interest in and use of the symptoms and experiences of people whose language pushes the boundaries of neurological normativity – stammering, Tourette’s syndrome, and expressive and receptive disorders such as aphasia – I also want to explore what it would mean to mark Beckett’s language not as pathological but as disabled; in so doing, I will suggest that the work produces conditions under which the idea that the avatar of the human must be a rational, independent speaking and writing subject might be rethought.

Body Language There is a point towards the end of the final volume of Beckett’s letters where the voice in the archive falters. Missives feel telegraphed and truncated, with the elderly writer apologizing for long silences and holes in his correspondence, while detailing his difficulties in walking, thinking, and writing: “the old legs are only part of the problem, the main trouble is cerebral, grey matter starved of blood [. . .] In a word, gone gaga.”7 But Beckett follows the word “gaga,” for which he had a fondness way back in Murphy, with a quotation from the first poem in Addenda I from Watt, written in the 1940s: “‘Who can tell the tale Of the old man?’: I try half heartedly.”8 Never dislocated for long from the insistent concerns of his oeuvre, there remains a signature. Flashes sweep round repeatedly in most letters that sound “like something out of Beckett,”9 as when he writes to one of his oldest friends, Mary Manning Howe: “I hope words have now failed me.”10 Of course, Mary Manning was the recipient of many letters from Beckett, and in 1937 he told her his ideas about disrupting and pathologizing language: “I am starting a Logoclasts league,” he proclaimed: “I am the only member at present. The idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude, like a hernia.”11 The late Beckett is repeating a careerlong refrain, then, even as one might note a movement away from the young man’s disruptively active “logoclasm” towards a more passive voice – something less controlled and intentional. The note to Manning was written two days after Beckett’s famous letter to Axel Kaun spoke of drilling “one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through’;12 and, read together, the involuntary, embodied qualities of the hernia and an oozing void seem limned with significance. Beckett notes, with some pleasure, that in writing in his imperfect German he is able to “violate a foreign language as involuntarily as, with knowledge and

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intention, I would like to do against my own language,”13 and of course he famously turned to writing texts in French to repeat the effect; but he also turned to models of language that both fall below and exceed normative ideas of language’s association with intention and communication. When, in late life, Beckett suggested that there may be a chance for the writer in “[g]aping into his synaptic chasms,” it seems likely that he was not renaming the “synaptic cleft” – the space between neurons across which nerve impulses are transmitted associated with communication, intention, action; for the synaptic chasms here seem more like losses and lesions: “brain damage.” But the uncertainty gets to the point: for Beckett, it is clear, pretty much from the beginning, that one can make something (or nothing) from a language riddled with ruptures and gaps. Beckett’s last poem, “what is the word,” was written in 1988, following a period of aphasia resulting from a stroke: one “last chance,” perhaps. In this poem, words are scattered like glacial moraine across and down the page, formed into heaps that never quite form a sum: folly seeing all this – this – what is the word – this this – all this this here –14

A question is then posed – what is the word – – though this cannot be proposed with absolute certainty as there are no punctuation marks other than the blank deferring action of dashes that Beckett termed his “traits de désunion” (as opposed to “trait d’union,” French for hyphen).15 Potential certainty is offered by the bald answer “over there –,” but confidence in this assertion slips away as the adverb “there” is gradually distanced from the implied subject by an accumulation of increasingly indistinct prepositions: away over there – [. . .] afar away over there – [. . .] afaint afar away over there – [. . .]16

Although “afaint afar away” points rather precisely back to the final words of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s remains a trembling hand, as the last words are stuttered out and rubbed over: folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what – what – what is the word – what is the word.17

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Despite the implication of insistent deferral, this is, nevertheless, a finish – both of the poem and published oeuvre. And Beckett clearly wanted it that way. He wrote on the top of his manuscript “Keep! for end,”18 characteristically, though paradoxically, attached to the idea that a final set of words that insisted on refusing to offer a last word would be where his writing should stop, if not ever find its full stop. But if aphasia was Beckett’s omega, the grey canon illuminates that psychological and neurological atypicalities were his alpha, too. In a notebook from the early 1930s, filled when he was writing his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett was clearly compelled by conditions that disturbed the smooth relationship between idea, intention, and embodied execution. Beckett was particularly concerned to note down from Max Nordau’s 1892 Degeneration terms that marked how language and intention might be disarticulated: he specifically pulled out “ZwangsVorstellung (coercive idea, obsession)” and “aboulia (absence of will),” alongside terms for neurological language disturbances: “echolalia (word & sound repetition),” “logorrhea,” and “coprolalia (mucktalk).”19 Nordau was a doctor who had studied under Jean-Martin Charcot, and he used psychological and neurological terms in Degeneration to condemn the modern art of the 1890s as contaminated with symptoms of pathology caused by refusing the rationality associated with realism and modes of figurative ordering. For Nordau, such artists and their work, alongside their audiences, were tainted by expressions of mind that were degenerate because defective in the “higher” faculties of cognition and conation – they were compulsive, will-less, associated more with the body than a mind in sovereign control. As Nordau put it, quoting Guérinsen, and Beckett transcribed, “Genius,” at least of this sort, “is a disease of the nerves.”20 Beckett’s reasons for scrutinizing Nordau’s text come more clearly into focus when we read his letters from the period. For he surely hoped that his own unruly bodily systems – heart palpitations, a powerfully disrupted peristalsis, and what one doctor described as his “deep-seated septic cystic system”21 – might allow him to claim the position of nervous genius. In Nordau’s text, language and representation are forced into an alarmingly slippery continuity with the somatic and with the body’s more semi-automatic processes, and from this we can see Beckett beginning to wonder whether a kind of “body language” might offer possibilities for his writing. Beckett suggested to his friend Thomas McGreevy, in both pride and despair, that he rejected what was high-minded in his poetry to pursue the back passages of art: the “Give us a wipe’ class of guttersnippet continues to please me,” he groaned, for “[o]ne has to buckle the wheel

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of one’s poem somehow [. . .] Or run the risk of Nordau’s tolerance.”22 And in this period, Beckett certainly remained plagued by a sense that no one was interested in publishing his work and that he was not in full control of his artistic material. He wondered whether printing his work, his “Beckett Bowel Books,”23 on toilet paper would facilitate the inevitable process by which they would be flushed away, while complaining elsewhere of feeling “soiled [. . .] with the old demon notesnatching” from Nordau and others.24 But although there is something disgusted in this selfrecognition, the oddly compulsive method of parroting material from Nordau at least allowed a positive identification with those modern artists compelled by “echolalias,” obsessions, pathologies, and bodily drives. As the 1930s progress, however, Beckett begins to imagine a strikingly embodied linguistic aesthetic that can take a bit of capital from this incompetence. In a letter to McGreevy from 1932, he speaks of wanting to produce a writing that would not be “facultatif,” optional;25 instead, he invokes an ejaculatory form of expression that would be obligatory, reflexive: “I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s [hanged man’s] emission of semen [. . .] the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.”26 Afflicted with boils and cysts that he imagined he worked up out of self-involvement and psychological pain, Beckett initially associates all writing that does “not represent a necessity” with the “fraudulent manoeuvres” of a style that mirrors his ailments: “the work of the abscess.”27 But not long afterwards, abscesses begin to figure a little hope – a precious, though abjected, relief and release from an art that otherwise feels “all frigged up, in terram, faute d’orifice [for want of an orifice].”28 In 1933, Beckett writes another letter to McGreevy, turning his language towards a reflexive embodiment that might puncture the stretched skin of artistic intention linked with cognition and a masturbatory exercising of will with an involuntary emission: “It’s an ill cyst that blows nobody any good. I find it more and more difficult to write and I think I write worse and worse in consequence. But I still have hopes of its all coming in a gush like a bloody flux.”29 But it was not until the Trilogy and Texts for Nothing, written in a compulsive burst of creative activity between 1947 and 1951, that Beckett finally found an appropriate artistic container in language imaged as vomit, shit, slobber and tears that dribble or gush from his creatures. In Text for Nothing VIII (1951), language that echoes the earlier notion of a weeping abscess mingles verbal outpouring with bodily fluids, words with tears, as the discrete qualities of intention-bound meaning seep towards disorganization:

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I confuse them, words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth [. . .] it’s forever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end that gives meaning to words.30

In The Unnamable (1949), however, anal incontinence becomes an explicit analog for the birth of language, subject, and artwork, oddly repeating those earlier feared and longed-for emissions and explosions: “I’ll let down my trousers and shit stories on them, stories, photographs, records, sites, lights, gods and fellow-creatures [. . .] Be born, dear friends, be born, enter my arse, you’ll just love my colic pains, it won’t take long, I’ve the bloody flux.”31 The Unnamable is also forcefed, vomiting forth words of others that will never be at one with its intentional capacities: “It is they who dictate this torrent of balls, they who stuffed me full of these groans that choke me. And out it all pours unchanged, I have only to belch to be sure of hearing them.”32 This “body language” matches the aesthetic aspiration Beckett marks to the art critic Georges Duthuit during the same period, as urgent embodied expression becomes an evacuation: “I can only invoke this unintelligible, unchallengeable need to splash colour on [the canvas], even if that means vomiting one’s whole being.”33 For better and worse, writing and language pour out in terror and relief as shit, vomit, slobber, pus, and tears in a relentless logorrhoea. If Beckett works to pathologize his language by associating it with the abject bodily materials, then language necessarily becomes associated with the semi-automatic workings of a nervous system represented as functioning at the lower levels of the hierarchies of the neurological body established in the nineteenth century.34 And this links, in turn, to Beckett’s use of neurological and psychological language “pathologies” themselves. For Nordau, it was clear what non-normative language signifies: “[d]egenerates lisp and stammer instead of speaking. They utter monosyllabic cries, instead of constructing grammatically and syntactically articulated sentences,” he opined, criticizing the “babbling and stammering” of late nineteenth-century Symbolist poetry which brings “no intellectual processes but only moods.”35 For Nordau, “[t]he march of progress is characterized by the expansion of consciousness and the contraction of the unconscious; the strengthening of the will and the weakening of impulsions.”36 But for Beckett, using “disordered” language in contact with “moods” and “impulsions” rather than straight lines of the will is what is needed if one is to “buckle the wheel” of one’s writing.37

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Working on the Nerves In the letter to McGreevy of October 18, 1932, Beckett noted that he was “not ashamed to stutter like this with you who are used to my wild way of failing to say what I imagine I want to say and understands that until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the mouth must stutter or rest.”38 He nevertheless implies that at this point he is ashamed to stutter with others. As Gilles Deleuze famously suggests, however, stuttering was to become one of Beckett’s artistic signatures.39 In the final throes of The Unnamable, for example, the comma splice insists while the full stop and semi-colon are banished or reduced, effecting a restless forward movement of interruption and urgent propulsion that disarticulates the possibility of writing a “last word” by pistoning out the obligation to express further: you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.40

As Shane Weller and Dirk Van Hulle have pointed out, it is as if L’Innommable can only use the final recto of Beckett’s notebook to disrupt the propulsive, stammered qualities of the writing and bring the novel to an end.41 The effect, however, is a finish that feels dependent on the contingencies of matter rather than summative, fully intended, independent. Beckett’s association of language with the more involuntary and automatic bodily functions alongside his insistent working with and through words as matter rather than ciphers for immaterial ideas, comes into suggestive contact with new neurological conceptions of language emerging into visibility at the same historical moment as literary modernism. Between the 1860s and 1880s, for example, the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson turned his attention specifically to the striking phenomenon of “speech automatisms” – the recurring utterances articulated by people with particular types of aphasia frequently or invariably when they try to speak.42 Although such automatisms sometimes consist of nonsense syllables, one commonly finds lexical speech automatisms that are made up of recognizable words and syntactically correct structures. From this, Jackson inferred that much of our spoken language uses automatic rather than fully conscious processes. Such language includes cursing, swearing, rote-learnt

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activities like automatic counting, nursery rhymes and prayers, clichés, and idioms. Unlike propositional speech where original ideas are encoded into newly constructed utterances, the linguistic elements within such nonpropositional speech are not individually generated. Using terms that can still be found in contemporary neurology, Jackson surmised that language is represented at different anatomico-structural levels of brain matter, with expression by older and less conscious levels inhibited by younger controlling mechanisms higher up the nervous system.43 He suggested that propositional or referential speech is under conscious control, while non-propositional speech is the product of phylogenically earlier, less evolutionarily developed processes; so when higher areas of brain function are damaged to the degree that they fail to inhibit the behavior of the lower levels, the result can be “a loss of intellectual (the more voluntary) language, with persistence of emotional (the more automatic) language.”44 Jackson describes the nonpropositional qualities of swear words and oaths thus: Although oaths differ from mere alterations of tone, in that they consist of articulate words, they are generally used in talking, not to express ideas, but to make up by vigour in delivery what is wanting in precision of expression. They may, indeed, be considered as phrases that emotion has filched from the intellect.45

For Jackson, then, such ejaculations “take low rank in language, little above that of other bodily starts.”46 As a consequence, Jackson’s model gets easily entangled with the discourses of degeneration that arc over the period. He himself indeed suggests that in brain damage “there are degrees of loss of the latest acquirements with conservation of the earlier, especially of the inherited, acquirements: in each case there is Dissolution, using the term as [Herbert] Spencer does, as the opposite of Evolution.”47 “[T]he speechless man is seen to have lost the most voluntary or special part of language,”48 Jackson states and, as L. S. Jacyna notes, in being deprived of the “higher” functioning of the will, the “speechless man” is, in effect, “rendered passive, impotent, feminine” via a model that shores up hierarchies of the period.49 Nevertheless, neurology also allowed new qualities of speech and writing to become visible and to be absorbed into a broadened conception of human language eagerly engaged with by modernist artists. And perhaps Beckett would have had an easier time in the 1930s if he had been able to throw his lot in completely with those writers engaging with language emerging from neurological and psychological atypicality rather than Nordau, whose

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disgust was already a generation out of date by the time Beckett filled his notebooks with Degeneration’s terms. For example, the Surrealists André Breton, Theodore Fraénkel, Louis Aragon, and Max Beckman, alongside the late Romantic Eugene Jolas, all either studied psychiatry, worked as doctors, or worked as assistants in the medical services during World War One. Each came into close contact with the language of brain-injured and shell-shocked soldiers and found possibilities for art there. Breton, who had worked with neurologist Joseph Babinski, recommended in 1924, via his reading of Janet and William James, an artistic method that returned to the automatic writing experiments of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory of the 1880s; and in 1928, Beckett himself translated “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria” by Aragon and Breton, in which hysteria was recommended as “a supreme form of expression.”50 Beckett also translated sections from The Immaculate Conception by Breton and Paul Éluard that suggested accessing the “maladies virtual in each one of us [that] could replace most advantageously the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the poem without head or tail, and other decrepit modes.”51 But Beckett’s use of language decoupled from attachments to rationality and intention does not quite mirror the transgressive reversals of the Surrealists. For example, the “grey canon” confirms that Beckett the budding writer was suspicious of the transcriptions of unconscious states produced in so-called automatic writing. In 1930, while lecturing at Trinity College Dublin, he insisted that such states should not be used in literature as they “destroy the integrity of the real”; instead, as his student Rachel Burrows remembers, Beckett laid emphasis on making contact with “the half of consciousness.”52 As her notes record, Beckett’s fascination with Gide was linked to the halflight of representation Degeneration’s author found so troubling: “Gide interested in liminal consciousness (sneered at by Nordau).”53 But how this idea of a half-consciousness might be associated with the “integrity of the real” is illuminated only later in Beckett’s writing. In Molloy, Moran has a sardonic hope that the “great classical paralyses” could offer “unspeakable satisfactions”; but despite the yearning for a paring-back of capacity and sensation, there remains, at least here, an emphasis on an articulating and feeling witness invested with a form of “liminal consciousness”: To be literally incapable of motion at last, that must be something! My mind swoons when I think of it. And mute into the bargain! And

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perhaps as deaf as a post! And who knows blind as a bat! And as likely as not your memory a blank! And just enough brain intact to allow you to exult!54

Even though what is registered is an ironic fantasy of rapture rather than pain or distress, the insistence that there must be “just enough brain intact” to allow an affective response is crucial. Instead of the frisson of transgression produced as the sounds, associations, and syntactical structures afforded by psychologically or neurologically disturbed language lever open literary technique, Beckett seems to be hoping to register a more variegated and more sensed experience of disabled language and its affects. If one were searching for representations of linguistic automaticity in Beckett’s work, one might well alight on Not I (1972), where the speaking subject is reduced to a mouth involuntarily leaking body language: “sudden urge to [. . .] tell . . . then rush out stop the first she saw . . . nearest lavatory . . . start pouring it out . . . steady stream . . . ’.55 But it is nevertheless clear that she is not simply a machine running on its way or a representation of unconscious incontinence: “can’t stop the stream . . . and the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain [. . .] and the brain . . . raving away in its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop.’56 This awareness, this sense of her subjective experience, affirms that language does not emerge with unfettered unconsciousness. Mouth’s language is hardly book-matched with intention and volition, but the compulsive push and pull that produces words spilling over with feeling demonstrates that mind and embodied awareness are urgently present within the scene. In 1972, Beckett did affirm a certain automatism within Not I, writing to the director Alan Schneider that there was a distinction between mind & voice [. . .] Her speech a purely buccal phenomenon without mental control or understanding, only half heard. Function running away with organ [. . .] I hear it breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic, panting along, without undue concern with intelligibility. Addressed less to the understanding than the nerves of the audience which should in a sense share her bewilderment.57

But Beckett insists that the audience must share in Mouth’s affective experience, this consciously sensed bewilderment; he insists that there is something or someone left that can witness, even if only half-heard in the half-light: a Mouth with enough brain left to know it is “begging,” an audience that can feel bewildered, or an Auditor who becomes a materialized witness and can raise their hands in a “gesture of helpless compassion,”58 even as the scene cannot be brought into the glare of

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“understanding.” Although it is clear in his early writings that Beckett hopes to find in various forms of somatic “incontinence” transformed into language a way of curing his writing of its constipating intentions, he never could revel in language imagined as fully automatic – “mindless.” Instead, Beckett seems to make contact with the forms and shapes of disabled language as a way of bearing witness to the compact between mind and body, intellection and emotion, intention and affect, that insists alongside the automaticity in and of words. He mobilizes a disabled language decoupled from secure intention but nevertheless infused with and driven by feeling that constellates within an affected subject and audience sufficiently conscious to act as sometimes bewildered, sometimes melancholy, sometimes amused, occasionally even exultant witnesses.

Disabling Language Speaking about Beckett’s correspondence, Daniela Caselli has introduced the idea of an “unbearable archive” that haunts the “grey canon” of which scholarship has made so much.59 As Caselli notes, the editors of the letters position themselves as bound by Beckett’s own strictures in reducing the correspondence “to those passages only having bearing on my work.”60 But a particular idea of what might constitute a bearing on the work has led to the excision of some affectively charged elements from the correspondence and a reconfiguration of the idea of the archive as a vessel filled with stable propositions useful to scholarship’s attempts to uncover Beckett’s writing practices. While Beckett’s oeuvre may consistently play out the impossibility of “saying I,” insist on the vagaries of expression, and express the commerce between the propositional and semi-automatic in any linguistic usage, the archive is frequently held as a place where language works in a normative fashion: a place where a stable “speaking” Beckett is found that can repair the loss of Beckett himself as a site of authority and meaning. Caselli suggests that one task for Beckett studies is to use this canon of materials to keep attending to the complex questioning of authority, intentionality, and the unsettled and unsettling polysemic intertextuality that Beckett’s writing persistently stages. The final section of this chapter thus uses the insistent engagement with language “pathologies” that can be traced through the archive to open up an encounter with materials the archive finds it difficult to admit: the constellations of affect and the ethics entangled in Beckett’s echoing and evoking of linguistic disability. There is a legitimate suspicion that, from the point of view of Disability Studies, Beckett may be using linguistic impairment and

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figures disabled by a society that will not accommodate them, as materials and metaphors: articulations of the impossibility of being a speaking subject, and, by inference, markers of a human condition bound to “ignorance,” “impotence,” and an existential impossibility of possibility. After all, it is clear that Beckett’s work does not use impairment for “confront[ing] the material conditions of actual disabled persons,” to use Michael Davidson’s terms.61 It is true that almost none of Beckett’s figures, whether disabled or not, resemble actual people, with mappable histories, realist evocations of embodied pains, or a sustained sense of psychological interiority. But neither are they simply ciphers. In Waiting for Godot, Lucky speaks of “divine aphasia” in his tirade that emerges, like a conditioned reflex, from a stimulus command positioning him as an animal: “[t]hink, pig!”62 But in both a nod to and defection from the long history in Western literature of using linguistically disabled people as “sacred fools” to “figure the divine,” Beckett never settles the meaning of Lucky’s atypical, rapid-fire speech as a conduit for “higher” meanings.63 Although there is enough allusive charge in the names Lucky and Godot, or in Hamm and Clov, to activate the tingle of allegorical signification, there is an excess of embodied particularities to ensure that symbolic readings both fall below and overshoot the form and content of Beckett’s texts. Indeed, a surfeit of material details that may mirror the contingency of embodied symptoms makes an allegorical fit difficult to force through. But the match with “speech pathologies” is also not exact. So Lucky’s tirade could represent an aphasic speech automatism, except it is too long; it could be a “word salad” associated with fluent aphasia or the telegraphic speech of schizophrenia,64 except it is rattled out at too virtuosic a speed, too automatically; Lucky speaks fluently, if nonpropositionally, in one act but not at all in the next, though this change is not marked as the after-effect of something like a cerebrovascular accident. Lucky’s speech isn’t quite allegorical but equally it cannot be matched up to a realism of character or mimetic presentation of a disabled person’s experience. As his correspondence amply demonstrates, Beckett consistently pulled back from any easy metaphors or analogies, resisting neat identifications and straightforward correspondences. Beckett famously wrote to Schneider, in response to his questions about Endgame: My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own

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laura salisbury aspirin. Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te [neither with you can I live nor without you], in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.65

If Disability Studies is suspicious of metaphoricity, Beckett also refused allegorical translations. But whereas Disability Studies is concerned to give oxygen to the socio-political and embodied reality of people’s lives, Beckett insisted on dampening down the general texture of reality in his work, finding instead in highly specific and often stonily recalcitrant aspects of human minds and bodies – in a reserve that cannot be lifted into the realm of pure idea – the material means to put pressure on normative notions of human experience, human worlds. In 1949, while writing The Unnamable, Beckett wrote to Georges Duthuit, and there he spoke of seeking the means to produce a “non-relational,” disconnected art. Affirming that art must not substitute allegorical or symbolic wholeness for realist presentations modernism had eschewed, Beckett states that the artist must instead “grasp that the break with the outside world entails a break with the inside world, that there are no replacement relations for naïve relations”: art must instantiate “the impossibility of reconnecting.” In this sense, representation, even at the level of cognition, must not run smoothly: “to want the brain to function is the height of crassness,” Beckett notes.66 It is perhaps in the idea that Beckett’s art works to refuse the “crassness,” the coarse insensitivity of an idea of a representing brain that simply “functions” – according to normative ideas, but maybe with little of the complexity and diversity of how brains actually work (and do not work) – that Beckett and Disability Studies come into productive contact. For both put significant pressure upon the idea of the “functional,” the “normal” – undergirded by an Enlightenment subject who is imagined, in both cognitive and more broadly embodied terms, to be whole, self-identical, and for whom the intending body and mind become a locus of power. Beckett has long been read as anticipating postmodern accounts of language and selfhood that are more distributed and dispersed than liberal humanist models and that force the disarticulation of a coherent speaking subject. But Lennard J. Davis has influentially suggested that Disability Studies might force postmodernism to face the degree to which it is still in thrall to ideas of power and independence, particularly when postmodernist ideas play out in formations of identity. His demand for a “dismodernist” theoretical mode suggests an ideal “that is not a hypostatization of the normal (that is, dominant) subject, but aims to create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and

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interdependence.”67 For Davis, “[i]mpairment is the rule, and normalcy is the fantasy. Dependence is the reality, and independence grandiose thinking”;68 and as Michael Davidson has suggested: “When disability is the norm – as in Beckett’s work – the human condition must be revised in terms of nontraditional bodies and sensoria.”69 Indeed, as Beckett himself noted, when faced with the dependent reality of war-torn bodies and minds at the Irish hospital in St. Lö in France in 1946, when faced with “a vision of humanity in ruins,” it is here that one might catch “an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again.”70 In 2017, Jess Thom – an actor, performer, and writer with Tourette’s Syndrome – staged “a neurodiverse production” of Not I at the Edinburgh Festival. Although it is clear that Mouth is not a realist or even coherent representation of a person with Tourette’s, Thom nevertheless finds within the play something that speaks to and speaks out of her embodied experience of language and that “communicates [her] experience as a disabled person.” “I have this experience of automatic speech,” she states, noting that by her identifying Mouth “as a neurodiverse character [. . .] I feel that hers is – in part – my story to tell.”71 Thom’s performance manages and explores the complex interaction between verbal and motor tics which intrigued Beckett,72 and between the automatic speech of Tourette’s and the automatic speech of rote-learnt lines. Indeed, she notes a complex interplay between intention and automaticity, between “can’t” and “must”: “when I put that text through my body at speed, some of my vocal tics are displaced, so they tend to simplify, though my motor tics find their way out; and it’s like any ‘biscuit’ [one of Thom’s speech automatisms] that would have been there out pistons out at speed.”73 These tensions produce a compelling performance that hovers nervously on the boundaries between virtuosity and uncontrolled emission, throwing into clear relief the degree to which Not I has always been a play strung out between intention, between “understanding,” and the semi-voluntary work of the nerves that can be shaped by the will but cannot be dominated by it. This version of the play also makes something more of the figure of the Auditor than emerges from the play as written. Casting Charmaine Wombwell – a hearing actor with British Sign Language as her first language – as the Auditor who translates Mouth’s “body language” into signs consisting of bodily movements, emphasizes that a gesture that comes from listening can be more than a signal of “helpless compassion.” Instead, it highlights the dependence of Mouth on an other to translate and make her voice signify, at least to some in the audience, though also perhaps to herself; it both materializes the dependence within all acts of

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communication and illuminates the function of the audience in witnessing a subjectivity that cannot just be an “I,” but emerges into visibility as an intersubjective other, a “she.” In so doing, the play disturbs the idea of language as a cipher of the intending mind, emphasizing instead its role in adumbrating a subjectivity that is structurally incomplete – “whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence.”74 Ato Quayson has worried that it is still possible to write off Beckett’s disabled characters as “philosophical ciphers” precisely because of the lack of fit between the impairments the texts stage and any realist affective responses to them by the characters.75 He suggests that embodied disability in Beckett’s work, “represented predominantly via the mode of hermeneutical conundrum,” has an aesthetic and conceptual drive that ensures “the entire apparatus of representation is riddled with gaps and aporia.”76 Quayson is right that Beckett’s work exhibits an “aesthetic nervousness” as it levers the representation of disability away from the phenomenological reality of disabled people’s experience to stage instead a paradoxically productive hermeneutical and aesthetic impasse; but it also insists on invoking an account of human experience, at both a subjective experiential and more abstract level, suffused with not knowing, with uncertainty, with incoherence, with finitude, and with dependence. For the fantasy of normalcy simply isn’t how it is in Beckett’s aesthetic and ethical universe – “nec tecum nec sine te [neither with you can I live nor without you], in such a place, and in such a world.” And it is this to which the work bears intellectual, but more importantly, a feeling witness. Linguistic disability in Beckett’s work, by refusing certain aspects of mimesis, indeed seems to body forth rather than simply symbolize a rupture in the capacities of realist representation, but whether this turns the complex, diverse, embodied reality of language into a cipher or whether it “communicates [the] experience of a disabled person” depends on the act of witnessing being produced. As Thom’s work shows, there is enough “play” and diversity in a work that is only “half-heard” and aimed at those who might “share [Mouth’s] bewilderment” at the affective level of the “nerves” rather than philosophical “understanding,” to allow an encounter with disability which is not worked up in advance as allegory. Such interpretations might be incidences of the excessive resonance Beckett disliked – “headaches among the overtones”; but an insistence on the less than predictable embodied materiality of language and its affects that cannot be lifted up and synthesized into an idea, suggests an anchor in the specificity of “fundamental sounds” that hedges fidelity to at least one of the Becketts the “grey canon” reveals.

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Lennard Davis has suggested that the realist novel does much to ‘“promulgate and disburse ideas of normalcy”;77 if this is so, then perhaps we might claim that Beckett’s modernist insistence that language must not imagine crassly functional relations between idea, intention, and representation, alongside his use of language to body forth the difficult effects and affects of dependence, enable a significant disarticulation of the normative, even as his work pays scant attention to realist ideas of doing sociopolitical justice either to the world as it is for disabled people, or as it might be. Indeed, by using the “grey canon” to anatomize Beckett’s life-long interest in putatively “pathological” language, but insisting that we must think beyond the archive as a receptacle for stable bits of information suffused with knowledge to be mobilized with clear intentions, it is possible to begin to track the distributed sites and multiple means through which Beckett’s writing both disables and allows itself to be used by utterances and inscriptions that expand the idea of what language is perceived to be and how it might be understood to work. “Fundamental sounds” are never quite last words, after all; instead, they will always resound, reverberating through the material forms compelled to embody them.

Notes 1. Joë Bousquet, Les Capitales, Paris: Le Cercle du Livre, 1955, 103. 2. Lawrence Shainberg, “Exorcising Beckett,” Paris Review 104, 1987, 103. 3. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (henceforth LSB) iv: 1966–1989, eds. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 506. 4. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, New York: Grove, 1984, 139. 5. Beckett mentions “Inania Verba,” from Virgil, as a possible title for a dramatization of Texts for Nothing. The editors of the letters gloss “inania verba” as “hollow words [. . .] sound without sense.” See SB to Joseph Chaikin, September 5, 1980, in LSB iv, 532–533. 6. In “Dante. . . Bruno . Vico. . Joyce,” Beckett begins by asserting that “[t]he danger is in the neatness of identification,” Disjecta, 19. 7. SB to Jocelyn Herbert, November 5, 1988, in LSB iv, 709–710. 8. Ibid., 710. 9. This phrase appears in a draft of That Time from 1974. 10. SB to Mary Manning Howe, April 8, 1989, in LSB iv, 719. 11. Samuel Beckett to Mary Manning, July 11, 1937. Qtd. in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. i: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 521.

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12. Published in Ruby Cohn’s volume of Disjecta in 1984; retranslated for LSB, I, 518. 13. SB to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937, in LSB i, 520. 14. Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, eds. Séan Lawlor and John Pilling, London: Faber, 2012, 228. 15. Beckett, Collected Poems, 474. 16. Ibid., 229. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 474. 19. Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling, Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999, 89, 91, 92, 97. 20. Ibid., 90. 21. SB to Thomas McGreevy, December 5, 1932, in LSB i, 144. 22. SB to Thomas McGreevy, September 12, 1931, in LSB i, 87. 23. SB to Mary Manning Howe, November 14, 1936, in LSB i, 383. 24. Qtd. in Pilling, Dream Notebook, xiii. 25. SB to Thomas McGreevy, October 18, 1932, in LSB i, 133. 26. Ibid., 134–135. 27. Ibid., 133, 134. 28. Ibid., 134. Following John Pilling, I suggest that the editors of the published version of this letter have mistranscribed “frigged” as “trigged,” and “in terram” as “in terrain.” 29. SB to Thomas McGreevy, May 13, 1933, in LSB i, 159. 30. Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, London: John Calder, 1999, 40. 31. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, London: Faber, 2010, 97. 32. Ibid., 49. 33. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Becket, Vol. ii: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 141. 34. See, for example, Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. 35. Max Nordau, Degeneration, London: William Heinemann, 1895, 119, 555. 36. Ibid., 554. 37. SB to Thomas McGreevy, September 12, 1931, in LSB i, 87. 38. SB to Thomas McGreevy, October 18, 1932, in LSB i, 134. 39. Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Gilles Deleuze and Daniel W. Smith, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London: Verso, 1998, 163–199. 40. Beckett, The Unnamable, 134. 41. Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller, The Makings of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable, Antwerp and London: UPA/Bloomsbury, 2014, 176. 42. See also Laura Salisbury and Chris Code, “Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms and Psychosomatic Language,” Journal of Medical Humanities 37, 2016, 205–222.

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43. See Elizabeth A. Franz and Grant Gillett, “John Hughlings Jackson’s Evolutionary Neurology: A Unifying Framework for Cognitive Neuroscience,” Brain 134, 2011, 3114–3120. 44. John Hughlings Jackson, “Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System,” Lancet 1, 1884, 556. 45. John Hughlings Jackson, “Loss of Speech: Its Association with Valvular Disease of the Heart and with Hemiplegia on the Right Side – Defects of Smell – Defects of Speech in Chorea. Arterial Lesions in Epilepsy [1864],” in “Reprint of Some of Dr Hughlings Jackson’s Papers on the Affections of Speech,” Brain 38, 1915, 40. 46. John Hughlings Jackson, “On Affections of Speech from Disease of the Brain [1880],” in “Reprint,” 139. 47. Ibid., 149. 48. John Hughlings Jackson, “On the Nature of the Duality of the Brain [1874],” in Jackson, “Reprint,” 113. 49. L. S. Jacyna, Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain, 1825–1926, Princeton University Press, 2000, 140. 50. Louis Aragon and André Breton, “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Surrealism,” trans. Samuel Beckett, in Franklin Rosemont, What Is Surrealism?, London: Pluto, 1978, 321. 51. André Breton and Paul Elúard, The Immaculate Conception, trans. Samuel Beckett, in ibid., 51. I am grateful to Ulrika Maude for drawing my attention to this. 52. Qtd. in Brigitte Le Juez, Beckett before Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Lectures on French Literature, London: Souvenir Press, 2007, 53. 53. Qtd. in Beckett, Dream Notebook, 91. 54. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, London: Faber, 2009, 146. 55. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber, 1990, 382. 56. Ibid., 380. 57. SB to Alan Schneider, October 16, 1972, in LSB iv, 311. 58. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 375. 59. Daniela Caselli, “Insufferable Beckett: The Unbearable Archive,” presentation, British Association of Modernist Studies Conference, 2014. 60. Caselli, qtd. in LSB I, xiv. 61. Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 1. 62. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 41, 42. 63. James Berger, The Disarticulate: Language, Disability and the Narratives of Modernity, New York University Press, 2014, 7, 8. 64. For a reading of Lucky’s speech in relation to schizophrenic language see, for example, Benjamin Keatinge, “Beckett and Language Pathology,” Journal of Modern Literature 31, 2008, 86–101. 65. SB to Alan Schneider, December 29, 1957, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. iii: 1957–1965, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 82.

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66. SB to Georges Duthuit, March 9, 1949, in LSB ii, 140. 67. Lennard J. Davis, Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, New York University Press, 2002, 30. 68. Ibid., 31. 69. Michael Davidson, “‘Every Man his Specialty’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence,” Kirsty Johnston, ed., Disability Theatre and Modern Drama, London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2016, 112. 70. Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989 New York: Grove, 1995, 278. 71. Jess Thom, “Edinburgh Showcase 2017: ‘Not I by Samuel Beckett,’ by Touretteshero and Battersea Arts Centre,” accessed October 25, 2017. 72. For the first and most extended account. See Ulrika Maude, “‘A Stirring beyond Coming and Going’: Beckett and Tourette’s,” Journal of Beckett Studies 17, 2008, 153–168. 73. “Samuel Beckett’s Not I Performed by an Actor with Tourette’s Syndrome,” Channel 4 News, accessed October 25, 2017. 74. Davis, Bending, 30. 75. Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 84. 76. Ibid., 84. 77. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, London: Verso, 1995, 49.

chapter 12

Beckett and Mathematics Baylee Brits

In 1981, Beckett drafted a short two-part text entitled The Way, a version of which would appear in College Literature with the title “Criss-Cross to Infinity.”1 This short text resonates with much of Beckett’s other work because it progresses a narrative via perambulation, and because the text revolves around a number, of sorts. Echoing key elements of Mercier and Camier (1946), Molloy and Malone Dies (both 1951), Enough (1965), and Quad (1981), The Way replaces rising and falling action, climax, and denouement with perambulatory rhythm. Common to all of these texts is also the seemingly oxymoronic “choreographed walk,” a combination of the aimless and the predetermined. In The Way a figure charts a route that turns out to be – in the first part of the text – the figure eight, and in the second part the letter eight tipped on its side, becoming the lemniscate, the figure for infinity. The second draft of the text, titled “8,” describes the walk as follows: “The way wound up from foot to top and thence on down another way. On back down. The ways crossed more or less midway. A little more or less than midway up and down. The ways were one-way.” The serious description of an abstract walk determined by the sign for infinity is scrupulous in tone but equally absurd, weaving the sublimity of the infinite with the apparent boredom and mundanity of such a walk. In this brief but significant text, Beckett constructs a reciprocal relation between literature and mathematics; just as the prose creates the lemniscate in The Way, so too does the mathematical mark create the prose by providing the basis for the walk. It is this reciprocity between two seemingly antithetical fields that I will analyze in this essay in order to demonstrate the significance of mathematics for Beckett’s specifically literary aims. In Beckett’s work, number is, counterintuitively, precisely the key to the affective states and phenomenal worlds that he wants to explore. In addition to being an important archival text worthy of attention, The Way offers a means of recovering a mode of reading. Beckett’s 215

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sustained inclusion of mathematics in his novels, short texts, and plays constructs a reciprocity between mathematical notation and narrative. This reciprocity offers both a literal and allegorical model whereby one type of language (either “natural language,” which relies on the signsignifier-signified relationship, or mathematical notation, which does not) facilitates function of its implicit “other.” Here I am concerned, in particular, with the way that Beckett uses the “other” of natural language in order to suture together the formal and the felt, two seemingly antithetical poles of human endeavor and experience. The Way exemplifies this literary achievement, imbricating what we consider to be the most highly abstract human endeavors – pure mathematics – with fundamental narrative operations: differentiation, rhythm, stagnation. What is essential to this “suturing” is that the affective and subjective dimensions of literary work do not co-opt the formal, rendering a lofty or hubristic human endeavor finite and fallible. This would hardly be an innovative, let alone interesting, literary endeavor, although it is a common position adopted in the humanities. Instead, Beckett’s recourse to pure mathematics offers something genuinely new to literature: the development of a formalism that is quite foreign to the novel, in particular, but is in fact common to music. This formalism is realized in a text like The Way, where the mathematical and the textual are literally linked, one inscribed over the other, knitting together the suggestive and the abstract. In The Way, Beckett explores the latent formalism, the “mania for geometry,” to use a phrase from Molloy, that resides at the core of even the most nonchalant of activities. The third section of the text proceeds under the sign of the lemniscate: “Forth and back across a barren same winding one-way way. Low in the west or east the sun standstill. As if the earth at rest. Long shadows before and after. Same pace and countless time.”2 Here, Beckett offers a formalism that is no longer an abstraction from phenomenal reality, or the “felt” world of the literary, but is instead key to this very process of feeling. The flux of this text emerges not from the contingencies of subjectivity but from the shape of an ideogram. It is this coupling of the formal and its antithesis that gives us scope for a mode of criticism that recognizes the purest of abstractions as the fundaments of our existence in the sensory world.

* Significant work on mathematics in Beckett’s oeuvre has been done by Chris Ackerley, Hugh Culik, and Brian Macaskill, who have, respectively, cataloged varied mathematical episodes in Beckett’s work; elaborated the

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literary significance of mathematical modes of negation and incompleteness; and theorized the connection between literary and mathematical uncertainty.3 But there is scope for a more generalized awareness of mathematics in Beckett’s prose, one mindful of the difference between literary and mathematical notation, whilst also comprehending the significance of numbers for the specifically affective domains of Beckett’s literature. In the first instance, mathematics offers Beckett a means by which to address the inadequacy of language for the task of literature, the traditional modernist, avant-garde dissatisfaction with the bounds of literary style. It also allows for an approach to modernism in Beckett that is generalized. This “generalized” modernism couples literary and scientific modernity, allowing for an exchange of hermeneutic codes, as well as a “stereoscopic” re-evaluation of the meaning of the “formal,” the abstract, the nonsignifying mark. The most famous Beckettian articulation of this “nonsignifying mark” is the “unword.” The concept of the “unword” is perhaps one of the most frequently used “keys” to the Beckettian aesthetic. The “unword” was famously elaborated by Beckett in a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun. In this letter, Beckett could not find “any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved” and in his view the deeply modernist task of literature was to facilitate this dissolution.4 The “unword,” a construction that would retain the identity of the word but, through its form, dissolve the “grammar and style” of language, facilitates the notion of a literature composed against the strictures of its very form. In The Way, written forty-two years after this early formulation of Beckett’s aesthetic task, we can explicitly see the dissolution of literature by virtue of the ”non-signifying” mathematical mark that exists behind it. The coupling of ideogram with narrative shape, mathematical concept with narrative destiny, and the arbitrariness of mathematical notation with affect here achieves the literary innovation sought by Beckett by finding fundamental links in apparently antithetical domains. Beckett’s early work, especially Murphy, includes frequent recourse to elements of mathematics that are equal parts superstition (The “Lucky Number 4”) and banal sums seemingly extracted from a high-school textbook. For instance, Neary’s nighttime existential horrors are concluded, somewhat perfunctorily, with a mathematical aside: A curious feeling had come over Neary, namely that he would not get through the night. [. . .] He did not feel cold, far from it, nor unwell, not in

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It is, chiefly, the mathematical coupling of arbitrariness and abstraction that serves Beckett here. As in The Way, the mathematical is grafted onto the suggestive, here. The number of seconds in a night is both arbitrary (a “pasting” of a sexagesimal structure onto time) and abstract (not having a physical manifestation), and the mathematization of Neary’s experience functions exactly the same way in this paragraph – the ending is an abstraction from his experience to the level of the reader, and it is humorous largely for this and its arbitrary nature. Here, just like in The Way, where Beckett literally grafts mathematics onto narrative form, we see the literary clone the form of the mathematical conclusion: the fundaments of a mathematical statement provides a means for the literary to express both these qualities at the level of experience. Chris Ackerley argues that Beckett’s use of mathematics allows him to commingle categories that should be separated: Belacqua’s “error,” in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is to “use mathematics to attempt that which is beyond the categories of reason.”6 This melding of categories does indeed contribute towards a destabilization of categories, reverberating in a generalized frustration that pervades Murphy and other early work. However, contra Ackerley, I don’t believe that Beckett is capitalizing on an error or an absurdity here, even if it may appear this way. The frustration emerges not because Belacqua is importing mathematics into categories of feeling or experience or because Neary’s fears are inappropriately characterized by numbers, as if a correct use of mathematics, or stripping the affective of inappropriate numerals might solve this problem. The frustration, instead, is characterised by experiences that are shaped intimately by the consciousness of number. Presumably, what Neary does all night is count, his dread building with the passing of each second, each minute. This destabilizes the category of mathematics only if we hold fast to an image of it that is contrary to what is present not only in Murphy and Dream of Fair to Middling Women but throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, whereby mathematics is the domain that makes a mockery of feeling. Instead, just as the lemniscate conditions the flux of affect and perspective in The Way, numbers condition and produce experience far beyond their disciplinary bounds. This is exemplified in the two novels Molloy and Watt.

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Although Molloy and Watt are very different texts, they share a preoccupation with the undifferentiable and this preoccupation is realized, largely, through the use of numbers in the text. The novelist J. M. Coetzee has described Beckett’s art as an “art of zero.”7 Coetzee claims that Beckett is preoccupied with the primary differentiation between objects, between one thing and another, a problem core to mathematics: “If we can justify an initial segmentation of a set into classes X and not-X, said the mathematician Richard Dedekind, the whole structure of mathematics will follow as a gigantic footnote. Beckett is mathematician enough to appreciate this lesson: make a single sure affirmation, and from it the whole contingent world of bicycles and greatcoats can, with a little patience, a little diligence, be deduced.”8 In Molloy, this preoccupation with differentiation, with “X and not-X,” shapes the overarching failure of the narrative arc. Rather than developing as a character, Molloy becomes “a little less” than “the creature [he was] in the beginning, and the middle [of his tale].”9 Rather than a narrative of degeneration this is a narrative of – to use another well-worn Beckettian concept – lessening, of becoming less rather than other. One mathematized version of this “lessening” is the subordination of character to figure. Early in the novel Molloy observes two figures on the road below him, and names them “A” and “C.” These two algebraic placeholders move “slowly towards each other, unconscious of what they were doing. [. . .] At first a wide space lay between them. They couldn’t have seen each other, even had they raised their heads and looked about.”10 Just as Molloy and Moran go on journeys that revolve around meeting each other, so too do A and C walk until they “stop breast to breast,” and then turn “towards the sea which, far in the east, beyond the fields, loomed high in the waning sky, and [exchange] a few words. Then each went on his way.”11 Dan Mellamphy has analyzed the significance of this same algebraic substitution in Endgame, where Mother Pegg is a “non-persona [who] functions as the focal point not only of that play in particular (Endgame), but figuratively – or rather, figurelessly: that is, as a function (functionally) rather than a figure per se – more generally in Beckett’s work.”12 Here, A and C are cipher characters stripped of their content, “lessened” to the algebraic mark, to embody the most minimal form of differentiation possible, one that involves no distinction in attributes but simply a separate formal designation. The issue of differentiation is also seen in the famous “sucking stones” sequence in Molloy, where Molloy struggles with the need for ordinal as opposed to cardinal counting. Ordinal and cardinal numbers allow for two

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separate, elemental functions in the everyday use of mathematics. A cardinal number demonstrates the number of things, i.e., there are three apples. An ordinal number, on the other hand, demonstrates the position of a thing in a series, i.e. this apple is placed third in a row of apples. Molloy carries stones in the pockets of his trousers and famous greatcoat, and sucks these stones habitually. His trouble with this habit lies in his capacity to count the stones cardinally but not ordinally: I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it.13

Molloy circulates the stones in a clockwise direction, moving the stones from left to right as he sucks them in turn. But he cannot truly establish whether the stone that he is sucking is the one that has spent the longest in his left pocket. He may, in fact, be simply circulating a few of the same stones constantly. His problem is thus with an imperfect “mode of circulation”: “The possibility nevertheless remained of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished, but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about. So I had to seek elsewhere than in the mode of circulation.”14 Molloy’s solution, here, is to impose a “method,” one which is somewhat bizarrely ordained, appearing under the sign of “trim.” Molloy claims that his inspiration for a new way of sucking his stones, one that could ensure appropriate consistent circulation, came to him with the name “trim,” almost as if the thought had arrived the same way a revelation does: out of nowhere. “One day suddenly it dawned on me, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim,” Molloy announces.15 Both the origin and the substance of “trim” are a mystery to Molloy: The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once [. . .] Finally I seemed to grasp that this word trim could not here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and that it was my refusal to consider any

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distribution other than this that had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally insoluble.16

Here, the word “trim,” which could refer to a vast number of different possibilities, from a decoration to the action of cutting, from the fact of being fit to the art of flying airplanes, is obscure because it is so overdetermined. Molloy’s solution to his problems – the concept of “trim” – cannot itself participate in the linguistic circulation system, where the exchange of meaning happens via a circulation between sign, signifier, and signified. In this sense, the solution, which emerges out of nowhere and does not clearly refer to anything, enacts in linguistic terms the very mathematical problem of circulation that Molloy seeks to solve. In this sense, the literary problem of meaning – here an issue of the differentiation between words – rubs up against the mathematical problem of ordinal counting – an issue of differentiation by virtue of placement or order. Once again, as we saw above in the mirroring between the mathematical and the experiential in the episode concerning Neary, we have a formal correlation between an issue of signification and an issue of counting, whereby the hermeneutic issue surrounding the word trim is formalized in the mathematical problem of ordinal counting exemplified in the sucking-stones sequence. Molloy applies this same commitment to methodical action to the way that he kills the charcoal burner: “I rested a moment, then got up, picked up my crutches, took up my position on the other side of the body and applied myself with method to the same exercise. I always had a mania for symmetry.”17 Here again, we have not so much an amusing confusion of categories but something far more significant. Here the “mania for symmetry” is not an error of the passions, it is the nature of Molloy’s passion. His mania is geometric, both in form and in content. It is not an error that Molloy applies systematic, mathematized approaches to two types of action least associated with method: a compulsive, or at least habitual tic and an act of extreme violence. Instead, the appearance of mathematics where we have been taught to least expect it puts under pressure our notions of method and its relation the affect. For Molloy, mathematics and affect are intimately intertwined: circulation and regularity are associated with satiation. In this sense, the fundamental mathematical operation of differentiation, specifically here the instantiation of ordinal counting, facilitates comfort and pleasure, perhaps, even, a type of bliss. The issue of ordinal counting also appears in Watt. The plot of this novel declares itself as following an irregular count, one that defies the very

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meaning of the ordinal nature of numbers: “As Watt told the beginning of his story, not first, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end. Two, one, four, three, that was the order in which Watt told his story. Heroic quatrains are not otherwise elaborated.”18 This emphasis on “disorganized structure” is coupled with an emphasis on – as J. M. Coetzee puts it – the “fictiveness of the fiction,” where the narrative focuses selfconsciously on its own composition. This self-reflexivity is carried through in the continual, varied pressure on Watt to achieve different forms of exactitude for seemingly arbitrary or insignificant tasks. It is here that we see a close relationship between Molloy and Watt, in that both novels feature incidents revolving around the subjective exertions of method and measure. Each week Watt prepares Mr Knott’s food, and must weigh, measure, and count with the utmost exactness, the ingredients that composed this dish [. . .] and to mix them thoroughly together without loss, so that not one could be distinguished from another, and to put them on to boil, and when boiling to keep them on the boil [. . .] This was a task that taxed Watt’s powers, both of mind and of body, to the utmost, it was so delicate, and rude.19

The irony, here, is that Watt’s efforts at gastronomic precision are inevitably countered by a process of homogenization, each ingredient becoming undifferentiated. It is the endeavor of differentiation and the undifferentiation that exhausts both Watt and the prose style of the novel, as endeavors like this result in increasingly long and less structured sentences to the point in which Watt’s various acts of logic and repetition are no longer described but reproduced in the text, exhausting character and reader simultaneously. This same problem appears multiple times in the text. A clear example of this occurs in the case surrounding the “Galls.” The Galls are a father–son enterprise that tune Mr Knott’s piano. What is striking to Watt about the visit from the Galls is that he registers a phenomenal contradiction, a “palpable” sense of nothing: What distressed Watt in this incident of the Galls father and son, and in subsequent similar incidents, was not so much that he did not know what had happened, for he did not care what had happened, as that nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness, and that it continued to happen, in his mind, he supposed, though he did not know exactly what that meant.20

Gilles Deleuze states: “What Blanchot says of Musil is equally true for Beckett: the greatest exactitude and the most extreme indeterminacy; the

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indefinite exchange of mathematical formulations, and the pursuit of the formless or the unformulated. These are the two senses of exhaustion, and both are necessary in order to abolish the real.”21 When such a statement is applied to Molloy and Watt, Beckett can be seen to use the combinatorial or permutational activity of listing to evacuate the novel form of its key predicates: necessity, preference, goals, and signification. This coupling of exactitude and formlessness, and the sense of the “utmost formal distinctness” of nothing is also realized in the bizarre narrative lists that Arsene produces. In a tirade seemingly on the general state of the week, Arsene bemoans: The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday notes, the Sunday yams, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.22

Arsene’s lists are characterized by excessive accumulation and a sense of the madness of permutation: a form of counting that at once includes new and distinctive elements yet equally seems not to progress, enumerating without clarifying. Whole pages of the novel are given to this form of permutative listing, and, as such, reading happens at the level of the page as opposed to the level of the line. Although in Arsene’s monologue we have an array of different events, sounds, or gestures, each different from the next, the grammatical repetition and the parataxis homogenizes the various elements of the list, collapsing the elements into a basic series of “one thing after the next.” Here, the failure to count mathematically – to establish differentiation between units, to enumerate away from rather than towards nothing – becomes a failure to count in literary terms, in the sense that “to count” refers to “to mean” or “to be important.” It is in this way that we again encounter a palpable sense of “nothing,” bringing into relief the rhythms of negative affective states including exhaustion and confusion. In these two novels it is the act of counting that contributes most profoundly to the realization of affective states. In particular, it is the fundamental mathematical endeavor to differentiate, and hence create a universe of difference and meaning, that contributes to Beckett’s literary enterprise, in which the very tools of his art are put under pressure. This is, of course, the modernist approach to literary work found in his formulation of the “unword”: to return to the fundamental abstract operations that allow for meaning to be established at a basic level, rather than taking the

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acts of signification and suggestion for granted. In both cases, mathematics has been used to probe the fundaments of signification, and to explore negative or ephemeral affective registers better than any semiosis or symbolism could. The centrality of mathematics to these two key novels in Beckett’s oeuvre provide a foundation for much more overt and radical engagements with counting and mathematics in his late work. This is exemplified by the short text All Strange Away (1964) and its companion text, Imagination Dead Imagine (1965). The title of Imagination Dead Imagine is taken from the first line of All Strange Away and this later text retains much of the content of All Strange Away, although it does not possess the more elaborate pornographic passages of the earlier text. Echoing the figures “A” and “C” in Molloy, in these texts Beckett contorts rather than “fleshes out” characters stripped of attributes, substituting evocative language and the production of imagery with topological coordinates and spatial distribution. All Strange Away is divided into two sections, the first without a title and the second entitled “Diagram.” This short text is narrated in a stream of consciousness characterized either by instructions for the manipulation of the scene (“take his coat off, no, naked, all right, leave it for the moment”23) or for the audience to relinquish elements of the imagination. The bare scene is initially only populated by the narrator, who is observed by the two onlookers Jolly and Draeger Praeger Draeger, who will later disappear, to be replaced by “Emma,” whose face, ‘arse,’ knees and feet are each aligned to one of the coordinates of the space. The scene is described using coordinates – “Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out”24 – and the narrator breathlessly stipulates the predicates of the scene, the contortions of Emma’s body, and the shifts in light and color. The text is dense with cues for the reader to evoke and then immediately abandon imagery: “Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit,” stirring the imagination only to demand its eradication.25 All Strange Away and Imagine Dead Imagine present fictional worlds so spare that they consist of little other than a bleached scene, which resembles the interior of a skull, and geometric coordinates to guide the reader’s sense of movement and development in the text. The text of Imagination Dead Imagine quickly descends into passages of measurement, which demarcate points that map the body of the figure located in the rotunda. The rotunda is expressed in terms of four points: “Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA.”26 The contortions of the body in this text are mapped against these four points A, B, C, and D (and e, f, g, and h, which delineate the corners of the

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ceiling). These four points contract, steadily reducing the size of the space that the figure inhabits. The oscillation between stream of consciousness narration and compulsive injunction or instruction generates a confounding series of positions within a geometric domain: Call floor angles deasil a, b, c and d and ceiling likewise e, f, g and Beckett, say Jolly at b and Draeger at d, lean him for rest with feet at a and head at g, in dark and light, eyes glaring, murmuring, He’s not here, no sound, Fancy is his only hope.27

This bizarre mode of fiction realizes the task that the title sets, in that it presents imagery intended to divest the imagination of its content; to deaden the imagination. The component parts of this text, defying any literary impulse towards rich and evocative fictional scapes, are constructed through the atomic units of language: four alphabetic letters. These “atoms” of literature, unable to become meaningful as part of a signifying word, are in fact no longer literary particles at all. They are mathematical in the sense that rather than representing something, they are that thing: the point does not refer to anything other than itself. In other words, mathematical notation is presentational rather than representational, because it does not refer to any signified. Given that, in the Euclidean definition, a point is “that which has no part,” this text is presenting us with a fictional scene comprised of dimensions that are evacuated of content, again echoing the famous “unword” formulation.28 Here we see the most reduced elements of literature become mathematical, offering, paradoxically, an image of the dead imagination: number. These points, rather than representing space, time, and images, generate space through the changing relationship between the coordinates. In “A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett’s Mathematics in Quad,” Brett Stevens points out that mathematics is often used as a scene-setting device in Beckett’s later work.29 Stevens, a mathematician, analyzes the “Gray” code (also known as the Beckett–Gray code), which forms the basis of the choreography of Quad, a later television play that I will discuss below. He claims that the use of the code allows Beckett to “express the inexpressible” and this argument certainly holds for All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine, if we take these algebraic marks to offer an imaginary experience of “nothing.”30 What we have, here, is a hortatory negation of the imagination: just as the imagination becomes deadened, so too is it awakened, as the reader charts a course between the letters A, B, C and D, to try to piece together a literary scene or plot. Mathematics here allows literature to “express the

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inexpressible” and, reciprocally, it is through literature that the mathematical mark can take on its full experimental status; the algebraic letter is functional because it is literally and figuratively subtracted from the word. Here, mathematics provides an arch formalism that enables a close investigation of the “felt”: the abstractions of fantasy worlds, the images of memory, and the inexpressible incompletion of the imagination. The concept of four algebraic marks manipulating a spare, abstract scene is replicated in Quad, originally titled Quadrat I and II. Four dancers from the Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School performed in the television play, each wearing a colored hooded robe (red, yellow, blue, or white), which turned them into hunched, anonymous monk-like figures. For the duration of the play the dancers walk in time to a rapid metronomic drumming, tracing the outlines of two squares, one inside the other. The squares are not marked on the ground, and as such the dancers appear to follow invisible paths, adhering closely to straight lines and sharp corners. The dancers take turns to walk around the squares, with two dancers on the scene at any one time. As such, the performance is conducted less according to choreography than to a code. As noted above, the dancers take turns to walk on the scene according to the “Grey Code.” Joe Sawada and Denis Wong describe a “Grey Code” as “an ordering of combinatorial objects such that any two successive objects differ by some pre-specified constant amount.”31 The dancers in Quad follow the prescribed walk whilst maintaining a consistent gap between any two dancers and a consistent order of succession. This produces a finite number of different combinations and the duration of the play is solely based on the length of time needed to enumerate all of these combinations. Here, all the action of the television play and the duration of the play are predetermined by a code. This is, in other words, a dance subordinated to the principle of the code, as opposed to supported by or structured by a code, a form of composition appropriate to the computational age, where the material composition of the televisual image relies on code. A code is, perhaps, the ultimate form of narrative stripped of meanings, as the composition can essentially be written as a mathematical formulation, and indeed Beckett’s instructions for the production take the form of a diagram annotated by the algebraic marks A, B, C, D, and E. And yet this “stripping” or evacuation of artistic meaning in Quad can equally be viewed as saturated symbolism, evoking an occult or superstitious ritual whose ambiguity in terms of signification only increases the suggestiveness of the piece.32 Both code and ritual (the abstract, the quotidian, and the spiritual) suggest an abstruse and mute “key” to

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the performance, though in radically different ways. In this sense, mathematics is again intimately bound up with its other: the superstitious or spiritual, which shares the same stakes in determinism, code, or secret, deferred, or absent meaning and hermeticism. Just as the lemniscate is created by the text of The Way, and the lemniscate in turn determines the content of the text, so too do we see, here, a mathematical essence being realized by performance and, vice versa, a performance being reducible to a simple mathematical procedure. Again, in this work, the coupling of the artistic and the mathematical offers a coupling of two antitheses: abstraction and evocation, undoing our familiar associations connected to mathematics and literature and dissolving the difference between formalism and affect. In each of these texts, the abstractions of mathematics are key to our capacity to make the “single sure affirmation,” to use Coetzee’s words, necessary to posit the fundamental elements of literature. Beckett’s use of the mathematical contradicts the lofty and bloodless caricature of the discipline so familiar in the arts. Moreover, the suturing of formal measure and progression to narrative or duration allow for a dissolution of the divides between the abstract and the imminent, as we see in Molloy and Watt and Quad. This has allowed for an exploration of affective states – exhaustion in particular – through mathematics that defies the division between the arts and the sciences, between the word and the number. The early twenty-first century has seen a resurgence in the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Andrew Gibson, in his book Beckett and Badiou, notes that “romantic philosophy more or less completely separate[ed] philosophy from mathematics, with Hegel playing the decisive role. The anti-philosophical stance of positivism does no more than mirror the anti-mathematical stance of romanticism.”33 This separation between philosophy and mathematics begins to be ameliorated in the twentieth century. The fact that philosophers like Deleuze and Badiou privilege the mathematical aspects of Beckett is indicative of this. In an era in which literary studies is increasingly mathematized (one thinks, for instance, of the quantitative approaches to literature so common in digital humanities work), there is an urgent need for a hermeneutic that finds commonality in language and mathematics, especially in the reciprocal capacity of mathematics to shape affect and literature to shape logic, rather than simply using mathematics as a tool upon which to work on literature. The ascendency of number in social and political life translates, for Badiou, into a present time that sustains a regime of number but also, somewhat paradoxically, forgets the problems and possibilities entailed in the

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foundations of number.34 In other words, our present time embraces the act of counting so closely that numeracy comes to stand in for bland objectivity. In Badiou’s summation, number now “governs our conception of the political, with the currency [. . .] of the majority”; it “governs the quasi- totality of the ‘human sciences,’’’ as well as the economy.35 Above all, for Badiou, “Number informs our souls. What is it to exist, if not to give a favorable account of oneself?”36 In Beckett’s work, probing the numeracy inherent in the literary act of “accounting” illustrates this only too well: the phenomenal world of his characters – from Molloy’s tics to the fantasy life of the narrator in All Strange Away – is warped and molded by number, just as the author’s capacity to describe and evoke is also shaped by mathematical fundamentals, including differentiation and repetition. In other words, mathematics offers a literature of invisible spaces, affect that relates to possibility rather than actuality or action, and the opportunity for states of being that transcend situation. At the same time, mathematics contributes to literature in a genuinely experimental way, whereby narrative arc is secondary to an inquiry into formal consistency, paradox, and modes of counting. Beckett’s work, when analyzed considering the value of mathematics for literary ends, revises our conception of the dominant critical arrangement between mathematics and the literary, too often presented as reductive and monoscopic. Beckett’s texts help us move beyond a critical divide no longer appropriate for our era.

Notes 1. It is unclear whose decision it was to give the text this title. An editorial note on the publication explains that the text arrived with the titles “8” and “∞” inscribed above each of the two sections. I will refer here to the title given to the archival text. This is the title also used by S. E. Gontarski in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 2. Samuel Beckett, The Way, Box 17, Folder 3, 1981, Carlton Lake Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 3. Macaskill’s essay, “The Logic of Coprophilia: Mathematics and Beckett’s Molloy,” analyzes “an affinity between Beckett’s style and numerical practice,” but also rejects a “naïve belief in mathematical certainty” (14). Indeed, it is mathematical uncertainty that Macaskill focuses on, looking at Molloy’s “logic of [. . .] being and the logic of literature which delivers his being” through Aristotelian logic, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Russell’s paradoxes. Macaskill produces a masterful analysis of Molloy’s

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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relation to zero, in particular the “zero” of the anus, the ungenerative orifice that so preoccupies and disturbs Molloy. See Brian Macaskill, “The Logic of Coprophilia: Mathematics and Beckett’s ‘Molloy,’” SubStance 17, no. 3, 1988, 13–21. Hugh Culik’s “Mathematics as Metaphor: Samuel Beckett and the Esthetic of Incompleteness” has a similar focus to Macaskill, looking at the necessary incompleteness of “descriptive sufficiency” (132). Culik works with the “Pythagorean struggle with irrational numbers” (132) and Beckett’s development of Pythagorean metaphors. Culik focuses largely on the novel Murphy, the mind–body problem, and the “Pythagorean ambition to mathematize the world” (143), in order to elaborate the significance of mathematical models for the very possibility of Beckett’s art. Culik’s essay is particularly significant, here, because he connects Beckett’s formal solutions to representational issues with mathematics and – briefly – his modernist context. Ackerley’s entry on “mathematics” in the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett details instances and engagements with mathematics across the entire oeuvre of Beckett. This brief article is encyclopaedic in nature and does not possesses the scope or intention for detailed analysis. See Hugh Culik, “Mathematics as Metaphor: Samuel Beckett and the Esthetics of Incompleteness,” Papers on Language and Literature 29, no. 2, 1993, 131–151; C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 2004, 347–358. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. i: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 518. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, New York: Grove Press, 1957, 224. Chris Ackerley, “Samuel Beckett and Mathematics,” available online: www .uca.edu.ar/uca/common/grupo17/files/mathem.pdf, accessed October 23, 2017. J. M. Coetzee, “Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style,” in David Attwell, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, 43. Ibid. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, ed. Shane Weller, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 28. Beckett, Molloy, 4–5. Ibid., 5. Dan Mellamphy, “Alchemical Endgame: ‘Checkmate’ in Beckett and Eliot,” in Aaron Cheak, ed., Alchemical Traditions from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde, Melbourne: Numen Books, 2013, 491. Beckett, Molloy, 64. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 66.

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16. Ibid. 17. Beckett, Molloy, 79. 18. Samuel Beckett, Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 186. 19. Ibid., 73. 20. Beckett, Watt, 76. 21. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance 78, 1995, 5. 22. Beckett, Watt, 46. 23. Samuel Beckett, “All Strange Away,” in Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press, 1995, 170. 24. Ibid., 169. 25. Samuel Beckett, “Imagination Dead Imagine,” in The Complete Short Prose, 182. 26. Beckett, “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 182. 27. Ibid., 171. 28. Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements, ed. and trans. Sir Thomas L. Heath, 2nd edn., New York: Dover Publications, 1956, 155. 29. Brett Stevens, “A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett’s Mathematics, in Quad,” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Samuel Beckett, Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010, 164. 30. Ibid. 31. Joe Sawada and Denis Wong, “A Fast Algorithm to Generate Beckett-Gray Codes,” Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics 29, 2007, 572. 32. Minako Okamuro convincingly argues that Quad is influenced by alchemical symbolism of the circle and square; See: Minako Okamuro, “Alchemical Dances in Beckett and Yeats,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14, 2004, 87. 33. Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 6–7. 34. Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008, 1. 35. Ibid., 2–3. 36. Ibid.

chapter 13

Beckett’s Bilingual Explorations Nadia Louar

Up until 1945, I wrote in English [. . .] Since 1945 I have written only in French. Why this change? It was not deliberate. . . . I do not consider English a foreign language. It is my language. If there is one that is really foreign to me, it is Gaelic. You may put me in the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act. Which does not preclude there being urgent reasons, for this change. I myself can half make out several, now that it is too late to go back. But I prefer to let them stay in the half-light. I will all the same give you one clue: the need to be ill equipped.1

In its original French, “le besoin d’être mal armé” [“the need to be ill equipped”] exemplifies the linguistic playfulness with which Beckett was accustomed to answer any inquiries concerning his literary choices. In “mal armé,” one indeed also hears Mallarmé, the name of the major symbolist poet whose radical exploration of the limits of language anticipated Beckett’s own literary enterprise of linguistic defacement. The pun does not thus simply fulfill a ludic function; it also reveals an aesthetic posture2 and suggests a literary affiliation. Although the details of his initial linguistic shift from English to French seem to elude him, Beckett could recall its “urgent” necessity – an urgency that, as we know, led him to shed the stylistic nimiety of his native language and its sociocultural habitus. This is the explanation the author gave, in various formulations, to those who asked him about his reasons for the shift from one language to another after the war.3 Yet, in light of the rare explications that the author appended to his linguistic corpus, the facetious allusion to Mallarmé suggests a literary model, which, rather than free him from tradition, seems to tie him instead to a line of modernist writers whose works are notably influenced by the seminal figure in modern poetry. Since its inauguration in the 1950s,4 one of the abiding concerns of Beckett Studies has been to situate the author and his work in relation to 231

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specific literary traditions and cultural history. Hailed as “the last modernist”5 and often considered a “crucial transitional figure between modernism and postmodernism,”6 Beckett has been read through a range of critical prisms examining his literary allegiances and his socio-cultural identity. However, the cosmopolitan literary movements with which he has been associated on the one hand, and his systematic literary bilingualism, on the other, make it difficult to assign him definite precursors, or to place his work in a well-defined national literary history. Rónán McDonald7 and Shane Weller8 summarizing, respectively, the Irish and international histories of the reception of Beckett’s work, have shown the heterogeneity of Beckett criticism – while at the same time establishing its clear linguistic divide between French and English. In fact, except for some overlapping resulting from critical trends (or turns) in literary studies, Beckett criticism remains fundamentally divided along national lines, and the francophone Irish author is therefore as easily aligned with Céline and Gide as with Yeats and Bowen. Any historically conscious criticism – one which grounds its understanding of history in an author’s relation to a specific literary and cultural context – has tended to silence Beckett’s recalcitrant voice(s) and force him into a linear national and cultural trajectory that his own writing otherwise denies. In this way, Beckett’s literary bilingualism challenges in unique ways those culturally bounded notions of national literature and specific literary traditions. Although once overlooked, the question of bilingualism and selftranslation has become something of a minor critical industry in Beckett studies of late.9 Central to recent anglophone studies focusing upon the topic is the idea that Beckett’s practice of self-translation is firmly “anchored and informed by the political and social events of his time.”10 In a monograph in which she tackles with remarkable insight the complex question of self-translation, Sinéad Mooney argues that Beckett’s bilingual practice is the direct consequence of his job as a translator in 1930s Paris. Accordingly, she links his lifelong commitment to self-translation with “[his coming] of age as a writer amid intense modernist investment in translation as a mode of literary production.”11 Examining the question through the prism of the cultural discourse and linguistic experimentations in the Ireland of the early twentieth century, Mooney continues: “Beckett’s self-translations need to be read in terms of their response to specifically Irish post-independence national anxieties.”12 In the same vein, Emilie Morin, in a chapter she devotes to the question of “translation as principle of composition,” takes issue with criticism depicting Beckett’s turn to French as a “contradiction,” “an abandonment,” a “betrayal,” and

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a “form of linguistic self-denial [that would somehow position him] antagonistically in relation to his Irish origins.”13 Rather, Morin identifies the preservation of “a residual degree of attachment with an Irish historical predicament by way of a disengagement from it.”14 She elucidates the means by which this residual cultural and historical specificity in his work may be related to Beckett’s anti-essentialist approach regarding notions of identity, and rearticulates his “apparent autonomy in relation to its residual attachment to Irish culture and history.”15 The cultural and historical residue of Irishness aligned with that of “vestigial referentiality,”16 which Boxall takes up in his work, recalls the longstanding consensus that Beckett dismissed all things Irish tout court – an argument refuted today by scholars who identify in the author’s texts the haunting presence of Irish locales and childhood memories. Far from being merely autobiographical – or in Porter Abbot’s useful phrase, autographical – this topographical obsession, Rónán McDonald argues, “hints, more fundamentally, at the encoding of certain paradigms and models of Irish cultural and historical experience in Beckett’s literary method . . . More important than Beckett’s memory of Irish geography, he writes, is “the Irish geography of Beckett’s memory.”17 What these studies suggest is that the Irish element in Beckett’s writings springs from a literary habitus that dissolves the biographical element within a geopolitical space. It is unquestionable that the contextualization of place allows for a more discerning historical or cultural reading of Beckett’s bilingualism and practice of self-translation. Yet, the geographical element appears to be ancillary to the pivotal role of the body and its somatic incorporation of the environment. If one considers his bilingual œuvre as a whole, Beckett’s turn to French reveals itself as both a linguistic and a somatic turn. If, furthermore, Beckett’s choice of French for his primary language of literary composition was initially to get rid of an Irish habitus imprinted in language, this “riddance” was contingent upon a concomitant depreciation of the physical body. Clearly, bodies in Beckett’s texts are made to figure the loss of linguistic intelligibility through their own physical failings. This organic connection, which is poignantly captured by one of the most tender-hearted of Beckett’s female characters, comes to be ingeniously and technologically dramatized on the stage over the course of Beckett’s career as a playwright: “it would ill become me who cannot move,” says Winnie in Happy Days, “to blame my Willie because he cannot speak.”18 Such theatrics of sociability in the author’s dramatic oeuvre, first exemplified by the legendary mutually dependent dramatic couples engaged in stichomythic dialogues, and later rendered in the phantasmal confabulations of the playwright’s ageless

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characters, can thus be understood as being predicated on a linguistic skepticism19 that necessarily contaminates the subjectivized body, threatening its integrity. In The Unnamable, the agony experienced through the “cretinous mouth” of a human stump “extruding indefatigably . . . the words that obstruct it”20 crystallizes the connection between linguistic impairment and disembodiment. If Beckett’s first literary forays into writing in French began with freeverse poetry in the 1930s,21 his trilogy of post-war novels marks the true beginning of his lifelong practice of self-translation, as well as the production of a formidable bilingual oeuvre. When Beckett switches to French and first-person narrations in 1946, his “denarrative” strategies, alongside a corollary enterprise of desubjectification, disinherit his characters and “nip” their life stories “in the bud.”22 His oft-remarked upon “syntax of weakness,” or stylelessness which the French language rendered possible, leads to a weakening of historicity that forestalls conventional storytelling in his post-war work. His enterprise of désoeuvrement in the Trilogy memorably exposes processes of socio-cultural denudation, defamiliarization, and foreignization, using the body as their political vector. In the course of their linguistic, geographic, and corporeal peregrinations, characters come to experience particular forms of geographical and social estrangement. In turn, these might be elucidated by some homologies between situations encountered by the characters in the Trilogy and theoretical positions found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, as will be sketched out below.

Body Topographies To recount in terse linguistic terms a literary experiment, which since its publication in French (1951–1953), and then in English (1955–1959), has been dissected to the smallest meaningful unit of speech, the Trilogy is a story of affixes: [de], [un], [dis], and [less], etc., as in undoing, unwording, disintegration, dissolution, decomposition, stylelessness. The list is inexhaustible. If, in L’innommable/The Unnamable, metaphors for the narrative voice are finally uttered out of existence, the failure to contain subjects within strict and regulated linguistic boundaries in the first two novels ultimately leads to the emancipation of desubjectivized bodies that merge within the space they inhabit. From then on, stories map themselves out on his characters’ estranged bodies which increasingly appear as the unreliable but irreducible loci for the enactment and reenactment of histories and memories.

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The evacuation of subjectivity from the body and the corollary loss of situational reference elicit a kind of Darwinian response in which the body starts to adjust physically to its immediate milieu – as in cases of mimicry – until the physical resemblance blurs the boundaries between body and space. As Beckett’s characters become more and more itinerant and socially and linguistically isolated, their bodies take on an increasingly geomorphic dimension. Put another way, Beckett’s compositional disembodiment takes the literary form of geographic dispersion. Rather than locating themselves in relation to geography by using locatives as their medium, characters define themselves as geography, using their body as a frame of reference. In Molloy, for instance, the geographical boundaries of the “Molloy country,”23 as Moran identifies the region which he reaches in the second part of the novel, imperceptibly merge with the corporeal limits of Molloy’s own body: “[f]or if my region had ended no further than my feet can carry me,” Molloy placidly explains, “surely I would have left it changing slowly. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another. And I never noticed of the kind.”24 He therefore draws two conclusions from these bodily reasonings: first, that he had probably never left; and second, that “[his] movements owed nothing to the places they caused to vanish.”25 These somatics of space are exceptionally edifying in Malone Dies, considering that the titular character, confined to his room, lies dying on his bed: “All that matters to him, [is] to continue to fit in his room.”26 And yet, the stories Malone tells himself conjure up a geography that traces the contours of an almost geodesic body: This sensation of dilatation is hard to resist. All strains towards the nearest deeps, and notably my feet, which even in the ordinary way are so much further from me than all the rest, from my head, I mean, for this where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call them in [. . .] would I think take me over a month . . . But my fingers too write in other latitudes . . . and perhaps on my hands, it is the shimmer of the shadows of leaves and flowers and the brightness of a forgotten sun27

The perilous contiguity of Malone’s body with the physical space it inhabits – and comes to be inhabited by – is previously established in the narrative structure of Molloy as both protagonists, Molloy and Moran, embark on their respective quests, Molloy for his mother, Moran for Molloy. At the outset of the first part of the narrative, as told by Molloy, the latter experiences sharp symptoms of depersonalization, which he revealingly juxtaposes with his forgetting the name of his native town:

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By the end of the novel, as Moran’s body deteriorates, displaying increasingly physical impairments identical to Molloy’s, the novel’s two protagonists come to resemble each other more closely, and their seemingly shared dissocialized and decrepit body gives rise to an experience of physical foreignization that paradoxically restores a sense of identity: Physically speaking it seemed to me I was now becoming rapidly unrecognizable. And when I passed my hands over my face, in a characteristic and now more than ever pardonable gesture, the face my hands felt was not my face any more, and the hands my face felt were my hands no longer. And yet the gist of the sensation was the same as in the far-off days when I was well-shaven and perfumed and proud of my intellectual’s soft white hands. And this belly I did not know remained my belly, my old belly, thanks to I know not what intuition. And to tell the truth I not only knew who I was, but I had a sharper and clearer sense of my identity than ever before, in spite of its deep lesions and the wounds with which it was covered29

The physical scarring of the once clean-cut and decent Moran is mirrored in the decay of his once well-kept property, which he left to search for Molloy and finds in a state of total desolation upon his return. Exhibiting all the “scars” of neglect, the house had been abandoned (“la maison était abandonnée”) and the bees and hens left to die. A returning Moran slowly ascertains a correspondence between his now derelict property and the new version of himself: La maison était abandonnée. La compagnie avait coupé le courant. Ils ont voulu me le redonner. Seulement moi je n’ai pas voulu. Voilà comme je suis devenu.30 The house was empty. The company had cut off the light. They have offered to let me have it back. But I told them they could keep it. That is the kind of man I have become31

In fact, Moran’s sentiments toward his orderly setting undergoes an ominous adjustment on the very day of his initial departure. As he is about to embark on his journey to find Molloy, he is physically ill at ease, reckoning that “there is something in this house tying [his] hands.”32

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As he grows increasingly agitated – he “cannot keep still,”33 and can “[do] nothing but go to and fro”34 – Moran takes refuge in the garden, but to no avail: Finding my spirits as low in the garden as in the house, I turned to go in, saying to myself it was one of two things, either my house had nothing to do with the kind of nothingness in the midst of which I stumbled or else the whole of my little property was to blame35

In the concluding section of Moran’s narrative, the possibility of freedom, viscerally linked to the emancipation from place, is evoked in conjunction with the deciphering of a non-transmissible language that, again paradoxically, enables him to write his final report. It is “not the [words] Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in his turn had taught his little one.”36 Instead, it is a language freed from constraints of domesticity and sensibility. Moran’s narrative thus puts an end to domestic life and the homo socialis, interrupting the transmission of knowledge from father to son. The question of the transmission and genealogy of language and knowledge necessarily carries over to that of Beckett’s self-translation since the composition of the first version of Molloy is in French. Moran’s words in the concluding paragraph of the novel, in fact, foreground a language that he did not understand at first but “was getting to know better”: I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in his turn had taught to his little one. So that at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, all wrong perhaps [. . .] Does this mean that I am freer now than I was? [. . .] Then I went back into the house and wrote37 J’ai parlé d’une voix qui me disait ceci et cela. Je commençais à m’accorder avec elle à cette époque, à comprendre ce qu’elle voulait. Mais j’ai fini par comprendre ce langage. Je l’ai compris, je le comprends, de travers peut-être [. . .] Est-ce à dire que je suis plus libre maintenant? [. . .] Alors je rentrai, et j’écrivis38

In the French text, the question is usefully contextualized in light of the author’s well-known desire to free himself from a language that was tying him up precisely because he knew it too well.39 Beckett’s visceral response to the use of his native tongue – that is, a language that ties him organically to a community (in some shape or form) – exemplifies the somatic ways in which his characters experience, or rather must endure, language. In the

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context of an aesthetics aimed at erasing contextual determination, to be “ill-equipped” as an author, to recall Beckett’s clever remark cited in the epigraph, means in fact to dislocate, disembody and render foreign the bodies of his characters. Linguistic failings and physical impairments in Beckett’s work should therefore be read as the two facets of one and the same process of foreignization, one that socially excludes, geopolitically dislocates, and ontologically “others.” In Beckett’s writing, there seems to be a direct and necessary correlation between “stylelessness” and disembodiment. This suggests that the literalmindedness that Beckett acquires in French is intimately bound up with the socio-cultural denudation of his characters. In his postwar novels written in French, the author’s dismissal of the subject in its pronominal “farcical” forms40 coincides with his mocking of the body as the recalcitrant depositary of social and cultural practices. To quote Liz Barry, Beckett’s bodies are “unable – whether through intransigent refusal or sheer incompetence – [. . .] to learn the syntax of power, and their own place as object within it.”41 In L’innommable/The Unnamable, this refusal is categorical and displays its physiological necessity: “my inability to absorb,” says the narrator, “my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with [. . .] Nothing will remain of what they have glutted me with.”42 [“Mon incapacité d’absorption, ma faculté d’oubli, ils les ont sousestimées [. . .] Il ne me restera plus rien de leur bourrage.”43] In both languages, learning is couched in terms of force-feeding, which Barry aptly reads alongside Bourdieu’s theory of socialization based on the idea of incorporation. The body “ingests” and “digests” and “assimilates” information.44 Bodily hexis, the now familiar concept accounting for the ways bodies are socially and culturally molded through repetition and habituation, but also the performative aspect of habitus (the key concept of Bourdieu’s sociology), represents an invaluable theoretical vantage point from which to gauge the political valence of the estrangement and foreignization of Beckett’s bodies. For French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the body is the “site of incorporated history.”45 It is where “political mythology [is] realized, incorporated, turned into permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking.”46 The body, in other words, is where memory is stored, and upon which the past is imprinted. However, Bourdieu does not mean that the body memorizes or embodies the past. Rather, he explains, “it enacts the past”; in other words, it plays its part without knowing it is a part: “[t]he body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief.”47 This internalizing process is “a practical mimesis

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[. . .] and has nothing in common with an imitation that would presuppose a conscious effort to reproduce a gesture [or] an utterance.”48 Bourdieu’s distinction is crucial in understanding Beckett’s characters, whose utterances, gestures, and postures are precisely produced by imitation but without grasping “the essence of the system” that gives them meaning.49 According to Bourdieu, the body absorbs and incorporates data, and turns acquired knowledge into body memory: “what is learned by the body is not something one has, it is something one is.”50 Contrasting the rules regulating social fields51 with those of sports games, the sociologist insists on the unconscious level at which one enters the social game (in this case, of learning) and follows its rules. He uses “the trope of an epistemological encounter”52 to describe “the dialectical process . . . through which “one makes oneself up” in accordance with “what one is made of” and one “chooses” according to “what one is chosen for.”’53 Significantly, this “miraculous encounter”54 – or “social magic” – is to the learning of a game what the acquisition of a mother tongue is to the learning of a foreign language.55 In other words, one becomes aware of the artifices and arbitrariness of the rules only when one becomes aware of the game itself in exactly the same way that one becomes aware of the artifices and arbitrariness governing one’s own language when one consciously immerses oneself in a foreign language. What this structural analogy reveals, and what makes it specifically relevant to Beckett’s bilingual literary enterprise, is that the logic of a field of practice rests upon the faith in, and allegiance to, the game: “[b]elief is thus an inherent part of belonging to a field.”56 And here, the shadow of Mallarmé hovers. For Beckett, like Mallarmé, experienced, on his own (literary) terms, the “exquisite crisis” of disbelief, which the French poet famously proclaimed in his Crise du vers.57 In Bourdieu’s prosaic terminology, one might say that, as a cultural agent, Beckett is au fait with the facticity of the game that he enters – or rather is “born into” – and with the arbitrariness of its rules as well as the limitations of its medium. According to Bourdieu, the non-allegiance to, and disbelief in, the “game” leads to absurdity: “one only has to suspend the commitment to the game [. . .] in order to reduce the world, and the actions performed in it, to absurdity, and to bring up questions about the meaning of the world.”58 In the Beckettian game devised in his fiction, commitment is reduced to degree zero. Bodies reenact speech, gestures, postures, and rituals that do not recall the thoughts and feelings associated with them. Thus, rather than expressing grief, tears in The Unnamable and in Molloy, for example, remain incomprehensible. The notion of bodily memory is ridiculed by Molloy’s

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national revitalization of a dead metaphor when he finds himself unable to gauge the emotional state of Lousse, whose dog he has killed in a bicycle accident. He concludes tersely: “Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.”59 In The Unnamable, tears are shed for no reason: “The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain. Past happiness in any case has gone clean from my memory, assuming it was ever there. If I accomplish other natural functions it is unawares.”60 [“Les larmes ruissellent le long de mes joues sans que j’éprouve le besoin de cligner des yeux. Qu’est qui me fait pleurer ainsi ? De temps en temps. Ill n’y a rien ici qui puisse attrister. C’est peut-être de la cervelle liquéfiée. Le bonheur passe en tout cas m’est complètement sorti de la mémoire, si tant est qu’il n’y fut jamais présent. Si j’accomplis d’autres fonctions naturelles, c’est à mon insu.”61] This uncontrollable yet gratuitous lachrymal emission that does not affect the protagonist suggests the idiocy of a body that continues to perform habitual gestures for which emotional significance has been lost in translation. And this is not just a bon mot, for the etymological history of the term “idiocy” conjures the archaic “idiotism” (now “idiom”), denoting a locution that precisely does not translate from one language into another.62 In Bourdieu’s “social magic,” the perfect coincidence between bodily gestures and regimes of emotions is compared to the experience of the native speaker in her/his native tongue as opposed to the “[confrontation] of a non-native speaker with a language that is perceived as such.”63 In light of this comparison, one might read the idiocy of the body in L’innommable/The Unnamable as the untranslatability of a language of emotion predicated on a double genealogy of cultural practices which, in the passage from one language to another, sediments in Beckett’s bodies. Idiocy and sedimentation appear, then, to be the accidental effects of an involuntary memory that intrudes from the past as “tenacious trace[s]:”64 I must have been wondering if I didn’t feel like sitting down after such a long time standing, and remembering what I had learned in that connexion, namely that the sitting posture was not for me anymore [. . .] And yet the desire to sit down came upon me from time to time, back upon me from a vanished world. [. . .] Yes, my mind felt it surely these tiny sediments, stirring like grit at the bottom of a puddle65

Unlike the reciprocity of Bourdieu’s social magic, Proustian involuntary memory as glossed by Beckett in his 1931 critical study, is an “unruly magician. It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle.”66 In this reading, involuntary memory imposes itself on the

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characters; what comes back to them as unanchored and inexplicable traces are not lessons learned and conjured up willingly. For them, it is more like “the remnant of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten.”67 The question of memory is inseparable from the question of authority in the Trilogy. Throughout, the narrators reenact confrontations with regimes of authority as represented by a series of coercive third-person plurals, tyrants, and tormentors. Considered in the light of Bourdieu’s bodily hexis, Beckettian bodies stand as foils: they suggest that what is learned by the body is not something it is, but rather something it has. This is made explicit in the following example: I sat down cautiously, and I must say with a certain curiosity, on the ground. Anyone else would have tried to sit down as usual, offhandedly. Not I [. . .] But when you sit down on the ground you must sit down tailor-wise, or like a fetus, these are so to speak the only possible positions, for a beginner. So that I was not long in letting myself fall back flat on my back. And I was not long either in making the following addition to the sum of my knowledge, that when of the innumerable attitudes adopted unthinkingly by the normal man all are precluded but two or three, then these are enhanced.68

In the Trilogy, repertories, collections, inventories prevail and, to use a previous analogy, these linguistic schemes reduce the mechanism of sociality to mimicry. Paraphrasing Judith Butler, one might say that in mocking the normal body, the Beckettian body reveals the imitative structure of the normal body, as well as its contingency. In the context of the reflexive sociology offered by Bourdieu’s critique, the Beckettian social agent demonstrates an entrenched distrust of the reflective practice.69 Since they have no memory of, and no confidence in, their substantiality – or that of the world’s – they do not process information. Rather, they offer themselves as desubjectivized and foreign “conduit[s]”70 for memories and histories. Instead of being endowed with body memory, Beckett’s characters make themselves memory: “I’ll make myself a memory,” says the unnamable.71 Hence, in its most achieved form, this “corps mémoire,” to use Pierre Nora’s formulation, becomes a “pure ear,”72 “une pure oreille,”73 and a “cretinous mouth,”74 “bouche idiote.”75 Mouth and ear ultimately appear as the synecdochal transmitter, receiver, and container of individual histories and memories perpetuated through an idiotic and imperishable body.

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Nothing but the Place: Beckett and Mallarmé Mais quant à dire qui je suis, d’où je viens et ce que je fais, tout cela dépasse vraiment ma compétence. [But as for saying who I am, where I come from and what I am doing, all that is quite beyond me.]76

“Nothing will have taken place but the place itself,”77 Mallarmé writes in his celebrated poem, Un coup de dés. The story of the body in Beckett’s oeuvre echoes the“lingering dissolution” of time and place as reference, which this Mallarmean verse enacts. The Beckettian impossibility of being in the world therefore demands a future anterior for a history always made posthumously. In the wake of The Unnamable, Beckett’s long line of dramatic ghosts, specters, and other fictional chimera falls within a hauntology imposed by grammatical tenses. Exemplary in this respect is Assez/Enough, the beautiful tale of remembrance written in French in the mid 1960s. In this short text, the narrator reminisces about his romance, in an implausible putative future conceived as an unaccountable past: “it is then I shall have lived then or never.”78 Mallarmé, about whom Proust famously declared, “how unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen,”79 reinvented poetic expression through syntactical dislocation and rhythmical asymmetry. In the monograph he dedicates to the poet, Sartre also admires his “extraordinary negative logic [. . .] how by means of his pen, a lace bedspread abolishes itself, revealing only the absence of a bed.”80 Beckett’s legendary linguistic necropsy aligns itself with the symbolist poet to whom his clever quip pays homage. The coupling of the two authors is not unfamiliar. Studies by Adam Piette81and Marina Warner,82 for instance, examine how the mnemonics of familiar and foreign sounds informs both authors’ relation to languages, and influences their development as writers. As is well known, both writers were disinclined teachers, translators, and poets whose literary ambition was, in Mallarmean terms, to invent “une langue qui doit nécessairement jaillir d’une poétique très nouvelle,” which he then describes as “peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.”83 Beckett seeks to achieve a similar eidetic experience when, through the facetious voice of Belacqua, his fictional alter ego in the early 1930s, he contemplates writing a book in which the reader’s experience would be “the memory of an unspeakable trajectory.”84 However, as Rónán McDonald pertinently points out, “to demonstrate an affiliation (a question of choice) is not necessarily to prove a “filiation” (a question of lineage).”85 Thus, the relation with Mallarmé that Beckett’s double entendre provides does not establish a genealogy (a question of

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lineage). Rather, it intimates an affinity which relates Beckett’s approach to language and literary creation to that of Mallarmé. One of the most important features linking Beckett’s work with Mallarmé’s is the way in which they both repeatedly resignify space and time in their writings. Mallarmé’s poetry is revolutionary for having reconfigured the space of the page itself, and for imposing upon its creative space a self-reflexive stasis that ignores, in the words of Malcolm Bowie, “the petty differentiations to which the mind is so devoted.”86 In his narrative reconfiguration of space, Beckett ignores the petty differentiations of nationally and culturally bounded conceptions of language. He thus translates into corporeal terms the cartography of his mental geography. His physical conception of the body as the vehicle of both history and memory creates a corporeal topography that then takes precedence over spatial deixis. Pierre Nora, known for his seminal work on the “places of memory,” the Lieux de mémoire, contends that memory has been engulfed by history altogether.87 Since (cultural) memory has become a private matter, the role of the repository of history – that is, the historian or archives – has shifted from being “a vehicle of transmission” to becoming “in himself un lieu de mémoire.”88 By contrast, in Beckett’s Trilogy, history has been engulfed by memory, translated in bodily terms into a collective memory that sediments in the cultural body of his fiction.

Notes I wish to express my gratitude to Matthew Feldman and Shane Weller for their expert readings of this essay. My special thanks to Rivky Mondal for her patience and generosity. 1. Letter to Hans Naumann, February 17, 1954, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (henceforth LSB) ii: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 462–463, emphasis added. 2. The sociopoetic concept posture, as defined by Alain Viala, pertinently brings out the performative terms of an authorial ethos and the formal strategies of a poetics. See Alain Viala and Georges Molinié, Approches de la réception, Paris: Puf, 1993. 3. From “Pour faire remarquer moi,” to targeting “stylelessness in French,” to reaching the “right weakening effect,” Beckett always justified his shift in term of linguistic impoverishment. 4. By the end of the 1950s, Beckett started to be the subject of critical anthologies. See Ruby Cohn (1962), Ronald Ayman (1968), John Fletcher (1970), and Hugh Kenner (1974).

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5. Title of the biography written by Anthony Cronin, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. 6. Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 239. 7. See Rónán McDonald, “Groves of Blarney: Beckett’s Academic Reception in Ireland,” Nordic Irish Studies 8, no. 1, “Samuel Beckett,” 2009, 29–45. 8. Shane Weller, “Beckett among the Philosophes: The Critical Reception of Samuel Beckett in France,” in The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, eds. Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman, Continuum Reception Studies: London, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009, 25–39. 9. From the first essays written on the author as self-translator in the 1960s (by Ruby Cohn and Richard Coe) to the comparative studies conducted in the late 1980s and 1990s exploring the status of the translated texts and the associated probing of originality and authorship (by Brian Fitch, Ann Beer, Linda Collinge, Charles Krance, and Raymond Federman), to the last decade’s monographs focusing on bilingualism and self-translation from the perspective of translation theories and/or genetic studies (by Pascale Sardin, Chiara Montini, and Michael Oustinoff), critics have come to recognize Beckett’s literary bilingualism as one of the most complex features of his oeuvre. 10. Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 2. 11. Sinéad Mooney, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 29. 12. Ibid., 147. 13. Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 54–55. 14. Ibid., 5; emphasis added. 15. Ibid., 3; emphasis added. 16. Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, London: Continuum, 2009, 23. 17. Rónán McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 142. 18. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, New York: Grove Press, 1951, 36. Surprisingly, this quotation does not appear in the French text, as if only the English version needed glossing. 19. For analyses of Beckett’s linguistic skepticism, see Matthew Feldman, “‘Myself I Cannot Save’: Geulincx, Mauthner, Beckett,”Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes,” New York/London: Continuum, 2006, 78–108; John Pilling, “Beckett and Mauthner Revisited,” in S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, eds., Beckett after Beckett, University of Florida Press: Gainesville, 2006, 158–166; Dirk van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 20. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: Three Novels, New York: Grove Press, 1955, 390.

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21. Beckett had already “immersed” himself in French beforehand with critical writings such as Le concentrisme (1930) and Les deux besoins (1938?), which Ruby Cohn considered “a major esthetic statement,” in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writing and a Dramatic Fragment, New York: Grove Press, 1984, 12. 22. Samuel Beckett, All That Fall, New York: Grove Press, 1960, 74. 23. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: Three Novels (henceforth TR), 131. 24. Ibid., 65; emphasis added. In French, the corporeal integration of the space is reinforced by the solecism: à portée de mes pas, rather than, á ma portée [literally, within the scope or the reach of my feet, rather than within my scope, or my reach]: “Car si ma région avait fini à portée de mes pas, il me semble qu’une sorte de dégradement me l’aurait fait pressentir car les régions ne finissent pas brusquement, que je sache, mais se fondent insensiblement les unes dans les autres.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982, 87. 25. TR, 66. 26. TR, 235. 27. TR, 234; Molloy (henceforth M), 112. 28. TR, 31; M, 40. 29. TR, 170; emphasis added; M, 230. 30. M, 237. 31. TR, 175; emphasis added in both quotations. 32. TR, 122. 33. TR, 104. 34. TR, 108. 35. TR, 123; M, 167. 36. TR, 176. 37. TR, 176. 38. M, 238, emphasis added. 39. In 1949, “[wresting] with the Bram dialogue,” Beckett explains to Georges Duthuit that his writing block apparently derives from writing in a horrible English, one which he knew too well: “C’est peut-être le fait d’écrire directement en anglais qui me noue: Horrible langue que je sais encore trop bien,” in LSB ii, 170. 40. TR, 355. Samuel Beckett, L’innommable (henceforth I), Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1953, 139. 41. Liz Barry, “Beckett, Bourdieu and the Resistance to Consumption,” Modernist Cultures 2, no. 1, 2006, 31. 42. TR, 325. 43. I, 76. 44. Ibid., 38. 45. John B. Thompson, Introduction to Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, 13.

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46. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Stanford University Press, 1990, 70. 47. Ibid., 73. The French reads: “[le corps] ne représente pas ce qu’il joue, il ne mémorise pas le passé, il agit le passé, ainsi annulé en tant que tel, il le revit,” in Le sens pratique, Paris: Minuit, 1980, 123; emphasis added. The literal translation of the clause I italicized should be: “thus cancelled as such,” and not “bringing it to life,” which is conducive to a fundamental misinterpretation: it is not a reenactment of the past or its retrieval, but its unconscious (or involuntary) enactment. 48. Ibid. 49. TR, 25. 50. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 73. 51. In his now classic theory of social practices, Bourdieu introduces a systematic form of sociological analysis founded upon the identification of various fields of practice (religious, political, cultural, economic, social, literary, etc.). Each has its intrinsic constitutive rules of actions. The economic paradigm upon which Bourdieu founds the structural homology between the various fields also gives his theory its terminology. 52. Judith Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic,” in Richard Shusterman, ed., Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999, 117. 53. My translation. Bourdieu’s sentence has been excised in the English translation. Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 113. 54. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 66. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965, 360. 58. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 67. 59. TR, 37; M, 48. 60. TR, 293. 61. I, 12. 62. I am indebted to Marie Berne for the etymological interpretation of idiocy to its relation to translation. See her Éloge de l’idiotie: Pour une nouvelle rhétorique chez Breton, Faulkner, Beckett et Cortázar, Faux-Titre: Amsterdam, New York, 2009. 63. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 67. 64. Samuel Beckett, Nohow On, New York: Grove Press, 1980, 86. 65. TR, 22, emphasis added; M, 28. 66. Samuel Beckett, Proust, New York: Grove Press, 1931, 21. 67. TR, 31; M, 41. 68. TR, 140, emphasis added; M, 190. 69. Reflexive practice is generally defined as the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning. 70. TR, 353; I, 35. 71. TR, 411.

Beckett’s Bilingual Explorations 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Ibid., 354. I, 137. TR, 390. I, 212. LSB ii, 465. Mallarmé, “Rien/n’aura eu lieu/que le lieu,” Un coup de dés, Oeuvres complètes, 474. Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press, 1995, 189. Legendary quote with no identifiable source. Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm, University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988, 143. See Adam Piette, Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. See Marina Warner, “Strange Tongues: Mallarmé in the English Nursery, Beckett in Babel,” in Naomi Segal and Gill Rye, eds., Essays in French Studies in Memory of Malcolm Bowie, Bern Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2011, 7–35. “I am inventing a language which must necessarily burst forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.” Stéphane Mallarmé, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé: Correspondance avec Henri Cazalis 1826–1897, eds. Lawrence A. Joseph and Carl Paul Barbier, Paris: Nizet, 1977, 137. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, London and Paris: Calder Publications, 1993, 137. McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett, 44. Malcolm Bowie, “Genius at Nightfall: Mallarmé’s ‘Quand l’ombre menace de la fatale loi,’” in Christopher Prendergast, ed., Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Reading, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 234. Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mé moire, ed. Pierre Nora, 7 vols., Paris: Gallimard (Quarto), 1997. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations,. 26, Special Issue: “Memory and Counter-Memory,” Spring 1989, 18.

chapter 14

Waiting for Godot among the Prisoners Lance Duerfahrd

Eight months after its 1953 premiere at the Babylon Theater in Paris, inmates translated, staged, and performed Man wartet auf Godot (Waiting for Godot) inside Lüttringhausen Prison. A chasm separated these performances. At its world premiere, Godot received a dismal response. An editorial at Le Monde reported that director Roger Blin had to drop the curtain before the end of Act I because of “sifflets, insultes, rien n’y manqué” [“whistles, insults, the works”] and that many in attendance departed vociferously at the start of Act II upon realizing that nothing had changed during the intermission.1 At its nether-world premiere, Godot was a transfigurative experience for the prisoners. After the first night, inmate K. F. Lembke wrote to Beckett, inviting him to the production and raving, “Votre Godot ce fut un triomphe, le délire – votre Godot ce fut ‘notre’ Godot, à nous! bien à nous!” [Your Godot was a triumph, a delirium – Your Godot was ‘Our’ Godot, ours! ours!]. Audiences who were free to walk often seized that right. Yet when performed on a makeshift stage in front of criminals surrounded by guards bearing rifles, the play seems to find its true address. When Lembke speaks about the delirium induced by the performance we are forced to imagine how this piece of theater could exceed, or impede, the delirium caused by jail itself. It carried Lembke beyond the reach of the prison: he jumped bail, walked from Wuppertal to Beckett’s doorstep in Paris, and like one of Beckett’s weathered characters, waited.2 Has any reader, critic or scholar gone literally this far for the play? That the viability of Waiting for Godot depended on the audience of thieves, forgers, murderers, pederasts, and the wrongly accused was not lost on critics. Martin Esslin begins his classic study of the avant-garde theater, The Theatre of the Absurd, with the performance of Godot at San Quentin Prison in 1957. He asks, “Why did a play of the supposedly esoteric avantgarde make so immediate and deep an impact on an audience of convicts?”3 Esslin never quite answers this question, but in asking it exposes a crucial 248

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problem: how can a play whose chief offering is alienation, and whose characters graze upon the failure of anything to happen, be so popular?

Waiting, Routine The subheadline to the San Francisco Chronicle’s review of the San Quentin performance suggests an answer: Theme Not New to Cons.4 The reviewer here welds the event of the play, the nonarrival around which all its (in) activity unfurls, to the life of the prisoners, whom the article awards with the title “experts in waiting.” The prison performance transformed Beckett’s play from a perplexing novelty into something “not new,” from something challenging (to sophisticated theatergoers) to something recognizable to audience of criminals who, according to ex-San Quentin inmate Rick Cluchey, “previously had never been in a theater, not even to rob one.”5 The “absurdity” of the play accurately describes the prisoners’ situation. The waiting that transpires on Beckett’s stage is the opposite of utilitarian waiting that we experience when we wait for something (a bus, a cab, a check). In prison, waiting is pure expenditure: its outcome is only further waiting. This is the institutions’ punishment for a prisoner whose crime is one of emotion and control, and who has refused the fundamental axiom of civilization: to defer gratification, to delay, to wait. The prison thus takes waiting out of the hands of the inmate. Waiting for Godot, like waiting in prison, resembles waiting for a bus only if you are waiting in a city without a bus system. In his review of Godot in the San Quentin News, inmate C. Bandman draws attention to the message relayed by the boy, and delivered twice in the play, that Godot will be coming – tomorrow. He calls the boy the “immemorial child-conscience which prods [Gogo and Didi] into waiting for something more, even though they cannot help it.”6 That they cannot help waiting implies that the vagabonds do not choose to wait. The process cannot be begun, interrupted, relieved, or stopped. The inmate Bandman picks up on how waiting on stage has frozen into something closer to forcible detention. More broadly, prisoners reckon with Beckett’s play because of the way it reduces drama to a set of routines and in so doing renders a latent image of prison. Beckett’s notebooks from his direction of Waiting for Godot at the Schiller-Theater in 1975 suggests that he conceptualizes the rhythm of the play according to incarceration. Beckett writes, “Thus establish at outset 2 caged dynamics, E[stragon] sluggish, V[ladimir] restless + perpetual separation and reunion of V[ladimir]/E[stragon].”7 In his review of the play, inmate C. Bandman picks up on the involuntary rapport between

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opposites who can neither stand nor leave one another: “We continue to wait. When the scenery gets too drab or the action too slow, we’ll call each other names and swear to part forever – but then, there’s no place to go!”8 The aimless and habit-structured interactions on Beckett’s stage appeal to prisoners who have every hour of their day organized from above. The sun itself seems to be going through the motions, as familiar and recycled as summer-stock theater: “The day,” says Vladimir, “is very near to the end of its repertory.”9 The most negligible moments, like Vladimir’s reminder to Gogo not to “overdo it with your carrots,” surface from an extinct world in which couples once chastised one another for wanting something in excess of its necessity.10 The weakness before excess and the articulation of desire over need makes little sense between hobos who have nothing, and where nothing is to be done (let alone overdone). This habit of speech has not died, even as it is spoken on a stage featuring a single carrot. In his essay on Proust, Beckett describes habit as “the ballast that chains a dog to his vomit.”11 By showing only habit on stage, Beckett implies the prisoner’s chain.

A Study Facing the Prison A biographical anecdote helps us specify how Beckett’s work situates the theater in relation to the prison. Beckett’s apartment on the seventh floor at 38 Boulevard Saint Jacques was in view of three landmarks: Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and the barred cell windows of the gray Santé Prison. In his biography of Beckett, James Knowlson notes that the prison faced Beckett’s study.12 Knowlson reports that Elmar Tophoven, the German translator of Beckett’s work, came up to the seventh-floor apartment to find the author leaning out the study window. Beckett was using a mirror to signal in Morse code to an “inmate housed in a cell clearly visible from Beckett’s study window.”13 At Tophoven’s arrival, Beckett raised and lowered his arms to indicate to the prisoner that the exchange would have to be interrupted because someone had just called to see him. Shutting the window, Beckett explained: “They have so little to entertain them, you know.”14 This anecdote provides us with a sense of how Waiting for Godot speaks to prisoners. Without leaving his study, Beckett slipped into the prison, communicating through unofficial channels. He bypassed the bureaucracy of visiting hours and phone calls made to someone visible behind plexiglass. This was not a choice, since Beckett did not know his audience prior to his communication by mirror. Whom could he tell the Warden he

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wanted to see? Beckett began by communicating with no one, until a gleam of light came back, and initiated a new triangle formed by the sun, Beckett’s window, and the cell. This was in some ways a fulfillment of a wish Beckett expressed at a dinner party in 1937, when asked, “What would you most like to create.” Beckett answered: “Light in the monad.”15 The scenario also gives us something surprising: a light that comes from the monad. Beckett’s study faced the prison: Knowlson’s description of the architectural layout of the Boulevard Saint Jacques is a model for the orientation of Beckett’s work toward the carceral institution. Prison never makes an appearance in Beckett’s study, and yet it exerts pressure on it, countenances it, even shines a beam of information into it. Beckett says he was entertaining the prisoner from his study. He means that he entertained the prisoner as part of his study – something that entered his thought and which he temporarily retained in his thinking, but not as the subject of direct concentration, as he could only see Santé when he looked up from his work. Entertaining the prisoner from his study, his play became entertainment for the prisoner. Waiting for Godot never names the prison, does not internalize the institution as its subject (the way, for example, Jean Genet’s piece Haute Surveillance does). It asks rather to be confronted by the prison, something that in fact happens when Godot is performed there.

Shouting at Godot Prison audiences are famously raucous, something unimaginable to the critic or theatergoer accustomed to decorum. The inmates react as if the characters were in the yard with them rather than before them on a stage. They interrupt the performance by shouting questions, making comments, and thinking aloud, loudly. Sidney Homan notes that his production of Godot at Raiford Prison in the Florida State Penitentiary system in 1974 did not even get to Vladimir’s second line before eliciting yells. After Estragon’s “Nothing to be done,” Vladimir begins, “I’m beginning to come around to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me.” At this point, Homan says, an inmate leapt to his feet and cries, “What do you mean ‘put it from me’?”16 Once it became clear that the actors, refusing to fall out of their roles, would not answer his question, the inmate posed it again, “I said, what the hell do you mean by ‘put it from me?’”17 The prisoner’s confusion here was not primarily a question of vocabulary. Beckett’s line cut close to the intimate exchange the prisoner had with the power exercised over him. Vladimir uses physical terms to convey his

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attempt to forget something or shrug off a nagging suspicion, as if this opinion (“nothing to be done”) were something he had to literally relocate far from himself. The prisoner in the audience was the first to wonder: where is it to go? What means are available to erase a conviction in a place where every gesture is scrutinized and where every convict is synonymous with his crime and his sentence? In these performances the closed system of Raiford Prison seems to digest the closed system of Beckett’s stage, where, according to Gogo, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”18 The pressure exerted by one over the other becomes visible after Vladimir utters his line “All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying you haven’t tried everything yet. And I resume the struggle. So there you are again!” Gogo answers, “Am I?” Homan reports that one spectator shouted, “Doesn’t he know whether he’s here or not?”19 The convict heckler undercuts Gogo’s doubt, suggesting that Cartesian doubt will never do away with existence in prison, that prison (and therefore a stage within prison) condemns you to appear and offers no hiding place. Prison never gives you the chance to forget you are in prison. The prisoner asked, “Doesn’t he know whether he’s here or not” rather than “there” (as Vladimir specifies). What seems to be a misquotation by the prisoner is in fact testament to the indivisible reality of prison. Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet notes that the situation of the vagabonds on Beckett’s stage “is summed up on this simple observation, beyond which it does not seem possible to advance: they are there, they are on the stage.”20 Further on, he notes: “They are there; they must explain themselves. But they do not seem to have a text prepared for beforehand and scrupulously learned by heart. They must invent. They are free.”21 To the critic, there designates the yonder of the stage. The proscenium arch allows the critic to divide the existence on stage from his own. The prisoner shrugs his shoulders at this claim: the point “beyond which he cannot advance” is not an irreducible existence on stage but existence in prison, in here. The critic points to the stage. The reality of the closed system (here) is one to which one need not point: the prisoners sit with crossed arms. The prisoners forcibly introduce the characters to the dynamics of the institution, beginning with the fact of being shouted at, and being held accountable. The convicts subject the proceedings on stage to a review not of the critical sort (in which they evaluate or analyze) but to a review one might give to troops (actors form troupes, after all), something closer to a frisking, a pat-down, a calling to order, an asking to declare. Vladimir, Estragon, Lucky, and Pozzo are called to explain themselves and fall into

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line with the everyday power relations that structure the lives of the audience. Where critics deem Beckett’s world unfamiliar, the prisoners set about to familiarize the characters to themselves. They shout at Gogo not to “take all that crap” and ask Lucky why he submits so silently and uncomplainingly. The inmates therefore request the characters on stage to reckon with the invisible forces that oppress them. These responses bring to the surface the coercion that pervades Beckett’s play in a latent state, submerged within Beckett’s stage directions which determine the actor’s movements but go unspoken. The prisoners force the characters to take stock of the subtle dynamics of subjection and domination in which they are trapped but to which they seem blind. In addition to experiencing a kind of transference (of a psychoanalytic nature) onto Beckett’s characters, the prisoners seem to undertake their transfer as well. Here we can reverse the directionality of Sidney Homan’s comment, “it’s as if they want to get into the play.”22 Instead the responses of the convicts seem to authorize the transfer of characters from the stage into the prison. The prisoners engage the characters through traditional empathy, but of a kind that has become loud and coercive. These cries do not dispel the fictional status of the stage, do not separate actor and performance. As the actor playing Estragon observes, “Audiences don’t usually speak to you in character.” Instead of tearing down the fourth wall of the theater, the audience’s intrusions persistently remind the characters on stage that they are enclosed within the fourth wall of the prison – the one behind the audience’s back. At the conclusion of one of the performances, Homan notes that one of the spectators yelled, “You guys – you oughta live here. That’d show you!”23 Such an invitation can only be issued to a group that has become recognizable (“you guys”) to the cons through their interruptions. This inmate offers not a reading but a sentencing: the audience member foregoes the activity of judgment on the play (the Brechtian response), the trial, and immediately offers them life in prison. What, exactly, would prison show them? That convicts know more about the total futility of waiting, starting with the fact that it lasts longer than two acts? That you live in prison as a character, and not as an actor? That your agency, your actor, is felt at every moment to have been locked out of the prison? That prison is a dangerous space in which one may be addressed as pig, but commanded to do more than think? What does it mean to show the theater something? Does this particular prisoner sense that Beckett’s world is somehow attentive to the prison (studies the prison), yet does not somehow adequately incarnate the

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prison? That Beckett’s stage is the prison’s antechamber, or even its rehearsal? The shout reverses Knowlson’s description of the view from Beckett’s apartment. The prisoner says, “Let your study face our prison. You should see your study from where we stand.” Audiences attending Godot premieres in London, Dublin, and Brussels are equally incited to shout, but for reasons entirely different from those of the prisoners. These theatergoers react vociferously to what the play represents rather than to the intricacies of how it unfolds on stage. In Brussels, for example, an elderly spectator stood up in the middle of the performance and shouted “to her astonished companions in the stalls, ‘Why won’t they work?’”24 This irate patron wants the character to do something useful, to produce the conflict or action or distraction expected from actors on stage. Implicit in her objection is a criticism that Beckett’s play does not perform its theatrical duty and that it does not “work” for her. A theatergoer at the London premiere yelled, “This is why we lost the colonies!”25 Civilian theater patrons feel free to assault theater etiquette under the affidavit of official culture. These comments bear the ethic of compulsory labor or melancholy for the dissolution of the British Empire. Breaking decorum becomes an opportunity to vent a greater outrage, as if the decision to interrupt the audience’s silence during a performance revealed a symptomatic wound and not just an isolated instance of boredom pushed to the boiling point. These patrons address their complaints equally to their fellow audience members rather than to the stage. The demonstration of these patrons signifies only that they are spectators, not prisoners.

A Film about Rick Cluchey In 1957 Rick Cluchey was serving a life sentence in San Quentin for armed robbery when he crossed paths with Beckett’s work. He describes the encounter in this way: “I was always waiting for Godot, only I didn’t know it.”26 Cluchey’s statement constitutes a kind of retort to the subheadline for the San Francisco Chronicle review for the successful performance of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin in 1957: “Theme not new to Cons.” For Cluchey, the play is neither new nor not new, but something that brings what he is unconsciously doing into view. It exerts force over Cluchey’s life more powerfully than a mere “theme.” Like a horoscope the play makes his time in prison slightly more legible; it gives him the means by which he can access that waiting process. Before Godot arrived, Cluchey unwittingly was already a Beckett character, not on a stage but in life.

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That life of Rick Cluchey, who later left San Quentin and became the friend and protégé of Samuel Beckett, told me more about this collision of prison and theater than any article. The impetus to do research by other means, with camera rather than with pen, began when I was completing a book on the appeal of Beckett’s work to audiences under duress. Wars, floods, civil rights protests, and jails provide some of the historical addresses for the bleak country road specified in Godot’s stage directions: shouldn’t the proper conclusion to a study of these subterranean productions be not a vacuous summing-up gesture (“in short ”) but rather a road test? I staged Waiting for Godot in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests as an epilogue to the manuscript.27 As with the productions I was examining, this protest already possessed the physiognomy of Beckett’s stage. Instead of taking to the streets, Occupy seemingly aspired just to inhabit them. The park possesses little symbolic or utilitarian value: hunkering down in a park for four months is as absurd as occupying a stage for two acts, waiting for a character who never arrives. Passive resistance wound down to something more inert and resembled the strange obduracy of Beckett’s characters. As in San Quentin, a line of police encircled the production, keeping the audience inside the park in a state of contained motion. The situation around the stage provided an echo chamber for particular moments in the play. In productions of Godot in Lincoln Center, Didi’s questions, Did they beat you? Gogo! Where did you spend the night? hint at unseen, off-stage violence surrounding the vagabonds’ situation. To an audience who risked suffering the same abuse from police and equally worried about their place of rest, these questions were received non-rhetorically and heard more viscerally. Zuccotti Park brought the audience into alignment with aspects of the vagabonds’ agony that go muted in more traditional theater settings. I began making a film, Was I Sleeping, about Rick Cluchey in order to visualize something about which my curiosity hungered but about which very little visual documentation exists: the secluded prison performances in San Quentin. What was the atmosphere of this makeshift “theater,” previously a gym and located under the former gallows of the prison? Rick said that before San Quentin he had never been to a theater, “not even to rob one.”28 His joke suggests that the theater is too poor to rob – the warden granted 20 dollars a year to the San Quentin Drama Workshop for make-up. Yet how did these convicts, performing on stage for other convicts, break into this theater, particularly into the sealed world of Beckett’s plays? What did they take from it if not the cashbox? Rick Cluchey’s obituaries uniformly suggest that the criminal/stage transaction

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flows in one direction only. Though he became an actor Rick is never the agent within these sentences, each dispensing the same moral tale: the theater rehabilitated Rick; Beckett did something for Rick; the theater showed Rick the way out of his criminality. Yet the visualization of Rick’s life required me to shed this moral schema, for the simple reason that it made it impossible to imagine what Rick did: on stage, to the theater, for Beckett’s work, and to himself. What would we be given a chance to see, were a documentary to start from the opposite, non-moral, premise that it was Rick who rehabilitated theater, helped it breathe without need of a ventilator, gave it his explosive energy, restored its body? John Hancock, the director of Weeds, the fiction film based on Rick’s life, told me that one day in the late 1970s, Rick took him to see the set for Endgame, in which Rick was playing Hamm. They arrived at the Grillo Theater only to find the doors locked that afternoon. After a moment’s reflection, Rick drew a revolver from his jacket and tried to shoot the lock off.29 Instead of following the non-credible trajectory of rehabilitation, Was I Sleeping aims at the mystery of a man who went from having never been in a theater before his arrest to trying to blast his way into one during his parole. My visualization of Rick as a rendezvous point between the institutions of the prison and the theater was necessary not just because censorship by the institution made it impossible to witness these performances. It was also part of the process by which I continued to experience after-images generated by my watching footage of Rick on Beckett’s stage. The day before I was to begin interviewing Rick in Seattle, I saw a haggard man with massively disheveled hair emerge from his tent under a bridge. His face was riddled with a look of surprise mixed with exhaustion: two states that seldom come together. Wearing oversized found-looking shoes, he shuffled toward the sidewalk. For a brief instant, I caught a glimpse of Rick, in the persona of Krapp, moving wearily toward the singular light of the stage and out of the shadows where he keeps his audiotapes. The grime and darkness of this man’s living quarters, the quality of human ruin and shipwreck in his weathered face, summoned that picture to my mind. Too poor to instantiate reality, Beckett’s plays perhaps send images through us, to seek a reality on their behalf. Rick’s stage persona consequently found its address in this man without one. What place does evocation have in our understanding of the theater? What kind of theater might require evocation? In his essay The Crime of Imprisonment, George Bernard Shaw writes that in his youth he had seen the great Italian actress Ristori play Mary Stuart, and that the most vivid

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moment from that performance was “her representation of the relief of Mary at finding herself in the open air after months of imprisonment.”30 The exact nature, that is to say the force, of Ristori’s performance however does not hit Shaw until he chances upon a barnyard. There he is reminded of Ristori “when I first saw a stud of hunters turned out to grass.” It is in the cavorting of the horses that Shaw finally apprehends the actresses’s movements. At the same time that the stable helps to incarnate his memory of the stage, the stage sheds light for Shaw upon the stable: “I at once understood that [the horses] had been prisoners in their stables, a fact which, obvious as it was I had not thought of before. And this sort of thoughtlessness, being continuous and unconscious inflicts more suffering than all the malice and passion in the world.”31 Gestures of freedom are harder to discern in Waiting for Godot than in Saint Joan. No actor on Beckett’s stage ever gets to flex like Ristori because the imprisonment never ends. One must look under the bridge to find the moment that aligns us with Beckett’s stage. The documentary takes its cue from the circumstances under which Rick first encountered Beckett’s work: he didn’t. While 1,500 inmates packed the North Dining Hall for the performance of Waiting for Godot in 1957, Rick was forced to remain in his cell because he was deemed an escape risk. Yet Rick had no choice but to listen to the performance, as it was piped over the prison’s PA system. How strange it must have been to hear such lines as “the English say cawm” and “How’s the carrot?” through the apparatus that habitually barked out the routine of the prison day. Cluchey encountered Godot as a radio play: it must have been startling to discover that the characters who loudly proclaim their decision to go in fact do not move. Martin Esslin would have to write a far more absurd introduction to Theatre of the Absurd from the standpoint of someone who was not present at the performance, but who became its target, of someone who encountered the play not only as a captivated audience but as a confined one, behind bars. Rick was a stellar boxer inside prison and set the record for quickest knockout in San Quentin history: it took him a mere 18 seconds (briefer than Breath) to knock out Ghost Jones in 1959. The kinetic process of film helps us see, in montage, how Rick brought a boxer’s rhythm to Beckett’s stage. The connection is quite literal, as the first stage used by the San Quentin Drama Workshop was constructed by pushing two boxing rings together, with the ropes removed. How to grasp this reusing of materials and spaces in the prison, this churning of items in a closed system? Rick described the recycling this way: “At night I was acting with people on the

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platform where I was knocking them unconscious by day.”32 The prison boxer is the spectacular training persona for the Beckett actor: he knows the meaning of the tiny wedge of violence within a bigger and largely unseen system of violence. What kind of no-man’s land (the setting for Godot) is provided by the matte surface of the boxing ring? What holdover did it have for the people watching the play? Where are the blows struck in theater? The question of the ring as stage precedes the entire question of how Rick continued to bring that boxer’s energy to his performance in Beckett’s plays. In a letter to Rick, Beckett refers to his “dense stage presence” that makes Rick “capable of achieving this without gratuitous movement.”33 Beckett speaks here about how the final smile should appear on Krapp’s face. Gratuitous movements are fatal to the boxer and the Beckett actor: they give him away. The entirety of Rick’s performance in this role is suffused with his boxer’s training, the discipline required to suffer blows, and to strategically dissipate the force of the opponent’s punch. The density Beckett remarks in Rick’s presence is echoed by a comment made by Norman Mailer, who compared Rick to a “piece of old prison wall.”34 Rick exerted none of the restrictive function of an intact wall: he was a remnant, someone whose character was torn from, and preserved the resilience of, that wall. Nearly everyone I spoke to in trying to gain perspective on Rickformer cellmates, fellow actors, friends- would suddenly start jabbing the air in imitation of Rick’s skills in the ring. These spasms would overwhelm them in mid-discussion: a few people paw the air gently, the prison therapist Rick knew actually stands up in his chair and starts furiously throwing rights and lefts into the atmosphere, and an old friend from San Quentin who remembered every second of the 18 second knockout yet who did not attend any of the stage performances, raised one arthritic hand into a fist. The film features a montage of people who mourn via shadow boxing, i.e. boxing with Rick’s shadow, and thereby momentarily conjuring it for the screen. I conceived other parts of the movie as a possible assistance to Rick in the visualization of his own experience. In his unpublished autobiography From the Dead, Rick transcribes an entire group-therapy session from his time in San Quentin. It features nine convicts and a prison therapist. With Rick’s help I arranged to have nine ex-convicts at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles perform this group therapy session as if it were a stage play. Each ex-inmate got his lines and the therapist was played by a therapist who works with convicts. The goal was to have Rick direct the play, and to

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have Rick amend their staging, tone, and the rhythm of the performance in order to bring it closer to what these prison sessions might be like. What is exploration of oneself like behind bars? What place did dreams have in this session, or in prison generally? How does prison hinder or facilitate expression? Did the prisoners regard the therapist as a snitch? I wanted the theater to serve as an aide-memoire to Rick, and to have this memory image loom in the process of Rick intervening on the stage. Instead of a re-enactment I wanted this experiment to act as a reagent that might help the image of prison loom on stage.35 Rick would never have become an actor had he not been arrested. His life constitutes an incredible itinerary toward Beckett’s stage, toward that encounter he missed but which nevertheless came to him in his cell.

Notes 1. Anonymous, “Manifestation au Théatre de Babylone,” Le Monde, February 2, 1953, 36. 2. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 369. Knowlson continues, “A frozen figure, dressed in lightweight summer clothing, turned up at the theater in a freezing cold Paris [. . .] the penniless half-starved prisoner had broken parole to come see him.” 3. Ibid., xvii. 4. Michael Harris, “‘Godot’ presented at Quentin,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, November 24, 1957, 23. 5. Rick Cluchey, personal interview, October 2015. 6. C. Bandman, “The Play’s the Thing . . ., ” San Quentin News, San Quentin, CA, November 28, 1957, 2. 7. Samuel Beckett, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: “Waiting for Godot,” eds. Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson, vol. i, New York: Grove Press, 1994, 1985. 8. Bandman, “The Play’s the Thing . . ., ” 2. 9. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1982, 55. 10. Ibid., 44. 11. Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: Calder, 1987, 19. 12. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 422. 13. Ibid., 566. 14. Ibid. 15. Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936–1937, London: Continuum, 2011, 163. 16. Sidney Homan, “The Embarrassment of Swans,” unpublished memoir, 2. 17. Ibid.

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18. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 27. 19. Homan, The Embarrassment of Swans, 5. 20. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, 1965, 115. 21. Ibid., 121. 22. Homan, “The Embarrassment of Swans,” 12. 23. Ibid., 13. 24. “To which another spectator evidently yelled, ‘Because they don’t have time.’” Alan Simpson, “First Dublin Production,” in Ruby Cohn, ed., Samuel Beckett: ‘Waiting for Godot’: A Casebook, London: Macmillan, 1987, 34. 25. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 374. 26. Rick Cluchey, unpublished interview, October 2015. 27. I discuss this production in “Precarious Theater: Staging Waiting for Godot at the Occupy Wall Street Protest,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 29, no. 2, January 2017, 350–360. 28. Rick Cluchey, unpublished interview, June 2015. 29. John Hancock, unpublished interview, August 2015. 30. George Bernard Shaw, The Crime of Imprisonment, New York: Citadel Press, 1961, 23. 31. Shaw, The Crime of Imprisonment, 23. 32. Rick Cluchey, unpublished interview, October, 2015. 33. Samuel Beckett to Rick Cluchey, December 25, 1986, Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett iv: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 665. 34. Rick Cluchey, unpublished interview, October, 2015. 35. Rick passed away after he had helped me arrange this, but before we could film it. I filmed the group therapy session with the ex-convicts in 2016.

Index

Abandonment of works, 36–45 Abandonné, 36 Abbott, H. Porter, 30, 75, 233 Abu Ghraib, 12–13 Ackerley, Chris, 138, 145, 216–217, 218, 228–229 Acton, William, 178 Acts of Literature (Derrida), 95 Admussen, Richard, 36 Adorno, Theodor W., 4, 8–9, 10–12, 88–89, 164 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 9 Algerian War of Independence, 12 All Strange Away, 30–31, 37–43, 224–225, 228 All That Fall, 121–122, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140–141, 142, 143, 149 Anacreon, 70 Anders, Günther, 4–7 Annales School, 107 Aphasia, 198–199, 207 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 74 Aragon, Louis, 203–204 Arendt, Hannah, 110 Arikha, Avigdor, 41, 50, 53, 59, 74–75 Art and Language (collective), 124–125 Art: 21 (documentary), 125 Arts Technology Research Laboratory, 19–20 “Assumption,” 181 “As the Story Was Told,” 104 Atik, Anne, 50, 79 Aubert, Jacques, 100 Augustine, 67, 179 Austen, Jane, 31, 91 Auster, Paul, 13 Automaticity, 202–206 Avant-textes (preliminary documents), 21, 44 Babinski, Joseph, 204 Babylon Theater, 248 Badiou, Alain, 75, 227–228 Balka, Miroslaw, 118, 120, 127–129, 130, 131–132 Balzac, Honoré de, 91, 93, 107 Banfield, Ann, 30–31

Barry, Liz, 238 Barthes, Roland, 94–95 Bataille, Georges, 95–96 Beckett, Samuel. See also specific topic or work bilingualism of (See Bilingualism of Beckett) collaboration by, 120 digital media and (See Digital media) as director, 7–8 disability and (See Disability) enduring popularity of, 3–13 historical context of works, 103–114 (See also Historical context of Beckett’s works) letter writing by, 48–55 literary criticism of (See Literary criticism of Beckett) mathematics and (See Mathematics) moving image works by, 122–124 poetry of (See Poetry of Beckett) political resistance and, 8–9 politics of, 12 queer issues and (See Queer issues) radio works by, 120–122 (See also Radio works) reflexes and (See Reflexes) revolution in approach to, 1–3 as translator, 8, 232–233 Beckett and Badiou (Gibson), 227 Beckett Digital Library, 26 “Beckett Digital Manuscript Project,” 1 Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), 22–25, 26, 37, 43 Beckett International Foundation, 44–45 Beckett on Film, 20 Beckett Writing Beckett (Abbott), 30 Beckman, Max, 203–204 Begam, Richard, 97 Beheading of St. John the Baptist (Caravaggio), 58 Being and Time (Heidegger), 4 Belmont, Georges, 74 Benjamin, Walter, 98–99 Bergson, Henri, 180–181, 185, 188–189 Bernstein, Charles, 66

261

262

Index

Bersani, Leo, 12, 158–170 Bethell, Adrienne, 70 Bicycles, 52 Bilingualism of Beckett overview, 231–234 body and, 234–241 French versus English, 231–234 Malone Dies and, 235 Molloy and, 235–238, 239–240 place and, 242–243 The Unnamable/L’Innommable and, 234, 238, 239–240 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 43 Bion, Wilfred, 1–2 Blanchot, Maurice, 2, 96–97, 102, 137 Blin, Roger, 248 Bolin, John, 2 Bouglé, Célestin, 107 Bourdieu, Pierre, 234, 238–239, 240–241, 246 de Bourrienne, Louis-Antoine Fauvelet, 106 Bousquet, Joë, 195 Bowen, Elizabeth, 232 Bowie, Malcolm, 243 Boxall, Peter, 31, 233 Brain science, 175–176 Bray, Barbara, 39, 40, 41, 50–51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 189 Breath, 129–130 Breathe Walk Die (Rondinone), 119 Breton, André, 72, 98, 203–204 British Broadcasting Company (BBC), 121–122 British Film Institute, 122–123 British Library, 122–123 Brits, Baylee, 2 Brown, Andreas, 42 Brown, Llewellyn, 12 Burrows, John F., 31 Burrows, Rachel, 204 Byrne, Gerard, 119 Cage, John, 70 Calder, John, 41, 49 “The Calmative,” 104 Campbell, Duncan, 123 Camus, Albert, 4 Canaan, 112 Cantos (Pound), 68 Caravaggio, 58 Cardiff, Janet, 122 Carver, Beci, 97 Cascando, 141–142, 144, 145, 146–147, 148 Caselli, Daniela, 206 Catastrophe, 13, 144 Celan, Paul, 8–9 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 232

Cézanne, Paul, 58 Chabert, Pierre, 8 Chan, Paul, 119 Chaplin, Charlie, 6 Char, René, 74 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 199 Chödrön, Pema, 157 Claddagh Records, 120 Cluchey, Rick, 14, 249, 254–259 Coetzee, J.M., 219, 222, 227 “Coeur temps air feu sable,” 72 Coffey, Michael, 12–13 Cohen, Seth, 125, 126 Cohn, Ruby, 30, 37, 44–45, 61, 130–131, 187 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 43, 75 CollateX (software), 23–25 Collation, 23–25 Collected Poems, 1, 71–72 Collected Works, 13 College Literature, 215 Come and Go, 41 Comédie, 123, 131 Comédie Humaine (Balzac), 93 Company, 36–37 Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Burrows), 31 Constructing Postmodernism (McHale), 30 Contemporary art and Beckett overview, 131–132 Balka, Miroslaw, 118, 120, 127–129, 130, 131–132 Holzer, 124–126 How It Is/Comment c’est and, 131 moving image works by Beckett, 122–124 radio works by Beckett, 120–122 Waiting for Godot and, 121 Watt and, 121 works inspired by Beckett, 118–119 Continuity errors, 23 Cortázar, Julio, 21 Costello, Nuala, 52, 60 Cousineau, Thomas, 7 Craig, George, 59 The Crime of Imprisonment (Shaw), 256–257 “Crisis of the Novel” (Benjamin), 98 “Criss-Cross to Infinity,” 215 Croce, Benedetto, 90 Cronin, Anthony, 97 Culik, Hugh, 216–217, 228–229 Culler, Jonathan, 22, 68 Cultural negotiation, 21 The Culture of Redemption (Bersani), 160, 162 Cunard, Nancy, 112, 121–122 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 188

Index Daiken, Leslie, 100 Damned to Fame (Knowlson), 61 Dante, 51, 60, 67, 88, 177 Darwin, Charles, 176, 184 “Das Sonnet” (Goethe), 20 Davidson, Michael, 207, 208–209 Davis, Lennard J., 208–209, 211 Degeneration (Nordau), 186, 199, 203–204 de La Boétie, Etienne, 5–6 de la Tourette, Gilles, 186 Deleuze, Gilles, 140, 185–186, 189, 202, 222–223, 227 Derrida, Jacques, 95 Descartes, René, 177 Deschevaux-Dumesnil, Suzanne (wife), 56–57, 70, 71 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Godard), 9 Diary Fiction (Abbott), 30 Dickens, Charles, 91 “Dieppe,” 108–109 Digital media digital performance, 19–21 digital poetics, 21–26 distant reading, 27–33 new interpretive strategies, 26–27 periodization, 27 stylometry, 31 virtual reality, 20–21 Disability overview, 195–197 aphasia, 198–199, 207 automaticity, 202–206 “body language,” 197–201 Disability Studies and, 206–211 Molloy and, 204–205 Murphy and, 197 stuttering, 202 Tourette’s syndrome, 209–210 The Unnamable/L’Innommable and, 201, 202, 208 Waiting for Godot and, 207 Watt and, 197 Distant reading, 27–33 Divine Comedy (Dante), 60 Dostoïevski (Gide), 90–91 Douglas, Stan, 9–12, 123–124 Dramatische Dichtungen, 25 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 30–31, 36–37, 90, 92–94, 96, 106, 179, 180, 199, 218 Dreyfus affair, 105 Duchamp, Marcel, 68, 71 Duckworth, Colin, 44–45, 129 Duerfahrd, Lance, 13, 14 Durcheinander (pell-mell), 20–21 Duthuit, Georges, 51, 53–56, 58, 60, 64, 73, 108, 195–196, 201, 208

263

Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, 65, 66, 67, 72 Echo’s Bones (short story), 1, 179, 180, 181 École Méthodique, 107 École Normale Supérieure, 107 Edelman, Lee, 170 Éditions de Minuit, 2, 13 Eh Joe, 124, 189 Eleutheria, 2 Eliot, George, 93 Eliot, T.S., 68 Éluard, Paul, 204 Embers, 131, 135, 139–140, 143, 148, 149 Endgame, 4, 5, 9, 10, 111–112, 142, 207–208, 219, 256 The End/La Fin, 30, 45, 179 Endspiel, 111–112 Enough/Assez, 30–31, 79, 215, 242 Enueg (literary form), 80 Esslin, Martin, 248–249, 257 The European Caravan (Putnam), 106 Evergreen Productions, 123 Evergreen Review, 25 The Expelled, 30–31 Faber and Faber, 23, 25 Faulkner, William, 21 “Faux Départs,” 37–43 Fear of a Queer Plant (Warner), 158 Federman, Raymond, 44–45 Fehsenfeld, Martha, 61 Film, 10–11, 105, 123, 131 Film works by Beckett, 122–124 Fin de partie, 106, 111–114 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 14, 19, 198 First Love/Premier amour, 31–32, 44, 182–183 Fizzles, 3, 79 Flaubert, Gustave, 5 Fletcher, John, 44–45 Footfalls, 36, 53, 137–138, 190 40yearsvideoart.de Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany from 1963 to the Present (Herzogenrath and Frieling), 122 Fraenkel, Theodore, 203–204 Freud, Sigmund, 1–2, 160 The Freudian Body (Bersani), 160, 165 Fried, Michael, 127 Frieling, Rudolf, 122 From an Abandoned Work, 31–32, 36, 37 From the Dead (Cluchey), 258–259 Fülöp-Miller, René, 111 The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (Acton), 178 Funeral Rites (Genet), 164

264

Index

Gainsborough, Thomas, 58 Gall, Franz Joseph, 176 Garland Press, 2, 13 Garnier, Pierre, 178–181 Genet, Jean, 158, 162, 163–164, 166, 251 German Diaries 1936–37, 1, 44 Geulincx, Arnold, 1–2 Ghéon, Henri, 89–90 Ghost Trio, 190 Gibson, Andrew, 227 Gide, André, 88–92, 93, 96, 97, 98–99, 158, 204, 232 Godard, Jean-Luc, 9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 65–66, 67, 91 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 122 Gontarski, S.E., 45, 187 Gorey, Edward, 42 Gotham Mart, 42 Guggenheim, Peggy, 70 Gunn, Daniel, 1, 72–73 Habit, 188–191 Halberstam, Judith, 157, 164, 171 Ham, 112 Hancock, John, 256 Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), 25–26 Happy Days, 7, 185, 187–188, 190, 233 Harvey, Lawrence, 36, 41, 44–45, 181 “Harzreise im Winter” (Goethe), 65–66 Haute Surveillance (Genet), 251 Hayden, Henri, 50 Hayden, Josette, 50 Hegel, G.W.F., 5–6, 90, 103 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 7 Hello, Sam (O’Doherty), 119 Herbert, Jocelyn, 7 Herkenhoff, Paulo, 128 Herman, Luc, 21 Herzogenrath, Wulf, 122 Historical context of Beckett’s works, 103–114 allusion and, 104–105 continuum of history and, 105 historical novels, influence of, 107–108 How It Is/Comment c’est, 104–105, 110–111 longue durée and, 105–106 Nazi concentration camps and, 109–110 post-war works, 108–109 slavery and, 111–112 Soviet concentration camps and, 109–110, 111–112 Hocquenghem, Guy, 163 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 2 Holocaust, 9, 105, 109–110 Holzer, Jenny, 120, 124–126, 131–132 Homan, Sidney, 251–252, 253 Homer, 177

Homos (Bersani), 158–159, 160, 162, 165, 168 Homosexual Desire (Hocquenghem), 163 Hope Against Hope (Mandelstam), 12, 111 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 66 Howe, Mark, 58 How It Is (Balka), 118, 131 How It Is/Comment c’est generally, 5, 30 contemporary art and, 131 historical context, 104–105, 110–111 letter writing and, 53, 55 masturbation and, 180 periodization and, 31–32 radio and, 134 translation of, 33 Hurricane Katrina, 3–4 Ill Seen Ill Said, 125–126 Imagination Dead Imagine, 37–43, 79, 224–225 The Immaculate Conception (Breton and Éluard), 204 Impuissance physique et morale (Garnier), 178 Indifference to Difference (Menon), 173 Indochina War, 109 “Intermedial Play,” 19–20 International Commission Against Concentration Camp Regimes, 110 Introduction aux études historiques (Langlois and Seignobos), 107 Ireland To-day (newspaper), 70 Irigaray, Luce, 161 Irish Times (newspaper), 108–109 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 111 Jackson, John Hughlings, 183–184, 187, 193, 202–203 Jackson, Virginia, 68 Jacyna, L.S., 203 Jakobson, Roman, 68 James, Henry, 31 James, Janet, 204 James, William, 204 Jameson, Fredric, 159 Johnson, B.S., 21 Johnson, Nicholas, 19–20 Jones, Alfred, 1–2 Jones, Ghost, 257 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 51 Joyce, James, 2, 3, 14, 19, 21, 26–27, 67, 69, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 100, 107, 198 Judd, Donald, 127 Jung, Karl, 1–2 Kafka, Franz, 9, 11 Kahn, Gérard, 57

Index Kalb, Jonathan, 141 Kaun, Axel, 68–69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 197–198 Kenner, Hugh, 40–41 Kerbel, Janice, 122 Knowlson, James, 26–27, 30, 44–45, 61, 190, 250, 251, 254 Kosuth, Joseph, 119, 124–125 Krapp’s Last Tape, 23, 51–52, 134, 147–148, 189 Krauss, Rosalind, 127 Kravchenko affair, 12, 109 Kursbuch (journal), 38, 40, 42 Lacan, Jacques, 135, 136, 140, 141, 146, 147 La Débâcle (Zola), 113 La Dernière Bande, 8 Langlois, Charles-Victor, 107 La Nouvelle Revue Française, 89–90 Laocoon (Lessing), 19 “La Peinture des Van Velde,” 87 Las Caves du Vatican (Gide), 98 A Late Evening in the Future (Bryne), 119 Laurel and Hardy, 5 Lautréamont et Sade (Blanchot), 96 Laws, Catherine, 145 Le célibat et les célibataires (Garnier), 178 Le Figaro littérarie (journal), 109 Le Mariage (Garnier), 178 Lembke, K.F., 248 Le Mime du Rêveur, 2 Le Monde (newspaper), 248 Lemonnier, Camille, 113 Les Faux Monnayeurs, 92 Les lettres françaises (journal), 109 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 19, 20–21 Lessness, 79, 126 Les Temps Modernes (journal), 70, 108, 109, 114 The Letters of Samuel Beckett generally, 1, 43, 48 annotation of, 60 gathering of, 56–57 selection of, 61–62 transcription of, 57–59 translation of, 59–60 Letter writing, 48–55 Lettres Nouvelles (journal), 37 LeWitt, Sol, 127 “L’Expulsé,” 45 LGBT issues. See Queer issues Lieux de mémoire (Nora), 243 Lindon, Jérôme, 42, 49, 74–75 Literary criticism of Beckett overview, 87–89 “classic answer” and, 92 “direct expression” and, 89–90 historical context and, 94–97

265

incoherence and, 92–94 interminability and, 94–97 Malone Dies and, 97 modernism and, 97–99 Molloy and, 87, 96 Murphy and, 93, 97 postmodernism and, 97–99 The Unnamable/L’Innommable and, 88–89, 97 Long Observation of the Ray, 12–13 The Lost Ones, 42, 125–126 Losurdo, Domenico, 105 Louar, Nadia, 2, 8 Louis XVIII, 105 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 104 Lowlands (Phillips), 122 Lucier, Alvin, 121 Lüttringhausen Prison, 248 Macaskill, Brian, 216–217, 228–229 MacGreevy, Tom, 55, 58, 59, 61, 66, 67–68, 69–71, 75, 78, 103, 175, 177, 178–179, 182, 199–200, 202 MacSwiney, Terence, 104 Madame Edwarda (Bataille), 96 Magee, Patrick, 51 Mailer, Norman, 258 Making It New, 67 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 91, 231, 239, 242–243 Malone Dies bilingualism and, 235 literary criticism and, 97 mathematics and, 215 periodization and, 30, 32–33 poetry and, 74 queer issues in, 166 Mandelstam, Nadezda, 12, 111 Mandelstam, Osip, 12, 111 Mani, 179 Manning Howe, Mary, 58, 197 Marclay, Christian, 122 Marie, André, 108 Marx, Karl, 5–6, 103 Masturbation, 178–183 Mathematics overview, 215–216 differentiation and, 219–224 language versus, 217–218 Malone Dies and, 215 modernism and, 217–218 Molloy and, 215, 216, 219–224, 227 Murphy and, 217–218 philosophy and, 227–228 scene-setting and, 225–227 Watt and, 221–224, 227 Matisse, Henri, 58

266

Index

Matter and Memory (Bergson), 188 Maude, Ulrika, 2 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 62 McDonald, Rónán, 232, 233, 242 McGowran, Jack, 42 McHale, Brian, 30, 35, 97 McQueen, Steve, 123 McWhinnie, Donald, 131, 138 Mellamphy, Dan, 219 Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte (de Bourrienne), 106 Menon, Madhavi, 158, 171, 173 Mercier et Camier, 5, 8, 15, 30–31, 42, 215 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 109–110, 114, 189 Middlemarch (Eliot), 93 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 44 Miller, George Bures, 122 Miller, Tyrus, 98–99 Milton, John, 67, 79 The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (Fülöp-Miller), 111 Minghella, Anthony, 20 Mirlitonnades, 79 Mitchell, Pamela, 53, 61 Miteinander (together), 19, 20, 33 “Mittelalterliches Dreieck,” 30 ModNets (consortium), 26 Molloy generally, 5, 8, 27, 96 bilingualism and, 235–238, 239–240 disability and, 204–205 literary criticism and, 87, 96 mathematics and, 215, 216, 219–224, 227 modernism in, 97 periodization and, 30–31, 32 poetry and, 74 queer issues in, 165–169 radio and, 134, 138 Montini, Chiara, 30–31 Mooney, Sinéad, 232 More Pricks than Kicks, 30–31, 36–37, 180 Moretti, Franco, 34 Morin, Emilie, 11, 12, 232–233 Morris, John, 121–122 Morris, Robert, 127 Moving image works by Beckett, 122–124 Murphy generally, 3, 50 disability and, 197 literary criticism and, 93, 97 masturbation and, 180 mathematics and, 217–218 periodization and, 30–31 poetry and, 66

reflexes and, 177 Nacheinander (one after the other), 19, 20–21, 31, 33 Napoleon, 105, 106 Nauman, Bruce, 123, 124 Naumann, Hans, 73–74 Nazi concentration camps, 109–110 Nebeneinander (side by side), 19, 20–21, 31, 33 Negative Dialects (Adorno), 8 Negro (Cunard), 112 Nerve theory. See Reflexes Nicholls, Peter, 98 Nick Silver Can’t Sleep (Kerbel), 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 103, 160–161 Night Songs (Young), 75 Nixon, Mark, 1, 2, 96 Noah, 112 No Future (Edelman), 170 Non-volitional speech or language, 183–188 Nora, Pierre, 241, 243 Nordau, Max, 186, 199–200, 201, 203–204 Not I, 8, 13, 36–37, 58, 184, 185, 186–187, 205–206, 209–210 O’Doherty, Brian, 119 Of Habit (Ravaisson), 189 Onanisme seul et à deux sous toutes ses formes et leurs conséquences (Garnier), 178–181 196 x 230 x 141 (Balka), 127–128 “On the Marionette Theatre” (von Kleist), 189 Opera for a Small Room (Cardiff and Miller), 122 Origin of Species (Darwin), 176 Out of This Century (Guggenheim), 70 Paik, Nam June, 124 Paludes (Gide), 98 Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera, 20 Paris Commune, 105 Pascal, Blaise, 2 Pavlov, Ivan, 184 Pecora, Vincent, 101 Periodization, 27–33 Perloff, Marjorie, 1, 137 Péron, Alfred, 70 Péron, Mania, 74 Pertile, Lino, 60 Philips, Susan, 122 Pickup, Ronald, 190 Piette, Adam, 242 Pilling, John, 30, 44, 89, 179–180 Ping, 79 Pinget, Robert, 2, 53 Play, 19–21, 25 Poèmes 37–39, 70, 71–72

Index Poetry of Beckett. See also specific work defiance in, 66 evolution of, 65–74 Malone Dies and, 74 Molloy and, 74 Murphy and, 66 poeticity of, 79 as “slow starter,” 67 traditional nature of, 67 The Unnamable/L’Innommable and, 74–75, 77 Watt and, 78 World War II, impact of, 72–73 Political context of Beckett’s works, 103–114. See also Historical context of Beckett’s works Porge, Erik, 137–138 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 92 Poubellications (“garbage publications”), 157–158, 170–171 Pouillon, Jean, 109 Pound, Ezra, 68 Pountney, Rosemary, 37 Prisons film about Rick Cluchey in, 254–259 proximity of Beckett’s apartment to, 250–251 routine and, 249–250 shouting during performances at, 251–254 waiting and, 249–250 Waiting for Godot in, 14, 248–254 Prochaska, Georg, 176 Proust, 183, 189 Proust, Marcel, 3, 88, 91, 97, 98, 106–107, 158, 189, 242, 250 Psychoanalysis and Medicine: A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill (Stephen), 187 Putnam, Samuel, 66, 106 Quad, 190–191, 215, 225–227 Quayson, Ato, 210 The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam), 157, 164 Queer issues overview, 157–158 anal emphasis, 162–164, 165 art and, 162–164 death and, 160–161 Durchfall, 162–164, 165, 166 ébranlement, 159–160, 161, 167 feminism versus, 169 “homo-ness,” 158–160, 164 jouissance, 159–160, 161, 167 in Malone Dies, 166 in Molloy, 165–169 “queer universalism,” 158, 171 redemption and, 160, 162 sex and, 160–164 Quint, Léon Pierre, 112

267

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 78–79, 96 Racine, Jean, 90, 177 Radio works overview, 134–135 by Beckett, 120–122 enunciation and, 141–144 How It Is/Comment c’est and, 134 image and, 147–148 invisibility and continuum, 139–141 Molloy and, 134, 138 silent voice and, 135–136 solitude and, 148–149 as technology, 136–137 The Unnamable/L’Innommable and, 144 visibility, breaking down of, 137–139 words-music duality in, 145–147 Raiford Prison, 251–252 Rancière, Jacques, 12 Ravaisson, Félix, 189 Rayuela (Cortázar), 21 READ (consortium), 25–26 Reavey, George, 59, 71, 111 Reflexes overview, 175–177 brain science and, 175–176 habit and, 188–191 masturbation and, 178–183 Murphy and, 177 non-volitional speech or language as, 183–188 sexual reflexes, 178–183 The Unnamable/L’Innommable and, 184 Waiting for Godot and, 184–186 REPLAY (Marclay), 122 Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (Rousseau), 75 Revision of works, 36–45 Reynolds, Mary, 71, 81 Ricoeur, Paul, 189 Rimbaud, Arthur, 67, 177 Ristori, Adelaide, 256–257 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 252 Rockaby, 190 Roe, Molly, 52–53, 60 Rondinone, Ugo, 119 Ronen, Ilan, 6 Rosset, Barney, 49 Rothberg, Michael, 105 Rough for Radio I, 136–137, 141–142, 143, 149 Rough for Radio II, 11, 110–111, 141–142, 144 Rough for Theatre I, 104 Rough for Theatre II, 110–111 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 75 Rousset, David, 109–110 Rousso, Henry, 105 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 89–90

268

Index

Sade, Marquis de, 11, 96–97 “Saint-Lô,” 108–109 Salisbury, Laura, 2 Samuel Beckett: Teleplays (Douglas), 124 Samuel Beckett: Works for Radio – The Original Broadcasts, 122 Samuel Beckett Is Closed (Coffey), 12–13 San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper), 254 Sanies, 80 San Quentin Prison, 248–249 Sarajevo, Siege of, 3–4 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 70, 94–95, 109–110, 120, 242 Sawada, Joe, 226 Schmidt, Judith, 38 Schneider, Alan, 187, 205, 207–208 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 179 Schultz, Eva Katharina, 188, 190 Schulz, Kathryn, 34 Schwartz, Jake, 45 Seaver, Richard, 40, 74–75 “Secularization thesis,” 101 Sedan, 113–114 Sedan (Lemonnier), 113 Seignobos, Charles, 107 Self-presentation, 21 Serena (literary form), 80 Sexual reflexes, 178–183 Shainberg, Lawrence, 48, 195 Shakespeare, William, 44, 188 Shaw, George Bernard, 256–257 Sheehan, Paul, 95 Simonin, Anne, 105 Sinclair, Peggy, 178 Slavery, 111–112 Slonim, Marc, 111 Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (Nauman), 124 Soap Corridor (Balka), 127 “Sottisier,” 44 Sound works by Beckett, 120–122. See also Radio works Soviet concentration camps, 109–110, 111–112 Spenser, Edmund, 67, 79 Spiel, 189 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, 176 Stein, Gertrude, 69, 98 Stephen, Karin, 187 Stevens, Brett, 225 Stewart, Paul, 182 Still, 30–31 Stirrings Still/Soubresauts, 27, 42–43 Stuttering, 202 Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School, 226 Stylometry, 31 Suarès, Andre, 89–90 Suhrkamp, 25

“Suite,” 106, 109 Sunday Times, 37 Surrealists, 203–204 Szymborska, Wislawa, 126 Tajiri, Yoshiki, 180 Tate Media, 130 Tate Modern, 118 Television works by Beckett, 122–124 Texts for Nothing/Nouvelles et Textes pour rien, 30, 32, 33, 42, 74–79, 119, 121, 200–201 The Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin), 248–249, 257 Theweleit, Klaus, 163 “They come,” 69–71 Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human (Rabaté), 96 Thom, Jess, 209–210 Thomas, Calvin, 12 Thomas, Dylan, 121 Thorez, Maurice, 113–114 Three Dialogues, 88, 91–92, 195–196 Three Novels, 94–95 Tophoven, Elmar, 250 Tourette’s syndrome, 186, 209–210 “The Tower” (Yeats), 79 Trial (Kafka), 9 “Trilogy” of novels, 53–54, 59–60, 74, 78, 200–201, 234, 243. See also Malone Dies; Molloy; The Unnamable/L’Innommable Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, 19–20 Tzara, Tristan, 72 UbuWeb (website), 122 Ulysses (Joyce), 19, 95 The Unfortunates (Johnson), 21 University of Reading, 122–123 The Unnamable/L’Innommable generally, 1, 9, 27 bilingualism and, 234, 238, 239–240 disability and, 201, 202, 208 literary criticism and, 88–89, 97 masturbation and, 180 periodization and, 30–33 poetry and, 74–75, 77 radio and, 144 reflexes and, 184 Unzer, John Augustus, 176 Valéry, Paul, 89–91 Vancouver Art Gallery, 123 van Hulle, Dirk, 2, 8, 96, 202 van Velde, Bram, 58, 73 Van Velde, Geer, 87 van Velde, Jacoba, 59 Variants of works, 36–45

Index Vereecken, Christian, 145 Vervaeck, Bert, 21 Vichy government, 105 “Vidéo,” 9, 10–11 “Virtual Play,” 19–21 Virtual reality, 20–21 Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium, 125 von Kleist, Heinrich, 189–190 “The Vulture,” 65, 66, 67 Waiting for Godot generally, 2 anarchist comedy in, 6–7 aphasia in, 207 evolution of, 7 letter writing regarding, 51 masturbation in, 182 non-volitional speech or language in, 184–186 in prisons, 14, 248–254 (See also Prisons) “pseudocouples” in, 4–6, 7 rewriting of, 8 transition to theater, 121 war in, 112 Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (Chan), 119 “(Waiting for-) Text for Nothing” Samuel Beckett, in Play (Kosuth), 119 Walker, David, 92 Ward, Anthony, 90 Warner, Marina, 242 Warner, Michael, 158 Warrilow, David, 13 Was I Sleeping (Duerfahrd), 254–259 Waste Land (Eliot), 68 Was Wo, 124 Watt generally, 3, 42 contemporary art and, 121 disability and, 197 letter writing and, 55 mathematics and, 221–224, 227

269

periodization and, 30–32 poetry and, 78 Watt, Ian, 101 Wawrinka, Stan, 157 The Way, 215–216, 217–218, 227 Weeds (Hancock), 256 Weiner, Lawrence, 124–125 Weininger, Otto, 19 Weller, Shane, 95, 99, 202, 232 de Wendel, François, 113–114 Wenning, Henry, 40, 45 What Is Literature? (Sartre), 94–95 What is the word/Comment dire, 27, 198–199 What Where, 11, 13, 191 White, H.O., 108 Whitelaw, Billie, 8, 190 “Whoroscope,” 44 Whytt, Robert, 175–176 Wilkinson, Judith, 7–8 Winock, Michel, 105 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 77–78 Wombwell, Charmaine, 209 Wong, Denis, 226 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 98 Words and Music, 131, 141–142, 145–146 The Work of Poverty (Duerfahrd), 13 World I (Holzer), 125 Worstword Ho, 27, 31–32, 145, 157, 170 XML (eXtensible Markup Language), 26–27 Yeats, Jack B., 58 Yeats, W.B., 31, 67, 69, 79, 162, 232 Young, Edward, 75 Young, La Monte, 121 Zagajewski, Adam, 126 Zilliacus, Clas, 139, 143, 145, 147 Zola, Emile, 113 Zone (Apollinaire), 74