Beckett and Phenomenology 9781472542960, 9780826497147, 9781441123176

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For Gerald Doherty, friend, teacher and scholar UM For Edward, Elisse and Roxane Bevilacqua with love MF

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Simon Robinson, PhD student at the University of Durham, who worked as a Research Assistant on this book, and helped bring it to completion. His work was funded by the AHRC Research Training Scheme, whose generous contribution the editors acknowledge. The editors also wish to extend warm thanks to Mr Edward Beckett and the Samuel Beckett Estate, for kindly and generously granting us permission to quote from the Thomas MacGreevy correspondence, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ and ‘Ceiling’. Ulrika Maude also wishes to acknowledge the Cora Maud Oneal Fellowship awarded by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and the exceptionally friendly assistance of all the staff at the HRC.

Notes on Contributors

Chris Ackerley is Professor and former Head of Department of English at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His research interest is annotation, with particular reference to Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. Recent works include a revised Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004); Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt (Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005); and, with S. E. Gontarski, the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (Grove Press, 2004 & Faber, 2006). He is currently editing Watt for Faber and working on a study of Samuel Beckett and Science. Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London and Academic Director of the London Consortium. A second, revised edition of his book, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, which first appeared in 1988, was issued by Davies Group Publishers in 2007. He is a writer and broadcaster for radio and the author of books on Dickens, Joyce and postwar British fiction, as well as of Postmodernist Culture (Blackwell, 1989, 2nd edn 1996), Theory and Cultural Value (Blackwell, 1992), Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford University Press, 2000), The Book of Skin (Reaktion, 2003) and Fly (Reaktion, 2006). His Next to Nothing, a historical poetics of the air, will appear in 2009. His website at www. stevenconnor.com includes many lectures, broadcasts and unpublished works. Matthew Feldman is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Northampton. He is the author of Beckett’s Books (Continuum, 2006) and coeditor, with Mark Nixon, of Beckett’s Literary Legacies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and Beckett’s International Reception (Continuum, 2009). Together with Erik Tonning, he convenes the annual seminar series, ‘Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies’, held at the University of Oxford. Daniel Katz is an Executive Board member of the Samuel Beckett Society, and the author of Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Northwestern University Press, 1999) and American Modernism’s

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Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). He currently teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Steven Matthews is Professor of English at Oxford Brookes University, and Assistant Dean for Research in the School of Arts and Humanities. He is the author of Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation. The Evolving Debate, 1969 to the Present (Macmillan, 1997); Yeats as Precursor (Macmillan, 2000) and Les Murray (Manchester UP, 2001). He is editor of the Contexts series of monographs (Arnold) addressing the major periods of English Literature in the light of recent ideas about historicism, to which he has contributed the volume on Modernism (2004). He is also editor of the Sourcebooks series for Palgrave; his volume on Modernism appeared in 2008. He is co-editor of Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (Longman, 1997), and is currently completing a study of influence in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Ulrika Maude is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Durham. She is the author of Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The Body and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She is also co-editor of Beckett on TV, a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies (2009). She has published numerous essays on Beckett, perception and theories of embodiment and is currently writing a book on Modernism and Medical Culture. Mark Nixon is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. He is the Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation and has published widely on Beckett’s work. He has recently edited, with Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Literary Legacies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (Continuum, 2009). He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies, Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and is currently working on Beckett’s Library with Dirk Van Hulle. He is also preparing, for Faber and Faber, an edition of Beckett’s Shorter Fiction 1950–1981, as well as a critical edition of Beckett’s unpublished short story, ‘Echo’s Bones’. Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. His latest publications include Given: 1) Art, 2) Crime (Sussex University Press, 2006), Hélène Cixous—On Cities, co-ed., (Slought, 2006), Lacan Literario (Siglo 21, 2007) and 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Blackwell, 2007). His most recent book is The Ethics of the Lie (The Other Press, 2008).

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Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition (Praeger, 2003). His most recent publications include essays on The Matrix Trilogy, Thomas De Quincey and cinematic animals, and he is currently finishing a study of violence and aesthetics in the literature and cinema of the last 100 years. Paul Stewart is an Associate Professor at the Languages and Literature Department of the University of Nicosia. He is the author of Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions (Rodopi, 2006) and has published a number of articles on various facets of Beckett’s work, the most recent being ‘But why Shakespeare? The Muted Role of Dickens in Endgame’ in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (Rodopi, 2007), and ‘A Rump Sexuality: The Recurrence of Defecating Horses in Beckett’s Oeuvre’ in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 18 (2007). His current research focuses on aspects of sexuality in Beckett’s work. Shane Weller is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (Legenda, 2005); Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He is also co-editor of The Flesh in the Text (Peter Lang, 2007). He is currently editing Beckett’s Molloy (Faber, 2009) and writing Modernism and Nihilism for Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman

In the summer of 1981, Samuel Beckett worked on a prose fragment he called ‘Ceiling’. It describes, in minute detail, the experience of coming to after the loss of consciousness: On coming to the first sight is of white. Some time after coming to the first sight is of dull white. For some time after coming to the eyes continue to. When in the end they open they are met by this dull white. Consciousness eyes to of having come to. When in the end they open they are met by this dull white.1 In this short passage, Beckett focuses on three themes that are central to phenomenological enquiry: consciousness, sensory perception and embodied experience. These concerns, and many others of equal phenomenological relevance, are present in Beckett’s work from its early stages, whether in his tongue-in-cheek enquiry into the structure of Murphy’s mind; his critical writings on Proust and the van Velde brothers or in the dramatization of memory and sensory experience so vividly staged in plays like Krapp’s Last Tape and That Time. In a volume released to mark the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth, Dermot Moran offers a useful point of departure for the study of Beckett and philosophy. He suggests that the ‘Beckettian world cries out for philosophical interpretation’, but also cautions the reader to bear in mind that Beckett ‘was not a philosopher; if he had been, he would not have needed to engage with art’ (Moran 2006: 94). Surveying the complex question of the influence of Western philosophy on Beckett’s writing, Moran’s acknowledgement of Beckett’s debt to the ‘bricolage of philosophical ideas’ comes with a caution: ‘Merely listing the occasions on which Beckett refers to philosophy [. . .] would be both tediously pedantic and entirely beside the point. To address the theme of philosophy in Beckett one must do more than rattle off the occasions where philosophy appears in his work’ (2006: 93, 100). What Dermot Moran

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neglects to address in his essay, however, is of equal significance to this volume, for although he is the author of several fine books on phenomenology, he makes no consideration in his essay of the usefulness or relevance of phenomenological enquiry to Beckett’s work.2 This blind spot in critical analyses of Beckett’s writing has been surprisingly pervasive. In recent years, phenomenological approaches to Beckett’s work have been few and far between. The contributors of the present volume have adopted a different stance. Collectively, the argument put forward here is that phenomenology does bear substantial relevance to Beckett’s work, both in terms of influence and interpretation. Just as phenomenology claimed for itself the role of a foundational ‘first science’, then, Beckett and Phenomenology also immodestly claims to be foundational, in offering the first nuanced exploration of Beckett’s writing in the light of phenomenological ideas. Phenomenology, in its most basic sense, is the field of philosophy dedicated to the study of ‘phenomena’ as they appear to the experiencing consciousness. The word ‘phenomena’, in turn, refers to appearances as opposed to ‘reality’. Central to the field of phenomenology is the experiencing subject; as the emphasis on phenomena implies, phenomenology is devoted to first-person experience. Phenomena themselves should here be understood widely. They can include temporal, sensory or intersubjective experiences; self-awareness or spatial awareness; various forms of linguistic activity; our experience of objects and tools, such as musical instruments or prostheses; bodily movement, emotion, memory, desire and imagination, as well as various forms of social and cultural experience. Furthermore, not all phenomena are fully conscious ones, but reside in the margins of our attention, and are therefore not readily available to self-conscious reflection. Examples of liminal experiences that reside in the ambiguous zone between conscious and unconscious experience include sleep, fainting or involuntary or autonomous functions like breathing. We also experience much of the sensory world, such as our habitual soundscape, only in the periphery of our conscious minds. One could even argue that this liminality characterizes all forms of experience, for their structure is not readily available to the experiencing subject except in retrospect or anticipation. This is precisely one of the arguments used by Jacques Derrida in his critique of Husserl’s ‘phenomenology of presence’. What is often forgotten or overlooked, however, is that post-Husserlian phenomenologists themselves address this complexity of experience, insisting, like Heidegger, on its temporality; or like Sartre, on the subject as both for-itself and in-itself; or like Merleau-Ponty, on the embodied, incarnate nature of subjectivity that through the clash between the habitual and the present body, fails to coincide with itself. A certain critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is therefore already built into the phenomenological tradition, long before Derrida launches his critique of Husserl’s work. The phenomenological tradition, as Husserl himself put it, was only ‘in its beginnings’ in his writings (1931: 259). As Paul

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Ricoeur has observed, its history is one of Husserlian heresies (1987: 9). In the works of second- and third-generation phenomenologists, the tradition has moved further and further away from its transcendental origins. It has recognized that ‘there is no self-understanding which is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts’ (Ricoeur 1983: 191). The field of phenomenological enquiry, in other words, has not remained static. The term first appeared in philosophical discourse in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1807), but although phenomenology as a movement was profoundly influenced by Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Brentano and others, phenomenology as a fully developed and delineated branch of philosophy was inaugurated by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). It has been one of the most important philosophical movements since its inception in 1900, and it coincides with the earliest manifestations of modernist writing, as the publication of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in 1899 suggests. Modernism shares many of the central preoccupations of phenomenology, such as the emphasis on consciousness, memory and sensory perception. The technique of free indirect discourse, one of the defining characteristics of modernism, itself signals the pervasive interest modernist writers have in representing the structure of consciousness. In philosophy, Husserl set the scene, and profoundly influenced later phenomenologists who followed in his footsteps, but also trod their own paths, as the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) attests. Husserl’s three followers developed his transcendental phenomenology, and took the discipline towards diverse and more materialist directions. Each advanced his own approach to the field: Heidegger, who was Husserl’s student, stressed our ‘being-in-the world’. He rejected Husserl’s emphasis on the structure of consciousness, directing his enquiry instead to worldly relations. Sartre, in turn, centred his philosophy around the distinction between ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’ (self-conscious being), and developed the branch of phenomenology known as existentialism.3 Merleau-Ponty, finally, premised his philosophy on the incarnate subject, and stressed the centrality of the body to our experience of the world. Phenomenology, therefore, as this brief sketch implies, is far from narrow or simple to define. Furthermore, second- and third-generation theorists, drawing from the work of classical phenomenology, have developed the discipline into yet further directions. Examples of theorists who draw from the phenomenological tradition or are deeply influenced by it include Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–96), who have taken phenomenological enquiry towards reception theory, hermeneutics and ethics. Although Jacques Derrida was one of the movement’s most prominent critics, he tellingly began his career with a book dedicated to Husserlian thought (Speech and Phenomena: see Derrida 1973). As Christopher

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Norris has argued, ‘Derrida is as far from “rejecting” Husserl as he is from simply dismissing the linguistics of Saussure or the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss’ (Norris 1993: 48). Derrida takes on board Husserl’s phenomenology for its rigour, precisely because it proves a worthy topic of his attention. He addresses Husserl because his work raised the kinds of ‘questions that Derrida [wished] to press’ (Norris 1993: 48). This, and the move away from transcendental thinking that has characterized post-Husserlian phenomenology from Heidegger onwards, are issues that have often been overlooked in literary studies, where phenomenology, at least since the rise of poststructuralism, has often been shunned. This has by no means been the case in other disciplines, such as Film Studies, where phenomenological enquiry has proved vibrant and prolific. In Beckett studies, phenomenology, with a few notable exceptions, has been reduced to Sartrean existentialism. Although existentialism offered the most prominent early theoretical approach to Beckett’s work, one could argue that its excessive emphasis on the will and its ultimately affirmative conviction in man’s freedom and choice were ill-suited to accommodate Beckettian negativity. Indeed, so pervasive was the influence of Sartrean analyses of Beckett’s work that they resulted, as Steven Connor argues in his essay, in an eventual ousting of Sartre from all considerations of Beckett’s writing. Furthermore, as a result of the overwhelming prominence in the 1960s and 1970s of existentialist analyses across the range of modern literature, followed by Derrida’s critique of the ‘phenomenology of presence’, which gained ground in literary studies in the 1980s, phenomenology was reduced either to its transcendental form or glossed over as existentialism and, as a consequence, avoided if not spurned. As the various essays in this volume make clear, however, Beckett was familiar with the work of Husserl through his reading of Wilhelm Windelband, Heinz Heimsoeth and Sartre. Beckett also had knowledge of Heidegger’s work, and as a young man, he was placed at the École Normale Supérieure (1928–30) contemporaneously with Merleau-Ponty and Jean Beaufret. Beckett read Sartre’s Nausea and the work of Camus, as well as some of the theoretical writings of Beaufret and Simone De Beauvoir, all of whom worked in the phenomenological tradition. Beckett knew Sartre personally, and shared the intellectual climate of interwar and postwar Paris with him, Merleau-Ponty and others, such as Beaufret, Beckett’s former student and friend, who was instrumental in introducing Heidegger’s thought to France. Although poststructuralist analyses have foregrounded, often brilliantly, Beckett’s own suspicion of the phenomenology of presence, the dismissal of phenomenology has often stemmed from misreadings of deconstructive theory which have disregarded the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology on Derrida’s own thinking, and have also overlooked developments in phenomenology itself, from Husserl’s transcendental version to an engagement with temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity, which often paralleled poststructuralist analyses

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of these themes. Much of second- and third-wave phenomenology shares affinities with deconstructive theory, including an inbuilt suspicion of the phenomenology of presence. Both first-generation existentialist-humanist analyses of Beckett’s work as well as second-generation poststructuralist approaches to his oeuvre, owe a debt to phenomenological themes such as the epoché, methodological doubt and the centrality of consciousness and lived experience to philosophical speculation. It is the aim of this volume, therefore, to reassess the long-overdue question of Beckett and phenomenology, and to inaugurate new and productive ways of reading Beckett’s work through the lens of phenomenological enquiry. This volume brings to the fore the richness of the phenomenological tradition, by examining Beckett’s work in the light of classical phenomenology, namely the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, as well as theorists who have developed the tradition in new directions, such as Ingarden, Iser, Hirsch, Levinas and Ricoeur. The eleven essays in this volume offer novel and imaginative readings of Beckett’s work, and act as a corrective to the often limited ways in which critics have interpreted the usefulness of phenomenology to Beckett’s work. The volume is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Beckett and Phenomenology’, considers the relevance of the four major classical phenomenologists to a reading of Beckett’s work. By comparing and, at times, contrasting Beckett’s work with these principal figures in phenomenology, the authors of these essays cast light on various previously unexplored ways in which the work of the major phenomenologists illuminates, coincides and occasionally contrasts with central concerns in Beckett’s writing. The first section opens with Matthew Feldman’s essay, which considers Husserl’s impact on Beckett through his encounter with phenomenology in 1938. Focusing on Beckett’s reading of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), Windelband and Heimsoeth’s analysis of Husserl, which Beckett was familiar with, as well as his encounter with Husserl’s own influences, namely Mauthner, Schopenhauer and Kant, Feldman argues that Beckett undertakes a more ‘phenomenological method’ from the late 1930s, writing ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’ more directly as a way of refracting the object through the unstable consciousness of an individual subject. This, he concludes, partly explains the difference between Murphy and Watt, and paves the way for Beckett’s postwar fiction. In Feldman’s essay, as in a number of the chapters that follow, turning to the archives for insight into Beckett’s ‘life-world’ therefore becomes both a phenomenological method and a literary-critical approach: a way of seeking that ‘raw material’ that presented itself to Beckett in the construction of his literature. The second essay, by Shane Weller, also relies in part on archival research. The focus is on Husserl’s student, Heidegger, and his discursive influence on Beckett’s work. Weller opens with the observation that, were one to rank those writers who exhibit the most abiding literary preoccupation with the nothing,

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there would arguably be few, aside from Mallarmé, who could compete with Samuel Beckett. Drawing from Beckett’s reading notes of the 1930s, Weller begins his analysis by considering Beckett’s appropriation of various preSocratic theories of the nothing, especially those of Democritus and Gorgias. Although Beckett’s relation to modern philosophy, especially Heidegger and Sartre, is much more difficult to establish, Beckett shared at least one close textual proximity with Heidegger, namely his ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’, first published in the journal Fontaine in November 1947, shortly before Beckett began writing En attendant Godot and L’Innommable. Weller considers some of the similarities and differences between Beckett’s treatment of the nothing in his writings of the late 1940s and Heidegger’s treatment of it in his works between 1929 and 1947. The third essay in this section, written by Steven Connor, boldly and brilliantly revisits the connections between Beckett and Sartre, after nearly three decades of critical silence on the topic. Connor turns his focus on the largely ignored question of Sartre’s theory of embodiment, and the hitherto unexamined treatment of nausea in Beckett’s writing. He demonstrates, through an analysis of How It Is and Ill Seen Ill Said, that in both Beckett and Sartre alimentation emerges as the manner in which embodiment and worldedness are existed. Nausea, or Sartre’s ‘physiological disgust’, appears as the ‘persistent, vague but still unmistakable apprehension of the contingency, the thisness of my body. It might be regarded as the for-itself of the in-itself’. Ulrika Maude’s essay, the final one in this section, extends the analysis of the Beckettian body, through a focus on Merleau-Ponty’s incarnate subject, and, more specifically, his treatment of perception, which is often strikingly similar to Beckett’s own. Beckett and Merleau-Ponty shared an interest in painting, partly because it functioned as an index of perceptual experience. This can be evidenced in Beckett’s early correspondence and critical writings, which reveal his preoccupation with the reorganization of perception in modern art. Both Beckett and Merleau-Ponty foreground Cézanne’s repudiation of anthropocentrism in favour of what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘chaos of sensation’. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Beckett’s prose, which suggests that the author’s interest in the embodied nature of perceptual experience was central to the formation of his aesthetic. The second section of this book, ‘Beckett’s Phenomenologies’, examines the various ways in which Beckett’s own writing explores themes that are central to phenomenological enquiry, such as the structure of the immature consciousness, intersubjectivity or sleep. Although the question of Beckett’s relation to philosophy is a complex one, his work repeatedly problematizes the neat boundary between literature and theory, which at times makes his own writing appear like a phenomenological analysis. This questioning of the boundary between literature and philosophy, which is characteristic of the period, can also be found in phenomenology itself: Heidegger’s writing often

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approaches the condition of poetic discourse, while Sartre famously turned his focus to drama and fiction. This section also explores the phenomenologically-informed reader-response to Beckett’s work, through a detailed analysis of the reading experience of Beckett’s performative prose, and the problem of authorial intention and interpretation in the complex process of annotation. The section opens with Mark Nixon’s analysis of the relation between the Husserlian life-world and Beckett’s art-world in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, completed in 1932, but not published until posthumously in 1992. Linking Brough’s conception of ‘art-world’ and ‘life-world’ to Porter Abbot’s understanding of textual ‘autographs’ in Beckett’s fiction, Nixon offers a close reading of the way in which the novel’s ‘autobiographical layer’ merges Beckett’s interwar experiences and creative imagination. However halting and Joycean Beckett’s first novel may be, the self-reflexivity in Dream heralds a lifelong investigation into consciousness ‘in the absence of a coherent, stable subject– object reality’. By refracting salient episodes in Dream through Beckett’s phenomenological treatment of a veil between subjective consciousness and perceived reality, Nixon demonstrates that, from the start of his writing career, Beckett’s experiences were intimately connected with his fiction. His essay finds the tension between art- and life-worlds at the forefront of Beckett’s authorial consciousness. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay, like Nixon’s, focuses on Beckett’s early work. It offers a systematic comparison between two novels written and published at the same time, namely Beckett’s Murphy and Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, both of which date from 1938. The essay uncovers numerous common features between the two novels, not least the fact that both are experimental modernist novels predicated on the opposition of form versus chaos. Gombrowicz’s main concept, immaturity, can also be applied productively to Murphy. What underpins both texts is a philosophy of form that needs to be expressed through literary means. Rabaté’s essay discovers that Beckett explores all the ramifications of a post-Cartesian or post-Husserlian cogito, which should be qualified via Gombrowicz as an immature cogito. Steven Matthews’ essay turns its focus on intersubjectivity, and, specifically, on Beckett’s treatment of it in the immediate postwar period. For MerleauPonty, Matthews argues, the phenomenology of perception is dependent upon inclusion not only of the ‘I’ accessible only to the self, but also of the ‘other’, which enables the subject’s ‘incarnation in . . . the possibility, at least, of a historical situation’. This inherently dramatic sense of ‘revealing me in a situation’ as the radical drive of phenomenology forms the core of his chapter. Matthews deploys phenomenological history to challenge the standard critical notion that Beckett’s sense of consciousness and bodiliness render his writing ahistorical. His essay seeks, instead, in line with Husserl’s thought, to analyse Beckett’s response to his time’s ‘crisis of European man’.

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Daniel Katz’s essay extends the analysis of intersubjectivity and history to the question of Beckett’s relevance to post-Auschwitz art. Katz explores this question through an exploration of Agamben’s recent work on enunciation in a post-Holocaust context, where ‘the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness to a desubjectification’. Katz compares Agamben’s work with Levinas’ account of shame, which emerges, in seeming contrast to Agamben’s thinking, as ‘the ineluctable link to one’s own singularity’. Drawing from the work of these two theorists, Katz’s essay asks what it means to speak for oneself, in one’s ‘own’ language, and relates this enquiry to Beckett’s work. If a certain ‘absent present’ lies at the heart of Katz’s analysis, it also forms the thematic concern of Paul Sheehan’s essay. Sheehan’s chapter moves into the anteroom of consciousness, in its analysis of Beckett’s focus on sleep. It offers an example of Beckett’s persistent exploration of the kinds of liminal experiences that defy analysis by not being readily available to conscious reflection. Sheehan opens with an overview of phenomenological approaches to the ‘absent present’ quality of sleep, and thereafter, advances a reading of what he calls Beckett’s ‘deep sleep’ dramas. Through the non-diegetic use of sound and other forms of self-othering, Sheehan argues, Beckett’s late dramas foreground the ‘absent present’ quality of experience, which, despite a critical bias that has associated drama with ‘presence’, turns out to be the precondition of theatre itself. Paul Stewart’s essay draws from the theories of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser in its exploration of the reading phenomenology of Beckett’s work. His chapter examines and extends the phenomenological study of aesthetic responses to reading, by asking what occurs to the reader when he or she is confronted with The Unnamable. Following Husserl, Ingarden divides the literary work and its correlates in consciousness into interdependent strata which are concretized in a ‘polyphonic harmony’ by the reader. According to such criteria, however, Beckett’s work fails to achieve any aesthetic synthesis and therefore Ingarden’s theory does not so much capture what reading a Beckett text might involve as delineate Beckett’s divergence from classical texts. Taking up the challenge of creating a theory that would accommodate Beckett’s work, Iser, in turn, does allow for the many frustrations and so-called ‘minus functions’ of the text, but, as Stewart argues, rather than offering a theoretical account of what the reader undergoes in the process of reading The Unnamable, Iser’s work amounts to a description of what occurs in the text itself. This difficulty, namely that The Unnamable stages its own reading and therefore places the actual reader elsewhere, forms the basis of Stewart’s phenomenological analysis of the reader’s response to the text. Chris Ackerley’s essay, finally, draws on the work of E. D. Hirsch, in its exploration of the complex process of annotation, where the search for authorial intention is both crucial and, in the case of Beckett’s work, highly elusive. Anchored to Beckett’s penultimate story, ‘Yellow’, in More Pricks Than Kicks,

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Ackerley’s essay applies Hirsch’s method of ‘valid’ meaning reconstruction; that is, the manner in which a ‘determinate’ intertextual annotation may be traced back to ‘probable’ artistic intent. In this way, the phenomenological act of reading is transformed: through the mediation of the annotator, a new, sharable meaning is created in the reader’s consciousness. Intended meaning, then, is ‘reproducible’ by the critic tracing out both explicit and implicit textual references; in the case under scrutiny here, through a discussion of the word ‘yellow’ itself. Raising new meanings through annotation therefore entails that the annotated ‘object’ be considered as a phenomenological construct— one cohering around a hermeneutical ‘horizon of meaning’ that can be approached through the communicative act of ‘valid annotation’. As such, the concluding chapter of Beckett and Phenomenology is as much a peering behind the annotator’s methodological ‘veil’ as a phenomenological account of meaning-creation in the act of reading itself. As the authors of this collection argue, phenomenological themes such as consciousness, embodiment, perception, nausea, immaturity, enunciation, shame and sleep, offer new and fascinating insight into Beckett’s work. Together, the eleven essays in this collection demonstrate the rife interconnections between Beckett and phenomenology and contribute to the revival of phenomenological analyses of Beckett’s work.

Notes 1

2

3

The six holographs and three typescripts of ‘Ceiling’ are held in the Carlton Lake Samuel Beckett Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Folder 17, Box 1. The quotation is from the third and final typescript. Warm thanks are due to the Harry Ransom Center and the Samuel Beckett Estate for kind permission to quote from the manuscript. Dermot Moran is the author of Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge 2000), Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (London: Polity, 2005), and four other volumes on phenomenology, including The Phenomenology Reader (London: Routledge, 2001). The classification of existentialism as a branch of phenomenology has at times been contested, but Sartre himself considered existentialism as deeply rooted in the phenomenological tradition, as the subtitle of Being and Nothingness, namely, A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, indicates.

Bibliography Brough, J. B. (1988), ‘Art and Artworld: Some Ideas for a Husserlian Aesthetic’, in R. Sokolowski (ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition. Washington D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, pp. 25–45.

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Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1910), Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. London: George Allen & Unwin. Husserl, E. (1931), Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. B. Gibson. New York, NY: Macmillan. Moran, D. (2006), ‘Beckett and Philosophy’, in C. Murray (ed.), Samuel Beckett: 100 Years. Dublin: New Island, pp. 93–110. Norris, C. (1993), Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1983), ‘On Interpretation’, in A. Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175–197. —(1987), A l’école de la philosophie. Paris: J. Vrin. Sartre, J.-P. (2000), Nausea. Trans. R. Baldick. London: Penguin.

Chapter 1

‘But What Was this Pursuit of Meaning, in this Indifference to Meaning?’: Beckett, Husserl, Sartre and ‘Meaning Creation’ Matthew Feldman1

I Samuel Beckett’s wartime novel, Watt, confronts both characters and readers with fundamental dilemmas of meaning and meaning creation. In this sense, it may be read as quintessentially ‘Beckettian’: without doubt, ‘it has its place in the series’, as Beckett wrote to George Reavey in 1947, ‘as will perhaps appear in time’ (cited in Pilling 1997: 185). To some extent, such a ‘place’ in Beckett studies has been created, thanks in large measure to important scholarship on the ‘final’ text of Watt and also to extant manuscripts, composed and doodlefestooned in France between February 1941 and May 1945.2 Yet Watt stands out as unusual all the same, even by the standards of Beckett’s revolutionary writing. Situated between the semi-obscure fiction, poetry and journalism of the interwar years on one side, and the postwar ‘frenzy of writing’ broadly lasting until 1950 (so facilitating his international acclaim) on the other, Watt may be seen as the pivotal novel in Beckett’s oeuvre. Simply put, Watt is Beckett’s artistic fulcrum, linking early and ‘mature’ writings. For Watt marks the abandonment of writing in English for more than a decade; the progressive abandonment of third-person narration; the elimination of conventional literary structures like plot and setting; and even more remarkably, it solves the problem of writing about something which had preoccupied Beckett since, at least, his 1929 homage to Joyce’s Work in Progress: Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. (Beckett 1984: 27)

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As such, this chapter will argue that Beckett achieved the breakthrough heralded in Watt by beginning to write phenomenologically. It will adopt an empirically bounded methodology to explore Beckett’s interwar engagement with phenomenological ideas, and conclude by suggesting that Watt represents Beckett’s ‘phenomenological turn’ in literature. ‘Hymeneal still it lay, the thing so soon to be changed, between me and all the forgotten horrors of joy’, recounts Arsene, attempting to explain ‘existence off the ladder’ to the eponymous newcomer, despite his ‘recent costiveness and want of stomach. But in what did the change consist?’ (Beckett 1970: 41–2). Grappling with this question over his 20-page ‘short speech’, Arsene sets out his own struggles with (non-)meaning in Mr. Knott’s sanctuary, thereby also summarizing Watt’s ensuing struggle with meaning creation, or ‘intellection’3: The change. In what did it consist? It is hard to say. Something slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my tobacco-pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly somewhere some little thing slipped . . . . To conclude from this that the incident was internal would, I think, be rash. For my—how shall I say?—my personal system was so distended at the period of which I speak that the distinction between what was inside it and what was outside it was not at all easy to draw. Everything that happened happened inside it, and at the same time everything that happened happened outside it . . . . It was not an illusion, as long as it lasted, that presence of what did not exist, that presence without, that presence within, that presence between, though I’ll be buggered if I can understand how it could have been anything else. (Beckett 1970: 41–3) Yet Arsene’s ‘radical change of appearance’ so distending his ‘personal system’ owes much to another novel also exploring ‘abstract change without object’, Jean-Paul Sartre’s near-contemporaneous La Nausée (1969: 4). First published in 1938, Nausea presents Antonin Roquentin’s battle with a very similar phenomenological crisis: ‘Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can’t describe it; it’s like the Nausea and yet it’s just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits the night, I am as happy as a hero in a novel’ (1969: 54). Upon reaching the end of this ‘anti-hero’s’ enquiry into consciousness, Beckett enthused to Thomas MacGreevey on 26 May 1938: ‘I have read Sartre’s Nausée and find it extraordinarily good’ (TCD MS 10904). The basis for this praise, as will become clear, was over the treatment of the subject–object relation, rendered as a ‘no-man’s-land’ in the 1934 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (Beckett 1984: 70)—one also central to Edmund Husserl’s construction of phenomenology—that Beckett had been engaging with from the very outset of his writing career. Additional parallels in the novels are numerous, from structural affinities— such as Watt’s climactic ‘(MS. Illegible)’ and ‘(Hiatus in MS.)’ (Beckett 1970: 238–40) with Nausea’s introductory ‘Word left out’ and ‘Word . . . is illegible’

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(Sartre 1969: 125)—to concluding scenes at a railway station, and explicit ‘editorial’ interventions across both works.4 Indeed, the two texts complement each other in the most intimate of ways, especially if one considers psychological readings of ‘madness’, notably schizophrenia, in the two texts.5 Roquentin laments in his diary—in a manner immediately redolent of Watt’s finding himself ‘in the midst of things which, if they consented to be named, did so as it were with reluctance’ (Beckett 1970: 78)—‘Things are divorced from their names . . . I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenceless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me’ (Sartre 1969: 125). In one of a series of distinctly phenomenological passages on this experiential change, Roquentin, like Arsene, is outdoors, and then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the every past of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the [tree] root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (Sartre 1969: 127) In passing judgement on this perceptual change, although ‘I was not even conscious of the transformation’, Roquentin notes his ‘atrocious joy’: ‘This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy’ (1969: 131). When Roquentin is in this state of Husserlian ‘bracketing’, even uttering words is ‘a little like an exorcism’ (1969: 125). But in Watt’s strikingly similar case, this failure is even more general, and indeed dispiriting: ‘For to explain had always been to exorcise, for Watt’ (Beckett 1970: 74–5). Edith Kern is one of the very few Anglophone critics to have appreciated this philosophical congruence, noting ‘Sartre and Beckett evoke in this respect analogous situations and even use similar terms to describe them. Like the Roquentin of Nausea, Watt feels closing in on him a world that has lost its human meaning and can no longer be put into human categories or safely expressed in ordinary language’ (Kern 1970: 190).6 Whereas Jacqueline Hoefer was ready to see in Watt a pastiche of Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein’s early attempt at an ‘ideal language’ in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as the ‘empirical and rational system’ Watt lives by (Hoefer 1965: 74–5), Kern was far happier to cast Watt’s linguistic instabilities in existential terms: ‘Explaining and naming are man’s weapons to exorcise an otherwise demonic universe that is threatening in its purposelessness’ (Kern 1970: 190–1). Despite this early and impressive critical linking of Beckett and Sartre, however, this chapter will demonstrate that it was the ‘phenomenological’ Sartre of the later 1930s who was of interest to Beckett, and far less the ‘existentialist’ Sartre made famous by the wartime No Exit (1942) and Being and Nothingness (1943). This sense is captured in Beckett’s response to Knowlson’s suggestion, discussing Sartrean philosophy,

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that ‘from my own perspective, we were too firmly en situation (too limited by our situation) for the existentialist’s emphasis on human freedom to have a lot of meaning’—constraints largely glossed over by existentialist philosophy. Knowlson reports that ‘Beckett agreed enthusiastically with this objection, saying that he found the actual limitations on man’s freedom of action (his genes, his upbringing, his social circumstances) far more compelling than the theoretical freedom on which Sartre had laid so much stress’ (Knowlson and Haynes 2003: 18). This corresponds with Beckett’s letters linking Sartre’s Nausea to Camus’ The Stranger in the mid-1950s; and more importantly, a letter of October 1945, some six months after the completion of Watt, where Beckett comments on Morris Sinclair’s request for academic advice regarding a PhD on Sartre: ‘His German adhesions would be into your barrow. Husserl—? (Das Schloss, Der Prozess). Kierkegaard comes in also. I should be very glad to help you and could introduce you to Sartre & his world’ (cited in Gunn 2006: 14). However, if struggles with intellection ultimately lead to Watt’s institutionalization—and however much Watt was written in wartime hiding ‘to stay sane’— the manuscript’s 1945 completion immediately preceded Beckett’s ‘revelation’: ‘Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write down what I feel’ (Knowlson 1996: 333, 351–2, 772 n.55). As Knowlson’s authorized biography makes clear, even though the ‘vision at last’ so famously dramatized in Krapp’s Last Tape initiated the breakthrough writings of the postwar years—whereby ‘outside reality would be refracted through the filter of his own imagination’—a far longer process of stocking Beckett’s fertile imaginings, of drawing upon experiences and erudition from the interwar period, nevertheless meant ‘the ground had been well-prepared’ (1996: 352–3). But in terms of Beckett’s artistic development, ‘in what did the change consist?’ Although there are several fruitful responses to this question (psychology, material conditions, wartime experiences, the shift to French, and so on), one largely overlooked by Beckett studies is the phenomenological rendering of intellection; translated into artistic terms, that is communicating the vexed experience of a conscious subject depicting objects as they are perceived. Just as existential and poststructuralist accounts in Beckett studies might be aided by, as it were, a move back to their shared heritage in Husserlian phenomenology, so too will this step back here assist in illuminating the path leading to Beckett’s phenomenological turn.

II First of all, what is phenomenology anyway? A useful working definition is offered in a recent philosophical biography of Edmund Husserl, undisputed founder of phenomenological philosophy, who ‘envisaged phenomenology as the descriptive, non-reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its

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appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness’. Extending his initial idea for phenomenology in the 1900–1901 Logical Investigations from Franz Brentano’s sketch of intentionality gave Husserl the epoché, or phenomenological reduction, in order to get at the essences of consciousness directed towards objects (whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’). ‘He explicitly characterizes phenomenology as the systematic study of the essential correlation of subjectivity with objectivity’, Dermot Moran argues, leading to a philosophical methodology which is ‘essentially “correlation-research” ’ (Moran 2005: 2, 7). Indeed, with his phenomenological motto, ‘back to the things themselves!’, Husserl, late in life, sometimes saw phenomenology’s bracketing, the reduction of objects to individual consciousness in order to examine their underlying essence, as ‘his paramount achievement’, for ‘the point of bracketing is to turn our attention away from the objects that normally concern us to our consciousness of these objects, and to the meanings through which we experience them’ (Woodruff-Smith 2007: 45, 29). Vitally, phenomenology may therefore be considered as much a process and a method as an epistemology and a modern(ist) philosophical system. Phenomenology as established by Husserl is furthermore guided by self-reflexive strictures of method, always revisiting certainties, always ‘bound by its essential nature to make the claim of being “first” philosophy and to provide the means for all the rational criticism that needs to be performed; that it therefore demands the completest freedom from all assumptions and absolute reflexive insight in relation to itself’ (Husserl 1962: 172). In short, every Husserlian phenomenological statement has PERHAPS lingering somewhere in the background. Apropos Watt and Roquentin, the very act of ‘bracketing’ the ubiquitous natural standpoint—namely, through the refraction of the ‘objective’ world through individual consciousness—is the greatest a priori (in Husserl’s terminology, ‘eidetic’) form of doubt possible; for Husserl, this is an uncertainty far more radical than Descartes’s method (which never seriously doubted either God or Euclidean logic; see MacDonald 2000: 1–17). Husserl’s breakthrough was effected by extending Immanuel Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ beyond the essence of objects (the Kantian ‘Thing-inItself’) to the essential processes of consciousness; a ‘transcendental-phenomenological Idealism in opposition to every form of psychologistic Idealism’. A final excerpt from Husserl’s English Preface to his celebrated 1913 exposition, Ideas—a work of critical importance to Beckett in 1938, if only indirectly— clarifies the role for phenomenological philosophy, one intended to be far more foundational than the Cartesianism preceding it: I obtain an original and pure descriptive knowledge of the psychical life as it is in itself, the most original information being obtained from myself, because here alone is perception the medium . . . . This transformation of meaning concerns myself, above all, the ‘I’ of the psychological and subsequently transcendental inquirer for the time being . . . . It leads eventually to the

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Beckett and Phenomenology point that I, who am here reflecting upon myself, become conscious that under a consistent and exclusive focusing of experience upon that which is purely inward, upon what is ‘phenomenologically’ accessible to me, I possess in myself an essential individuality, self-contained, and holding well together in itself, to which all real and objectively possible experience and knowledge belongs, through whose agency the objective world is there for me with all its empirically confirmed facts . . . . The absolute positing means that the world is no longer ‘given’ to me in advance, its validity that of a simple existent, but that henceforth it is exclusively my Ego that is given. (Husserl 1962: 7–8, 11)

That said, in line with Karl Marx’s rejection of ‘Marxism’ later in life—evocative of another Marx’s (this one admired by Beckett: Groucho) refusal to join any group that would have him as a member—Husserl, following his retirement, ‘declared himself the greatest enemy of the so-called “phenomenological movement” ’ (Moran 2000: 2–3). (Surely due in no small measure to Martin Heidegger’s defection toward a ‘Being’ fully realized, for him, in a Nazism persecuting Husserl in the last 5 years of his life.7) As Ricoeur suggested, phenomenology has followed a trajectory of Husserlian heresies (see Introduction, p. 3). The religious terminology is surely apt if we consider that Husserl’s final work, The Crisis of European Sciences, viewed phenomenological approaches to the world as akin to a Damascene conversion: ‘Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion’ (cited in Macdonald 2000: 15). Shades of Beckett’s ‘personal system’ abound, not least in his corresponding deification of art (Feldman 2009). Yet Beckett was as much a revolutionary artist as Husserl was a positivistic scientist, a vital distinction between the two needing to be borne in mind. Despite these vocational poles—Husserl’s ‘foundational philosophy’ as against Beckett’s ‘non-Euclidean logic’—the role of consciousness in meaning creation was as central for the early Beckett as it was for the later Husserl.8 For instance, in 1931: Husserl also spoke in the deeper sense in which the world is infinite: not only is the world as already ‘there’ unlimited, but through our new experiences, and our new insights, our decisions, our activity, new reality is constantly and forever created. (Cairns 1976: 47) This sentiment is, in and of itself, heuristically comparable to Beckett’s remarks at the outset of Proust, published in March of that year: [T]he world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say) the pact must be

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continually renewed . . . . The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. (Beckett 2006: 515–16) Considering the existentialist and poststructuralist ‘heresies’ overtaking phenomenology in postwar Europe (for example, Derrida’s 1954 dissertation was entitled The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, while his first book in 1962 introduced and translated Husserl’s Origin of Geometry), perhaps another idiosyncratic phenomenological approach may be added: art. How else can Sartre’s decision to write La Nausée be explained, alongside the ‘4 years’ of intensive study it took Sartre ‘to exhaust Husserl’ (Sartre 1984, 184)? Upon being introduced to Husserl’s ideas by Raymond Aron, just back from Berlin in 1933—‘this glass, this table . . . phenomenologists spoke of them philosophically’—‘Sartre discovered in Husserl’s phenomenology an intellectual process whose every stage and every theme referred him back to his own’ (Cohen-Solal 1987: 91). As this serendipitous introduction decisively shaped the 1938 Nausea, it thus seems perfectly reasonable (at least for the purposes of this literary essay) to employ David Woodruff-Smith’s more maximal definition of phenomenology as a self-reflexive ‘theory of the study of consciousness as lived or experienced form the first person perspective; especially, focusing on pure consciousness and its characteristic intentionality, its structure in the stream of consciousness’ (2007: 441). With these last three words, in particular, Beckett returns to view. Or does he? For all their similarities, Husserl and Beckett have, to date, made unusual bedfellows. This is, itself, all the more unusual given that both existential humanism and poststructuralism—the two dominant readings of Beckett’s oeuvre— are themselves the children of Husserlian phenomenology. Returning to Husserl therefore offers a paradoxical opening for phenomenology as mode of literary criticism; this is especially relevant to Beckett’s writing, even if it has largely been left to phenomenologists, rather than literary critics, to make this case (Feldman 2002: 229–32). Broadly, arguments that phenomenology might be ideally expressed through literature are left to philosophical, not literary, commentaries, such as Valdes’ hermeneutical aside on how The Unnamable brings to the surface of the reader’s consciousness those presuppositions from which spring all operations of comprehension . . . . Once the reader becomes conscious of the necessary presuppositions of comprehension, he or she will find that the foundations of all unassailable knowledge begin to shift. (Valdes 1992: 36) Another rare sally across disciplinary boundaries is provided by Maurice Natanson’s The Erotic Bird, containing a chapter on the way in which the ‘transcendental in Waiting for Godot lies in the bracketing of the axioms of existence which everyday life otherwise takes for granted as “real” ’, thus ‘forfeiting the world of reality for a perspective on what composes the world in surreptitious ways’ (Natanson 1998: 72, xv). Yet, these are exceptions amongst

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phenomenological literary criticism. A still rarer monograph, Kaelin’s, using the approach of ‘structural phenomenology’ to Beckett’s work is, in actuality, a New Critical analysis of Beckett’s principal works, not a consistent phenomenological enquiry into the nature of the author’s phenomenological representation of an ‘unhappy consciousness’ (Kaelin 1981: 7). Such a neglect of Husserl and Beckett has been endemic to Beckett studies, despite numerous analyses on the role of consciousness in the author’s work.9 And this is despite existential-humanist and poststructuralist critics intimating that precisely such an exploration would be profitable. Locatelli’s otherwise excellent Unwording the World, for instance, does not elaborate on the tantalizing promissory observation advanced in her introduction: [M]ethodologically, Beckett could thus be compared to Husserl, whose ‘reductions’ constitute a process, a dynamic, investigative device, well known to the analyses of descriptive Phenomenology. Obviously, Beckett’s investigation develops on and through literature, and in a non-transcendental direction. Unlike Husserl, he is not looking for an irrefutable foundation of knowledge, a discovery which in itself is charged with an important cognitive significance. (Locatelli 1990: 2–3) In turn, Butler’s Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being posited that ‘[i]n spite of all protestations to the contrary, Beckett is working the same ground as the philosophers’ (1984: 2). But Butler’s existential phenomenology takes its point of departure from Hegel not Husserl, giving him a skewed perspective on Heidegger and Sartre’s phenomenological ‘heresies’. The Preface to Edith Kern’s aforementioned Existential Thought and Fictional Technique, in turn, argues, in relation to existentialism, that: From its inception, existential thought has felt itself at home in fiction. Because of its intense ‘inwardness’ and the ‘commitment’ of its proponents, it has expressed itself more strikingly in imaginative writing than in nonfictional treatises. According to modern existentialist thinkers, the paradox and absurdity of life can be more readily deduced from fundamental human situations portrayed in fiction than described in the logical language of philosophy which is our heritage. Existentialism’s abhorrence of rigid thought systems as being alien to life and existence has equally pointed toward a preference for poetry and fiction. (Kern 1970: viii) These critical accounts could be considered suggestive ‘near-misses’ in connecting Beckett with Husserl. It is nevertheless clear that appropriating a phenomenological methodology to analyse the rendering of intellection in Beckett’s work is a viable heuristic foundation for literary interpretation—even without any evidence of direct correlations between the two. And even if

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Beckett studies have remained virtually silent on Husserlian phenomenology, archival deposits have not. As shall become clear, Beckett’s foundering on the rocks of the subject–object distinction was decisively aided by Husserlian philosophy in Spring 1938. Noting in his uniquely insightful notebook from the late 1930s, the ‘Whorosocope Notebook’, that ‘Philosophy in the 20th century stresses problem of cognition’, Beckett took this lengthy German excerpt on Husserl, translated and reproduced here for the first time: This philosophy, oriented towards a critique of knowledge and a philosophy of science, has found its most significant form in the ‘transcendental idealist’s’ way of thinking, represented in Germany above all in the neoKantian movements and schools (above all in the ‘Marburg School’: H. Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer and the ‘Baden’ or ‘Southwest German School’: W. Windelband and H. Rickert, E. Lask, Br. Bauch), under whose systems of thought one must count the ‘immanence philosophy’ (Schuppe) as well as the theory of consciousness [Bewußtseinslehre] and ‘transcendental idealism’ of E. Husserl. In France philosophers of science such as Hamelin, or Milhaud, even Hannequin stand close to such a form of thinking. From the neo-Kantian movement the Marburg School has forcefully moved the focus of attention of the transcendental question to the categories of ideas of the mathematical natural sciences and from there pursued the systematic discovery of the formal laws of knowledge even for such areas as ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. The special merit of the fully developed form of thinking of the Baden School, pioneered by W. Windelband, and reflected today in H. Rickert’s system, has been the transition to the use of logic and methodology in the discipline of history. cf. Kants [sic] definition of ‘transcendental’ [written by Beckett in English]: I call transcendental all cognition that deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of cognizing objects in general insofar as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori [taken here from (Kant 66) . . .] Critique of Knowledge: After preparatory work in the 19th century (in Germany for instance [by] Helmholtz, H. Hertz, Kirchhoff, in Austria E. Mach) this critique of knowledge has seen a great development above all in France (H. Poincaré, P. Duhem, Milhaud, Meyerson, Le Roy, Rougier, Hannequin). The questions raised here, equally significant for both our views on nature and the theory of epistemology, with the further progressing ‘foundational crisis’ [Grundlagenkrisis] of the sciences, continuously gain new fuel and topicality. In England Whitehead, Russell, Eddington for instance have provided important contributions to the critical reflection on the foundations of mathematics and the natural sciences. New advances and questions have also been

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Beckett and Phenomenology brought up by Hugo Dingler, and E. Mach (d. 1916), which are yet to be clarified.10

Just as the above quotation ties Edmund Husserl’s ‘transcendental idealism’ (via Kant) to Beckett’s readings, it also represents the end of his 10-year struggle with philosophy. That is to say, Beckett’s engagement with phenomenology around mid-1938 marked the conclusion of his search for philosophical answers, particularly regarding the subject–object relation in art. Philosophical thought (particularly that of Schopenhauer and Dr Johnson) would henceforth be consulted to reinforce or extend Beckett’s literary endeavours. In short, in finding phenomenological ideas in the contemporaneous philosophy first advanced by Edmund Husserl, Beckett solved—or at least to his satisfaction, resolved—the matter of how individual perception makes meaning out of objects. Critically, these need not be objects of the world, but can be those of individual consciousness too. Yet at the same time, Beckett’s break was a progressive one. For fretting over the subject–object relation is part and parcel of Beckett’s artistic evolution in the 1930s.

III An account of Beckett’s engagement with subject–object relations, leading to its resolution in 1938, must here be offered in a necessarily brief and biographical sketch. Rather than looking at the fictional works of the period— the early poems, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy—I will offer an overview of Beckett’s manuscripts, letters and nonfiction at this time.11 Interestingly, grappling with the elusive subject–object relation was triggered by two opposing influences, canonical philosophy and contemporary art—both only truly introduced to Beckett in ‘The Paris Years’ (Knowlson 1996: 87–119). By the end of nearly 2 years (early November 1928 to mid-Sept. 1930) at the École Normale Supérieure, Beckett had already employed Vico’s theory (via Bruno) on the identification of opposites and ‘rejection of the transcendental’ in praising James Joyce’s ‘High Modernist’ style: ‘His writing is not about something: it is that something itself ’ (Beckett 1984: 26–7). And while the 98-line poem Whoroscope—replete with Eliotesque footnotes, supplied at Richard Aldington’s request on 16 June 1930—may be philosophically downplayed as part of a short flirtation with Descartes, two recurrent features stand out. First is the yoking of European philosophy to radically modernistic aims, (even if these early works were rather tame compared with the postwar fictions); and second, Beckett started to specifically enquire into those dialectics that are the bread and butter of Western philosophy, exemplified by the tradition of mind–body dualism (Feldman 2008: 41–57).

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With more of his own views advanced, perhaps, than in either of the two previous publications (Whoroscope and ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’), Proust, submitted to Chatto & Windus upon Beckett’s return to Dublin in September 1930, takes these twin features even further. Like Joyce, Marcel Proust ‘makes no attempt to dissociate form from content. The one is a concretion of the other, the revelation of a world.’ Over the 16 volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, argues a highly reflexive Beckett, Proust achieves this feat through effecting the breakdown of Habit through artistic experience: ‘When the subject is exempt from the will the object is exempt from causality (Time and Space taken together) and this human vegetation is purified in the transcendental apperception that can capture the Model, the Idea, the Thing in itself’. As this excerpt suggests, in saluting Proust’s literary impressionism, ‘his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility’, Beckett again seeks philosophical support, this time from Schopenhauer’s first volume of The World as Will and Representation (Beckett 2006: 550–2). While the influence of Schopenhauer on Proust has long been noted in Anglophone scholarship, Beckett’s gravitation towards the former’s ‘veil of Maya’—or ‘what Kant calls the phenomenon as opposed to the thing-in-itself’, even if ‘Kant did not arrive at the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as representation and that the thing-in-itself is the will’—is, without doubt, a major influence on both Beckett’s artistic temperament and his philosophical outlook during the interwar period (Schopenhauer 1969: 419, 421).12 Moreover, by rationalizing away the fact that phenomena were representations of reality, and that these representations were illusions created by individual egoism (what Schopenhauer calls the ‘principle of individuation’), Kant is admonished in The World as Will and Representation for failing to consider moments when the ‘veil of Maya’ stops deceiving the mind, leaving existence to be perceived directly in its essence; one beyond ‘this visible world in which we are, a magic effect called into being, an unstable and inconstant illusion without substance, comparable to the optical illusion and the dream, a veil enveloping human consciousness, a something of which it is equally false and equally true to say that it is and that it is not’. Schopenhauer’s ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy’, ‘that we never know the essential nature of the world, namely the thing-in-itself’—the first of many ‘neo-Kantian’ attempts to overcome the master’s ‘Idealism’ regarding individual subjectivity grasping at external objects— thus becomes connected to the artist’s unique ability to counter the ‘principium individuationis’ (Schopenhauer 417–22). Sounding more like a Schopenhauerian rendering of Brahmanism, Beckett’s essay ascribes this artistic overcoming to Proust’s use of ‘involuntary memory’: [I]t abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what

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Beckett and Phenomenology the mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal—the real. But involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the performances of its miracle. (Beckett 2006: 523)

Beckett then developed this interest ‘on relation between object & its representation, between the stimulus & molecular disturbance, between percipi and percipere’ through ‘the old demon of notesnatching’, as demonstrated by jottings from the introduction of Jules de Gaultier’s From Kant to Nietzsche near the end of the 1931–1932 ‘Dream Notebook’ (Pilling 1999: 165, xiii). As is typical of the Joycean style undertaken in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Gaultier’s reference is recycled for a section of Dream parodying Beckett’s tutor, Rudmose-Brown (the Polar Bear), ‘if we could only learn to school ourselves to nurture that divine and fragile Fünkelein of curiosity struck from the desire to bind for ever in imperishable relation the object to its representation, the stimulus to the molecular agitation that it sets up, percipi to percipere’ (Beckett 1992: 160). As Erik Tonning recounts, Gaultier ‘seems to go even further’ than Schopenhauer’s Mayan illusion: ‘Within the phenomenal world, subjects are confronted with nothing but a “representation” or “screen”, never with objects themselves’ (Tonning 2007: 40). Like his venerated Schopenhauer a century earlier, Gaultier is at pains to castigate the ‘disloyal breach that Kant himself made in order to escape on the wing of the old dogmas’; namely, the separation of subject and object, or of phenomena and thing-in-itself, without attention to the truly critical matter at hand: ‘the phenomenal screen of the shadows, in which it is represented and strives to apprehend itself’ (Gaultier 1961: xi, 5). In this way, Kant’s variously supposed limitations thus become the starting point for Western philosophy thereafter; this is no less true of Husserl’s phenomenology than Schopenhauer’s: ‘Kant’s mental gaze rested on this [phenomenological] field, although he was not yet able to appropriate it and recognize it as the centre from which to work up on his own line a rigorous science of Essential Being’. Here again, the phenomenological reduction—or Schopenhauer’s ‘veil of Maya’ and Gaultier’s ‘screen’—is explicitly set out as a way of overcoming the challenge of Kantian Idealism (Husserl 1962: 160). Yet Beckett had neither read Kant nor about Husserl by Spring 1932; that challenge was still 6 years away. Over the next 4 years, in fact, Beckett’s knowledge of philosophy, psychology and literature were overwhelmingly mediated by overviews like Gaultier’s. Nowhere is this clearer than Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ of 1932–1933—containing just under 100 sides of handwritten summaries on the period ‘from Kant to Nietzsche’ in Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, with fully a quarter of these dedicated to Kant.13 In turn, fully 13 sides are devoted to ‘The Object of Knowledge’ in Kantian philosophy (covering 14 pages in Windelband, 537–50), hinging on the question: ‘the

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relation of knowledge to its object, in what does it consist, and what does it rest?’ (TCD MS 10967/223). Similarly, a decade later, the novel Watt asks, ‘what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend? These are delicate questions’ (Beckett 1970: 72). But precisely such haste led Peter Murphy to claim that ‘Watt is a Kantian novel’: ‘Kant’s philosophy offers the difficult and paradoxical situation of man as phenomenally determined but noumenally free, as determined and free at the same time’ (Murphy 1994: 229, 230). Despite valuable insights, Kant goes too far for Beckett, just as Murphy goes too far in linking the two in Watt. For it is precisely the connection of subject and object, of free mind and fixed world—as with Beckett’s comments to Knowlson on Sartre above—that Windelband’s rendering of Kant points beyond: Human knowledge is limited to objects of experience, because the perception required for use by categories is in our case only the receptive sensuous perception in space and time. If one could suppose a perception of a non-reflective kind, producing synthetically not only its Forms, but also its contents—a truly ‘productive imagination’—its object would no longer be phenomena, but things-in-themselves. Such a faculty would be intellectual perception (intuition) or intuitive intellect, the unity of the two knowing faculties of sensibility and understanding, which in man appear separated, though their constant inter-reference indicates a hidden common root. Thus Noumena, things-inthemselves, are thinkable negatively as objects of a non-sensuous perception, of which unknowable can predicate matter. They are thinkable as limiting conceptions of experience. (TCD MS 10967/227–227.1, corresponding to Windelband 1958: 547) By way of further contrast, in terms of ‘the Kantian distinction between the beautiful and sublime’ highlighted by Murphy (1994: 231), Beckett here reverts back to his standard note-taking style, summarizing Windelband’s ‘Natural Purposiveness’ on Kant’s aesthetic and moral theories in just over a page (Windelband 1958: 559–67; corresponding to TCD MS 10967/232.1–232). For Beckett’s interest, instead, was learning about Kantian ‘phenomenal appearance, behind which the thing-in-itself remains unknown’, the nature of ‘intellection’, sought in Windelband’s account of Kant’s epistemology, one doubtless contributing to Beckett’s evolving view of the vicissitudes and instabilities of individual consciousness (TCD MS 10967/224.1). Kant’s views on art, it also seems, were about 200 years out of date for an artist claiming only a year later, in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’: ‘I propose, as rough principle of individuation in this essay, the degree in which the younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object’. In Beckett’s view, this

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‘no-man’s-land’, this ‘rupture of the lines of communication’, offers nothing like a stable, Kantian basis for the categorization of phenomena; for the ‘artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects’. Thus, even if he is reading about ‘antiquarians’ in philosophy, Beckett’s heart was with those modernist ‘others’ refusing the artistic ‘flight from self-awareness’: Jack B. Yeats, Eliot, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey (Beckett 1984: 70–1). Recalling that review for its early awareness of the ‘vanished object’ to his friend, the art critic Georges Duthuit, Beckett explicitly linked the ‘no man’s land’ of subject–object relations to Proust’s own ‘zone of evaporation’: I remember coming out once, the regulation 20 years ago, being at that time less little than now, with an angry article on modern Irish poets, in which I set up, as criterion of worthwhile modern poetry, awareness of the vanished object. Already! And talking, as the only terrain accessible to the poet, of the no man’s land that he projects round himself, rather as a flame projects its zone of evaporation. (Quoted in Gunn 2006: 15)14 In the mid-1930s however, it was painting, not poetry, that best communicated the complexities of the subject–object relation to Beckett. Without doubt, this provided much of the interior landscape for Beckett’s trip through Nazi Germany, following the completion of Murphy, between October 1936 and April 1937. In one of the few accounts of daily life in the Third Reich by a nonGerman, Beckett’s encounter with a young Nazi enthusiast, Claudia Asher, prompted him to claim that ‘the fence between the big and little worlds is Zwei Herren dienen [serving two masters]. I talk bilge (Kimwasser? Schlagwasser?) about relation of subject and object’. Four days later, in viewing a portrait by one of the ‘degenerate’ Expressionists, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Beckett discussed the matter with Dr Rosa Shapire, as recorded in his highly revealing ‘German Diaries’: Launch into mixed dissertation, twine object–subject round stem of art as prayer. New figure occurs as I speak. The art (picture), that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer, in onlooker, i.e. Priest: Lord have mercy upon us. People: Christ have mercy upon us. What is the name of this art . . . . Leave about 12¼. Went to be mocked, stayed to pray.15 Also in mid-November 1936, Beckett came across yet another German Expressionist, Franz Marc’s, aphorisms and letters on ‘subject, predicate, object relations in painting’, commenting in the ‘German Dairies’: ‘The object particularises, banalises the “thought”. Which gives me: Musik is Satz ohne Objekt. Lied is music nur insofar als die Noten bloss Laute sind.’ But if Beckett’s notes on Marc’s ‘alogical’ painting methods explicitly ‘affirm the ability of the artist

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to intuitively grasp the true form of things being appearance’—the same phenomenological peering behind the veil of objects to glimpse the thing-in-itself, Husserl’s ‘essence of beings’—they simultaneously imply something else. Modernist painting, and to a lesser degree, music, were better able to render this ‘inner artistic logic’ than were mere words; and not least, philosophical words (Tonning 2007: 126–7; Feldman 2008: 15). Even if, after Descartes and especially Kant, Western philosophy could analyse the nature of subject–object antimonies, its logical and descriptive method meant that, for Beckett, it could not adequately address a dilemma ‘ineffable’ in nature.16 A week later, Beckett visited Karl Ballmer’s studio, viewing several paintings, including Kopf in Rot [Head in Red], prompting Beckett to remark: Would not occur to me to call this painting abstract. A metaphysical concrete. Nor Nature convention, but its source, fountain of Erscheinung. Fully a posterior painting. Object not exploited to illustrate an idea, as in say Léger or Baumeister, but primary. The communication exhausted by the optical experience that is its motive and content. Anything further is by the way. (Painting and quotation in Knowlson 2006: 70–1) Alongside radical art, Ballmer dabbled in contemporary philosophy, some of which Beckett read months later, including a 1933 pamphlet employing Rudolf Steiner ‘on the cognitive process’ to ‘elucidate the painting of Ballmer’. In addition to offering Beckett deeper perspectives on Ballmer’s art, the text in question, Aber Herr Heidegger!, is important for two further reasons. First, it provides early evidence of a deep synthesis of contemporary philosophy with modernist art, setting Ballmer’s thought against ‘Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant critic of reason Heidegger? It is the old Plato–Aristotle Realist– Nominalist Idealist–Materialist Antithesis?’ As Beckett also noted in his ‘German Diaries’ on 20 March 1937, Ballmer ‘[r]epresents Heidegger as mere thinker to the end of motifs . . . . With not an original contribution except perhaps the doctrine of the Greek qualitative criterion of truth, whereby “truth” (a-letheia) is nothing more than the Uncovering of objective being’. And secondly, in investigating these questions, Beckett was specifically introduced to two contemporary philosophers: Martin Heidegger and Fritz Mauthner. Given his distaste for the ‘NS gospel’ registered across the ‘German Diaries’, it is perhaps unsurprising that Beckett shied away from Heidegger’s ideas—not least considering that Aber Herr Heidegger! is, in part, an account of the latter’s first act as a National Socialist: his inaugural rectoral address at Freiburg in May 1933.17 On the other hand, Fritz Mauthner’s ‘negative’ approach to logic—‘he made fun of all logic and of all philosophical claims of thinking because all thinking was, after all, only speaking’—showed Beckett a potential way out of the post-Kantian subject–object antimonies. That is to say, Mauthner’s ‘learned ignorance’, his identification of language and thought behind a metaphorical

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‘screen’ of inchoate perceptions; and indeed, his view that both made language suitable for poetic rather than epistemological thought—all of these suggested what might be termed a ‘linguistically phenomenological’ way out of the subject–object dualism. As Beckett read in Aber Herr Heidegger!: Mauthner did not consider that the logical laws of thought—which do not correspond to, in Aristotelian fashion, a spoon-feeding limited by an externallyimposed nature of thought, but which might even seize the true nature through their own propulsion—must in any case be different from the time-honoured ‘Laws of Thought’ that Mauthner recognised as mere grammar.18 This method of using language against itself, of course, finds its most familiar artistic expression in Beckett’s oft-cited ‘German letter of 1937’: To bore one hole after another in it [language], until what lurks behind it— be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today . . . . In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All. (Beckett 1984: 172) However, the above excerpt to Axel Kaun was not written with Mauthner in mind, for those readings—and Beckett’s additional readings in phenomenology—were still a year away. Only then, fully a year after the ‘German letter of 1937’, did the three intersecting threads from the interwar period, discussed above, come together. These derived from, first, a revolutionary artistic programme, one drawing upon modernist art and criticism; second, a background in Western philosophy stressing fundamental dualisms, especially regarding the relation between subject and object; and finally, a struggle with post-Kantian attempts to account for the ‘screen’ dividing the two. A concluding glance at how Beckett synthesized these ideas in 1938 will focus on that great intellectual repository of the later 1930s, the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’.

IV The conclusion to Beckett’s own struggles with ‘intellection’ through Western philosophy, it seems, occurred in the months following his nearly fatal stabbing in January 1938. Assuming that the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ runs in a roughly chronological order, more than half the material was added after this date, as John Pilling has impressively demonstrated (see Pilling 2006b). At this point, and once again helping Joyce with the interminable Work in Progress, Beckett transcribed 11 excerpts from Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, focusing on

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Mauthner’s ‘Self destruction of the metaphorical’. Here again, Kant is the straw man; in this case, for a radical critique of language: This insight into the nature of experience and thinking, which at this level no longer present themselves as opposites, but as two ways in which memory views things, we owe to a continuation of Kant’s critique, and we would owe it to Kant himself, if Kant had undertaken, instead of his critique of pure reason, a critique of reason in general, if he, the most astute and hopefully last of all the ‘word realists’, had not taken abstractions for reality, words for definable judgments, worthless currency as real money . . . . Kant’s reasons for the sole dominance of experience, that is against all materialism, do not need to be repeated. It has become for us a platitude that the world, the ‘thing-in-itself’, can only develop from our consciousness, from our subjective thought and not the other way around. If even the most banal experience, a comparison of two perceptions, requires thought, so every higher experience, every science with its so-called laws, is an addition of thought to experience. Conformity to a natural law is regular causality; and understanding causality has never yet uncovered a simple perception in the world. That is what Kant taught, after all, and added to it Hume’s critique of the concept of causality, so that even the projection of a perception into the External world, that is the simplest objective perception, which, e.g. traces back the sensation of green of the tree before my window, hypothesizes an uncontrollable unverifiable cause of the perception of consciousness.19 Interspersed with the Mauthner entries are jottings from the ‘antediluvian edition’ of Kant’s works, which, as Peter Murphy notes, Beckett obtained in early 1938 (1994: 229). Interestingly, virtually all are from the last of 11 volumes, Ernst Cassirer’s biography, Kant’s Life and Thought, with two passages working their way into Watt (Pilling 2004b: 45). This train of thought is followed by a return to Jules de Gaultier, with Beckett transcribing a further passage on Kant’s ‘antinomial’ distinction between perceptual phenomena and thought: Now the great work of Kant, accomplished in the fifty pages of the TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC, consists in his having demonstrated that space and time do not on the one hand, have substantial reality and that, on the other hand, they are not properties of the object either; that, on the contrary, they belong to the knowing subject and that they are the forms of this subject’s sensibility. (Gaultier 1961: 66)20 For Beckett’s own aesthetic, the matter had come to a head. In his only published review from these critical months, ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’, for example, this ‘severed’ relation is mooted as ‘the absolute predicament of

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particular human identity’; moreover, ‘the distinction is not idle, for it is from the failure to make it that proceed the common rejection as “obscure” of most that is significant in modern music, painting, and literature’ (Beckett 1984: 91). Enter the ‘extraordinarily good’ Nausea in late May 1938, where Beckett encountered Sartre’s alter-ego (a far cry from Beckett’s Belacqua), Roquentin’s, overcoming of this subject–object distinction: ‘suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood. I have seen’ (Sartre 1969:126). Quite possibly in order to chase up this philosophical–artistic rendering of subject–object synthesis, Beckett then read Sartre’s L’Imagination, making three short entries into his ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ (Pilling 2004b: 46). A few pages later (presumably close in time to reading Sartre) Beckett transcribed portions of Windelband and Heinz Heimsoeth’s sketch of Husserl, translated above— tellingly given the same subtitle as Mauthner used in his self-appointed enterprise, ‘Wissenschaftkritik’. And this, in effect, represents the final evidence of Beckett’s philosophical struggle with the relation between subject and object. For Beckett in mid-1938, it may be argued, Western philosophy had fully served its didactic purpose. Henceforth, while clearly drawing upon material already accumulated over the past decade, only those thinkers with whom Beckett felt a personal affinity would be revisited. Yet philosophy is by no means abandoned, as Rabinovitz observed in analysing Watt: ‘It is not that he is reluctant to use philosophical themes, rather, he is unwilling to permit them to undermine the aesthetic integrity of his works’ (Rabinovitz 1984: 140). In aesthetic terms, in fact, Beckett may be writing in the ‘no-man’s-land’ between subject and object, writing the veil, the experience of self-reflexive consciousness itself. In this light, a final question can be raised: did Beckett see Watt in Sartre’s imagination; or rather, what did Beckett see in Sartre’s Imagination? The short answer is Husserl. Or rather, Sartre’s Husserl, first introduced in his École dissertation, published in 1936, as opposing Henri Bergson, who ‘was not of the opinion that consciousness must have a correlate, or, to speak like Husserl, that a consciousness is always consciousness of something’ (Sartre, 1962: 39). Sartre’s view of Husserlian phenomenology, moreover, envisages it dissolving nearly everything that came before. Over several preceding chapters that criticize Western philosophy’s tradition of smuggling in metaphysical assumptions about the perceptual image, Sartre concludes his study with ‘The Phenomenology of Husserl’, specifically the ‘great event of pre-WorldWar-I philosophy’, Husserl’s celebrated Ideas, ‘destined to revolutionize psychology no less than philosophy’ (1962: 127). Mired in Husserl and his as-yet unpublished Nausea, for Sartre of the mid-1930s it was Husserlian ‘bracketing’—the phenomenological reduction of Kantian ‘intellection’ to the experience of consciousness—that answered all the big problems. This, for Sartre, was like a secular revelation: ‘The notion of intentionality gives a new

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conception of images’, considering that an ‘image, too, is an image of something’ (1962: 131–3). In a critical passage, he argues: By becoming an intentional structure the image has passed from the condition of an inert content of consciousness to that of a unitary and synthetic consciousness in relation with a transcendent object . . . . At a stroke vanish, along with the immanentist metaphysics of images, all the difficulties adduced . . . concerning the relationship of the simulacrum to the real object, and of pure thought to the simulacrum . . . . Husserl freed the psychic world of a weighty burden and eliminated almost all the difficulties that clouded the classical problem of the relations of images to thoughts. Husserl did not stop there with his suggestions, however. In effect, if an image is but a name for a certain way in which consciousness takes aim on its object, nothing prevents us from aligning physical images (paintings, drawings, photographs) with images termed ‘psychic’. (Sartre 1962: 134–5) Sartre illustrates this by describing, at length, Husserl’s analysis of a painting by Albrecht Dürer. Symbolically, at least, the tables had turned: Beckett was now reading modernist philosophy critiquing ‘classical’ art. With subject and object unified around an intending consciousness, Sartre’s essay concludes by leaving it to others—modernist artists and writers in particular—to address a new fissure arising from Husserlian phenomenology, not between subject and object but between images and perceptions; what Sartre respectively called ‘memoryimages’ and ‘fiction-images’. In what might read as a programme for Watt and Beckett’s postwar fictions, Sartre concluded his 20-page paean to Husserl with a call to arms: We know that we must start afresh, setting aside all the prephenomenological literature, and attempting above all to attain an intuitive vision of the intentional structure of the image. It also becomes necessary to raise the novel and subtle question of the relations between mental images and ‘physical’ images (paintings, photographs, etc.) . . . . The way is open for a phenomenological psychology. (Sartre 1962: 143) Where Imagination ends, it seems, Watt begins. ‘The ambiguous and maddening ineffability that will infuse not only Watt but all of Beckett’s later work is already present and half-formulated’, David Hayman persuasively argues, especially evident in ‘the development of the opening sequence’ of the novel (2002: 35, 33). Focusing on the first two pages of the third Watt notebook—dating from May 1942, some 4 years after Beckett’s engagement with Husserlian phenomenology—Hayman reproduces these ‘mediations’, strikingly evocative of the conclusion to Sartre’s Imagination:

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The creative consciousness is driven & obscure. Obscure and obscene when it acts, terrible and driven when it receives. Its action is a receiving, its receiving an acting. When it acts it receives its own act, when it receives it acts on the act of another. (Hayman 33) There are not, and never could be, images in consciousness. Rather, an image is a certain type of consciousness. An image is an act, not some thing. An image is a consciousness of some thing. (Sartre 1962: 146) As this chapter has shown, Beckett had travelled a long way in tracing out his own philosophical–artistic relation between subject and object, arriving, after a decade, at what might be described as a phenomenological perspective on the ‘creative consciousness’. As Sartre imparted to him in mid-1938, the difference between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ images need not be seen as an unbridgeable chasm, but as a void to be fruitfully explored. Finally, if Watt can be considered the workbook for Beckett’s later fictions, a last, stumbling exercise in writing direct experience prior to the postwar ‘frenzy of writing’, then it was in this novel that subject and object first ceased to be viewed as ‘two holes [that] had been independently burst’ in the ‘fence’ separating image and world. Instead, through the synthesis of subject and object offered especially to Beckett by Sartre’s rendering of Husserl in both fiction and non-fiction, an alternative conclusion first comes into view in Watt: ‘was it not after all just possible . . . the two fences were but one?’ (Beckett 1970: 159–60)

Notes 1

2

In preparing this chapter, I am grateful for relevant conversations with John Pilling and Erik Tonning; I also thankfully acknowledge translations from German provided by Detlef Mühlberger and Christian Egners. I also gratefully acknowledge Edward Beckett, the Beckett Estate, and the Beckett International Foundation for the permission to quote from unpublished Beckett manuscripts. Hayman, Ackerley and Pilling (1997) have fruitfully explored the extensive Watt manuscripts, held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Austin, Texas. Some of the hallmarks of scholarship on the published novel include Hoefer, Mood and Rabinovitz (1984: 124–50). The perspective taken here, if less psychologically emphatic, is generally in line with Hugh Culik’s view of Watt’s ‘nonlogical mental processes’: ‘Because these [artistic] concerns receive an inadequately “direct expression” in Watt—that is, because content and form are fused only on a highly rationalized allusive level—the work only suggests the elements more perfectly fused in the trilogy’ (Culik 1983: 69, 58).

Beckett, Husserl, Sartre and ‘Meaning Creation’ 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

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The useful concept of ‘intellection’ is applied by Adrien Van der Weer and Ruud Higgen’s ‘Intellection in the Work of Samuel Beckett’ as ‘the natural way for rational, human beings to try to imagine the unimaginable [limits of expression] via language’ (1992: 91). Regarding textual interventions, both novels ostensibly use footnotes for the guidance of the attentive reader, as with Watt’s ‘editorial’ warning on the numbers given for the Lynch family (‘The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous’, [Beckett 1970: 101, 211]); or Nausea’s ‘the text of the undated pages ends here’ (Sartre 1969: 3). The only Anglophone work to treat this intimacy in any detail is found in the impressive theoretical treatment provided in Louis Sass’ Madness and Modernism, developed in Damien Love’s unpublished PhD thesis (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004: Ch. 2). In a work published the year before, Michael Robinson also noted that Watt’s ‘refusal of things to assume their time-honoured names is a modern dilemma which has occupied writers since it was first acknowledged by Hofmannsthal, Rilke and Proust . . . . Although he is more coherent Roquentin is in a very similar position to Watt. In the midst of the nameless he too sets to trying names on things’ (Robinson 1969: 125–6). For a discussion of Heidegger’s embrace of German fascism, see Feldman (2005). Regarding Heidegger’s progressive distancing from his onetime mentor’s philosophy, Husserl commented in 1931 that ‘a careful reading of Heidegger showed him how far Heidegger was from him. He laid this to Heidegger never having freed himself completely from his theological prejudices, and to the weight of the war on him. The war and ensuing difficulties drive men into mysticisms. This too accounts for Heidegger’s popular success. But [is not] Heidegger by far the most important of the non-Husserlian philosophers today? His work bears the mark of genius’ (Cairns 1976: 9). See MacDonald (2009: 93) for an analysis of the critical difference between Descartes and Husserl on the matter of mathematics: ‘The touchstone for cognition which is immune to doubt in these early stages, against which both Descartes and Husserl evaluate other epistemic claims, is that of the intuition of mathematical truths’ (2000: 6). For Beckett’s artistic evolution in the 1930s described as ‘non-Euclidean logic’, see Feldman (2008: 13–20). For example, two important works in English on the role of consciousness in Beckett’s work make either passing reference to Husserl (Kaelin 1981: 1–12; Katz 1999: 87), or no reference at all (see Butler 1984). One exception here, however, is the discussion of Husserl found in Dobrez (1986: 53–62). [Ihre bedeutsamste Ausprägung hat diese erkenntniskritische u. wissenschaftstheoretische gerichtete Philosophie gefunden in der Denkweise des “transzendetalen Idealismus”, - vertreten in Deutschland vor allem durch die . . Richtungen u. Schulen des Neu-Kantismus (vor allem die “Marburger Schule”: H. Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer u. die “badische” oder “südwestdeutsche Schule”: W. Windelband u. H. Rickert, E. Lask, Br. Bauch), denen Gedankenbildungen wie die “Immanenzphilosophie” (Schuppe) oder die “Grundwissenschaft” Relankes sowie auch der transzendentale Idealismus E. Husserls beizuordnen

34

11

12

13

14

15

16

Beckett and Phenomenology sind. In Frankreich stehen Wissenschaftsphilosophen wie Hamelin, oder Milhaud, auch Hannequin solchen Denkweisen nahe – Von den neukantischen Richtungen hat die Marburger Schule mit besonderer Energie die Denkkategorien der mathematischen Naturwissenschaft in den Mittelpunkt der transzendentalen Fragestellung gerückt u. von da die systematische Erforschung der formalen Bewusstseinsgesetzlichkeiten auch für die Gebiete der Ethik, Aesthetik, Religionsphilosophie betrieben. Das besondere Verdienst der durch W. Windelband begründeten, heute in H. Rickerts System zur vollen Ausgestaltung gelangten Denkweise der badischen Schule ist der Ueberschritt zur Logik u. Methodenlehre der Geschichtswissenschaft gewesen. (Heimsoeth) cf. Kants definition of “transcendental”: “Ich nenne alle Erkenntnis transzendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnisart von Gegenständen, sofern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt.” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Einleitung VII; III, 49.) Wissenschaftskritik Nach Vorarbeiten im 19. Jahrhundert (in Deutschland etwa Helmholz, H. Herz, Kirschholz, in Oestereich E. Mach) hat diese Wissenschaftskritik vor allem in Frankreich eine glänzende Ausbildung gefunden (H. Poincaré, P. Duhem, Milhaud, Meyerson, Le Roy, Rougier, Hannequin). Die hier aufgeworfenen, für unsere Wirklichkeitsanschauung wie für die Erkenntnistheorie gleich bedeutsamen Fragen erhalten mit der weiter fortschreitenden “Grundlagenkenntnis” der Wissenschaften ständig neue Nahrung u. Aktualität. In England haben etwa Whitehead, Russell, Eddington wichtige Beiträge zur kritischen Reflexion auf die Grundlagen der Mathematik u. Naturwissenschaft geliefert.] UoR MS 3000, 65-6, corresponding to Windelband and Heimsoeth (1935: 574–575). For detailed analyses of Murphy, see Ackerley (2004); and of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (and indeed More Pricks Than Kicks), see Pilling (2004a); for an outstanding discussion of Beckett’s interwar poetry, see Sean Lawlor’s ‘“Making a Noise to Drown an Echo”: Allusion and Quotation in the Early Poems of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1935’ (University of Reading, unpublished PhD thesis: 2008). For discussions of Schopenhauer’s influence on Proust, see O’Hara and Pilling (1993); for discussion of Schopenhauer’s ‘veil of Maya’, see Nixon (2006), Tonning (2007: 30–48) and Feldman (2009). See Windelband (1958: 529–682); general discussion of Kant occurring at 532– 67; for an analysis of Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ see Feldman (2008: 39–77). For the connection between this letter and Beckett’s Proust, see Lawlor (2008: 1–2). ‘German Diary’ entry for 15/11/36, cited in Giesing et al. (2007: 133). For a general discussion of the ‘German Diaries’, see Knowlson (2006: 230–61); as well as portions provided on the Beckett and Hamburg website, online at: http:// www.beckett-in-hamburg-1936.de/ (last accessed 30/8/08). The term, used by Arsene in Watt, belongs to Arnold Geulincx; for details on Beckett’s reading of his Metaphysics and Ethics in early 1936, see Feldman (2008: 131–7).

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18

19

20

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‘German Diary’ entry of 20/3/37, Beckett International Foundation, Reading. I am particularly grateful to Mark Nixon for his assistance with this passage. For a discussion of Heidegger’s rectoral address, see Feldman (2005). [Mauthner zog nicht in Erwägung dass die logischen Gesetze eines Denkens, das nicht aristotelisch am Gängelbande der dem Denken von außen gegebenen Natur einhergeht, sondern sich der wirklichen Natur möglicherweise aus seiner Eigenkraft bemächtigt, jedenfalls andere sein müssten als die hergebrachten ‘Denkgesetze’, in denen Mauthner nur lauter Grammatik erkennt . . . ]. (Ballmer 1933: 19–20; translation by Christian Egners). [Diese Einsicht in das Wesen von Erfahrung u. Denken, welche sich auf dieser Stufe nicht mehr als Gegensätze, sondern als zwei Betrachtungsweisen des Gedächtnisses darstellen, verdanken wir einer Fortführung der Kantschen Kritik, und wir würden sie Kant selbst verdanken, wenn Kant anstatt einer Kritik der reinen Vernunft eine Kritik der Vernunft überhaupt unternommen hätte, wenn er nicht als der scharfsinnigste u. hoffentlich letzte aller Wortrealisten Abstraktionen für Wirklichkeit, Worte für definierbare Urteile, uneinlösbare Scheine für bare Münze genommen hätte . . . . Kants Gründe gegen die alleinige Herrschaft der Erfahrung, also gegen allen Materialismus, brauchen nicht wiederholt zu werden. Es ist für uns ein Gemeinplatz geworden, dass man die Welt, das Dingan-sich, nur aus unserem Bewusstsein, aus unserem subjektiven Denken erschliessen dürfe u. nicht umgekehrt. Ist schon zur banalsten Erfahrung eine Vergleichung zweier Wahrnehmungen, also Denken notwendig, so ist jede höhere Erfahrung, jede Wissenschaft mit ihren sogenannten Gesetzen, ein Hinzukommen des Denkens zur Erfahrung. Gesetzmässigkeit ist regelmässige Ursächlichkeit; u. den Begriff der Ursache hat noch niemals eine blosse Wahrnehmung in der Welt gefunden. Das hat ja Kant eben gelehrt u. es Humes Kritik des Ursachbegriffs hinzugefügt, dass schon das Projizieren einer Wahrnehmung in die Aussenwelt, also schon die einfachste Wahrnehmung, die z.B. die Grünempfindung auf den Baum vor meinem Fenster zurückführt, unkontrollierbar eine Ursache der Sinnesempfindung hypostasiert.] (Mauthner 1923: 699–701); corresponding to the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, 56–8. Beckett’s transcription from the original French corresponds to p. 61 in the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’: [C’est la grande oeuvre de Kant, accomplie dans les cinquante pages de l’Esthétique Transcendentale, qui consiste a avoir démontré que l’espace et le temps n’ont point, d’une part, une réalité substantielle, que d’autre part, ils ne soient pas non plus des propriétés de l’objet, qu’au contraire ils appartiement au sujet de la connaisance et qu’ils sont les formes de la sensibilité de ce sujet.]

Bibliography Ackerley, C. (1993), ‘Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 175–188. —(2004), Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books.

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—(2006), Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. Ballmer, K. (1933), Aber Herr Heidegger! Zur Freiburger Rektoratsrede Martin Heideggers. Basel: Verlag von Rudolf Geering. Beckett, S. (1970), Watt. London: Calder & Boyers. —(1984), Disjecta. Ed. R. Cohn. New York, NY: Grove Press. —(1992), Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: The Black Cat Press. —(2006), The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. Ed. J. M. Coetzee. New York, NY: Grove Press. —‘Philosophy Notes’. TCD MS 10967, Trinity College, Dublin. —Samuel Beckett–Thomas MacGreevy Letters, TCD MS 10904, Trinity College, Dublin. —‘Whoroscope Notebook’. UoR MS 3000, Beckett International Foundation, Reading. Butler, L. St. J. (1984), Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in the Ontological Parable. London: Macmillan. Cairns, D. (ed.) (1976), Conversations with Husserl and Fink. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Cassirer, E. (1981), Kant’s Life and Thought. Trans. J. Haden. London: Yale University Press. Cohen-Solal, A. (1987), Sartre: A Life. London: William Heinemann Ltd. Culik, H. (1983), ‘The Place of Watt in Beckett’s Development’. Modern Fiction Studies 29/1, 57–71. Dobrez, L. A. C. (1986), The Existential and Its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. London: Athlone Press. Feldman, M. (2002), ‘ “I Inquired into Myself”: Beckett, Interpretation, Phenomenology?’ Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 12, 215–234. —(2005), ‘Between Geist and Zeitgeist: Martin Heidegger as Ideologue of Metapolitical Fascism’. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2/6, 175–198. —(2008), Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. London: Continuum. —(2009), ‘ “Agnostic Quietism” and Samuel Beckett’s Early Development’, in Kennedy, S. and Weiss, K. (eds), Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. de Gaultier, J. (1961), From Kant to Nietzsche. Trans. G. M. Spring. London: Peter Owen. Giesing, M., Hartel, G. and Veit, C. (eds) (2007), Das Raubauge in der Stadt: Beckett liest Hamburg. Goettingen: Wallstein Verlag. Gunn, D. (2006), ‘Until the Gag is Chewed: Samuel Beckett’s Letters: Eloquence and “Near Speechlessness” ’. Times Literary Supplement, 21 April, 13–15. Hayman, D. (2002), ‘Getting Where? Beckett’s Opening Gambit for Watt’. Contemporary Literature XLIII/1, 28–49. Hoefer, J. (1965), ‘Watt’ reprinted in M. Esslin (ed.), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 62–76. Husserl, E. (1962), Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Collier Books.

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—(1977), Cartesian Meditations. Trans. D. Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kaelin, E. F. (1981), The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett: An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kant, I. (1996), Critique of Pure Reason: Unified Edition. Trans. W. S. Pluhar. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. Katz, D. (1999), Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kern, E. (1970), Existential Thought and Fictional Technique. London: Yale University Press. Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. —(2006), ‘Beckett’s First Encounters with Modern German (and Irish) Art’, in F. Croke (ed.), Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, pp. 60–75. Knowlson, J. and Haynes, J. (2003), Images of Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawlor, S. (2008), ‘ “Making a Noise to Drown an Echo”: Allusion and Quotation in the Early Poems of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1935’, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Reading. Locatelli, C. (1990), Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. MacDonald, P. S. (2000), Descartes and Husserl: The Philosophical Project of Radical Beginnings. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mauthner, F. (1923), Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Vol. II. Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner. Mood, J. J. (1971), ‘ “The Personal System”: Samuel Beckett’s Watt’. PMLA 86/2, 255–265. Moran, D. (2000), Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. —(2005), Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge: Polity. Murphy, P. J. (1994), ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’, in J. Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 222–240. Natanson, M. (1998), The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nixon, M. (2007), ‘ “Scraps of German”: Samuel Beckett reading German literature’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16, 259–282. —(2007), ‘Solitudes and Creative Fidgets: Beckett Reading Rainer Maria Rilke’. Litteraria Pragensia 17/33, 6–18. O’Hara, J. D. (1988), ‘Beckett’s Schopenhaurian Reading of Proust: The Will as Whirled in Re-presentation’, in E. van der Luft (ed.), Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 273–292. Pilling, J. (1993), ‘Beckett’s Proust’ reprinted in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), The Beckett Studies Reader. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, pp. 9–28. —(1997), Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(ed.) (1999), Beckett’s Dream Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation. —(ed.) (2004a), A Companion to Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.

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—(2004b), ‘Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook’. Journal of Beckett Studies 13/2, 39–48. —(2006a), A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave. —(2006b), ‘Beckett and Mauthner Revisited’, in S. E. Gontarski and A. Uhlmann (eds), Beckett after Beckett. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, pp. 158–165. Rabinovitz, R. (1984), The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Robinson, M. (1969), The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett. London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. Sartre, J.-P. (1962), Imagination. Trans. F. Williams. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. —(1969), Nausea. Trans. L. Alexander. New York, NY: New Directions Books. —(1984), War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, November 1939–March 1940. Trans. Q. Hoare. London: Verso. Sass, L. A. (1992), Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books. Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. Tonning, E. (2007), Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen, 1962– 1985. Bern: Peter Lang. Valdes, M. J. (1992), World-Making: the Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts. London: University of Toronto Press. Van der Weer, A. and Higgen, R. (1992), ‘Intellection in the Work of Samuel Beckett’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 86–92. Windelband, W. (1958), A History of Philosophy, 2 Vols. Trans. J. H. Tufts. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. Windelband and Heimsoeth, H. (1935), Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, Mit einem Schlusskapitel ‘Die Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert’ und einer Übersicht über den Stand der philosophiegeschichtlichen Forschung. Tübingen: Mohr. Woodruff-Smith, D. (2007), Husserl. Abingdon: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Phenomenologies of the Nothing: Democritus, Heidegger, Beckett Shane Weller

‘When the Somethings Give Way’: Beckett after Democritus Were one to rank those writers who exhibit the most abiding literary preoccupation with the nothing, there would arguably be few, aside perhaps from Mallarmé, who could compete with Beckett. In general, however, the nothing remains in Beckett’s works an object of contemplation, intimation, desire or fear, rather than of immediate experience. The exceptions to this rule are all the more striking precisely because they are exceptions, and the most fully elaborated of these occurs in Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy (1938), at the end of the game of chess between Murphy and Mr Endon and shortly before the former’s fiery death. The passage in question reads as follows: [L]ittle by little [Murphy’s] eyes were captured by the brilliant swallow-tail of Mr Endon’s arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. Wearying soon of this he dropped his head on his arms in the midst of the chessmen, which scattered with a terrible noise. Mr Endon’s finery persisted for a little in an after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded and Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. His other senses also found themselves at peace, an unexpected pleasure. Not the numb peace of their own suspension, but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real. Time did not cease, that would be asking too much, but the wheel of rounds and pauses did, as Murphy with his head among the armies continued to suck in,

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As has often been noted, in this remarkable passage Beckett signals the principal source for his own literary conception of the nothing as that most paradoxical object of experience, namely the pre-Socratic atomist Democritus of Abdera. With the recent making available to scholars of Beckett’s reading notes from the 1930s, we are now in a position to trace this influence back to its precise textual sources, which is something that early commentators on the nothing in Beckett such as Kennedy (1971), Hesla (1972), and Henning (1985) were not in a position to do. As Everett Frost observes, those sources are principally Archibald Alexander’s Short History of Philosophy, John Burnet’s Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato, and Wilhelm Windelband’s History of Philosophy (see Engelberts et al. 2006: 67–8; see also Feldman 2006a: 33–8). Among the intertextual relations that we are now able to establish on an empirical footing, one of the more significant concerns the phrasing of the so-called atomist paradox—that the void exists as much as the atoms (atomoi or indivisibles) that are to be found within it. In Murphy, this paradox is presented in the form: ‘the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real’ (Beckett 1938: 246). As it happens, this phrasing is not Beckett’s own but is taken from Alexander’s Short History, in which one finds the following statement: Aristotle, in his account of the early philosophers, says, ‘Leucippus and Democritus assume as elements the “full” and the “void”. The former they term being and the latter non-being. Hence they assert that non-being exists as well as being.’ And, according to Plutarch, Democritus himself is reported as saying, ‘there is naught more real than nothing’. (Alexander 1922: 38–9; cf. TCD MS 10967/75r) As for the nature of perception in the atomist materialism of Democritus, this is summarized by Alexander (and duly noted down by Beckett) as follows: According to Democritus, the perceiving mind or soul consists also of atoms of the finest, smoothest and most mobile character. These he calls ‘fire-atoms’, because they are the same as those which constitute the essence of fire. These indeed are scattered throughout the whole world, and are present in all animate things, but are united in largest numbers in the human body. The emanations which proceed from things set in motion the organs, and through them, the fire-atoms of the soul. These emanations he calls images (εʾι′δωλα), and regards them as infinitely small copies of the things. Their impression upon the fire-atoms constitutes perception. External objects, in other words, give minute copies or images of themselves. (Alexander 1922: 40)

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This passage suggests that the fiery nature of Murphy’s death shortly after his perception of the nothing is no coincidence, and that in fact it heralds Beckett’s playful departure from Democritus. For, whereas Murphy’s death might seem to mark his transformation into atoms of the ‘finest, smoothest and most mobile character’—that is, ‘pure mind or soul’—Beckett insists that his ‘body, mind and soul’ are reduced to ashes, which in turn end up being ‘freely distributed’ across the floor of a pub (Beckett 1938: 275). Beckett’s reading notes on Democritus (TCD MS 10967/72r–79v) include considerable material on the pre-Socratic philosopher’s theory of perception, including his fundamental distinction between what Burnet terms ‘trueborn’ and ‘bastard’ knowledge: ‘To the bastard belong all these; sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The trueborn is quite apart from these’ (Burnet 1914: 198; cf. TCD MS 10967/78v). A key point here is the belief that it is the atoms within the void that render perception imperfect: the image received by the eye is not an exact likeness of the body from which it comes . . . . If there were no air, but only the void, between us and the objects of vision, this would not be so; ‘we could see an ant crawling on the sky’. (Burnet 1914: 196; cf. TCD 10967/78v and Beckett 1938: 248) Furthermore, for Democritus, in contrast to the world of thought, the world of phenomena is transient, and this very point is made emphatically in Murphy with regard to that most paradoxical of perceptions, namely the perception of the nothing: Then this [the Nothing] also vanished, or perhaps simply came asunder, in the familiar variety of stenches, ear-splitters and eye-closers, and Murphy saw that Mr Endon was missing. (Beckett 1938: 246) While both Alexander’s and Burnet’s descriptions of how ‘external objects’ are perceived leaves out of account the perception of the nothing, in Murphy this particular, and no doubt strangest, act of perception occurs simply through the disappearance of all possible ‘objects’. This disappearance is a two-phase process: the reduction of the clear to a ‘blur’, and then the reduction of this ‘blur’ to ‘the Nothing’. In other words, the ‘external objects’ lose their outline or, in the terminology of the Gestalt psychologists about whom Beckett read at roughly the same time in R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931), those ‘external objects’ lose their ‘figure’ and thus disappear into the ‘ground’. This ‘ground’ is not, however, simply the ‘big blooming buzzing confusion’ to which Beckett refers in the above-quoted passage, and which he took from William James via Woodworth (see TCD MS 10971/7/12). Rather, in the perception of ‘the Nothing’ as it is presented in Murphy, both ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ give way, to disclose, if all too briefly for Murphy’s taste, that which would lie beyond all figure and all ground.

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Another notable aspect to the experience of the nothing as it is presented in Murphy is Beckett’s choice of the word ‘soul’, which Alexander (in a decidedly Cartesian manner) uses simply as a synonym for ‘mind’: ‘the perceiving mind or soul’ (Alexander 1922: 40). Beckett himself maintains an important (antiCartesian) distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘soul’, reserving the experience of ‘the Nothing’ precisely for the latter (see Weller 2005: 85–6). It is not through the mind but rather through the ‘posterns of his withered soul’ that Murphy perceives ‘the Nothing’ (Beckett 1938: 246). That this is no mere coincidence is suggested by Beckett’s reference, in Watt, to the protagonist’s experience of the void as a ‘soul-landscape’ (Beckett 1963: 249–50). Ackerley observes that Notebook 1 of the Watt manuscript contains a chapter entitled ‘The Nothingness’, and he connects this with the ‘soul-landscape’ included in the Addenda of the published text, which he identifies as the novel’s ‘primal scene’ (Ackerley 2005: 210–12). It is also in Watt that Beckett includes the visit of the pianotuning Galls, this being presented as the very taking place of the 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 . . . . Yes, Watt could not accept, as no doubt Erskine could not accept, and as no doubt Arsene and Walter and Vincent and the others had been unable to accept, that nothing had happened, with all the clarity and solidity of something . . . . (Beckett 1963: 73) That the experience of ‘a thing that was nothing’ is a source of distress for Watt in his ‘mind’, whereas it is a source of ‘positive peace’ for Murphy in his ‘soul’ (Beckett 1938: 246), tells us all we need to know about the relation between the nothing and rationality. For the rationalist, the nothing proves to be nothing but a problem. The anti-Cartesianism at work in Beckett becomes clearer still when one recalls that both Descartes and Geulincx simply deny the very possibility of the void. In his Principia philosophiae (1644), for instance, Descartes observes that Democritus ‘imagined there to be a vacuum around the corpuscles, whereas I demonstrate the impossibility of a vacuum’ (Descartes 1988: 208). And, in his Metaphysica (1691), Geulincx follows suit, declaring that ‘A vacuum is impossible’ (Geulincx 1999: 5). The experience of the nothing is, however, far from being limited to the characters in Beckett’s works. Indeed, it plays a key role in his aesthetics. For instance, a variation on the atomist conception of the nothing—a variation that carries us very close to a form of what Burnet terms ‘cosmological nihilism’ (Burnet 1914: 122) and which he associates with the pre-Socratic Gorgias of Leontini—is to be found in Beckett’s well-known letter of 9 July 1937 to Axel Kaun. Here, Beckett proposes a literature of the unword (Literatur des Unworts)

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that, through a labour of negation on the language veil (Schleier), would disclose the reality that lies beyond language. The precise nature of this reality Beckett leaves open, one possibility being that it is precisely the nothing: Und immer mehr wie eine Schleier kommt mir meine Sprache vor, den man zerreissen muss, um an die dahinterliegenden Dinge (oder das dahinterliegende Nichts) zu kommen. [And ever more my own language appears to me to be like a veil that one must tear apart in order to get to the things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.] (Beckett 1983: 52; my translation) The nothing (Nichts) of ‘cosmological nihilism’ is, then, a state or condition, rather than a process, and it is a state or condition that is to be reached through negation as a process or procedure: in this instance, through a puncturing or rending of the language veil. Beyond both Democritus and the ‘cosmological nihilism’ of Gorgias, any consideration of the phenomenology of the nothing in Beckett also has to take account of Schopenhauer, in whose Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1818) a certain nothing plays a key role. According to Schopenhauer (whom Beckett first read, in French, in 1930), with the complete denial (Verneinung) of the will, a denial that is ethically justified, all that remains is what those who continue to inhabit the realm of representation will take to be precisely nothing: we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing [nichts]. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing [nichts]. (Schopenhauer 1969: 411–12) In the analysis of the impact of both the pre-Socratics and Schopenhauer on Beckett’s literary conception of the nothing we can rely on a considerable body of textual support in the form of the various, more or less clearly flagged, allusions within the published works, Beckett’s reading notes from the 1930s, various working notebooks (including the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’), and remarks in Beckett’s correspondence. As Matthew Feldman observes, for instance, it is in a letter of 21 April 1958 to A. J. Leventhal that Beckett refers to the three fundamental propositions of Gorgias’ ‘cosmological nihilism’, about which he had first read over two decades earlier: 1. Nothing is. 2. If anything is, it cannot be known. 3. If anything is, and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech. (Beckett quoted in Feldman 2006a: 76)

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The same kind of textual evidence is not available, however, when it comes to more modern philosophical conceptions of the nothing. Nonetheless, I wish now to turn to just such a conception, namely Martin Heidegger’s, in order to consider the possibility that it too may have had at least some impact on Beckett’s literary conception of the nothing.

‘If I Could Speak and Say Nothing’: Beckett after Heidegger? When Beckett’s oeuvre first began to attract critical attention in the late 1950s, it tended to be seen as part of that existentialist movement in literature which might be said to date in France from the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea) in 1938, the year in which Beckett’s Murphy was first published. That Beckett read and admired both La Nausée and Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (The Outsider, 1942) is evidenced by remarks in his correspondence (see Knowlson 1996: 295, 358). However, Beckett’s sense of his own relation to existentialism as a philosophical movement and, in particular, his relation to Heidegger, as arguably the key figure for both French phenomenology and existentialism, is not easy to determine. On the one hand, it would appear that one can speak here neither of Heidegger’s influence on Beckett, nor even of a genuine familiarity with Heidegger’s works on Beckett’s part. Indeed, on this second point, there is evidence to suggest precisely the opposite. For instance, when questioned on his readings in philosophy by Gabriel D’Aubarède in 1961, at the time of the publication of Comment c’est (How It Is), Beckett not only denied reading ‘philosophers’ but also insisted upon a fundamental distinction between his kind of writing and that of philosophy: ‘Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?’ ‘I never read philosophers.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I never understand anything they write.’ ‘All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.’ ‘There’s no key or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.’ (Beckett, interview with Gabriel D’Aubarède in Graver and Federman 1979: 217) A remark such as this would seem to justify fully the absence of any entry under Heidegger in both the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett and John Pilling’s Samuel Beckett Chronology. In the same year as he made the above remark,

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however, Beckett gave another interview, to Tom Driver, where he responded to Driver’s use of the word ‘truth’ in the following manner: What is more true than anything else? To swim is true, and to sink is true. One is not more true than the other. One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. (Beckett, interview with Tom Driver in Graver and Federman 1979: 219) This remark contradicts the one made to Aubarède in so far as it suggests that Beckett is indeed familiar with the work of both Heidegger and Sartre, even if he finds their language ‘too philosophical’ for his taste. In a paradox that is characteristic of Beckett’s own ‘syntax of weakness’ (Harvey 1970: 249), his claim that he can make nothing of the ontological difference itself demonstrates an understanding of the most fundamental tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy. But this of course raises the following series of questions: (1) If Beckett is familiar enough with both Heidegger and Sartre to judge their language ‘too philosophical’ for him, then on which work or works is he basing this judgement? (2) When did he read, or at least try to read, these works? And (3) with regard to the topic that is the subject of this chapter: If Beckett did read at least some Heidegger and/or Sartre, did this reading have any identifiable impact on his own literary conception of the nothing? A first sally into this difficult terrain might be to recall that it is no lesser an authority than Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, who includes Heidegger as one of the ‘philosophical sources’ for the dialogue in Godot (Knowlson 1996: 379), and, secondly, that the 26 March 1937 entry in Beckett’s ‘German Diaries’ indicates that he is reading Karl Ballmer’s pamphlet Aber Herr Heidegger! (But Mr Heidegger!, 1933), which was written as a counter-blast to Heidegger’s notorious 1933 Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (The Self-Assertion of the German University), in which Heidegger, at that time a member of the Nazi Party, pronounces on the fate (Schicksal) and the spiritual mission (geistiger Auftrag) of the German people (deutsches Volk), and frames all this in terms of struggle (Kampf ), a word with a very obvious resonance in the Germany of that period (see Heidegger 2003: 2–11). In fact, for all their radically opposed political outlooks, the closer one looks the more Beckett and Heidegger come to form a strange literary-philosophical pseudocouple. For instance, both exhibit abiding concerns with what Heidegger terms ‘the basic problems of phenomenology’, namely time and temporality, perception, truth and being, and the ‘fundamental moods’ (including anxiety and boredom); both come in the course of the 1930s to value the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin very highly; and both privilege the pre-Socratics. As I hope

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to demonstrate, however, it is in their concern with the experience of the nothing that Beckett and Heidegger are, paradoxically, at both their closest and their most distant. While there is no evidence to suggest that Beckett was reading Heidegger in the 1930s, it was in the immediate postwar years in Paris that Heidegger came to be considered a major philosophical figure outside Germany. This reputation was owing in part to Emmanuel Levinas, whose En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger) was first published in France in 1949. Much more significant for the growth of Heidegger’s reputation in France at the time, however, was the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness) in 1943 and the incalculably more accessible L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), which was first delivered as a lecture in Paris on 29 October 1945, and published in 1946 (Paris: Nagel). Regarding Heidegger, the significance of L’Existentialisme est un humanisme lies less in its actual content than in the fact that it prompted the philosopher Jean Beaufret to solicit a response from Heidegger to a series of questions—including ‘Comment peut-t-on redonner du sens au mot humanisme?’ (‘How can we restore meaning to the word “humanism”?’)—in a letter to Heidegger dated 10 November 1946 (see Safranski 1998: 356). As is well known, that response came in the form of Heidegger’s Brief über den Humanismus (Letter on Humanism), the first German edition of which appeared in 1947 (Bern: A. G. Francke) and the first full French translation of which was published in 1953 in Cahiers du sud, 319–20, to be followed in 1957 by the first book publication of the French text (Paris: Aubier). In November 1947, however, a decade before the first book publication of the French translation of the Brief über den Humanismus, an extract from this work was published in a translation by Joseph Rovan in issue 63 of the journal Fontaine under the title ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret (Fragment)’. This bibliographical fact is significant for two principal reasons: first, this ‘fragment’ from the French translation of Heidegger’s Brief was not only addressed in its title to Beckett’s pre-war philosopher-friend, Jean Beaufret, but was also preceded by an essay by Beaufret entitled ‘Heidegger et le problème de la vérité’ (‘Heidegger and the Problem of Truth’); and, secondly, it was in issue 57 of the same journal that Beckett had published one of his own first French texts, the nouvelle L’Expulsé ’ (The Expelled), in December 1946–January 1947. Of course, neither of these facts proves that Beckett read the French extract from Heidegger’s text, but they do establish the close textual proximity of Beckett, Beaufret, and Heidegger in 1947. To put Heidegger’s remarks on the nothing (das Nichts) and nihilation (das Nichtende) in the ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’ into the context of his own thought, it is necessary briefly to revisit two earlier key works, Was ist Metaphysik? (What is Metaphysics?, 1929) and the 1935 lecture series, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Introduction to Metaphysics), first published in 1953. In What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger claims that while ‘the nothing [das Nichts] is rejected precisely by

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science, given up as a nullity’, the experience of Being (Sein), and of the ontological difference between Being and beings (Seiendes), is predicated on the very possibility of the nothing (Heidegger 1998: 84). Now, this experience of the nothing, defined as ‘the complete negation of the totality of being’ (die vollständige Verneinung der Allheit des Seienden), occurs in the fundamental mood (Grundstimmung) of anxiety (Angst): ‘Anxiety makes manifest the nothing’ (Die Angst offenbart das Nichts) (Heidegger 1998: 88). However, the nothing is not to be mistaken for either a state or a condition; it is not simply the absence of all beings, and indeed it is not even a mode of negation. In this, Heidegger’s conception of the nothing marks its radical difference from both Democritus’ and Gorgias’s. The Heideggerian nothing is nihilation (Nichtung): ‘[Das Nichts] is neither an annihilation [Vernichtung] of beings nor does it spring from a negation [Verneinung]. Nihilation [Die Nichtung] will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]’ (Heidegger 1998: 90). That said, negation is nonetheless at work here, since the experience of the nothing in anxiety ‘robs us of speech’ (verschlägt das Wort) (Heidegger 1998: 89). And yet—and here it is almost as though Heidegger were offering a commentary avant la lettre on Beckett’s L’Innommable—this loss of the word in the presence of the nothing can result in a compulsion to speak, the production of a kind of chatter: ‘That in the uncanniness of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk [ein wahlloses Reden] only proves the presence of the nothing’ (Heidegger 1998: 89). In what will constitute one of the principal differences between the nothing in Heidegger and the nothing in Beckett, however, Heidegger proceeds to argue that, as nihilation, ‘For human Dasein, the nothing makes possible the manifestness of beings as such’ (Das Nichts ist die Ermöglichung der Offenbarkeit des Seienden als eines solchen für das menschliche Dasein) (Heidegger 1998: 91); that is, the manifestness of beings in their Being. So, but for the experience of the nothing as nihilation in the mood of anxiety, the human Dasein would never experience beings in their Being. And but for the experience of the nothing, which makes the human being the ‘lieutenant of the nothing’ (Platzhalter des Nichts) (Heidegger 1998: 93), there would be ‘no selfhood and no freedom’ (Heidegger 1998: 91). Furthermore, and no less crucially, the nothing ‘unveils itself as belonging to the being of beings’ (enthüllt sich als zugehörig zum Sein des Seienden) (Heidegger 1998: 94). In short, then, the experience of the nothing as nihilation is not only possible, but this possibility is also the possibility of the experience of beings in their Being, and of all freedom and all selfhood. If we turn now to Heidegger’s 1935 lecture series Einfuhrüng in die Metaphysik, we find that the experience of the nothing is no less central to the experience of the ontological difference between Being and beings. As we have seen, in Was ist Metaphysik? the nothing is taken to strike down the word, to render silent, but also to produce compulsive talk. As for the possibility of an unmediated or direct (unvermittelt) speaking of the nothing, this, Heidegger now claims, ‘can be indicated’ (lässt sich hinzeigen) (Heidegger 2000: 28). For an example of

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such indicating, Heidegger turns not to a philosophical text but rather to a recently published novel, Knut Hamsun’s The Road Leads On (Men Livet Lever, 1933), the German translation of which (by J. Sandmeier and S. Ungermann) was first published in 1934 under the title Nach Jahr und Tag (Munich: Albert Langen/Georg Müller). The passage that Heidegger quotes to support his argument on the indication of the possibility of such an unmediated speaking of the nothing reads as follows in the 1934 German translation: Er sitzt hier mitten zwischen seinen Ohren and hört die wahre Leere. Ganz komisch, ein Hirngespinst. Auf dem Meer rührte sich etwas, und dort gab es einen Laut, etwas Hörbares, einen Wasserchor. Hier trifft Nichts auf Nichts und ist nicht da, ist nicht einmal ein Loch. Man kann nur ergebungsvoll den Kopf schütteln. [He [the novel’s protagonist, August] sits here between his ears and hears true emptiness. Quite amusing, a fancy. On the ocean something stirred, and there, there was a sound, something audible, a water chorus. Here nothing meets nothing and is not there, there is not even a hole. One can only shake one’s head in resignation.] (Knut Hamsun, quoted in Heidegger 2000: 29) Without wishing to make too much of the coincidence beyond the fact that it demonstrates Hamsun’s reputation (and indeed the availability of his works) in Nazi Germany, one might note that Beckett was reading this same German translation of The Road Leads On in Germany less than 2 years later, in January 1937, the book having been lent to him by Axel Kaun on 15 January 1937 (see Pilling 2006: 64). Turning now to the ‘fragment’ from Brief über den Humanismus published in Fontaine in November 1947, we find that Heidegger continues to think the nothing as nihilation, although now it is termed ‘Le Néantisant’ (das Nichtende) (Heidegger 1947: 799). As in Einführung in die Metaphysik, so here too Heidegger anticipates the accusation that his philosophy, in its concern for ‘le Néant’ (Nichts), ‘le rejet’ (Verwerfung), and ‘la déréliction’ (Verworfenheit), is simply ‘un “nihilisme” irresponsable et destructeur [an irresponsible and destructive “nihilism”]’ (Heidegger 1947: 789). Beaufret, too, notes this (in his view) thoroughly mistaken reading of Heidegger as a ‘promoteur de nihilisme [promoter of nihilism]’ in his essay ‘Martin Heidegger et le problème de la vérité’ in the same issue of Fontaine (Beaufret 1947: 759; my translation). Heidegger himself argues in the ‘Lettre’ that the real nihilism lies elsewhere, namely in the thinking of Being (Sein) in terms of values. As in Einführung in die Metaphysik, so in the ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’, it is the evaluative thinking of being that is ‘l’oubli de l’être’ (Seinsvergessenheit): Penser en évaluant constitue, ici et partout, le plus grand blasphème contre l’être qui puisse s’imaginer. Etre ‘contre les valeurs’ ne signifie donc pas être

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pour l’absence de valeur et la nullité de l’étant (Wertlosigkeit und Nichtigkeit), mais être contre la subjectivisation de l’étant qui ravale ce dernier au rang de simple objet, et pour l’être. [Evaluative thinking constitutes, here and everywhere, the greatest blasphemy imaginable against being. Thus to be ‘against values’ does not mean to be for the absence of value and the nullity of beings, but to be against the subjectivization of beings that reduces the latter to the status of a simple object, and for being.] (Heidegger 1947: 791; my translation) While in many obvious respects Heidegger’s being ‘pour l’être’ is alien to the spirit of Beckett’s oeuvre, Heidegger’s attack on evaluative thinking is strikingly anticipatory of Beckett’s own rejection of any ‘jugement de valeur [value judgement]’ (Beckett, quoted in Juliet 1986: 165). Similarly, Heidegger’s appreciation of the pre-Socratics (in the ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’, it is principally Heraclitus) bears a resemblance to Beckett’s, via Burnet, in its insistence that their thinking of being does not take the form of an ethics: ‘Les penseurs antérieurs à cette époque [de Platon] ne connaissent ni “logique”, ni “éthique”, ni “physique” [The thinkers who precede the time [of Plato] know neither “logic”, nor “ethics”, nor “physics”]’ (Heidegger 1947: 795; my translation). With regard to Heidegger’s ongoing thinking of the nothing, in the ‘Lettre’ he argues that ‘au sein même de l’être [at the very heart of being]’ there is ‘le principe combattif du “Ne . . . pas” [the combative principle of the “not”]’ (Heidegger 1947: 799). This principle is not, however, derived from negation: ‘Le Nicht, toutefois, ne peut jamais naître de la négation. Tout non (Nein) n’est qu’affirmation du Nicht [The Nicht, however, can never be born of negation. Every no (Nein) is only an affirmation of the Nicht]’ (Heidegger 1947: 799; my translation). And this Nicht ‘s’attribue et s’adresse à l’homme sous la forme du “néantisant” (das Nichtende) [gives and addresses itself to man in the form of “nihilating”]’ (Heidegger 1947: 799; my translation). Of particular relevance here to Beckett’s own works, especially L’Innommable, is the notion that negation (the saying of the ‘Non’) is itself a form of affirmation, namely of the Nicht as das Nichtende, and that therefore no absolute negation is possible. As Heidegger puts it: le ‘Nicht’ n’est d’aucune façon conséquence ou produit du Non. Le Non dit ‘oui’ au ‘Nicht’. Le Néantisant déploie son essence (west) au sein même de l’être. Cet (élément) néantisant dans l’être est l’essence de ce que j’appelle Néant (Nicht). C’est parce qu’elle pense l’être que la pensée peut penser le néant. [the ‘Nicht’ is not in any respect the consequence or product of the No. The No says ‘yes’ to the ‘Nicht’. The Nihilating unfolds its essence (west) at the very heart of being. This nihilating (element) in being is the essence of what I term Nothing (Nicht). It is because it thinks being that thought can think the nothing.] (Heidegger 1947: 799; my translation)

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It is evident, then, that Heidegger is not proposing a thinking of the negative that would fall under the traditional rubric of either ‘cosmological’ or ‘ethical’ nihilism. The ‘Nothing’ (Néant; Nicht) as ‘Nihilating’ (Néantisant; Nichtende) belongs to ‘being’ (être; Sein), and is not to be thought as the product of any negation. And yet, the possibility of the experience of the nothing remains an essential one for Dasein. But for this experience of the nothing, there can be no ‘rémemoration’ (Andenken) of being, and thus no surpassing of ‘nihilisme’ defined as the forgetting of being (Seinsvergessenheit). In Beckett’s L’Innommable, however, the emphasis falls precisely on the failure of both negation and affirmation, the failure to experience both being and the nothing. In this respect, a remark made by Beckett to Charles Juliet in November 1977 is telling: ‘La négation n’est pas possible. Pas plus que l’affirmation [Negation is not possible. Any more than is affirmation]’ (Beckett in Juliet 1986: 49; my translation). At this point, one might turn to another contemporary theory of the nothing in its relation to literature that would appear simply to be reproduced uncritically in Beckett’s L’Innommable, namely that of the French writer and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot. In the opening (untitled) essay in his 1943 collection Faux Pas, Blanchot argues that the writer experiences the aporetic conjunction of the necessity and the impossibility of writing: ‘L’écrivain se trouve dans cette condition de plus en plus comique de n’avoir rien à écrire, de n’avoir aucun moyen de l’écrire et d’être contraint par une nécessité extrême de toujours l’écrire’ / ‘The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it’ (Blanchot 1943: 11; 2001: 3). Blanchot clarifies this statement by claiming that ‘nothingness’ (le rien) is in fact the writer’s ‘material’ (matière). Now, irrespective of whether Beckett was familiar with Blanchot’s characterization of the writer’s predicament, the above statement not only places the nothing at the very heart of writing but anticipates even in its phrasing Beckett’s own well-known later statement in the first of his Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949): ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett 1965: 103). Returning to Heidegger, we find that although we may not be in a position to determine whether or not Beckett read the ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret (Fragment)’ (1947), or Beaufret’s essay on Heidegger in the same issue of Fontaine, neither are we in a position to assert that, when in L’Innommable (which he began writing on 29 March 1949) he refers to ‘leurs histoires d’être et d’existence’ / ‘all their balls about being and existing’ (Beckett 1953: 103; 1959: 351), it is, as Feldman puts it, ‘clear that Beckett is more likely referring to the beginnings of Western philosophy in Greece than to his philosophical contemporaries’ (Feldman 2006b: 7). And this for a number of reasons.

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First and foremost, the distinction between ‘être’ and ‘existence’ in L’Innommable is, unsurprisingly, to be found repeatedly in the ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’—for instance, in the following statement: ‘L’homme est, et il est homme, dans la mesure où il est celui qui ec-siste, c’est-à-dire où il se tient avancé dans l’apérité de l’être [Man is, and he is man, to the extent that he is the one who ec-sists, that is to say, holds himself out in the openness of being]’ (Heidegger 1947: 791; my translation). And, as Jean Beaufret observes in his 1947 essay on Heidegger, the distinction between ‘l’être’ and ‘l’existant’ (that is, the ontological difference between Sein and Seiendes) is precisely not ‘explicitly formulated’ in earlier philosophy. In short, it is Heidegger, not the pre-Socratics, who is the first to bring this distinction explicitly to our attention: ‘Il est clair, en effet, qu’à aucun moment la tradition philosophique dans son ensemble ne formule explicitement la distinction qui sépare l’être et l’existant [It is clear, in effect, that at no time does the philosophical tradition in its entirety explicitly formulate the distinction that separates being and the existent]’ (Beaufret 1947: 766; my translation). While it is true that Beaufret’s phrasing differs slightly from Beckett’s in that the former refers to ‘être’ and ‘existant’, whereas in L’Innommable Beckett refers to ‘être’ (‘being’) and ‘existence’ (‘existing’), this terminological slippage may be owing to another distinction, of particular importance to Sartre in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. As Sartre puts it: ‘il y a au moins un être chez qui l’existence précède l’essence, un être qui existe avant de pouvoir être défini par aucun concept et . . . cet être c’est l’homme’ / ‘there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man’ (Sartre 1996: 29; 1980: 28). Secondly, the remark concerning ‘être’ and ‘existence’ in L’Innommable is an entirely dismissive one, especially in Beckett’s English translation: ‘leurs histoires’ / ‘all their balls’. Now, the allusions to Democritus (the so-called ‘laughing philosopher’) in Murphy and elsewhere in Beckett’s works are generally of an approving nature. On the other hand, as we have seen, Beckett is negative in his judgements of both Sartre and Heidegger in interview, claiming that their language is simply ‘too philosophical’ for him. Thirdly, as we also have seen, James Knowlson argues that En attendant Godot (which was written between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949, less than a year after the publication of Heidegger’s ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’ and 2 years after Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un humanisme) is a work that appears to be echoing and playing with existentialist preoccupations. These echoes include Estragon’s remark: ‘On trouve toujours quelque chose, hein Didi, pour nous donner l’impression d’exister?’ / ‘We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?’ (Beckett 1952: 97; 1990: 64); and Vladimir’s ‘Dans un instant, tout se dissipera, nous serons à nouveau seuls, an milieu des solitudes’ / ‘In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the

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midst of nothingness’ (Beckett 1952: 113; 1990: 75), thus capturing (in Beckett’s translation rather than in the original French) that fundamental mood of anxiety (Angst) in which, according to Heidegger, the nothing is experienced. Rather than trying to determine whether or not Beckett did indeed read Heidegger’s ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret’, however, I wish now briefly to consider the extent to which L’Innommable may be said to include a sense of the nothing as nihilation rather than simply as a state or condition that is to be opposed to being, and how Beckett’s literary treatment of the nothing differs from Heidegger’s philosophical treatment of it. As in Murphy, so too in L’Innommable the nothing is the principal object of desire: ‘là où il ferait bon être’ / ‘a blessed place to be’ is where ‘on ne sent rien, n’entend rien, ne sait rien, ne dit rien, n’est rien’ / ‘[you] feel nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing’ (Beckett 1953: 145–6; 1959: 377–8). Indeed, the word ‘rien’ / ‘nothing’ occurs more often in L’Innommable than in any other Beckett text. However, while in Malone meurt Beckett reiterates the atomist paradox on the nothing first expressed in Murphy—‘Je connais ces petites phrases qui n’ont l’air de rien et qui, une fois admises, peuvent vous empester toute une langue. Rien n’est plus réel que rien’ / ‘I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing’ (Beckett 1951: 29–30; 1959: 193)—in L’Innommable the reference to Democritus ‘the laughing philosopher’ takes the form of a denial: ‘hi hi, ça c’est les côtes, de Démocrite, non, de l’autre’ / ‘hee hee, that’s the Abderite, no, the other’ (Beckett 1953: 202; 1959: 412). The key difference between the treatment of the nothing in Murphy and in L’Innommable lies in the fact that in the latter the experience of the nothing is taken to be achievable only through utterance. The ‘je’ of this text seeks an ‘exposé’ / ‘statement’ that will ‘décidera de moi’ / ‘dispose of me’ (Beckett 1953: 26; 1959: 304), to speak ‘pour ne rien dire, mais vraiment rien’ (‘to say nothing, really nothing’) (Beckett 1953: 27; 1959: 305). In accordance with a savage (because aporetic) economy, however, utterance is taken here to be both the way and that which blocks the way to the nothing: ‘Mais il semble impossible de parler pour ne rien dire, on croit y arriver, mais on oublie toujours quelque chose, un petit oui, un petit non, de quoi exterminer un régiment de dragons’ / ‘But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something, a little yes, a little no, enough to exterminate a regiment of dragoons’ (Beckett 1953: 27; 1959: 305). It is the ‘voix’ / ‘voice’—be that voice a ‘métaphore’ (Beckett 1953: 64; 1959: 327) or an ‘image’ (Beckett 1953: 100; 1959: 350)—that ‘empêche d’être rien, nulle part, l’empêche mal, tout juste’ / ‘prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere’ (Beckett 1953: 140; 1959: 374). Referring back to Heidegger, it is as though the ‘concert’ (‘babble’) (Beckett 1953: 102; 1959: 351) that is produced in L’Innommable is precisely that ‘compulsive chatter’ (wahlloses Reden) generated by the experience or at least

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the intimation of the nothing. In other words, the relation to the nothing in L’Innommable occurs in and through a language that is itself nihilating in a manner that is affirming. To return to the dismissal of ‘all their balls about being and existing’, we might say that the unmediated experience of the nothing as it occurs in Murphy and Watt is no longer possible precisely because everything— and, above all, the nothing—has now to be thought through language. Thus the experience of the nothing becomes a figure—for instance, Worm: Il doivent m’estimer suffisamment abruti, avec leurs histoires d’être et d’existence. Oui, maintenant que j’ai oublié qui est Worm, comment il est, où il est, ce qu’il fait, je vais me mettre à l’être. Tout plutôt que ces propos de khâgneux. Vite un endroit. Sans accès, sans issue, endroit sûr. Pas comme l’Eden. Et Worm dedans. Ne sentant rien, ne sachant rien, ne pouvant rien, ne voulant rien. (Beckett 1953: 103) They must consider me sufficiently stupefied, with all their balls about being and existing. Yes, now that I’ve forgotten who Worm is, where he is, what he’s like, I’ll begin to be he. Anything rather than these college quips. Quick, a place. With no way in, no way out, a safe place. Not like Eden. And Worm inside. Feeling nothing, knowing nothing, capable of nothing, wanting nothing. (Beckett 1959: 351) This is not to say, however, that in place of ‘être’, ‘existence’, and ‘rien’ there is now only language or the voice. To claim as much would no doubt be one more ‘propos de khâgneux’ of the kind one might expect from a philosopher-friend in France. The language of philosophy simply will not do here. Indeed, in L’Innommable language itself will not do, since it is no longer that of which it can be said that it ‘is’. In short, the voice is not a voice: ‘Appeler ça des voix, pourquoi pas après tout, du moment qu’on sait qu’il n’en est rien’ / ‘And I speak of voices! Why not, so long as one knows it’s untrue’ (Beckett 1953: 82; 1959: 338). If the voice is in fact nothing of the kind, this is because, both more generally and more paradoxically, L’Innommable is a text in which nothing is what it is, and in which all language, not only the language of Heidegger or Sartre or Beaufret, but also that of Beckett’s own text, remains simply ‘too philosophical’ to achieve the goal of rendering the nothing a possible object of experience. In other words, it is in L’Innommable that the possibility of both any phenomenology and any ontology of the nothing breaks down, and in which the nothing becomes what it will henceforth remain in Beckett works: the uncanniest of guests.

Bibliography Ackerley, C. J. (2004), Demented Particulars: The Annotated ‘Murphy’. 2nd rev. edn. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books.

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—(2005), Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated ‘Watt’. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E. (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. New York, NY: Grove Press. Alexander, A. B. D. (1922), A Short History of Philosophy. Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, & Co. Beaufret, J. (1947), ‘Martin Heidegger et le problème de la vérité’. Fontaine 63 (November), 758–85. Beckett, S. (1938), Murphy. London: George Routledge & Sons. —(1951), Malone meurt. Paris: Minuit. —(1952), En attendant Godot. Paris: Minuit. —(1953), L’Innommable. Paris: Minuit. —(1959), Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder. —(1963), Watt. London: John Calder. —(1965), Proust and Three Dialogues. London: John Calder. —(1983), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder. —(1990), The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber. Blanchot, M. (1943), Faux Pas. Paris: Gallimard. —(2001), Faux Pas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Burnet, J. (1914), Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato. London: Macmillan. Descartes, R. (1988), Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans. J. Cottingham and R. Stoothoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engelberts, M., Frost, E. and Maxwell, J. (eds) (2006), ‘Notes Diverse Holo’: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays. Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi. Feldman, M. (2006a), Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. New York, NY and London: Continuum. —(2006b), ‘Returning to Beckett Returning to the Presocratics, or, “All their balls about being and existing” ’. Genetic Joyce Studies 6, 1–12. Geulincx, A. (1999), Metaphysics. Trans. M. Wilson. Wisbech: Christoffel. Graver, L. and Federman, R. (eds) (1979), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hamsun, K. (1933), Men Livet Lever. Oslo: Gyldendal. Harvey, L. E. (1970), Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, M. (1947), ‘Lettre à Jean Beaufret (Fragment)’. Fontaine 63 (November), 786–804. —(1953a), Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. —(1953b), ‘Lettre sur l’humanisme’, trans. R. Munier. Cahiers du sud 319, 385–406, and Cahiers du sud 320, 68–88. —(1986), Was ist Metaphysik? Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. —(1998), Pathmarks. Ed. W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2000), Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. G. Fried and R. Polt. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

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—(2003), Philosophical and Political Writings. Ed. M. Stassen. New York, NY: Continuum. Henning, S. D. (1985), ‘The Guffaw of the Abderite: Murphy and the Democritean Universe’. Journal of Beckett Studies 10, 5–20. Hesla, D. H. (1972), The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Juliet, C. (1986), Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Kennedy, S. (1971), Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Kleinberg, E. (2005), Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927–1961. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Pilling, J. (2006), A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Safranski, R. (1998), Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Trans. E. Osers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1957), Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. London: Methuen. —(1980), Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. P. Mairet. London: Methuen. —(1996), L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Gallimard. —(2000), Nausea. Trans. R. Baldick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 1. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York, NY: Dover. Weller, S. (2005), A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. Oxford: Legenda. —(2008), ‘ “Gnawing to Be Naught”: Beckett and Pre-Socratic Nihilism’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 20, 307–19.

Chapter 3

Beckett and Sartre: The Nauseous Character of All Flesh Steven Connor

It should not be a matter of much amazement that Beckett studies should be playing so vigorous a part in the current revival of interest in phenomenology. The upsurge (to use a prime item of phenomenological lingo) of Beckett into literary and cultural awareness during the 1950s seemed to demand and handsomely to reward interpretation in terms of the then-dominant philosophies of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It is hard to overstate the importance in particular of the Sartrean version of phenomenological philosophy. The extent to which Sartre’s form of existential philosophy dominated the field can be measured by the negative imprint of his absence from the thoughts not only of philosophers but more particularly of literary, cultural and social critics today. Sartre was not just lost to view—he was disappeared. For Sartre was so ubiquitous that only a massive and sustained act of philosophical cleansing could scour him so completely from the field of intellectual reference. The disappearance of Sartre from the field is all the more striking in the case of Beckett studies, given that ‘Beckett and Sartre’ was at one time as reliable a double-act as Marks and Spencer or Abbot and Costello. For 20 years or so, it was almost impossible to make any sense of Beckett outside the paradigm of existentialist phenomenology, with its bifurcated emphasis on the themes of anguish, arbitrariness and absurdity on the one hand, and of choice, freedom and transcendence on the other. Above all, it was the figure of Sartre and the arguments he developed in Being and Nothingness which were the source of these principles. In 1970, Neal Oxenhandler could begin an essay on the nouveau roman, with Beckett as one of its most distinguished exponents, with the calmly assured statement that Whatever historical calipers one uses, it is hard to separate French literature of the sixties from that of the fifties and late forties. The major writers who

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follow existentialism—Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon—share a common ground of specific aesthetic tendencies which set them off from the pre-existentialist tradition. (Oxenhandler 1970: 169) While objecting to the simple designation ‘phenomenological’ for the writers of the nouveau roman, Oxenhandler nevertheless assures us that ‘What we need is some kind of map, a map of what Samuel Beckett might call “the Sartre and Merleau-Ponty country” ’ (1970: 172). The essay-flogging site 123helpme.com advertises its wares with a preview of an essay on ‘Sartre’s Existentialism in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’ (which is rated ‘Blue’ for ‘a powerful essay’ and no doubt priced accordingly) (Anon n.d.). But who sets essay-titles like this any more? I suspect that this is a littlevisited precinct of the site, a ghost-town enlivened only by the eerie wail of a harmonica and occasional swirl of tumbleweed. Generations of students have been taught (some of them perhaps by some of the things I have written) both to condescend to and to be wary of ‘existential-humanist’ readings of Beckett. The superstitious dread of the empty space represented by Sartre is revealed by the fact that when phenomenology has again occurred to Beckett studies, it has been in a form relieved of its Sartrean thematics of choice, freedom and engagement. Where in the 1950s, phenomenology had presented itself almost entirely in the compound form of ‘existential phenomenology’, in recent years, the specifically existential associations of phenomenology have been dropped. Contemporary phenomenological readings (of Beckett and others) exhibit a strong preoccupation with the body, oddly, but conveniently enough a topic that attracts little sustained attention either from Sartre or from his explicators. Those contemporary critics who have turned to phenomenology have often done so in order to make out a more intimate and inward sense of embodied existence than poststructuralist criticism seemed to make possible, looking for a more fleshly ‘phenomenological body’ to supplement poststructuralism’s body of signs. Beckett studies appears to want from phenomenology at this moment what other new adopters of phenomenology want; not an invigorating account of man’s absurd freedom, but a reassuringly holistic account of man’s inherence in the ‘flesh of the world’, in Merleau-Ponty’s conception (1968: 248). Discussions of Sartre and Beckett have tended to emphasize the anguish of subjectivity rather than the lived condition of the body. The existentialist themes made out by Edith Kern in the work of Beckett are limited to the absurdity of the outside world and the unavailability of the self to itself, as it represents ‘the Sartrean pour-soi in futile quest of a Self that becomes a stranger, an en-soi, an object as soon as it is seen by an intelligence which classifies and judges it’ (Kern 1970: 207). In this, she follows Richard Coe, who also saw the Beckettian self in terms of the Sartrean pour-soi (Coe 1964: 75). Even Lance St. John Butler, who provides a detailed explication of Beckett’s work in the light of

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Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, nevertheless considers the question of the body only in a 4-page afterthought (Butler 1984: 106–10). All this suggests that, whatever utility there may be for Beckett studies from a reconsideration of his relations with Sartre may perhaps be derived from some close attention to the way in which Sartre treats the topic of the body that so animates the recent return to phenomenology.

Everywhere in the World The problem with Sartre is that the body is such a problem for him, that the body is always a form of foreign body. This makes him less useful and congenial in this project of recovery than his associate and later critic, Maurice MerleauPonty, whose work seems to articulate an altogether less hostile and agonistic view of embodied existence. To be sure, this may not at first appear from the way in which Sartre begins his chapter on ‘The Body’ in Being and Nothingness. The first few pages give what ought to be a reassuring enough account of the priority of the lived body over the body as object of knowledge—this latter being simply ‘the body for others’, which Sartre will tell us is indistinguishable from a corpse (Sartre 1984: 303). My body is more than merely my own: as ‘a living possibility of running, of dancing, etc.’ (1984: 305), it is me, it is my very individuation. Without my body, there would be no orientation, no perspective on, or place in the world, there would be no world. That is to say, my body does not just happen to be in the world, it is my way of being enworlded, my being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. Sartre goes on to argue against the conventional view of the senses, which places them in some intermediary position between me and the world. This implies that, somewhere and somehow, I must have ‘sensations’ that correspond to my experience of the world. Sartre regards such a view as untenable, not least because none of us has ever had access to a ‘sensation’ as such. I may see that the cover of this book is green, but I can never get the greenness to appear to me on its own, as a subjective fact. In each case, what we take to be a subjective sensation is in fact an objective quality of the world that is revealed to me (1984: 312). This is another sense in which my body cannot be said to be ‘in’ the world, as the plant is in the pot or the pea is in the pod. Rather, as ‘the point of view on which there can not be a point of view’ (Sartre 1984: 329–30) my body is the entire way the world appears to me, and the world is therefore wholly impregnated with my body. I cannot subtract from my being-in-the-world the embodied portion of it. Thus to say that I have entered into the world, ‘come to the world,’ or that there is a world, or that I have a body is one and the same thing. In this sense my body is everywhere in the world. (Sartre 1984: 318)

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The list of examples Sartre provides of the way in which the world ubiquitously indicates the body which is my way of being in it (really, and more briefly, my way of being it) not only has a Beckettian cast, it also employs some distinctively Beckettian properties: My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body in so far as the house was already an indication of my body. That is why my body always extends across the tool which it utilizes: it is at the end of the cane on which I lean and against the earth; it is at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars; it is on the chair, in the whole house. (Sartre 1984: 325) Viewed in this way, some of the experiences of the body detailed in Beckett’s writing may start into a different kind of sense. Two of Beckett’s bedridden characters in particular have an experience that is represented as a kind of scattering or alienation of the body. In Murphy, Mr Kelly has some difficulty in gathering together his scattered attention before he is able to dispense advice to Celia: ‘His attention was dispersed. Part was with his caecum, which was wagging its tail again; part with his extremities, which were dragging anchor; part with his boyhood; and so on. All this would have to be called in’ (Beckett 1963: 17). At the end of the novel, this will be reversed, as his body seems to soar out of sight at the end of his kite-string. These experiences are recalled by Malone’s probings with his stick, themselves recalled by the speaker in The Unnamable, who imagines investigating his circumstances with ‘a stick or pole, and the means of plying it, the former being of little avail without the latter, and vice versa’ (Beckett 1973: 302): Then I would dart it, like a javelin, straight before me and know, by the sound made, whether that which hems me round, and blots out my world, is the old void, or a plenum. Or else, without letting it go, I would wield it like a sword and thrust it through empty air, or against the barrier. But the days of sticks are over. (Beckett 1973: 302–3) But of course the very possibility of projection is still available in whatever kind of existence it is that here represents itself. The very experience of imagining being able to project physically, even under circumstances where it is impossible, is itself a kind of Sartrean project, a surpassing of the condition of helplessness. This is temporal as well as spatial; reflecting on the simultaneous necessity of having a pole and ‘a means of plying it’, the speaker remarks in passing, ‘I could also do, incidentally, with future and conditional participles’ (Beckett 1973: 302). The voice in The Unnamable is never permitted, nor can ever procure for itself, a fully out-of-body experience. Its projections beyond the body are always bodily projections and therefore as much bracing as scattering.

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All this might suggest a conveniently post-Cartesian fusion of body, mind and world, with the body as ‘that strange object which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently “be at home” in that world’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it (1996: 237). But, for Sartre, I am never merely identical with my body, nor can the body and the world simply intersect. The most well-known, even notorious, aspect of Sartre’s philosophy is his distinction between being ‘in-itself’, that is, forms of being that are simply and self-identically themselves, through and through, and the kind of existence he calls the ‘for-itself’. The latter is distinguished by being a kind of active nothingness—a nihilation. Sartre intensifies Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is outside of itself; this means, says Sartre, ‘that Dasein “is not” in itself, that it “is not” in immediate proximity to itself, and that it “surpasses” the world inasmuch as it posits itself as not being in itself and as not being in the world’ (Sartre 1984: 18). Man is therefore ‘a being who causes Nothingness to arise in the world’ (1984: 24). My nihilation is the fact that I must always surpass or set at naught my contingent condition in the world. And it is my body, or my condition of being embodied, which represents this contingency—indeed, Sartre will define the body as ‘the contingent form which is assumed by the necessity of my contingency’ (1984: 309). Thus, even though I am not anything but my body, the body ‘is perpetually the surpassed’ (1984: 330). It was not, is not, will not have been, necessary that I should be at all. There is no reason for the phenomenon that I know as me to have come into being. But, since I am in being, it is necessary that I should take some form or other, which will always prevent me from attaining to any kind of being-in-general. It is an easy but dangerous mistake to see the kind of negation of the body in which the for-itself must be involved as leading to a reinstatement of the Cartesian split between the inert body and the active but immaterial soul. For Sartre, existence is indeed split between the in-itself and the for-itself, between the form of being that is identical with itself and the ‘being such that in its being, its being is in question’ (1984: xxxviii). But inasmuch as this is a fissure within consciousness, which is never anything else than fully embodied, it is also a fissure within the body, not between it and something else. I think that Stanton B. Garner is right to find a similar ‘impossibility of transcendental self-possession’ in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and to recommend his philosophy as a way of understanding the ‘problematic corporeality’ to be found everywhere in Beckett’s work (Garner 1993: 451, 453). Merleau-Ponty would therefore be the baby rescued from the gurgling outflow of phenomenology, the philosopher who shows ‘the deconstructive possibilities inherent in the phenomenological stance itself’ (Garner 1993: 453). But this maladjustment is a much milder, more benign, and much less dynamically anguished thing for Merleau-Ponty than it is for Sartre. Where, for Merleau-Ponty, embodiment can be spoken of as a condition, for Sartre, bodily existence is never anything but a project of striving.

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Strides of Alimentation There is one bodily action and associated affect that seems to be uniquely expressive of the split in embodied existence both for Sartre and for Beckett, namely, the experience of eating and, in its negative affect, that of nausea. In his essay ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ of 1946, Sartre even identifies a kind of nausea as the effect of existentialist fiction: [I]t appears that ugliness is being identified with existentialism. That is why some people say we are ‘naturalistic,’ and if we are, it is strange to see how much we scandalise and horrify them, for no one seems to be much frightened or humiliated nowadays by what is properly called naturalism. Those who can quite well keep down a novel by Zola such as La Terre are sickened as soon as they read an existentialist novel. (Sartre 1948: 24) For both Beckett and Sartre, eating seems to be inseparable from the background or possibility of disgust, or nausea. The condition of the for-itself appears to be constitutionally dyspeptic. In order to make out what it may be apt to call a nauseous sensibility shared by Sartre and Beckett, it will help to distinguish more precisely what Sartre means by the term ‘nausea’, which certainly names something much more specific than what Rosette Lamont referred to casually as ‘the sickness of the void’ (Lamont 1959: 319). The term appears on a number of occasions in Being and Nothingness before finally being given a definition, at the end of the first section of the chapter on the body that is devoted to ‘The Body’s Being For Itself’. It is the climax of a discussion of the ways in which the sufferer from pain or illness makes these conditions his own precisely by projecting himself beyond them. But it is not necessary for there to be a specific form of bodily experience in question in order for this to happen, for there will always be some kind of apprehension of the body within consciousness: Consciousness does not cease to ‘have’ a body. Coenesthetic affectivity is then a pure, non-positional apprehension of a contingency without color, a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence. This perpetual apprehension on the part of my for-itself of an insipid taste which I cannot place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get away from it, and is my taste—this is what we have described elsewhere under the name of Nausea. (Sartre 1984: 338) The hint to readers of Sartre’s 1938 novel seems clear—this, we are to understand, is the philosophical explication of the state of nausea experienced psychologically by Antoine Roquentin. The problem, however, as Richard Kamber (1983) lucidly indicated, is that the experience evoked in Being and

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Nothingness is not at all that repeatedly described in Nausea. In Sartre’s novel, nausea is induced by the sudden awareness of the mute, irreducible, absurd facticity of things, which repels all efforts to ascribe to them sense or value. Nausea is provoked by the sense of being touched by objects: Objects ought not to touch, since they are not alive. You use them, you put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it’s unbearable . . . . I remember better what I felt the other day on the sea-shore when I was holding that pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How unpleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, I’m sure of that, it passed from the pebble into my hands. Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it: a sort of nausea in the hands. (Sartre 1976: 22) There, nausea is something like the apprehension of the pure existingness of things, their resistance to being swallowed into human value and significance: ‘Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself. When you realized that it turns your stomach over and everything starts floating about, as it did the other evening at the Rendez-vous des Cheminots; that is the Nausea’ (Sartre 1976: 188). But, in Being and Nothingness, nausea names the apprehension, not of the simple existence of the In-itself, but of that specific form or phase of the In-itself that is an indissoluble component of the For-itself. Nausea is the persistent, vague but still unmistakable apprehension of the contingency, the thisness of my body. It might be regarded as the for-itself of the in-itself. If, for Sartre, it is no sooner there than it is necessarily surpassed, it is always nevertheless necessarily there to be surpassed. It clings and lingers through all my efforts to expel or outstrip it. Hence perhaps the name: for nausea is most commonly the designation not of the vigorously decisive, and divisive, act of vomiting, but rather of the unresolved desire for expulsion. We might say of nausea what Sartre says of illness, that it is transcendent but without distance. It is outside my consciousness as a synthetic totality and already close to being elsewhere. But on the other hand it is in my consciousness, it fastens on to consciousness with all its teeth, penetrates consciousness with all its notes; and these teeth, these notes, are my consciousness. (Sartre 1984: 336–7) Sartre describes as ‘the unique character of corporal existence’ the fact that ‘the inexpressible which one wishes to flee is rediscovered at the heart of this very wrenching away; it is this which is going to constitute the consciousnesses which surpass it; it is the very contingency and the being of the flight which wishes to flee it’ (Sartre 1984: 333). The spectrality of Beckett’s later works, the quality, manifest in such plays as Footfalls and . . . but the clouds . . . and such texts as Ill Seen Ill Said, of not being quite there, has been the subject of much

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attention in recent years, by critics who have related it to the ‘ghosting’ of the body in technology and media. Sartre’s formulation helps us to grasp this spectrality in a different sense. They are spectral, not because the body is erased or made less manifest, but because they are ‘body-haunted’. They are ghostly, not because, or not only because they are no longer quite there, they are ghostly because they disclose the haunting of the body that is characteristic of the living. Nausea thus has two aspects: on the one hand a necessary subjection or submission to one’s own bodily self-consciousness, or consciousness of oneself as body, and on the other hand the effort to project oneself beyond this identification with the bodily self. This twin relation of submission to and surpassing of the factical dimension of the for-itself is precisely the way in which the foritself is, in the sense that it is the way in which it becomes an issue for itself. I am my nausea. Lance St. John Butler is certainly right to see this ‘permanent undercurrent of nausea’, or ‘contingency-sickness’ as he calls it, as the status quo in Beckett’s writing (Butler 1984: 109), but perhaps underestimates the way in which, for Beckett as well as Sartre, nausea is also taken up positively into the nihilating project of the non-coinciding for-itself that is Beckett’s writing. Sartre gives a curious name to this relation of simultaneous submission and surpassing, saying that this is the way in which, using the word in a transitive sense, ‘consciousness exists its body’ (Sartre 1984: 329). The body is brought into existence by the way in which consciousness exists as embodied, which is to say, in both necessarily recognizing and refusing the body as itself. In a certain sense, Sartre seems to be saying that we give ourselves the forms of our very subjection to the contingency of being embodied, the contingency that being embodied is. So the nauseous condition and effect of our self-sensing consists both in the fact that I can never be other than other to myself, and therefore must always apprehend my self-taste as a kind of nausea, a desire to expel the foreign body, and also in the fact that this particular kind of revulsion is my very self, that the foreign body in question is my own. So nausea is not just a passive condition, to which I am subjected, and against which I may or may not revolt. It is the revulsion itself, it is the self precipitated in revulsion from self. Sartre will not make this idea clear until the final chapter of Being and Nothingness. There we will find the remarkable claim that tastes— whether applied to the object, as when one speaks of the taste of coffee or vinegar, or to the subject, as when one speaks of someone’s ‘taste for’ a particular kind of food, or, metaphorically, for a particular kind of activity—are in fact part of the project of existing itself, and thus of world-making, in which each for-itself is engaged: [T]astes do not remain irreducible givens; if one knows how to question them, they reveal to us the fundamental projects of the person. Down to even our alimentary preferences they all have a meaning . . . the totality of the

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For Beckett, as for Sartre, alimentation and appetite have a more than contingent relation to existence; for both of them, eating is the necessary form of my relation to my contingency, for it is one of the ‘fundamental projects of the person’, in which I may be said to exist my body.

Relish of Disgust However, we may have to draw a sharp distinction between Sartre and Beckett. Where, for Sartre, every taste or inclination will represent ‘a certain appropriative choice of being’ (1984: 615), Beckett seems to enact through eating, or not eating, a fundamental refusal of the choice of being (even if this can never be a refusal of choice as such, since refusal in itself constitutes a choice). This refusal arises early in Beckett’s work in the elaborate lunch prepared by Belacqua in ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The meal can be seen as a parodic reprise of Bloom’s moderate repast in ‘Lestrygonians’, in contrast to the carnivorous, even cannibalistic frenzies of eating that he sees around him in lunchtime Dublin—‘swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food . . . . Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff’ ( Joyce 1987: 138, 139). Bloom takes a glass of Burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich, a meal that allows him a homeopathic dose of exposure to the nausea that he has encountered earlier, with the profit of a certain kind of ‘relish’ (reminding us of the very first thing we ever hear about Bloom, that he ‘ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls’): ‘Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate’ (Joyce 1987: 142). Belacqua’s lunch, by contrast, seems designed to effect, not a temperate interchange of contraries, but a violent self-cancellation. The bread he toasts must be completely incinerated, since ‘If there was one thing he abominated more than another it was to feel his teeth meet in a pathos of pith and dough’ (Beckett 1970: 11). Pathos is precisely the point in this story, in which Belacqua seems to be doing everything he can to avoid the pang of pity. Belacqua cuts the bread on a spread-out newspaper which shows the face of Henry McCabe, who, at the time the story is set, had recently been convicted of the murder of his employer and four other people in a house-fire in Malahide. Much of the

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uncertainty of the case derived from the fact that the bodies had been partially, but not entirely consumed in the fire (Kroll 1977). The half-round of the bread becomes identified with the Dantean problem of the spots on the moon with which Belacqua has been tussling earlier that day. According to popular interpretation, the maculated moon was the face of Cain, ‘fallen and branded, seared with the first stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly’ (Beckett 1970: 12). Belacqua’s toasting procedure is identified both with the putative arson that has led to the deaths of five people in ‘La Mancha’, the Malahide house, and with the execution of McCabe that will take place the following morning: ‘He laid his cheek against the soft of the bread, it was spongy and warm, alive. But he would soon take that plush feel off it, by God but he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face’ (Beckett 1970: 11). It is not at all a quick death for the slowly-carbonadoed rounds of toast. Smeared with a fiery paste of mustard, salt and Cayenne pepper, they are intended by Belacqua to enclose the round of high Gorgonzola that he will go out to procure. He is dissatisfied with the cheese reserved for him by the shopkeeper, this time however because the cheese is insufficiently putrid: A faint fragrance of corruption. What good was that? He didn’t want fragrance, he wasn’t a bloody gourmet. He wanted a good stench. What he wanted was a good green stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive, and by God he would have it. (Beckett 1970: 14) If he wants the bread thoroughly carbonized, but the cheese leppingly alive, it is in order that there should be maximum resistance to the triumph of his assimilation. His meal, ‘spiced’ by the news that McCabe’s appeal has been rejected, is an orgy of sadomasochistic oral rage: ‘his teeth and jaws had been in heaven, splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each gnash. It was like eating glass. His mouth burned and ached with the exploit’ (Beckett 1970: 17). This is an eating that seems designed at once to obliterate its object entirely, and to deny the very appropriation involved in alimentary consumption. It eagerly amplifies and embraces disgust, turning it into a principle of abjection. It is like not having one’s cake and violently expelling it at the same time, as though one were assimilating the very refusal of incorporation. What will catch Belacqua off guard later in the day is the sudden pathos of the thought of the vulnerable internal body of the lobster’s reassuringly crunchy carapace, a principle that introduces a real indigestibility. Throughout his work, Beckett enacts the nihilation of the for-itself in the most literal way, as an anorexic rejection of the being which it has had imposed contingently upon it. Malone’s version of the gran rifiuto is less grand than Belacqua’s. In announcing ‘I shall be neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid, without enthusiasm’ (Beckett 1973: 180), he is presumably

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looking forward with pleasure to the fate promised in Revelation 3.16 for the lukewarm soul: ‘because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth’. In the course of his valedictory statement, Arsene imagines a violent refinement of this procedure, in which the spewing of the indifferent soul from felicity is replaced by a two-way spewing traffic, as meaning is alternately rammed into and violently rejected from the body of the subject: [I]s it useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. (Beckett 1972: 43) In The Unnamable, the refusing nihilation of being takes the form of a specifically verbal nausea, in which speaking becomes a voiding or vomiting of sense rather than the expression of it: It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. I never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they have glutted me with. And I’ll be myself at last, as a starveling belches his odourless wind, before the bliss of coma. (Beckett 1973: 327) Ann Banfield reads this as a rejection specifically of the surrogate mother-tongue (English rather than Irish): ‘Since English, like the forced feeding of the hunger striker, is thrust upon the Irish speaker . . . that attack reduces the languagemilk taken in against the will to an excrement’ (Banfield 2003: 9). Au contraire: it is hard to believe that Beckett’s lactose intolerance could have been lulled at the breast by the lilt of Erse, Bantu, or any other candidate mother-tongue. The emetic aesthetic is maintained through Texts for Nothing, with its determination to turn aside from every ‘guzzle of lies piping hot’ (Beckett 1984: 105), and, indeed, alimentary forms of lessening and worsening survive to the end of Beckett’s writing, for example in the bulimic rhythm of filling and evacuation used by Worstward Ho to express its sense of serial negations and returns: First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where

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none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. (Beckett 1983b: 8) Edith Fournier’s French version of this passage opts to make the sickness and the throwing up, which may be read metaphorically in the English, entirely literal: ‘Dégoûté de l’un essayer l’autre. Dégoûté de l’autre retour au dégoûte de l’un . . . Vomir et partir . . . Jusqu’à être dégoûté pour de bon. Vomir pour de bon. Partir pour de bon’ (Beckett 1991: 8–9). But this loses what we might think of as the specifically nauseous nature of the project of worsening or sickening meaning, for nausea in fact never permits the full and definitive separation of throwing up ‘for good’.

The Slimy Sartre articulates in the final pages of Being and Nothingness a horror at the prospect of absorption by the indeterminate condition he names the visqueux, translated by Hazel Barnes as the slimy. The slimy is a quality of the In-itself which threatens the freedom and nihilating self-determination of the For-itself. There is a ‘tactile fascination’ in the indeterminate substance which seems to be docile to my touch, but wants to appropriate me as I attempt to appropriate it. To absorb this kind of substance is to encounter what Sartre calls ‘a poisonous possession’, in which there is a possibility that the In-itself might absorb the For-itself; that is, that a being might be constituted in a manner just the reverse of the ‘In-itselfFor-itself,’ and that in this new being the In-itself would draw the For-itself into its contingency, into its indifferent exteriority, into its foundationless existence. (Sartre 1984: 609) So captivating, so overwhelmingly gluey is Sartre’s evocation of his own disgust at the threat to the projective powers of the For-itself posed by the slimy that it is easy to see why he has frequently been accused of a neurotic desire to shore up the integrity of the self in the face of formlessness, an accusation sharpened by his unabashed characterization of the slimy as female. What this misses is the fact that all this is represented as a taste for Sartre, a way of choosing, that is, existing, his body, not the way in which bodies exist as such (as in so much else, for Sartre, there is no as such about it). The point of this final discussion in Being and Nothingness is not to assert the universality of this mode of the foritself, though one can be forgiven for thinking so; rather it is to show that, even in this most proximal, reflex or even ‘instinctual’ affect, there is always a kind of choosing of being, a choice that is never free, in the sense of being entirely unconstrained, but must always be made, precisely because it is subject to the

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general constraint that I cannot choose not to make a choice as to how to exist my body, how to live in and live out my nausea. Indeed, Sartre even allows the possibility of a choice of the slimy. The kind of existential psychoanalysis which he sketches in the final chapter of Being and Nothingness must orientate itself, not to the fundamental ‘symbols of being’, like holes, slime, snow and shine, but rather ‘the free project of the unique person’ in relation to them (Sartre 1984: 614): If the slimy is indeed the symbol of a being in which the for-itself is swallowed up by the in-itself, what kind of person am I if in encountering others, I love the slimy? To what fundamental project of myself am I referred if I want to explain this love of an ambiguous, sucking in-itself? (Sartre 1984: 614) Sartre’s question may help us describe a form of nauseous sensibility different from that we have so far made out in Beckett’s work. For, where Sartre insists on the primal horror at being sucked or swallowed up in mess or mire—the mire of ‘Bouville’, for example, that compound of La Rochelle and Le Havre which forms the setting of his Nausea—Beckett’s writing at times seems to find some accommodation with, and even a kind of appetite for the mess. Sartre seems to want above all to distance himself from this indistinctness. In the final pages of Being and Nothingness, this distance is given a temporal form, as projection rather than Beckettian disjection: It is horrible in itself for a consciousness to become slimy . . . . A consciousness which became slimy would be transformed by the thick stickiness of its ideas. From the time of our upsurge into the world, we are haunted by the image of a consciousness which would like to launch forth into the future, toward a projection of self, and which at the very moment when it was conscious of arriving there would be slyly held back by the invisible suction of the past and which would have to assist in its own slow dissolution in this past which it was fleeing . . . . The horror of the slimy is the horrible fear that time might become slimy, that facticity might progress continually and insensibly and absorb the For-itself which exists it. (Sartre 1984: 610–11) The occupants of How It Is seem, by contrast, like the inhabitants of Chandrapore at the beginning of Forster’s Passage to India, to be ‘of mud moving’, and the very text to be a metabolic amalgam of mud, body, mouth and murmured words, past, present and future, churning and percolating into each other. The words which we read declare themselves to be simply the regurgitations of the voices the speaker hears, both within him and abroad. It is a ‘continuous purgatorial process’, as Beckett puts it at the conclusion of his essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in which neither ‘prize nor penalty’ is to be expected

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and in which ‘the partially purgatorial agent’ is the ‘partially purged’ (Beckett 1983a: 33). Here, it seems, time itself has indeed become slimy. There are two opposite conditions in How It Is, which alternate in what seem like peristaltic spasms. On the one hand, there is the slow oozing together of things, the body sinking into the mud, alimentation and excretion becoming simply phases of each other, everything slowly subsiding into everything else. But, on the other, there are the sudden ‘existings’, accesses of image and miracle, which stand clear of the indeterminate subsiding into equivalence. The first condition, in which nothing is to be distinguished from anything else, is figured by the image of a population crawling across the miry terrain each dragging a sack with a burst bottom: ‘those dragging on in front those dragging on behind whose lot has been whose lot will be what your lot is endless cortège of sacks burst in the interests of all’ (Beckett 1977: 53). But the sack with its bottom intact, that still contains cans of sardines and tuna, along with the vital ‘opener’, figures the principle of local separation from the general metabolism, the possibility of an opening in, or nihilation of, the general condition of metamorphic decay. An unruptured sack is a kind of negentropic pocket in things, which scoops out a state of exception from all the otherwise-undifferentiated slurping and oozing. If there are sacks with the bottoms unburst, there is the possibility still of local variation, or an upsurge of existence out of the mud, that will allow the possibility of time, an existence that takes the form of a kind of miraculous nausea: ‘or a celestial tin miraculous sardines sent down by God at the news of my mishap wherewith to spew him out another week’ (Beckett 1977: 53). Beckett is, if possible, even closer than Sartre to that proximal relation to self which Sartre designated as nausea. The problem under such circumstances is how to achieve or safeguard any kind of exteriority. Since I endlessly consume myself, there is no object outside me for me to assimilate; in just the same way, there is no possibility of my emptying myself of myself. There is no interchange of self and other, but only a kind of autophagy, of the kind that Beckett described in the course of a letter to Georges Duthuit of 9–10 March 1949, explaining why it is impossible for him, not just to write about van Velde, but to ‘write about’ (Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006: 20) at all, in that action of assisted exteriorisation which in his brief ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’, he will call ‘the lenitive of comment’ (Beckett 1983a: 149): [I]rresistibly, I will tend to bring the case of Bram back to myself, which is the condition of being able to be there and speak of it, and then for other less mentionable reasons. Let’s say it is a matter of the happy knack of existing in several different forms, in which each in a sense takes turns at certifying the others, or is certified in turn by the one nominated to this office, and, swollen up with the visions thus obtained, indulges now and then in a small séance of autology with a greedy sucking sound [gorgé de visions ainsi obtenues,

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Beckett and Phenomenology se livre de temps en temps à une petite séance d’autologie, avec un bruit goulu de succion]. (Beckett in Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006: 18–19, 16)

Beckett’s self-reproach here introduces a new dimension to the question of the body: namely, the dyspepsia induced by the body of the Other.

Incorporation Sartre does not regard the question of the body as exhausted by his explication of the body for itself. There are two further sections of ‘The Body’, one devoted to my apprehension of the body of the Other, and the other devoted to the being-there for the Other of my body. Beckett’s writing may be said to follow something like the same trajectory, in its shift from the intensely interiorized account of the body-for-itself to an account of the body of and for the Other. In one sense, the body of the Other is just like my body for the Other—it is a pure object of knowledge. But there is a complexity. For it seems to be possible for me to share in some sense in the Other’s nauseous self-relation: This facticity is precisely what the Other exists—in and through his for-itself; it is what the Other perpetually lives in nausea as a non-positional apprehension of a contingency which he is, a pure apprehension of self as a factual existence. In a word, it is his coenesthesia. (Sartre 1984: 342) Of course, my relation to the Other’s body is different from his own, since for me it is a matter of something known. But, sooner or later, says, Sartre, a new kind of nausea comes about, in which I take on or into myself some of the Other’s nauseous relation to his own contingency: What for the Other is his taste of himself becomes for me the Other’s flesh. The flesh is the pure contingency of presence. It is ordinarily hidden by clothes, make-up, the cut of the hair or beard, the expression, etc. But in the course of long acquaintance with a person there always comes an instant when all these disguises are thrown off and when I feel myself in the presence of the pure contingency of his presence. In this case I achieve in the face or the other parts of a body the pure intuition of the flesh. This intuition is not only knowledge; it is the affective apprehension of an absolute contingency, and this apprehension is a particular type of nausea. (Sartre 1984: 343–4) Sartre here seems to hold out the prospect not just of knowing the fact of the other’s contingency to himself, his taste of himself as an object, but also of feeling it in a kind of shared coenesthesia, in which I affectively (nauseously)

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participate in the Other’s nauseated self-tasting. I get a taste of the Other’s taste of himself. In the final section of ‘The Body’, which is devoted to the ways in which ‘I exist for myself as a body known by the Other’ (Sartre 1984: 351), Sartre gives us another version of this shared nausea. Discussing the ways in which ‘a beingfor-others haunts my facticity’, Sartre evokes the kind of disgust that one may be prompted to feel for one’s own body in the light of my knowledge of other people’s viewpoint on it, though he then immediately modifies the nature of this disgust, claiming that it is not strictly my own: I am not disgusted by all this. Nausea is all this as non-thetically existed. My knowledge extends my nausea toward that which it is for others. For it is the Other who grasps my nausea, precisely as flesh and with the nauseous character of all flesh. (Sartre 1984: 357) Even worse, for the voice in The Unnamable, than ‘the inestimable gift of life [that] had been rammed down my gullet’ is the prospect of ingesting the body, or the idea of the body of others: ‘What they were most determined for me to swallow was my fellow-creatures’ (Beckett 1973: 300). But, in Beckett’s writing after The Unnamable, the nauseous relation with the body comes more and more to implicate the body for, and the bodies of, others: the nausea of coenesthesia becomes the more complex nausea of heteraesthesia. Sartre’s final considerations of alimentation, assimilation and expulsion in general, as they are expressed in the final chapter of Being and Nothingness, bring to a climax his argument about the nature of possession, through which the for-itself attempts to make good the deficiency that decrees that ‘[t]he foritself is the being which is to itself its own lack of being’ (Sartre 1984: 565). Doing, Sartre declares, is always in fact a kind of having. Sartre assimilates knowledge to possession, since the urge to know is the urge ‘to devour with the eyes’ (Sartre 1984: 578). The most complete form of possession is that which takes the appropriated object into the body, through consumption. But an even more complete form of assimilation offers the magical prospect of eating one’s cake without depleting it. Sartre finds in certain kinds of object and condition—snow or shininess, for example—the promise of the ‘digested indigestible . . . the dream of the non-destructive assimilation’ (Sartre 1984: 579): The known is transformed into me; it becomes my thought and thereby consents to receive its existence from me alone. But this movement of dissolution is fixed by the fact that the known remains in the same place, indefinitely absorbed, devoured, and yet indefinitely intact, wholly digested and yet wholly outside, as indigestible as a stone. (Sartre 1984: 579) This ideal, says Sartre, amounts to the desire to become God, or to have the same relation to the world as God has—both possessing it, and yet allowing it to

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be in full independence. This relation is, of course, an ideal, and scarcely to be achieved in the world—indeed, Sartre doubts if even God could manage it: ‘The tragedy of the absolute Creator, if he existed, would be the impossibility of getting out of himself, for what he created could be only himself’ (Sartre 1984: 590). There is a particular Beckett text in which this relation seems to be aimed at, if not acted out. In Ill Seen Ill Said something like a revival or limited rehabilitation of appetite seems to be permitted. The siege of the figure of the woman by the wooing eye is represented as a kind of hunger: ‘Finally the face caught full in the last rays. Quick enlarge and devour before night falls’ (Beckett 1982: 22–3). The alternating rhythm of opened and closed eyes becomes a rhythm of ingestion and digestion, with visual and alimentary assimilation being assimilated to each other: Having no need of light to see the eye makes haste. Before night falls. So it is. So itself belies. Then glutted—then torpid under its lid makes way for unreason . . . . While the eye digests its pittance. In the private dark. The general dark. (Beckett 1982: 23–4) The most extended imaging of the woman shows her eating: The eye closes in the dark and sees her in the end. With her right hand as large as life she holds the edge of the bowl resting on her knees. With her left the spoon dipped in the slop. She waits. For it to cool perhaps. But no. Merely frozen again just as about to begin. At last in a twin movement full of grace she slowly raises the bowl toward her lips while at the same time with equal slowness bowing her head to join it. Having set out at the same instant they meet halfway and there come to rest. Fresh rigor before the first spoonful slobbered largely back into the slop. Others no happier till time to part lips and bowl and slowly back with never a slip to their starting points. As smooth and even fro as to. Now again the rigid Memnon pose. With her right hand she holds the edge of the bowl. With her left the spoon dipped in the slop. (Beckett 1982: 35) The narrative here evinces disdain for the content of the eating (slop), while expending great labour on capturing and enacting its mobile form, which reads like a slowed-down, statuesque redemption of the furiously autonomous mechanism, with its ‘flying arms, and champing mouth, and swallowing throat’, of Mary the parlourmaid’s ceaseless eating in Watt (Beckett 1972: 54). The coming together of mouth, hands and bowl, and then their parting, mimic the slow, respiratory rhythm of the opening and closing eye. The two extremes of the movement are ‘grace’ and ‘slobber’, separation and commingling. The alimentary churning of self and other found in How It Is has become slow, sepulchral

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and separated out. In place of the allergic expulsion or annihilation of the other to be found in Belacqua’s lunch or the omnivorous assimilations of How It Is, the text here makes a space for the body of another which hovers between assimilation and abandonment. At the heart of the movement is a kind of miniature nausea, in the ‘spoonful slobbered largely back into the slop’, which will be recalled in the ‘suspicion of pulp’ at the corner of the woman’s mouth when seen later (Beckett 1982: 49). This nausea is a way to register within the field of the visible the woman’s way of existing her body, neither abandoning nor accepting it. It is a momentary taste of her own self-taste, an internal sapience. As the text approaches its end, the analogies between eating, seeing, seeking, seeming and speaking become closer and closer. The narration imagines closing itself off from external stimulus to protect itself from ‘the vicissitude of hardly there and wholly gone’ (Beckett 1982: 37–8), though then immediately acknowledges the possibility that it might have to find some relief in external vision: ‘No more unless to rest. In the outward and so-called visible. That daub. Quick again to the brim the old nausea and shut again. On her. Till she be whole. Or abort. Question answered’ (Beckett 1982: 38). Perhaps the ‘old nausea’ of the visible world is what will fill the eye ‘to the brim’. Perhaps, on the contrary, it is open to us to see this as the eye, perhaps like the woman’s own eyes, later described as ‘fit ventholes of the soul that jakes’ (Beckett 1982: 58), itself filling the outward scene with its own effluence. In a similar way, it is possible to read ‘Shut on her’ as meaning both shutting her off, and enclosing her, in the way in which a mouth closes on what it means to consume—not to mention the possibility of a conjugation of shut into shit and shat. Finally, the extraordinary finish of the text seems to allow an acknowledgement of the famishing that has driven it throughout: First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness. (Beckett 1982: 59) The unpredictable lurches of register make the pitch of the writing extremely hard to catch. There is savage relish at the prospect of finally consuming the woman (‘moment by glutton moment’) combined with a kind of disgust (if she is carrion, then he is less predator than scavenger). But this suddenly gives way to a suspension, a graceful, grateful holding back of the swallow, as the saying of grace defers the beginning of the meal, an exquisite interval between appetite and assimilation, in a simultaneous solicitation and seeing off of the woman who we know well enough by now has anyway been all along no longer of this world. We may be reminded here of Sartre’s suggestion that destruction can in fact be an ideal form of assimilation. The destroyed object ‘has the

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impenetrability and sufficiency of being of the in-itself which it has been, but at the same time it has the invisibility and translucency of the nothingness which I am, since it no longer exists’ (Sartre 1984: 593). Here, the tarrying, the epoch, the suspension, the catch in the throat, is perhaps itself a kind of reversed nausea, for what is nausea but the indefinite abeyance of the violent desire for definitive expulsion? This is not a passing beyond nausea, but an existing of it, a resiling against revulsion. Here, Beckett finds a way to hold to the nausea that is embodiment, of the body for-itself, the body for the other and the body of the other for itself. For both Beckett and Sartre, embodiment takes the form of a nausea, a proximity-to-self which can neither be purged nor absorbed. For both writers, alimentation is the way in which notions of embodiment and worldedness are ‘existed’. Existence is indigestion. For Sartre, remarkably, this is a matter of much more—or perhaps one should say less—than a metaphor. The nausea of self-tasting is no symbol drawn from bodily experience, but rather the origin of that experience: We must not take the term nausea as a metaphor derived from our physiological disgust. On the contrary, we must realize that it is on the foundation of this nausea that all concrete and empirical nauseas (nausea caused by spoiled meat, fresh blood, excrement, etc.) are produced and make us vomit. (Sartre 1984: 338–9) Nausea is itself because it has no mediating form, or because it is the form of immediacy itself, for it allows us no distance from ourselves. You cannot escape that desire for escape from yourself which is nausea, precisely because you are that desire. It is the very being of the subject that must be what it is not and not be what it is. Alimentation and disgust are the privileged expression of that relation of primal, proximal revulsion, that internal ‘coefficient of adversity’ (Sartre 1984: 328), that is at the heart of the not-quite-issueless predicament articulated in Sartre’s phenomenology, in ‘the fact that I am nothing without having to be what I am and yet in so far as I have to be what I am, I am without having to be’ (Sartre 1984: 309). Sartre’s and Beckett’s writings converge, not on a neutral set of beliefs or philosophical principles, but rather in a kind of cognitive tonality, in which nausea is nevertheless given some form, in something of the way in which Sartre describes the parsing of a sickness as my own. For both Sartre and Beckett, nausea becomes a kind of melody of malady (Sartre 1984: 336, 338). Phenomenology in general helps to explicate Beckett’s attempt to find a way to write of and from the proximal heart of being. But perhaps only Sartre’s version of phenomenology allows us to understand the impossibility of self-coincidence, the proximal revulsion from what is most proximate, in that part of me from which I can never pull apart, that Beckett finds at that heart. And it does so not by

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giving us a set of transferable terms by which to explicate Beckett’s representation of embodiment. Rather, Sartre provides an opening into an understanding of the conditions under which Beckett’s writing is prompted always (‘on’) to its own project of being, its existing of its body. And Beckett will find, at the almostlast, that, if existence is always haunted by the body, then embodiment demands to be existed as incorporation.

Bibliography Anon (n.d.), ‘Sartre’s Existentialism in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’ http:// www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=20926 Banfield, A. (2003), ‘Beckett’s Tattered Syntax’. Representations 6, 6–29. Beckett, S. (1949), ‘Letter to Georges Duthuit’, 9 March 1949 & 10 March 1949 [Reproduced in Gontarski and Uhlmann, pp. 15–18]. —(1963), Murphy. London: John Calder. —(1970), More Pricks than Kicks. London: Calder and Boyars. —(1972), Watt. London: Calder and Boyars. —(1973), Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: Calder and Boyars. —(1977), How It Is. London: John Calder. —(1982), Ill Seen Ill Said. London: John Calder. —(1983a), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. R. Cohn. London: John Calder. —(1983b), Worstward Ho. London: John Calder. —(1984), Collected Shorter Prose 1945–1980. London: John Calder. —(1991), Cap au pire. Trans. Edith Fournier. Paris: Minuit. Butler, L. St. J. (1984), Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable. London: Macmillan. Coe, R. N. (1964), Beckett. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd; New York, NY: Grove Press. Garner, S. B. (1993), ‘ “Still Living Flesh”: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body’. Theatre Journal 45, 443–60. Gontarski, S. E. and Uhlmann, A. (eds) (2006), Beckett after Beckett. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Joyce, J. (1987), Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. H. W. Gabler. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kamber, R. (1983), ‘Sartre’s Nauseas’. MLN 98, 1279–85. Kern, E. (1970), Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Kroll, J. L. (1977), ‘The Surd as Inadmissible Evidence: The Case of AttorneyGeneral v. Henry McCabe’. Journal of Beckett Studies 2, 47–58: Online at http:// www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num02/Num2JeriKroll.htm Lamont, R. C. (1959), ‘The Metaphysical Farce: Beckett and Ionesco’. French Review 32, 319–28. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible: Followed By Working Notes. Ed. C. Lefort. Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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—(1996), Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Oxenhandler, N. (1970), ‘Toward the New Aesthetic’. Contemporary Literature 11, 169–91. Sartre, J.-P. (1948), Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. P. Mairet. London: Methuen. —(1976), Nausea. Trans. R. Baldick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —(1984), Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. London: Methuen.

Chapter 4

‘Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order’: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty and Perception Ulrika Maude

Merleau-Ponty’s well-known essay, ‘The Eye and the Mind’, from 1960, opens with the observation that ‘[s]cience manipulates things and gives up living in them . . . it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals’ (1993a: 121). Quoting Valéry, Merleau-Ponty observes that, in contrast, the ‘painter “takes the body him” ’ (1993a: 123). The body is present when between see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body. (Merleau-Ponty 1993a: 125) Merleau-Ponty evokes the sense of touch side by side with vision, for his thinking parts company with received philosophical assumptions about the detached and objective nature of sight. Instead, vision itself in Merleau-Ponty’s work becomes a kind of caress, a complex intermingling of the subject and the world. Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the temporal and situated nature of vision is a cornerstone in his much wider questioning of philosophical assumptions about the nature of perception, inaugurated in his seminal work, Phenomenology of Perception, from 1945. What Samuel Beckett shares with Merleau-Ponty—besides the intellectual climate of the École Normale Supérieure and interwar Paris—is his interest in painting and his often strikingly similar treatment of perceptual experience. The wider significance of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of vision becomes clear when we examine his thinking side by side with received Western assumptions about sight, which have played a constitutive role in theories of subjectivity. The apparent detachment of the spectating subject has consolidated belief in the subject’s independence of the object, as the by now notorious links

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drawn between the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ indicate. While the proximity senses, most emphatically touch, involve the subject’s interaction with the object, visual sensations have been assumed to stem from a realm in which subject and object remain distinct. Seeing, after all, requires little perceptible activity on the part of the subject. Although the same can be said about hearing, it does demand action on the part of the object, for sound is not emitted from objects as easily as light. Vision seems therefore to exist effortlessly in its own right, elevating it to the status of theory or of that which is consistently valid, while hearing and touch, partly by being more explicitly temporal, pertain to the field of practice and fleeting instances. Vision also appears to endow the perceiver with an air of immunity and detachment, for not only does vision benefit from physical distance in that we get a better view of our focus of interest from afar than we do closer up; the perceiver also remains at a remove from the potentially corrupting aggressiveness and raw power of lived experience (Jonas 1966: 148). A brief summary of the history of vision reveals that, at least since Plato, reason has been conceived and imagined in terms of sight (Connor 1992: 91). For Aristotle, for instance, sight was the supreme sense because it resembled the intellect most closely, ‘by virtue of the relative immateriality of its knowing’ (Flynn 1993: 274). The association of sight with reason only became heightened in Cartesian thought. As Paul Ricoeur has observed, Cartesian philosophy ‘is contemporaneous with a vision of the world in which the whole of objectivity is spread out like a spectacle on which the cogito casts its sovereign gaze’ (Ricoeur 1974: 236).1 Ricoeur’s observation coincides with, if not originates in Heidegger’s essay, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (1938), in which Heidegger finds the essence of modernity in the idea of a world picture, which should not be understood as an image of the world but as the world itself ‘conceived and grasped as picture’ (Heidegger 1977: 129). Neither should we think that some fundamental change has occurred in the world picture itself, thus drawing a dividing line between the medieval and the modern; on the contrary, Heidegger argues, ‘the fact that the world becomes picture at all’ is the distinguishing essence of modernity (Heidegger 1977: 130). Heidegger, like Ricoeur, traces the origins of the world picture back to Descartes, in whose metaphysics truth first became ‘transformed into the certainty of representation’. The emergence of the world as picture is historically contemporaneous and interwoven with the idea of man as subject, ‘that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth’. Man, Heidegger continues, ‘becomes the relational centre of that which is as such’ (Heidegger 1977: 127, 128). Anything that is, in other words, is now only in being insofar as it is at man’s disposal, before him, as an object in relation to the viewing subject. Man becomes the setting in which whatever is presents itself; simultaneously, the stance man takes towards his surroundings

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depends, for the first time in history, on man alone. The attitude becomes one of mastery, and the world is given order through the process of enframing. Heidegger calls to mind the definition of vorstellen, ‘to represent’: [T]o set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is. (Heidegger 1977: 132) The separation of the self from the picture, in other words, is the precondition for grasping the enframed totality, just as the mind, in Cartesian thought, ‘is said to be set apart from the material world it observes’ (Mitchell 1989: 223).2 Beckett’s work shares Merleau-Ponty’s suspicion of received philosophical assumptions about the senses. Beckett’s early interest in the reorganization and reevaluation of perception can be detected in his correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, now held at Trinity College Dublin. In a letter of 1932, when Beckett was 26 years old, he wrote to Thomas MacGreevy of mourning for what he found in ‘Homer Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind’ (Beckett 19323). Besides suggesting, like Merleau-Ponty’s work, the primacy of perceptual consciousness over intellectual consciousness, this letter also seems to imply an aesthetic in the making, by signalling the kinds of formative influences and aesthetic qualities Beckett admired. The MacGreevy correspondence is especially revealing because it contains so many references to Beckett’s reading, whether in prose (e.g. Melville), poetry (e.g. Keats), philosophy (e.g. Schopenhauer), psychology (e.g. Alfred Adler), science (e.g. Darwin) or critical works (e.g. MacGreevy himself on Eliot and Yeats). The correspondence also, crucially, provides us with a document of Beckett’s passion for painting, and the various visual artists and aesthetic qualities in their work that inspired or moved him. Like so many of his contemporaries, such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, for instance, Beckett was particularly taken by the work of Paul Cézanne. In 1934, while visiting the Tate Gallery in London, Beckett saw one of Cézanne’s many paintings of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, which prompted him to write one of his most famous and often-quoted letters to MacGreevy, from early September 1934: ‘Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’ (Beckett 1934a4). What Beckett particularly admired in Cézanne, as he put it in a subsequent letter, written a week later, was the ‘sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life . . . operative

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in himself’ (Beckett 1934b5). Beckett also famously admired Jack B. Yeats’s canvases for similar reasons. He detected in them an ‘ultimate hard inorganic singleness’, and a ‘perception & dispassion’ which was ‘beyond tragedy’ (quoted in Gunn 2007: 15). Beckett’s interest in the visual dimension and the broader question of subjectivity becomes explicitly manifest in his critical writings on the visual arts, and in his more general fascination with the nature of the aesthetic. There is, furthermore, a discernible shift in interest in Beckett’s critical writings from an initial concentration on literature, as ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’ (1929) and Proust (1931) prove, to a post-war focus on painting, evidenced in reviews and texts such as ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’ (1945); ‘La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’ (1946); ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ (1948) and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949), to mention but the best-known pieces.6 Beckett’s critical writings, like Merleau-Ponty’s work, reveal his early interest in an art that aims to move ‘outside of systems of relations assumed requisite to philosophical understanding’ (Oppenheim 2000: 107). This interest could be evidenced as early as 1934, when Beckett wrote his pseudonymously published ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, where he discussed ‘the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object’ equated in the text with ‘the breakdown of the subject’ (Beckett 1983b: 70). In ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’, published in 1948, Beckett situates the van Velde brothers, Bram and Geer, within a history of art interpreted as ‘painting’s changing relationship to the object’ (Morris 1993: 171). In the essay, Beckett states that ‘the essence of the object is to elude representation’, and the role of art to represent ‘the conditions of that elusion’ (Beckett 1948).7 In ‘La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’, from 1946, Beckett proposed that Bram van Velde’s paintings are ‘held in suspense, suggesting not just an unfinished quality, but an unfinishable situation’ (Morris 1993: 171). The manner in which Beckett develops his early interest in the subject–object relationship, is manifest in the most famous of his writings on the visual arts, Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, first published in transition in 1949.8 In the dialogues, Beckett and Duthuit discuss the work of three painters: Pierre Tal Coat, André Masson and Bram van Velde.9 Beckett is critical of Tal Coat precisely for remaining within the constraints of ‘a composite of perceiver and perceived’ (Beckett 1983b: 138). Although André Masson, according to Beckett, explores the subject–object relationship in his work, he nevertheless ‘continues to wriggle’: ‘it seems to me impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already’ (Beckett 1983b: 140, 141). For Beckett, as we have seen, the object of representation resists representation, something that he finds Bram van Velde to acknowledge, and

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a view that Beckett shares with Merleau-Ponty who, in Phenomenology of Perception, writes that it is of the essence of the world and of the thing to present themselves as ‘open’, to send us beyond their determinate manifestations, to promise us always ‘something else to see’. This is what is sometimes expressed by saying that the thing and the world are mysterious. They are indeed, when we do not limit ourselves to their objective aspect, but put them back into the setting of subjectivity. They are even an absolute mystery, not amenable to elucidation, and this through no provisional gap in our knowledge, for in that case it would fall back to the status of a mere problem, but because it is not of the order of objective thought in which there are solutions. (MerleauPonty 1992: 333) In a letter to Duthuit, of March 1949, Beckett writes in approbation of Bram van Velde’s art: Ce n’est pas le rapport avec tel ou tel ordre de vis-à-vis qu’il refuse, mais l’état d’être en rapport tout court et sans plus, l’état d’être devant. (Beckett 1949: 16) [It is not the relation with such and such an order vis-à-vis that he refuses, but the state of just being in relation and, purely and simply, the state of being in front of.] (Trans. Oppenheim 2000: 107–8) Apart from making reference to the frontality of vision, as opposed to the more engulfing and hence less ‘objective’ nature of the acoustic and the tactile, Beckett is also seriously questioning the very plausibility of a subject–object divide: Quoi que je dise, j’aurai l’air de l’enfermer à nouveau dans une relation. Si je dis qu’il peint l’impossibilité de peindre, la privation de rapport, d’object, de sujet, j’ai l’air de le mettre en rapport avec cette impossibilité, avec cette privation, devant elles. Il est dedans, est-ce le même chose? Il les est, plutôt, et elles sont lui, d’une façon pleine, et peut-il y avoir des rapports dans l’indivisible? Pleine? Indivisible? Evidemment pas. (Beckett 1949: 16) [Whatever I say, I will appear to be enclosing (van Velde) again in a relation. If I say he paints the impossibility of painting, the denial of relation, of object, of subject, I appear to be putting him in relation to this impossibility, this denial, in front of it. He is within, is this the same thing? He is them, rather, and they are him, in a full way, and can there be relations within the indivisible? Full? Indivisible? Obviously not.] (Trans. Oppenheim 2000: 108)

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Apart from simply making reference to van Velde’s art, Beckett is also here making a self-referential remark about the nature of his own medium of expression, namely language: the difficulty of addressing the dilemma at hand in isolation of a preconceived relationship between categories, on which language as a medium, any language, is by definition based.10 Beckett is hence questioning not only the more general problem of representation, but the entire stance of opposition and relationship that this entails. For the birth of the world as picture identified in Heidegger’s essay also heralds the birth of humanism or what Heidegger terms anthropology, ‘that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man’ (Heidegger 1977: 133). From this moment onwards, the position of man becomes conceived of as a world view and whatever is is in existence only to the extent that it can be referred back to man’s life-experience. The world becomes reduced to a structured picture produced by man. Through ‘such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is’ (Heidegger 1977: 134). This is why Heidegger also writes about the death of gods but of the very birth of religious experience through the ‘transformation of the Christian doctrine into a world view’ (Heidegger 1977: 116–17). The struggle between world views leads to ‘the calculating, planning, and moulding of all things. Science as research’, Heidegger adds, ‘is an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of self in the world’ (Heidegger 1977: 135). Seen from this point of view, Beckett’s early comments about Cézanne’s painting, made on 8 September 1934, in a letter to MacGreevy, are more than revealing: What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphized landscape . . . or paranthropomorphised . . . or hyperanthropomorphized by Rubens . . . after all the landscape ‘promoted’ to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned with the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than Aesop and the animals), alive the way a lap or a fist is alive. (Beckett 1934a11) Beckett is protesting precisely against the falsifying view of ‘landscape’, depicted as if it existed in relation to the viewing subject. Beckett, after all, had stressed that Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities of vitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms, not in Pelman’s landscapality. (Beckett 1934a12)

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What Beckett appears to be suggesting, in other words, is that Cézanne manages the unmanageable: namely to paint, at least to some extent, past and beyond preconceived categories of representation. In 1945, eleven years after Beckett had written his letters on Cézanne to Thomas MacGreevy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty published his own essay on Cézanne, entitled ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’. The essay first appeared in the December issue of Fontaine, a monthly periodical dedicated to poetry and French letters, and was subsequently reprinted in Merleau-Ponty’s collection of essays, Sense and Non-Sense (1948), as the collection’s lead piece. This is how Merleau-Ponty characterized the work of Cézanne: His painting was paradoxical: he was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, without following the contours, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature, with no outline to enclose the color, with no perspectival or pictorial arrangement. This is what Bernard called Cézanne’s suicide: aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it. This is the reason for his difficulties and the distortions one finds in his pictures between 1870 and 1890. Cups and saucers on a table seen from the side should be elliptical, but Cézanne paints the two ends of the ellipse swollen and expanded . . . . In giving up the outline Cézanne was abandoning himself to the chaos of sensation, which would upset the objects and constantly suggest illusions, as, for example, the illusion we have when we move our heads that the objects themselves are moving. (Merleau-Ponty 1993b: 63) It is interesting to note that, as early as Proust (1931), Beckett himself makes mention of the manner in which the ‘observer infects the observed with his own mobility’ (Beckett 1970: 17). What was striking for Merleau-Ponty was the manner in which Cézanne seemed to abandon himself to sensation. Cézanne, who was of the opinion that one should paint faces as objects, ‘wanted to depict matter as it takes on form’, to portray ‘the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive’, rather than the ordered and rationalized compositions of Renaissance perspective and geometry (Merleau-Ponty 1993b: 63, 64). As Cézanne himself observed to Émile Bernard: ‘You have to create a perspective of your own, to see nature as though no one had ever seen it before’ (Bernard 1990: 289). What is remarkable and simultaneously terrifying about Cézanne’s work, Merleau-Ponty argues, is precisely that ‘he painted as if no one had ever painted before’ (1993b: 69).13 Cézanne bracketed, to use a phenomenological term, scientific, preconceived assumptions of how the ‘world should look’, and emphasized instead, in all its strangeness, ‘the lived perspective as the visible world arises in relation to [the] living body’ (Johnson 1993: 13). In this way, Merleau-Ponty argues, Cézanne revealed ‘the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself’ (1993: 66). Like Beckett, who had emphasized the relief of encountering

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Cézanne’s canvases after ‘all the anthropomorphized landscape—Van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels’, Merleau-Ponty stressed the ‘inhuman character’ of Cézanne’s work which, he added, ‘penetrates right to the root of things beneath the imposed order of humanity’ (Beckett 1934a14). Cézanne’s aesthetic, for Merleau-Ponty, grew not out of a preconceived idea or concept; rather, Merleau-Ponty writes, the ‘meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere . . . . It summons one away from the already constituted reason’. For Cézanne, ‘ “[c]onception” cannot precede “execution” ’—this would only anthropomorphize the landscape anew (Merleau-Ponty 1993b: 61, 69). Beckett himself, as early as 1937, had made a similar observation, condemning the German painter, Max Klinger, ‘for projecting concepts on the canvas, rendering “the optical experience post rem, a hideous inversion of the visual process, the eye waiving its privilege” ’ (Beckett 1937; quoted in Nixon 2009). For Cézanne, in contrast, there is nothing before expression ‘but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there’(Merleau-Ponty 1993b: 69). This something or nothing, which has an odd reverberation with Beckett’s 1937 letter to Axel Kaun—in which he wants to ‘bore one hole after another’ in language, ‘until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through’ (Beckett 1983b: 172)—is the very source of Cézanne’s doubt—a doubt which prompted the elderly painter to wonder ‘whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of his body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1993b: 59).

‘Exhausted of Meaning’ In his letter of 8 September 1934, Beckett complains to MacGreevy of ‘the Impressionists darting about & whining that the scene wouldn’t rest easy!’ He goes on to say: How far Cézanne had moved from the snapshot puerilities of Manet & Cie when he could understand the dynamic intrusion to be himself & so landscape to be something by definition unapproachably alien, unintelligible arrangement of atoms, not so much as ruffled by the kind attentions of the Reliability Joneses. (Beckett 1934a15) In Cézanne’s mature pictures of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, the lines no longer converge in the manner we expect. The mountain appears stark and barren rather than sheltered, and the land open, lacking the boundaries that in pastoral images would frame the view. The art critic Meyer Shapiro describes the 1904–6 version of the Mont Sainte-Victoire in the following manner: ‘The earth

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approaches chaos, yet is formed of clear vertical and horizontal strokes in sharp contrast to the diagonal strokes of the mountain and the many curving strokes of the sky’ (Shapiro 1988: 124). Cézanne has done away with the rules of perspective. He has given in, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, to ‘the chaos of sensation’, and is recording the experience on his canvas (1993b: 63). Beckett, one could argue, had his own Mont Sainte-Victoire, a landscape he, like Cézanne, compulsively returned to in his various writings. For Beckett’s letters to Thomas MacGreevy contain numerous references to the Dublin mountains that keep recurring in unexpected configurations throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, much as the Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne’s native landscape, keeps reappearing on the painter’s canvases. In one of his earliest letters to MacGreevy, written at his family home, Cooldrinagh, in January 1930, when Beckett had returned back to Ireland after his period at the École Normale Supérieure (from 1928 to 1930), he observed to MacGreevy, in a question that is more rhetorical than actual, ‘How do you work with these hills behind you’ (193016). In another letter, written 2 years later, and dated Cooldrinagh, 18 October 1932, Beckett writes, I walk unmeasurably & unrestrainedly, hills and dales, all day, and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my [?] belt . . . . I disagree with you about the gardenish landscape. The lowest mountains here terrify me far more than anything I saw in Connemara & Achill. Or is it that a garden is more frightening than a waste? I walked across Prince William’s Seat, a low mountain . . . and was reduced almost to incontinence in the calm secret hostility. (Beckett 193217) On 8 September 1934, Beckett recalls, in low spirits, having been ‘exhausted of meaning by the mountains’ (1934a18). He found in the Irish landscape ‘a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set’ (quoted in Gunn 2007: 15). The echoes of these sentiments later find their way into a number of Beckett’s works.

‘Eyes Soon Sockets’ In his creative writing, then, Beckett is faced with the following dilemma: how to overcome the preconceived categories on which language and our received thought-patterns are based, in something of the manner in which he had seen Cézanne break away from received modes of representation.19 The challenge for Beckett’s writing would not only be to reimagine the relationship between subject and world, and hence to outline a new phenomenology of perception, but to create a mode of expression in which these reimaginings could be represented.

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In the Four Novellas, which inaugurate Beckett’s mature style, one can detect a striking prominence of verbs of vision. Beckett wrote his four novellas, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative and The End, in the final months of 1946. They are the first texts he originally composed in French and later translated into English.20 The Calmative, the penultimate novella in the collection, is the story of the first-person narrator, who leaves his den to traverse a strange town he has not seen before, but one that he, oddly, nonetheless, appears to recognize. The Calmative has an extraordinary emphasis on vision, as can be evidenced in the recurrence of the verb ‘to see’ which, in its different declinations, is mentioned seventeen times in the novella. In addition, the verb ‘to look’ appears five times and the verbs ‘to gaze’, ‘to eye’ and ‘to focus’ are each mentioned twice. Amongst further vision-related verbs in the novella figure ‘to appear’, ‘to loom’ and ‘to shine’. There are also a number of visual adjectives, such as ‘blind’ and ‘glittering’ (Beckett 1995: 62, 73). The man who, towards the end of the novella, gives the narrator a phial, is said to have a ‘radiant smile’ (Beckett 1995: 75). The novella’s emphasis on vision is heightened by references to a peculiar silence, and to the recurrent failure of vocal articulation. When the narrator reaches the town, he observes that ‘[t]he trams were running, the buses too, but few, slow, empty, noiseless, as if under water’ (Beckett 1995: 64). The young boy the narrator encounters on the quayside, is similarly described as ‘silent’; when the narrator attempts to address the boy, he himself fails: ‘I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended’ (Beckett 1995: 66). Back in town again, the narrator encounters ‘[n]ot a single private car, but admittedly from time to time a public vehicle, slow sweep of light silent and empty’ (Beckett 1995: 70). It is as if Beckett were here performing his own variation of bracketing, a peculiar phenomenological reduction into the nature of visual experience. The absence of sound is made all the more prominent by the contrasting presence of a powerful light, for the city is described as ‘brighter than usual’ and the nave in the cathedral as ‘brilliantly lit’ (Beckett 1995: 64, 68). The narrator observes the ‘extraordinary radiance’ and ‘atrocious brightness’ of the streets, and makes mention of the fact that he is ‘famished for shadow’ (Beckett 1995: 70, 75). In addition to verbs and adjectives of vision, the novella makes frequent note of eyes. The narrator mentions the young boy’s ‘guttersnipe’s eye’, and tells himself not to ‘open [his] eyes’ (Beckett 1995: 66, 76). The eye itself is presented not as detached and disembodied, but as fleshly and vulnerable, subject to damage and decay, as the narrator acknowledges at the outset of his journey when he mentions ‘the eyes soon sockets’ (Beckett 1995: 62–3). The man the narrator encounters in the cathedral is described as ‘wild-eyed’; when he slides ‘out of sight’, all that remains is ‘the vision of two burning eyes starting out of their sockets’, a comment that again highlights the incarnate nature of the eye (Beckett 1995: 69).

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The narrator draws attention to the fallible nature of sight itself, when he comes across the ramparts: ‘Cyclopean and crenellated, standing out faintly against a sky scarcely less sombre, they did not seem in ruins, viewed from mine, but were, to my certain knowledge’ (Beckett 1995: 63). Rather than giving the narrator access to an instantaneous comprehension of the scene, vision is from the outset described as prone to miscalculations. A distinction is made between what the eye sees and the narrator knows, problematizing the received relationship between vision and rationality. The narrator of The Calmative goes on to mention the stars he sees on the horizon, and again distances sight from reason by pointing out that they are ‘not to be confused with the fires men light, at night, or that go alight alone’, for both fires and stars, seen from the narrator’s vantage point, look all too similar (Beckett 1995: 69). Vision is also subject to other physical restraints. The narrator, for instance, mentions a flagstone, ‘which I was not focusing, for why focus it’; when he watches a boy with a goat recede into the horizon, he remarks, ‘soon they were no more than a single blur which if I hadn’t known I might have taken for a centaur’ (Beckett 1995: 66, 67). Blurring in Beckett highlights the physiological limitations of sight, and the constraints the eye as an organ lays on our field of vision. One thinks of David Michael Levin’s point about the spontaneous and uncontrollable changes that occur in the field of visibility: What happens when we stare intensely at something? Instead of clear and distinct perception, blurring and confusion; instead of fulfilment, the eyes lose their sight, veiled in tears; instead of stability and fixation at the far end of the gaze, we find a chaos of shifting, jerking forms as the object of focus violently tears itself away from the hold of the gaze. (Levin 1988: 69) Blurring is also an ironic comment on the codes of mastery inherent in vision, a theme Beckett revisits in Film (1964; see Beckett 1999), where the effect is achieved through the use of a gauze filter, and something that was also on Cézanne’s mind, as the painter pondered over his failing eyesight. The objects of vision in The Calmative themselves repeatedly resist the narrator’s gaze, as when he sees a curious cyclist pedalling by: ‘I watched him recede till he was no more than a dot on the horizon’ (Beckett 1995: 71). Something of this nature also happens when the narrator, for the second time, encounters the girl he has seen in the cathedral tower: I succeeded however in fastening briefly on the little girl, long enough to see her a little more clearly than before, so that she wore a kind of bonnet and clasped in her hand a book, of common prayer perhaps, and to try and have her smile, but she did not smile, but vanished down the staircase without having yielded me her little face. (Beckett 1995: 75)

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Beckett is acknowledging that although vision sets the object apart from the viewing subject, and hence posits itself as an ‘objective’ sense, ‘sight also composes that view or scene or perspective by being a selective interpretation of appearances or visual representations’ (Rodaway 1994: 124). What is more, vision in The Calmative, as the verb ‘fasten’ implies, presents itself as a temporal synthesis that requires intent and effort on the part of the perceiver. As Merleau-Ponty writes, The act of looking is indivisibly prospective, since the object is the final stage of my process of focusing, and retrospective, since it will present itself as preceding its own appearance, as the ‘stimulus’, the motive or the prime mover of every process since its beginning. The spatial synthesis and the synthesis of the object are based on this unfolding of time. (Merleau-Ponty 1992: 239) Yet, the little girl in the cathedral does not ‘yield’ her face. The negative form of the archaic ‘yield’ only further adds to the air of resistance, for the verb means ‘[t]o surrender, give way [or] submit’ (OED 1989: Def. III), which brings to mind Beckett’s views of Geer van Velde, for whom, in ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’, the object of representation resisted representation (‘l’empêchement-object’), evidenced, too, in Cézanne’s lifelong efforts to capture the Mont Sainte-Victoire on canvas (Beckett 1983b: 136). The powerful light that surrounds the narrator of The Calmative itself functions as an obstacle to vision, for the eye, instead of being empowered, is only blinded by the ‘atrocious’ light (Beckett 1995: 75). Beckett is drawing attention to the vulnerable character of sight, for ‘[t]he eyes are a specialised organ for “reading” the ambient or reflected light’; in the case of radiant light, ‘one sees only whiteness and can gain little visual information about the source or the environment’ (Rodaway 1994: 121). Vision in the novella, furthermore, can no longer be associated with theoria.21 When the narrator is in the harbour, he says: ‘the quays were deserted and there was no sign or stir of arrival or departure. But all might change from one moment to the next and be transformed like magic before my eyes’ (Beckett 1995: 65). Far from presenting the narrator with the ‘immutable essence’ of objects, an assumption that has contributed to the primacy of vision in Western culture, the scene is subject to sudden and baffling transformations.22 In fact, all the landscapes the narrator encounters are prone to incomprehensible shifts: the narrator is in a cathedral tower where he sees an old man and a girl, then on a street where another man gives him a phial in exchange for a kiss, then back again at the top of the tower as in a ghostly succession of dream images that keep fading in and out of focus. The landscapes of The Calmative are in constant flux, unlike conventional perspectival images that duplicate the spectator’s fixed vantage point. Besides drawing attention to the intermittent character of sight, Beckett is making a further comment about the nature of

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vision. The narrator says: ‘suddenly I was descending a wide street, vaguely familiar, but in which I could never have set foot, in my lifetime’ (Beckett 1995: 70). The strange déjà vu incident only enhances the complexity of the narrator’s experience, in which perception, memory and imagination exchange functions and merge into one. In the novel Watt, which Beckett completed in 1945, the protagonist experiences what could be described as a series of optical illusions or even hallucinations: ‘as Watt fixed his eyes on what he thought was perhaps the day again already, the man standing sideways in the kitchen doorway looking at him became two men standing sideways in the kitchen doorway looking at him’ (Beckett 1981: 62). Vision, in the Western tradition, has been considered the only sense that respects the division between subject and object, for in touch, taste, smell, and even hearing, the boundaries between self and world become blurred. In The Calmative, however, the narrator infects the object of vision with his own experience. A case in point is the remark he makes of the trees he encounters: ‘They were the perishing oaks immortalized by d’Aubigné. It was only a grove’ (Beckett 1995: 62). Later, the narrator sees ‘a lush pasture’, but rushes to add, ‘nonsuch perhaps, who cares, drenched in evening dew or recent rain’ (Beckett 1995: 63). If categories such as perception, memory and imagination lose their differentiating characteristics, the neat distinction between subject and object must also become problematic. The sharp division between imagination, perception and memory is also questioned by Merleau-Ponty, who suggests, firstly, that perception is intertwined not only with the rational intellect but also with the artistic imagination, and who, secondly, brings memory into the field of perception, through his exploration of the phantom limb.23 The objects the narrator of The Calmative perceives refuse to render the instantaneously comprehensible whole that has been considered one of the advantages of vision over the explicitly temporal hearing and touch. On the contrary, in the novella, Beckett brings vision closer to the proximity senses, firstly by stressing the material, embodied nature of sight, and secondly, by emphasizing that vision may not, after all, constitute the space that guarantees the subject’s detachment from the world, but rather, through the chaos of sensation, makes him part of that world. If the neat distinction between subject and object ceases to be plausible, the spectator’s relationship of subjection and mastery towards the object also dissolves. The novella ends with the narrator’s impotent, anti-anthropocentric remark, reminiscent of Beckett’s observations about Cézanne’s landscapes: ‘in vain I raised without hope my eyes to the sky to look for the Bears. For the light I stepped in put out the stars, assuming they were there, which I doubted, remembering the clouds’ (Beckett 1995: 76–7). Beckett’s preoccupation with the embodied nature of vision persists throughout his career, as is, for instance, revealed in a short prose text entitled ‘For Avigdor Arikha’, which Beckett wrote in 1966: ‘Back and forth the gaze beating against unseeable and unmakeable’ (Beckett 1983b: 152). Beckett’s work also

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acknowledges the fleshly nature of vision in its realization that the senses eventually fail us and fade. In the final typescript of a late, aborted mime of 1983, entitled ‘Mongrel Mime for One Old Small (M)’, Beckett envisions three chambers lit and equipped with ‘invisible loudspeaker and colour’.24 As the protagonist, M, progresses from one chamber to the next, the lighting, colour, voice and sound progressively decrease, as if to acknowledge the manner in which we slowly lose our perceptual faculties.

‘Integrity of the Eyelids’ In ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, from 1952, Merleau-Ponty argues that while imagination remains a variant of perception, it allows ‘interruptions and discontinuities, mixings, foldings and intertwinings between visible and invisible, real and imaginary’ (Johnson 1993: 30). In ‘Eye and Mind’ he adds that painting ‘scrambles all our categories’ (Merleau-Ponty 1993a: 130). This is perhaps how Beckett imagined a mode of representation for his prose: the landscapes, at times drawing on the limitations of our perspectival view, and at others, discarding perspective and categorical distinctions altogether, refuse coherent syntax, presenting to us instead a scene of disruptions, and in the process, foregrounding the intermittent, fleshly nature of sight. ‘Perhaps’, Beckett wrote, in the letter of 8 September 1934, ‘it is the one bright spot in a mechanistic age—the deanthropomorphizations of the artist. Even the portrait beginning to be dehumanized as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God’ (Beckett 1934a25). Beckett’s comments bring to mind Cézanne’s desire to paint faces as objects, for Beckett detected in his canvases ‘the sense of [the painter’s] incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life . . . operative in himself’ (Beckett 1934b26). For Beckett, as for Merleau-Ponty, vision no longer guarantees the spectator’s detachment from the world. Instead, the eye is embodied, searching, fallible and subject to damage and decay. The eye situates rather than detaches the subject from its surroundings, a factor Beckett foregrounds throughout his landscapes in which figure is forever threatening to merge into ground. This somatic immediacy may finally be one of the ways in which Beckett’s work achieves that mourned for ‘integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind’ (Beckett 193227).

Notes 1

As Foucault’s discussion of natural history in The Order of Things exemplifies, in the Classical episteme (which despite Foucault’s terminology inaugurates the

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3 4 5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

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modern period), the relationship of a subject to its object becomes one of direct observation. Natural history ‘takes on a meaning closer to the original Greek sense of a “seeing” ’. Sight becomes the virtually exclusive sense employed in the process of observation, with the almost complete exclusion of olfactory, acoustic and tactile perceptions. Sight itself, furthermore, is used in a restricted way: colours, for instance, which belong to the so-called secondary qualities of objects, do not form an integral part of the observation of nature. What becomes important, in accordance with Cartesian thought, is the structure of the observed object: the visual is limited and filtered to render into language the forms, numbers, magnitudes and relative spatial arrangement of the objects observed. Natural history, according to Foucault, ‘traverses an area of visible, simultaneous, concomitant variables, without any internal relationship of subordination or organization’ (Foucault 1986: 137). Spatiality is the norm at the almost exclusive expense of temporality. For Descartes, the material world in its entirety was a question of res extensa, extended substance, a matter of nothing apart from ‘divisions, shapes, and movements’, as he argues in section 64 of the second part of Principles of Philosophy (1988: 20). In his search for certainty, Descartes sought to mathematize all but the res cogitans, the thinking substance. However, Descartes’s own thinking already shows signs of doubt about the neat division he proposes: the so-called secondary qualities of objects, such as colour, texture, scent or smell, in other words everything that cannot be mathematized, belong in Descartes’s thinking to the sphere of the subjective mind and become, in this way, detached from the physical world. Quoted in Maude 2009: 25–6. Ibid.: 26. Ibid. With the exception of Beckett’s work on Proust, these critical writings are all reproduced in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (1983b). Beckett translated ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ into English as ‘The New Object’. The translation appeared in the unpaginated exhibition catalogue, Geer and Bram van Velde (New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, 1948). Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit was first published in transition 49: 5 (1949), signed by both Beckett and Duthuit. It has since been published as Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder, 1965) and also reprinted in Disjecta, pp. 138–45. Duthuit was the editor of transition from 1948 to 1950. It is this relationship that Beckett saw Tal Coat simply accepting, hence his criticism of the painter for remaining ‘on the plane of the feasible’ (Beckett 1983b: 139). Quoted in Maude 2009: 29. Ibid. Cézanne exclaimed to Jules Borély: ‘If only we could see with the eyes of a newborn child!’ (Borély 1990: 296). Quoted in Maude 2009: 30. Ibid.: 31. Ibid. Ibid.: 31–3. Ibid.: 33.

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20 21

22

23 24

25 26 27

Although I do not mean to argue here that Beckett’s art-historical writings contain the aesthetic programme or formula of Beckett’s literary works, I am suggesting, in a view I share with a number of critics, that the problems and methodology of the visual arts influenced Beckett’s own creative enterprise. The Expelled and The End were translated in collaboration with Richard Seaver. The modern association of vision and theory stems from two main biases. Firstly, vision has been considered free of causality and temporality. Secondly, because the object of vision is detached from the subject, and hence has been seen as ‘the thing in itself as distinct from the thing as it affects me’, sight has been associated with theoretical truth (Jonas 1966: 146–7). As Martin Jay observes: ‘The word theater . . . shares the same root as the word theory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to behold. So too does theorem, which has allowed some commentators to emphasize the privileging of vision in Greek mathematics, with its geometric emphasis’ (1993: 23). For a discussion of theoria, see the first chapter of Downcast Eyes (1993: 21–82). However, as Jay remarks, ‘the Greeks believed that the eye transmitted as well as received light rays (the theory of extramission)’, and hence ‘there was a certain participatory dimension in the visual process, a potential intertwining of viewer and viewed’. In the Middle Ages, however, the theory of extramission was forgotten (1993: 30–1). It has been claimed that vision, unlike the other senses, provides a sense of being instead of becoming. Hans Jonas writes: ‘Only sight . . . provides the sensual basis on which the mind may conceive the idea of the eternal, that which never changes and is always present. The very contrast between eternity and temporality rests upon an idealization of “present” experienced visually as the holder of stable contents as against the fleeting succession of nonvisual sensation. In the visual presence of objects the beholder may come to rest and possess an extended now’ (Jonas 1966: 145). For a discussion of phantom limbs in Beckett’s work, see Maude (2009: 10–22). The holograph and typescript manuscripts of ‘Mongrel Mime for One Old Small (M)’ are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Quoted in Maude 2009: 41. Ibid.: 41. Ibid.: 25–6.

Bibliography Beckett, S. (1930), ‘Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5 January 1930’, TCD MS 10402. Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Library Dublin. —(1932), ‘Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 18 October 1932’, TCD MS 10402. Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Library Dublin. —(1934a), ‘Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 8 September 1934’, TCD MS 10402. Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Library Dublin. —(1934b), ‘Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, [undated]’, TCD MS 10402, Trinity College Dublin.

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—(1948), ‘The New Object’, Geer and Bram van Velde, unpaginated exhibition catalogue. New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. —(1949), ‘Letter to Georges Duthuit’, 9 March 1949 & 10 March 1949 [in Gontarski and Uhlmann, pp. 15–18]. —(1970), Proust/Three Dialogues. London: Calder & Boyars. —(1981), Watt. London: Calder. —(1983a), ‘Mongrel Mime for One Old Small (M)’. Carlton Lake Samuel Beckett Collection, Series I, Box 17, Folder 7, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. —(1983b), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. R. Cohn. London: Calder. —(1995), Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York, NY: Grove Press. —(1999), Film. Dir. A. Schneider, Perf. B. Keaton. New York, NY: Applause. Bernard, É. (1990), ‘From A Conversation with Cézanne’, in R. Kendall (ed.), Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings. London: Macdonald, 1990, pp. 289–93. Borély, J. (1990), ‘From Cézanne en Aix’, in R. Kendall (ed.), Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings. London: Macdonald, pp. 294–6. Connor, S. (1992), ‘Between Theatre and Theory: Long Observation of the Ray’, in J. Pilling and M. Bryden (eds), The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, pp. 79–98. Descartes, R. (1988), Principles of Philosophy. Trans. B. Reynolds. Studies in the History of Philosophy 6. Lewiston, NY, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Flynn, T. R. (1993), ‘Foucault and the Eclipse of Vision’, in D. M. Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 273–86. Foucault, M. (1986), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Gontarski, S. E. and Uhlmann, A. (eds) (2006), Beckett after Beckett. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Gunn, D. (2007), ‘Until the Gag is Chewed. Samuel Beckett’s letters: Eloquence and “near speechlessness” ’. Times Literary Supplement, 21 April, 13–15. Gutting, G. (1989), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1977), ‘The Age of The World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York, NY: Harper & Row, pp. 115–54. Jay, M. (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Johnson, G. A. (ed.) (1993), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jonas, H. (1966), The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York, NY: Delta. Levin, David M. (1988), The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation. New York: Routledge.

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Maude, U. (2002), ‘The Body of Memory: Beckett and Merleau-Ponty’, in R. Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 108–22. —(2009), Beckett, Technology and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1992), Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge. —(1993a), ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. M. B. Smith, in Johnson, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 121–49. —(1993b), ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, trans. M. B. Smith, in Johnson, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 59–75. —(1993c), ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, trans. M. B. Smith, in Johnson, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 76–120. Mitchell, T. (1989), ‘The World as Exhibition’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 217–36. Morris, F. (ed.) (1993), Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55. London: Tate Gallery. Nixon, M. (2009), ‘Samuel Beckett’s “Film vidéo-cassette projet” ’, in U. Maude and D. Pattie (eds), Beckett on TV, special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies (forthcoming). Oppenheim, L. (2000), The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ricoeur, P. (1974), The Conflict of Interpretations. Trans. D. Ihde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rodaway, P. (1994), Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Schapiro, M. (1988), Paul Cézanne. London: Thames and Hudson. ‘Yield’, def. III, (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 5

Between Art-world and Life-world: Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women Mark Nixon

The writing of the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women represented Beckett’s earliest sustained attempt to establish himself as a literary, rather than an academic man. Having achieved a certain reputation with his study of Proust (1931), Beckett proceeded to resign from his university post in January 1932 and turn his attention to the composition of his first extended piece of fiction. Earliest drafts towards the novel date from Spring 1931, but the writing proceeded in a ‘ragged sort of way’, as Beckett told MacGreevy, and it was only in February 1932 that he began to work on the book in earnest (Pilling 1999: xvi). In the event, the novel was deemed too ‘strange’ and ‘difficult’ by the publisher Chatto & Windus (and subsequently by other publishing houses), and would remain unpublished during Beckett’s lifetime. The book still presents a disconcerting reading experience today, not least due to its wild shifts in narrative perspective and its formidably dense intertextual fabric. Essentially, Dream dramatizes Beckett’s own escape from the pressures of reality, from academia, love lost and psychological tensions, and pits the world of cultural exchange against one firmly embedded within a social, commercial and domestic sphere. The vexed relationship between real life and art preoccupied Beckett throughout his writing career, as various comments, such as the following one, made in a letter to Megged in 1960, reveal: ‘I understand, I think no one better, the flight from experience to expression, and I understand the necessary failure in both’ (quoted in Beplate 2007: 67). The tension between experience and expression, and more importantly, the conscious negotiation conducted between the two by both Beckett as a writer and his alter ego Belacqua in Dream, will in this essay be reconfigured through the phenomenological concepts of the life-world and the art-world. In his essay ‘Art and Artworld: Some Ideas for a Husserlian Aesthetic’, John Barnett Brough expands Husserl’s concept of the relationship between

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the life-world, the world essentially lived by a subject, and the objectivescientific world, by replacing the latter with the art-world. The relationship between these two remains somewhat vague, although Brough adopts Husserl’s discussion of ‘the contrast and inseparable union’ (Husserl 1970: 131) of life-world and science and applies it to ‘the relation between life-world and any cultural world, including the artworld’ (Brough 1988: 41). As such he problematizes the assumption that the art-world necessarily draws on the life-world, or that ‘works of art always “refer” to the perceptual world’ (1988: 41). To be sure, the artist uses the life-world in its fundamental perceptual sense in the making of his works. The life-world supplies him with sensible materials and with instruments for his creative works. (Brough 1988: 42) Yet, as he goes on to argue, ‘the meaning of the particular works may be affected by . . . references to the life-world, but their status as art does not depend on those references’ (1988: 42). Once again drawing on Husserl’s discussion of science in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (originally published in German in 1936), Brough locates the difference within the fact that, unlike the perceptual stratum of the life-world, the art-world is a cultural formation with a ‘purposeful structure’ reflecting a ‘goal-directed life’ (Husserl 1970: 382, 380). Despite his eagerness to separate life from art, Beckett in conversation frequently spoke of autobiographical experiences as ‘materials’ to be used in the creation of art. As he told Lawrence Harvey, ‘[w]ork doesn’t depend on experience; it is not a record of experience. But of course you must use it’ (quoted in Knowlson 2006: 137). Beckett’s autobiographical investment during the compositional process is particularly marked in his early work, and Dream of Fair to Middling Women is set within a fictional framework which can be clearly identified as encompassing real experiences from 1928 to 1932. Indeed, James Knowlson has gone a long way in uncovering the autobiographical sources of many of the events described in the novel, such as Beckett’s visit to the dance school his cousin Peggy Sinclair was attending, Schule Hellerau-Laxenburg to the south of Vienna, or the calamitous end of their affair in Kassel on New Year’s Eve 1929 (Knowlson 1996: 83–5). Beckett’s narrator refers to Dream as a ‘virgin chronicle’ (Beckett 1996: 69, 118), which can be read in two ways. First of all, it draws attention to the Greek stem of the word, ‘chronika’, meaning ‘annals’ (plural of ‘chronikos’, ‘of time’). Second, it also brings to mind the medieval French ‘chronique’, a register of events in order of time, but which commonly amalgamates fact with legendary fiction. At times Dream’s narrative opens up and allows a glimpse of its ‘factual’, autobiographical origin, as in the scene between the Alba (based on Ethna

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MacCarthy) and Belacqua on Silver Strand. Assuming the role of the chronicler, describing the events of a given passage of time, the narrator (assuming the first person plural ‘we, extenuate consensus of me’; [Beckett 1996: 112]) realizes that looking back through our notes we are aghast to find that it was Jack’s Hole; but we cannot use that, that would be quite out of place in what threatens to come down a love passage. (Beckett 1996: 189) Although the indecorous suggestion may distract the reader, the narrative is here self-referentially announcing its own fictional status, and simultaneously admitting to an underlying (autobiographical) reality.1 This process can ultimately be aligned with Porter Abbott’s contention that Beckett’s texts represent a ‘moment of action taken in the moment of writing’ within what he terms Beckett’s ‘autography’.2 Fundamentally, the writing of Dream was, as John Pilling has pointed out, a ‘purging of a recent past and an even more recent present’, and specifically of Beckett’s unhappy love affairs (Pilling 1997: 62). Yet Beckett’s difficulty was to find the adequate manner of fictionalizing his own ‘unsanitary episodes’ (Beckett 1996: 109), which is evident in the ambiguity in the narrative attitude between concealment and revelation. The concealing impulse appears in an aside which the narrator seems to direct at himself as much as the reader, ‘No no I won’t say everything, I won’t tell you everything’ (1996: 72). Yet barely 2 pages later the revealing (or confessional) tendency is reinstated, as the narrator declares, or rather insists, ‘[w]e strive to give the capital facts of his [Belacqua’s] case . . . . Facts, we cannot repeat it too often, let us have facts, plenty of facts’ (1996: 74). Between these two extremes a ‘Mr Beckett’ is parenthetically introduced into the text, who helps the narrator to find the right words, such as ‘Kleinmeister’s Leidenschaftsucherei [a minor master’s passion-seeking] (thanks Mr Beckett)’ (1996: 69). Moreover, an instance of Freudian Verschreiben alerts the reader to the problematic relationship between the narrator and Belacqua. When the reader is asked, ‘No but surely you see now what he am?’ (1996: 72), the inharmonious interplay of personal pronouns removes the differentiation that had previously distinguished narrator (and by extension author) and protagonist. The autobiographical layer of Dream would remain largely indecipherable to the reader of today were it not for the availability of biographical data. Yet at the time of writing, and despite an urgent wish for his acquaintances and former lovers to detect their caricaturization, Beckett undoubtedly felt that concealment was necessary in order to avoid causing offence. When Dream was recast for publication as More Pricks than Kicks in 1934, Beckett softened the satirical elements, although the biographical reality underlying the fiction remained

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visible. Beckett’s friend and later literary agent, George Reavey, for example, noted in his diary that Belacqua was a faithful portraiture of Beckett.3 Evidently Beckett felt remorse over his portrayal of friends and family, and a letter of 1934 to Morris Sinclair, the brother of Peggy (who had died the previous year), refers to his ‘embarrassed pain’ over the way he had proceeded. The destabilized boundary between fictional and autobiographical textual layers can obviously be aligned with Husserl’s statement that the ‘life-world includes and nourishes the cultural world of science [and, by extension, the art-world] which in turn has constant reference to the life-world’ (Brough 1988: 41). However, on the face of it, Dream is at pains to uphold its fictional status, and it does so mainly by way of a self-conscious textual instability and a complicated narratological structure. As such, it quite simply reflects Brough’s criteria that ‘[h]owever else it may appear, the work of art presents itself as something that has been made, an artifact’ (1988: 32). This is most obvious when the narrator muses on the story he is writing, or rather indicates the kind of story he could be writing: ‘we could write a little book that would be purely melodic . . . a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect’ (Beckett 1996: 10). Accordingly, the narrator draws attention to the wild narrative shifts with the comment ‘[t]he only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity’ (1996: 133), although this is later typically undermined by the statement that ‘we were . . . inclined to fancy ourself as the Cézanne, shall we say, of the printed page, very strong on architectonics’ (1996: 178–9). At another point, the narrator fears that ‘the book is degenerating into a kind of Commedia dell’Arte, a form of literary statement to which we object particularly’ (1996: 117). And finally, the ending of the book is anticipated with the comment that [w]hat we are doing now, of course, is setting up the world for a proper swell slap-up explosion. The bang is better than the whimper. It is easier to do. It is timed for about ten or fifteen thousand words hence. (Beckett 1996: 177) The effect of these self-conscious references is to create what Husserl calls a ‘cultural space’, a ‘self-enclosed world’ (Husserl 1970: 392, 379). This is extended to the characters, which are themselves denied any ‘reality’. That is to say, they are only vaguely embedded in what we could call a recognizable social reality. Instead, they function as fictional or narrative devices: It is possible that some of our creatures will do their dope all right and give no trouble. And it is certain that others will not. Let us suppose that Nemo is one of those that will not. John, most of the parents, the Smeraldina-Rima, the Syra-Cusa, the Alba, the Mandarin, the Polar Bear, Lucien, Chas, are a few

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of those that will, that stand, that is, for something or can be made to stand for something. (Beckett 1996: 9)4 In a long passage, the narrator further muses on the way that his ‘refractory constituents’, his characters, refuse to interact (‘give us a synthesis’), in that they ‘not only shrink from all that is not they’ but also ‘strain away from themselves’ (1996: 119). As such, the narrator claims, these characters simply fail to play their fictional parts: They are no good from the builder’s point of view, firstly because they will not suffer their systems to be absorbed in the cluster of the greater system, and then, and chiefly, because they themselves tend to disappear as systems. (Beckett 1996: 119) Beckett then sets up the fashionable novelistic trend as a contrast, taking particular aim at Balzac, who ‘has turned all his creatures into clockwork cabbages’ (1996: 120). It is a further instance where Beckett moves away from a phenomenological sociology such as the one formulated by Habermas, in which social co-ordination and communicative interaction are based on common practices, values and so forth. The characters of Dream are never allowed to construct their own identity or create social solidarity, but are essentially puppets whose strings originate in the art rather than the life-world. In many ways this anticipates Beckett’s persuasive use of the trope of puppetry, in part derived from his reading of Kleist’s essay on puppet theatre and brought to bear on Murphy, the early drama and the Trilogy as when Molloy states that ‘I suddenly collapsed, like a puppet when its strings are dropped’ (Beckett 1976: 51). More importantly, however, the narrator of Dream in fact seems to be saying that the way his characters behave is more realistic than the ones inhabiting Balzac’s world. Having dismissed Balzac in the manner described above, the text goes on to wonder ‘but why call a distillation of Euclid and Perrault Scenes from Life? Why human comedy?’ (Beckett 1996: 120; Beckett’s emphasis). Essentially, Dream not only creates a fictional reality, a world modelled on the life-world, but projects yet another art-world, which Beckett appears to claim is more ‘real’ than the life-world (whether the fictional or the real one). That is to say, the tension between experience and art felt by Beckett is replicated within the novel. Within the art-world of the novel, Belacqua and the other characters represent hypothetical existential models, projections of ‘Beingin-the-Art-World’, to expand Heidegger’s concept. Nevertheless, the reader is repeatedly invited to perceive the characters of the novel, and the German word ‘Blickpunkt’ (point of view) is invoked at numerous junctions (see Beckett 1996: 65, 149, 160, 232). Indeed, the novel opens with the invitation to ‘Behold Belacqua’ (1996: 1), and this is repeated at certain junctions.5 Thus we

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are to ‘Behold, Mr Beckett . . . a dud mystic’ (1996: 186), and the Alba is grandiosely introduced: Silence now we beseech you, reverence, your closest attention. For whom have we here. Follow us closely. Behold it is she it is the ALBA. Behold her gliding ahead of schedule . . . . (Beckett 1996: 151) In a curious way, however, the characters remain subjects, even as they are presented as objects to be scrutinized and evaluated. Accordingly, the SmeraldinaRima ‘was not an object at all, no, not an object in any sense of the word’ (1996: 12). Yet at the same time they remain firmly embedded within the art-world of the novel. This is most obviously the case with Belacqua, as the narrator is at pains to point out: ‘There is no real Belacqua, it is to be hoped not indeed, there is no such person’ (1996: 121). Belacqua himself appears to agree, when he questions existential subjectivity: ‘The notion of an unqualified present— the mere “I am”—is an ideal notion. That of an incoherent present—“I am this and that”—altogether abominable’ (1996: 102). Part of the problem lies in the fact that, as Beckett clarifies in his essay on Proust, ‘the individual is a succession of individuals’, different from one moment to the next (Beckett 1965: 19). Indeed, within the framework of the novel, Belacqua consistently locates himself within the art-world rather than any recognizably realistic world of social exchange. Or to put it in other words, he attempts to escape from beingin-the-world. He does this by denying his bodily existence and retreating into his mind: The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room . . . the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies suppressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off. (Beckett 1996: 44) This state, which anticipates the third zone of Murphy’s mind, is further described as being a kind of pure essence, in that ‘in the umbra, the tunnel, when the mind went wombtomb, then it was real thought and real living, living thought’ (1996: 45).6 Belacqua is thus denying an existence that relies on social intercourse, one that connects him with other people. The Husserlian emphasis on intersubjectivity, of one subject relating with another subject within communal practice, is thus also denied. At the same time, Belacqua elicits a conscious awareness of this denial: ‘All that can be said for certain is, that as far as he can judge for himself, the emancipation, in a slough of indifference and negligence

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and disinterest, from identity, his own and his neighbour’s, suits his accursed complexion’ (1996: 121).7 Belacqua’s attitude is explicitly rooted in his role as poet, or at least aspiring writer. ‘It’s the little poet speaking’ he tells the Smerry early in the book, ‘don’t mind him’ (1996: 26). And later we hear of his project to ‘write a book’ (1996: 138), although he has already written poetry (declared to be ‘too clever’ according to the Alba [1996: 169]). As a result, Belacqua views the world around him in artistic terms, a procedure more often than not also adopted by the narrative voice. Thus the physical attributes of objects and characters are not described in a ‘realistic’ manner but consistently in cultural terms. The Smeraldina-Rima has ‘Botticelli thighs’, and is (according to Belacqua) ‘the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede’ (1996: 15). Similarly the Syra-Cusa: ‘The sinewy fetlock sprang, Brancusi bird, from the shod foot, blue arch of veins and small bones, rose like a Lied to the firm wrist of the reins, the Bilitis breasts’ (1996: 33). And the features of Lucien’s face ‘bloom, as in Rembrandt’s portrait of his brother’ (1996: 116). Even physical objects are described via cultural analogies, so that the tram for example is ‘like a Cézanne monster’ (1996: 167). The above examples establish what could be called an art-world within the art-world that is the novel Dream. This is primarily constructed by the huge amount of intertextual borrowings Beckett embedded in the book, a large corpus of extraneous material and literary allusions inserted at different levels of remove from the surface of the text. Dream thus introduces a different kind of embodiment, whereby the textual body at times subsumes the bodily manoeuvres of the characters. Thus Belacqua makes it clear to the Alba ‘that he did not propose to Blake her, did not propose to Hieronymus Bosch her’ (Beckett 1996: 193). This is not to say that the book shies away from presenting physicality, but it does so with a sense of unease. In part this is due to the ambiguous movements of concealment and revelation discussed earlier, and is ultimately rooted in the autobiographical sources underlying the novel. One example should suffice here. During the New Year’s Eve scene in Dream, it is implied that Belacqua pays a visit to a brothel. This is signposted through a complex set of cultural references revolving around the city of Nuremberg. The details of this passage, such as the allusions to the town’s artistic legacy (the ‘Haus Albrecht Dürer’ and the sculptor ‘Adam Kraft’), derive from Beckett’s own short stay in Nuremberg on his way to Kassel in Spring 1931. On that day, Beckett had visited the castle with its torture chamber and (possibly) a brothel, and in Dream details from the visit to the castle (such as the smoking prohibition) are used to transmit the sexual content of the text. Thus the brothel becomes its own kind of torture chamber, as the admonition ‘[n]o effing smoking do you hear me in the effing Folterzimmer [torture chamber]’ and the later reference to ‘The Cast-Iron Virgin of Nürnberg’ indicate (Beckett 1996: 72, 182).

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The conflation of the two localities as ‘torture chambers’ renders the sexual details obscure, but the subtext is indicated by the diminutive dismissal of the ‘whorchen’, a German-English hybrid similar to the later ‘Jungfräulein’ (1996: 72, 130). Moreover, in that she is a ‘little bony vulture of a whorchen’ she is linked to Dürer (‘dürr’ is German for ‘skinny’), just as the sculptor’s name ‘Adam Kraft’ evokes a (now lost) power inherent in the edenically pure first man. Although the passage is on the whole rather impenetrable (‘I won’t tell you everything’), the fact that it is there at all attests to Dream’s attempt to ‘extinguish . . . the fatiguing lust for self-emotion’ (1996: 24). Belacqua’s flight from the life-world to the art-world is subjected to a sustained critique from the Mandarin, the Smeraldina-Rima’s father, during this New Year’s Eve scene. The exchange between the two men, conducted in a bar, amounts to a distilled discussion of the tensions between the two spheres. The Mandarin thus criticizes Belacqua’s artistic way of life: You simplify and dramatise the whole thing with your literary mathematics. I don’t waste any words with the argument of experience, the inward decrystallisation of experience, because your type never accepts experience, nor the notion of experience. So I speak merely from a need that is as valid as yours, because it is valid. The need to live, to be authentically and seriously and totally involved in the life of my heart . . . . (Beckett 1996: 101) Belacqua’s position, in contrast, and as summarized by the Mandarin, is that the ‘reality of the individual . . . is an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently’ (Beckett 1996: 101), and is thus separated from the notion of experiential living adumbrated by the Mandarin. Indeed, as Belacqua goes on to argue—tellingly by referencing Rimbaud and Beethoven—life is nothing but ‘incoherent’, and its ‘authentic extrinsecation’ can only be conducted creatively, in the ‘incoherent continuum [which is a] punctuation in a statement of silences’ (Beckett 1996: 102). This idea is further outlined in Belacqua’s projection of the book he shall write. In what reads like an aesthetic programme, one which remarkably introduces a whole range of themes that will preoccupy Beckett throughout the 1930s, Belacqua outlines the book he envisages writing: The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory . . . I think of his [Beethoven’s] earlier compositions where into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces. (Beckett 1996: 138–9)

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The ‘coherence gone to pieces’ of course reflects the structure of Dream itself, but also points to Beckett’s increasing commitment to a view of reality as fundamentally chaotic and irrational. The question of how to deal with this artistically—and Dream is no doubt an effort to do this—was already the topic of Beckett’s study of Proust. There Beckett harnessed Schopenhauer’s ‘definition of the artistic procedure as “the contemplation of the world independently of the principle of reason” ’ (Beckett 1983: 87). Thus the task for the artist is specified as ‘the non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility’ (Beckett 1983: 86). This brings us back to Husserl, and his view (expressed in Experience and Judgment, first published in 1939 as Erfahrung und Urteil) that ‘retrogression to the life-world’ is necessary, which entails the ‘destructions of the idealizations which veil the life-world’ (Husserl 1992: 41). To be sure, Beckett adopts the idea of a veil that shrouds ‘real’ life from Schopenhauer, but the terms are not dissimilar. However, it is Beckett’s belief, following Schopenhauer, that a commitment to the artistic endeavour will allow this veil to be torn apart, as is evident from various statements made during the 1930s.8 Already in his study of Proust, Beckett refers to habit as ‘a screen to spare its victims the spectacle of reality’, appearing ‘when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept’ (Beckett 1965: 21). Beckett proceeded to discuss this veil or screen in an entry made in August 1936 in the so-called Clare Street notebook: Es gibt Augenblicke, wo der Hoffnungsschleier endgültig weggerissen wird und die plötzlich befreiten Augen ihre Welt anblicken, wie sie ist, wie sie sein muss. Es dauert leider nicht lange, die Wahrnehmung geht schnell vorüber, ein so unverbittliches Licht können die Augen nur auf kurze Zeit ertragen, das Häutchen der Hoffnung bildet sich von neuem, man kehrt in die Welt der Phänomene zurück. [There are moments when the veil of hope is finally torn apart and the suddenly liberated eyes see their world, as it is, as it must be. Alas, it does not last long, the revelation quickly passes, the eyes can only bear such pitiless light for a short while, the membrane of hope grows again and one returns to the world of phenomena].9 As the 1930s progressed, Beckett increasingly (and paralleling Habermas’s development of Husserl’s theories into the linguistic arena) located this veil as being woven by language. The oft-cited letter to Kaun of 1937 thus expressed Beckett’s attempts to reach beyond the fabric of words: Und immer mehr wie ein Schleier kommt mir meine Sprache vor, den man zerreissen muss, um an die dahinterliegenden Dinge (oder das dahinterliegende Nichts) zu kommen.

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[And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it]. (Beckett 1983: 52; trans. 171)10 As Beckett adumbrated in his essay on Proust, the ‘only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth’, in that the artist ‘who does not deal in surfaces’ must engage in the ‘labours of poetical excavation’ (Beckett 1965: 64, 29). From the very beginning, Beckett’s poetics were directed at exploring what he deemed to be the real experience of life rather than the surface nature of outer reality. His TCD lectures on the modern French novel were dismissive of writing that attempted to represent reality but shirked from its complexity. The essay on Proust gave Beckett the opportunity to voice his contempt for the ‘realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience’ who are moreover ‘content to transcribe the surface’ (1965: 78). Beckett’s fundamental critique derives from a sense of authenticity: to describe merely the surface results in the erection of a ‘façade’, a static representation of life incommensurable with life’s uncertainties and shifting realities. Beckett’s remark in Proust that the ‘observer infects the observed with his own mobility’ (1965: 17) indicates just how much he believed in the absence of a coherent, stable subject–object reality. Essentially, his first foray into sustained fiction, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is an inquiry into the consciousness of precisely such an absence of relation. But it is also a book that charts Belacqua’s (and in turn, perhaps, Beckett’s) aim ‘to come to a little knowledge of himself’ (Beckett 1996: 184).

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Jack’s Hole is in fact the cove where Beckett and Ethna MacCarthy spent an afternoon; see Knowlson 1996: 149. Abbott’s two studies Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (1984) and Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (1996) are relevant to any discussion of the interaction between fiction and autobiography in Beckett’s work. George Reavey, diary entry for 20 June 1934 (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin). However, on page 49 the narrator declares that the Syra-Cusa essentially ‘belongs to another story, a short one, a far far better one. She might even go into a postil’ (Beckett 1996: 49). Note that the opening of the novel, the short chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2, where Belacqua is sitting on the pier, can be aligned with MerleauPonty’s ‘primacy of perception’, in that our introduction to Belacqua’s consciousness is via the perception of his body. This is further underlined by the emphasis on the body in the way Belacqua experiences the world: his sadness at the departure of the Smerry is not expressed through emotions but through the bodily experience of masturbation.

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8

9

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The ‘third being’ within Belacqua’s ‘trine nature’, in which the ‘the glare of the will and the hammerstrokes of the brain . . . were expunged’ is essentially derived from Schopenhauer (Beckett 1996: 120–1). It is interesting to note at this point that this anticipates Beckett’s well-known discussion of Cézanne and the problematic relationship between subject and object in two letters to MacGreevy written in September 1934, in which he argues that Cézanne ‘had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life . . . operative in himself’ (quoted in Pilling 1997: 133). For the specifically Schopenhauerian influence on Beckett’s discussion of the veil, see Nixon (2006). ‘Clare Street’ notebook, UoR MS5003, 17r–18r. See Ulrich Pothast’s recently published study The Metaphysical Vision (2008: 13–14) for a discussion of the Schopenhauerian origin or tone of this passage. Cf. also entry 642 in Notebook A of George Berkeley’s ‘Philosophical Commentaries’: ‘the chief thing I do or pretend to do is only to remove the mist or veil of Words. This has occasion’d Ignorance & confusion’ (Berkeley 1975: 313).

Bibliography Abbott, H. P. (1984), Diary Fiction: Writing as Action. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —(1996), Beckett writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beckett, S. (1965), Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder. —(1976), The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador. —(1983), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. R. Cohn. London: John Calder. —(1996), Dream of Fair to Middling Women. London: Calder and New York, NY: Riverrun. —‘Clare Street’ notebook, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS5003. Beplate, J. (2007), ‘ “Like an Idiot at High Mass”: Beckettian Motifs in John Banville’s Art Trilogy’, in M. Feldman and M. Nixon (eds), Beckett’s Literary Legacies. Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 58–77. Berkeley, G. (1975), ‘Philosophical Commentaries’, in Philosophical Works, including the works on vision. London: Dent, pp. 305–412. Brough, J. B. (1988), ‘Art and Artworld: Some Ideas for a Husserlian Aesthetic’, in R. Sokolowski (ed.), Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, pp. 25–45. Husserl, E. (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(1992), Experience and Judgement. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press [1973].

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Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Knowlson, J. and Knowlson, E. (2006), Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Nixon, M. (2006), ‘ “Scraps of German”: Samuel Beckett reading German Literature’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 16, 259–82. Pilling, J. (1997), Beckett before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pilling, J. (ed.) (1999), Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation. Pothast, U. (2008), The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s own way to make use of it. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Chapter 6

Murphydurke, or towards a Phenomenology of Immaturity (Reading Murphy with Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke) Jean-Michel Rabaté

I will start from a chronological coincidence: Samuel Beckett published Murphy in 1938, and Witold Gombrowicz Ferdydurke in 1937–38. The principle of historical simultaneity can be tricky. Having worked on the culture of one single year, which was 1913 (see Rabaté 2007), I became aware of innumerable convergences cropping up between works written at the same time, whose authors had little knowledge of what their contemporaries were doing. Thus Andrei Biely and James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam and T. S. Eliot, Tagore and Yeats, Pessoa and Pound, Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau, W. E. B. DuBois and Frobenius worked on similar issues and in similar ways in 1913. Is this due to the Zeitgeist, to deep epistemic structures à la Foucault, or are these coincidences an illusion produced by a retrospective glance that sees only similarities? What I propose to do is to read Murphy through Ferdydurke, hoping to connect their indubitable structural and thematic parallels with a common concern for a phenomenology of form. Born in 1904, Gombrowicz drafted short stories in 1926, and after a stay in France in 1928, finished these in Warsaw, publishing them in 1933 under the title of Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity. He wrote a play, Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, published in 1938, while working on a novel in 1935–36. Published under the title of Ferdydurke in 1937, it gained some acclaim despite its experimental nature. It was followed by a thriller, Possessed, or the Secret of Myslotch, in 1939. That year marked a fateful break: invited as a young and promising Polish author to visit Argentina and report on the country, Gombrowicz was in Buenos Aires when he heard of the declaration of war and the subsequent invasion of Poland. He took the decision not to return home, and stayed in Buenos Aires, where he met with dire poverty while experiencing something like a liberation. He was free to explore a new life marked by multiple gay encounters with hoodlums. He survived on little food, boarded in cheap

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conventillos, then lived with a male friend in a pension. Meanwhile, a group of devotees gathered around him, helping him translate Ferdydurke into Spanish. Slowly, Gombrowicz resumed his literary career. After 23 years of exile in Argentina, he returned to Europe, avoiding Communist Poland, living first in Berlin and then in Paris. Finally, he married a much younger woman from Québec and settled in the South of France where he died in 1969. There is no need to labour the point that Gombrowicz’s career presents many similarities with Beckett’s early years: his hesitant progression, his short stories and aborted novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the slow and painful writing of Murphy, finally published in 1938, followed by an identical disruption when the war led to Resistance activities and the flight to Roussillon. Both writers experienced voluntary exile, cultural dislocation and adaptation to precarious circumstances, both learned to survive and learned to write in a non-native language: Gombrowicz, who spoke and wrote Polish, German and French, had to master Spanish, whereas Beckett used French as an antidote to his overcultured English and Italian. Like Beckett, Gombrowicz expressed himself in three main genres: short stories, novels and plays. To this he added a predilection for personal diaries and a peculiar distaste for poetry; his attack on Dante and, by extension, all poetry would have shocked Beckett, as it did many of Gombrowicz’s contemporaries (Gombrowicz debunked the mystifying role of lyrical poetry in Poland, a recurrent theme in his work). There is moreover a geo-political or ideological resemblance connecting Poland and Ireland. Friedrich Engels stressed their common ‘exception’ when he wrote to Kautsky in February 1882: ‘[T]wo nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic’ (Marx and Engels 1971: 432). However, Beckett and Gombrowicz were never ‘nationalistic’ in any sense: Beckett’s fidelity during the Second World War was to France, while Gombrowicz opted for freedom in Argentina. Just as Gombrowicz’s oeuvre appears as a systematic rejection of the upper-class Catholicism of his parents, who claimed a noble lineage while belonging merely to the moneyed bourgeoisie, Beckett’s relation to his Protestant and upper-class education and to his inscription in the bourgeois ascendancy played a notable role in his early choice of literary forms deemed ‘subversive’. There has not been much critical work linking the two authors, probably because they look too different; the name of Gombrowicz does not appear in the Beckett biographies by Cronin and Knowlson; when they are paired, it is mostly in a distant and respectful manner, often with Kafka and Nabokov added into the mix of twentieth-century literary ‘geniuses’. The only time that Beckett and Gombrowicz were actually considered together was in 1968: both were nominated for the Nobel Prize at the same time—and to the surprise of most, the award went to the then relatively unknown Japanese novelist Kawabata. In

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July 1969, Gombrowicz died in Vence. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in October 1969. Nevertheless, both have left a deep impact in their native countries; in Ireland, when a situation is called ‘Beckettian’, one is slightly less worse off than when it is deemed ‘Kafkaian’, whereas in Poland, two words, mug and bum, used in idiosyncratic phrases borrowed from Ferdydurke, ‘to give someone a mug’ and ‘to fix a bum on someone’, have become common idioms—meaning, respectively, ‘to lend someone a character or personality different from his or her own’ and thus to ‘negatively frame someone’, and ‘to infantilize someone’, for instance by treating an adult person as if he or she were a child.1 The only critic who has forcibly and competently analysed Beckett and Gombrowicz together is Ewa Ziarek, who edited the collection, Gombrowicz’s Grimaces (1998), and authored The Rhetoric of Failure (1996). In this excellent book, a chapter on How It Is is followed by a chapter on ‘Forms of Life as Disfigurement’ in Gombrowicz’s work. However, Ziarek does not focus on the novels Murphy and Ferdydurke. I have chosen these early novels because they were later interpreted by their authors as containing the seeds of all that followed. The Joycean portmanteau-term of my title blends the names of the two novels to suggest that the proper names converge. ‘Murphy’ is the eponymous hero of Beckett’s novel and the only real character in the book, as Beckett himself suggested, while all the others are ‘puppets’ (Beckett 1980: 71). In Ferdydurke, in turn, there is not even a character called ‘Ferdydurke’ in the book. Too much has been written on the name ‘Murphy’, one of the most common Irish patronyms, which also contains within it the Greek Morpheus, the god of sleep, and morphe, meaning ‘form’, without, of course, forgetting the typically American ‘Murphy Bed’. In Gombrowicz’s case, the title contains an absurdist joke: it puns on ‘Freddy Durkee’, a minor character in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, from 1922. Why did Gombrowicz choose this title for a novel in which no character bears the name? Why did he scramble ‘Freddy’ into ‘Ferdy’? In Babbitt, Freddy Durkee is an acquaintance of the narrator’s—he has ‘made it’ in Chicago. Babbitt was a favourite novel of Gombrowicz’s in the 1930s—he liked the way Lewis denounced the stupidity and vulgarity of modern American life. Gombrowicz always refused to explain his title: the name is autonomous, it does not refer to the content of the plot, but rather becomes a character of its own. Later in Argentina, Gombrowicz would call upon the ‘Ferdydurkians’ of all countries, as if they formed a political party or a sect. And when he was asked to explain the title of a collection of stories, Bacacay (a street in Buenos Aires in which he had lived), he told his Italian publisher that he chose the title ‘for the same reason that a person names his dogs—to distinguish them from others’.2 The offhand treatment of the title alerts us to the particular function of neologisms for Gombrowicz. After the novel was translated into Spanish, he had to warn readers that it was not written in ‘bad Spanish’ (he had several friends read it and correct it) but instead created a special semantics and syntax. Thus,

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the function of the word pupa (translated into English as ‘bum’ and into French as ‘cucul ’ with its derived verbs like cuculiser, etc.), which appears in the novel in infinite variations, is to ‘symbolize the principal problem of Ferdydurke, that of infantilization’ (Gombrowicz 1947, quoted in Gombrowicz 1984: 100). In the recent translation by Danuta Borchardt, the word is left in Polish, as in the example, ‘he had dealt me the pupa’ (Gombrowicz 2000: xviii, 68). As Borchardt explains, it means ‘the buttocks, behind, bum, tush, rump’ (Gombrowicz 2000: xix). This literalist solution has the advantage of suggesting a Nabokovian layer of allusions to the insect’s cocoon, where it grows from a larval stage to maturity. And it combines elegantly these entomological references with the use of ‘poop’ in baby talk. What then is the plot of this weird novel? The hero, Jojo Kowalski, who like Gombrowicz has published his Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, wakes up one morning from turgid dreams: he is 30, ‘halfway down the path of his life’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 2) like Dante, but the nightmare threatens to engulf him when he discovers that the ‘dark forest’ is not black but green, a colour that points to his immaturity. This alleged immaturity has been criticized by his acquaintances, in particular by his genteel ‘aunts’ who stand for a well-off and conventional family. They want him to choose a profession, or at least do something. Fully regressing now, he returns to his old high school, coerced by his former schoolteacher Pimko, who pretends that Kowalski is just 15. He falls into the infantilizing world of the school, much like Alice when she enters her dream-world. Joey keeps shrinking, and confronts various groups of schoolboys: during a tedious lecture on Polish poetry, he meets Kneadus, the would-be hoodlum; Siphon, the self-declared innocent and idealistic youth, and is attracted by the beauty and indifference of Kopyrda, the only ‘normal’ boy. Kneadus and Siphon engage in a duel of grimaces with Kowalski as designated umpire. Kneadus wins at the last minute thanks to a rape ‘through the ears’ (Gombrowicz, 2000: 66, 132): the bad boy shouts obscenities into the ears of the nice pupil, who as a consequence chokes and dies. The school setting is thereafter left aside in a first series of mini-narratives: ‘The Child Runs Deep in Philidor’ contains a preface in which Gombrowicz discusses the relation of the parts to the whole. It is a philosophical apologue which sets Filidor, a Professor of Synthetology, against Anti-Filidor, who embodies Analysis. Their ridiculous duel ends when they both shoot their wives to pieces. Both professors lose their minds and blabber like children. The main narrative then resumes, and Pimko decides to place Joey in a modern family, in the hope that he will fall in love with Zuta, the typical teenager and adolescent schoolgirl who likes modern dances and parties. This does indeed happen, but Joey escapes by writing a letter to his rivals for Zuta’s attention, the old Pinko and the young Kopyrda, who are discovered by the parents in Zuta’s room after midnight. A terrible scuffle follows and while all are entangled, Joey and Kneadus escape, hoping to meet ‘farmhands’ or naïve and unsullied peasants.

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A second series of philosophical apologues interrupts the narrative. This time, it is a French Philibert who regresses to childhood. We thereafter return to the two youths who roam the streets of the city and find only sordid degradation. It is worse still when they reach the real peasants, who are first abjectly subservient, but transform into a pack of murderous dogs when they realize that the two young men only want to befriend them. They are saved from being lynched by the last-minute intervention of the genteel aunts, who reestablish order and take them to the family manor. There, they are first seduced by the refinements of the family gatherings, but the insipid small-talk whose aim is to avoid all unpleasant topics soon becomes boring. Both are obsessed with a handsome male servant, who finally embodies the ideal of the pure farmhand. Kneadus, eager to ‘fra-fraternize’ with the lower classes, asks the servant to slap his face, which he does. The news of the event spreads, triggering a social rebellion—the masters are not to be treated with respect any more! The family unites against Kneadus who is flogged and almost murdered, while Joey flees with his friendly cousin, Zosia, who has secretly been in love with him. The idea of elopement provides an ultimate form, and the two escape from what has tended towards pure chaos. The final image in the novel is that of Joey, running in the countryside with his beautiful cousin. Already utterly bored, he no longer knows what to do with his cousin and longs for the intervention of a third party that would save him from their intolerable intimacies. At each transitional point there is a general brawl, chaos reigns, which affords a momentary escape, followed by a descent back into conventional forms. Gombrowicz forcibly expounds the idea that immaturity is the force behind all our creative endeavours, while showing us that there is no escape from the relentless, normalizing form that is imposed by ‘kneading’ or ‘giving a mug’. The novel ends more or less where Murphy begins: Joey tries to avoid the glare of the sun, since the sun shines on the grass and makes it all the greener: In the meantime the pupa rose and fired a billion glistening rays over a world that was only a substitute world, made of cardboard, touched up in green, lit from above with a burning glare . . . . She walked and I walked, I walked and she walked, and together we kept on walking under the rays of the merciless, brilliant, blazing, infantile and infantilizing pupa. (Gombrowicz 2000: 274–6) Meanwhile, his revulsion at her romantic love becomes more acute: Oh, the gall these cute little women have, so greedy for love, so eager to team up in loving, so keen to become the object of admiration . . . . How dare she, a mushy, wishy-washy nobody, acquiesce to my fervor and accept my worship . . . . Is there anything on this earth and under the blazing, scorching pupa more

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terrible than that cloying, womanly warmth, that shy, intimate idolizing and snuggling? (Gombrowicz 2000: 277–8) This could be paralleled with one of Murphy’s sallies against Celia, who has set him an ultimatum: either he finds a job or she leaves him. Murphy is about to capitulate but not without firing a last salvo: Women are all the same bloody same, you can’t love, you can’t stay the course, the only feeling that you can stand is being felt, you can’t love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery. My God, how I hate the charVenus and her sausage and mash sex. (Beckett 1980: 25) Murphy even mimicks a child in his desperate attempt to convince Celia to allow him to remain unemployed: ‘He threw his voice into an infant’s whinge. “I cudden do annyting, Maaaammy” ’ (Beckett 1980: 25). The French version is more vulgar and violent: ‘Putain de putain, ce que ça m’emmerde, la Vénus de chambre et son Eros comme chez grandmère’ (Beckett 1965: 33). This low diction reappears in the French when Murphy struggles against the maternal principle embodied in the waitress Vera: Je vous emmerde, je le sais bien, mais que voulez-vous, ils m’ont foutu tout plein de jus de vache. ‘Emmerde’ et ‘vache’ furent ici les mots actifs, nulle serveuse ne pouvait resister à leur harmoniques mélanges d’amour et de maternité. (Beckett 1965: 65) The English original is much more polite: ‘I am a great nuisance but they have been too generous with the cowjuice’ (Beckett 1980: 51). A similar scene occurs in Ferdydurke when the hero is invited to share the meal of the ‘Youngbloods’, whose pretty daughter, Zuta, fascinates him as she displays a curious indifference to usual values: ‘she disdained maturity, for her immaturity was her maturity’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 137). In order to be cured of this unhealthy interest, he has only one recourse—to fall in love with her. Of course, she will despise him all the more and will ‘screw a mug on him’. However, her parents are absurdly liberal and tell her that she can even have an illegitimate child with a lover. In order to free himself from these new chains, Kowlaski acts out his immaturity. During the family dinner, he blurts out a lamentable ‘mammy’ addressed to the teenager: So instead of thinking my thoughts in sky-blue-green colors, giving them a fresh and bold form, I opted for the puny and the miserable: ‘Well, a child is a child,’ I thought to myself, and I imagined labor, wet nurses, illnesses,

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exudative skin rashes, child-related messiness and living expenses, and I thought that an infant, with its milk and baby warmth, would destroy the girl, turning her into a lubberly, warm little mommy. I therefore leaned toward Miss Youngblood and miserably, as if I were speaking to myself, I said: ‘Mommy . . .’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 142) This sly blow below the belt triggers hysterical giggles in the father and disrupts the pretence of harmony and sexual tolerance flaunted by the parents. The father’s giggle turns into a veritable fit while Joey muses: What was it that so tickled his nervous system? The expression ‘Mommy’? He must have been amused by the contrast between his ‘girl’ and my ‘Mommy’, something clicked, cabaret humor perhaps, or perhaps my sad and doleful voice had led him to humanity’s backyard. He had the capacity, common to all engineers, of being easily tickled by szmonces, and my phrase had indeed the flavor of a szmonces. (Gombrowicz 2000: 142–3) Szmonces are Jewish quips or witticisms (shmontze in Yiddish), and it is symptomatic to see Gombrowicz allude to Jewish humour. Unlike most of his family members, he never shunned the company of Jews, keeping a close (if at times antagonistic) friendship with Bruno Schultz, who wrote the first rave review of Ferdydurke in 1938. This subversive use of a child’s voice belongs to Jewish humour and not to Greek irony, to use Deleuze’s distinction in Proust and Signs (see Deleuze 2000: 101–2). Pushing his luck, Joey makes a mess at the table and adds to his fruit compote everything that he can find, salt, pepper, toothpicks, and ingests the mixture, which brings to mind the famous preparation of Mr. Knott’s food in Watt: ‘And I proceeded to eat the pap; and the pap didn’t really make the slightest difference to my spirit. It’s hard to describe the effect this had on the Youngbloods’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 144). The father giggles and squeals louder, the mother is disgusted, and the girl leaves the table. Hereafter, Joey’s aim will be to ‘fix’ the girl’s brain as he has ‘fixed’ the compote. This suggests that behind the joint accusation against maternity and paternity, there is a deeper principle of parody, a parody that works on forms and distorts them. In this sense, the conjunction of Beckett and Gombrowicz forces us to see the two in line with the earlier Bataille of ‘The Solar Anus’ (1927), who sees the sun as the key to a ‘purely parodic’ world view—a view developed later in Cosmos, Gombrowicz’s last novel and testament. Here is Bataille at his most convulsive: A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love . . . .

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Love, then, screams in my own throat: I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun. I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night. The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shafts, toward the earth, but it finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar way. The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night. (Bataille 1985: 8–9) This could resonate, admittedly in a less frantic mode of expression, with the beginning of Murphy, where we see the sun embodying necessity and fate in a male mode. The subject’s freedom can only be marginal and partly delusional (‘Murphy sat out of it, as if he were free’) while the whole world is occupied by the principle of debased exchange (‘the big world where Quid pro quo was cried as wares’ [Beckett 1980: 8]). This staging of the sun as both universal pupa and castrating glare no doubt underpins the scene in the room in Beckett’s Film (1964), where Buster Keaton shrinks away from the hated rays of the sun that nevertheless filter through the tattered blind. Is the sun the ultimate allegory of the punishing stare of E (the camera eye), or is it the condition of possibility of a neutral visibility that is refused? At least these echoes should throw some light (if you excuse the image) upon a riddle in the novel, the decision made by Murphy to leave Celia, although she loves him and he loves her, for life in the lunatic asylum. Murphy’s own confusion is emphasized in the passage of quasi inner monologue at the end of chapter five, where Celia, it seems, has been relegated to the domain of ‘pensums’ (Beckett 1980: 62). The eponymous hero is hoping for good sex (‘impatient for the music to begin’) when he discovers that Celia has exchanged positions with him: she is now spreadeagled on the bed, as he was in chapter one. Grasping that she is no longer in the mood for sex (she is upset by the memory of the neighbour upstairs who cut his throat with a razor), all he can do is tell her a silly joke (‘Why did the barmaid champagne? . . . Because the stout porter bitter’), which leads to a regressive display: ‘He sank down on the dream of Descartes linoleum, choking and writhing like a chicken with the gapes, seeing the scene’ (Beckett 1980: 81). This recalls the moment when Murphy defines humour as a way of warding off chaos; we are told that he classifies experience by distinguishing between ‘jokes that had once been good jokes and jokes that had never been good jokes’. He adds: ‘What but an imperfect sense of humour could have made such a mess of chaos. In the beginning was the pun. And so on’ (Beckett 1980: 41). Beckett makes an intertextual reference to Joyce’s remark that the Church

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was founded upon a pun when Christ told Peter: ‘Tu es Petrus—super hanc petram ecclesiasticam edificabo’ ( Joyce 1939: 170. 05). Saint John’s initial Logos (‘In the beginning was the Word’) is replaced by a pun, which suggests that Jesus’s joke had once been a ‘good’ joke, at least as long as Peter did not recant. This echoes a riddle of Finnegans Wake, ‘the first riddle of the universe’: ‘when is a man not a man?’ The answer is ‘when he is a—. . . Sham’ (Joyce 1939: 170. 23–4), which of course refers to Shem the Penman, the writer within the book, another grimacing image of immaturity. What Shem, Stephen Dedalus, Joey Kowalski and Murphy have in common is that they all postpone as long as possible the efforts of well-intentioned others (or would-be mothers) to ‘make them a man’, even a ‘man of the world’, which is Celia’s goal with Murphy: ‘Celia was conscious of two equally important reasons for insisting as she did. The first was her desire to make a man of Murphy!’ (Beckett 1980: 41). The second reason is more serious: she does not want her trade, prostitution, to interfere with her newly-found happiness with Murphy. He, on the other hand, would be more accommodating on this issue—his ‘tolerance’ smacks of indifference. Reciprocal love is not enough, an escape route should always be left open for an all-too-free subjectivity kicking against the pricks of . . . form. We can now develop the idea that the central theme in both novels is Form. This theme is dependent upon a certain mental projection, a specific phenomenology. The need for form derives from the fear of subjective fragmentation, and yet form keeps on entrapping the subject. This appears as early as the second page of Ferdydurke: [A]s I lay awake but still dreaming, I felt that my body was not homogeneous, that some parts were still those of a boy, and that my head was laughing at my leg and ridiculing it, that my leg was laughing at my head, that my finger was poking fun at my heart, my heart at my brain, that my nose was thumbing itself at my eye, my eye chuckling and bellowing at my nose—and all my parts were wildly raping each other in an all-encompassing and piercing state of pan mockery. (Gombrowicz 2000: 2) A similar note is sounded in Murphy when we are told that Murphy could think and know after a fashion with his body up (so to speak) and about, with a kind of mental tic douloureux sufficient for his parody of rational behaviour. But that was not what he understood by consciousness. (Beckett 1980: 65) The key question then becomes: what does Murphy understand by consciousness? Why does he (or Beckett) need the vocabulary of ‘forms’ to talk about what looks like the Unconscious? As we know, Beckett distinguishes three levels

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of Murphy’s mind, that of ‘forms with parallel’ followed by ‘forms without parallel’, and then, finally, ‘a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms . . . nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change’ (Beckett 1980: 65–6). Are these forms images? Are they representations? Can they, especially in the third zone, resist the powers of chaos? Similarly, the body parts of Celia do not really add up in the list that opens chapter 2: ‘Head, Eyes, Complexion, Hair, Features, Neck, Upper arm, Forearm, Wrist, Bust, Waist, Hips, etc., Thigh, Knee; Calf, Ankle, Instep’ all provide a parody of the classical genre of ekphrasis understood as a description of a body from ‘head to foot’ (Beckett 1980: 10). Does this mean that she is seen from the point of view of Murphy only; the ‘schizoidal spasmophile?’ (Beckett 1980: 32). When Joey in Ferdydurke muses on the links between the inner man and the ‘masks’ who write books on bees and become famous, he uses the same term: A life unmindful of these bonds, a life that does not evolve in unbroken continuity from one phase to the other is like a house that is being built from the top down, and must invariably end in a schizophrenic split of the inner self. (Gombrowicz 2000: 5) We know however that Murphy’s division follows a more rigid or ordered Cartesian dualism (his conarium has shrunk to nothing). Gombrowicz’s treatment of fragmentation is more rhapsodic, divisive and chaotic. Let us note, for those who tend to read Gombrowicz through Deleuze and Guattari (who often quote Cosmos) that the rejection of Form does not lead us to a ‘Body without organs’ but rather to ‘organs without bodies’ as ŽiŽek has recently argued (see ŽiŽek 2004). In short, Gombrowicz is much closer to Bataille’s concept of the ‘Formless’ than to Deleuzian flows of desire: Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. (Bataille 1985: 31) The Bataillian notion is shared by all the teachers who loom so large in both novels as they reflect on pedagogy. Neary’s many questions to Wylie in chapter 4 of Murphy and Pimko’s obsession with Form are rigorously similar. Like Neary, Pimko is caught up in compulsive and serial enamoration, he is even one of the

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lovers of the young girl Zuta. Neary needs love to introduce I-order into life’s chaos: ‘The face’, said Neary, ‘or system of faces, against the big blooming buzzing confusion. I think of miss Dwyer . . . . The one closed figure in the waste without form; and void! My tetrakyt!’ (Beckett 1980: 6–7). William James’s famous phrase quoted via Robert Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931) is taken from a context describing the recognition of faces by the infant: The baby cannot be supposed to see the face accurately, nor to have any notion of what the blotch is, but at least, so the Gestalt psychologists believe, he singles out the face as a compact visual unit, and so makes an important start toward coming to know the face. (Quoted in Ackerley 2004: 36) Something similar happens in the face-pulling duel between Kneadus and Siphon, as the hero has to remind himself that ‘a face is not an object, a face is a subject, a subject, a subject!’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 63). Nevertheless, he is soon caught up in the series of distortions that are grimaces: And my own face, like a mirror image of their faces, also turned freakish; while fear, disgust and terror carved on it an indelible mark. A clown between two clowns, how could I attempt anything that would not be a grimace? (Gombrowicz 2000: 65) When Kneadus rapes the boy ‘through the ears’ it is a violent penetration that destroys him completely. In this case, only the utmost violence can signify the dialectics of opposed forms. This is why Ferdydurke represents so many mock duels. We find an echo of this in all the witty verbal duels of Murphy, those between Celia and Murphy, Wylie and Neary, and then all the surviving characters in chapter ten. The duel condenses and, at the same time, exposes the essential structure of duality—an imaginary fight to the death. Form proceeds by the violent exclusion of irrelevant parts and by the forceful construction of a coherent whole, but whereas we believe that we build something from within and outward, it is actually our construction that constructs or informs us. Thus, the process opposing parts and whole also defines literary creation: We think we are the ones who construct (Form), but that’s an illusion, because we are, in equal measure, constructed by the construction. Whatever you put down on paper dictates what comes next, because the work is not born of you—you want to write one thing, yet something entirely different comes out. Parts tend to wholeness, every part surreptitiously makes its way toward the whole, strives for roundness, and seeks fulfillment, it implores the rest to be created in its own image and likeness . . . . A total inability to encompass wholeness marks the human soul. (Gombrowicz 2000: 72)

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In a similar manner, Murphy is a hero who reacts against his own division and searches for the wholeness that he imagines in Mr Endon. Endon’s name refers to his living ‘within’ as he is a perfect schizophrenic (Beckett 1980: 105). This self-sufficiency triggers love in Murphy, a ‘love of the purest possible kind’ (Beckett 1980: 104), since Endon exhibits ‘a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Murphy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain’ (Beckett 1980: 105). However, his fingers are adorned with rings, he is dressed in silk pajamas and looks like a parody of some demented Oscar Wilde. Yet Endon allows Murphy to indulge in ‘vicarious autology’ (Beckett 1980: 107). Madness is thus less a scandal than a solution, less a solution than a dead end: a dead end (which justifies Murphy’s untimely death in the narrative structure) is still better than the illusion of success. In Gombrowicz’s world, from Ferdydurke to Cosmos, madness erupts all at once from efforts at rationalization that become inevitably extreme. This is most visible when Joey defiles Zuta’s bedroom. He has already ruined for good the awe inspired by the parents’ bedroom by dancing wildly in front of their ‘towels, pajamas, shaving cream, beds, and sports gear’ (Gombrowicz, 2000: 155). This time, her possessions prove more resistant to his perverse prying; when he sees a carnation negligently dropped in a tennis shoe, he nearly loses it. Defeated by her spontaneous mastery of incompatible forms, he has only one solution: he catches a fly, tears off its legs and wings, leaving the tortured body buzzing invisibly inside the carnation. He stresses his own temporary madness: The fly, through its numb and dumb suffering, vitiated the shoe, the flower, the apple, the cigarettes, the schoolgirl’s entire household, while I stood there with an evil little smile, listening to what was going on in the room and within me, studying the ambiance, I and a madman, we were like two peas in a pod—and I thought that it’s not only little boys who drown cats and torture little birds, big boys sometimes also torture, just for the sake of ceasing to be schoolgirls’ boys, just to get the better of their schoolgirls, yes, the schoolgirl! (Gombrowicz 2000: 157) We may remember that the first thing that Mr Endon does once he has been freed from his cell is to torture the hypomanic patient (Beckett 1980: 130). He is not a peaceful and indifferent god . . . . By a striking verbal parallel, in a long litany of tortures that fill up our existence, the narrator of Ferdydurke includes ‘perhaps the hypomanic torment of hypomania’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 196). In the same vein, Gombrowicz gives a 2-page list of various methods of torture that all have something to do with form (Gombrowicz 2000: 194–5). This can be linked with Alain Badiou’s repeated comments about Beckett’s oeuvre which stages the ‘torture of the cogito’ (see Badiou 2003: 12–16, 21, 29, 32, 49– 56, 72). I have attempted elsewhere to bring Badiou and Adorno closer by analysing how Watt demonstrates the links between Kant’s morality, capitalism,

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technology (Watt as the inventor of the steam engine) and Marquis de Sade’s rhetoric of excess and pain (see Rabaté 2005). This principle of torture opens up to the question of the other when it becomes the very core of How It Is. For Badiou, this text offers less a meditation on post-apocalyptic survival than on the paradoxes of everyday-life: the torture begins as soon as we agree that love consists of making a one with two. What links Beckett and Gombrowicz on a deeper level, then, is the strong connection they establish between the torture of self and others and phenomenology as a necessary foundation for philosophy. To fully grasp the underpinnings of this phenomenology of immaturity, we need to take a look at Gombrowicz’s Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. This homemade compendium of philosophy first started as improvised lectures given by Gombrowicz to his wife and to his friend Dominique de Roux. Gombrowicz, terminally ill, had asked de Roux for a gun or poison in order to commit suicide. De Roux, soon himself to die of an incurable illness at the age of 41, requested instead to be taught by Gombrowicz, who gave him classes on the history of philosophy. They began on April 27, 1969: Kant . . . Beginning of modern thought. One could also say that this is Descartes (beginning of the 17th century). Descartes: a single important idea: absolute doubt. Here rationalism begins: subject everything to absolute doubt, until moment when reason forces us to accept an idea. (Basis for the phenomenology of Husserl). (Gombrowicz 2004a: 1) Thus, for Gombrowicz as for Beckett, Descartes is the key and philosophy a progression from Kant to Husserl and Heidegger. Gombrowicz always aims at linking forms with consciousness: Philosophy begins to deal with consciousness as something fundamental. Imagine an absolute night, with a single object. If this object does not encounter a consciousness capable of sensing its existence, then it does not exist. There is no individual consciousness, but consciousness in general. (The brain’s consciousness, etc.) The dog. Descartes, precursor of modern thought. Kant. Berkeley (rural youth). (Gombrowicz 2004a: 3)

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The aside on Berkeley’s youth in the Irish countryside fits well with Beckett’s sympathy for the immaterialist philosopher—one of those who refined the idea of phenomenology. After lively and competent discussions of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Gombrowicz decides to tackle Husserl’s phenomenology. He describes Husserl’s meticulous organization of the eidetic structure well. A revealing aside connects these remarks to his first novel: There is still one law of consciousness formulated by Husserl, called ‘the intentionality’ of consciousness, that is, that consciousness consists in being conscious. But in order to be conscious, one must always be conscious of something. And that means that consciousness can never be empty, separated from the object. This leads directly to Sartre’s notion of man, which says that man is not a being himself as objects are, but he is a being ‘for himself,’ that he is conscious of himself. This leads to the notion of man divided in two, with an empty space. It is for this reason that Sartre’s book is called Nothingness. This nothingness is a kind of water spray or Niagara Falls which always goes from the interior to the exterior. For example, I am conscious of this painting, my consciousness is not within me, it is in the painting (object of consciousness). Consciousness is, so to speak, outside of me. When I read that in Being and Nothingness, I shouted with enthusiasm, since it is precisely the notion of man which creates form and which cannot really be authentic. Ferdydurke fortunately appeared in 1937 and Being and Nothingness in 1943. And this is why someone kindly credits me with anticipating existentialism. Let us return to our task. I spoke of Husserl’s phenomenological method because it made existential philosophy possible. In truth, existentialism cannot produce any philosophy. (Gombrowicz 2004a: 52–3) It would take too long to gloss these fascinating notes in a manner that would do them justice. Let’s simply assert that for Gombrowicz, philosophy finds its true foundation in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. He then examines the philosophies of Heidegger and Nietzsche and ends with Structuralism. In an interview given just before his death, Gombrowicz proclaimed himself the first structuralist—this is not as fanciful as it seems, given his interest in form and formalism. This corresponds with Badiou’s reading, which reveals how Beckett’s operations reproduce the ‘methodical askesis’ that goes back to Descartes and Husserl, in their wish to ‘suspend’ everything that is inessential—this is the only rigorous way of reaching ‘the real’ and ‘the true’. All the trappings of the clownish humour and the nihilistic elements of despair and anxiety are always already instrumental in this context. Beckett reduces human subjects to

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paralyzed cripples, mere ectoplasms or shapes in a jar, fitting Winnie in a hole in the ground in Happy Days and imagining the Unnamable occasionally as an egg-like sphere with a few apertures. Beckett returns to Cartesian and Husserlian epoché (Badiou 2003: 44) that aims to expose what is truly ‘generic’ in man. Beckett initiates a systematic, serious investigation into thinking humanity by way of torture and destruction, in order to discover what resists, what remains indestructible. Such a fundamental indestructibility provides the foundation for a new ethics and a new aesthetics. This analysis would also apply to Ferdydurke. What stands out is Gombrowicz’s wish to treat Ferdydurke as a serious philosophical treatise, which he announced in his Preface to ‘The Child Runs Deep in Filidor’, a text that had been published separately: ‘[T]hat this construction from particles is not a mere construction, it is actually an entire philosophy which I’ll present here in the frivolous and frothy form of a carefree magazine article’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 70). Yet, this philosophy cannot be reduced to the struggle between the creative individual and oppressive social masks, as some early commentators believed. Gombrowicz criticizes this reductive reading in his diary, and to buttress this he formalizes the various levels at which the dialectic of form and immaturity works: (1) Human being created by form, in the profoundest, most general sense. (2) Human being as the creator, the indefatigable producer of form. (3) Human being degraded by form (always being an ‘under-’ or an ‘im-’— undereducated, immature). (4) Human being in love with immaturity. (5) Human being constituted by Inferiority and Youngness. (6) Human being subjected to the ‘interhuman’—a superior creative force, our only accessible divinity. (7) Human being for another human being, knowing no other authority. (8) Human being made dynamic, elevated and magnified by other people . . . . Do you want to reduce all of this to one single revolt against the social forms of being? (trans. modified by and quoted in Ziarek 1996: 216) Ziarek comments astutely: ‘By relentlessly reversing the hierarchies of high and low, profound and trivial, Gombrowicz resists turning the negativity of literary language—of the dissolution of form—into a new aesthetic value’ (Ziarek 1996: 209). This creates a double postulation, since on the one hand one needs forms to express oneself, while on the other these have to be constantly debased by ludicrous strategies of infantilization, unleashing immaturity, shameful inferiority and deliberate formlessness as unstoppable pandemics. It is in this context that we should understand sexuality as perversion: the praise of immaturity signals a triumphant return to the ‘polymorphous

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perverse’ stage. In Ferdydurke, the proliferation of hypocoristic words signifying ‘arse’ send us to the pupa as the foundation of the body, the opposite of form and the degree zero of the face. Yet Gombrowicz relished more the idea of social transgression (as a young man, he would chase young scullery maids and cleaning ladies; in Buenos Aires he would consort with pimps, sailors and homeless youths). He was horrified when critics compared him with Jean Genet, for instance. There is a similar double-standard in Murphy’s libidinal investments. He has entered the male world of Ticklepenny, Bim and Bom, Endon and all the psychotics when he leaves Celia behind. Is this in order to come to terms with his fundamental immaturity? The role of Ticklepenny appears in retrospect crucial—he watches Murphy naked on his rocker, and almost seduces him, but then is shocked to see him so catatonic that he fears Murphy (Beckett 1980: 108–9). Ticklepenny has replaced Celia in that he is indirectly responsible for Murphy’s death (it is he who rigged the makeshift contraption with the gas and the heater) even though he loves Murphy. Their first meeting is decisive, even if couched in derision. Ticklepenny emerges out of nowhere it seems, just when Murphy has managed to triumph over the maternal principle with Vera. He is the object of the author’s scorn and ridicule, yet Beckett’s parody of Austin Clarke is not devoid of complexity. He almost rapes Murphy who responds by playing possum (‘Murphy had such an enormous contempt for rape that he found it no trouble to go quite limp at the first sight of its application’ [Beckett 1980: 52]) In the garret scene, Ticklepenny is more attentive and concerned for Murphy’s sanity. His bond with the homosexual Bim and Bom makes of the asylum a male-dominated world, in which homoeroticism seems to be, if not encouraged, at least tolerated. This is a situation that recurs in Watt when Watt and Sam talk about Mr Knott in the asylum. In Murphy, the ‘butterfly kiss’ of Murphy to Mr Endon seals the former’s misunderstanding of the latter’s psychosis. In this way, Murphy discovers the Nothing, which generates intolerable anxiety and leads him to look for rest in the garret. But what kind of Nothing is this? Is it a Sartrean freedom defined by negativity, or a Nietzschean metaphysical nihilism? Ferdydurke poses the same question. This occurs at the end of the scene of the scandal in the Youngblood household, when all fight in a heap: Joey thinks that he can escape, he is alone and free, then realizes that the moment has passed: ‘No, it was all gone, I was neither young nor old, neither modern nor old-fashioned, neither the pupil nor the boy, neither mature nor immature, I was neither this nor that, I was nothing’ (Gombrowicz 2000: 190). This nothing proves to be a momentary illusion, for it turns out that there is really someone next to Joey: this is Kneadus, ready to look for ‘farmhands’ with him. A similar illusion of wordless autonomy brings Murphy as close to Mr Endon as is possible, after which he can only deplore his illusion—he falls into a state of Christ-like despair after the failure of his chess game with the schizophrenic. Moreover his death redeems nothing—life goes on for the other characters.

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Of course, we should be wary of blindly following such slippery parallels and allusions. This is something that is stated very explicitly by Gombrowicz who had not waited for Beckett’s famous reservation in Watt (‘No symbols where none intended’ [Beckett 1976: 255]) to tell his readers not to waste their time: ‘There are no symbols here, only associations. It should be taken exactly as it is written. I am never symbolic.’3 Gombrowicz wrote these words in a ‘Short Explanation’, a series of notes for the readers of the first edition of Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity/Recollections from Adolescence, which dates from 1933. Subsequently, and very consequently, he deleted his note. Whether we are still looking for symbols or not, it was no coincidence that Gombrowicz happened to be exiled to Buenos Aires. There, he found himself in a situation comparable to that of Ireland and Poland, two relatively marginal countries facing the main currents of European literature. This was exactly Borges’s point in his lecture on ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’. Borges quoted Thorstein Veblen’s account of the intellectual preeminence of Jews in Western culture: they act in this culture without feeling bound to it. According to Borges, this was true of Irish writers facing mainstream British culture, and even more of the Argentinians: ‘we can take on all the European subjects, take them on without superstition and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate consequences’ (Borges 1999: 426). Gombrowicz met Borges but found him too mannered and literary, although he liked his work. He wanted to be even more ‘minor’ than that. This is the Polish predicament, of which he was acutely aware. He stressed this cultural backwardness in discussions with Dominique de Roux. This would chime with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s assessment of Kafka, a writer whom they associate with the triumph of ‘minor literature’ (see Deleuze and Guattari 1986): Gombrowicz concurred when he repeatedly stated that one should never be afraid of appearing as a second-rate writer. Thus even the word ‘art’ should be avoided since it can ‘stick you with that disconcerting pupa’. The pupa is a ‘postérieur’ that is indistinguishable from an ‘apostérieuri’. Ferdydurke finds a confirmation in the rhetorical closure of Beckett’s 1938 text, ‘Les Deux Besoins’, in which the principles of science and the discourse of theology ‘feed the squalls of affirmative and negative farts out of which have come and still come the diarrheic aposterioris of Spirit and Matter’ (Beckett 1983: 56–7). The scatological tropes throw a somewhat new light on Beckett’s refusal to repeat or develop the literature already accomplished and perhaps exhausted by Proust and Joyce. The corrosive action of excremental immaturity on form makes form adhere more closely to the essentials, cling to the bare bones of life. I hope to have produced not a forced agreement but a dialogue of ‘Beckett with Gombrowicz’, in the spirit of Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’. Lacan used the historical simultaneity of the publication of the major works of Sade and Kant, concluding that one was the exact inverse of the other, that Sade’s cruelty stated the truth of Kant’s morals of impersonality. Beckett and Gombrowicz exhibit

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the same logic facing the ‘torture of the cogito’, even if Beckett appears on the side of form as form and Gombrowicz on the side of an immature undoing of forms. Both are aware that we are condemned to form, just as we are condemned to consciousness, exactly as Murphy is linked to his own name. Joey manages to escape for a while, although he behaves often like a collarless dog, who never responds to the master’s whistle. Murphy’s solution is contained less in the hero’s undecidable death (is it an accident or suicide?) than in his last encounter with negativity. By linking the Nothing to its final appearance (‘Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi.’ [Beckett 1980: 138]), we understand how truth is produced—as Badiou, following Lacan, has it, it is in the shape of a hole in the real. Having encountered this hole, Murphy can vanish—in other words, turn into the pure generic. He is not an exception any more, not a seedy solipsist isolated from the rest of the human race. This human race has also been brought closer to its companions, such as dogs or rats—or simply little children. Their immaturity is never a definitive state of mind, never an ontological category: it is just a momentary dissolution of all forms, a fugitive guffaw, an unstoppable fou rire. It is in farts, stutterings, drunken whoops and irrepressible hiccups, similar to those of Aristophanes in the Symposium, that one can benefit from a regenerative embarrassment of Form.

Notes 1

2 3

See Gombrowicz’s comment on the popularity of these idioms (Gombrowicz 2004c: 4–5). Quoted in Bill Johnston’s ‘Afterword’ to Bacacay (Gombrowicz 2004b: 272). Quoted in Bill Johnston’s ‘Afterword’ to Bacacay (Gombrowicz 2004b: 275).

Bibliography Ackerley, C. J. (2004), Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books. Badiou, A. (2003), On Beckett. Ed. A. Toscano and N. Power. Manchester: Clinamen Press. Bataille, G. (1985), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Ed. and trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Beckett, S. (1965), Murphy. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —(1976), Watt. London: Calder. —(1980), Murphy. London: Picador. —(1983), Disjecta. London: Calder. Borges, J. L. (1999), ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, in Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. and trans. E. Weinberger. New York, NY: Penguin, pp. 420–7.

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Deleuze, G. (2000), Proust and Signs. Trans. R. Howard. London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. D. Polan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gombrowicz, W. (1933), Pamie˛tnik z okresu dojrzewania [Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity]. Warsaw: Rój. —(1947), ‘Note sur la traduction’ (reprinted in Gombrowicz 1984). —(1980), Possessed, or the secret of Myslotch. London: M. Boyars. —(1984), Gombrowicz en Argentine: Témoignages et documents 1939–1963. Paris: Denoël. —(2000), Ferdydurke. Trans. D. Borchardt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. —(2004a), A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. Translated from French by B. Ivry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. —(2004b), Bacacay. Trans. B. Johnston. New York, NY: Archipelago Books. —(2004c), Polish Memories. Trans. B. Johnston. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Husserl, E. (1999), Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. D. Cairns. Dordrecht; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Joyce, J. (1939), Finnegans Wake. London: Faber. Lewis, S. (1922), Babbitt. New York: Modern Library. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1971), Ireland and the Irish Question. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Rabaté, J.-M. (2005), ‘Unbreakable B’s: From Beckett and Badiou to the Bitter End of Affirmative Ethics’, in G. Riera (ed.), Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 87–108. —(2007), 1913: The Cradle of Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Woodworth, R. S. (1931), Contemporary Schools of Psychology. London: Methuen & Co. Ziarek, E. P. (ed.) (1996), The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. —(1998), Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Žižek, S. (2004), Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York, NY and London: Routledge.

Chapter 7

Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other Steven Matthews

When Beckett’s postwar writings touch upon those facets of experience so beloved of phenomenological philosophy, namely subjectivity and embodied perception, they devote particularly anguished attention to what Beckett calls in Proust ‘this predominating condition and circumstance—Time’ (Beckett 1987: 12–13). Beckett’s defence of abstraction, for example in the Dialogue ‘Tal Coat’, which notoriously becomes a defining characteristic of his late style, meditates on the relation of subjectivity to that which lies outside it, in very specific yet complex ways. As one ‘speaker’ puts it, ‘Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. Question of degree.’ And, the riposte comes, ‘More. The tyranny of the discreet overthrown. The world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation’ (Beckett 1984: 138). Beckett complicates the issue liberatingly here. The Heraclitean flux, when acknowledged artistically, assumes into itself the moment, ‘living time’, as it renders the ‘total object’. It shows the marks of— the ‘effort’—of doing so, but also the freedoms which such an aesthetic achieves.1 In similar vein comes Beckett’s acknowledgement that there is an intractable and resistant relation between the perceiving artist and the ‘total object’ (‘L’objet de la répresentation résiste toujours à la représentation’) of ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ (1948). As Beckett himself sonorously admits at the start of the paragraph in which this phrase occurs: ‘L’histoire de la peinture est l’histoire de ses rapports avec son objet’ (Beckett 1984: 135). The history of painting is a history of adaptation between creator and the objects of creation. Aesthetics cannot occlude such historical pressures as they exist within the work of art, but also as they act upon it. My argument here is that it is Beckett’s anguished

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attention to issues of temporality and history, as they manifest themselves within and behind his writings, taken together with questions about subjectivity, embodiedness and perception, which mark the proximity of his fictions to the philosophical writing of his day. Subjectivity, embodiedness and perception are themselves, after all, similarly determined by ‘predominating conditions’. It is Beckett’s alertness and sensitivity to the specific yet locating anguish of his own time which brings about the key turn in his writing during the Second World War, into the mid-1950s, and beyond. ‘Time’, then, not simply as historical and therefore narrative continuity, but as the issue for modern writing, as the ‘predominating’ inflictor of victimhood and imprisonment, the ensurer of the hampered creatureliness of Beckett’s fictional creations, but also of that of their creator. It is the movement of this understanding, from its origin as an aperc¸u of the young Beckett-the-critic, to its characteristic specificity within his own writing, which I wish, however inadequately, to map here in relation to those phenomenological implications which ‘partake’ of the ‘living time’ both within and around Beckett’s writings. In the preamble to a 1951 lecture, ‘Man and Adversity’, in which he reviewed what he called ‘this transformation of our understanding of man’ which had been achieved in philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century, Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out that [t]he great or valuable work is never an effect of life, but it is always a response to life’s very particular events or most general circumstances. Although the writer is free to say yes or no to such circumstances, and to justify and limit his refusal or assent in different ways, he never can arrange things so that he does not have to choose his life in a certain historical landscape which excludes certain solutions even if it imposes none. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 24–5) It is that ‘historical landscape’ which seems to me to be the oft-missing term that needs to stand alongside ‘subjectivity’, ‘embodiedness’ and ‘perception’ in critiques of this strand of modern philosophy; a term which dominates a writer’s particular impulsions towards these questions and areas of experience, as well as dominating the changes in his relation to these questions detectable across his career. Beckett’s is a work which increasingly operates from a position which excludes ‘certain solutions’, narrative or perceptual, while implying a ‘historical landscape’ from which it is unable to free itself. For there is a very real shift between the character of Murphy and his precursor Belacqua, and the protagonists which Beckett began creating through Watt to the first fictions in French. With Belacqua and Murphy we are presented with creatures actively striving, however absurdly, to make sense of, or translate a sense of, meaning. They therefore, and paradoxically, in the process make themselves vulnerable to rebuttal or extinction by a deus ex machina. With the

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subsequent fiction and drama, the fascination—comic or otherwise—with such unlikely concepts as Murphy’s mind has receded. From the Four Novellas onward, Beckett’s protagonists (his tramps and indigents) commence from a situation of loss, abandonment, expulsion, bereavement or similar abjection, and seek to retrieve or recreate the settledness and assurance which has already been withdrawn before the so-called action of the narrative begins. These two phases of characterization, the one in which consciousness seeks to dominate circumstance, perhaps, and the other in which consciousness is originally dominated by it, are inevitably related. But there is also a gulf between these two phases. In the process of being moved from what I have called one phase to the next, as we shall see, tropes of mutuality, towards which Beckett had typically been drawn (esse est percipi), take on a new urgency in his writing, and the dramatic and generic necessity of his work emerges fully.2 Such tropes of mutuality, of course, also dominate the philosophy of Beckett’s day, and are most eloquently linked to the ‘historical landscape’ from which they ultimately derive by Merleau-Ponty, whose work I shall discuss alongside Beckett’s own. Beckett’s radio talk, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ (written in 1944), which was never transmitted, and which focuses on Beckett’s experiences as a storekeeper for the Irish Red Cross Hospital at Saint-Lô, provides a rare account of some of the features and identifications of this ‘gulf’. The piece begins and ends by assuring the (presumably Irish) intended audience about the comparative permanence of the prefabricated huts which form the Hospital, certainly when compared with the devastation around. The huts show ‘finish’; ‘there is real glass in the windows’ (Beckett 1995: 275). By the end of the piece, this assurance has been applied by Beckett to the act of naming itself, and with pointed resonance now. The huts, ‘when they have been turned into dwellings’, will remain ‘the Irish huts’ (Beckett 1995: 278). Between these framing upbeat notes to ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, however, there is a good deal of makeshift confusion of categories on the one side, and misapprehension on the other, which make this final assertion of nationally inflected continuity and pre-fabricated permanence seem more troubled. ‘The walls and ceiling of the operating theatre are sheeted in aluminium of aeronautic origin,’ we are told, ‘a pleasant variation on the sword and ploughshare metamorphosis’ (Beckett 1995: 275). But this kind of makeshift is, Beckett insists, likely to be uninteresting in the light of his feeling that the difficulties suffered by the Irish Hospital were caused because proper and necessary relations could not be established with the French (‘their way of being we, was not our way’ [Beckett 1995: 277]), and the fact that a good deal of derision was expressed between the two parties. In the light of this disappointment, Beckett is moved in his closing paragraph of ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ to muse upon other contrasts and failures, transporting us from the immediate circumstance of his topic (it will take 10 years to reconstruct Saint-Lô) towards general understanding and mooted possibility.

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‘ “Provisional” is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional’, he asserts, before venturing in his closing phrases that some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France. (Beckett 1995: 278) The passage is not without its own moments of derision. Alongside the mimicked reassurance to the Irish public that their charity towards the Red Cross has not been wasted, and that their emergent, although non-combatant, nation has made its contribution to European recovery, there is set the translation of that ‘vision’ of ‘humanity in ruins’ back into the home country through certain witnesses. Yet that conception is also ‘time-honoured’, a desperate sneer which renders the concluding rhythm and tone of the succeeding phrase uncertain: ‘an inkling [odd precious word] of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’ (Beckett 1995: 278). ‘Thought again’ as a renewal, a rethinking of the issues which led to the ruins, or ‘thought again’ as simple recurrence in spite of what it is impossible to face or to think? In this tonal uncertainty is contained the shift which I am pointing to in Beckett’s positioning of his creatures, from his pre-war, to his wartime and postwar writings—the move from potential mastery and recovery of a situation in history, to a repeated sense that such potentiality, however nonsensical it had appeared in the first place, is no longer possible through ‘vision’, which must now be alone ‘vision’ as ‘time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’. This is what it meant to ‘have been in France’, as Beckett of course had been absolutely in France, in contrast to many of the Irish Red Cross workers; this is what he ‘got’. Language has lost its specific and local referent here. ‘Provisional’, as a term applied to a specific situation and understanding, does not mean in the face of the universally provisional which now pertains. As Merleau-Ponty asserts in the later phase of his review of half a century’s ‘thought’: Man is absolutely distinct from animal species, but precisely in the respect that he has no original equipment and is the place of contingency, which sometimes takes the form of a kind of miracle (in the sense in which men have spoken of the miracle of Greece), and sometimes in the sense of an unintentional adversity. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 240) To ‘have spoken’ of the miracle of former civilizations is not to exist humanly, in the present of adversity and contingency. Humanity in these circumstances transcends animal being only in the momentary awareness of its forming the

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ground, the consciousness and the physical body upon which contingency is enacted. This is the ‘crisis’ of modern humanity which Merleau-Ponty’s precursor, Edmund Husserl, diagnosed in his later writings, a ‘crisis’ formed out of a conflict in which once stable forms of what Husserl calls scientific or ‘objective’ truth are set against a determining and irresolvable, an ultimately ‘fragmentary’, interiority (Husserl 1965: 184). The pivotal crisis moment in Beckett’s fiction, from this point of view, comes with Watt’s famous reflections upon the visit of the Galls, father and son, to Mr Knott’s house. After having seen the piano tuned, the Galls take on a different character for Watt, who, we are told, was obliged, ‘because of his peculiar character, to enquire into what they meant, oh not into what they really meant, his character was not so peculiar as all that, but into what they might be induced to mean’. Watt’s ambition in this event, however, is thwarted and distressed, not because he cares about what happened, but because he comes to understand that nothing happened, and that it continued to happen in his mind, he supposed, though he did not know exactly what that meant, and though it seemed to be outside him, before him, and so on, inexorably. (Beckett 1970: 71–3) What remains to Watt is a sense of the nothing which underwrites the incident in its ‘utmost formal distinctness’. Watt’s subsequent and systematic deformation in the asylum in part III of the novel displays Beckett’s alertness to the harrowing of humanity once it is subjected to such ‘formal’ logic—writing, as he began to write Watt, while on the run during the War. In seeking and failing to read the event of the Galls’ visit, Watt noticeably becomes not only other than himself, but other to himself (‘it seemed to be outside him, before him’). In attempting to think his way out of the Husserlian ‘crisis’ of interiorized fragmentation, similar to the experience Beckett’s creature Watt at this pivotal point in the text also seems to undergo, MerleauPonty, in his immediately postwar Phenomenology of Perception, argues that [f]or the ‘other’ to be more than an empty word, it is necessary that my existence should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but it would take in also the awareness that one may have of it, and thus include my incarnation in some nature and the possibility, at least, of an historical situation. The Cogito must reveal me in a situation. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: xiv) Faced with a philosophical ‘crisis’ at this particular historical moment, in other words, Merleau-Ponty conceives of phenomenology as a tendency towards the world, a tendency which unites, through the self’s perception of objects which offer themselves to the perceiver, an extreme subjectivism with an extreme objectivism. If the individual selfhood is created by its thought, what it must

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think is the ‘situation’ in which thought occurs. The self is dramatized in the act of thinking itself, at least possibly, in history. Phenomenology under this aegis, in other words, bridges that historical gulf which I have described earlier as existing between the consciousnesses of Beckett’s pre- and postwar characters, and resituates the cogito in a historical perspective which, as it were, heals the wound. The subject enters history through this process of self-othering, the ability to conceive of itself as others might—a positing of an adjustment which might ensure peaceful understanding between the two. As my later discussion of Texts for Nothing and other postwar writings will reveal, for Beckett as for Merleau-Ponty it is through self-othering that we not only enter history, but also through self-othering that we become vulnerable to the immediate historical ‘situation’. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s classic text, The Phenomenology of Perception, seems haunted, as Beckett’s abject postwar characters are, by the possibility that such union between interior and exterior consciousnesses might not be achievable at this moment. At the beginning of his chapter on ‘Sense Experience’, for example, Merleau-Ponty conceives of the historical consciousness in a very different way to that of his text’s otherwise more seamless moments: In so far as we believe in the world’s past, in the physical world, in ‘stimuli’, in the organism as our books depict it, it is first of all because we have present to us at this moment a perceptual field, a surface in contact with the world, a permanent rootedness in it, and because the world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash around a wreck on the shore. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 240–1) There is conflict then, in Merleau-Ponty’s way of thinking, between the calm presence of the ‘perceptual field’ and the images of assault and adversity assailing an already established wreckage. Our ‘permanent rootedness’ in the world does not act as resistance to, but here, rather, in contrast to the assault which continues in spite of us. In establishing his sense of the proper phenomenological relation of subject and object elsewhere in The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty contentiously draws upon case studies of the afflicted, including that of the wrecked, brain-damaged, immobile, soldier from the First World War, Schneider. Having carried forward what he describes as a new methodology, an ‘existential analysis’, upon Schneider’s various inabilities to relate perception to consciousness, Merleau-Ponty assures his reader, rather, that ‘to see as man sees and to be Mind are synonymous’. Yet, at the moment at which this phenomenological rapprochement is laid down, Merleau-Ponty has to move away towards a more uneasy recoil: In so far as consciousness is consciousness of something only by allowing its furrow to trail behind it, and in so far as, in order to conceive an object one

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must rely on a previously constructed ‘world of thought’, there is always some degree of depersonalization at the heart of consciousness. Hence the principal of an intervention from outside: consciousness may be ailing, the world of its thoughts may collapse into fragments . . . it cannot be consciousness without playing upon significances given either in the absolute past of nature or in its own personal past, and because any form of lived experience tends towards a certain generality whether that of our habits or that of our ‘bodily functions’. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 158) At these moments in his text, it is not impossible to feel that Merleau-Ponty’s consciousness is haunted by such examples as Schnieder’s, tentatively shoring its superstructure and world of habits against shattering collapse. Later in the book, Merleau-Ponty manifests similar recoil, arguing that ‘Even if I become absorbed in the experience of my body and in solitary sensations, I do not succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world.’ Then, several sentences later, he sees a ‘slipping away’ of such substance, a ‘foreshadowing’, a possibility of the body (and thence of consciousness) falling prey to what he calls ‘an active nothingness’. Again, even later in the book, he asks himself ‘do we know whether plenary objectivity can be conceived? . . . There may well be, either in sensory experience or in each consciousness, “phantoms” which no rational approach can account for’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 191, 255). Phenomenological consciousness, the fact that we are ‘in the world’ and that from experience derives all knowledge, is then rapidly reasserted by Merleau-Ponty to steady the trajectory of his argument, but the gulf—Husserl’s ‘crisis’, the debilities of the historical situation—has been opened. Such phenomenological consciousness, in so far as it can be conceived, is partly haunted by the irrational ‘phantoms’ of the ‘absolute past of nature’, a ‘personal past’, what Merleau-Ponty also calls ‘prehistory’: ‘there would be no present . . . if perception, in Hegel’s words, did not retain a past in the depths of the present’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 279). That haunting, and irrationality, is what enters randomly into the account, a shadow through which phenomenology’s unificatory purpose might not be achieved. It is asserted that ‘Man, as a concrete being, is not a psyche attached to an organism’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 101). Yet the relation between the two seems unregulated in the medium of time and, implicitly, through history, a ‘movement to and fro of existence which at one time allows itself to take corporeal form and at others moves towards personal acts’. Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion to The Phenomenology of Perception returns us to a place, after its various hauntings and counterassertions, in which, as literary critics, we feel at home: Let us suppose that a man is tortured to make him talk . . . . What withstands pain is not a bare consciousness . . . but the prisoner with his comrades or with those he loves and under whose gaze he lives; or else the awareness of his proudly willed solitude, which again is a certain mode of the Mit-Sein. And

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probably the individual in his prison daily reawakens these phantoms, which give back to him the strength he gave to them. But conversely, in so far as he has committed himself to this action, formed a bond with his comrades or adopted this morality, it is because the historical situation, the comrades, the world around him seemed to him to expect that conduct from him. The analysis could be pursued endlessly in this way. We choose our world and the world chooses us. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 527) At one limit of the spectrum of ‘existential analysis’ stands the endless talking cure of Freudian psychoanalysis; at the other, an endless fretting away at the nature of the communal ‘historical situation’ expressed through ‘bare consciousness’. On the one side is the pre-reflective and primordial consciousness, ‘the core of primary meaning around which the acts of naming and expression take shape’.3 On the other, experience which might ‘present me with other people, since otherwise I should have no occasion to speak of solitude’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 419). And standing over the whole spectrum, in this historical situation, as Merleau-Ponty concludes elsewhere, is ‘fear of contingency’, which is ‘everywhere, even in the doctrines which helped reveal it’. Fear of contingency is partly fear of division, of non-relationship between people and peoples, as envisaged also by Beckett at Saint-Lô; ‘the discussions of our time’, as Merleau-Ponty calls them, are ‘so convulsive . . . because in recognizing—without any intervening veil—the menace of adversity, it is perhaps closer than any other to recognizing the metamorphoses of Fortune’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 242–3). Beckett’s protagonists of the immediate postwar period seem inscribed by, and to be predicated upon, such menace and actual adversity; exiled, expelled, and unable, even in death, ever to come to rest. Amongst much else, this would seem to be what Beckett’s self-othering move to writing in French yielded: the sudden advent of a host of creatures alternatively imprisoned in rooms, failed bodies, dustbins, and (later) in cylinders and quadrilaterals; or, on the other hand, living an unhoused, indigent, semi-feral existence in byres and ditches. Both alternatives yield creatures hampered in their ability to act, to intervene in the world, or to make sense of it, in a variant of consciousness as an unsettled and unsettling wise passiveness. This, and an often desperate and countervailing quest for mutuality, are the radical markers of the ‘historical situation’ upon Beckett’s writing, and the foundation of his uniqueness.4 The sense of change, of irremediable alteration, which underlies the heightened postwar feeling for the provisional, is captured at the beginning of text 7 of the 1950–51 Texts for Nothing, through a fret that something of the speaker’s past life might have been unassayed or ungrasped: This tone is promising, it is more like that of old, of the days and nights when in spite of all I was calm, treading back and forth the futile road, knowing it short and easy seen from Sirius, and deadly calm at the heart of my frenzies.

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My question, I had a question, ah yes did I try everything, I can see it still, but it’s passing. (Beckett 1995: 127) Beckett’s original French version of the phrase ‘deadly calm’, ‘d’un calme de mort, au coeur de mes frénésies’, carries a whole other resonance, of a centering and continuing rest at the heart of the need to know that all of the world had been experienced, or at least all of the world in which, we are told, ‘there was a chance of my being, where once I used to lurk’ (Beckett 1958: 162; 1995: 127). This is a world in which imagined perspective, ‘easy seen’, could hold. That holding is more evident in the original French. The English rendering, ‘deadly’, is somehow more sinister. Part of Beckett’s unease in these postwar texts is an unease between languages and associations. In the ‘now’ of other Texts for Nothing, that calmness which exists does so amidst a vigilance and radical decentredness, an enforced ‘depersonalization’ (to draw in the word applied by Merleau-Ponty to the war-victim Schneider): My keepers, why keepers, I’m in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it’s to make me think I’m a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away . . . . Other times it’s like ghouls, naked and soft as worm, they grovel round me gloating on the corpse, but I have no more success dead than dying. Other times it’s great clusters of bones . . . . It’s varied, my life is varied, I’ll never get anywhere. (Beckett 1995: 123) ‘Frantic with corporeality’ is an amazing re-rendition, rather than translation, of the original’s ‘gonflé de présence’ (Beckett 1958: 154), which is something literally more like ‘swollen with presence’, odd in itself, but giving a sense of the keepers’ slight fear and disgust at him they consider a prisoner. More intriguing, in terms of the attendant ‘historical situation’, is the curtailing in this English passage of the original’s ‘en faire céder les murs, les murailles, les frontières’ (1958: 154) into ‘rearing to get out and away’ (1995: 123). The original keepers’ projected fear that the speaker might make fall or break down the walls, or ramparts, or frontiers, potentially holds a different, local and national impulsion. Underpinning Texts for Nothing is a sense of ejection, what text 8 calls the ‘past’ which ‘has thrown me out, its gates have slammed behind me, or I have burrowed my way out alone’ (Beckett 1995: 132). In this, of course, the turnof-the-1950s Texts reprise the situation from the immediate postwar novellas, The End, The Expelled, The Calmative and First Love, all of which were written alongside the first novel in French, Mercier and Camier, in a great outpouring in 1946. (The Textes were, of course, bound together with the Nouvelles in the Éditions de Minuit publications of the two in 1955 and 1958.) The End, the novella Beckett wrote first, was published for the first time as a fragment in Les Temps Modernes, the journal which had been recently founded by Merleau-Ponty

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and Jean-Paul Sartre.5 In some ways it is the rawest of these postwar analyses of abjection, and therefore the novella which wears its mechanisms and governing ambition closest to its textual surface. The End signals the philosophical implication of narrating the meanderings of its expelled character—literally clothed in a dead man’s clothes—through his reminiscing about the copy of Geulincx’s Ethics which had been given to him by a former tutor. The unnamed protagonist of The End finds himself an ‘exhibit’, victim of a political harangue, a harangue which becomes street theatre, as he stands at his daily unemployment, begging in the street: He was bellowing so loud that snatches of his discourse reached my ears. Union . . . brothers . . . Marx . . . capital . . . bread and butter . . . love. It was all Greek to me . . . . It never enters your head, resumed the orator, that your charity is a crime, an incentive to slavery, stultification and organized murder. Take a good look at this living corpse. You may say it’s his own fault. (Beckett 1995: 94) ‘Stultification’ is a dictionary version of Beckett’s original French word, ‘abetissement’ (Beckett 1958: 102), which retains an etymological connection to the ‘animal’ (Beckett 1995: 94). The protagonist of The End is the first of several such figures in Beckett, including Molloy and Malone from the Trilogy, who finds himself in a single room having his meals delivered, and his chamberpot emptied, by an anonymous woman on a regular basis—a return to a primal scene of mothering, but also setting the speaker of the tale in the position of an animal in a zoo (‘Who will bring me food? To the Zoo’, is an odd concatenation in The Expelled of the orders the protagonist gives to a cab driver [Beckett 1995: 53]). A troubled relation between the animal and the human, which underwrites notions of the pre-conscious in the philosophy of the period, also determines the troubled self-characterization of Beckett’s creatures, as the residual echoes of the French ‘abetissement’ suggest. Taken more broadly, however, the politically motivated imposition in the orator’s exhibiting of the protagonist in The End is implicitly set against the ethical understanding which that speaker has derived from Geulincx: the notion that the body, and bodily affliction such as that suffered by this protagonist, is not in causal relation or connection to some broader situation of guilt, or of false and faulty consciousness. Whatever the virtues of the orator’s politics, his exhibition of the beggar is abusive. In his renewed attention to the ‘frantic . . . corporeality’ of his creations, and to their own attention towards the external world as it is filtered through to them in ‘snatches’, Beckett is forced to reconsider the relation of his own reading and understanding to political questions. In these early postwar texts, in other words, we find in Beckett’s understanding of the ‘historical situation’, and consequent stripping away of the lifecircumstances of his protagonists, an opening out to a broader, ethically

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founded politics, in which a proper relation between the self and others remains the central but irresolvable concern.6 In these works, we find Beckett wrestling, as Merleau-Ponty did also, with a profound ambition, one which seeks to mediate and overcome that ‘crisis’ which Husserl diagnosed in Europe. What this brings about is a significant generic shift in Beckett’s writing, through which the understanding of consciousness melds with the reaching out towards others, to create the explicitly (and often failedly) dialogic and dramatic foundations of Beckett’s work, in both the theatre and on the page, across the rest of his career (Eleutheria dates, of course, to 1947). The drama of the failed desire for connection beyond the self, and of two linked but othered selves, is reprised again and again in Beckett’s writing. It is on the surface of Mercier and Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, Eh Joe and also the very late texts including Company and Footfalls. But it seems particularly urgent in the short texts written in the 5 years after the War’s end, the novellas which in many ways look forward to the Trilogy, and the Texts for Nothing which, in turn, predict the manoeuvres of the late prose. There is in these late voices a wish to escape from the problem of relation, and from the problem of the other, through an emotional autism which is at the same time ridiculed by what narrative there is. The speaker of First Love urges upon us a ‘dispeopled kingdom’ which involves the ‘dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the nonself and even the world’ (Beckett 1995: 31, 38). He poses the question, as he stares at his lover, whether faces can ‘be described as objects?’ (Beckett 1995: 38). After visiting a church, the speaker of The Calmative fantasizes committing a murder or being killed, before asking ‘Into what nightmare thingness am I fallen?’ ‘To know I had a being, however faint and false, outside of me, once had the power to stir my heart,’ as the first-person narrator of The End fondly and nostalgically recalls (Beckett 1995: 69, 97). ‘Once had the power’, but presumably no more. The projection of self as other, which sustains so many of these late speakers, is sometimes seen as best occluded within a mortal numbness. Such dramatic gestures reach their fullest intensity, perhaps, in the twelfth of the Texts for Nothing, which begins with a night scene and a seeing of the ‘impossible body’, a ‘veteran, inured to days and nights’: [T]here are voices everywhere, ears everywhere, one who speaks saying, without ceasing to speak, Who’s speaking?, and one who hears, mute, uncomprehending, far from all, and bodies everywhere, bent, fixed . . . . And none will wait, him no more than the others, none ever waited for me to die for me to live in him, so as to die with him, but quick quick all die saying, Quick, quick let us die, without him, as we lived, before it’s too late, lest we won’t have lived. And this other now, obviously, what’s to be said of this latest other, with his babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims, this other without

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number of person whose abandoned being we haunt, nothing. (Beckett 1995: 150) This is a hallucinatory battlefield in which self and other are locked together in a wish for mutual extinction as an ultimate guarantee of knowledge, the self thwarted in wishing to be confirmed by the other at the moment of death.7 But in the ‘now’ we have the ‘homeless’ and ‘untenanted’ others, like the creatures that haunt Beckett’s writing, but in a world which is itself already haunted by the ‘bodies everywhere’ of modern history. All is cast adrift within and before death in this postwar writing, which seeks to dramatize and inherently politicize the relation with others, to cast the imagination itself as an exemplary instance of such a relation. The protagonist of The Expelled recalls that [w]hen I was younger I thought life would be good in the middle of a plain and went to the Luneburg Heath. With the plain in my head I went to the heath. There were other heaths far less remote, but a voice kept saying to me, It’s the Luneburg heath you need. The element lune must have had something to do with it. And the Luneburg heath was most unsatisfactory, most unsatisfactory. I came home disappointed, and at the same time relieved. (Beckett 1995: 50) Luneburg Heath, the year before Beckett wrote The Expelled, had been the place where more than a million German soldiers surrendered to General Montgomery, bringing the war in Europe to an end. The French is more direct, but unlocated: ‘il ferait bon vivre au milieu de la plaine’ (Beckett 1958: 18). ‘The element lune’ offers, so far as I understand it, a nice translingual joke on the protagonist, since ‘lune’ has no meaning in German, only in Romance languages’ association of moonfed lunacy. Psychology and history, again. The speaker’s unsatisfaction with the Heath and with what took place there is Beckett’s: ‘unconditional surrender’ at the end of the Second World War did not mediate the gap between desire and reality, or lay to rest the voices from elsewhere which unsettle and haunt the postwar world and its most unique writings. Such recurring tropes, through which the abject, hampered or prone protagonist ceaselessly yet futilely reaches out towards another, determine the basis of Beckett’s historical responsiveness, of his dramatic, political imagination. Perhaps paradoxically, this basis is more immediately evident within the discursiveness of the prose than within the staged events of the actual drama. How It Is, the last extended prose text, provides the most sustained exposition of these trends in the later work, from amidst the nuclear nightmare of the 1960s. As an accumulation of panted moments, the piece exposes a desperate search for mutuality, but also the potential torturing vindictiveness of all relationship.

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It achieves this through a speaker, like that of the battlefield of ‘Text for Nothing’ 12, mired in the mud and reduced to a creatureliness from which the writing emanates, and upon which it is inscribed. ‘[W]hat comfort in adversity others what comfort’ speculates the speaker at the end of Part I of How It Is, the part ‘before’ the arrival of the other, or the self-as-other, alongside him in the mud (Beckett 1964: 53). But, by now, Beckett has come to realize the economic underpinning of such tropes of mutual possibility: having discussed the ‘company’ which arises from the ticking of the watch (time passing) upon the other’s wrist, the speaker’s attention moves immediately towards the issue of naming: no more than I by his own account or my imagination he had no name any more than I so I gave him one the name Pim for more commodity more convenience its off again in the past (Beckett 1964: 66) In generating the other, for this moment ‘Pim’, out of himself, and in naming it, the speaker is creating an expression which can enter circulation through the economy of language, a name which can be changed, exchanged, bartered.8 While ‘company’ would have made this speaker, he asserts, ‘different’, ‘universal’, the perpetual urge to re-circulate his capital goes along with a desperation to fix, once and for all, the product by inscribing its name upon the body of the other, ‘to carve . . . on Pim’s back . . . YOU PIM’ (Beckett 1964: 77–8). In the absence of verifiable recognition of the other body alongside him in the mud, the speaker reacts by torturing and tormenting him, and receives knocks and blows in return. In this aggressive, mutually destructive, later work of self-othering, Beckett conceives more intensely the relation of torment to song; the need to obtain response from the world leads to a momentary transcendence, to the day when clawed in the armpit instead of crying he sings his song the song ascends in the present its off again in the present (Beckett 1964: 70) But the urge to torment is also perpetual. The speaker uses the other’s body as a holder, jabbing a can-opener into its thighs, its arse. ‘All the rest its promises its solaces all imagination’: the speaker-as-creator cannot trust in the creature of his imagination. Yet, ‘when Pim stops what becomes of me but first the bodies glued together’ (Beckett 1964: 88, 99). This text is, at least in part, a ‘notebook for the body’, an engagement with self-as-body which is always and inevitably an engagement with the body of the other. But in this very engagement lies the torment, the agony of self-othering: according as left or right north or south tormentor or victim these words too strong tormentor always of the same and victim always of the same and now

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alone journeying abandoned all alone nameless all these words too strong almost all a little too strong I say it as I hear it (Beckett 1964: 124) The self-exculpatory bluff-empiricism of the last intonation here belies the tangle of victimhood and torturing which, the text suggests, enact Beckett’s developed understanding of humanity in these circumstances, as it had seemed to do the peroration of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The aloneness and the namelessness, the abandonment, lead to an inability to connect, which fails to relieve the Dantean sense of a world permeated with viciousness and suffering. Beckett’s increased concentration upon these qualities towards the end of his career, his awareness of the drama involved in needing to negotiate and feel the ‘gaps’ in language and the world, and his exacerbated sense of contingency (‘each instant each ceased’ [Beckett 1964: 132]), impel an urgent understanding of the ethical and political necessity to achieve such negotiation with the world without. How It Is presents a world of tormentors and victims familiar from the experience of the Second World War; the diggings into and carvings upon the body reimagine its torments, as does its mathematics of torture (‘814326 to 814325’ [Beckett 1964: 130]). In the postwar situation, there is no resolution; the past haunts the present, the present the past, ‘so things may change no answer end no answer I may choke’ (Beckett 1964: 160).

Notes 1

2

3

4

Earlier critics considering Beckett and phenomenology have often neglected this ‘predominating condition’ in their discussion. See Garner (1993: 447), and the more extended treatments of these issues from Hesla (1971) to Butler (1984) and Trezise (1990). John Pilling has described the ‘remarkable’, ‘affirmative’ sense of relationship which appears in Beckett’s postwar writings, the sought-for ‘peaceful coexistence’ which underwrites them (Pilling 1997: 190–1). As will become clear, I share something of Pilling’s alertness to this shift, but am more tentative with regard to its effect upon Beckett’s writings. My argument, rather, emphasizes the time-conditioned provisionality of this and subsequent work, its inevitably endless openness. Jacques Derrida has criticised the ‘phenomenological reduction’ which he sees implicated in notions of self-presence: ‘The certitude of inner existence, Husserl thinks, has no need to be signified.’ Beckett, like Derrida, would doubt the self’s ability to actually live such ideal certainties. See Derrida (1973: 43). While I share Lance St. John Butler’s view that there is something Heideggerian about Beckett’s understanding of the ‘inescapable bond between the Self and the Other’ (Butler 1984: 33), I disagree that this is solely ontological, rather than ‘social or psychological’. The one cannot exist without the other: the tramps and

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indigents signify in themselves, and are not simply interchangeable with other characters or symbols. James Knowlson gives an account of the various resentments and misunderstandings which led to the latter part of this text not being printed in the journal (Knowlson 1999: 358–9). For Merleau-Ponty there is an inevitable connection between ‘our relations with the world, and our past’, history, and politics, as exemplified, for example, in his consideration of class and revolutionary consciousness in Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 514–20). His emphasis is that the movement towards collective political freedom mirrors the freedom to choose of the individual and the artist (‘[I am] a consciousness which freely evaluates itself as a middle class or a proletarian consciousness . . . . The revolutionary movement, like the work of an artist, is an intention which itself creates its instruments and its means of expression.’). In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological celebration of individual freedom as the trigger for political movements, however, lies the origin of his dispute with Sartre in the early 1950s, which led to MerleauPonty resigning from Les Temps Modernes. Defending himself against the now proCommunist Sartre’s charge that he had ceased political engagement and that he believed philosophy to operate independently of politics, Merleau-Ponty stressed his refusal to offer an immediate response to events (‘the event cannot be appreciated in the entirety of a politics which changes the meaning of it’). He then argued in this letter of 1953 for the political efficacy of a ‘healthy ambiguity’ which affirms ‘the basic agreement and disagreement de facto between the individual, others and the truth’, as opposed to the certainties of ‘professional politics.’ Instead (and I would argue that in this his position can be compared with Beckett’s), Merleau-Ponty concludes in favour of ‘engagement’ which is not ruled by ‘the dilemmas in politics of today’. ‘The greatest part of action takes place . . . in the thick stratum of symbolic actions which operate less by their efficacy than by their meaning. To this zone belong books, lectures, but also meetings’ (Stewart 1998: 338, 340, 350). I am grateful to Dr Nathalie Aubert for providing me with the source from which these quotations derive. Jacques Derrida raises important points about such instances of self-confirmation in The Gift of Death (1995: 41). Thomas Trezise has some illuminating comments on ‘the indeterminate subjectivity of discourse itself’ in his discussion of The Unnamable (Trezise 1990: 159).

Bibliography Beckett, S. (1958), Nouvelles et Textes Pour Rien. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. —(1964), How It Is. London: John Calder. —(1970), Watt. London: Calder & Boyars. —(1974), Mercier and Camier. London: Picador. —(1979), The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador. —(1984), Disjecta. Ed. R. Cohn. New York, NY: Grove Press. —(1987), Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder.

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—(1995), The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York, NY: Grove Press. — ‘Philosophy Notes’, TCD MS 10967. Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Library Dublin. Butler, L. St. J. (1984), Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(1995), The Gift of Death. Trans. D. Wills. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Garner, S. B. (1993), ‘ “Still Living Flesh”: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body’. Theatre Journal 45, 443–460. Hesla, D. H. (1971), The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Husserl, E. (1965), Phenomenology and the Crisis of Perception. Trans. Q. Lauer. New York, NY: Harper Row. Joyce, J. (1993), Ulysses: the 1922 text. Ed. J. Johnson. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Knowlson, J. (1999), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), Signs. Trans. R. C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(2002), Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Pilling, J. (1997), Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, J. (2004), Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity. Athens: Ohio University Press. Stewart, J. (ed.) (1998), The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Trezise, T. (1990), Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 8

What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History Daniel Katz

Beckett, despite his difficulty, or perhaps at times to excuse it, has surprisingly often been posited as a ‘relevant’ author to his times. In Adorno’s ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, one thing that is meant to be understood is that Beckett’s resistance to understanding is precisely what makes him the supreme creative figure of his historical moment, a moment which we must not attempt to ‘understand’ through the discredited frameworks of a humanist heritage which Auschwitz has thrown into crisis. In terms of Endgame, Adorno explicitly links its never quite named ‘catastrophic event’ to both the ‘Second World War’ (Adorno 1991: 244) and the ‘atomic age’ (Adorno 1991: 245), and designates the trashcans of Nagg and Nell as ‘emblems of the culture rebuilt after Auschwitz’ (Adorno 1991: 267). In the wake of Adorno, then, Beckett often emerges as the quintessential post-Auschwitz author, with Endgame frequently seen as the most ‘relevant’ of his works to this problematic.1 But such a reading contains its own contradictions, for as has recently been emphasized, for Adorno, Beckett’s ‘relevance’ to post-Auschwitz art cannot simply lie in the ‘rightness’ of what might be read as coded or allegorical references to the camps, such as those Endgame might seem to offer with its post-apocalyptic environment, sadistic interpersonal relationships, and foreboding sense of both past and future catastrophe. On the contrary, as both Shane Weller and Simon Critchley have stressed, Adorno finds Beckett’s works to be the most appropriate reaction to the death camps precisely because the camps never appear within them, because they seem to be as if under the jurisdiction of an ‘image ban’. Weller emphasizes that what makes Beckett’s response ‘fitting’ for Adorno is ‘intimately related to a non-naming, a non-identification’ (Weller 2005: 14), while Critchley asserts: ‘Yet, Adorno shockingly suggests that Beckett’s work is the only appropriate response to the Holocaust, more so than direct witness accounts, precisely because it is not part of the manifest content of Beckett’s work, as if it were subject to a Bilderverbot’ (Critchley 1997: 22).

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From this perspective, reading a Beckett work for a representation of the death camps, in whatever figurative or allegorical form, is to miss the point.2 Rather, Beckett intervenes not only through his frequently stated desire and supreme ability to cancel out, to undo and unsay, but also through a not-saying, although such a not-saying implies a pointing not only to the place where the image does not appear, but to the ban which prohibits it. That is to say, if Beckett articulates and makes palpable an absence, that absence can only take on the aspect of prohibition through a larger contextual economy, which delineates the space emptied by the working of the ban. In this respect, it might be suggested that the figure of Godot and the suppressed reference to Auschwitz are structurally parallel, each producing effects through their very non-appearance; one might also invoke Beckett’s account of Quad as structured around a kind of ‘taboo’ that controls the dancers’ evasion of the central point, rather than a pragmatic desire to avoid collision (Bryden 1995: 111). What must be stressed is Adorno’s implication that Beckett’s reticence to name is not ‘fitting’ because of some sort of tact, but rather due to the violence of the ban. In this light, Adorno’s position resembles Beckett’s in the Three Dialogues: oddly, the liberating vitality of Beckett’s work in relation to the death camps derives from its refusal to express, within the clear sense of an obligation that has no name. However, around the time of Adorno’s death, it would appear that the ‘image ban’ was lifted: in her pathbreaking study, Chacun son Dépeupleur, Antoinette Weber-Caflisch (1994) has suggested that the strange world of the ‘cylinder’ in Beckett’s Le Dépeupleur has a clear legibility as an evocation of concentration camps, and particularly those of the Nazis, as the text seems to contain an allusion to, or even citation of Primo Levi.3 Weber-Caflisch points out that the phrase ‘si c’est un homme’, upon which the text increasingly insists as it draws to a close, is also the title of Primo Levi’s famous account of Auschwitz, as well as being a key line from the poem Levi placed as exergue to his book (see Weber-Caflisch 1994: 41–3).4 She then goes on to point to some of the obvious allegorical resemblances between the brutalizing conditions of the cylinder, and those of the camps as described by Levi. Key to her argument is her association of those Beckett calls the ‘vanquished’ with the dying inmates of Auschwitz, frequently discussed by Levi, whom starvation and illness had seemed to push past the limits of the human, and who in camp jargon were termed ‘Muselmänner’ (literally, ‘Muslims’). Recent criticism of Beckett has taken seriously the idea that The Lost Ones could intervene in discussions of both Levi and the death camps in a meaningful way. For example, Jean-Michel Rabaté has linked the ‘zones’ delineated in The Lost Ones to what Levi called the ‘grey zone’ in The Drowned and the Saved— the zone of necessary moral impurity which affected all members of the camp, guards and inmates alike—and he goes on to consider Beckett’s earlier interest in a ‘monadic self’ as seen in Murphy, in which the hero’s brain is likewise divided into ‘zones’ (Rabaté 1999: 80–5). More recently, in two important

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articles, David Houston Jones (2006, 2008) has read Le Dépeupleur not only in relation to Levi, but also in light of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) remarkable meditation on Auschwitz, in which Levi figures extremely prominently.5 Again by way of Beckett’s possible allusion to Levi, Jones also focuses on the ‘Muselmann’ of Levi’s account, and he examines this figure in terms of Agamben’s theories of biopolitics, the homo sacer and the state of exception, which are indeed at the centre of Agamben’s concerns.6 However, Jones makes an additional move, one which draws Agamben to Beckett in a different way, for also central to Agamben is a reflection on the very possibility of witnessing and testimony (Agamben answers the implicit question of his title by asserting ‘The witness is this remnant ’ [Agamben 2002: 134; original italics]) in relation to what he calls the ‘empty place’ of the subject (Agamben 2002: 145). We shall return to the complex of arguments which subtend this conception for Agamben; for now, what must be stressed is that his examination of the ‘essential lacuna’ (Agamben 2002: 13) within witnessing and testifying—often by way of Benveniste’s work on enunciation—proceeds in a manner which markedly evokes the problems so familiar in Beckett’s first-person prose works, above all The Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing. As Jones puts it, elements of Texts for Nothing seem a ‘striking enactment of the central dilemma of Remnants of Auschwitz’, and the ‘radical selfdispossession’ of narrative agency in the Texts ‘uncannily anticipates that of the subject in Agamben’ (Jones 2008: 55–6). Indeed, in terms of a poetics of ‘desubjectification’ Agamben invokes Keats and Pessoa, but an analysis like the following could almost be applied to Beckett verbatim: For not only is the ‘I’ always already other with respect to the individual who lends it speech; it does not even make sense to say that this I-other speaks, for insofar as it is solely sustained in a pure event of language. . . this I-other stands in an impossibility of speaking—he has nothing to say. (Agamben 2002: 117) Indeed, his summation of Pessoa’s situation also largely echoes one of the most important recent emphases in readings of the Beckettian subject: ‘he must answer for his own desubjectification’ (Agamben 2002: 119, translation modified)—a situation which creates paradoxes in Levi’s work that will sound familiar to readers of Beckett. For, according to Agamben, the final lesson of Levi is not the sanctity of the ‘true account’ of the person who was ‘really there’, but rather that ‘the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness to a desubjectification’ (Agamben 2002: 120–1, original italics), which means that properly speaking, ‘there is no subject of testimony’ (Agamben 2002: 121), while testimony means testifying to this fact. Thus, as Jones’ work also indicates, if Agamben is right, Beckett becomes a quintessential ‘post-Auschwitz’ author not only from the familiar perspective first sketched by Adorno, largely in reference to the drama, but also through the post-phenomenological investigations of subjectivity and expression found above all in the prose.7

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Agamben’s relatively recent book is already the subject of extensive commentary, and I cannot rehearse the entirety of his arguments or the responses to them here.8 In terms of the problematics of witnessing and subjectivity which will interest us in this context, what is crucial is the way Agamben stresses the witness to Auschwitz as being in what Henry James might have called a ‘false position’. This argument, and indeed, much of the burden of the study as a whole, derives almost entirely from a key passage in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, which Agamben cites and discusses at length. There, Levi affirms that the true witnesses to the essence of Auschwitz are those who were destroyed by it, and therefore by definition unable to bear witness. But for Agamben, this destruction refers not only to those murdered in the gas chambers, but above all to the ‘Muselmänner’, those who in some way ceased to live as humans before their own ‘biological’ deaths. Levi writes that the ‘complete witnesses’ were ‘the “Muslims”, the submerged . . . the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we [the survivors] are the exception’ (Levi 1989: 64), and goes on to specify his own predicament: Even if they had paper and pen, the submerged would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy. (Levi 1989: 64) For Agamben, it is the ‘Muselmann’ who is the true ‘core of the camp’ (Agamben 2002: 81), and the impossible necessity for him or her to bear witness leads to what he calls ‘Levi’s paradox’: How can the non-human testify for the human, and how can the one who by definition cannot bear witness be the true witness? For the Italian title of Survival in Auschwitz, ‘If This Is a Man,’ certainly also has this meaning: the name ‘man’ applies first of all to a non-man, and the complete witness is he whose humanity has been wholly destroyed . . . . If we give the name ‘Levi’s paradox’ to the statement that ‘the Muselmann is the complete witness,’ then understanding Auschwitz—if such a thing is possible—will coincide with understanding the sense and nonsense of this paradox. (Agamben 2002: 82; translation modified) That Agamben’s concern is more than a philosopher’s conceit is made clear by Levi himself, who stresses his own sense of inadequacy as a witness in a chapter devoted to survivors’ guilt, and bearing the title ‘Shame’: ‘I must repeat—we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion . . .’ (Levi 1989: 63). However, Agamben goes on to extrapolate that ‘Levi’s paradox’, rather than being limited to a specific historical situation, in fact can be shown to reveal the deep structure of all witnessing, indeed of all enunciation,

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as ‘speaking is a paradoxical act that implies both subjectification and desubjectification, in which the living individual only appropriates language in a complete expropriation, becoming a speaking being only on condition of falling into silence’ (Agamben 2002: 129; translation modified). Again, the relevance to Beckett’s work is evident, but so are the objections to the implications of making ‘Levi’s paradox’ an emblem of the transcendental predicament of the speaking subject. For as J. M. Bernstein has pointed out, the tendency of Agamben’s study is to destroy the specificity which Levi was at such pains to articulate: ‘Witnessing, testimony, thus turns out not to be of or to Auschwitz or even, finally, to the Muselmann; rather, it is the metaphysically privileged revelation of the desubjectified moment of all language that the Muselmann represents’ (Bernstein 2006: 45). This problem has emerged as a major concern to critics of Agamben, legitimately so,9 and Colin Davis has also helpfully highlighted two other essential moves that need to be questioned: taking Auschwitz to be the paradigmatic camp, and following Levi in designating the ‘Muselmann’ as the paradigmatic witness of it.10 Interestingly, however, Agamben’s detractors have almost entirely failed to notice that in the crucial chapter for the account of subjectivity and language to which they object— ‘Shame, or On the Subject’—Agamben’s decisive witness is no longer Levi, but Robert Antelme, who in turn is read not through Levi’s exploration of ‘shame’ as found in the chapter of The Drowned and the Saved which bears that title, but rather in light of the analysis of shame found in an early text of Emmanuel Levinas. Precisely when emphasizing that Levi sees himself as witnessing in the place of the ‘Muselmann’, Agamben turns to other witnesses, in place of Levi. In fact, in one of his very rare criticisms of Levi, Agamben begins his chapter on ‘shame’ by explicitly pointing to the inadequacy of Levi’s account of it, which he considers ‘so puerile it leaves the reader uneasy’ (Agamben 2002: 88). What Agamben objects to is the trope of ‘survivor’s guilt’, in all its guises: if Agamben continually insists on Levi’s sense of ‘speaking in place of another’, he rejects all conceptualizations of shame as deriving from the sense of ‘living in place of another’; in fact, it is Robert Antelme who ‘bears witness’ to the fact that shame ‘is not a feeling of guilt or shame for having survived another but, rather, has a different, darker and more difficult cause’ (Agamben 2002: 103). To illustrate this, Agamben turns to Antelme’s story of the death march from Buchenwald to Dachau, during which the SS executed all stragglers who might slow them down, in addition to many others, apparently at random. Antelme recounts how a young Italian, picked out by an SS soldier, blushes when he realizes he has been chosen to die: ‘He must have glanced about him before he flushed; but yes, it was he who had been picked, and when he doubted it no longer, he turned pink. The SS who was looking for a man, any man, to kill, had found him’ (quoted in Agamben 2002: 103). For Agamben, such a blush effectively separates shame from wrong doing (he never considers separating the

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blush from shame), and given this, he seeks clarification of the concept in Emmanuel Levinas’ little known essay of 1935, De l‘évasion (‘On Escape’). In the essay, Levinas tries to establish what seems an a priori definition of shame, arguing that shame is not the outgrowth of any particular fault or failing, but rather the inescapable fact that one is the person one is, rather than being somebody else; or in other words, shame is the ineluctable link to one’s own singularity. He writes, ’La honte se fonde sur la solidarité de notre être, qui nous oblige à revendiquer la responsabilité de nous-même [Shame is founded on the solidarity of our being, which forces us to claim responsibility for ourselves]’ (Levinas 1982: 111; my translation). But this is in no way an appeal to a phantom univocity of the subject— rather, Levinas is pointing precisely to the fact that our lack of univocity of being, our inability to understand our own motives or desires, nevertheless fails to free us from being whomever we happen to be, or offer a possibility of ‘escape’ from our own singular destiny. This is what Levinas means when he insists that shame reveals ‘le fait d’être rivé à soi-même . . . la présence irrémissible du moi à soi-même [the fact of being bound to oneself . . . the irremissible presence of the self to itself]’ (Levinas 1982: 113; my translation). Thus, shame ceases to be consequent to a contingent failing, but rather inherent in the structure of a subject which is doomed to be whatever, at any point, it happens to be: La honte ne dépend pas . . . de la limitation de notre être, en tant qu’il est susceptible de péché, mais de l’être même de notre être, de son incapacité de rompre avec soi-même. [Shame does not depend . . . on the limitations of our being, inasmuch as it may be given to sin, but on the very being of our being, on its inability to break with itself.] (Levinas 1982: 111; my translation) Simply being what and who we happen to be is something for which it is impossible to take credit or blame in any meaningful sense, that is, something for which no responsibility can be assumed, and this incapacity is shame. As Agamben puts it, ‘To be ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But this unassumable is not something external, but rather comes from our very intimacy, is that which is most intimate in us . . . . The “I” is thus overcome and supplanted by its own passivity, by the sensibility that is most its own, and yet this expropriated and desubjectified being is also an extreme and irreducible presence of the “I” to itself’ (Agamben 2002: 105–6; translation modified).11 This passage needs to be stressed, as it clarifies ‘Levi’s paradox’ of testifying by proxy, delegation, and surrogation in important ways, which also have a clear bearing on Beckett’s work, with its obsessive insistence that one speaks by proxy precisely when most speaking for oneself. However, again in agreement with Levinas, Beckett’s work consistently suggests that this sense of subjective

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différance does not effect a Levinasian ‘escape’ from oneself, but just the opposite: this is the drama of the oscillations in The Unnamable between the impossible identifications and the impossible disavowals of the various narrative instances. But curiously, Levinas’ account of shame also can function as a long extrapolation of another phrase from Levi, which, if noted by Agamben, does not seem to be investigated to the extent it deserves. For if Levi is insistent that his ‘bearing witness’ to the camps indeed operates by ‘proxy’ (Levi 1989: 64),12 there is another context in which he denies that a ‘proxy’ relationship can even be maintained as an intellectual hypothesis. This occurs in some of the most powerful pages of The Drowned and the Saved, where Levi disallows any moral condemnation of the acts of complicity and collaboration of the prisoners in the camps, up to and including the ‘Special Squads’, entrusted with materially managing the gassing of prisoners and the burning of their bodies. In a turn of phrase which echoes the one he uses to insist that he speaks by proxy for the ‘submerged’, Levi writes: ‘I repeat: I believe that no one is authorised to judge them’ (Levi 1989: 42), it being literally impossible to imagine how a person might behave in similar circumstances. This leads Levi to a conclusion which is central to the ethics he sketches throughout The Drowned and the Saved: ‘Even without having recourse to the extreme case of the Special Squads, it often happens to us who have returned that when we describe our vicissitudes, our interlocutor will say: “In your place I would not have lasted for a single day.” This statement does not have a precise meaning: one is never in another’s place’ (Levi 1989: 43). Oddly enough, when Agamben cites this last phrase, he fails to see its importance for his own argument, only regarding it (somewhat tendentiously) as an element in Levi’s unconvincing attempts to absolve himself from the guilt of perhaps having survived in the place of, at the expense of, another (Agamben 2002: 91). But in terms of the expressive economy of The Drowned and the Saved, it is precisely the fact that ‘one is never in another’s place’ which gives the true measure of Levi’s ethical predicament when he sets himself the task of speaking in place of the ‘submerged’. Indeed, the rhetoric of the book links its two major ethical imperatives—to speak for those who cannot speak, to abstain from judging those whose experience cannot be known—by using the same intensifier: ‘I repeat’, ‘I must repeat’ (Levi 1989: 42, 63).13 In this way, Levi’s entire book hinges on the relationship between absolute singularity on the one hand, and delegation, surrogation and the proxy on the other, and for this reason, Agamben’s intuition of the relevance of Levinas’ theory of shame is absolutely correct. ‘One is never in the place of another’ is precisely Levinas’ point, just as for Beckett, such a conception is the necessary aporetic counter-claim to the idea that one can never speak for oneself,14 while the blush of Antelme’s doomed young Italian is nothing other than the moment of recognition that he is not in another place than the one in which he finds himself, that he is the object of the SS soldier’s interpellation, which will mean his death. At the same time, Agamben’s oddly under-examined

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shift from Levi to Antelme at a decisive juncture in his argument seems to enact the problems of exemplarity and surrogation he has been concerned with throughout: Antelme becomes the best witness of that to which Levi supremely testifies, and Levinas speaks the ‘shame’ on which Levi is inexpressive. On the one hand, then, one of Agamben’s major arguments is clearly deconstructive: ‘how can one ever speak for someone else?’ leads him to the question, ‘How can one ever speak for oneself?’ If this is an important corrective to certain articulations of ‘witnessing’ which might rely on what Adorno, in a different context, calls ‘the wishful image of unbroken subjective immediacy’ (Adorno 2005: 374), it is itself in need of the second corrective, supplied by Levinas’ account of shame: it is always oneself that is failing to speak for oneself. It is this second moment, with its emphasis on the singular, which would open the space for a return from transcendental speculation on the apparatus of enunciation to historical specificity—a return which Agamben’s critics accuse him of failing to make. In order to articulate the conditions of such a passage, we must move from a consideration of language as such, enunciation, and deictics, to the specificity of different languages, and different historically operative names—that is, to the element Adorno pointed to as the Beckettian ‘image ban’, and which Weller perceptively describes as a ‘not-naming’. For as Adorno seems to have understood, for Beckett not naming is just as important as, and of a piece with, not arriving or not happening; indeed, in The Unnamable it is the failure ever to conclude by finding the ‘right’ name that leads to the imperative to ‘go on’, just as Godot’s failure to arrive opens the space for the play itself. Similarly, Beckett was certainly not indifferent to the historical and cultural imbrications of proper names, especially, as Leslie Hill has persuasively argued (see Hill 1990: 52–8), in the context of what he was increasingly aware of as a bilingual oeuvre: Malone, Molloy, ‘Moran, Jacques’ and for that matter, Godot, all circulate between French, English and Irish cultural and linguistic spaces in complex and different ways. For our purposes, it is interesting to note that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Beckett had considered an onomastic option which would have inflected his work and its reception in extraordinary ways: early drafts of En attendant Godot bestowed on one of the tramps the unmistakably Jewish name ‘Lévy’ (see Knowlson 1996: 380). Discussing this, James Knowlson has compellingly suggested that by 1948, when Godot was being drafted, Beckett would have already read early accounts of the Nazi camps, as two of them evoked in some detail Beckett’s friend Alfred Péron, who died in Mauthausen, and whose widow, Mania, was close to Beckett at this time (Knowlson 1996: 380–1). Had Beckett chosen to mark his friend’s representative murder by a Jewish name in Godot, reception of the play would likely have been almost wholly tethered to the context of the Nazi crimes—a context which its earliest audience tended to apply to it in any case—and the hegemony of the kinds of existentialist readings which emerged in the 1950s would have been significantly challenged. Be that as it may, the name Lévy, essentially the same

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Jewish name as Levi and Levinas might also have appealed to Beckett for etymological reasons, as it is customarily read as deriving from the Hebrew for ‘attached’, ‘joined’, or ‘combined’—as are both the two tramps and Lucky and Pozzo in Godot, and as Levi and Levinas come to be in Agamben. From our perspective many elements make it almost impossible to imagine Beckett having let such a potentially overweening historical reference stand; one imagines he would have legitimately feared that ‘Lévy’ would be automatically reduced to ‘the Jew’. Still, it is fascinating to see that in Beckett’s own revision process, something very like the ‘image ban’ that Adorno postulated apparently did impose itself. Additionally, this question of the proper name as marker of ethnicity, and the ethnic designation itself in all its capacity for totalizing, racist reduction, also arises in Agamben’s discussion, with its insistent focus on a paradigmatic figure itself given a name that is far from neutral: the ‘Muselmann’. While Agamben devotes some space to discussing the possible origins of this disturbing nickname (Agamben 2002: 44–5), as Fethi Benslama has pointed out, he is far from careful either in this analysis, or in his appropriation of the name for use in his own study.15 Benslama, like Levi, is sceptical of the usual explanations for the term, and asks a question Agamben ignores: why would the Jews in the midst of the horror of their extermination choose this particular name to designate the ‘integral’ victims of the camps, those who are as if dead before their deaths, the specters whose fate haunts every single prisoner?16 Benslama’s answer is eloquent: what the prisoners named the ‘Muslim’ is in fact everything that the Nazis wanted to bear the name ‘Jew’ (Benslama 2001: 463). In other words, when Agamben writes that the camps are ‘above all, the site of the production of the Muselmann, the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum’ (Agamben 2002: 85), this is a translation of the prisoners’ understanding that the Nazi name for such a ‘substance’ was, precisely, ‘Jew’. According to Benslama, to defend themselves against this literal ‘incarnation of Nazi discourse’ [t]he Jews of the camps thus called ‘Muslims’ those among themselves they saw as capable of realizing, through their own annihilation, the Nazi imaginary of the ‘Jew,’ in order to be able thereby to reject them, without renouncing them totally. (Benslama 2001: 463, my translation) If this renunciation is not total, it is because for Benslama the designation ‘Muslim’ implies a certain degree of ‘Abrahamic’ identification. Therefore, the act of choosing such a name for the ‘submerged’ means: ‘the Jew become waste, in whom the project of the SS is being accomplished, is not me, or not entirely me—he or she is the nearest of the distant’ (Benslama 2001: 463, my translation). For Benslama, then, what ‘Muselmann’ names is ultimately not the ‘non-human’ created by the camps, but the act of ‘the Jewish human, forced by

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his torturer to take leave of the wounded part of his self and be the agent of his own mutilation within the imaginary in order to survive’ (2001: 463, my translation). But by doing so through the name of the Abrahamic brother, the ‘Muslim’, Benslama proposes that the act must also be considered Witz in the Freudian sense, within the Jewish prisoners’ ‘rhetoric of survival’ (Benslama 2001: 465)—by which term he means a construction of meanings capable of providing a bulwark for survival within the assault on all human values of the camps. What emerges from consideration of Benslama’s account, is that the designation ‘Muselmann’ arises precisely as an onomastic disavowal of ‘shame’ as Levinas defined it—the impossibility of escaping the irremissible fact of being bound to oneself—a fact the name ‘Muselmann’ both denies and acknowledges. That this is a supremely Beckettian scenario is obvious; indeed, Benslama’s French description of this disavowal, ‘ce n’est pas moi, ou pas tout à fait moi’ (Benslama 2001: 463), inevitably recalls the French title of Not I, in addition to the mechanisms explored in that play. But in fact, the Trilogy itself balances the sense of testifying to one’s own desubjectification, of constantly speaking by proxy for an absent witness who can never be given the floor, with the sense of an equally impossible disavowal and failed renunciation—while I can never speak for myself, at the same time, I can never not, no matter how much I give my subject the name Molloy, Moran, Malone, Mahood, or Worm (that the series of provisional names almost always features the ‘M’ can hardly leave us indifferent here). It is this impossible escape that Levinas stresses in De l’évasion, arguing that it is not ‘lack’ which subtends ‘need’, but rather ‘plenitude’: ‘Le besoin n’est pas dirigé vers l’accomplissement total de l’être limité, vers la satisfaction, mais vers la délivrance et l’évasion [Need does not aim at the total fulfilment of the limited being, at satisfaction, but at deliverance and escape]’ (Levinas 1982: 120; my translation). At the same time, Beckett’s work testifies throughout to the power of the name within the pseudoalternative of impossible identification and impossible disavowal, not only through the Trilogy’s serial narrative instances, but also, for example, through the shift from ‘Lulu’ to ‘Anna’ in First Love (Beckett 1995: 34–5) or between ‘Loy’ and ‘Lousse’ in Molloy, to say nothing of the redesignation of ‘Mama’ as ‘Mag’ in the same book. Beckettian exile is always both outside the self, and also within, as is made plain in Beckett’s late lineated prose text, ‘Neither’. Moving ‘from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither’, the short text seeks to be ‘absent for good from self and other’ in search of the ‘unheeded neither’, which would be the ‘unspeakable home’ (Beckett 1995: 258). A space between ‘refuges’ is the only ‘home’, a home which only exists as a negation— ‘neither’—and thus is literally unspeakable. But returning to the question of what can ‘remain’, near the end of his study, Agamben cites Hannah Arendt’s response, when asked what remains of the pre-Hitlerian Europe in which she lived: ‘ “What remains?” Arendt answered,

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“The mother tongue remains” (was bleibt? Die Muttersprache bleibt)’ (Agamben 2002: 159). Agamben will go on to argue that witnessing means to take up a living language as if it were dead, as if a remnant, to ‘place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it’ (Agamben 2002: 161). And in this context, Beckett’s bilingualism as an experiment in witnessing would deserve an extended investigation. To close, however, I would like to point to another blush, coming from the far side of the Nazi crimes, in a text that everywhere foretells them. This would be from the early pages of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, an autobiographical novel, which if mostly completed by the mid-1930s, is completely clear-eyed and prophetic regarding the fate awaiting German Jews. Here, in 1930, at the time of Hitler’s first important political success, ‘Christopher’ gives an English lesson to the frivolous, young, Jewish Fräulein Hippi, who flirtatiously asks, ‘And tell me, please, do you find German girls different than English girls?’ (Isherwood 1954: 16). Christopher’s answer is a blush—not because Frl. Hippi has come so close to uncovering his desire, but because she is so far from suspecting that the crucial ‘difference’ which has led him to her country is not that between ‘German’ and ‘English’, but rather that between girls and boys. Yet the blush is followed by a second effect: ‘I blushed. “Do you find German girls . . .” I began to correct her and stopped, realizing just in time that I wasn’t absolutely sure whether one says different from or different to’ (Isherwood 1954: 16). Here, the body’s marking of itself as itself, which is shame in Agamben’s reading of Levinas, is accompanied by an unhousing of Arendt’s privileged remnant, as the ‘mother tongue’ Isherwood is meant to transmit suddenly makes itself felt as foreign to the person accepting money on the grounds of being at home within it. The question of the ‘difference’ between German and English girls leads to a crisis provoking a momentary erasure of the differences within the English language—by way of the very word ‘difference’ itself—which in turn causes Isherwood to speak from the sense of being outside it. If James Knowlson is right that Godot, and for that matter, all the Trilogy too, might be significantly informed by Alfred Péron’s fate in Mauthausen, then Isherwood’s moment of linguistic desubjectification could serve as a kind of allegory for Beckett’s crisis of loss and writerly reinvention immediately after the War, in France. For the Pérons played a special role within the history of Beckett’s relationship to the French language. Alfred was his collaborator in his early translations of Finnegans Wake, but his widow Mania played an even more extraordinary part. For as Beckett began to write in French in earnest, Mania was the native speaker to whom he turned for expert help and advice with the language which, despite his exceptional mastery, remained foreign to him, submitting his manuscripts to her for correction.17 The negation of home in Beckett, through not only linguistic difference but the differences between languages, is how the image ban becomes both the impossible expression and its negation, and neither.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

See Shane Weller on how for Adorno, ‘historicizing’ Beckett in general and ‘Endgame in particular’ (Weller 2005: 130), means reading his work as ‘essentially a post-Holocaust art’ (Weller 2005: 131). Although Critchley’s term ‘manifest content’ could be seen to open such a path. Le Dépeupleur first appeared in French in 1970, one year after Adorno’s death, though it was mostly written several years earlier; Beckett’s English translation, under the surprising title The Lost Ones, was published in 1972. In Levi’s poem, ‘Shemà’, one finds the Italian phrase ‘se questo è un uomo’ (Levi 1990: 17), which corresponds neatly to Beckett’s French; his English rendering of the phrase in The Lost Ones, ‘if a man’ (Beckett 1972: 61, 62), is far less evocative of Levi. Agamben’s Italian title is Quel che resta di Auschwitz, of which a literal translation would be, ‘What Remains of Auschwitz’. The book has appeared in English under the title Remnants of Auschwitz. Working from Agamben, Jones points out that the ‘volkloser Raum’ imagined by Hitler is not ‘simply a space emptied of its inhabitants, but according to Agamben, an absolute biopolitical space, which like the cylinder of Le Dépeupleur, would serve to document the disappearance of its human population’ ( Jones 2006: 255; my translation). Although Agamben is frequently reliant on the linguistics of enunciation in his analysis, this strand of linguistic inquiry, sometimes assimilated to ‘post-structuralism’, bears a complex relationship to the phenomenology of the subject it often ends by throwing into question (as is to some extent revealed by Agamben’s ability to marry it to Levinas’ work on shame, as we shall see). In terms of these conjunctions and their relevance to Beckett, it should be remembered that Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ first emerges by confronting Husserlian phenomenology with semiotics and the question of the sign, and that Derrida makes use of certain forms of phenomenological reduction at decisive moments in his elaboration of différance and the trace, even asserting, in reference to Husserl, that ‘a thought of the trace can no more break with a transcendental phenomenology than be reduced to it’ (Derrida 1976: 62, original italics). Meanwhile, in his Cartesian Meditations, which Levinas translated into French in 1931, Husserl posits his phenomenology as deriving from Descartes’s ‘method’, itself of decisive importance for Beckett’s investigations of subjectivity in the Trilogy and the Texts. Thus, the critical return to a certain Cartesian elaboration of the subject is indispensable not only for Beckett and Husserl, but also implicitly for deconstruction, by way of its engagement with the latter. For the ways in which Beckett’s reworking of Cartesian ‘method’ might be consonant with Derrida’s work on the subject and voice in Husserl, see Katz (1999), Szafraniec (2007), and Trezise (1990); see Uhlmann (2006) for the importance of Geulincx within Beckett’s dialogue with Descartes. For a thorough, incisive, and often critical account, see Bernstein (2006).

156 9

10

11

12 13

14

15

16

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Colin Davis notes something similar: ‘The experience of the Muselmann, then, is an extreme instance of the desubjectification constitutive of the experience of being a subject, and what testimony reveals is precisely this experience’ (Davis 2004: 84); likewise, Esther Marion, though not always fair to the intricacies of Agamben’s argument, has grounds for insisting that his study ‘effaces the very historical constitution of this aporia [of Auschwitz], which he structurally appropriates for assimilation into his philosophical discourse’ (Marion 2006: 1009). ‘The Muselmann becomes, as it were, the paradigmatic prisoner in the paradigmatic camp’ (Davis 2004: 85). This important passage presents considerable difficulties to the translator. Notably, the Italian first-person pronoun ‘io’, here translated as ‘I’, is also the standard term for the Freudian ‘Ego’. In this context, the first instance does seem to imply the Ego of psychoanalysis, but the main point of Agamben’s argument would be lost if the second instance were also read in this sense. Pierre Alferi’s (in Agamben 1999: 136) excellent French translation adopts this line, using first ‘le moi’ (the Ego) and then ‘je’ (‘I’) to translate what is the same word in Italian. ‘per delega’ in Italian (Levi 1991: 65). In Italian, Levi introduces his key points with ‘Ripeto’ (Levi 1991: 44) and ‘Lo ripeto’ (Levi 1991: 64). It is a failure to recognize this point which can make a certain inflection of Blanchot’s ‘neutre’ unhelpful in reading Beckett. This in contrast to Levi himself, who identifies these prisoners as the ‘submerged’ of the title of his book, The Drowned and the Saved (the same Italian word, ‘sommersi’, is used both in the title and to refer to the camp victims in Levi’s original; the English translation renders it by ‘Drowned’ for the title, but usually as the ‘submerged’ within the text), and consistently stresses that ‘Muselmann’ was camp jargon, and not a term he wishes to take up as his own (see Levi 1989: 77). See Benslama (2001: 462–3). Levi judges the explanations of the term’s origins not ‘very convincing’ (Levi 1989: 77). Which he often, and increasingly, over-ruled (see Knowlson 1996: 361–2).

Bibliography Adorno, T. (1991), Notes to Literature, Vol. one. Trans. S. W. Nicholsen. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. —(2005), Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York, NY: Continuum. Agamben, G. (1998), Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimonio. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Trans. into English (2002) by D. Heller-Roazen under the title Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, New York, NY: Zone Books. Trans. into French by P. Alferi (1999) under the title Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz: l’Archive et le témoin, Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages. Beckett, S. (1970), Le Dépeupleur. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —(1972), The Lost Ones. New York, NY: Grove Press. —(1995), S. E. Gontarski (ed.), Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. New York, NY: Grove Press. Benslama, F. (2001), ‘La représentation et l’impossible’. Évolution psychiatrique 66, 448–66.

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Bernstein, J. M. (2006), ‘Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics “after Auschwitz” ’. New German Critique 97, vol. 33, 1, 31–52. Bryden, M. (1995), ‘Quad: Dancing Genders’, in C. Wulf (ed.), The Savage Eye/L’Oeil fauve: New Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 4). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 109–122. Critchley, S. (1997), Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. London: Routledge. Davis, C. (2004), ‘Can the Dead Speak to Us? De Man, Levinas and Agamben’. Culture, Theory, and Critique 45, 1, 77–89. Derrida, J. (1976), Of Grammatology. Trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hill, L. (1990), Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isherwood, C. (1954), The Berlin Stories. New York, NY: New Directions. Jones, D. H. (2006), ‘Néomorts et faux vivants: Communautés dépeuplées chez Beckett et Agamben’, in S. Houppermans (ed.), Présence de Samuel Beckett/Presence of Samuel Beckett (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 17). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 249–263. —(2008), ‘From Contumacy to Shame: Reading Beckett’s Testimonies with Agamben’, in L. Ben-Zvi and A. Moorjani (eds), Samuel Beckett at 100: Revolving it All. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 54–67. Katz, D. (1999), Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Levi, P. (1990), Ad ora incerta. Milan: Garzanti editori. —(1991), I sommersi e i salvati. Turin: Einaudi. Trans. into English by R. Rosenthal (1989) under the title The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus. Lévinas, E. (1982), De l’évasion. Intro. and notes by J. Rolland. Paris: Fata Morgana (livre de poche). Marion, E. (2006), ‘The Nazi Genocide and the Writing of the Holocaust Aporia: Ethics and Remnants of Auschwitz’. MLN 121, 1009–1022. Rabaté, J.-M. (1999), ‘Beckett et la poésie de la zone: (Dante . . . Apollinaire. Celine . . . Lévi)’, in M. Engelberts, M. Buning, S. Houppermans (eds), Poetry and Other Prose/Poésies et autres proses (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 75–90. Szafraniec, A. (2007), Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trezise, T. (1990), Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Uhlmann, A. (2006), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Weber-Caflisch, A. (1994), Chacun son dépeupleur: Sur Samuel Beckett. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Weller, S. (2005), A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. Leeds: Legenda.

Chapter 9

Beckett’s Ghost Dramas: Monitoring a Phenomenology of Sleep Paul Sheehan

Of all the misapprehensions that have come to be applied to theatre, the notion that the appearance of the live actor onstage automatically furnishes a performance with an immediate and unambiguous presence—along with all the metaphysical baggage that now accompanies the term—is amongst the most enduring. As a philosophical claim, it relies on the belief that flesh-andblood transcends ‘representation’, to present unmediated truth. Since the advent of theory, the somewhat roughshod reasoning that props up this belief has been periodically denounced, often in the most unsparing terms (see, for example, Derrida 1978: 248). Yet despite this, the work of Samuel Beckett continues to be used to uphold the claim—a situation all the more striking, given the changes that took place in the last phase of his theatrical career. From about 1965 on, Beckett begins to develop ways of limiting the intensely corporeal character, the often over-assertive physical being, of the actor’s body. Accordingly, he devotes himself to a series of experiments involving ghosts and other spectral, wraith-like figures. Their haunted utterances and liminal presences are given shape by combining voice recordings with non-speaking protagonists and/or silent witnesses. This dramaturgical shift begins when Beckett stops writing for radio and turns his attention to television, as if transferring his newly acquired radiophonic skills to another technological horizon. Perhaps a precedent could be seen in Krapp, the obsessive self-archivist, impulsively replaying his aural diary. But in the later works no recording equipment is visible, as voices are freed from the hardware of mechanical inscription. It is the ‘voiceover’, then, that comes to characterize Beckett’s dramatic signature, in this final period of his writing. But rather than tell stories or provide commentary, as they are conventionally made to do, these voices accuse, recite, intone dispassionate descriptions and ramble freely. The first of the television works, Eh Joe (1966), depicts a man beset by a vengeful, hectoring

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female voice, intent on summoning other, earlier voices to wear down his stoic façade. Ghost Trio (1976) and . . . but the clouds . . . (1977) are memory-plays of a different kind, concerned with ‘appearance’ and the material residues that precede the play of voice(s). Nevertheless, as in Eh Joe, these voiceovers have an agential function, determining what takes place within the frame. The stage works, too, move into the ethereal realm of disembodied drama. In this regard, Happy Days might be seen as the turning-point: it marks the end of the ‘pseudo-couple’, with Willie acting as quasi-mute witness to Winnie’s endless monological deliberations. Subsequent works introduce an ‘auditor’ (Not I ), a ‘listener’ (Ohio Impromptu), and dialogues between actors and body-less voices (Footfalls, Rockaby). In That Time (1976), a recorded voice is doubly ‘alienated’ by being dispersed in space to three points of emission, a technique that isolates it even further from any corporeal origin. With all these works, Beckett is striving for a theatrical (or televisual) uncanny, seeking to render a physical, quasi-tangible art form more immaterial by opening up the dramaturgical space between presence and absence. These works operate, in fact, not unlike the Derridean trace (which is formulated around the same time), in terms of the latter’s mission to dissolve the couple of presence/ absence, by pressing at linguistic thresholds and confuting the clear-cut determinations of metaphysical doxa. Spectral figures, disembodied voices, liminal spaces that defy the practicalities of staging . . . the technical manoeuverings in the works that I have designated Beckett’s ‘ghost dramas’ transform the resolutely presence-based medium that the theatre is often taken to be into something more easily graspable through film or television: a theatre of shadows, traces, impressions and phantoms, whose fleeting qualities belie their material underpinnings. What do these attempts at artistic denaturation convoke on the screen or the stage? Or more specifically: what kind of experience do such works awaken, for anyone who confronts them? In Nicholas Zurbrugg’s estimate, a ‘reply’ of sorts can be gleaned from the opening lines of Footfalls,1 when the ghostly voice of V tells May, her daughter: ‘I heard you in my deep sleep. [Pause] There is no sleep so deep I would not hear you there’ (Beckett 1984: 239). Taking this remark as self-reflexive, Zurbrugg proposes that Beckett’s last writings be seen as ‘attempts to enact or to describe the impersonal, ritualistic actions and intonations of ghostly figures from the depths of “deep sleep”, or the real that Beckett defines as “the within” ’ (Zurbrugg 1987: 152). Between the cognizant and the insentient, between consciousness and oblivion, lie Beckett’s late dramas. Far from settling the issue, then, Zurbrugg’s comment prompts a further question, one inflected by phenomenology: what is specific to these works, i.e., what characteristics do they display, that might account for their ability to convey to consciousness the (non-mimetic) experience of sleep? If sleep can dispel the auratic enticements of ‘presence’, then perhaps phenomenological enquiry has the potential to monitor the line

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separating heterogeneous states of wakefulness from periodic surrender to the non-conscious. But for certain philosophical thinkers, when the question of presence is raised, phenomenology is the problem rather than the solution. One stumbling block is Edmund Husserl’s belief that perceptual intuition renders intention or meaning as something that is fully present, e.g., when an object is present before ones eyes. It is not difficult to detect here—and in transcendental phenomenology more broadly—an unashamed privileging of presence over absence. As Derrida remarks: First of all, it signifies the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience, and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. The present alone always is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence. (Derrida 1973: 53) In the French phenomenological tradition, by contrast, observations on the phenomenon of sleep veer away from Husserlian postulates. With its selfdeclared task of distilling existential significations from the world of perceptual experience, this later tradition also lends itself to the aesthetic sphere. In fact, the native roots of French phenomenology can be glimpsed in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). The philosophical drama of the involuntary memory is initiated when Marcel tastes the famous madeleine dipped in tea, then scrupulously examines the objects of his consciousness for their underlying supports. In contrast to Husserl’s aggrandizement of the lived present, Proust strives for something like the absolute present—a state in which the moment can only be experienced retrospectively, yet with such intensity and passion as to annul the conventional order of temporal priority. These echt-phenomenological passages, and others like them in the Recherche,2 assist in the transition from German philosophy to French philosophy. In French phenomenology proper, only Emmanuel Levinas is unsympathetic towards the world of artistic endeavour. Elsewhere, amenability to drama and fiction is either self-evident, as in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, a playwright and a novelist as well as a philosopher; implicitly valorized, as in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s animadversions on sensuous, embodied perception; or consistently apparent, as in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneneutically engaged phenomenology, with its emphases on the symbolic mediations at work in culture via image, myth, text, and so forth. The principal aim of this chapter, then, is to establish the phenomenology of theatre that is inscribed in Beckett’s ghost dramas—in the uses they make of the voiceover (and its technological dependencies), and in the ‘deep sleep’ drama that issues from them—and to show how this combats still-prevalent myths of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. But it would be misleading to imply that these works somehow adhere to principles established in advance. To the contrary, there

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are gaps and omissions in Beckett’s phenomenological dramas, but it is this deficit that enables them to be put into meaningful dialogue with their philosophical coevals. Thus, even as Beckett’s ghost plays are in some sense attuned to developments in French existential phenomenology, they hint at deeper and more nuanced ways of understanding the tradition.

Postponing Oblivion: Towards a Phenomenology of Sleep In confronting the warp and weft of quotidian reality, phenomenology purports to look beyond the ‘compressed immediacy’ of everyday life. Short-term goals, whether necessary for survival or just demanding of attention, distract from more far-reaching matters, confining entities and events to a narrow band of meaning. Profounder meanings are only made available when those objects of our experience are allowed to disclose their complex, multifarious involvements with other things; which means, in effect, that they must give up for inspection the set of conditions through which experience is made possible. As the virtual ‘anteroom’ of existence, and one of the most elemental parts of everyday life, sleep would seem to be an apt subject for phenomenological scrutiny. In practice, however, it has not always been recognized as such. Transcendental phenomenology gives pride of place to consciousness—to conscious perception and a prior, perceiving subject. The simple fact that a ‘perceptual barrier’ comes between sleeper and world thus makes the notion of a phenomenology of sleep a misnomer, at variance with the tradition’s founding principle. In the later development of existential phenomenology, however, the question of the unconscious is treated less circumspectly. Merleau-Ponty, for example, suggests that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams offers a description of the unconscious as a ‘perceiving consciousness’ that operates ‘through a logic of implication or promiscuity’. This gaunt, proscribed ‘logic’ is compelled to follow a path it can barely see, while deploying a negativity that enables it to ‘envisage’ objects and beings, without yet ascribing proper names to them (Merleau-Ponty 1988: 118). Insofar as it is possible to speak of ‘unconscious perception’, it would seem to be something radically regressive, involving a primitive, almost embryonic state of cognizance. Could sleep then be construed as a kind of provisional, yet nonetheless genuine, non-existence? For Descartes, the mere possibility kindles his vehement resistance. He counters it in the first of the Meditations by asserting that we are never entirely unconscious, no matter how deep or sound our sleep is. By the Sixth Meditation, however, he is confident that dreams (and hence sleep) can be demarcated from states of wakefulness. Despite this confidence, the mystery of the ‘absent presence’ that governs sleep continues to haunt him, much as the mind/body problem—how res cogitans can affect, still less command or guide, res extensa—is never satisfactorily resolved.

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Descartes’s uncertainty persists, albeit with knottier entanglements, in phenomenological enquiry. For sleep, like birth, death and aging, is something that is ‘never reached by my consciousness as an experienced event’ (Ricoeur 1966: 442). In addition, unlike other interruptions of consciousness, such as coma, there is habitual return from sleep; we fall both into and out of it. Seen from one direction, consciousness can only be theorized through sleep— in the sense that, to be awake, one must first have some experience of nonwakefulness.3 From the other direction, sleep can only be rendered in phenomenological terms obliquely, by reference to either sickness or death. Falling asleep, avers Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), involves a process of homeopathic mimesis. By imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper, it is possible to become one, i.e., to be transformed into ‘an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alertness of the senses’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 164). The body’s role here is cardinal, transforming ideas into things, and mimicry of sleep into real sleep. Although we lose our identities, we remain alert; thus, the ‘absent present’ character of the sleeping state that so vexed Descartes (who saw it as a choice between ‘consciousness’ or ‘oblivion’) only begets further paradoxes. To pursue the implications of ‘anonymous alertness’, Merleau-Ponty draws a striking parallel between sleeping and illness. He takes the analogous instance of a patient who, despite being in isolation, is never entirely ill while he retains a sense of human sociality and of the future, i.e., of the inter-subjective world. In similar fashion, the sleeper is never completely isolated, hence is ‘never totally a sleeper’. Merleau-Ponty writes: We remain free in relation to sleep and sickness to the exact extent to which we remain always involved in the waking and healthy state, our freedom rests on our being in a situation, and is itself a situation. Sleep and waking, illness and health are not modalities of consciousness or will, but presuppose an ‘existential step’. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 164) In wresting the ‘existential step’—the awareness of being situated in a world, and the bodily condition that accompanies it—from consciousness and will, phenomenology is detached from its transcendental origins. Freedom, for Merleau-Ponty, is predicated on involvement, on being situated, and although sleep falls outside the boundaries of consciousness and will, it is not a surrender of that freedom. Sleep, then, ‘is a modality of perceptual activity’, and its enabling condition is ‘distance’ rather than ‘absence’; though the world recedes, for the sleeper, it is not annulled. Or as Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘The negation of the world in sleep is equally a way of upholding it, and thus sleeping consciousness is not a recess of pure nothingness: it is cluttered with the debris of the past and present;

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it plays among it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1988: 115–16). A ‘negation’ that nevertheless supports and sustains the world, sleep’s ‘absent present’ quality is presented, once again, in paradoxical terms, as a ludic negotiation that figures memory in terms of delayed immediacy, set amidst ‘the debris of the past and present’. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of sleep is predicated on the body in space. What he outlines in existential terms as a ‘situation’, Emmanuel Levinas considers in more overtly corporeal terms as ‘position’. And so, in Existence and Existents (1940), he divests sleep of any lingering abstraction: What does sleeping consist in? To sleep is to suspend physical and psychical activity. But an abstract being, hovering in the air, lacks an essential condition for this suspending: a place. The summoning of sleep occurs in the act of lying down. To lie down is precisely to limit existence to a place, to position. (Levinas 1978: 69) The experience of sleep is thus a surrender to immobility, as a prelude to establishing a relationship with place. Moreover, the position occupied by the sleeper grants an opening for consciousness, allowing it to come to itself. When the body assumes a physical position it ‘communes’, so to speak, with consciousness—‘Through position consciousness participates in sleep’, says Levinas (1978: 72)—not unlike the ‘existential step’ that Merleau-Ponty identifies as the pre-condition to becoming situated. Alphonso Lingis usefully summarizes the Levinasian perspective: ‘Sleep is not a suspension of the existential arc by which one is in the world; it is a mode of being in the world. It is, indeed, existence reduced to taking up a position, positing oneself, achieving repose’ (Lingis 1978: 9). Rather than calling upon mimesis, sickness or immobility to posit a phenomenology of sleep, Paul Ricoeur invokes death. There are certain situations, he says, in which consciousness becomes ‘blinded and extinguished’: extreme fatigue, fainting, sleep. But even though death is the ultimate ‘extinction’ of consciousness, none of these other ‘boundary’ experiences can adequately prepare us for it. To the contrary, he avers, such experiences obscure its negative clench: And yet these experiences mask our death more than they reveal it: we speak of sleep, which Marcel Proust patiently describes, only after the fact, upon awakening—but we do not return from death: it is always ahead of us. More than that, for the waking consciousness sleep is not nothingness but a more or less refreshing interval inhabited by dreams: it is an other, unreal consciousness which relieves the waking consciousness. (Ricoeur 1966: 457) In accordance with Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, then, Ricoeur does not see sleep as a simple loss of consciousness; rather, it precipitates a different kind of

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consciousness, one that recognizes the otherness of oblivion, without actually submitting to it. But if temporary suspensions of consciousness cannot prepare us for the final extinction, the inverse nevertheless obtains. Thus, the certainty of our future death, and our anticipation of it, mean that the ‘most subjective experiences of my impotence and my negativity to which I submit passively’ (sleep, fainting, etc.) are contaminated with the odour of death, becoming, as it were, ‘quasiexperiences’ of death themselves: Finally sleep and fainting would not have that power of stimulating an always future death if this certitude of death, derived from elsewhere, did not lend them this symbolic significance. Thus nothingness and death cast their shadow over the sleeper who already suggests a corpse. (Ricoeur 1966: 461) Ricoeur is mapping the other side of the existential-spatial and corporeal components of sleep that mark out Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’s phenomenological passages. For even as the latter two determine to shield sleep from non-existence and death, they are not, unlike Descartes, impelled to do so by committing themselves to the sovereignty of consciousness. Indeed, by letting go of the latter they are free to speculate, like Freud and his ‘perceiving consciousness’, with such quasi-oxymoronic descriptions of sleep as ‘anonymous alertness’ and ‘negative upholding’ (Merleau-Ponty 1988: 118). Ricoeur, by contrast, admits the possibility that sleep may be a form of oblivion, in its ghostly intimations of death and nothingness. But the key term in his otherwise austere prognosis is ‘symbolic significance’. By insisting on the mediated nature of the phenomenal world, Ricoeur is issuing a riposte to Husserl’s faith in direct perceptual intuitions (see Ricoeur 2002: 589–92). It is not nihilistic actuality that sleep discloses, but a reflexive response brought about by a hermeneutical detour. Beckett, too, adumbrates a mediated conception of death and nothingness, and does it in a way that avoids a crudely mimetic empiricism. As the twilight of the body, sleep provides a material correlative to the ghost, and to the haunting that makes its trace-like existence both perceptible and meaningful. Something similar can be seen in the uses Beckett makes of the technologically mediated voice, a process that begins with the turn towards television drama.

The Voice from Elsewhere: Beckett’s Archaic Teleplays The feature common to all of Beckett’s works for television, contributing most to their singular aesthetic, is the use of asynchronous image and sound. Spoken dialogue, as such, is non-existent; every voice that is heard comes from somewhere other than the bodies inhabiting the frame. As a technique, the key

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precedent for this is filmic, rather than televisual: the cinema praxis of Jean-Luc Godard. Though his most lasting contribution to film language may be the jump-cut, it is Godard’s much less imitable experiments with sound-and-image asynchrony that constitute his most radical technical innovations; indeed, they provide the cornerstone for his aesthetics of suspicion. Like Brecht before him, Godard developed ways of quickening the viewer’s scepticism about film’s facile power of seduction (or, as Paul Coates once put it, ‘Godard’s films are machines for turning viewers into critics’ [Coates 1985: 46]). Godard experimented with every possible kind of image/sound relationship: music filtering obtrusively across scenes; voices appearing on the soundtrack, from no apparent source; and ambient sound either eerily absent, or incongruously displaced onto the ‘wrong’ scene. But although Godard’s work is more overtly political than Beckett’s, in its neo-Brechtian assault on the Aristotelian creed of empathy (motivation, identification, catharsis),4 his undertaking is finally not so different from Beckett’s. Which is to say, both men’s projects are phenomenologically oriented: they present the media of cinema and television in their essential forms, by foregrounding their facility for manufacturing illusion. Yet to realize this, each had to resurrect a model from his formative, most vital screen experiences. For Godard, it was the classic Hollywood B-picture, particularly the noir potboiler; and for Beckett, the silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, with its air of distant, yet deep-rooted melancholia. Using these somewhat orphic precedents as leverage, they sought to re-conceive the medium of cinema or television without its customary enticements, its regulating apparatus for viewer gratification. Beckett’s use of voiceover is fundamental to this process of reinvention. For television, like film, thrives on the illusion of ‘speaking’; to convince, it must weather the basic technological necessity of having image and voice captured separately, on different recording media, then recombined for broadcast. There is a phenomenological component at work here, too, in that these disparate experiences are ‘intended’ together by the viewer, and turned into a seamless audio-visual whole. But Beckett, as it were, reintroduces the split, the technological schism that is concealed in broadcast, by eliminating all visible speaking roles. Instead, he deploys what Michel Chion calls the ‘acousmatic voice’, the voice that is heard but never seen, that has no body and thus no position from which to speak, a voice without a place. Chion writes: ‘Being in the screen and not, wandering the surface of the screen without entering it, the acousmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension’ (Chion 1999: 24). This quality of inside/outside uncertainty leads us to the question of diegetic and nondiegetic sound; and through that, to the phenomenon of the voice-off. Once again, the notion of presence becomes paramount. As an aural phenomenon, presence is manifested when the verisimilitude of sound recording technology reduces the perceived distance between an object and its representation, lending it a quasi-metaphysical aura. In theory, it would be possible to

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confound this kind of technologically acquired presence by using antiquated recording equipment; yet because that carries with it associations of recapturing lost affect, the result is not so much presence dissolved as presence refigured, transmuted into the indefinite ache of nostalgia. More efficaciously, presence is complicated by the use of the voice-off, produced when diegetic sound, emerging from a source in the story space, or diegesis, is replaced by the non-diegetic sound of the disembodied voice.5 As Mary Ann Doane describes it: ‘Voice-off’ refers to instances in which we hear the voice of a character who is not visible within the frame. Yet the film establishes, by means of previous shots or other contextual determinants, the character’s ‘presence’ in the space of the scene, in the diegesis . . . . The traditional use of voice-off constitutes a denial of the frame as a limit and an affirmation of the unity and homogeneity of the depicted space. (Doane 1985: 165) Thus, unlike the ‘acousmatic voice’, which induces ‘disequilibrium and tension’, the voice-off is experienced as a reassertion of presence. It does this by enlarging the diegetic field, stretching it beyond the boundaries of the image, exceeding what the camera can register. When a viewer confronts it, a phenomenological reflex obliges him or her to experience the disembodied sound as part of the diegesis—first, by ascribing an ‘owner’ to the voice; then by ‘intending’ the unseen space the phantom speaker occupies back into the frame, hence making it recoverable. And so, as Kaja Silverman remarks, the ‘threat of absence’ raised by the voice-off is forestalled, because its owner ‘is almost always brought within the field of vision at some point or other’ (Silverman 1988: 48). In Beckett’s works for television, however, this expectation is consistently thwarted; and in doing so, the materiality of the medium, conventionally masked by synchronous sound, is exposed: As soon as the sound is detached from its source, no longer anchored by a represented body, its potential work as a signifier is revealed. There is always something uncanny about a voice which emanates from a source outside the frame. (Doane 1985: 167) This gives rise to an ‘absent present’ notion of character (or as Chion puts it, an ‘acousmatic presence’). In Beckett’s teleplays, the voice-off is inassimilable to diegesis, and hence it provides a kind of technological mediation between presence and absence, an aural equivalent for the phenomenology of sleep. The more fundamental matter at issue here, however, is Beckett’s uneasy relationship with technology. On the one hand, the reduced circumstances of his stage characters are ably served by the theatre, which naturally allows for a modesty of material elements and a minimum of technological supports. The recording arts, on the other hand, even at their most elementary, tender an

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abundance of resources that cannot be entirely, or even substantially, cast off. Beckett’s work in the electronic media of radio, cinema and television thus always seems, at least in theory, to cancel out some of the reductions he pursues so avidly in print and on the stage. One way of assaying this contradiction is through the backwards-looking design of the work. John Banville writes of the deliberate way in which the older Beckett archaicized his material; the landscape and objects of his mature work are those of a stylised childhood world of country roads with donkeys and antique bicycles and muttering old men in ragged coats and dented bowler hats. (Banville 1996: 28) In other words, at the level of content, this ‘stylized childhood world’, with its near-complete absence of technological markers, just does not fit with the sophistications conferred by the recording arts. The medium of television, whose birth coincides with Beckett’s international fame as a writer, would seem to be the most uncongenial of all, lacking even the limited history of its coevals. Banville’s observation does, however, stand up in the context of the teleplays— but not for the reasons he suggests. To be sure, these works are peopled by haunted-looking loners dressed in costumes at least 50 years out of date, murmuring details drawn from pastoral life (‘[U]ntil the time came . . . to issue forth again, to walk the roads. [Pause] The back roads’ [Beckett 1984: 261–2]). But rather than turn the technological capability of the medium to productive ends, Beckett prefers instead to focus on ‘the effortful, the recalcitrant, even the incorrect’ (Albright 2003: 1). Which is to say, there is an archaicization of form at work in the Beckett teleplays, facilitated by the use of voiceover technology. Tracing the aetiology of the visual recording arts, Michel Chion notes: ‘The synchronous voice comes from the theater . . . and voiceover commentary from the magic lantern shows and from older arts involving narrated projections’ (Chion 1999: 4). This, we might say, is part of the teleplays’ technological uncanniness—their evocation of all-but-forgotten pre-cinematic forms, which hint at a ghostly archaeology of the broadcast voice. In Eh Joe, the title character is haunted by his past, in the guise of a vengeful, insistent female voice inside his head. Filmed in a single take, the piece begins in long shot, with the camera moving in on Joe, narrowing the frame; in nine slow, inexorable movements, it ‘captures’ him in tight close-up, as the taunting voice (V, spoken by Sîan Phillips) continues to pin him down. By the ninth movement Joe’s face, dominating the frame for an inordinate length of time, sheds its representational quality and becomes itself a kind of screen, across which the voice’s words pass. V is a voice from the distant past, an extra-diegetic sound, in the tones of a former lover. But as the magnification of a memory-trace inside Joe’s head, it is

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also intra-diegetic, albeit located so far within that no recording equipment can register it. Jack MacGowran, who plays Joe, says of the piece: ‘It’s really photographing the mind. It’s the nearest perfect play for television that you could come across, because the television camera photographs the mind better than anything else’ (quoted in Zilliacus 1976: 198). What is most striking about this oft-quoted comment is its nonchalance towards V’s voiceover, without which Eh Joe would be little more than a pseudo-Warholian exercise in obduracy and torpor. If Beckett is, indeed, ‘photographing the mind’, he is doing it with a device that is more aural than optical. Moreover, the instrument he uses to achieve this, the interior monologue, puts in question any conventional understanding of the term. Interior monologue in fiction, like soliloquy in performance, is the speech of the soul, uninhibited and direct, and as near as a work can get to expressing the unmediated purity of presence. In terms of film, Doane describes the ‘privilege’ that interior monologue enjoys: ‘[T]he voice and the body are represented simultaneously, but the voice, far from being an extension of that body, manifests its inner lining . . . . The voice here is the privileged mark of interiority, turning the body “inside-out” ’ (Doane 1985: 168). In Eh Joe, then, Beckett creates an interior monologue that is entirely other—an exterior monologue, perhaps, a true voice from elsewhere, destroying Joe’s defences with such patient, concentrated malice as to deny any association with the stirrings of conscience. In confounding the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, Beckett is also charting an in-between state that disturbs the division between presence and absence, just as sleep does. Indeed, the paralyzing flatness of the voice, and the fact that Joe’s fathomless face—not without expression, as such, but with most of the signposts removed—is the only visual interest, comes perilously close to being a soporific. Ghost Trio, however, conveys its sleep aesthetic at the level of cause, i.e. through form, rather than effect. Taped in October 1976, and broadcast by the BBC 6 months later, it wears its archaisms on its sleeve, as indebted to 1920s’ silent cinema—Ronald Pickup as F, the male figure, seems to have wandered in from a German Expressionist film—as it is to the geometrized planes of Mondrian and Rothko. Scene one, ‘Pre-action’, is as impersonal as a floor plan. Though F (theoretically) occupies the room, it is transformed into a stubbornly non-human space, evacuated of anthropic qualities, by the narrator’s insistent focus on abstract forms. ‘Mine is a faint voice’, she announces. ‘It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens’ (Beckett 1984: 408). The viewer is then instructed to look (‘Look [. . .] Now look closer [. . .] Look again’ [1984: 408–9]), while various rectangular shapes appear on the screen: close-ups of window, door, pallet, wall and floor. This might be testing the veracity of Husserlian perceptual intuition, in the sense of securing presence through thereness, through the summoning of objects or shapes for electronic transmission. In scene two (‘Action’) the narrator switches from looking to listening: ‘He will now think he hears her’

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(1984: 410), she says, momentarily humanizing the scene. F becomes a recognizably sentient individual—no longer a figure lost in space amidst stark, estranging abstractions, but a figure in time, standing outside the oppressive demands of the moment, freeing himself from the shackles of presence. Anticipation, however, gives way to absence, in scene three (‘Re-action’). The woman F is waiting for does not come—a young boy announces this with a firm, silent, shake of the head—and the narrative voice absents itself, in lieu of samples from the Beethoven piece that gives the play its title. Waiting is, then, but the pretext for the play, whose true subjects are appearance and nonappearance. In addition, F’s repeated adoption of a bowed head and slumped posture establishes his relationship to place—to the room, in all its rectangular abstraction—enabling him to ‘take up a position’, to ‘posit himself’, which Levinas sees as the essential pre-condition for a phenomenology of sleep. But if Ghost Trio touches on the question of appearance indirectly and conceptually, through non-human forms and musical intervention, . . . but the clouds . . . confronts it head on. Made the same year as Ghost Trio, it showcases the attempts of another unnamed male protagonist, M, to probe the structures of appearance. ‘When she appeared it was always night’ (Beckett 1984: 419), he says, alluding to the visions he experiences of his elusive muse (or lost lover, or absent friend). He is, ultimately, a failed phenomenologist, unable to ascertain anything more specific about how these visions appear—and, hence, their mode of being—than the basic data of duration and utterance. He narrows it down to three kinds of appearance: fleeting and ephemeral; briefly lingering, but in silence; and lingering and ‘speaking’ (in fact, miming M’s words). This concise catalogue is underscored by the adept, effective use of fades and dissolves, formally conveying the uncanny nature of the trace, of the play of memory, that is the hallmark of these three teleplays.

No Sleep So Deep: Footfalls and Rockaby In his reflections on Beckett’s work for television, and the writer’s ‘recalcitrance against the medium’, Daniel Albright notes: ‘In a stage play you can’t unsay the presence of physical bodies, but in a television play they are already unsaid, so overtly unreal, at once glaring and dim, that you don’t need to stress their incompetence of being’ (Albright 2003: 135). Yet Beckett’s ghostliest stage drama, Footfalls, is precisely that: an attempt to ‘unsay the presence of physical bodies’, carried out by stressing the ‘incompetence of being’ of its protagonist. Thus, where Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds . . . show absence in terms of nonappearance, in Footfalls it is presented as a marker of non-being, the play’s sole actor required to demonstrate a kind of ontological slippage. Three ‘speaking’ scenes obliquely hint at this slippage, then a coda confirms it: a brief, dimly lit image of an empty stage, slowly fading into darkness.

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The first scene introduces us to May, a 40-ish wreck of a woman, who spends most of her time pacing the same tenebrous strip of floor, when she is not caring for her sick, bedridden, 90-year-old mother. The latter only appears as a voice-off, ‘from dark upstage’, and is designated as ‘V’. ‘Will you not try to snatch a little sleep?’ V asks her daughter (Beckett 1984: 400). But if this plea suggests that pacing might be a substitute for sleeping, in the logic of the play the two are co-extensive. For May is a chronic sleepwalker, her paces coordinated around the exchanges she has with her mother’s voice. Even to call these moments ‘exchanges’, however, is to assume too much, particularly in light of the earlier discussion about acousmatic presence. In other words, V may in fact be—like Joe’s vengeful accuser—a purely interior voice, the product of a mind subdued by self-torturing guilt. Yet despite this, in scene two May remains silent, while a ghostly V (‘I walk here now. [Pause] Rather I come and stand. [Pause] At nightfall’ [1984: 241]) relays some details of her daughter’s incomplete ontogeny. The victim of a difficult birth that blighted her passage to existence and scarred her being, May ‘has not been out since girlhood’, preferring to stay hidden in the ‘old home’, the ‘same where she began’ (1984: 401). To these two distinct Mays—the diegetic pacer of scene one, and the non-diegetic subject of scene two—can be added a third, the surrogate storyteller. In scene three, she relates an incident concerning old Mrs Winter and her daughter Amy. Though only mentioned for the first time, these are characters (May assures us) ‘whom the reader will remember’ (1984: 402). There is, indeed, much that is familiar about these two apparently improvised figures. ‘Amy’ is, of course, an anagram of ‘May’, and Mrs ‘Winter’ signifies an upside-down ‘M’ (just as ‘Watt’ provided an inverted continuation of the series from Murphy to Molloy, et al.). The dialogue that takes place between them—a dispute about presence, no less, at the earlier Evensong (Amy: ‘I was not there’; Mrs Winter: ‘Not there? . . . But I heard you respond’ [Beckett 1984: 403])—concludes with the same phrases that V addressed to May: ‘Will you never have done [. . .] revolving it all? . . . In your poor mind’ (1984: 240, 243). Though the ‘it’ is never properly identified, the evidence points to the mother– daughter relation, ‘revolving’ into an interior voice now drawn from memory (V), now displaced onto barely fictional others (Amy, Mrs Winter). At the core of the play are two forms of repetition. Elsewhere in Beckett’s work, repetitive patterns proliferate like fractal geometry: the circular shape of narrative forms, the involuted mathematical writhing of permutation, the compulsive behavioural and linguistic tics of outcast protagonists. The ghost plays, however, use the more suggestive motif of repetition as a form of haunting. As the opening words of V’s monologue (‘I walk here now’) remind us, ghosts haunt the living by re-enacting the same scene again and again, ‘revenants’ mysteriously bound to certain times and places. (Derrida sees this as fundamental to the phenomenon of spectrality: ‘The specter, as its name indicates, is the

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frequency of a certain visibility’ [Derrida 1994: 100]).6 This is borne out in Hamlet, the founding ghost drama of the modern stage, when the anticipated re-appearance of King Hamlet’s apparition rouses the Prince to his task. Haunting is, however, but the ‘background’ repetition of the play. In the foreground is the repetition of rhythm. May’s measured pacing back and forth, implacable and austere, keeps time for her and V’s voices to follow. Pacing establishes the rhythm that conditions the play, so that ‘deep sleep’ drama can emerge—a process facilitated by isolating the symptoms of actual sleep. As studies of sleeping subjects have shown, it is during the most intensive ‘deep sleep’ part of the cycle that such parasomniac activity as limb movements, sleepwalking and night terrors all occur (Strollo, Jr. 1998: 10). This is the topos that Footfalls establishes: a nocturnal theatre of sleep, fading slowly before our eyes, as tenuous and provisional as the vanishing present.7 So effective is this ethereal ambience, says Stanton B. Garner, that it relocates language in ‘an ambiguous half-world where its status as utterance (and the status of its utterances) become, like the play’s eerie central figure, mountingly indeterminate’ (Garner 1989: 163). Nevertheless, other critics have viewed these qualities in terms of conventional dramaturgy. Adam Piette, for example, avers: ‘The body’s halts and revolutions and ghostly look may be a haunting of the mind, or created by its words; none the less they are physically there on stage’ (Piette 1996: 227). The empirical evidence of that thereness, however, cannot be corroborated by existential assurance. For what underpins this particular ‘thereness’ is absence, ephemerality, non-appearance and (as May demonstrates) liminal non-being. The physical, in other words, is cast in doubt by the phenomenological, through its articulation of the nothingness of sleep. Consciousness and oblivion, the couple that coordinates the philosophy of sleep, finds a correlative in the more familiar dyad of self and other. But although May’s story, in scene three, reaches out for something external and other, she ends up telling her own story, the otherness of imagination yielding to the sameness of narrative iteration. Amy’s guileless remark (‘I was not there’ [Beckett 1984: 403]) thus becomes May’s fate, in the play’s coda. Unable to secure even a limited subjectivity, May is pure other, an ‘I-less’ self, which is to say, a non-self—a trace, an emanation, a fleeting after-image. Ricoeur’s observation that every sleeper is somehow marked by the shadow of her final end—that sleep is, in some sense, a rehearsal for death—is succinctly dramatized in this doleful anti-spectacle. The pacing that defines May’s mode of being leads her through the rhythmic undulations of sleep and into oblivion. With Footfalls, as Enoch Brater notes, Beckett ‘has finally succeeded in making absence a palpable stage presence’ (Brater 1987: 60). Like Footfalls, Rockaby only approximates its classification as a one-woman drama, since what is really being staged is a complex interaction between a woman (W), a voice and a rocking-chair. Through four highly repetitive ‘movements’, W’s back-story is brought to light—how she came to be the ‘Woman in

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chair’ (Beckett 1984: 435), and how her voice came to ‘speak’ her, like an external commentary. For unlike in Footfalls, the voice is W’s own, a recording whose intonation is pitched somewhere between a lullaby and a lament. Rhythm once again underlies repetition, but here it is mechanically achieved: first, through the machine-like rocking of the chair,‘[c]ontrolled mechanically’ (1984: 434), as Beckett’s directions stipulate; then via the tempo of the voice, synchronized to the chair’s rocks; and finally by the voice’s medium, allowing it to be mechanically reproduced over and over again. ‘[G]aze long into an abyss’, writes Nietzsche, and ‘the abyss also gazes into you’ (Nietzsche 2003: 102). W’s tragedy is that nothing gazes at or into her; she is a victim of too much seeing (‘all eyes | all sides | high and low’ (Beckett 1984: 435), a refrain repeated nine times) and not enough to see (‘famished eyes | like hers’ (1984: 439), in another refrain). The fear often attributed to middleaged women, of becoming invisible, is transformed here from a social anxiety about lost or misplaced identity into a crisis of ontology. It is given dramatic contours by the fundamental mismatch between body and utterance, recalling the similarly disjunctive face/voice combination of Eh Joe. But where Joe is temporarily overcome by an alien acousmatic presence, an unforgiving return of the repressed, W is afflicted with the more chronic and irreversible condition of self-alterity. The enabling factor for this condition is the mother–daughter relation, manifested through the rocker that channels the spirit of W’s dead mother. ‘[T]hose arms at last’ (Beckett 1984: 441): the chair’s arms that once ‘held’ the mother, rocking her to her final end, also evoke the mother’s arms holding W, rocking her to sleep. The difference is elided when W follows her mother into the chair, allowing ‘those arms’ to hold her once again. But if May could not be properly born, W cannot quite die. The head falling to one side at the end seems a gesture overwritten with ‘symbolic significance’—a representation of a representation, another rehearsal for death rather than expiration pure and simple. As W becomes her own ghost, her own (m)other, Rockaby plots the vanishingpoint of its protagonist, providing yet another complement to the teleplays’ focus on processes of non-appearance. The theatre, insofar as it has relations with the real world, registers them in the tension between sign (gesture, action) and thing (the actor’s body). Jean-Paul Sartre writes: In the theater it hardly worries you for a moment to see Madelaine Renaud as a twenty-year-old widow. For what counts is not that she is a widow of twenty, but is acting here. Where are the beauty and youth? They are not there. What is there is the significance of gesture. It is not a presence, but a kind of absence, a kind of intangible ghost; the absent object is enveloped in the gesture; you believe it is still there. (Sartre 1976: 60)

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From this Sartrean angle, there is a metaphysics of performance at work that renders actors both present and non-present. The theatre, in other words, is founded in the space between presence and absence, where the trace abides. Yet this apparently indubitable phenomenological observation has not been widely absorbed. Twenty years ago, Steven Connor outlined the cynosure of Beckett criticism: [I]t has been the prevailing critical and cultural consensus about the theatre and its strengths and capacities which has allowed [Beckett’s] work to be absorbed and rewritten as a humanist theatre of presence, a theatre which directly and powerfully embodies real and universal human predicaments. (Connor 1988: 118) There is, then, something elemental about Beckett’s theatre that enables, even encourages, the forging of links between theatrical form in the widest sense and local instantiations in the playwright’s work. If Beckett’s theatre, as Connor suggests, ‘asks questions of common conceptions about the theatre as a whole’ (Connor 1988: 118), then what is at stake, finally, is the nature of the medium itself. And what Beckett reveals about it sabotages some of its most timehonoured axioms. One way of countering the orthodoxy of the ‘humanist theatre of presence’ is to explore Beckett’s stage work as if it were founded on the failings and shortcomings of the medium (as Daniel Albright does, in Beckett and Aesthetics [Albright 2003: 1–2]). I have pursued a more oblique strategy, using the notion of ‘deep sleep’ drama to suggest how some of the late works line up with certain precepts of existential phenomenology. The more the desire for appearance, for visibility, for ocular reassurance obtains, the more it is offset by the fugitive and evanescent, and those quiescent qualities of waiting and suspension. If phenomenology begins as the science of appearances, Beckett engages with it by staging dramas of disappearance, deferral and non-appearance, shaping them with the recursive rhythm that is the chief property of the revenant. In short, they animate a situation that might be summed up as the ineluctable ephemerality of the visible. ‘Deep sleep’ drama is also about the voice from elsewhere. Its estranging character is conveyed via levels of audibility (‘Mine is a faint voice’ [Beckett 1984: 408]) and unwavering intonation (‘It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens’ [1984: 408]). The voice is pitched low, attuned to the rhythmic slowness of pacing and of rocking, and to dimness of illumination. The ghost voices circulating through these plays can only exist in the time of sleep, and can only commune with figures phantasmal and discarnate, on the very edge of non-existence. In these different ways, Beckett’s ghost dramas reveal the play of presence and absence, materiality and representation, the corporeal

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and the symbolic, that defines the drama. Sartre may have pinpointed the ‘absent present’ at the heart of performance, its ‘intangible ghost’ quality, but it is Beckett who tests it dramatically. In doing so, he not only touches on the essence of the medium but also discloses the phenomenological verity that, in a theatre of shadows, the ghost is the most real thing of all.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

Though Zurbrugg’s focus is the apparitional elements at work in Ill Seen Ill Said, the fact that he cites Footfalls points to the late drama (and the television work that anticipates it) as a congenial locus to explore his suggestive remark. For example, the opening pages dealing with the experience of waking up are alluded to by Ricoeur (1966: 457) and examined in detail by Merleau-Ponty (1962: 181). See Johnstone 1973. Joseph W. Galloway, however, argues that this is to assume too much; that ‘[t]here can be no gap in consciousness unless there is some consciousness to begin with’ (1977: 112). As Alan Williams sees it, Godard’s use of image–sound relations is consistent with Brecht, in the latter’s belief that a ‘radical separation of elements’ is essential to epic form (Williams 1985: 345). ‘The process of fusion’, writes Brecht, ‘extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought against’ (Brecht 1964: 37–8). The French term for voiceover is, in fact, voix-off, i.e., voice-off. See also Fraser (2000: 782). This is not to suggest that Beckett had any specialized knowledge of the science of sleep, or that he set out to dramatize a specific disorder, though he may well have had an intuitive grasp of such matters. In any case, these studies are mentioned here merely as an explicatory parallel. In similar fashion, Adam Piette sees some of May’s symptoms, including sleepwalking, in Pierre Janet’s analysis of a hysterical patient (Piette 1993: 41–8).

Bibliography Albright, D. (2003), Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banville, J. (1996), ‘The Painful Comedy of Samuel Beckett’. The New York Review of Books 43, 18, 14 Nov, 24–9. Beckett, S. (1984), Collected Shorter Plays. London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber. Brater, E. (1987), Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Brecht, B. (1964), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans. J. Willett. London: Methuen.

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Chion, M. (1999), The Voice In Cinema. Trans. C. Gorbman. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Coates, P. (1985), The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema. London: Verso. Connor, S. (1988), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(1978), ‘The Theater of Cruelty or the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 232–50. —(1994), Specters of Marx. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge. Doane, M. A. (1985), ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, in E. Weis and J. Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 162–76. Fraser, G. (2000), ‘ “No More than Ghosts Make”: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work’. Modern Fiction Studies 46, 3, 772–85. Galloway, J. W. (1977), ‘On Johnstone’s “Phenomenology of Death” and “Philosophy of Sleep” ’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38, 1, Sept, 107–13. Garner, S. B., Jr. (1989), The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theatre. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Johnstone, H. W., Jr. (1973), ‘Toward a Philosophy of Sleep’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34, 1, 73–81. Levinas, E. (1978), Existence and Existents. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Lingis, A. (1978), ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to E. Levinas, Existence and Existents. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —(1968), The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(1988), In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. J. Wild, J. Edie and J. O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Piette, A. (1993), ‘Beckett, Early Neuropsychology and Memory Loss: Beckett’s Reading of Clarapede, Janet and Korsakoff’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2, pp. 41–8. —(1996), Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ricoeur, P. (1966), Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. E. V. Kokák. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(2002), ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ in D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds), The Phenomenology Reader. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 579–600. Sartre, J.-P. (1976), Sartre on Theater. London: Quartet. Silverman, K. (1988), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Strollo, P. J., Jr. (1998), ‘Sleep Disorders in Primary Care’ in J. S. Piceta and M. M. Mitler (eds), Sleep Disorders: Diagnosis and Treatment. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, pp. 1–20. Williams, A. (1985), ‘Godard’s Use of Sound’ in E. Weis and J. Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 332–45. Zilliacus, C. (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television. Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi. Zurbrugg, N. (1987), ‘Ill Seen Ill Said and the Sense of an Ending’, in J. Acheson and K. Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 145–59.

Filmography Gibson, A. (1966), dir. Eh Joe. First televised on BBC2, 4 July 1966. McWhinnie, D. (1977a), dir. Ghost Trio. First televised on BBC2, 17 April 1977. —(1977b), dir . . . but the clouds . . . . First televised on BBC2, 17 April 1977.

Chapter 10

Living the Unnamable: Towards a Phenomenology of Reading Paul Stewart

I What happens in the consciousness of the reader as he or she reads The Unnamable? What is the nature of the experience that such a reader undergoes? As Wolfgang Iser states: ‘We have undergone an experience, and now we want to know consciously what we have experienced. Perhaps this is the prime usefulness of literary criticism’ (Iser 1974: 290). A phenomenological enquiry into what occurs in the consciousness of the subject reading The Unnamable naturally falls into a genealogy of theoretical attempts, derived from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, to capture the phenomenon of reading. Husserl himself, as he advocated the discipline of pure phenomenology, made it clear that a phenomenological method can and should be used not only to investigate the consciousness of the objective, spatio-temporal world, but also other states which correlate with processes of consciousness. Given that the objective world is itself ‘bracketed’ by phenomenological reduction (or Husserlian epoché), in order to focus on consciousness as such, that world is itself in a manner already rendered fictional, if only for the purposes of phenomenological enquiry. The fantastic nature of an art work is therefore no bar to employing the same phenomenological methodology. In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl uses the example of imagining St George killing a dragon, stating that ‘this object, this knight St George, lies within the meaning of the phenomenon, and is manifested there “as a datum” of a sort proper to appearance’ (Husserl 1964: 57). Thus phenomenology investigates not only the subjective consciousness of things of the outer world, but also the givenness of something absurd, of something contradictory, of something which does not exist. In general, whether a datum manifests what is merely

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represented or what truly exists, what is real or what is ideal, what is possible or impossible, it is a datum in the cognitive phenomenon, in the phenomenon of a thought, in the widest term. (Husserl 1964: 59) The path for the phenomenologically-derived study of how cognition relates to the pseudo-object of fiction is thus well signposted by Husserl’s revolutionary philosophy. Yet at the same time, to place the experience of reading Beckett’s The Unnamable within a phenomenological framework is to carry investigation up to, but no further than, a certain point. As the first major phenomenological theoretician of the encounter between reader and text, Roman Ingarden, fully appreciated, the borders of enquiry needed to be policed. It is at these borders that one might be tempted to find a congruence between Ingarden and Beckett. Writing against Husserl’s concept of the ‘ideal species’ of sentences, Ingarden suggests that the consequence of such an idealized syntax would be to ‘consider the writer to be not a creator of his work but only a discoverer of complexes of sentences’ (Ingarden 1973b: 99). In another’s hands, and within the post-structuralist mindset (itself indebted to Husserl) this would be an accurate description of precisely what occurs within The Unnamable, in which the protagonist is not the agent of creation but rather its object; he is indeed ‘made up of words’ and these words are in him merely as a matter of quotation: ‘I’m in words, made of words, others’ words’ (Beckett 1994: 390). Similarly, at the perimeters of Ingarden’s analysis lies the disturbing possibility that communication is itself impossible: If there were no ideal concepts and, furthermore, no ideal qualities (essences) and ideas, not only would sentences or real and intentional objectivities be impossible; it would also be equally impossible to achieve between two conscious subjects genuine linguistic communication, in which both sides would apprehend an identical meaning content of the sentences exchanged. (Ingarden 1973b: 364) Was not the same point raised by Beckett decades before, in his monograph Proust, in which he claimed: ‘There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication’ (Beckett 1987: 64)? On this basis Beckett, in accordance, he claims, with Proust, argues that human interaction—be it friendship or interaction between text and reader—is beset by insuperable difficulties, making art no longer a means of expression, but an ‘apotheosis of solitude’ in which ‘[e]ven on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expressions of personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them.’ (Beckett 1987: 64) One need only consider the fraught relations between the narrator and posited

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reader in Dream of Fair to Middling Women to envisage how Beckett’s work may be viewed in precisely these terms. Ingarden was aware that, once any hope of communicable ‘essence’ was removed, text, author and reader effectively disappeared as a result. He foresaw, and denied, the radical yet logical consequences of this position, so evident in the rise of post-structuralism, the prism through which Beckett’s art has so often been viewed over the past three decades. In rejecting the teleology of these consequences, Ingarden insisted on the literary work of art’s inherent ability to express. All such expression was dependent upon a text–reader relation, since ‘the stratum of the literary work which is constructed out of word meanings, sentences and complexes of sentences has no autonomous ideal existence but is relative, in both its origin and its existence, to entirely determinate subjective conscious operations’ (Ingarden 1973b: 105). This necessarily entails phenomenological methods undertaken by the author and the reader in their own subjective spheres: The literary work as such is purely an intentional formation which has the source of its being in the creative acts of consciousness of its author and the physical foundation in the text set down in writing or through other physical means of reproduction . . . . By virtue of the dual stratum of its language, the work is both intersubjectively accessible and reproducible, so that it becomes an intersubjective intentional object, related to a community of readers. (Ingarden 1973a: 14) By insisting on the essential processes of both text and reader, Ingarden clearly draws a line between his preference for a Husserlian theory of the cognition of the literary work of art, and the play of floating signs and signifiers within poststructuralism. No matter how tempting a continuation of thought into nonessentialist post-structuralism might be, it would traverse the boundaries of Ingarden’s phenomenology of reading, which depends upon the structurally implied and immanent possibilities of the text being concretized in the consciousness of the reader. If one focuses on the boundaries of Ingarden’s theory, or, rather, on its endpoints, it would seem that Beckett’s work emerges as an unfit subject for a phenomenology of reading. In what he saw as the necessary synthesis of the functioning strata within the literary work of art, Ingarden claimed that aesthetic value lay in a ‘polyphonic harmony’; that is, a form of transcendental reconciliation between diverse elements contained within the work of art: [T]he harmony of aesthetic value qualities constitutes a new unifying bond that binds even more closely the individual strata of the work, which, according to their essence, are already closely fused, and manifests anew the unity

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of the literary work of art despite the characteristic heterogeneity of its elements. (Ingarden 1973b: 372) As Beckett’s texts are marked not so much by harmony as by disjunction, dissonance and fragmentation, it would appear that his writing falls short of Ingarden’s prerequisite for aesthetic value. For Ingarden, moreover, Beckett’s texts may fail as works of art, for if the work, as a result of its own unclarities and disorder, cannot be read in any other way, then the aesthetic aspect will be seriously impaired. It will make no difference whether the unclarities are accidental flaws or intended features of the work. (Ingarden 1973a: 36) While Beckett’s art, in which ‘unclarities’ are unmistakeably intended features, might fall fowl of, or exceed, Ingarden’s claim for the synthesizing properties of polyphonic harmony, the manner in which the oeuvre ‘fails’ is itself revealing. Indeed, Beckett’s attempt to ‘fail better’ provides the points of intersection between his art and Ingarden’s criticism. To explore this convergence, it is first necessary to consider the four strata which, for Ingarden, form the literary work of art as it is given to consciousness: (1) the stratum of word sounds and the phonetic formation of higher order built on them; (2) the stratum of meaning units of various orders; (3) the stratum of manifold schematized aspects and aspect continua and series, and, finally, (4) the stratum of represented objectivities and their vicissitudes. (Ingarden 1973b: 30) Effectively, Ingarden ‘brackets’ any considerations other than those which are given by a text; namely, sounds, words, sentences and concatenations of sentences. Each of the strata and their correlatives may be studied separately despite acting interdependently, building upon and reacting to each other, in order to present the artwork as an aesthetic whole as it is concretized by the reader. Given that ‘harmony’ is the expected aesthetic result, it is not surprising to find that ‘flow’ is valued on the level of the meaning units of sentences: Once we are transposed into the flow of thinking the sentence, we are prepared, after having completed the thought of one sentence, to think its ‘continuation’ in the form of another sentence, specifically, a sentence which has a connection with the first sentence. In this way the process of reading a text advances effortlessly. But when it happens that the second sentence has no perceptible connection whatever with the first, the flow of thought is checked. A more or less vivid surprise or vexation is associated with the resulting hiatus. (Ingarden 1973a: 34)

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Effortlessness is not a word one would readily apply to any experience of reading Beckett’s prose. Nonetheless, the progress of sentence continuation described by Ingarden above helpfully delineates the method and nature of Beckett’s disruptive style. Following Husserl in stressing the spatio-temporal nature of perception, Ingarden emphasizes that the sentences and higher meaning units they form are dependent on their place within a linear sequence, perceived over time as one progresses through a given text: [T]he given sentence-forming operation is thus, on the one hand, under the guiding principle of the yet-to-be-expressed and, on the other hand, is under the pressure of the already-expressed; it is thus relatively dependent and is carried by the initial impulse of developing a theme. (Ingarden 1973b: 104) If a ‘theme’ is to emerge in the reader’s consciousness, effortless advancement is preferable for Ingarden; yet this is precisely what does not occur in Beckett’s prose. For instance, David Watson, in Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, has noted how, instead of using the ‘themic’ elements of a sentence as a linking method (namely those elements which are, in Ingarden’s terms, the ‘already-expressed’, which will be passed forward into the ‘yet-to-be-expressed’), Beckett uses unexpected elements within a sentence (the rhemic) to progress falteringly: ‘What Beckett’s text frequently does is to take as its point of digression rhemic elements of apparently minor significance, thus opening up a gap with the (presumed) general body of the text which resists bounding and closure’ (Watson 1991: 75). At the level of sentence construction—and therefore on the level of the ‘state of affairs’, or ‘schematized aspects’, of Ingarden’s higher units of meaning which are dependent on those sentences—harmony is resisted, while vexation and hiatus is induced. In the extreme prose at the close of The Unnamable, the themic, rhemic and sequential nature of the clauses refuses to form comprehensible blocks of meaning, let alone a clear structure of overarching meaning. The paradoxical temporality of meaning units in their ‘yet-to-be-expressed’ and ‘already-expressed nature’, which, in the following example from The Unnamable, is on the level of the clause rather than the sentence, leads to an apparently chaotic, churning progression and regression—hardly the writerly ‘flow’ praised by Ingarden: [I]t was never I, I’ve never stirred, I’ve listened, I must have spoken, why deny it, why not admit it, after all, I deny nothing, I say what I hear, hear what I say, I don’t know, one or the other, or both, those makes three possibilities, pick your fancy, all these stories about travellers, those stories about paralytics, all are mine, I must be extremely old, or it’s memory playing tricks, if only I knew if I’ve lived, if I live, if I’ll live, that would simplify everything, impossible to find out, that’s where you’re buggered . . . . (Beckett 1994: 416–17)

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This is not easy reading. Indeed, as soon as one assumes that the fragmented clauses are coalescing into a distinct meaning unit, a new tangent is opened up, pursued and aborted. The reader might well be vexed at the refusal of these clauses to coalesce into an identifiable meaning; yet this is precisely the Unnamable’s dilemma: an inability to make words settle into a meaningful identification with ‘him’, for even the pronouns are at fault. The reader’s dilemma is, therefore, already staged as the dilemma of the Unnamable and what is read is already a description of the reader’s experience. As such, Ingarden offers a method of viewing what happens in The Unnamable and to the Unnamable, albeit in the form of a negative reversal: ‘The sentences cannot merely “originate”; they must also be changed in corresponding subjective cognitive operations, connected into higher units, or, finally, be destroyed, that is, be removed from the world in the very specific operation of “rejection” ’ (Ingarden 1973b: 103). One might even interpret the Unnamable’s successive avatars as prefigured in this process of cognition, creation and rejection of meaning. On the level of what the literary work of art is and how it operates—measures by which Beckett’s The Unnamable fails to achieve aesthetic harmony—there appears to be considerable divergence between Beckett’s texts and Ingarden’s theory. However, while the manner of that divergence is useful in figuring what the Beckett text actually does to the reader’s consciousness, it should be noted that Ingarden and Beckett are both dependent upon the key recognition that literature is not truth. Therein rests its power. The fictive nature of literature is both a constant theme and a driving force within Beckett’s oeuvre, from the overt narrative incursions in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, through the rather more enigmatic authoring presences of Murphy, Mercier and Camier and Watt, to the complex creator/created relations of the Trilogy and beyond. Literature, while shamming the appurtenances of truth, is always a lie. In Molloy, the fictive fabric is revealed as having little or no valid connection to what may naïvely be called events in the naturalistic, intersubjective world: And every time I say, I said this, or, I said that, or speak of a voice saying, far away inside me, Molloy, and then a fine phrase more or less clear and simple, or find myself compelled to attribute to others intelligible words, or hear my own voice uttering to others more or less articulate sounds, I am merely complying with the convention that demands you either lie or hold your peace. For what really happened was quite different. (Beckett 1994: 87–8) In Malone Dies, the second novel of the Trilogy, there is the imperative to ‘live and invent’ (Beckett 1994: 195)—alongside a recognition that what are required are not attempts at truth, but stories told in the knowledge that they are play rather than symptoms of earnestness. Subsequently in The Unnamable, in which the complexities of truth and lies and what lies in-between are innumerable,

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previous Beckett texts are themselves revealed as lies circling around an inexpressible, unnamable core: ‘All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them, when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone’ (1994: 305). The Unnamable is well aware of being involved in the creation of yet further fictions: ‘I shall be obliged . . . to invent another fairy-tale, yet another, with heads, trunks, arms, legs, and all that follows’ (1994: 309). In these examples—and one could choose many others almost at random— Beckett foregrounds the intrinsically illusory nature of fiction. Importantly, even an affirmative statement within the literary work of art does not quite contain what it refers to beyond itself; indeed, it is doubtful whether it can be anything other than self-referential at all. It is precisely this radical ambiguity or ‘quasi-judgemental’ aspect of literary language that Ingarden sees as the source of literature’s phenomenological force: Since in a literary work there are only quasi-judgemental assertive propositions of various types, they are not . . . pure affirmative propositions. Thus, by virtue of their described properties, they are capable of evoking, to a greater or lesser degree, the illusion of reality; this pure affirmative propositions cannot do. They carry with them, in other words, a suggestive power which, as we read, allows us to plunge into the simulated world and live in it as a world peculiarly unreal and yet having the appearance of reality. This great and mysterious achievement of the work of art has its source primarily in the peculiar . . . quasi-judgemental character of assertive propositions. (Ingarden 1973b: 171–2) Ingarden’s perspective here is exemplified by the infamous conclusion to Molloy: ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (Beckett 1994: 176). In this case, the judgemental character of an assertive proposition is directly contradicted by an ensuing, negative assertion. The sentences within the Trilogy are revealed as invalid; however, this cannot be done through the mere favouring of one of these propositions over the other. That would be to privilege one proposition as more valid, and hence less quasi-judgemental, than the other. On what grounds could one make such a selection, when both statements refer to something which does not, in itself, exist? We cannot check our watches to see if it is midnight, nor go to the window to have a look at the weather, for these given realities are not the given realities of the fictional world. The reader is placed within an oscillating zone of indecision, ironically captured by the Unnamable’s uncertainty over whether to proceed by ‘aporia pure and simple?’ (1994: 293). But even this tautological manner of progressing is demonstrated to be an unconnected tautology, for ‘I say aporia without knowing what it means’ (1994: 293). As a literary method, aporia certainly cannot be pure and simple. Such an entrapment ultimately

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ends in what Ingarden would no doubt have seen as an aesthetic failure to coalesce into harmony. Although Ingarden may not have approved, his recognition of the quasi-judgemental nature of the propositions within the literary work of art creates a chain of logical consequences. Once the literary work itself recognizes its own quasi-judgemental nature and that recognition becomes part of the work, then hiatus and vexation will occur both within the work and the reader. In a rather paradoxical sense, harmony is restored through a shared experience of hiatus and vexation. Although one might wish to excise the phrase ‘wonderful world’ from Ingarden’s description of the reader’s involvement with a literary text when mediated through the effects of the assertive properties of fiction, the following description does hold true for what occurs within Beckett’s Trilogy, and for the effects it may have on the reader: The literary work of art is a true wonder. It exists and lives and works on us . . . it allows us to descend into the very depths of existence, and yet it is only an ontically heteronomous formation which in terms of ontic autonomy is a nothing . . . . It is a nothing and yet a wonderful world in itself . . . . (Ingarden 1973b: 373)

II Although Ingarden can prove a useful theoretical and phenomenological prism through which to view the reader’s experience of Beckett, the Beckettian text is frequently delineated by what Ingarden excludes from, or condemns in, the literary work of art. If one accepts Ingarden in his totality, it is difficult to see Beckett’s work as anything other than an aesthetic failure, one which refuses to provide the synthesis of polyphonic harmony that Ingarden holds to be the criterion of artistic success. The challenge then becomes how one might fruitfully include Beckett within a theory of aesthetic response. It is this challenge which Wolfgang Iser has accepted. According to Iser, the polyphonic harmony in Ingarden’s approach ‘provides closure of the system, for only if the system is closed can it put on the mantle of theory. As long as polyphonic harmony provides the guideline for interpretation of the literary work, its application will be restricted to classical texts’ (Iser 2006: 22). The ‘non-classical’ texts (Beckett and Joyce are Iser’s prime examples), can only be accommodated by a theory which does not seek to transform dissonance into harmony. Unlike Ingarden, Iser fully accepts the polyphony of the literary work and wishes to maintain that polyphony. For Iser, it is precisely the degree of such conflicting valences in the non-classical text that allows for the greater and more active involvement of the reader in the formation of the text’s meaning. Ingarden regards . . . interruption to the flow as a defect, and this shows the extent to which he applies even to the reading process his classical concept of

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the work of art as polyphonic harmony . . . . But in literary texts, not only is the sequence full of surprising twists and turns, but indeed we expect it to be so . . . . The ‘obstacle’ condemned by Ingarden enables the sentence correlates to be set off against one another. On the level of the sentences themselves, the interruption of expected connections may not be of any great significance; however it is paradigmatic of the many processes of focusing and refocusing that take place during the reading of a literary text. The need for readjustment arises primarily from the fact that the aesthetic object has no existence of its own, and can consequently only come into being by way of such processes. (Iser 1978: 112) Iser’s account is rooted in an appreciation—and indeed extension—of Ingarden’s thought. Iser has brought about a reversal of value in Ingarden’s phenomenology of reading: that which was bad (a ‘hiatus’ or a ‘vexation’) has become the method by which a work of literature functions within the reader. In The Act of Reading, Iser lays out his basic theoretical structure. Accepting Ingarden’s phenomenological strata in which the work is constituted, Iser advances a so-called ‘Wandering Viewpoint’, referring to a process of oscillation through which the reader builds a pattern of contingent consistency. Again, Husserl provides the philosophical underpinning for Iser’s programme of literary exegesis: In describing the inner consciousness of time, Husserl once wrote: ‘Every originally constituent process is inspired by protensions, which construct and collect the seed of what is to come, as such, and bring it to fruition.’ This remark draws attention to an elementary factor which plays a central part in the reading process. The semantic pointers of individual sentences always imply an expectation of some kind—Husserl calls these expectations ‘protensions.’ As this structure is inherent in all intentional sentence correlates, it follows that their interplay will lead not so much to the fulfilment of expectations as to their continual modification. Now herein lies a basic structure of the wandering viewpoint . . . . In most literary texts, . . . the sequence of sentences is so structured that the correlates serve to modify and even frustrate the expectations they have aroused. In so doing, they automatically have a retroactive effect on what has already been read, which now appears quite different. (Iser 1978: 110–11) The degree of modification has been greatly increased by Iser, principally because the ultimate synthesis of divergent viewpoints is no longer to be resolved into harmony. Rather, the process, to borrow a phrase from The Unnamable, of ‘affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered’ (Beckett 1994: 293) is the means by which the text presents itself to the reader: The relation between text and reader is . . . quite different from that between object and observer: instead of a subject–object relationship, there

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is a moving viewpoint which travels along inside that which it has to apprehend. This mode of grasping an object is unique to literature. (Iser 1978: 109) We, as readers, do not stand in relation to what is ‘out there’ in an objectified milieu or environment, but instead what is ‘in here’ within individual consciousness at the provocation of the demands of the indeterminacy of the text. Throughout a given text—and especially so with Beckett’s The Unnamable—the reader is involved in ‘consistency-building’, subjective meaning creation as the necessary way into a text’s possible readings. This consistency-building results in a greater whole, or gestalten, which Iser claims might be viewed as the perceptual noema of the text. This means that as each linguistic sign conveys more than just itself to the mind of the reader, it must be joined together in a single unit with all its referential contexts. The unit of the perceptual noema comes about by way of the reader’s act of apprehension: he identifies the connections between the linguistic signs and thus concretizes the references not explicitly manifested in those signs. The perceptual noema therefore links up the signs, their implications, their reciprocal influences, and the reader’s acts of identification, and through it the text begins to exist as a gestalt in the reader’s consciousness. (Iser 1978: 121) One suspects Ingarden would have ended his enquiry with the gestalten formed in the reader’s consciousness (i.e. this is what we are conscious of ), but Iser, who keeps his theory open to the phenomenological challenge of Beckett’s writing, argues that individual interpretation does not settle into a fixed form quite so easily. For Iser, the gestalten, dependent upon the process of selection, are always, and inherently, provisional: [T]he gestalten remain at least potentially under attack from those possibilities which they have excluded but dragged along in their wake. Indeed, the latent disturbance of the reader’s involvement produces a specific form of tension that leaves him suspended, as it were, between total engagement and latent detachment. The result is a dialectic—brought about by the reader himself—between illusion-forming and illusion-breaking. (Iser 1978: 127) This dialectic between formation and destruction, between engagement and detachment, denies a linear subject–object relation of reader and text respectively, allowing the text to be experienced as an ongoing and ever-renewed event: The ‘conflict’ can only be resolved by an emergence of a third dimension, which comes into being through the reader’s continual oscillation between

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involvement and observation. It is in this way that the reader experiences the text as a living event. (Iser 1978: 128) As Beckett was a distinct presence in Iser’s work from its very inception, it is tempting to regard Iser’s project as one already conditioned by, say, The Unnamable. Indeed, it is this awareness of Beckett’s work which requires a further dimension to be added to Iser’s thinking. Beckett’s extreme use of negation (including the negation of ‘traditional’ narrative functions, which thus creates a form of ‘minus function’) does not allow gestalten to form for any reasonable length of time, meaning that ‘the reader is forced continually to cancel the meaning he has formed, and through this negation he is made to observe the projective nature of all the meanings which the text has impelled him to produce’ (Iser 1978: 223). In The Implied Reader, Iser gives this concept a further phenomenological turn: in Beckett’s literature, the reader experiences something ‘closely akin’ to how one experiences life itself as lived. Thus, far from being removed from the real world, Beckett illuminates the structure of how it is to be within reality. Beckett achieves, Iser claims, what Merleau-Ponty describes in his groundbreaking Phenomenology of Perception: We have the experience of a world, not understood as a system of relations which wholly determine each event, but as an open totality the synthesis of which is inexhaustible . . . . From the moment that experience—that is, the opening on to our de facto world—is recognized as the beginning of knowledge, there is no longer any way of distinguishing a level of a priori truths and one of factual ones, what the world must necessarily be and what it actually is. (Iser 1974: 281, citing Merleau-Ponty 1962: 219 and 221) This amounts to an ethical effect on the reader who is self-reflexively aware of the phenomenological processes facing the individual reception of Beckett’s work. The manner in which the real world is processed, as if it were a Beckett text, leads the reader to an awareness of his or her own limited and indistinct perceptions. The reader therefore experiences the ‘historicity of his own standpoints through the act of reading itself’ (Iser 1974: 211). Once the reader is aware of his or her conditional perceptions, a new ‘openness’ to the possibilities of alternative modes of perceiving the world should be created. For Iser, Beckett’s challenging fictions thus help readers to challenge their own provisional perceptions of intersubjective reality. Whether implicitly or explicitly, Beckett is a constant presence throughout Iser’s phenomenological theory of aesthetic response. Indeed, the confusion and irritation of someone reading a Beckett text might be understood as the necessary condition for Iser’s work. Rather than Ingarden’s clarity, then, Iser’s work is dependent on dissonance and the suspension (or bracketing) of meaning; on the continual affirmation and denial of gestalten; in addition to

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syntactical structures, or the progressively higher level of meaning units. Together, these elements of a ‘reader response’ theory point towards the constant, incomplete negation of possible significance. Iser’s theory would be tailor-made for The Unnamable, were it not tempting to think that it was derived from it. A case in point might be Iser’s advocacy of the necessity of the failure underpinning the reader’s gestalten: ‘their very inadequacy will stimulate the reader into search for another gestalt to represent the connection between the signs—and, indeed, he may do so precisely because he has been unable to stick to the original, most obvious gestalt’ (Iser 1974: 130). The process occurring for the reader closely resembles Molloy’s situation, in which he tries to apply words and characteristics to his experiences. This represents nothing less than Molloy’s attempt to make the varying signs around him coalesce into a gestalt—for instance in being interrogated by a police sergeant—while all the while knowing that what he is trying to do is inadequate: ‘for what really happened is quite different’ (Beckett 1994: 88). Correspondingly, Iser’s critique might well describe the process whereby the Unnamable continually undergoes the formation and rejection of possible identities. Each new proffered identity, be it Basil/Mahood or Worm, is a definable entity: the peculiarities of their bodies (or lack thereof) are given; their situation (or lack thereof) is described. The Unnamable identifies with each of these figures for a moment before rejecting them. The figure subsequently undergoes a modification and is again offered up as a gestalt experience—which is to be accepted and is accepted by the Unnamable—only to be rejected yet again, allowing the eponymous character to say of Mahood that ‘I have been he an instant’ before moving on to ‘being’ Worm; and so on, in what the Unnamable suspects will be an infinite cycle: ‘I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of the fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means’ (Beckett 1994: 341). As with identities, so with concepts, which the Unnamable feels must be continually ‘revised, corrected and then abandoned’, prior to moving on to others that will also be ‘revised, corrected and then abandoned’ (Beckett 1994: 338). Yet the very applicability of Iser’s theory of aesthetic response to Beckett’s texts creates a paradoxical problem. Iser’s avowed concern is to capture the phenomenon of the reader reading, and how such a phenomenon is conditioned by a given text’s structure. When it comes to Beckett—no doubt due to his importance in the formation of Iser’s theory—this phenomenology of reading turns on the way the text reads itself, as if it were already performing the role of an actual reader. Thus, in the face of the Unnamable, Iser becomes descriptive, not theoretical. In other words, Iser’s theory becomes not what happens in the reader but what happens in The Unnamable. Nor is the problem of Beckett staging aesthetic phenomenology restricted to Iser’s Beckett-inspired theory. Similarly, Georges Poulet’s article-cum-manifesto ‘The Phenomenology of Reading’ (1969) also purports to be a theory which

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becomes merely ‘close reading’ when applied to The Unnamable. Of the experience of reading, Poulet writes: here I am thinking a thought which manifestly belongs to another mental world, which is being thought in me just as though I did not exist. Already the notion is inconceivable and seems even more so if I reflect that, since every thought must have a subject to think it, this thought which is alien to me and yet in me, must also have in me a subject which is alien to me . . . . I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself. (Poulet 1969: 6; original italics) The phenomenological methodology is also in evidence here, with Poulet’s stress on examining the consciousness of an experience coming from beyond, but which is nevertheless experienced as part of one’s own consciousness. But yet again, Poulet’s phraseology is almost precisely to be found at the beginning of The Unnamable: ‘I, say I. Unbelieving’ (Beckett 1994: 293). One also recalls the Unnamable’s refusal to accept the first person pronoun: ‘I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it’ (Beckett 1994: 358). Poulet correspondingly notes that reading is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me. (Poulet 1969: 57) This neatly describes the Unnamable’s relations with his many avatars. Whether as Mahood or Worm, the avatars go through a series of events as if they are or had been the Unnamable, and then use this evidence of felt experience to attempt ‘to produce ostensibly independent testimony in support of my historical existence’ (Beckett 1994: 321), thus creating an I to which the Unnamable can adhere. Poulet’s description of what occurs to the reader of a text—‘the I which I pronounce is not myself’—cannot be a description of the reader of The Unnamable, precisely because it is such an excellent account of what the Unnamable himself experiences. Ingarden, Iser and Poulet share common ground on the notion that, in reading, normally perceived subject–object relations do not obtain. As Poulet puts it: ‘the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside’ (Poulet 1969: 54). The Unnamable provides just such an instance of this collapsing subject/object distinction in the figure of a tympanum: perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one

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side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness. (Beckett 1994: 386) In each of these cases, a theory aiming to illuminate the reading process—and thereby help to describe what occurs within the reader—instead describes what is occurring in the object of the reader’s attention; that is, within the text itself. If The Unnamable already stages the reader-text dynamic within itself, what remains for the reader to feel and do?

III One of the clearest instances of The Unnamable already occupying the site of the reader—and thereby dislocating the traditional reader-text dynamic—occurs in Mahood’s attempt to convince the Unnamable that his family died in a rotunda while he spiralled towards them on his crutches. The episode is told in the first person, with occasional reminders, such as ‘Still Mahood speaking’ (Beckett 1994: 323). This provides the necessary distance for establishing the Unnamable as a reading subject, alongside occasional encouragements in this regard, such as ‘I really must lend myself to this story . . . there may be a grain of truth in it’ (Beckett 1994: 323). These reflexive markers have the effect of securing the temporary adherence from both the Unnamable and the reader. In order to secure such adherence, Mahood removes one of the character’s arms in an apparently arbitrary move which, paradoxically, signals the fictional status of the tale—and makes it more credible for the Unnamable. The ‘quasijudgemental’ nature of any assertive proposition within the literary work, therefore, is made apparent but, as Ingarden noted earlier, this only makes the reader (here, the Unnamable) even more likely to live within the world of the work. Mahood initially turns away from the rotunda due to the agonized cries of his family, but this is not acceptable to the Unnamable, whose incredulity necessitates a different ending, one in which he enters the rotunda and finishes his journey in his mother’s entrails. Ultimately and unsurprisingly, though, the whole story is rejected: ‘enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here’ (Beckett 1994: 326). In this episode, the I of the Unnamable all-but disappears behind the cover of Mahood’s fictional first person narrative, as if the Unnamable were becoming the creature that Mahood had created. In accordance with the spatiotemporal aspects of phenomena, the Unnamable is Mahood during certain phases of the fiction, only to then emerge as something else entirely once the story has been rejected. The actual reader—perhaps somewhat relieved to find him or herself within a clearly structured, if somewhat odd, quest narrative— feels involved within the fictional world that Mahood creates. Suspension of

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disbelief is maintained within this mode, partly due to the expectation that such a story might lead to some important information or conclusion. As if distracted by such an expectation—which the text encourages and also possibly parodies (the mother’s entrails are an open invitation for Freudian analysis)—the reader occupies the same site as the Unnamable. Both the reader and the character are together involved in attempts to gain knowledge of who the Unnamable is, or has been, or otherwise. With the rejection of the story, the Unnamable and the reader of Beckett’s text return to their own sites, which neither had ever left. However, the Unnamable’s return stages that of the reader; we read of the Unnamable’s return to his own site at the same time as we should be returning to our own site and so the reader’s feeling of return to his or her own consciousness is part of the quasi-judgemental world of The Unnamable. The relief from the fictional world is itself contained within that fictional world, leading to a feeling of entrapment which is not, however, entire; of course, the reader is still functioning in the mundane world, and can look up from the book, put it down, and walk away. The reader was never anywhere but there, book in hand. Here is one effect that can be traced. The feeling of entrapment and the staged return make the reader aware of his or her own presence within the actual world without, however, endowing that presence with certainty; a feeling the Unnamable would no doubt recognize. The reader is undoubtedly discomfited, for by engaging with the fictional realm, which seems to include the reader’s own mundane world, s/he is caught within shifting presences, or states of consciousness. In short, the I of the reader never goes away, but is overlaid by the shifting identities of the Unnamable. To break down the reader’s multilevelled experience of identification and non-identification at such moments may prove difficult and paradoxical, yet the attempt must be made. As with any other text, the reader is and is not the protagonist; she or he is living in the mundane world and ‘living’ within the text. In The Unnamable, the reader is and is not the protagonist as he is Mahood, and then as he is not Mahood. Following the rejection of the Mahood identity, the reader is and is not the Unnamable as he returns to that site which he claims never to have left, which itself mirrors our own site in the mundane world. The reader simultaneously is and is not the Unnamable as he is and is not. As the Unnamable oscillates between identification and non-identification, the reader shares that oscillation through the experience of reading, yet with the added level of the act of reading the text in the first place; a level which itself supposes simultaneous identification and non-identification. The experiences of the reader within The Unnamable are again staged by the eponymous protagonist, just before his brief emergence as ‘the tympanum’. One might feel safe reading on the sofa, until: ‘I don’t feel the jostle of words in my mouth, and when you say a poem you like, if you happen to like poetry, in the underground, or in your bed, or in yourself, the words are there, somewhere, without the least sound’ (Beckett 1994: 386). This passage poses the

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question that has preoccupied this chapter: what occurs when one reads The Unnamable? Crucially, the above excerpt proceeds from initially situating the recitation of others’ words first within the mundane world—on the train, at a desk, or in bed—before making it an occurrence within consciousness. This begs two concluding questions: what is one conscious of? And what is this ‘self’ in which the experience occurs? The actual reader exists in the world, of course, voicing those words which question the status of just such a voicing; a further example of the text’s ability to not only pre-empt the reading act but also thereby heighten awareness of that act. The Unnamable then returns to first physical principles: what does one actually feel? I don’t feel it, I don’t feel a mouth on me, nor a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well frankly now I don’t, so much the worse, I don’t feel an ear either, this is awful, make an effort, I must feel something, yes, I feel something, they say I feel something, I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what I feel, tell me what I feel and I’ll tell you who I am . . . . (Beckett 1994: 386) In a moment of phenomenological bracketing, the Unnamable focuses only on what can be perceived as phenomena within consciousness, but the nature of what is felt and the veracity of feeling cannot be certain, not least because of nagging uncertainties that the order ‘to feel’ actually comes from outside. In the face of a text in which embodied experience is at issue, the reader undoubtedly also feels something. However, the reader’s consciousness, which is both inside and outside the text, is caught between the felt reality of his or her mundane world and the quasi-felt, quasi-judgemental world created through living within the text. As one reads this passage, one simultaneously does and does not feel a mouth, a head, an ear; and one is yet further removed from ‘the felt’ inasmuch as the awareness remains that one is voicing the words of The Unnamable and not one’s own. On the cusp of a consciousness which is itself neither inside nor outside, but a tympanum which may be as ‘thin as foil’, the marginal status of what, and indeed how, one feels is forcefully brought to the fore. The question to the reader is felt in confusion and exasperation, but it remains: of what am I conscious?

Bibliography Beckett, S. (1973), Murphy. London: Picador. —(1987), Proust and the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder. —(1988a), Mercier and Camier. London: Picador. —(1988b), Watt. London: Picador. —(1992), Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: Black Cat Press.

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—(1994), The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. Husserl, E. (1964), The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ingarden, R. (1973a), The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Trans. R. A. Crowley and K. R. Olson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —(1973b), The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Trans. G. G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Iser, W. (1974), The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. —(1978), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. — (2006), How to Do Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Poulet, G. (1969), ‘The Phenomenology of Reading’. New Literary History 1, 53–68. Watson, D. (1991), Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. London: Macmillan.

Chapter 11

The ‘Distinct Context of Relevant Knowledge’: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Yellow’ and the Phenomenology of Annotation Chris Ackerley

This discourse addresses a simple question: when one annotates something, one is presumably annotating some thing—but what is that ‘thing’? It is, selfevidently (but see my sole note), a virtual or phenomenological object rather than anything tangible; but the quidditas of that object (transcendental Ding an sich, nominalist construct, or a mysterious hypostasis of the two) is precisely the point at issue. As an academic, I am frequently urged to reflect upon my practice; as an annotator, my practice is to annotate; but when I reflect upon what that means either I conclude, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, that I have been speaking prose all my life; or I recall the fable of the millipede, who got about perfectly well until asked how he co-ordinated so many legs, after which he was hopelessly entangled. In the words of Neary, I fear that my conarium (where the mysterious hypostasis should take place) has shrunk to nothing (Murphy I: 6). As one Vladimir famously said, ‘Что делать?’ (‘What is to be done?’). Estragon’s ‘Nothing to be done’ is the only response to this, as another Vladimir agrees: ‘I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle’ (Waiting for Godot III: 3). On. ‘On’ . . . . . . another tack. Winifred Nowottny’s superb little book, The Language Poets Use, begins by stating the obvious: ‘In considering the language of poetry it is prudent to begin with what is “there” in the poem—“there” in the sense that it can be described and referred to as unarguably given by the words’ (Nowottny 1962: 1). A. S. Byatt begins Possession with a statement by Randolph Henry Ash (an invented poet): ‘These things are there’ (Byatt 1990: 1). Given that Byatt attended the University of London where Nowottny taught, might one assume that a reference to The Language Poets Use is ‘there’ in these the opening words

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of Possession? Or that Estragon’s ‘Nothing to be done’ implicates Lenin (‘Vladimir’, the ‘struggle’)? There are no easy answers, except the obvious: that even in the simplest instances what is there is rarely an unequivocal ‘given’. And yet, and yet . . . without some assumption about what is unarguably given there could not be any thing to annotate, and would-be annotators would be whirled about their worlds without any textual rocks to which to cling. What follows, then, is a reflection on the principles underlying the practice of annotation, with reference to Samuel Beckett’s short story, ‘Yellow’ (1934), and to the notion of validity (another way of saying ‘these things are there’) as articulated in the influential study by E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation (1967), which strives within a phenomenological framework to save the baby that so many post-Maieuticists have thrown out, the better to savour the bathwater. Four decades ‘on’, and Hirsch is still the locus of any discussion of validity. Although some of his premises are contentious—the ‘sensible belief’ that a text means what its author intended it to mean (Hirsch 1967: 1), or his distinction between meaning (a property of texts) and significance (a relationship between that meaning and something else [8])—Hirsch’s insistence upon validity in terms of the reproducibility of meaning remains, well, valid. Hirsch offers as his working assumption the hermeneutic principle that ‘each interpretive problem requires its own distinct context of relevant knowledge’ (Hirsch 1967: vii); this constitutes equally the foundation of my annotative practice, an axiom of validity in annotation. The first problem, then, is to determine in principle and in practice how an ‘interpretive problem’ and its ‘distinct context of relevant knowledge’ might be identified. Broadly, this entails accepting Hirsch’s definition of the goal of valid interpretation as consensus, the winning of firmly grounded agreement that one set of conclusions is more probable than others (Hirsch 1967: ix). Like Hirsch, I affirm the principle of determinacy in meaning, and argue that a good annotation should offer insights based on the kind of textual and contextual evidence that compels consensus, that is, agreement that this set of conclusions for that particular problem is more probable than any others that have been or might be advanced; in a word, that it is valid. Like Hirsch, I claim that validity does not entail ‘truth’ or ‘certainty’, but probability; any hypothesis (any annotation) is at best provisional, to be replaced when another of greater explanatory power or elegance is advanced. The annotator’s aim, then, is two-fold: to define the ‘interpretive problem’; then determine the ‘distinct context’ of knowledge relevant to that problem. Or vice-versa, for this process entails a hermeneutic circle, the familiar problem of the part and the whole: the interpretive problem (a somewhat arbitrary concept, since it is what the annotator chooses to identify it as) cannot be clearly defined without deference to the demented particulars that inform it; and the relevance of these is in turn affirmed, to some extent, by the premise of the wider universe of discourse in which they operate (that is, are valid). As Hirsch points out (76), the encounter between part and whole could not occur if the

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parts did not have an autonomy capable of suggesting a certain kind of whole, nor if the whole were not capable to some extent of implying the parts that constitute it. But what Hirsch resists is the ‘mystical idea’ that linguistic signs can somehow speak their own meaning (Hirsch 1967: 23), on the grounds that meaning is ultimately an affair of consciousness. Understanding, he concludes, is difficult but not impossible; it is a matter of breaking into the circle at some point, guessing the type (or universal) and using that guess to determine a token (or particular); or by sensing a token and from that premising the type; then repeating the process ad infinitum (if need be) to evolve a better understanding of part and whole, each implicated within the other. The hermeneutic circle thus defined is, Hirsch says, ‘less mysterious and paradoxical than many in the German hermeneutic tradition have made it out to be’ (Hirsch 1967: 77). An example is in order. Many who read the ‘Song’ from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline delight in its ingenious couplet (IV.ii.263–4): Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. An annotation might assume as the ‘interpretive problem’ the image of ‘golden lads’, and postulate as constituting its distinct context of relevant knowledge such matters as: (i) the contrast of youth and age, (ii) the exploitation of children as chimney-sweeps, (iii) the pun on ‘come to dust’, (iv) the contrast of gold, that braves time, with dust, the wages of mortality, (v) the chill of closure created by the rhyme of ‘must’ and ‘dust’, (vi) the echo of Genesis 3.19: ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ and (vii) perhaps, the song recycled in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Beckett’s Happy Days. These details could be woven into an articulate commentary that accentuates the contrast between rhythmical lightness and thematic gravitas. Such an annotation would be valid, but the interpretation ventured might be modified by new information (that is, changes to the context of relevant knowledge). In The Pound Era Hugh Kenner says ‘golden’ is a magical word that so irradiates the song that we barely consider how Shakespeare may have found it: Yet a good guess at how he found it is feasible, for in the mid 20th century a visitor to Shakespeare’s Warwickshire met a countryman blowing the grey head off a dandelion: ‘We call these golden boys chimney-sweepers when they go to seed.’ (Kenner 1971: 122) And suddenly all is clear: dandelions that wilt in the heat of the sun and cannot endure the winter’s rages as an image both startlingly new yet reassuringly familiar: death as the blowing of a common flower. What is striking about this image (in my direct experience, and that of many of my students), is that something that earlier was not perceived (indeed, was

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earlier not perceptible) has been somehow precipitated into consciousness, so that the ‘meaning’ seems to have altered; an entity not ‘there’ on one reading is revealed as a presence (‘indubitably given’) on another, though the lines are unchanged. There would be general consensus, I imagine, that an interpretation that accounts for (that is, admits into the distinct context of relevant knowledge) the dandelion is likely to be better (that is, of greater explanatory power) than one that does not. This example illustrates the principle of sharability in hermeneutical situations, as ‘consensus’ and ‘validity’ are possible if and only if agreement is an experiential reality. Hirsch insists that it is far more likely that an author and an interpreter can entertain identical meanings than that they cannot: ‘The inaccessibility of verbal meaning is a doctrine that experience suggests to be false, though neither experience nor argument can prove its falsity’ (Hirsch 1967: 18). His use of ‘identical’ requires some qualification, for in his discussion of verbal meaning as type Hirsch indicates that the ‘region of precise identity’ in two different experiences is based on the experience of similarity rather than total congruity (Hirsch 1967: 265). This is inevitable, given the variety of perspectives, prejudices, preferences and experiences of different interpreters (or the ‘same’ interpreter on different occasions). By emphasizing the type, Hirsch can insist on a principle of determinism and reject the argument that the meaning changes simply because any interpreter, like Beckett’s Uncle of today as opposed to Uncle of yesterday (Proust IV: 513), is at different times a different person, holding different beliefs and attitudes. Hirsch argues that this distinction confuses the meaning of a text, which is invariable, with its significance, which frequently changes, on the grounds that when we construe another’s meaning we are not free agents but are rather subservient to the meaning that that person wills to convey. For Hirsch, this constitutes another axiom: the compelling normative principle of authorial will. Yet he has difficulty sustaining this. A ‘type’ he defines as ‘an entity that has a boundary by virtue of which something belongs to it or does not’ (Hirsch 1967: 50), something that can be reproduced and shared; but by the end of his second chapter his emphasis has shifted from the type willed by an author to the type experience common to author and reader. Despite his insistence that the primary reason for disagreement among interpreters is the faulty premising of type (this is a powerful argument, and worthy of respect: ‘premising of type’ as the crucial act of consciousness by which a distinct context of relevant knowledge is determined), Hirsch admits that full understanding can occur only if the interpreter proceeds under the same system of expectations and shares the same generic conventions (linguistic and social); in other words, if they can agree upon the boundaries. The focus of Hirsch’s attention thus shifts subtly (but crucially) from the presumption of a common repertoire towards the process of communication. Hirsch’s insistence on the construing of authorial intention as the determinant of the distinct context of relevant knowledge is thus controversial, but to

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reject it as the compelling normative principle is not to reject entirely the relevance of such intention. For the moment, however, I would affirm the force of Hirsch’s insistence on determinacy as the consequence of meaning and implication. As he argues, by virtue of being a type, meaning is reproducible (however reproduced) and hence sharable (however shared); likewise, shared meanings are always types and cannot relinquish that character (Hirsch 1967: 50). The definition of an annotative ‘problem’ is thus the definition of a type, which presumes that its meaning can be reproduced and shared. ‘Yellow’ illustrates this point. A literary title constitutes a type statement of intended meaning, and a reader’s initial premising of that type will be modified by nuances and ironies that emerge as the text unfolds. The primary sense of ‘yellow’ is shared by all members of a social and linguistic community, to whom the colour is familiar and for whom the implication of ‘cowardice’ (our hero’s yellow streak) is obvious. Thus, the word-type ‘yellow’ has implications of context that are invariable, and the force of this linguistic fact must first be admitted. For as Beckett’s text unfolds ‘Yellow’ assumes greater complexity. In Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (La Prisonnière I.232), the dying painter Bergotte drags himself from his deathbed to see once more the ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ of Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’, and, having done so, collapses and dies. A knowing reader will respond with appropriate irony to Belacqua’s last vision of sunlight on ‘the grand old yaller wall’ outside (‘Yellow’ IV: 206), before he too dies; but, missing this implication, a naïve reader will construct only the image of cowardice, or intuit an irony arising from the contrast of death and sunlight. Hirsch would argue (and I would agree) that the latter reading is not so much wrong as inadequate, the reader having failed to premise the more complex type of meaning in the title, ‘Yellow’. Belacqua’s ‘yellow face’ (‘Yellow’ IV: 211) aligns him with other cowards, such as himself in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett 1992: 235), the Polar Bear (‘A Wet Night’ IV: 135), and Murphy (Murphy I: 27), Beckett having noted from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as an index of fear: ‘He turned a little yellow—as well he might’ (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004: 236); readers may build their awareness of any of these into an interpretation. Completing the tale, they might also wonder if the ‘terrible yellow yerks’ in Belacqua’s skull as he dies under the anaesthetic (‘Yellow’ IV: 212) are implicit in the title, and reconstitute their hypothesis to account for the curious word ‘yerk’ (a Scottish dialect form of ‘jerk’, meaning a lashing or thrashing about). This might in turn invoke Moran’s discussion of the ‘Yerk affair’ (Molloy II: 131). The horizon of relevant meaning, to use Hirsch’s useful term (which he derives from Husserl and Kuhn), is less a given than a phenomenological construct that achieves better definition with greater awareness; that is, the ‘distinct context’ of relevant knowledge changes as the perceived relevance of other matters (Proust, jaundiced faces, ‘yerks’) forces the revision of previous

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hypotheses (Hirsch prefers ‘guesses’ or ‘intuitions’) about the meaning. Hirsch argues that underlying all semiotic norms is the principle of sharability, and that verbal meaning is determinate to the extent that it is accessible, sharable and reproducible; the better reader of Beckett, however, senses in the title ‘Yellow’ implications that the poorer reader does not. The validity of either interpretation is not in question; rather, what has happened is that a simple hypothesis is replaced by a better one, one that reaches deeper into the circle of relevant knowledge and promotes more subtle readings. Arguably, the association of ‘Yellow’ with ‘yerks’ is a textual given, and the relevant knowledge (with a possible exception of the link to Molloy) can be construed from the text alone. The Proust allusion is different, as it is entirely extra-textual; there is nothing explicitly ‘there’ in the text of ‘Yellow’ to invite the echo. Arguably, the association of ‘Yellow’ with ‘Proust’ is not a textual given, despite the obvious analogy (once perceived) of Bergotte’s death and his little patch of yellow wall. The apprehended horizon of relevant knowledge has somehow deepened to include aspects of extra-textual and (again, arguably) authorial intention. This raises the question of how the Proustian echo (for example) can be said to be ‘there’ in the word-type ‘Yellow’, and at what point the act of premising the type is complete. There is no easy answer to this; indeed, Watt, agonizing over the relationship of ‘Pot’ and ‘pot’ (universal and particular, langue and parole), drives himself further to despair by pondering both ‘the meticulous phantoms’ (the phenomena) that beset him and the evolution of ‘a hypothesis proper to disperse them’, only to find that the hypothesis evolved loses its virtue and has to be replaced by another, which in due course ceases to be of the least assistance, ‘and so on’ (Watt I: 230, 233). Despite this discouraging reductio of scientific method, Occam’s bistoury may yet slice through the problem (‘zeep!’), reducing the effort to ‘saddle’ events with ‘a meaning and a formula’ (Watt I: 230) to a process of communication. Returning to ‘Yellow’, as a famished dog to—no, just returning, I would argue that a simple hypothesis about the meaning of the title (one that ignores the Proust allusion) has been replaced by another of greater explanatory power and elegance, whatever the source (authorial, textual or extra-textual) of the relevant information, which is now re-constituted as part of the shared type. This effectively sidesteps the impossible (and, for my purpose, unnecessary) phenomenological problem of ascertaining whether that more powerful meaning is or was ‘there’ in the first place. As Hirsch says, and as the universal experience of ambiguity, polysemy, innuendo and missing the point confirms, any word sequence can, under the conventions of language, legitimately represent more than one complex of meaning (Hirsch 1967: 4); the task, thus re-defined, is not to agonize about the ontology of thereness but, with reference to a specified problem, to determine the boundary that separates implications that properly belong to the premised type from those that do not.1 The

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challenge, then, is to identify permissible (rather than permissive) meanings, those that can be determined, with reasonable probability of consensus, to be part of the meaning of the interpretive problem as defined. This is not always easy, but at least a model or modus operandi has been avowed, to be tested against specific problems. Before so doing, let me sum up my position, and how it differs from Hirsch’s insistence on authorial intention as the standard of normative judgement. I argue that the old-fashioned communication model, with its familiar paradigm of sender, message and receiver (here: author, text and interpreter), sets the standard quite adequately and more simply. And because ‘noise’ (in the precise technical sense of diverse elements responsible for the loss of information) affects every point of the process, in principle and in practice, the ‘message’ (in the precise technical sense of information encoded, transmitted and decoded) sent is never identical to that received. But to acknowledge that any act of communication by definition includes elements of indeterminacy is not the same thing as saying that the ‘message’ itself is indeterminable. In sum: 1. The object of annotative inquiry is a phenomenological construct, the understanding of which entails the definition of an interpretive problem and the determination of a distinct context of relevant knowledge (for that problem alone). 2. The ‘construction’ of that object and the determination of its horizon of meaning is a further phenomenological activity that draws on (in different ways) authorial intention, textual meaning and an interpreter’s premising of these. 3. This process is affirmed as the basic hermeneutic principle shaping the art of valid annotation. 4. This activity is fundamentally an act of communication. In a perfect act of communication, the ‘message’ intended by the author, that expressed by the text, and that reconstructed by the reader would match perfectly; but as Molloy notes (Molloy II: 84), perfection is not of this world (noises prevent his hearing the little voice). Truly determinate meaning (absolute validity) is ever compromised (which is not to say, rendered impossible) by the various processes of textual transmission (writing, setting, printing, proofing, publishing, reading, interpreting, reporting), each of necessity subject to ‘noise’ and error. But if one imagines a triangulation of author, text and reader, each the centre of a circle of intention, then it is possible to determine (conceptually) a ‘core’ of meaning as constituted by the intersection of the three circles, a phenomenological entity that differs for every interpretive problem. The French text of Molloy (Beckett 1950: 139), for example, depicts Moran, attracted by Martha’s stew, heading to the kitchen, à la recherche des oignons, a phrase which opens for the French reader the entire world of Proust, steeped not in a tea-cup

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but in a stew-pot. That circle of understanding is denied (is not part of the meaning for) the English reader. If the ‘thing’ to be annotated, to return to our muttons, is not a transcendental Ding an sich, nor a purely nominalist construct, but rather a phenomenological object that is the curious consequence of a conscious triangulation (a mysterious hypostasis, if you like) between authorial intention, textual meaning and the act of interpretation, then the further question arises, how best might that phenomenon be approached? Like two hedgehogs hypostasizing— carefully? A procedure is needed, neither purely mythological nor rigidly scientific (a distinction drawn from Beckett’s frequent source, Windelband’s History of Philosophy, and representing an essential epistemological dualism), but partaking of the nature of both; one that works despite the impossibility (theoretical and practical) of perfect annotation. Mythology: Stephen Dedalus’s ‘heresy’; the annotative activity likened unto the condition of the soul approaching ever nearer but never reaching the Creator (Joyce 1964: 79). Science: Moran, thinking of his bees, and calling his first assumption about their dance ‘an agreeable hypothesis’; then abandoning it in favour of better ones, before finally admitting that the dance involves ‘doubtless other determinants of which I had not the slightest idea’ (Molloy II: 163). Yet his response is not despair but rapture: ‘Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.’ The knowledge relevant to that problem changed in 1965 when Karl von Frisch cracked the code, the mysterious woggle-dance by which bee scouts locate for ‘the coagulum of continuous bees’ (Beckett 1992: 167) the source and direction and distance of the pollen; Moran, had he panted on, might have formed a better hypothesis, offered a better reading, approached nearer. Hirsch’s principle of validity and his sense of meaning as a phenomenological construct might well be tempered by scientific method—the most powerful heuristic and epistemological tool yet devised by the coagulum of curious minds, but despised or ignored by most literary theorists. Central to scientific method is the principle of falsifiability: every annotation, in theory and (alas, too often) in practice, may be replaced by another of greater explanatory power or elegance, hopefully (in the literal sense) ‘approaching nearer’ despite the impossibility ‘of ever reaching’ the Creator or the creation (Joyce 1964: 79). To explore a phenomenological object by means of a pragmatic and sceptical methodology may seem anomalous, but it is curiously satisfying and surprisingly successful (were there a better hypothesis, this argument would require that I adopt it). An example from ‘Yellow’ demonstrates the approach. When Belacqua recalls having underlined, as quite a callow boy, ‘a phrase in Hardy’s Tess’, that When grief ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity, it does not take much ‘cogging in the Synod’ (‘Yellow’ II: 199) to trace the reference to chapter 35 of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where Tess on her wedding night, having nothing

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more to fear and scarce anything to hope for, finally falls asleep. The source of the allusion and its broad band of reference is clear, but precisely how, and with what ironies, is the reader invited to draw a parallel between Tess’s sorrows and Belacqua’s fears, or follow the threads of fatalism common to both stories? Does it matter that Beckett (or Belacqua) has slightly misquoted, Hardy offering ‘sorrow’ rather than ‘grief’, and no comma? What does ‘cogging in the Synod’ mean? Should the sentiment be in italics, as in the 1934 original and the 1972 Grove reprint; or in plain print, as in the 1970 Calder text and the special ‘Hors Commerce for Scholars’ edition from Calder and Boyars in 1966? Should one ignore the quotation marks, errors, and Americanisms of the 1956 reprint in New World Writing (in a phrase piously omitted there, ‘flitter the fucker’)? Is it relevant that when Beckett was in the Merrion Nursing Home in 1932, awaiting in trepidation the operation on his ‘blasted neck’ (Ackerley and Gontarski 2006: 246), his father ‘brought in Tess’? What about Moran’s dozing off (Molloy II.97)? Or Beckett’s jests: ‘How to be Happy though Married’ Hardy (Edward John), mentioned in All That Fall (Ackerley and Gontarski 2006: 246); or the felicitous ‘hardy laurel’ (Watt I: 378)? What aesthetic critique is implied by this evocation of Thomas Hardy, whose abuse of coincidence Beckett disliked, at the outset of a tale that will feature (even as it mocks) life’s little ironies? Such details punctuate the ‘incoherent continuum’ (Beckett 1992: 102) that preludes annotation; the challenge, as ever, is to find the form to accommodate the chaos, to create a kosmos. Questions to be considered include the variable understandings of various readers, the parameters within which the ironies operate, the accuracy of the text, and any biographical details that cast light on authorial circumstance and hence intention. This trivial instance indicates the difficulties of determining precisely what is to be annotated, what might be assumed to be relevant knowledge, and what might be used or discarded in the act of constructing the kosmos. It demonstrates the difficulty (in Hirsch’s terms) of premising the type, and determining the horizon that separates implications that properly belong to the premised type from those that do not. Somehow, two annotations emerge: Hardy’s Tess: Thomas Hardy’s penultimate novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), is the tragedy of a young Wessex maid, Tess Durbeyfield, who is seduced by the libertine Alec d’Urberville, and gives birth to a child (‘Sorrow’) that dies. Making a new start, Tess falls in love with Angel Clare, who asks her to marry him. She tries to tell Angel about her past, but fate intervenes and her letter placed under his door disappears beneath the carpet. On her wedding night Tess finally tells Angel the truth, only to be rejected by him; and in chapter 35, on her wedding night, she at last cries herself to sleep. Hardy comments here: When sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity; Beckett has changed ‘sorrow’ to ‘grief’ and added the comma. The sentiment is italicised in the original 1934 Chatto & Windus edition and the 1972 Grove reprint;

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but is in plain text in John Calder’s ‘Hors Commerce’ edition for scholars (1966) and his 1970 trade edition. In 1932, when Beckett was in the Merrion Nursing Home awaiting in trepidation an operation for a boil on his ‘blasted neck’, his father ‘brought in Tess’ (Beckett to Tom McGreevy, 12 Dec. 1932). The detail accentuates Belacqua’s fears and the choice of tears that he will reject in favour of laughter. Beckett did not admire Hardy, whose reliance on coincidence he found excessive; but like Tess ‘Yellow’ is replete with life’s little ironies and ends in tragedy. In Molloy, Moran succeeds in dozing off, ‘which is not so easy, when pain is speculative’ (II: 97). cogging in the Synod: in context, reading Tess at the behest of the church authorities, which seems faintly incongruous given the novel’s scandalous reputation; ‘cogging’ implies cheating (as at dice), and a ‘synod’ is an assembly of ecclesiastical delegates. As a boy, Beckett won Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the diocesian synod examination as a prize for knowing the Bible (Cronin 1996: 21). The first note offers a brief summary of Tess, designed to give the essentials, but focused on chapter 35, from which the quotation is taken. This helps determine the broad ‘context of relevant knowledge’, before the initial crude hypothesis about the allusion is complicated by references to ironies and tragedy, the criterion of selection being their pertinence to ‘Yellow’. Differences of phrasing are cited (but not explained, as I have no explanation), and the Calder variants are noted, though not the other bibliographical impedimenta. Relevant biographical details are supplied. The annotation then moves to more ‘speculative’ opportunities (but still within the circle of implied meaning): Beckett’s tone and why he invokes Hardy, whom he disliked; and the citation of the same phrase in Molloy. Finally, I deemed that ‘Happy though Married’ Hardy and the ‘hardy laurel’, delightful as they are, fall outside the horizon of intended meaning (unlike Moran’s speculation), so with regret I omitted them. The second note, ‘cogging in the Synod’, began as explanatory, my original hypothesis being that it meant ‘studying Tess at University’ (‘Trinity’?), as Beckett may have done. I was about to check this (not quite sure how), when fortuitously I found in Cronin the synodic prize, ‘a godsend and no error’ (‘Yellow’ IV: 202), which incidentally offers an excellent example of how authorial intention, in this instance quite obscure, may form part of the context of highly relevant knowledge. The amended hypothesis, though not yet perfect (which diocesan synod? when?), has much greater explanatory power than my first tentative assumption. Another example, to reflect the intricate interplay between author, text and reader in determining the scope of an allusion: Belacqua, wondering whether to weep or laugh, exclaims: ‘Another minute of this and I consecrate the remnant of my life to Heraclitus of Ephesus, I shall be that Delian diver who, after the third or fourth submersion, returns no more to the surface!’ (‘Yellow’ IV: 203). The interpretive problem is readily defined as ‘that Delian diver’; but the

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practical task is that of determining the ‘distinct context of relevant knowledge’ that shapes the horizon of implied meaning. This might take several stages, of which I offer the rough notes: (a) Location of Delos, in the Cyclades; centre of a cult of Apollo; steep slopes, deep waters; sponge divers descend to great depths. (b) Context: laughing Democritus or weeping Heraclitus—Bel affirms D, despite provocation; failure to ‘resurface’ after the anaesthetic. (c) SB’s ‘Philosophy Notes’, TCD MS 10967/24: ‘Comes from the city of sanctuary. Heraclitus the dark, the obscure, the weeping philosopher. “A Delian diver needed to sound his works” (Socrates). Deposited his scroll in the Temple of Artemis and went up to the mountains & died there.’ (d) This from Alexander, 28–30; other details from Windelband, Burnet. Problem: no mention in these of Socrates and/or Delian diver; more research needed. (e) Diogenes Laertius, Lives II.22, 152–3: ‘They relate that Euripides gave him [Socrates] the treatise of Heraclitus and asked his opinion upon it, and that his reply was, “The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.” ’ Likely source, but did SB read DL? [TCD lecture on preSocratics? other accounts?] (f) Joyce, Portrait (Joyce 1964: 186): ‘It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.’ [gloss, not source] These details may be shaped into a coherent paragraph by a principle of decorum that respects an implicit horizon of meaning determined by their relation to the point at issue, the interpretive problem; with the weight of criticism roughly appropriate to what the text might reasonably bear. The knowledge reflects finding the requisite facts; relevance, determining their validity; and artistry, shaping these to an aesthetic end. Thus: Delian diver: a sponge-diver from Delos, in the Greek Cyclades, an island with steep volcanic slopes and deep waters; the centre of a cult of Apollo. Having affirmed the laughing Democritus over the weeping Heraclitus, Belacqua is provoked into reconsideration. Beckett’s philosophy notes (TCD MS 10967/24) record: ‘Comes from the city of sanctuary. Heraclitus the dark, the obscure, the weeping philosopher. “A Delian diver needed to sound his works” (Socrates). Deposited his scroll in the Temple of Artemis and went up to the mountains & died there.’ These details are mostly from Alexander’s A Short History of Philosophy (28–30), but neither Alexander, Windelband, nor Burnet mentions the Delian diver. A likely source is

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Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II.22, 152–3: ‘They relate that Euripides gave him [Socrates] the treatise of Heraclitus and asked his opinion upon it, and that his reply was, “The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.” ’ Compare Joyce’s Portrait (1964: 186), on dialectical profundities: ‘It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.’ Belacqua, regrettably, when he goes under the anaesthetic, will not ‘resurface’. Most annotations are less complex than this. When Belacqua, for example, calls the nurse ‘Miranda’ (IV: 205), he is not using her Christian name (an erroneous hypothesis), but rather alluding to the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and specifically to her cry as, safe upon the shore, her heart goes out to those who are drowning: ‘O, I have suffer’d/With those I saw suffer’ (I.ii.5–6; Ackerley and Gontarski 2006: 373); in effect, she is the type of the good nurse. Further variations upon this theme, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett 1992: 11), in Lucky’s ‘word-salad’ (Waiting for Godot III: 36), in Beckett’s Proust (IV: 529), or, more savagely, in the poem ‘Return to the Vestry’ (Harvey 1970: 311), confirm the accuracy of this interpretation without substantially changing it. A good annotation (not offered here) would shape these details into, if not the best possible account, the best account possible. When the theatre sister is described as ‘a great raw châteaubriand of a woman, like the one on the Wincarnis bottle’ (‘Yellow’ IV: 207), the note might read: Wincarnis: L. ‘meat-wine’; originally ‘Liebig’s Extract of Meat and malt Wine’. Described by its makers as: ‘A superior British wine made from imported grape juice, to which has been added the famous Wincarnis formula containing malt and meat extracts’; since 1887, an apéritif or tonic wine promoted by Hedges & Butler, 3 New Burlington Mews, London W1. Recently (2008) likened to a cheap Californian cooking sherry with a shot of rump roast in it; but, like the theatre sister, said to improve upon acquaintance. Beckett’s ‘on the bottle’ is misleading (or ironic, as in ‘drinking too much’), for the comparison is with the Wincarnis advertising sign, which advocates the wine for ‘ANAEMIA . DEPRESSION . BRAIN FAG . SLEEPLESSNESS . PHYSICAL & MENTAL PROSTRATION . NERVE TROUBLES . AND IN CONVALESENCE’; and as recommended by over 10,000 doctors. There is a bottle to the left of this information, and to the right a cheerful, robust nurse in uniform holding another bottle in one hand and raising a wineglass with the other. A note of this kind is purely explanatory, the information offered to prompt the reader to create the right visual image (no longer in the common repertoire, as

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the enamelled signs depicting the nurse have become something of a collector’s item). Equally, a ‘châteaubriand’ (not in most English dictionaries) would need to be defined as a thick filet of grilled beef. The ‘100,000 Chemises’ (IV: 206) invites a simple factual note: 100,000 Chemises: a popular Parisian brand of clothing, the name reflecting its history. The label appeared in 1891, in Châteauxroux, rue de Strasbourg, when a financial society founded in 1871 departed from traditional modes of shirt-making, until then done by women from home, in favour of factory work and mass-production, with division of labour, workhouse surveillance, and a preference for standardized articles in blue and/or white. There may be more to this detail than I have noted, as it is a common experience in reading ‘Yellow’ to miss the point of an embedded jest. For this is a text that consists of one bad joke that (like a fractal) is made up of literally dozens of quizzical quips and jaundiced jests, each of which requires for proper appreciation its own distinct context of relevant information. This account has, perhaps, untangled a few of the millipede’s legs, but scores remain, some quite hairy. These include compelling literary analogues, such as the ‘paradox of Donne’ (IV: 202), from the ‘Ivvenilia, or certaine paradoxes, and problemes’ (1633), the annotation of which might have to evaluate not simply the way that the ‘godsend’ influences Belacqua’s choice of tears or laughter but also how Beckett has slightly distorted Donne’s original to make that point. An explanation would be expected of figures such as the ‘Aschenputtel’ (IV: 205), the original Cinderella of the Brothers Grimm, and her ‘handy Andy’, who may or may not have been so named because he is ‘clean round the bend’ (was that jest current in 1934?). Questions abide concerning such details as the real-life provenance of ‘Fraisse’s Ferruginous Ampoules’ (IV: 210), with their Registered Trademark, ‘Mozart’, which I have as yet been unable to verify (unlike the following ‘Hexenmeister’, with its Masonic overtures), and so cannot determine precisely the right ironic inflection. The ‘little bump of amativeness’ (IV: 208) requires the scrutiny of a phrenologist, but ‘those two that night in a bed’ (IV: 209) can be explained with the assistance of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The oddity of ‘ultra-red’ (IV: 203) needs attention, because the French translation, ‘Blême’ (Beckett 1994: 250), more correctly reads ‘l’infrarouge’ (was the error picked up by Beckett or by his translator?). There are, then, an infinitude of small details to be tracked to their lairs, and to that extent my reading of ‘Yellow’ is at best provisional (as, indeed, all readings must be). Although this essay has emphasized a scientific and sceptical approach to the particulars of annotation, it might end by affirming the aesthetics of that practice. Hirsch throughout Validity in Interpretation (I inadvertently typed ‘Vladimir’) is careful to distinguish between the divinatory moment and the critical activity, the first being that intuitive ‘imaginative guess’ at the meaning, which is then tested against the relevant knowledge available, the reiterated

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hermeneutic process having ‘the indispensable function of raising interpretive guesses to the level of knowledge’ (Hirsch 1967: x). This commentary, reduced to its fundamental sounds, is but a scrutiny of ordinary reading practice, by which we enter (with varying degrees of understanding) into another kosmos, largely unaware as we do so that we are committing acts of intention. Yet, an aesthetic principle is involved. Sceptical to the end, distrustful of the epiphantic experience (Arsene’s sunlit experience in Watt, for example), and increasingly suspicious of the capacity of language to penetrate the silence, Beckett sought, most openly in the ‘German Letter of 1937’, a ‘literature of the unword’ and a form of ‘Nominalist irony’ as the only viable mode of expression (Beckett 1983: 170–3). In Proust (1931), he ‘solved’ (if only temporarily) the ‘Proustian equation’ by analysing the mystery of involuntary memory: ‘at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal’ (Proust IV: 544; with reference to Le Temps retrouvé and Marcel’s experience of the madeleine). Yet the paradox of the ‘ideal real’, I finally suggest, is not only a temporary solution to the Proustian equation but equally the statement of an aesthetic that, even as it was rejected, would manifest itself in Beckett’s writings for years to come. One reason for this is articulated in Proust, following the discussion of the ‘ideal real’, indeed, as the immediate consequence of that discussion: ‘But if this mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence, it follows that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being’ (Proust IV: 544). This is as much a literal as it is a metaphorical description of the aesthetic experience, the apprehension of the phenomenological ‘thing’, the ‘mysterious hypostasis’, perhaps. Over the years that experience would be battered, dismantled, deconstructed and destroyed as Beckett’s growing sense of the gulf between subject and object and the ultimate absurdity of life in the mud rendered suspect such an easy solution of the Proustian equation. Yet the ‘invisible reality’ (Proust IV: 554) did not entirely disappear; for had it done so there would be little point for his readers in striving to understand the incandescence (‘we stole that one. Guess where’) of what, if anything, lies beyond the vales, veils and ‘pale wales’ (‘Yellow’ IV: 203) of his phenomenal worlds.

Notes 1

Were I in the unenviable position of having to define an ontology of ‘thereness’, I would do so much as Gottlob Frege defined ‘threeness’ (the anagrammatic force is irresistible), as recorded in Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem: ‘Threeness’ is the abstract quality which belongs to collections of sets of objects containing three objects. For instance, ‘threeness’ could be used to describe the collection of blind mice in the popular nursery rhyme, or ‘threeness’ is equally

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appropriate for describing the set of sides of a triangle. Frege noticed that there were innumerable sets which exhibited ‘threeness’ and used the idea of sets to define ‘3’ itself. He created a new set and placed inside it all the sets exhibiting ‘threeness’ and called this new set of sets ‘3’. Therefore, a set has three members if and only if it is inside the set ‘3’. (Singh 1997: 150) I leave it to those better qualified to translate ‘threeness’ into ‘thereness’ and sets of particulars into the new set of sets called the ‘distinct context of relevant knowledge’, there if and only if they are inside that new set. While appreciating that this bypasses awkward questions, my pragmatic preference is to assume (as in my opening paragraph) that ‘there’, like ‘3’, is a self-evident phenomenological construct, which, like the feet of the millipede, is unproblematic until thought about.

Bibliography References (to most of the English works) are by short title, volume and page to Beckett, Samuel (2006). Samuel Beckett: The Centenary Edition. Ed. P. Auster. 4 volumes. New York: Grove Press. Ackerley, C. J. (2007), ‘Demented Particularity, or, the Art of Annotation’. The Beckett Circle 30/1 (Spring 2007), 13–16. Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E. (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York, NY: Grove Press. Alexander, A. B. D. (1907), A Short History of Philosophy. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons. Beckett, S. (1934), ‘Yellow’, in More Pricks than Kicks. London: Chatto & Windus, 227–52. —(1950), Molloy. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. —(1956), ‘Yellow’, in New World Writing 10 (Nov. 1956), 108–19. —(1966), ‘Yellow’, in More Pricks Than Kicks [special issue Hors Commerce for Scholars]. London: Calder & Boyars, pp. 88–97. —(1970), ‘Yellow’, in More Pricks than Kicks. London: John Calder, pp. 145–57. —(1972), ‘Yellow’, in More Pricks than Kicks, New York, NY: Grove Press, pp. 158–74. —(1983), ‘German Letter of 1937’, in R. Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder, pp. 51–54 and 170–3. —(1992), Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Ed. E. O’Brien and E. Fournier. Dublin: Black Cat Press. [The immediate source of ‘we stole that one’ (191); see also Murphy (I.150).] —(1994), ‘Blême’, in Bande et Sarabande. Traduit de l’anglais et présenté par E. Fournier. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, pp. 241–65. —Letters to Thomas McGreevy. Samuel Beckett Archives, Trinity College, Dublin. TCD MS 10402. —Notes on Philosophy [1931–32?]. Samuel Beckett Archives, Trinity College, Dublin. TCD MS 10967/24. Beckett, S. and P. Auster (eds) (2006), Samuel Beckett: The Centenary Edition. 4 volumes. New York, NY: Grove Press.

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Burnet, J. (1914), Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato. London: Macmillan. Byatt, A. S. (1990), Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus. Cronin, A. (1996), Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: HarperCollins. Diogenes Laertius (1925), Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Trans. R. D. Hicks [Loeb Classical Library]. 2 volumes. London: Heinemann. Hardy, T. (1974), Tess of the d’Urbervilles. London: Macmillan. Harvey, L. E. (1970), Samuel Beckett Poet and Critic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1967), Validity in Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Joyce, J. (1964), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kenner, H. (1971), The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Nowottny, W. (1962), The Language Poets Use. London: Athlone Press. Proust, M. (1919–27), A la recherche du temps perdu [Édition de la Nouvelle revue française]. 16 volumes. Paris: Gallimard. [The original source of ‘we stole that one’ (À côté de chez Swann, ‘Combray’ I.118).] Shakespeare, W. (1978), The Complete Works. Ed. P. Alexander. London and Glasgow: Collins. [The Tempest 1–26; Cymbeline 1197–1239.] Singh, S. (1997), Fermat’s Last Theorem. London: Fourth Estate. Windelband, W. (1914), A History of Philosophy. Trans. J. H. Tufts. 2nd edn, enlarged and revised. London: Macmillan.

Index

Ackerley, Chris 8–9, 32, 34, 42 Adorno, Theodor 120, 144–6, 151–2, 155 Agamben, Giorgio 8, 146–56 Albright, Daniel 169, 173 Alexander, Archibald 40–2, 204 Angst 47, 52 Antelme, Robert 148, 150, 151 anthropology 4, 82 anxiety 45, 47, 52, 122, 124, 172 Arendt, Hannah 153–4 Aristotle 27, 40, 78 art 6, 7, 8, 18–19, 22, 25–8, 31, 77, 79, 80–2, 84–5, 89–90, 92, 97–8, 100–5, 125, 128, 144, 155, 159, 174, 177–80, 182–5 Auschwitz-Birkenau 8, 144–8, 155–6 Badiou, Alain 120–3, 126 Ballmer, Karl 27, 35, 45 Banville, John 167 Bataille, Georges 115, 116, 118 Beaufret, Jean 4, 6, 46, 48–53 Beckett, Samuel (alphabetical by text): ‘Beckett’s Dream Notebook’ 24 but the clouds 62, 159, 169 The Calmative 86–9, 136, 138 ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ 130 ‘Ceiling’ 1, 9 ‘Clare Street Notebook’ 105, 107 Company 138 ‘Dante and the Lobster’ 64 ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’ 23, 80 Dépeupleur, Le (see also The Lost Ones) 145–6, 155 Dream of Fair to Middling Women 7, 22, 24, 34, 97, 98, 106, 110, 179, 182, 198, 205 Eh Joe 138, 158–9, 167–8, 172 Eleutheria 138 En attendant Godot (see also Waiting for Godot) 6, 51, 151 The End 86, 92, 136–8 Endgame 144, 155 The Expelled 46, 86, 92, 136, 137, 139 Film 87, 116 Footfalls 62, 138, 159, 169, 171–2, 174 ‘For Avigdor Arikha’ 89 ‘German Diaries’ 26–7, 34, 45

‘German letter of 1937’ (see also ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’) 28, 207 Ghost Trio 159, 168, 169 Happy Days 123, 159, 196 ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’ 69 How It Is 6, 44, 68, 69, 72, 73, 111, 121, 139–41 Ill Seen Ill Said 6, 62, 72, 174 Krapp’s Last Tape 1, 16 ‘La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’ 80 ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’ (see also ‘German Letter of 1937’) 42, 84, 105 L’Innommable (see also The Unnamable) 6, 47, 49–53 The Lost Ones (see also Le Dépeupleur) 145, 155 ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’ 80 Malone Dies 138, 182 Mercier and Camier 136, 138, 182 Molloy 16, 138, 153, 182–3, 188, 198–203 ‘Mongrel Mime for One Old Small (M)’ 90, 92 More Pricks Than Kicks 8, 22, 34, 99 Murphy 1, 5, 7, 9, 22, 26, 34, 39–42, 44, 51–3, 59, 101, 102, 109, 110–11, 113–14, 116–20, 124, 126, 145, 170, 182, 194, 198 Beckett, Samuel (Cont‘d) ‘Neither’ 153 Not I 153, 159 Ohio Impromptu 159 ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ 80, 88, 91, 128 ‘Philosophy Notes’ 24, 34, 204 Proust 18, 23, 80, 83, 91, 97, 102, 105–6, 128, 178, 197, 205, 207 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ 14, 25, 80 Rockaby 159, 169, 171–2 Texts for Nothing 66, 133, 135–6, 138, 146 That Time 1, 159 Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit 50, 80, 91, 145 The Trilogy 101, 137, 138, 153–5, 182–4 The Unnamable (see also L’Innommable) 8, 19, 59, 66, 71, 123, 142, 146, 150–1, 177–8, 181–3, 185–92

Index Waiting for Godot (see also En attendant Godot) 19, 57, 138, 194, 205 Watt 5, 9, 13–16, 25, 29–33, 34, 42, 53, 65, 72, 89, 115, 120–1, 124–5, 129, 132, 170, 182, 199, 202, 207 Whoroscope 22–3 ‘Whorosocope Notebook’ 28, 30, 35, 43 Worstward Ho 66 ‘Yellow’ 8, 195, 198–9, 201, 203, 205–7 being 3, 17, 18, 20, 23, 27, 40, 42, 44–53, 56, 58, 59–68, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 81, 82, 92, 107, 122, 123, 130, 136, 138, 139, 148, 149, 153, 158, 161, 163, 169–71, 179, 185, 186, 188, 207 being-in-the-world 3, 58, 101–2, 163 Benslama, Fethi 152–3, 156 Bernstein, J. M. 148, 155 Blanchot, Maurice 50, 156 body / embodiment 1–3, 6, 22, 40, 41, 43, 57–64, 66–8, 70, 71, 73–5, 77, 83, 84, 102–4, 106, 116–18, 120, 124, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 147, 161, 163–6, 168, 172, 192 Brentano, Franz 3, 17 Brough, John Barnett 7, 97, 98, 100 Burnet, John 40–2, 49, 204 Burton, Robert 198, 206 Butler, Lance St. John 20, 33, 57, 58, 63, 141 Cairns, Dorian 18, 33 Camus, Albert 4, 16, 44 Cassirer, Ernst 21, 29, 33 Cézanne, Paul 6, 79, 82–5, 87–91, 100, 103, 107 Chatto & Windus 23, 97, 202 Chion, Michel 165–7 cogito 7, 78, 120, 126, 132, 133 Connor, Steven 4, 6, 78, 173 Critchley, Simon 144, 155 Cronin, Anthony 110, 203 Dasein 47, 50, 60 Davis, Colin 148, 156 de Gaultier, Jules 24, 29 Democritus of Abdera 6, 40–43, 47, 51, 52, 204 de Roux, Dominique 121, 125 Derrida, Jacques 2–4, 19, 141, 142, 155, 158, 160, 170–1 Descartes, René 3, 22, 27, 33, 42, 78, 91, 121–2, 155, 161–2, 164 Cartesianism 17, 42 Devlin, Denis 26, 29 Diogenes 204–5 Doane, Mary Ann 166, 168

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Driver, Tom 45 Dürer, Albrecht 31, 103–4 Duthuit, Georges 26, 50, 69, 80–1, 91 École Normale Supérieure 4, 22, 77, 85 Ego 18, 156 Eliot, T. S. 26, 79, 109 Engels, Friedrich 110 essence 17, 23, 27, 40, 49, 51, 78, 80, 81, 88, 102, 147, 174, 179, 207 existence 14, 15, 20, 23, 45, 46, 50, 51, 53, 57, 58–64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 82, 102, 120, 121, 132, 134, 135, 141, 161, 163, 164, 170, 173, 179, 184, 185, 189 existentialism 3, 4, 9, 20, 44, 46, 51, 57, 61, 122 Feldman, Matthew 5, 40, 43, 50 Frege, Gottlob 207–8 Freud, Sigmund/ Freudian 99, 135, 153, 156, 161, 164, 191 Garner, Stanton B. 60, 141, 171 Geulincx, Arnold 34, 42, 137, 155 Godard, Jean-Luc 165, 174 Gombrowicz, Witold 7, 109–15, 117–26 Gorgias of Leontini 6, 42, 43, 47 Habermas, Jürgen 101, 105 Hamsun, Knut 48 Hardy, Thomas 201–3 Harvey, Lawrence 45, 98, 205 Hayman, David 31–2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 3, 20, 122, 134 Heidegger, Martin 2–6, 18, 20, 27, 28, 33, 35, 39–53, 56, 60, 78, 79, 82, 101, 121, 122, 141 Heimsoeth, Heinz 4, 5, 30, 34 Hesla, David 40, 141 Hill, Leslie 151 Hirsch, E. D. 5, 8–9, 195–202, 206–7 Hoefer, Jacqueline 15, 32 Holocaust 8, 144, 155 Humanism 19, 46, 48, 51, 61, 82 Hume, David 29, 35 Husserl, Edmund 2–5, 7–8, 14–33, 46, 97–8, 100, 105, 121–3, 132, 134, 138, 141, 155, 160, 164, 168, 177–9, 181, 185, 198 idealism 17, 21–4, 33 immaturity 7, 112–14, 117, 121, 123–6 Ingarden, Roman 3, 5, 8, 178–87, 189–90 Intersubjectivity 4, 6, 7, 8, 102 Iser, Wolfgang 3, 5, 8, 177, 184–9

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Index

James, William 41, 119 Joyce, James 7, 13, 22–4, 28, 64, 68, 80, 109, 111, 116–17, 125, 184, 201, 204–5 Juliet, Charles 49, 50 Kafka, Franz 110–11, 125 Kant, Immanuel 3, 5, 17, 21–9, 30, 33–5, 120–2, 125 Thing-In-Itself 17, 23, 24, 25, 29 Kaun, Axel 28, 42, 48, 84, 105 Keats, John 79, 146 Kern, Edith 15, 20, 57 Kierkegaard, Søren 3, 16, 122 Knowlson, James 15, 16, 22, 25, 27, 34, 44–5, 51, 98, 106, 110, 142, 151, 154, 156 Lawrence, D. H. 79 Levi, Primo 145–8, 149, 150–2, 155–6 Levinas, Emmanuel 3, 5, 8, 46, 148–55, 160, 163, 169 MacCarthy, Ethna 99, 106 MacGreevy, Thomas 79–80, 82–5, 97, 107 Mach, Ernst 21–2 Mallarmé, Stéphane 6, 39 Marx, Karl 18 Mauthner, Fritz 5, 27–30, 35 McCabe, Henry 64–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2–7, 56–8, 60, 77–90, 106, 129, 130–6, 138, 141, 142, 160–4, 174, 187 metaphysics 31, 34, 46, 78, 173 Moran, Dermot 1, 9, 17–18 nausea 6, 61, 62–4, 66–71, 73–4 negation 43, 47, 49–50, 60, 153–4, 162–3, 187–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 122, 124, 172 nihilism 42–3, 48, 50, 124 nothingness 42–3, 50, 52, 60–1, 74, 106, 122, 134, 162–4, 171 Nowottny, Winifred 194 ontology 53, 172, 199, 207 Oxenhandler, Neal 56, 57 Piette, Adam 171, 174 Pilling, John 13, 24, 28–30, 32, 34, 44, 48, 97, 99, 107, 141 Plato 27, 40, 49, 78 poststructuralism 4–5, 16, 19, 57, 178, 179 Poulet, Georges 188–89 Presocratic philosophy 6, 40–3, 49, 50, 203–5

Proust, Marcel 1, 23, 26, 33, 34, 91, 102, 106, 125, 160, 163, 178, 198–200, 207 psychoanalysis 68, 135, 156 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 7, 109, 121, 145 Rabinovitz, Ruben 30, 32 reality 2, 7, 16, 18, 19, 23–4, 29, 43, 83, 97–101, 104–6, 139, 161, 183, 187, 192, 197, 207 Reavey, George 13, 100, 106 Ricoeur, Paul 3, 5, 18, 78, 160, 162–4, 171, 174 Rimbaud, Arthur 79, 104 Sartre, Jean-Paul 2–7, 9, 14–33, 44–6, 51, 53, 56–75, 122, 124, 137, 142, 160, 172–3 Being and Nothingness 9, 15, 46, 56, 58, 61–3, 67–8, 71, 122 ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ 46, 61 Imagination 30, 31 Les Temps Modernes 136, 142 Nausea / La Nausée 4–5, 14–16, 19, 30, 33, 44, 62, 68 Schopenhauer, Arthur 5, 18, 22–4, 34, 43, 79, 105, 107, 122 ‘veil of Maya’ 23–4, 34 shame 8, 147–51, 153, 154, 155 Shapiro, Meyer 84–5 sleep 2, 6, 8, 111, 158–74 Socrates 204–5 Tal Coat, Pierre 80, 91 temporality / time 2, 5, 45, 91–2, 129, 181 Tonning, Erik 24, 27, 32, 34 Trezise, Thomas 141, 142, 155 truth 27, 45–6, 78, 92, 125–6, 132, 142, 158, 182, 187, 190, 195, 202 Uhlmann, Anthony 69–70, 155 van Velde, Bram and Geer 1, 69, 80–2, 88, 91 vision 16, 31, 41, 73, 77–8, 81, 86–90, 92, 131, 166, 198 Weller, Shane 5–6, 144, 151, 155 Windelband, Wilhelm 4, 5, 21, 25, 30, 33–4, 40, 201, 204 Woolf, Virginia 79, 196 Yeats, Jack B. 26, 69, 79–80 Yeats, William B. 109 Ziarek, Ewa 111, 123 Žižek, Slavoj 118