Beckett Ongoing: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics 3031420306, 9783031420306

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
You Must Go On
I Can’t Go On
I’ll Go On
Beckett: On
Bibliography
How to Become a Thing: Overcoming Mourning in Ill Seen Ill Said
Bibliography
Beckett’s Figural Language: A Reconfiguration of the Sensible
“fait voir ce qu’est voir”
“Pour faire remarquer moi”
Disremembering and Dismembering
Beckett’s Spectropoetics
Bibliography
Rêve de transfert collective: Beckett’s Resurgent Unanimist Dream
Bibliography
Beckett’s Unwarranted Miracles: Pascal, Geulincx, Kleist
Pascal, Miracle
Geulincx, Occasion
Kleist, Grace
Beckett, Wonder
Bibliography
Philosophy in the Flesh: Feeling, Folly, and Animals in Beckett
Bibliography
“The Golden Moment”: Enclosure, Fugitivity, and Broken Immanence
Ecstatic Visions
The Moment of Release
The Outside
Bibliography
Sans Cesse: Beckett, Proust, Knausgård
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF BECKETT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Beckett Ongoing Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics Edited by Michael Krimper · Gabriel Quigley

New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century Series Editor

Jennifer M. Jeffers Department of English Cleveland State University Cleveland, OH, USA

As the leading literary figure to emerge from post-World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.

Michael Krimper  •  Gabriel Quigley Editors

Beckett Ongoing Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics

Editors Michael Krimper Department of French and Gallatin School New York University New York, NY, USA

Gabriel Quigley Department of Comparative Literature New York University New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2945-6797     ISSN 2945-6800 (electronic) New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century ISBN 978-3-031-42029-0    ISBN 978-3-031-42030-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

Introduction  1 Michael Krimper and Gabriel Quigley Beckett: On 15 David Lloyd How to Become a Thing: Overcoming Mourning in Ill Seen Ill Said 37 Cosmin Toma  Beckett’s Figural Language: A Reconfiguration of the Sensible 57 Nadia Louar Rêve de transfert collective: Beckett’s Resurgent Unanimist Dream 75 Jean-Michel Rabaté  Beckett’s Unwarranted Miracles: Pascal, Geulincx, Kleist 95 Gabriel Quigley  Philosophy in the Flesh: Feeling, Folly, and Animals in Beckett119 William Broadway

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 “The Golden Moment”: Enclosure, Fugitivity, and Broken Immanence143 Michael Krimper Sans Cesse: Beckett, Proust, Knausgård163 Stefanie Heine Index189

Notes on Contributors

William  Broadway is Assistant Professor of English at Northern Michigan University. His research interests include British and Irish modernism, the twentieth-­century British and Anglophone novel, animal studies, and film studies. His article “Holes, Orifices, and Porous Subjectivity in Beckett’s Molloy” appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies. Stefanie  Heine is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse. Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (Turia + Kant, 2014) and Poetics of Breathing. Modern Literature’s Syncope (SUNY, 2021); co-­editor of Reading Breath in Literature (Palgrave, 2019), and editor of Mineral Poetics, figurationen 22/1 (2022). Michael  Krimper  is Lecturer in French and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He is the editor of a special issue for the Journal of Beckett Studies (Spring 2022) that published Beckett’s translations on the Marquis de Sade for the first time, and he is finishing a book on antiwork aesthetics and politics, titled Out of Work: The Refusal of Literature from Melville to Blanchot (under advance contract with SUNY). His essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in diacritics, New Literary History, SubStance, parallax, October, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. David Lloyd  is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Recent critical books include Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, vii

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2022), Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (Fordham University Press, 2019), and Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Poetry collections include Arc & Sill: Poems 1979–2009 (Shearsman, 2012) and The Harm Fields (Georgia Review Books, 2022). Nadia  Louar is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She specializes in Beckett Studies, with an emphasis on translation studies and literary bilingualism, and in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of Figure(s) du bilinguisme beckettien (2017), the guest editor (with José Francisco Fernández) of the Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui special issue on bilingualism (2018). Other recent works appeared in Michel Rabaté ed., The New Samuel Beckett Studies (2019), and in Davies, Will and Helen Bailey eds., Beckett and Politics (2021). Gabriel  Quigley  is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University working at the intersection of comparative modernisms, continental philosophy, and postcolonial theory. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, French Studies Bulletin, Derrida Today, Critical Inquiry, and the Journal of Modern Literature, among other venues. Jean-Michel Rabaté  is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, co-­founder and senior curator of Slought Foundation, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the author or editor of 50 books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory. Monographs include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), Beckett and Sade (2020), Rires Prodigues: Rire et jouissance chez Marx, Freud et Kafka (2021), James Joyce, Hérétique et Prodigue (2022), and Lacan l’irritant (2023). He has edited After Derrida (2018), New Beckett (2019), Understanding Derrida/ Understanding Modernism (2019), Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of Literature and Film (2020) and co-edited Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics (2022) as well as Encounters with SounGui Kim: Writings, 1975–2021 (2022).

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Cosmin Toma  is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages/St Hugh’s College. He has primarily published on modern and contemporary French literature, critical theory, music, and aesthetics. His first book, Neutraliser l’absolu. Blanchot, Beckett et la chose littéraire (Hermann, 2019), is an inquiry into what remains of the literary absolute when it is neutralized by modernity. He is also the editor of Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Introduction Michael Krimper and Gabriel Quigley

You Must Go On “Somehow on. Till nohow on.”1 These fragmented sentences, accompanied by other excretions of words or foirades, fizzling out as they go, indicate and enact the weak drive of perseverance traversing the life and work of Samuel Beckett. They resound with the celebrated formula introduced by the narrative voice of The Unnamable, not yet so diminished: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”2 What would it 1  Samuel Beckett, Nowhow On: Company, Ill Seen, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove, 2014), 89. 2  Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove, 2009), 407.

M. Krimper Department of French and Gallatin School, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Quigley (*) Department of Comparative Literature, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_1

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then take to persist, to go on, when it is no longer possible to do so? Somehow, nohow on? And, despite the constant reference to these lines, have we understood or fully appreciated the sense of this ongoingness in Beckett, in  Beckett ongoing, and its radical implications on modernist aesthetics, ethics, and politics up to the contemporary period? While the phrasal verb “to go on” usually means “to continue,” as signaled by the original usage of “continuer” in the French, Beckett at times displaces the semantic chain, recontextualizes the word “on,” and breaks apart the syntax of the English language. “On” thus yields diverse semantic and syntactic permutations: “further” (the “on” that complements the paradoxical movement backward, or at a standstill, of “worstward ho”); “activated” (connoting the various machinic assemblages deployed by Beckett, including the human-tape recorder, the human-camera, and the human-screen); the locative preposition (“the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”3); being (the ὤν or “on” of “ontology”); and its inversion, morphemically reduced to the negation: “no,” alluding to nonbeing or nothing at all. Beckett also uses “on” as a command: “On!” Pozzo declares repeatedly, cracking his whip at Lucky. On we go! On and out! Onwards! Where though? For Beckett, the demand to go on is not strictly governed by the principles of accumulation, realization, and productive action that underlie the indefinite growth of late capitalism. Instead, it is at once animated and thwarted by the overpowering counter-currents of degrowth, loss, incapacity, dispossession, errancy, and passivity.4 The weak drive of perseverance implied in each of these variations of onness is entangled with, and at the same time disjoined from, politics and the political. If the concept of the political pertains to the power of decision making and the willingness, for example, in Hannah Arendt’s view, “to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own,”5 then the language of Beckett’s own stories diverge from the politics of narrative initiation and self-actualization in the world. His stories lack determined beginnings or ends; the debilitated characters or voices who narrate them are unable to carry out the voluntary and goal-oriented action that would  Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove, 2011), 1.  The general orientation of this volume of chapters on the question of perseverance stems from the proceedings of an international conference held at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House in the spring of 2019 under the title “Beckett Ongoing: Ethics, Politics, Modernism,” which was organized by Michael Krimper, Gabriel Quigley, and John Waters. 5  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 186. 3 4

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properly authorize who they are, that would ascribe meaning and purpose to their lives within the framework of a coherent and self-unifying story, that would ultimately embed them within a political community and world where they could be recognized as persons or citizens endowed with rights. Nor does Beckett equate perseverance with the material calculus of individual and communal needs or fulfillment, that is, the biological subsistence, labor, leisure, social reproduction, and flourishing of the human species. His solitary narrators, on the contrary, tend to abandon themselves to the increasingly impersonal language of the narrative voice. The linguistic and experiential processes of desubjectification are always left unfinished but still press on, simultaneously forward and backward, thereby disowning anyone’s claim to their own story or identity. In this way Beckett exhibits the groundlessness on the basis of which the political, or any politics, could be established, justified, and constructed. It is a groundlessness on the basis of which human subjects cannot help but come undone and yet are exposed to something else at the threshold outside of language and existence. Beckett’s “on” safeguards an ethical demand to persevere, not as a will to power, but as a relinquishing of the powers of subjectivity. To answer this demand is to call into question the entire logic of property holding together the subject-object relation and to become attuned to the absence of relation, the distance between things, which cannot be grasped or owned but is shared in common without possession. Jean-Michel Rabaté illustrates this as an “ethics of nonrelation” shorn from the anthropocentrism and humanism of the modern Western subject.6 It is in this sense that the writing and artistic process staged by “The Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” no longer puts objects at the disposal of the subject, but introduces the “occasion” of creative production where the fashioning of the artwork or literary work stems from an experience of failure rather than mastery. Making coincides with a certain “disfazione” or unmaking, both of the artist or writer and the work, which likewise fails to work. The writer and reader are separated from the ruined work in which they lose themselves and keep disappearing without end. The movement of nonstop failure, moreover, re-embeds human being, whatever that might be, in the midst of things here and now. This is why Beckett’s aesthetics of failure is fundamentally ethical. The “on,” as David Lloyd suggests in his contribution to this volume, is the “baremost minimum” of an ethical injunction 6  Jean-Michel Rabaté, Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 76.

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to continue at or with impasses whose shifting and unknowable limits challenge Kant’s categorical imperative and, more generally, the politics of representation. To persevere, by giving up, sustains ways of coexisting, communicating, and creating otherwise. The demand of Beckett’s oscillating maxim “on” therefore cuts across aesthetics, ethics, and politics. His experiments with ongoing failure undermine the self-sufficient ground and autonomy of the artwork or literary work, as well as the mastery of the writer or artist, the meaning-­ making functions of language, and the sovereignty of the subject. Such an art of failure cannot finally bring about the accomplishment of self-­fruition, for it defies recuperation back into the modern capitalist machine of progress as well as neoliberal programs of entrepreneurial risk-taking, striving, improvement, self-care, and hustle culture. What perseveres, to reiterate, is failure. On repeat: “Fail again. Fail better.”7 To fail better, all over again, is to undergo an aesthetic or literary experience of shared dispossession, lessening, and invention. Many of Beckett’s most compelling readers show us how different senses of perseverance frame this aesthetics and poetics of failure. Gilles Deleuze distills it as “exhaustion,” Alain Badiou as “tenacity” or an ethics of courage; Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit under the header of “impoverished art,” Ann Banfield as “tattered syntax,” and Blanchot as “inoperativity” (désœuvrement). Blanchot, for his part, elucidates the literary metamorphosis of the “I” in The Unnamable explicitly in terms of “perseverance.” The narrative voice, he points out, in trying to go on under impossible circumstances, flows from an experience of depersonalization in which it is carried outside itself where it endures and lives on, errantly. Blanchot names this “survivance,” as a noun and in the progressive tense of the verb, evoking the uninterrupted overflow of language that, once divested of the powers of subjectivity, keeps surviving—keeps living or going on—without rest. “It is in the intimacy of this metamorphosis that an eloquent survivor [une survivance parlante] wanders, an obscure remnant that will not give way and fights [lutte] in motionless vagrancy, with a perseverance that does not indicate any power but rather the curse of what can never stop talking.”8 Nothing less than the struggle of literature and art, the insurgency and resistance of language and voice

 Samuel Beckett, Nowhow On: Company, Ill Seen, Worstward Ho, 89.  Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 113; Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 290. 7 8

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and gesture stripped of the subject-object property relation, is at stake in this perseverance. One could argue that Beckett thus modifies the meaning usually attributed to Spinoza’s conatus, approximated in English as “perseverance,” displacing and reinscribing it within a configuration of literary and aesthetic space exposed to what lies outside at the interstices of being. Rather than designating the drive of things to persist in their being, he traces an inconclusive struggle where “I,” devoid of power, can no longer maintain my own being, identity, attachments, affiliations, and desire. In Beckett, the anonymous and impersonal language of the narrative voice is responsive, not exactly to the event of being, but to the uneventfulness of ordinary life (and death) in modes of extreme negativity: unbecoming, unbeing, and unknowing. To persevere under the threat of the impossible is to stay disposed to the materiality of things, or to nothing, which is to say, to the inappropriable fact of finitude. The drive to go on resembles the drive to live on, to survive, in the face of death and dying, such that there would no longer be any “I” left to continue but only something or someone entirely other. This is why the momentum of beginning anew is constantly arrested or aborted in Beckett, as signaled by numerous formulations of stillborn natality exhibiting the source of narration: “birth to into death,” “they give birth astride of a grave,” and many more.9 In ruining the dialectical opposition between life and death, Beckett shows their inseparable entanglement, from which there is no escape. What’s “going on” in Beckett resonates furthermore with Jacques Derrida’s reading of “Living On” (“Survivre”) in Blanchot’s récits. Derrida draws our attention to the supplemental logic of the “on” (sur) between the English and French: “This enduring, lasting, going on, stresses or insists on the on of a living on [le sur d’un survivre] that bears the entire enigma of this supplementary logic. Survival [survivance] and revenance, living on and returning from the dead: living on goes beyond both living and dying, supplementing each with a sudden surge and certain surcrease, deciding [arrêtant] life and death at once.”10 The arresting decision, according to Derrida, cannot put to term the interminable but risks the undecidability of “life death” (la vie la mort), as he titles an earlier  Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954), 8.  Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines,” trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 108; “Survivre,” in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 153. 9

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seminar on this topic, and embraces the unfinishedness of finitude, an infinite openness to the other and to the outside. It is in this way that the excess of surviving—of living on, going on—calls the other to “come, come” with the urgency of an injunction. The uneventfulness of the other’s coming harbors the chance of an incalculable future and an immemorial past, each of which folds into the time of the now, akin to the waiting for Godot, to the listening of a call from whatever does not come, and, in never coming, cannot stop failing to arrive in the break of the present. The reader or audience, too, is called to give the work, emptied of authorship, the chance to live on, somehow on, till nohow on.

I Can’t Go On In articulating an aesthetics and ethics of failure as perseverance, Beckett persistently courts, evades, and deactivates political legibility. As early as 1934, he foregrounds poetry’s allegedly distinct autonomy from politics or any other established authority, affirming in this way: “The relief of poetry free to be derided (or not) on its own terms and not in those of the politicians, antiquaries […] and zealots.”11 Nevertheless, Beckett was keenly aware of the political valence of this claim to the autonomy of poetics, as indicated by his riposte to Harold Pinter’s insistence that “nothing” he has ever written is political: “this very absence of politics is in itself a political statement.”12 The dexterity of Beckett’s orientation toward the politics of aesthetics and poetics has attracted both critics and champions, perhaps best exemplified by the respective positions of György Lukács and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s. In his upbraiding of modernist aesthetics, Lukács identifies Beckett’s Molloy as the “idiotic” spokesperson for the movement’s projection of a historically homeless humanity and therefore modernism’s defeatist complicity with capitalism. As he explains, modernism yields a “description of the outer world [that] finds its complement in the reduction of the reality to a nightmare. Beckett’s Molloy is perhaps the ne plus ultra of this development.”13 11  Samuel Beckett, “Intersessions by Denis Devlin,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writing a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1984), 91. 12  Antonia Fraser, “Must You Go?”: My Life with Harold Pinter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010), 105. 13  György Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle, trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 31.

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Adorno, on the other hand, maintains that the placelessness and timelessness of Beckett’s signature poetics reflect and negate (both on and no) late capitalist society’s voiding of the present, and in doing so, makes a commitment incommensurable with the presentism of Bertolt Brecht’s or Jean-Paul Sartre’s “engagement.” Beckett’s works pursue this commitment precisely by “handing the bill” to the ideology of engagement: “interwoven in the veil of personalization is the idea that human beings are in control and decide, not anonymous machinery, and that there is life on the commanding heights of society: Beckett’s moribund grotesques suggest the truth about that. Sartre’s vision prevents him from recognizing the hell he revolts against.”14 Neither reductively political nor complacently apolitical, in the wake of the Second World War, Beckett acknowledges the systematic production, along with the seemingly unavoidable existence, of so much senseless pain, violence, and suffering in the world. And he is propelled by an ethos of excess, touching on what remains inappropriable and incommensurable, akin to what Adorno describes as “the minimal promise of happiness.” If Beckett’s work offers a negative standpoint of redemption for all the suffering in the world, then, Adorno holds, it “refuses to be traded for comfort, cannot be had for a price less than total dislocation, to the point of worldlessness.”15 Pushing worldlessness even further, though, we should note that Beckett does not settle for the autonomy of art or literature either. For, as Blanchot would put it, he contests the law of the work, and exhibits instead its lawlessness, the anarchy out of which another way of living in common and political community might be fashioned. While investigating multiple registers of the so-called political Beckett, this volume aims to critically assess the gaps that at once conjoin and disjoin the ever-dynamic spheres of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. After all, Beckett reminds us that “the danger is in the neatness of identifications.”16 We know that he confirmed what it means to “go on” in the political commitments he made in his own life, as elaborated at length by Emilie Morin.17 Beckett actively participated in the Resistance as a member of the 14  Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh (New York: Verso, 2020), 202. 15  Ibid., 212. 16  Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 2007), 19. 17  See Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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group Gloria; rebutted the ethnonationalism declared by the Irish Free State; objected to the French colonial war in Algeria; and claimed solidarity with members of the Black Panther Party in addition to the anti-­ Apartheid movement, just to name a few examples. However, the weak drive of perseverance traversing Beckett’s tragicomic literary and artistic work implicates an altogether different form of engagement, maybe even dis-engagement, whose contesting of the abstract figures of universalism, and whose erasing of fixed identarian differences, still remains to be fully laid out.18 The creative process of detachment, effacement, and reinscription improvised by Beckett, as a way of persevering with the extreme negativity of failure, already negotiates the space between the work’s historical and biographical conditions of creation and its unachieved space of autonomy, consigning everything to fragmentary breakdown and dissolution, also left incomplete. Thus, rather than submitting Beckett’s singular and plural body of work to a systematic procedure of interpretation based on the external domains of the biographical, historical, or sociopolitical, or reducing it to the material circumstances of creative production, this volume opts to follow the immanent frequencies of the “on” heard in the chords sounded by his prose, plays, poetry, and multimedia practice. Through the prism of perseverance, we might proceed to sketch the passages between Beckett’s life and work without prioritizing either sphere of existence. Subsequently, we can navigate more fluidly between the work and its performance, or the event of its reading, which inevitably renews the life of the work and engenders its numerous afterlives, ever aborted and started over again, as they reverberate with the open-ended unraveling of history.

I’ll Go On The chapters gathered together in this volume undertake an array of methodologies to explore the intersections of Beckett’s life and work with philosophy and literary or critical theory while addressing aesthetic, ethical, and political concerns that bear on the question of perseverance. They grapple with the ways in which he reinitiates and defies the long itinerary of modernism; responds to events of upheaval and catastrophe; shows the 18  This volume hereby corresponds with the direction taken by the editorial work of Helen Bailey and William Davies, with debts owed to the scholarship of Peter Boxall, in their recent collection of essays: Political Beckett (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

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senselessness of everyday and ordinary suffering beyond the limited scope of humanism; or invents forms of brokenness, ruin, and diminishment. In doing so, the authors interrogate the rational foundations and configurations of the classical subject and broach other ways of continuing, of living or going on, from the standpoint of the impossible. David Lloyd alerts us to the formalist voice heard in the syllable “on.” Conceiving politics as the domain of representation, undergirded by the notion of an integral voice whose utterance (outerance) reveals an inward essence, Lloyd posits that neither Beckett’s experiences nor expressions yield the political and ethical implications of his forms. Beckett evacuates the “formality” of bourgeois freedom, as well as duty, of any content and reduces the Enlightenment ideals of progress and development to the recurring word “on.” Likewise, the bodiless voice of Beckett’s plays from Krapp on is not the guarantor of the fullness of the subject in its Mündigkeit, finding authentic linguistic expression of its inner essence. Rather, it is the manifestation of the lacuna exhibited by the “suffering of being” in the state-oriented formation of an ethical-political subject. The little syllable “on,” which could be mistaken for a categorical imperative, does not interpellate its auditor as an ethical subject. For it insists on bringing the supposedly autonomous subject face to face with its own thingliness, that is, the uncontrollable and persistent voice buzzing in the ear. In reading Mal vu mal dit/Ill Seen Ill Said, Cosmin Toma similarly examines Beckettian thingliness, but according to the French usage of la chose as “the thing under question.” The thing, by way of suspending categorical, conceptual, or even phenomenal representation, furnishes an ethics beyond Kant’s sensus communis. To chart how a work of literature goes on when it is beholden to the seemingly self-defeating movement of what Blanchot calls le neutre (the neuter), Toma retrieves the “lurching rhythm” of the “neither/nor” in Beckett’s poetics. His voices linger, Toma observes, in a state of constant rehashing—the repetition of canceling and retracing what has been erased—which runs counter to the teleological structure of dialectics. But the narrator of Mal vu mal dit/Ill Seen Ill Said, who ostensibly assumes the role of the writer, experiences such immense grief that the self-discipline and mastery demanded by writing is interrupted. To go on, then, he seeks to become as much of a thing as the neutral figure he is supposed to depict. Teasing out the aesthetic mechanics of this metamorphosis as well as its ethical resonances, while simultaneously arguing that the tension between these two overlapping regimes is

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bound to stay unresolved, Toma locates thingliness in the very movement of the neuter, elucidating in this way the perseverance of no’s counterpart, on. The movement of “neither/nor” that punctuates Beckett’s thing for Toma corresponds to the ghostly oscillation between languages teased out in Nadia Louar’s chapter. While elaborating Beckett’s poetics of bilingualism and self-translation under the header “spectropoetics,” Louar uncovers incisive political features of his language in the ways that it disrupts sensible experience and aesthetics. Through a rapprochement of Jean-­ François Lyotard’s concept of the figural on the one hand, and the “distribution of the sensible” proposed by Jacques Rancière on the other, Louar depicts Beckett’s bilingualism as a defigurative project. It interrogates the relationships between the seen and the said, the audible and the visible, the inner and the outer, and, ultimately, the living and the dead. At the locus in-between, Beckett’s bilingualism summons modalities of spectrality that trigger novel modes of sense perception and give rise to hauntological forms of subjectivity. In doing so, Louar claims, Beckett inaugurates nothing short of a new “regime of identification of art,” affected by the afterlives of translations as they belatedly mutate the senses of the original—and back again. Jean-Michel Rabaté approaches the question of perseverance from the angle of Beckett’s experiments with avant-garde aesthetics, taking his unwritten dissertation on Unanimisme as a point of departure to articulate the collective energy of the crowd in a cluster of texts whose “Dantean sadism” confronts the moral absurdity of the trenches, death camps, and war. Observing how he was less inspired by Jules Romains’s dogmatic theses than by the work of the other principal Unanimist, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Rabaté locates an early influence of desubjectification in Beckett’s work. Unanimism maintained that individuals cannot be abstracted from the group and that human energy vibrates more intensely in a crowd. However, given the numerous instances of quasi-solipsist narrators in his fiction, Rabaté admits that it may sound counter-intuitive to hold that Beckett was marked by the avant-garde literary movement of Unaninism, and particularly its claim of the individual’s dissolution in the crowd. But, if Beckett at first inverts this vibrating energy of the crowd within the confines of the individual narrator, in later works such as How It Is, The Lost Ones, and Quad, the principle of multiplicity resurfaces: the serial mourners moving up and down in the cylinder; the almost infinite numbers of torturers and victims crawling in the mud; the anonymous dancers who

 INTRODUCTION 

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avoid a central square. All of this testifies to the resilience of an opposite principle, namely the insight that life is experienced more fully when stylized as a collective gesture. The Unanimist conception of the crowd thus subverts the pre-Copernican anthropocentrism that Beckett, Rabaté stresses, always sought to dismantle. Gabriel Quigley returns to the scene of the heaving crowd in How It Is, comprised of a near-nameless mass of individuals roving eastward across a grey and lifeless plain. But Quigley orients his chapter around a minor scene: as Pim searches for Pom, dragging along a rucksack filled with scarce provisions and a can opener, he witnesses a flash of radical possibility in the midst of actuality’s totalization. Pausing to open a tin of sardines, he cannot help but marvel at the movement of his hands: “little swirl of fingers and palms little miracle thanks to which little miracle among so many thanks to which I live on lived on.”19 Quigley explains how, for Pim, this subtle gesture defies necessity, explanation, and comprehension, yielding evidence that anything can happen. Guided by the ethical, political, and aesthetic resonances of this scene, Quigley traces the evolving role of the miracle in Beckett by considering three moments: Proust, How It Is, and Ghost Trio. Situating these moments in Beckett’s notes, manuscripts, and correspondence, Quigley reveals how each of these texts were shaped by Beckett’s fascination with accounts of the miraculous: Blaise Pascal’s Pensées on miracles, Arnold Geulincx’s metaphysics of “occasions,” and Heinrich von Kleist’s theory of “divine grace.” As the buried motif guiding his poetics of contingency, the principle of the miracle illuminates how Beckett’s works affirm the possibility of radical change even in the face of the darkest, most intractable regimes of necessitarianism. Whereas Quigley highlights marginal figures from Beckett’s philosophical canon, William Broadway problematizes the longstanding association between Beckett and his chief philosophical referent, Descartes. Acknowledging that Descartes was a key intellectual influence on Beckett and a central figure in his curriculum of philosophical self-education, Broadway nevertheless contends that Descartes’ influence is troubled by Beckett’s attunement to animal ways of being and feeling. If Descartes expounded a theory of human subjectivity grounded in reason, helping to inaugurate the modern philosophical doctrine of anthropocentrism that measures moral standing based on the capacity for specific forms of thought, Beckett affirms folly and feeling (bêtise) so as to imagine ways of  Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove, 1994), 35.

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relating to animals that short-circuit rationalist criteria of knowing. Broadway more specifically situates Beckett’s anti-Cartesian ethics against anthropocentrism through a nuanced reading of Molloy, in which sensation, intuition, and feeling involve regard for the physical suffering of animals and humans alike. Molloy depicts moments of transspecies communication and communion characterized by human efforts to approach animals across ontological and epistemological divides. Broadway thus not only reevaluates Beckett’s philosophical relationship with Descartes, but demonstrates how, in negotiating Cartesian metaphysics, Beckett furnishes an ethics that does not prioritize either human being or the capacity for reason. Plumbing the depths of posthuman ethics, Michael Krimper asks, how are we to read the drive of endless striving and perseverance that marks Beckett’s postwar shift to an aesthetics of failure? His first-person narrators “go on” to the extent that they keep trying to escape from a world and humanity in ruins; from the sociopolitical structures, institutions, and legal codes that brutalize and confine them; from the systemic mechanisms of control that have reduced their existence to the poverty of managed and appropriated life. Krimper considers the ethical and political stakes of the impossible fugitive movements that punctuate a sequence of Beckett’s writings, concentrating on “the golden moment” in Molloy, ecstatic release in “The End,” and the verbal overflow of Not I. The bodies, voices, or narrators of these stories aspire to break free, though always in vain, from the material forces that have captured them and continue to subject them to the threat of death. However, Krimper points out, in trying but failing to escape, they end up becoming immersed in the common life of things; which is to say, they end up evoking an immanence with an outside, a broken immanence. Drawing on Beckett’s affinities with Georges Bataille as well as his newly unearthed translations on the Marquis de Sade, Krimper elaborates the lines of flight and elusive departures outward, from within the biopolitical conditions of enclosure, of these fugitive  life forms  and writing. He argues that Beckett’s poetics of failure, charged by impersonal perseverance and survival, stages pathways for exiting sovereign configurations of power and violence constitutive of modernity. Beckett not only deflates sovereign paradigms of subjectivity, ethics, and politics depending on modern conceptions of the human, but also subverts agency in order to emphasize the everyday memory of embodied routine and habit. This is notably transmitted, Stefanie Heine contends, in

 INTRODUCTION 

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his essay on Proust’s Recherche, which outlines a “physiology of style” predicated on the “organic eccentricities”20 linking together memory and habit. Heine illustrates the textual afterlife of an aesthetics of material irregularities ranging from Beckett’s prose to Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp. Slightly at odds with Proust’s involuntary memory, Heine touches on “extreme cases” where “memory is so closely related to habit that its word takes flesh, and is not merely available in cases of urgency, but habitually enforced.”21 Beckett’s grotesque speakers exemplify these cases, for they articulate “organic eccentricities” in certain ways of speaking and being whose irregular rhythms defy the voluntary and involuntary powers of memory at the heart of personal selfhood. Following the image of “eccentric” hearts in Proust, Beckett, and Knausgård, Heine demonstrates how the impersonal nexus of memory, habit, and physiology can be felt in and through recurrent disruptions of language emptied of subjectivity. She thereby rethinks perseverance as the patter of a weak heart: a “simecope” in the gaps where matter and language coincide. If Beckett infamously blocks commentary, exegesis, and philosophical treatment, many emergent studies of his work embrace those impasses full on, staying with his aporias, doubts, inabilities, repetitions, discontinuities, breakdowns, and endless failures. The old Beckett canon is on the verge of falling away; other canons, continuums, and periodizations are in the making, but now by simultaneously unmaking themselves, are more attentive to the fact that his creative process tends to unsettle discursive systems and orders. The numerous theoretical, counter-theoretical, and historicist approaches in this volume contribute to this un-making, to what goes on and lives on, after Beckett. Perhaps we are still just beginning to learn how to read at once the biographical and sociohistorical conditions of his body of work, and the way it exceeds, interrupts, and transforms those very same conditions. In the constant oscillation between these two poles of reading, we are still discovering how Beckett’s responsiveness to an aesthetic or ethical demand of perseverance could reframe transnational itineraries of modernism and furnish nascent techniques and strategies to sense, convey, or shape the political struggles to come.

 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (New York: Grove, 1978), 8.  Ibid., 18.

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Beckett: On David Lloyd

Is it not in the experience of any critic who has devoted concentrated attention to a writer or artist that at a certain point they feel that they have exhausted all that they could possibly say about that subject? All that remains, if enjoined to go on about it, is, as the saying goes, to “go on,” elaborating but not adding much by way of illumination. In my own case, I confess that my initial reaction to being invited to contribute to a volume entitled Beckett Ongoing: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics was to feel, with some alarm, that I had already exhausted whatever I could possibly say about the question of Beckett, ethics, and politics. Let me hasten to add that by no means do I think I’ve exhausted all that could be said—the voluminous and ongoing discourse on Beckett, much of which is rich with new insights, would prove that thought a delusion. I merely mean that in what I had written on Beckett to date, it seemed that I had reached a certain limit, momentary or permanent, to my own thinking as to the consequences, political and ethical, of what I had come to think of as Beckett’s thinking of the thing—a thinking that is profoundly political and rigorously ethical

D. Lloyd (*) Department of English, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_2

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even as it dismantles virtually every tenet of what we think of as the ground of politics and ethics and, indeed, of aesthetics as it has been thought since Kant’s Critique of Judgement.1 Perhaps it is because the implications of his thinking for the ethical and the political are so radical, so epochal in their reach, that one pauses on the brink, hesitant to press on into the terrain of the “life in common” that they prefigure.2 It is as if one had to pass through the black hole of Beckett’s via negativa in order to emerge into the alternative possible world he shadows. If so, then I find myself suspended at some kind of event horizon. In any case, the present chapter responds inevitably to an injunction: an injunction to “go on,” even at the risk of “going on” too much, which is, perhaps, the same as to resume, to go back over in order to go on yet again. In doing so, all I may have to offer are some fragments, foirades, of where, if I could, I would go on to. The impasse—or the aporia, the “nohow on”—of having to go on after exhausting all that one could was all too familiar to Beckett. With hindsight, of course, one can look back on such moments of very painful incapacity on his part as “transitional moments”: they tended to occur after moments of astonishing productivity, as with the writing of the trilogy of novels and Waiting for Godot during the notorious “siege in the room” of the late 1940s, or to mark the thresholds of a new phase in his work, as with the miraculous Krapp’s Last Tape among his plays and How It Is among his novels, both of which—after a series of “roughs” and abandoned works—inaugurated the condensed dramatic and prose works of the 1960s. Of course, we can now reconstruct the evolution of Beckett’s work and identify its various phases as an arc that now seems one of remarkable consistency in its working out of a singular aesthetic. But this takes nothing either from the writerly pain that he suffered in those moments when he seemed to have exhausted every imaginable means or 1   See David Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); an extended chapter on How It Is in Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and to a brief exploration of the notion of breath in Beckett, Avigdor Arikha and Paul Celan, “Breath Crystals: A Poetics of Breath in Beckett, Celan, and Arikha,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 30, no. 2 (2018): 179–195, that already went on a little from Beckett’s Thing. 2  This phrase recurs throughout Part II of How It Is (London: Calder and Boyars, 1964), 61 and passim. Hereafter HII. I discuss it and its implications for thinking the possibilities of social life from the perspective of the “pathological subject” at some length in Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, chapter VI.

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from the actuality of the impasses that he identified and whose evidence is in those reluctantly published “roughs” for radio and theater. Those works, products of the peculiarly difficult transitional periods of the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggest—despite their thematic continuities with Beckett’s “finished” work—quite different formal directions than those that we now see as the hallmarks of his late style. One can read from them the reasons for his decisions not to go on in the directions they were indicating, whether for their reversion to certain kinds of pared-down naturalism (Pinteresque, one is tempted to say) or for their seeming requirement for a longer narrative treatment than one can now imagine Beckett undertaking. That they “fizzled” is the mark of the reality of Beckett’s perception that he had exhausted all that he could do, that he could not go on. It is a recurrent refrain in the letters that he is bone tired, that he has nothing more to say, that what he is writing or has written disgusts him, all the more when that writing is, as later appears, a new step and a new form: “Struggling on with B.W. [“Better Worse,” which would become Worstward Ho], loathing it the while.” “No heart to try to work. Haven’t looked at W.H. and but briefly at Graz attempt. Seldom if ever so stupid & inert.”3 The Texts for Nothing are probably the most evidently, even explicitly, transitional writings in Beckett’s oeuvre. They bear the marks of the arduous reformulation of the writer’s task that occupied him for several years, in both prose and theater, as he sought to go on after the completion of the Trilogy. So too, of course, were the Nouvelles with which the Textes were gathered in their first edition: they too were transitional texts in their time, composed in French in the post-war moment when Beckett, by committing to writing in a foreign tongue, was learning to become mal armé.4 Both in their different moments aim at the destruction of what had gone before, at learning once again to write “without style,” as Beckett put it, even when the style which had to be escaped was one he had

3  Letters to Ruby Cohn, 4 January 1982, and to Barbara Bray, 23 August 1982, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 573 and 588 respectively. The “Graz attempt” refers to the TV play Nacht und Träume (1982/1983). 4  Samuel Beckett to Hans Naumann, 17 February 1954, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–56, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 462.

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painfully forged in the preceding break with a habitual mode of writing.5 The Nouvelles and the Textes represent, as he described them more than once, “the first and last gasps” of the project whose indigent masterpiece was the trilogy of great novels that preceded them.6 Indeed, Texts for Nothing can seem like the last gasps of the Unnamable, the fizzling out of the ultimate avatar’s distinctive voice in a struggle to find some way to go on or simply, finally, to fade out, even as the opening of the texts resumes the Unnamable’s famous last words: “Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on. Someone said, You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on.”7 We will come back to this imperative voice out of nowhere that insists that the hearer “move on” or “go on.” Beckett’s description of the Texts as last gasps, while capturing their often breathless onward rush to peter out on some finishing line, nonetheless presents a paradox for a criticism that, with the safety of hindsight, is taken with their function or position within the oeuvre as “transitional.” To exhale a last gasp is to reach an end, a point beyond which there is nothing more. From the writer’s perspective, this last gasp of an exhaustion of means and ends that have served adequately if not well hitherto risks representing not the “passage through” or “across” of a transition, but precisely the dead-end of an impasse, being “at a standstill [en panne] […] sick of writing, the way I write [dégoûté d’écrire, comme moi j’écris].”8 Alain Badiou gives the most uncompromising expression of this sense of impasse: “The cogito of the pure voice is unbearable [insupportable] (in the strict sense: nothing, in the writing, can support it), but it is also inevitable. Arrived at this point, it seems that we have reached an impasse. And

5  Beckett, cited in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 324. 6  See, for example, Samuel Beckett to Con Leventhal, 26 January 1956, in Beckett, Letters II, 599. 7  Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, in Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, Vol. IV of The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 295. Hereafter T4N. In French, “go on” is “continuer,” which lacks the semantic range of the English. For the French, see Samuel Beckett, Nouvelles et Textes pour rien, avec 6 illustrations d’Avigdor Arikha (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1958), 127. 8  Samuel Beckett to Mania Peron, 18 September 1951, in Beckett, Letters II, 297–8. Two years later, he was writing to George Reavey: “Since 1950 have only succeeded in writing a dozen very short abortive texts in French and there is nothing whatever in sight” (Ibid., 376).

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so, indeed, at the moment of the Texts for Nothing, was Beckett’s feeling.”9 In the moment of writing itself, the letters testify, there was no guarantee of “continuing.” Indeed, the letters from that period—as at so many others—bear witness to how painfully Beckett felt this impasse, quite literally as a sense of physical as well as aesthetic exhaustion. So much, indeed, is registered from the outset of the Texts: “It’s not just tiredness, I’m not just tired, in spite of the climb” (T4N, 296). Exhaustion is at once a state, an end-state, and a process, a process of wearing out possibilities that have become routines, threatening to become mannerism in the sense of repeating a mode that one has already worked through. It is also a closure of exhausted possibilities, of ways in which one might possibly go on, much as Beckett remarked of his friend, the painter Jack B.  Yeats—a painter utterly familiar with the need to destroy style—that he “brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door.”10 Beckett’s insight into Yeats’s work and way of working reflects as much on artistic procedure, the painter’s refusal to return to the same formulas, as it does on the general existential predicament he illuminates. Exhaustion is an act of reduction that is not to be confused with a mere fatigue. As Gilles Deleuze once put it, writing of Beckett: “Does he exhaust the possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself in exhausting the possible, and vice versa. He exhausts that which is not realized through the possible. He has had done with the possible, beyond all tiredness, ‘for to end yet again.’”11 And—as Deleuze nicely captures—the posture of exhaustion is not that of the body lain down, at rest, but the one so typical of the late plays and prose, “seated at the table, empty head in captive hands, ‘Head sunk in crippled hands’[…].” (155), the latter citation being one of the few glimpses we get of the figure of the writer in Worstward

9  Alain Badiou, Beckett: l’increvable désir (Paris: Pluriel, 2011), 38, my translation. “Le cogito de la pure voix est insupportable (au sens strict: nul ne peut, dans l’écriture, le supporter), mais il est aussi inévitable. Parvenus à ce point, il semble que nous soyons dans l’impasse, et tel a bien été, au moment de son Textes pour rien, le sentiment de Beckett.” 10  Samuel Beckett, “MacGreevy on Yeats,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 97. 11  Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 152.

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Ho.12 It is the posture, all too familiar perhaps, of the one for whom the words will not come or come right but who is not thereby released from the unrelieved obligation to write. The Texts for Nothing represent, in Beckett’s wry jest, a marking of time within the aporia at which The Unnamable ends: the inability to go on and the obligation to do so. He describes the Texts to his American publisher Barney Rosset as “the thirteen or fourteen very short abortive texts that express the failure to implement the last words of L’Innommable: ‘il faut continuer, je vais continuer’ [‘You must go on, I’ll go on’].” And then he goes on, “Of course there’s no reason why it would start now or ever for that matter. I’m horribly tired and stupefied, but not yet tired and stupefied enough. To write is impossible but not yet impossible enough.”13 Indeed, as he begins to realize, the only way to go forward is by a further movement of reduction, dispossession, and confinement, a burrowing into the no-way-through, the sans-issue, in which, again and again, Beckett seems to have found his way forward. But always by dint of this exhaustion which is the only way to go on without the repetition that is just “going on”: it is to wear down repetition by dint of repetition, turning and turning in those “dull stupid spells” when work is “at a standstill.”14 Since I have harkened to the imperative to go on, let me then begin by resuming.

12  Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, Vol. IV of The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 472. Hereafter WH. 13  Beckett to Barney Rosset, 11 February 1954, in Beckett, Letters II, 457. Note that he omits from the quote precisely what he goes on to describe: “I can’t go on.” 14  Beckett, Letters IV, 358 and 333.

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Patrick Magee as Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape, BBC television production directed by Donald McWhinnie, 1972

What could we say is the politics of this image? What is, if any, its ethical horizon? It is an image imbued with Beckett’s persistent preoccupations, ones he will carry forward from this 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape, through the next thirty years of his work, even as it resumes a set of thematics that emerged consistently from the earliest work on. Beckett grasped with precocious insight the possibilities and the ontological implications of new technologies even when, as here with the reel-to-reel tape recorder, he had hardly had the opportunity to study them. Krapp’s ugly, sweating, almost oozing head is displaced by the impassive machine with which it forms a striking diagonal. In the deep chiaroscuro that impels the image to the front of the screen, the spool turns and a voice emanates, not from the human mouth but from the machine. It is Krapp’s voice-print, preserved from the past, transformed into the object of his obsessive attention. Gradually, as the play ends, the bulk of the machine and its glowing red light will take up more and more of the image until the human head comes to seem almost redundant. Beckett stages here, I’d argue, the human suspended as a thing in relation to the things that constitute it in its world, things that include not only the device of the tape recorder but also the voice that emanates from it. Since what he presents is not, clearly, the subject that subtends what we normally understand as the political, ethical, or even legal spheres as they

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have been conceived since the Enlightenment, what is it that we are looking at and how could we even begin to speak of a politics of this thing? The claim that I will attempt to sketch here is that the ethical and political Subject, capital S, the subject as we have come to understand it as that of liberal democracy, is the formal subject, abstracted from all that conditions it, the Kantian Subject of Reason that is emancipated from all forms of heteronomy in order to become the autonomous Subject of Freedom. Its counterpart, the subject subjected to the passions—desire, fear, gratification—and to the forces of nature—hunger, power, appetite—is what Kant designates the pathological subject, the subject that suffers, the subject that undergoes (pathein, in Greek). This pathological subject is thus externally and internally driven not by reason but by forces it cannot control or by appetites that are peculiar to itself. Accordingly, it can never rise to the condition of formal indifference that permits identification with the universality and disinterest on which alone the ethical and the very possibility of the political as a sphere of public or common sense can be predicated. Indeed, caught up in its own materiality, it can never attain the level of representativeness that constitutes the subject as human Subject. Furthermore, this pathological subject—subject to gratification, desire, and need—is the antithesis of the subject of aesthetic judgment, whose disposition is to contemplate the work with regard to its form, not to the materials of which it is composed or the impulses that it might provoke. That subject, who judges as if from the perspective of everyone else, gives the condition of possibility for what Kant calls “public, or common sense,” without which there could be no political or ethical sphere.15 It is this pathological subject that Beckett stages, in the suffering, disintegrating, aging, and raging personages that sparsely populate his texts. I emphasize that he stages it in light of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s unfolding of the paradoxes that stem from the fact that, despite offering only representations to view, “the theatre is fundamentally pathological,” both in terms of what it presents and in terms of what it excites in the spectator.16 But where the theory of tragedy that Lacoue-Labarthe discusses, from Aristotle down to Rousseau and Schiller, concerns the passions of the 15  I have elaborated these arguments in David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). For Beckett’s anti-­ Kantian implications, see Chapter VI, “On Extorted Speech: Back to How It Is,” in Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 209–212. 16  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Ordinary Mimesis, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 57.

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hero, worthy of being the object of a pity and fear transmuted into catharsis, the figures that Beckett presents call neither for imitation nor identification. His is absolutely not an ethical theater, any more than it is a political one, even in the “alienated” mode of Brecht’s gestural or epic theater. Manifestly, his work does not plead for the representation or recognition of its personae; it is not an argument for the ethical treatment of aging beings or for a politics of welfare and healthcare; nor is it even a brief for the rendering of the experience of suffering and aging that reduces the human subject to a thing among the things of its world. Experience, and any experiential basis for the ethical or political, is—in a very different way—as far from his work as it is from Kant’s Second Critique. Emilie Morin opens the first chapter of Beckett’s Political Imagination with a cautionary remark from a letter he wrote in 1960, not so long after he had written Krapp, with its celebrated détournement of an intense experience of his own: “the material of experience is not the material of expression and I think the distress you feel, as a writer, comes from a tendency on your part to assimilate the two.”17 Efforts to delineate Beckett’s politics suffer—and strangely Morin is no exception, given that her book proceeds to trace the correspondences between Beckett’s life and his writings— from the magnetism of relating experiences. Yet, as Beckett here warns, it is not as experience that any possible experience enters into expression: experience taken up into expression—as the rest of the letter implies— enters into “an order or disorder of a different nature” and is accordingly transformed into an element within a logic whose import is formal, whether read politically or ethically. It is in the formal procedures and their rigorous logic, not in any contingent eventuality in Beckett’s life or acts, humanly fascinating as they may be, that we must look for the political/ ethical implications of his oeuvre.18 Likewise, we should not seek in what the writer expresses, however Beckett works that term here and elsewhere, any propositions about the world or, in particular, of the subject. Beckett’s address to expression is always hedged both with the certainty of the failure to express and with the lack of a subject whose interiority might be the matter of 17  Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III: 1957–65, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 377. 18  For a study that is rigorous in its reading of the political implications of Beckett’s work from the form rather than the expression of experiences, see James McNaughton, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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expression—the “nothing to express” of his famous, perhaps infamous, formulation in “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”: “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.”19 It was, after all, and precisely in relation to the question of a “spiritual expression” of the political nation-­ people, that Beckett took his distance from his friend Thomas MacGreevy over the significance of Jack B. Yeats’s paintings.20 Politics is above all the domain of expression and of representation, each undergirded alike by the notion of an integral voice that gives utterance (outerance) to an inward essence, whether that essence be conceived as class interest or national or ethnic identity. For an expressive theory of politics, as indeed for critical notions of the development of the capacity to express oneself (e.g., poetic voice), voice is a key concept-metaphor. To participate in the political sphere is to have a voice, a voice one gains by entering into one’s majority or maturity—what Kant calls, in a German word that happily conjoins maturation and the capacity to utter, Mündigkeit.21 In this sense voice is, one might say, the mature expression of the inner essence of the experienced subject. But neither what he experienced nor what he expresses gives us a way into the political and ethical implications of Beckett’s forms. This may be because another voice cuts across this personal and individuated conception of voice that belongs to the ideal subject of expression and that subtends both the political subject (aggregated as the “voice of the people”) and the post-Romantic authorial subject that offers the image of autonomy and self-development. As Kant puts it in the Second Critique, this other voice is the abstract voice of “the moral law within us” that in its universality takes no account of the properties that individuate the pathological subject that is the constitutive other of the subject of Reason and Freedom.22 The personality (or personhood) of the human is defined by its “freedom and independence from the mechanism of the whole of nature” (74), and is thus divided from that aspect of the 19  Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1965), 103. Hereafter PTD. 20  Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing, 30–35. 21  Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 47, n. 2. 22  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122.

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human—“our pathologically determinable self” (64)—that remains subject to the natural laws of the “sensible world” (74). The moral law that conforms to the idea of the human in its freedom and autonomy can have no regard to feeling as the basis for an ethical disposition, given that feelings are always subjective and “personal.” Accordingly, the “heavenly voice” of the moral law, or the “voice of reason […] audible even to the most common human beings” (32), is one whose mode is always imperative: “the law of morality commands” (33, original emphasis). This imperative is, as Kant had already argued in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), categorical: its principle is grounded not in ulterior ends, but in a regard for the human subject as both autonomous and rational.23 This impersonal and imperative voice both exists “within us” and, as the impersonal command of a universal reason, comes from outside us and is heard as if it were “ominilateral.”24 As I have argued elsewhere, following Jacques Lacan’s essay “Kant avec Sade,” it appears to the subject as a thing, as if a kind of verbal hallucination, in that odd inner-outer space of its being in the world.25 The question of expression thus remains for the artist haunted by a peculiar yet corresponding categorical imperative, the obligation to express, the injunction to go on in the face of exhaustion of means and of will. As The Unnamable so insistently dramatizes, it comes at once from within and from nowhere, surrounding the speaker whose own internal voice it seems to be. “On!” may be the essential Beckettian categorical imperative, a vocable that percolates through the work from what is perhaps its most celebrated instance, the Unnamable’s “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” to Worstward Ho’s “nohow on.” If “on” is the ultimate utterance of Beckett’s “voice of the moral law,” a distillation of the “obligation to express,” it is mysteriously heteronomous, offering no guarantee either of the integrity or the autonomy of the subject that hears rather than utters it: “It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and 23  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Laura Dennis (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 76. 24  This useful term, omnilateral, I borrow from Paola Romero, Kant and Political Willing, PhD thesis for the Department of Government of the London School of Economics, 2019: https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4052/1/Romero__Kant-political-willing.pdf (accessed 9 November 2022). 25  Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 209–210.

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must speak, that is all I know ….”26 The voice that appears to utter comes from nowhere and from nobody, only the “Someone said” that opens Texts for Nothing or the impersonal “Be said on” of Worstward Ho. It is a voice not of some interiority that expresses itself, a movement from inner integrity to outward communication, but a voice that seems to confound inner and outer, much as Krapp’s tape-recorded voice, the supposedly intimate confessions of an earlier self, resonates in the ear of the old man, estranged and scarcely recognized. As the Unnamable apprehends it, this categorical imperative is—like its Kantian counterpart—violent, even torturing in its insistence. Beckett’s recurrent staging of scenes of torture, from How It Is to What Where, always insists on this violent subjection to and extortion of the voice. The prototype of this commanding voice that utters out of nowhere may lie in the couple Pozzo-Lucky, announced from off-stage in Act I by that single syllable: POZZO: (off). On! (Crack of whip. Pozzo appears. They cross the stage. Lucky passes before Vladimir and Estragon and exit[…].) (WG, 21)

It is also the last we hear of them in Act II: They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. (He jerks the rope.) On! Exeunt Lucky and Pozzo.27

Already, the imperative “on!” is associated with vanishing, fading, going “off.” This is as much the fate of the Master or the Subject as it is of the Serf or Object that Pozzo and Lucky have often seemed to represent, bound as they are to one another: they move together if they move at all. This categorical syllable “On!” determines both motion and voice, appearance and utterance, turning on and turning off. It retains its prepositional force precisely in the theatrical sense of going or being “on,” coming on stage, appearing on stage, what Jean-Luc Nancy has called, in his dialogues with Lacoue-Labarthe, “coming into presence (venue en

26  Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1959). Hereafter U. 27  Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 89. Hereafter WG.

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présence).”28 The “figure” who comes on stage in no way assures the presence of a subject who, as character or persona, is represented in the form of the utterances to which it gives voice. On the contrary, as Nancy clarifies, this figure is not a ‘subject of representation’, but rather an existent defined by a certain being-outside-oneself, by participation in, or by a sharing of, the performance as such, that is to say, of that which places something, in general, outside of itself—identical and different, or perhaps, neither simply identical, nor simply different. What rips the thing from the immanence of being and exposes it in appearance.29 (SD, 32; my emphasis)

This arrival of the figure “on stage” that “exposes it in appearance” is what it is to be “on.” It is to occupy what Nancy later calls “un ‘lieu’ (d’énonciation)” [a ‘place’ (of utterance)] rather than “un personage de roman (disons par commodité ‘une personne’) [a character in a novel (let’s say, for convenience sake, ‘a person’)]” (SD, 71). To be on partakes, then, of a theater—and, one may add, of a prose that shares the properties of Beckett’s theater in its breathless utterances and staging of figures—that is “essentiellement étranger à l’ordre de la ‘présence’ personnelle [essentially foreign to the order of personal ‘presence’]” (SD, 72). It refuses the terms of an interiority from which expressive utterance might emanate at the same time as it externalizes, in both the prose work and the drama, the inner voice that might have been considered the voice of conscience (Eh Joe!) or of the “judicial sentences” of the unsilenceable “prosecutor within”30 that dictates to the speakers of both Texts for Nothing and How It Is. This figure that goes on and off the stage seems closely associated with the images that flash on and off in the darkness and mud of How It Is, not so much memories as “rags of light in the light” (HII, 23): the image 28  Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Scène. Suivi de Dialogue sur la dialogue (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2013), p., 59. Hereafter SD. 29  My translation: “n’est pas un ‘sujet de la représentation,’ mais bien plutôt un existant definé par un certain être-hors-de-soi, par une participation à, ou par un partage de, la manifestation comme telle, c’est-à-dire de ce qui met quelque chose, en général, hors de soi— identique et différente, ou bien, ni simplement identique, ni simplement différente […]. Ce qui arrache la chose à l’immanence de l’être et l’expose dans le paraître.” English cannot capture either the double meaning of représentation as both representation and theatrical performance or that of manifestation as both event or performance and appearance or outward sign of something that “manifests.” Further translations from this text are my own. 30  Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 82.

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appears as if a “scene” or, indeed, a “still,” and then fades: “blue and white of sky a moment still April morning in the mud it’s over it’s done I’ve had the image the scene is empty” (HII, 34). Likewise in Worstward Ho, “in the dim void bit by bit” figures appear, the old man and the child, seen or “misseen” and then fade or, as the “narrator” revises, suddenly go on and off: First back turned the shade astand. In the dim void see first back turned the shade astand. Still. […] They fade. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade? No. Sudden go. Sudden back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. (WH, 473)

This occultating movement, the fading in and out, or the snapping on and off, of figure or image, which Beckett equally explored in the “coming and going” of the personae of such plays as Come and Go, Footfalls, and What Where (especially in its German television rendering), plays what Nancy explicitly considers “the whole question in Beckett [toute la question de Beckett],” that is, “the suspension between the spectacular and effacement [le suspens entre spectaculaire et effacement]”: “to reopen a scene, or else to open a new scene, assumes the reopening or opening of the space of ontological figurality [rouvrir une scène, ou bien ouvrir une nouvelle scène, suppose de rouvrir ou d’ouvrir l’espace d’une figuralité ontologique” (SD, 34). If so, it is an on-tology in which the being fades in and out, on and off, always as a figure in or on a space, rather than as a subject whose interior finds expression in its figures or representations. At the same time, “on” is the vestigial and caustic residue of the third ethical duty that Kant assigns the rational being in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, that is, the injunction “to develop, progress or improve”31—or, as Beckett will have it in Worstward Ho, “Somehow on. Anyhow on” (WH, 477). “On,” this preposition turned into imperative verb, describes the transition from being in place to end-directed motion, even if a kind of motion in place that afflicts Beckett’s characters increasingly—“plod[ding] on” in “eternal immobility,” as Alain Badiou puts it.32 “On” is an imperative with an indeterminate but necessary end or telos,  Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 82.  Alain Badiou, On Beckett, trans. Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2004), 112. 31 32

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necessarily unattainable, an “on” canceled almost at once by “nohow on” (WH, 471), as if the syllable on could only invoke its reflexive negation, no. No-on signals the fundamental chiasmus of being—the etymological on of his ontology—as it moves and appears (goes on) in Beckett’s work, even as it spells out the Nietzschean noon (or midnight) in which what appears is gone in the instant of its appearance.33 Beckett seems haunted by this ineluctable, impossible, and contradictory pair of imperatives that “no-on” condenses: that of ending, falling silent, hearing nothing, and that of going on, nohow on. Their impossible demands constitute the secret and the motor of his form, synthesizing the mysterious obligation to go on with the desire and the need to end, achieve homeostasis, rest. “The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is” as the Unnamable says, “what enables the discourse to continue” [U, 301–2]. The synthesis produces a further imperative, that of resuming, beginning again, for to end yet again. As Molloy has it, “at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?”34 Beckett’s response is perhaps his final prose text, Stirrings Still. The antithetical word, “on,” both preposition and imperative verb, signifying at once emplacement and the injunction to continue or progress, is matched by another, “still”—adjective, adverb, and verb—that likewise means at once to rest in place and to continue. The title says it all: So on till stayed when to his ears from deep within oh how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then. Rest then before again from not long to so long that perhaps never again and then again from faint from deep within oh how and here that missing word again it were to end where never till then. In any case whatever it might be to end and so on was he not already as he stood there all bowed down to his ears faint from

33  Noon, as Derrida has remarked, “n’est pas un lieu, il n’a pas lieu. Et ce n’est pas un moment, par cela même, seulement une limite aussitôt disparaissante. Et puis ça revient tous les jours, toujours, chaque jour, à chaque tour d’anneau. Toujours avant-midi, après-midi. See Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1984), 59. [“But the noon of life is not a place and it does not take place. For that very reason, it is not a moment but only an instantly vanishing limit. What is more, it returns every day, always, each day, with every turn of the annulus. Always before noon, after noon.” See Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. Avital Ronell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 14. 34  Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 36.

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deep within again and again oh how something and so on was he not so far as he could see already there where never till then?35

So on. The injunction to go on—so on—becomes the mere etcetera of contentless repetition, “and so on.” Beckett’s empty categorical imperatives—end, on—reduce the Kantian ethical command of reason, or of universal humanity, to the mere formality that—abstracted from any experience—it already was. The beautifully contradictory conjunction “on back” (WH, 475) condenses that pure formality into the most minimal “midget grammar” (HII, 84).36 Likewise, this command that emanates from nowhere, apparently from within the skull and yet from outside or beyond the subject that harkens, takes the form of a voice, “ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured in the mud” (HII, 7), that enjoins the subject who, ratiocinate as it will, can never identify its source (U, 393). It is not “expression,” lacking any place from which to express, any subject to express, and so takes the form of a psychotic verbal hallucination (one recalls the name of Murphy’s ataraxic psychotic, Mr End-on). The voice that issues these categorical if contradictory imperatives is itself a thing, and a thing for the subject, its extimate inner thing. As such, it divides the hearing-speaking subject into: 1) an interior voice and 2) the subject itself as the object of that voice of which it is also the listening subject. Interiority becomes depthless, resounding surface, a noon-thin “tympanum” in the Unnamable’s precise term: […]I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, 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 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, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either[…]. (U, 386)

The predicament of Kant’s subject divided between its inner formal freedom and its outward being in the “sensible world” is here reduced to 35  Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still in Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, Vol. IV of The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006). 36  On Beckett’s reduced grammatical forms, see further Ann Banfield, “Beckett’s Tattered Syntax,” Representations 84 (Autumn 2003): 6–29.

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breathless panic. Meanwhile, the subject, trapped by this thing it hears, becomes its victim, a thing that undergoes in pure heteronomy the suffering that thing inflicts. To this “issueless predicament,” and from le parti pris des choses, Beckett reduces the Kantian categorical imperative. Increasingly, this disembodied voice—descended perhaps from Lucky’s manic and terrifying cacophony—appears detached from the other constituents of the drama—gesture, light, human figure, action (if any). It emanates, finally, from nowhere or from some hallucinatory location or image, the “round of light” of What Where or the disembodied mouth of Not I. It is at once instigator and witness of the pain it induces in the human things it reifies, whether the “agenbite of inwit” of Eh Joe, or the whiplash of Rough for Radio II, or the “works” commanded by the voice of Bam in What Where. The interrogating-commanding voice is what the subject suffers, returning the subject-object of the ethical law to the status of the pathological subject and the voice to its percept or “thing.” On it goes, on and on. In all of Beckett’s reflections on aesthetics, whether on writing or painting, it is never a question of pleasure or of beauty. The science of pleasure and pain is reduced to a science of suffering, the Proustian “suffering of being” that is, in a precise parodic riposte to Kant, “the free play of every faculty” (PTD, 20). This reduction of aesthetic experience to a strictly pathological condition rips apart the very terms on which Kant, in the Critique of Judgement, predicated the possibility of the common or public sense that must ground any conception of the political and in which Schiller would locate the ideal identification of the Subject—“the archetype of a human being”—with the State that is its “objective and, as it were, canonical form.”37 Without the pleasurable experience of the beautiful that permits, for Kant and for Schiller, the free play of the faculties in which the purely representing and representative subject is imagined, the non-coercive accord of subjects in their shared but formal universality is unimaginable. By the same token, Beckett’s reduction of aesthetic “formal finality” or “finality apart from an end [Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck]”38 to an injunction ever to end yet again takes the pure formality of the Kantian 37  Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 17. 38  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 69, and, for the German, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Werkausgabe Band X, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 143.

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universal-representative subject at its word, only to evacuate it of any capacity to ground a republican “aesthetic regime” in which every voice might have its place. The subtraction of beauty and pleasure from the aesthetic sphere in the name of the pathological subject installs a dehiscence at the very heart of that sphere, disordering any claim it might make to furnish the condition of possibility of political community. The bodiless voice that imprints Beckett’s plays from Krapp on is not the guarantor of the fullness of the subject in its Mündigkeit, finding authentic expression of its inner essence in its utterance, but the manifestation of the lacuna inscribed by the “suffering of being” in the state-­ oriented formation of an ethical-political subject through aesthetic culture. Emanating from a mouth that is a wound, or from a nameless placeless inner exterior, Beckett’s voices are the mark of a gap or tear in the fabric of subjecthood itself. Heard as a categorical imperative, this voice nonetheless does not interpellate its auditor as ethical Subject; rather, it insists on bringing the subject face to face with its own thingliness, a thing for the thing that is this unowned voice buzzing insistently in the ear, “going on and on.” Nor is this thing the noumenal “thing in itself,” the substrate of what appears to us as in the form of a phenomenon. In Beckett, both subject and voice are no more than residual traces, fading, unraveling, persisting, going on, and in going on leaving their mark or vestige. They are, perhaps, rather the Hegelian thing, the thing casually produced as the remainder of a totalizing subsumption that seeks to incorporate the world in a spiritual devouring whose material correlative is the commodification-­ reification of everything that is.39 They present the excess of the thing over representation and correspond to the derelict and ruined creatures that populate Beckett’s works, persisting in and beyond their own redundancy to the political and ethical form of humanity. They are what Beckett envisaged in Saint-Lô in 1946 and realized gradually in his work: a “conception of humanity in ruins.”40 They track a progression of unfreedom and destruction that has been ongoing ever since and that, in the name of “humanity,” has rendered humans into things—tortured, incarcerated, redundant, surplus, and disposable. In that, they offer us the pitilessly 39  On this Hegelian thing, the detritus of the concrete particular that is appropriated as an object for consciousness, see David Lloyd, “The Racial Thing: On Appropriation, Blackness, and Thingliness,” Texte zur Kunst 117 (March 2020): 75–96. 40  Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: Calder 1990), 27.

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negative image of the place and the thing from “which our condition is to be thought”—if at all—once again.41 To follow Beckett in this will demand, not that we seek to redeem these ruins of humanity by restoring them to the very conception of personhood that constituted them in the first place, but rather that we go on, in Beckett’s track, obliged, in the words of Seamus Deane, to “awaken to the distinctions that create the naked and the dead […] the people born below or who fall below the horizon of the law, those who are classified as non-human, less than human and who are in any sense rendered invisible in the eyes of a purblind system of laws.”42 So on.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Beckett: l’increvable désir. Paris: Pluriel, 2011. ———. On Beckett. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2004. Banfield, Ann. “Beckett’s Tattered Syntax,” Representations 84 (Autumn 2003): 6–29. Beckett, Samuel. “The Capital of the Ruins,” in As The Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose, 17–28. London: Calder, 1990. ———. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984a. ———. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Edited by Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984b. ———. How It Is. London: Calder and Boyars, 1964. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–56. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III: 1957–65. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966–1989. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder and Boyars, 1959. ———. Nouvelles et Textes pour rien, avec 6 illustrations d’Avigdor Arikha. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1958. ———. Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, Vol. IV of The Grove Centenary Edition. Edited by Paul Auster. New York: Grove Press, 2006.  Ibid., 28.  Seamus Deane, “Republics That Were and Might Be,” Field Day Review 11 (2015): 149.

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———. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder, 1965. ———. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. Deane, Seamus. “Republics That Were and Might Be,” Field Day Review 11 (2015): 136–149. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Exhausted,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 152–174. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Translated by Avital Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. ———. Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1984. Kant, Immanuel, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals. Translation by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. ———. Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. ———. Critique of Practical Reason. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by Laura Dennis. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005. ———. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Werkausgabe Band X. Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Ordinary Mimesis. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Lloyd, David. Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. ———. “Breath Crystals: A Poetics of Breath in Beckett, Celan, and Arikha.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 30, no.2 (2018): 179–195. ———. Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. “The Racial Thing: On Appropriation, Blackness, and Thingliness”. Texte zur Kunst 117 (March 2020): 75–96. ———. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2019. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Scène. Suivi de Dialogue sur la dialogue. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2013. Romero, Paola. Kant and Political Willing. PhD thesis for the Department of Government of the London School of Economics, 2019, https://etheses.lse. ac.uk/4052/1/Romero__Kant-­political-­willing.pdf (accessed 2 August 2021). Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters. Edited and translated by Elizabeth M.  Wilkinson and L.A.  Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

How to Become a Thing: Overcoming Mourning in Ill Seen Ill Said Cosmin Toma

Of the countless guises assumed by the word on in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, undoubtedly the most well known occurs at the tail-end of The Unnamable: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”1 Paradigmatic in its monosyllabic stubbornness, it is also a commandment that bespeaks submission to an imperative, as though the will to go on emanated from without no less than from within, bordering on coercion. Such paradoxes are the very stuff Beckett’s poetics is made of, as Bruno Clément intuited in L’Œuvre sans qualités,2 which cogently argues that epanorthosis, or the process of second-guessing and self-correcting as one goes on, is the ultimate Beckettian trope, the technical apparatus that animates his body 1 2

 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 407.  Bruno Clément, L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

C. Toma (*) Department of French, Champlain College – Saint-Lambert, Saint-Lambert, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_3

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of work in its entirety. Yet it is worth recalling that Beckett himself wrote (at least) two distinct versions of the final novel in his so-called trilogy: the first in French, as L’Innommable; the second in English, as The Unnamable. And in the “original” version, the ending reads as follows: “il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.”3 A few preliminary remarks: (1) the impossibility of faithfully rendering “il faut” (one must/it lacks, with its homophonic echoes of faux) led the author-translator to settle for the second person in English (“you must”), partly muting the impersonal neutrality whence the French version emerges (“il faut” implies that something, a vague entity if at all, is what beckons here4); (2) metrically speaking, the English version has more swing to it, with one beat per word, whereas the French version sounds almost breathlessly uttered, presaging Jean Martin’s rendition of the Voice in the 1961 radio play Cascando; (3) the initial recourse to “continuer,” which Beckett was presumably happy to abandon in English (indeed, he could have opted for the more literal “you must continue”), betokens a different etymological lineage, as continuo in Latin means to hold together and thus to give something shape, to ensure that it doesn’t fall apart (hence the doublet contenir, “to contain,” incidentally recalling the (basso) continuo in music), whereas to “go on” also implies idle talk. In other words, there is a sense in which the speaker’s task is not quite the same from one language to the next: while for The Unnamable, merely marking another verbal beat is enough (then another, and another, and so on, ad nauseam), L’Innommable is more of an Atlas-like figure, the lynchpin without which the work collapses under its own weight. Insofar as such decisions are not the writer’s doing alone—after all, Beckett had no choice but to reckon with the French and English languages’ respective rules—one does not “go on” in quite the same manner across idioms, musically no less than semantically. Yet go on one must, for as long as there is life in a living being—be it indistinguishable from the never-ending business of dying—it will go on, willingly or unwillingly, even when it thinks it cannot. At the most minimal level—“the meremost minimum,”5 per Worstward Ho—this is indeed the “lesson” or “moral” of Beckett’s work, even as it remains a deeply unsatisfactory, even  Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 2004), 211.  On this explicit, see Michael Krimper’s analysis in “Beckett Ongoing and the Novel,” New Literary History 51, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 71. 5  Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nohow On (London: John Calder, 1989). 3 4

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anticlimactic one. This is why the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature committee’s contention that Beckett, despite his “negativism,” shows us how “modern man acquires its elevation” through “destitution,” or Alain Badiou’s belief in an ultimately triumphant, quasi vitalist Beckett,6 will always tell but one side of the story. Nor are there, as is occasionally presumed, but two sides at play here, as though the glass were either half empty or half full. As I have argued elsewhere, what characterizes the movement of Beckett’s writing is its attunement to what Maurice Blanchot called the neuter (le neutre), which is to say: ne uter, neither (nor). We are not merely lurching between “I can’t go on” and “I’ll go on,” but also between “je ne peux pas continuer” and “je vais continuer,” as well as between “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” and “je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer,” among other dilemmas. What’s more, this is no mere pendulum-like oscillation, from A to B and back, as though the enigma’s point of equilibrium could be found halfway between the two propositions (and the two languages), since it gestures toward something else entirely, which escapes the pendulum’s trajectory altogether. Indeed, we may settle for neither, for to “go on” also means this: neither term suffices—neither “ongoing” nor “nongoing,” so to speak— and that is precisely why it goes on and on. That it goes on by undermining its own ostensible ongoing: this much is clear, or as clear as such a seemingly self-defeating dance can be. But what goes on, how it goes on, and toward what—if anything at all, given how awkward it is to speak of a τέλος in Beckett’s oeuvre—are considerably more difficult questions. One may in fact argue that his writing process consisted in working through these undecidables, addressing them to the utmost of his ability without ever losing sight of the impossibility of offering an exhaustive solution. The “truest” or most accurate answer thus necessarily resembles Clov’s notorious observation in Endgame, “Something is taking its course,”7 which is, at best, a placeholder of a statement. * * *

6   See Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. and trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003). 7  Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Act Without Words (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 13 and 32.

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For the purposes of this chapter, the “what” I will be attending to is a late work: Ill Seen Ill Said, Beckett’s self-translation of Mal vu mal dit, which opens with an emblematic and very literal instance of “going on”: From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star’s revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one. Her old deal spindlebacked kitchen chair. It emerges from out the last rays and sinking ever brighter is engulfed in its turn. On.8

“On” is Beckett’s own translation of “Encore” (“Again”), once again betraying his manifest predilection for this multifaceted monosyllable in English. Yet no less notable here is the quasi-fugal principle of repetition that propels the paragraph ever forward despite its conspicuous pauses: “From where she lies,” “she sees Venus rise,” “when the skies are clear,” “her old […] chair” are indeed movable parts that are reiterated and modulated in such a way as to emphasize that the writing is not standing still. Rather, it is stirring still, to echo the fecund title of another of Beckett’s late prose texts, which also has much to teach us about the topic at hand. But why go on at all? Mysterious though the opening tableau might seem, we are soon made to surmise, as we read Ill Seen Ill Said, that the narrator is first and foremost a mourner who is struggling to overcome the death of a loved one. Unlike The Unnamable, which must go on simply because it must, because the neuter has decreed it, the voice tasked with adumbrating the unspoken tragedy that lies at the heart of Ill Seen Ill Said is also a melancholy, even lachrymose one. The yarn it spins can therefore be understood as a series of attempts to move on after the passing of another whom the narrator holds dear. Moreover, since the latter is prone to sudden fits of anger that lay bare his powerlessness—as was already the case in From an Abandoned Work, for example—Ill Seen Ill Said is also a study in self-control, even in stoicism, whose tenets the narrative both warps and enacts by way of objectification, as if to say: to go on, one must free oneself of human emotions; one must become a thing. * * *

8

 Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, in Nohow On, 67. Hereafter IS.

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As indicated by its very title, the passive action that lays the groundwork for Ill Seen Ill Said, spurring the narrator to go on, appears to be the sense of sight (mere sight, one is tempted to call it, so deceptively banal is Beckett’s premise). Indeed, the eye, “having no need of light to see” (IS, 58), can be said to have a mind of its own, whether it be open or closed: it perceives things extant and inextant, visible and invisible, palpable and impalpable, dead and undead, whereupon each in turn must be said (or rather: missaid). Something lies in abeyance here, waiting to be seen, yet it concomitantly comes about through writing, which is an act of “blindsight,”9 to quote the American poet Rosmarie Waldrop. Something is blindly seen through the eye, then written down just as blindly. And this wraithlike “something”—which is neither quite human nor nonhuman, reminding us that the thing is etymologically and ontologically ambiguous, denoting an object that is up for debate—marks the neutral space in which the text unfurls. Ill Seen Ill Said is the English name of the vaguely humanoid thing whose echoing voice its readers are tasked with deciphering and ventriloquizing. It speaks as we read it, which is also to say that it speaks through us. It delivers its lines to us that we may sound them, either mutely or out loud. Not only does it rearrange our skull into a stage, it also turns our eyes into projectors and our ears into loudspeakers, as though the human body were part and parcel of its toolset—put simply, it cannot go on without us. And while this is true of every text, Beckett’s writings are doubly keen on swapping the agency we conventionally ascribe to the human subject for the object’s purported passivity, as though to “go on” meant to neuter oneself, to be slowly but surely transformed into a thing, much like the one we happen to be reading. Indeed, each piece of the novella’s implicit mise en scène—from the narrator to the old lady to the set props10— is given over to this uncanny movement whereby they neutralize and fade into one another. By the same disconcerting token, saying and missaying are not fundamentally at odds with each other on this most neutral of textual terrains. Every single one of Ill Seen Ill Said’s utterances hits the mark by falling ever short of it, as a paradoxical matter of course, because language is symptomatic of an insuperable illness and perhaps that illness itself. This is  Rosmarie Waldrop, Blindsight (New York: New Directions, 2003).  Everyday objects described in minute detail are a staple of Beckett’s oeuvre, and Ill Seen Ill Said is no exception. See, for instance, the fragment on the buttonhook (IS, 65–66). 9

10

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a theme shared by most of Beckett’s mature works, so it is hardly surprising to see it deployed here anew. What is striking about Ill Seen Ill Said, however, is its willingness to spatially, even architecturally, circumscribe the source of this “evil.” In a gesture that recalls the ostensibly remote genre of horror fiction, the evil is said to spawn from within the cabin. Yet this is a verbal construct above all, not only because the cabin dwells within the text’s confines but also because the blight it begets is inseparable from a specific idiom. While the English word cabin is itself borrowed from the French cabane—whose diminutive, cabanon, with its dormant non (no), Beckett uses in the original version—translating the word mal is a less straightforward affair. Once ferried over into English, mal is split into at least three different words: ill, evil, and wrong. It cannot but be translated ill (le mal se traduit mal, so to speak). Our gaze, much like that of Ill Seen Ill Said’s narrator, is thus directed toward the malediction’s focal point. I say “malediction” or malédiction because that is precisely what mal dit implies: a verbal curse, doom, or damnation effected through speech. And I say “focal point” because this curse stems from the cabin’s foyer, which stands for the hearth—home as such, the comforts of the fireside—no less than for the illness’s source, in the medical, etiological sense of the term. The mal—the evil, illness, wrongness, or harm—therefore arises from the element of fire (focus), which clouds things even as it makes them visible, and which heals by burning the infected body to ash. Moreover, the recurrent question “what is the wrong word?” or, as Beckett usually puts it, “what the wrong word?” is itself a translation of “comment mal dire?,” which one may also render as “how say ill?,” “how say evil?,” even “how cast a curse?” (“comment maudire?,” which happens to be homophonous with “comment mot dire?,” that is, “how say a word/words?”). If language truly is the house of being, as Martin Heidegger once claimed, here it is host to the very core of corruption and decay, especially given Beckett’s subtle elision of ontology (“what the wrong word?” instead of “what is the wrong word?”). And its pestilence spreads ever outwards, poisoning and hence shaping literary space in the process. This is the tainted logic at play in Ill Seen Ill Said, one that harks back to the Greek χώρα: that mythical, primeval denomination of space which doubles as “a hybrid, bastard, or even corrupted reasoning,”11 to quote 11  Jacques Derrida, Khōra, trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 90.

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Jacques Derrida’s essay on Plato’s Timaeus. And much like χώρα itself, the ghost that haunts the tale is also its receptacle or genius loci. Not only does it spook the λόγος that seeks to speak it, it is itself a spooked λόγος, forever hovering between death and undeath. In such a textual topology, whether something lives or dies, is or is not, no longer matters, for the coming and going of the neuter takes over. It takes turns, between going and “nongoing,” bearing witness to a secret that is as nameless and fathomless as its protagonist, a secret reinforced by the narrator’s constant—and archaic, in English if not in French—use of the verb “to occult,” derived from the Latin occulto, meaning “to hide, to keep secret.” Indeed, as in so many of Beckett’s late works, the occult permeates Ill Seen Ill Said’s architecture, an oblique reminder of his lifelong fascination with the Romantic aesthetic, which gestures toward hauntology. * * * One of the most troubling consequences of this spatial configuration is how it contaminates the narrator’s—to say nothing of the author’s— attempts at topological consistency, thwarting his ability to go on in the most literal, physical sense. As ever in Beckett’s oeuvre, mathematics is necessary to delineate the work’s imaginary geometry, but it fails just as necessarily, by default. Things are fated to be off kilter, out of focus. As soon as it is introduced, the cabin is said to be “[a]t the inexistent centre of a formless place” (IS, 58), radicalizing Blaise Pascal’s definition of nature as “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”12 Yet the narrator’s observation is too approximate—that is to say, if we subscribe to the terms of this ailing, decaying language, too exact—to withstand the pull of the neuter, which cannot settle for an exhaustive maxim. As a result, the place is then described as “[r]ather more circular than otherwise finally. Flat to be sure. To cross it in a straight line takes her from five to ten minutes” (IS, 58). Neither form nor formlessness is a satisfactory response to the work’s “occult” secret, which is why Beckett’s artistry consists in giving the “partition” (IS, 92)—a word that can also mean a musical score in French—rhythm, even if this means the diameter of the outer circle that surrounds the cabin must vary from language to language. Although in French it is said to measure a thousand  Blaise Pascal, Pensées. My translation.

12

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meters (“Mille mètres”13), Beckett was manifestly dissatisfied with the five, tin-eared syllables a literal English translation would have yielded, rendering them as a colloquial imperative instead: “Say one furlong” (IS, 59)— about a fifth of the original estimate. It is thus tempting to echo How It Is’s narrator and exclaim “no matter which no matter which it is irrelevant”14—as long as the numbers sing, of course, since song is the best we can do as we go on. It is also worth recalling here that le nombre (the number) is an old synonym for “poetry” in French, one that features prominently in Stéphane Mallarmé’s work, which is to say that the criteria set forth to determine what it means to go on, one counted step at a time, are also of a poetic nature. Much like Mallarmé, Beckett is preternaturally aware that (ra) conter and compter (to tell a tale/recount and to count) are etymological twins, equally (ill) suited to passing the time and bearing the unbearable. In other words, his understanding of the “figure” is simultaneously aesthetic, mathematical, and geometrical, as evidenced by recurrent allusions to “the twelve”—a mysterious host that is as spectral as the haunting protagonist of Ill Seen Ill Said herself. The figure twelve, conjured up “come what may” and meant “to furnish the horizon’s narrow round” (IS, 60), suggests both a dial and the text’s own vaguely circular expanse (in addition to its other, Christian connotations, which are copiously scattered throughout). Indeed, the figure in question is simultaneously singular (the twelve) and plural (the twelve): the set itself and its components, much like Beckettian “man” himself, whose body is made up of fragmented parts. The dial is thus said to consist of a “hand”—a deliberately ambiguous, anthropomorphic word in English—that “advances by fits and starts” (IS, 86), a setup both cyclical and unpredictable, one representative of the clock-like yet spasmodic nature of bodily movement in Beckett’s work, stressing the spatial discontinuity of what it means to go on, all the more so when one recalls that Ill Seen Ill Said consists of sixty-one paragraphs, as though to textually embody the sixty minutes of a clock while recursively setting them in motion again, as the +1 suggests. Time is stirring still. * * *

 Samuel Beckett, Mal vu mal dit (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 11.  Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 119.

13 14

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Moreover, this configuration is also one of innumerably many red herrings aimed at hindering symbolic readings while simultaneously inviting them (“No symbols where none intended,”15 of course). On the one hand, it is tempting to identify the dial with the environs’ predominantly circular, disc-like shape. On the other hand, their vague resemblance or correspondence (in the Baudelairean sense) solves nothing. Indeed, what does it tell us? That time is space and space time? That the human figure is caught up in an irrational mechanism that lies beyond its control—a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man?16 Formulated with such derision, these metaphysical statements lose something of their allegorical luster, much like the all too overt comparison between the earthly globe and the eye, which might as well be a cliché. Yet these seemingly trivial, almost compulsive correspondences are nonetheless meant to meet the need for a rapprochement between a given thing and another—between the organic and the inorganic in particular—which underlies the work of mourning that is being undertaken here, wherein all is given over to “confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing” (IS, 67). Such are the text’s meager attempts at making sense of it all as it goes on, which are also attempts at warding off the evil (mal) that suffuses its landscape, an evil one may call, after Mallarmé, “the demon of analogy.”17 I speak of “evil,” in English, but in this space where things are invariably ill said, we ought to question the word’s demonic overtones or at the very least prefer the Ancient Greek demon to its later, Christian reinterpretation. After all, analogy is both a grounding condition of language (and thus of literature) and what gets in the way of verbal “well-being” in Ill Seen Ill Said. While analogy allows the text to go on by drawing connections between disparate “[t]hings and imaginings,” these are never “well seen well said,” unless we view them from the sole perspective of Beckett’s writerly art. They are ill said because words hamper intentionality, regardless of the precautions taken by the narrator, who seeks to  Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 254.  One may also point to Beckett’s fascination with Occasionalism, especially Arnold Geulincx’s use of a clock analogy to describe the appearance of mind–body interaction, but also the later Leibnizian view of a “clockwork universe.” Furthermore, we know that Beckett, via Georges Duthuit, would have been familiar with André Masson’s parody of the Vitruvian Man as it appears on the cover of the first issue of Acéphale. 17  Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Démon de l’analogie,” in Œuvres complètes, t. I, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 416–18. 15 16

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account for vision with as much linguistic accuracy as he can muster. Words are unable to signify themselves qua themselves, in the Cratylic sense, which is to say that there is no such thing as a literal absolute, to mimic Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.18 One may well intend to keep symbols at bay, but it is always merely that: an intention, as symbolism invariably returns through the backdoor. And because of this failure to utter the other or the thing-in-itself, language comes undone as it goes on and on and on, by analogizing and allegorizing and metonymizing, ever in vain. The demon of analogy is thus a key feature of the verbality—and verbosity—of our so-called human condition, allowing us to “go on” in the figurative sense, yet it is also the source of all “dehumanization,” understood here as the becoming-nonhuman of the “human.” It ensures that each and every one of the subjects and objects that make up Ill Seen Ill Said can be interpreted—always wrongly, in the final analysis—as a token, and hence as something that stands for something else or even someone else. From the very outset, Venus (itself an equivocal name) personifies the old woman on account of its to-and-fro movement, just as the cabin, too, embodies the old woman due to its relative stillness—two antithetical spatial modalities meant to shed light (ever misleadingly, of course) on the ghost’s lingering presence. Metaphorically speaking, and even though it would be a mistake to construe it as a one-to-one correspondence, (the planet) Venus and the cabin are the ghost herself—indeed, her ghostliness can only manifest itself indirectly, via such signs and tokens—which implies that some degree of dehumanization is needed if we are to apprehend the impossibly neutral, neither living nor nonliving being that haunts these pages. Beckett’s studied use of synecdoche takes it a step further. Let us recall, for instance, the tableau where the ghost whispers “to her feet the prayer, Take her” (IS, 61). Likewise, in a fragment that openly reflects Beckett’s passion for painting, the woman’s hands (a recurrent trope), “[s]een from above” (IS, 75), are depicted in minute detail, which has the dual effect of objectifying the human figure while delving into it with such minute care that it ultimately emphasizes its inerasable humanity. And once the narrator’s painstaking ekphrasis turns its attention to the ring finger, we are no 18  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

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longer able to distinguish human figures from nonhuman ones with any certainty: It is now the left hand lacks its third finger. A swelling no doubt—a swelling no doubt of the knuckle between first and second phalanges preventing one panic day withdrawal of the ring. The kind called keeper. Still as stones they defy as stones do the eye. Do they as much as feel the clad flesh? Does the clad flesh feel them? Will they then never quiver? This night assuredly not. For before they have—before the eye has time they mist. Who is to blame? Or what? They? The eye? The missing finger? The keeper? The cry? What cry? All five. All six. And the rest. All. All to blame. All. (IS, 76)

There is much to parse here, so let us limit our focus to these two consecutive questions, which pertain to the stone-like hands: “Do they as much as feel the clad flesh? Does the clad flesh feel them?” The stone, as Heidegger famously argued, is “worldless” (weltlos) and hence the being furthest from Dasein, who purportedly opens up the world. Here, however, we are faced with a striking reversal: not only are the still, petrified hands hypothesized to feel themselves, flesh is itself understood to be potentially unfeeling, in accordance with a physical habituation that all who wear a ring know well. And while in the English version the ambiguity almost goes without saying due to the absence of grammatical gender, which encourages inferences, its French counterpart explicitly plays with it: “Figées comme deux cailloux elles défient comme eux le regard. Sentent-elles seulement la chair sous l’étoffe? La chair sous l’étoffe les sent-elles? Ne vont-ils donc jamais frémir?”19 The use of the masculine “ils” thus makes plain that the last question calls back to the stones rather than the (feminine) hands, stones that are said to have “quivered” before. In other words, the gender slip-up, which is anything but unintentional, subtly conveys the objectification and neutralization that are taking place here. * * * As we’ve seen, such amalgamations between the animate and the inanimate are also a side effect of the mournful pall that hangs over the text as a whole. To summon Heidegger once again, we may recall his  Samuel Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, 40.

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paradigmatic characterization of humanity as “being-towards-death” (Sein-zum-­Tode), by way of contrast with the stone’s relative immortality (not to mention the animal’s supposed self-ignorance as it hurtles toward oblivion). Nowhere is Beckett’s subversion of these philosophical tropes more remarkable than in the face-to-face between the ghostly figure and the tomb-like monolith that awaits it. After all, her own face is described as a “[c]alm slab worn and polished by agelong comings and goings” (IS, 70) reminding us of the face’s geometrical definition as a flat surface, more readily apparent in English than in the original French, which speaks of a “visage.” The French version, however, contains an explicit reference to Mallarmé, since the “[c]alm slab” is in fact a “[c]alme bloc,”20 unmistakably echoing the “Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur”21 (“Calm slab fallen from an obscure disaster”) of “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe.” While the titular “ill” is meant to be traced back to the cabin’s interior, the tombstone or monolith to which the ghostly lady unceasingly returns as she goes on, and which eerily mirrors her own face, is to be found outside, in the open: She is drawn to a certain spot. At times. There stands a stone. It it is draws her. Rounded rectangular block three times as high as wide. Four. […] When it draws she must to it. […] There she too as if of stone. But black. Sometimes in the light of the moon. Mostly of the stars alone. (IS, 61)

One may readily speculate as to her reasons for haunting this rectangular stone: since she is dressed in black and the eye (either hers or the narrator’s or both) is later described as “widowed,” it is easy to envision the block as a tomb, even without the reference to Mallarmé. Yet this intertext also distantly evokes the musical genre of the tombeau (as in Marin Marais’s Tombeau pour M. de Sainte-Colombe, memorably featured in Pascal Quignard’s Tous les matins du monde). The remote echo of music in this desolate wordscape thus reinforces the possibility of aesthetic consolation, be it only in passing. It underscores, yet again, the extent to which Beckett’s writing is poetic, as Marjorie Perloff has routinely suggested,22 if we envision poetry as the literary mode that lies closest to music. Indeed,  Ibid., 30.  Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” in Œuvres complètes, t. I, 38. 22  See, for instance, her essay, “‘The Silence that is not Silence’: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays,” in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004): 102–28. 20 21

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Ill Seen Ill Said’s gradual unfolding, its (n)ongoingness, also hinges on semi-fugal passages such as this one: “Everywhere stone is gaining. Whiteness. More and more every year. All well say every instant. Everywhere every instant whiteness is gaining” (IS, 72). Everything turns into a white expanse of stone as time inexorably goes on, and art consists of transmuting this ill-fated process into song. This overt aestheticization of death and grief, which doubles as an anesthetic of sorts, is a defining trait of Beckett’s late style. Yet already in the mock-essay “Le monde et le pantalon,” written in 1945, he describes Bram van Velde’s art as “une peinture de la chose en suspens, je dirais volontiers de la chose morte, idéalement morte, si ce terme n’avait pas de si fâcheuses associations”23 (“a painting of the suspended thing, I daresay of the dead thing, ideally dead, if this term weren’t so fraught with unfortunate connotations”). To which he adds: “C’est la chose seule, isolée par le besoin de la voir, par le besoin de voir. La chose immobile dans le vide, voilà enfin la chose visible, l’objet pur. Je n’en vois pas d’autre”24 (“It is the thing alone, isolated by the need to see it, by the need to see. The thing lying still in the void, the visible thing at long last, the pure object. I can see no other.”). We are privy here to a remarkable conjunction between art, death, and the thing, between the subject and object so-­ called, to paraphrase the author. And this encounter is precisely what Ill Seen Ill Said/Mal vu mal dit tries to grasp as it unfolds, echoing the impossible catabasis undertaken by the archetypal poet-musician, Orpheus, as rewritten by Blanchot in The Space of Literature. To go on thus means to poetically long for a glimpse of death itself, of the absolute qua absolute, of the thing-in-itself, by way of a failing sense of sight. Is it any wonder that such an unattainable goal infects the space of literature, that it leads it to speak ill—even of the dead? This is no mere play on words, for as so often in Beckett’s oeuvre, it seems as though the object that is sought here—the other as such—cannot come into existence without some measure of violence (another mal)—to say nothing of suffering, often even of torture.25 Indeed, Beckett incessantly forces us to reckon with the idea that this harrowing violence is nothing less than a 23  Samuel Beckett, “Le Monde et le pantalon,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 126. 24  Ibid. 25  Put differently: of terror, as Christopher Langlois convincingly argues in Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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condition of possibility for art, in an almost Kantian sense. In the age-old tradition of catharsis, humanity must be put to the test of the thing-in-­ itself, namely death as such, the one and only “pure object” that infects us from birth, that we “need to see” and that we may only see through a lifelong illness, that we may only see ill. The eye’s “drivelling scribe” (IS, 90) as the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said describes himself, is therefore tasked not just with recounting suffering but with producing it as well, for aesthetic purposes. Art, which thrives on tension, cannot go on otherwise, which is why Ill Seen Ill Said must begin by “rail[ing] at the source of all life” (IS, 57); it must bask in the “[s]ilence at the eye of the scream” (IS, 73)—a most Francis Bacon-like sentence—and it must seek a semblance of release in the “[i]ncontinent […] void” (IS, 81) where one supposedly comes to “[k]now happiness” (IS, 97). As the old ghost gives herself up at last, the objectification she has longed for is ostensibly complete, as is the literary work itself, which no longer has a reason to go on. Not only because dying in the space of literature renders binary squabbles irrelevant—neither life nor death matters from its perspective, hence the phantom protagonist being variously depicted as already dead or clinging to life—but also because “her tenacious trace” (IS, 96) is said to disappear once and for all, overtaken by an ever-expanding sea of emptiness—what Ill Seen Ill Said calls the “whiteness,” which is also that of the page itself—that engulfs living beings and transforms them into inanimate matter. Scattered to the winds, the dying woman dissolves into death, a mere thing among things. There is no stepping beyond such a point, or so it seems—the poetic slab, now becalmed, is finally complete. * * * Yet Beckett is not Mallarmé. Unlike, say, the narrator of Igitur, whose voice weaves the illusion that it speaks the language of neutral indifference itself, the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said does not make us forget the sacrifice demanded by the res poetica in order to come into being. As we have seen, his voice thrashes about, knowing itself to be impotent yet resisting anyway. So while the narrator and the ghostly old lady are both drawn toward the same focal point or foyer whence the mal or ill stems, and which is but another name for the neuter that ineluctably turns everything into a deceptively calm slab among others, this is not tantamount to saying that the two figures are beholden to neutrality. Whereas neutrality demands

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that one refrain from picking a side, the neuter is a post-dialectical “movement,”26 as Blanchot describes it in The Infinite Conversation, one that goes on and on, whether we like it or not, whether we are indifferent to it or not, ostensibly ad infinitum. Indeed, the tortuous and torturous work of death (le désœuvrement, for short) rears its ugly head, undermining the placid, tomb-like stillness we tend to ascribe to neutrality. As befits the neuter’s movement, Ill Seen Ill Said is a polyphonic work where a single voice alternates between points and counterpoints, with the former tending toward “objectivity” and the latter toward “subjectivity,” provided we allow that this artificial distinction, is knowingly set up with a view to deconstructing itself. For instance, the second paragraph begins at the most “objective” end of the spectrum—“The cabin. Its situation. Careful. On.” (IS, 59)—yet even these most minimal and outwardly unproblematic statements are understood to be potential snags; every phrase is a step along a fraught obstacle course. Quasi-catechistic nagging questions in particular—a trope no doubt inherited from Joyce—belie the narrative’s latent violence: “But in what way no longer the same? What there now that was not there? What there no more that was? Enough. Away” (IS, 90). Lastly, one may also invoke a passage where either the narrator or the ghostly lady or both wish to become the very absence of reality they already embody, being literary figments: “How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful” (IS, 67). Put differently, Ill Seen Ill Said’s narrator yearns to be a stoic, neutral third party like the narrator of Igitur, which would presumably allow him to see and say “well” and hence to find an “objective correlative” (à la T. S. Eliot) for the very thing—the ghostly lady, absolute vision, death as such—he is attempting to circumscribe by means of language. Yet this simply cannot be done. As we well know, failure is posited as an inevitable outcome in Beckett’s oeuvre, and within its confines one cannot learn how to succeed, but merely how to “[f]ail better,”27 in line with Worstward Ho’s famous injunction. This, then, would be the most “optimistic” avatar of the characteristic back-and-forth between “ongoing” and “nongoing”: 26  “…the neutral movement of interpreting that, having neither subject nor object, is the infinite of a movement that relates to nothing but to itself” (Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson [Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 165). 27  Beckett, Worstward Ho, 101.

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to fail, yes, as one must, but in a manner that recalls John Keats’s “negative capability,”28 which claims to transfigure negative matter into transcendental art. More specifically, it would imply that a dialectical (Hegelian-Kojèvian) movement undergirds Beckett’s writing, ushering it toward a grand aim or purpose—be it ethical or aesthetic or other still— despite its claims to the contrary. At best one may argue that the narrator’s quasi-Buddhist aspiration toward the void is that ultimate aim, but this already implies a self-­ subversive paradox, since the void renders all aspirations irrelevant. More significantly still, as Ill Seen Ill Said’s final few sentences suggest, the end is never quite the end, and the ambiguities inherent to Beckett’s writing are never lifted: Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. 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. (IS, 97)

This deliverance is typically deceptive, of course. Insofar as the experience of knowledge (“Know”) evoked in this passage is aurally indistinguishable from negation in English (“No,” here already a prior sentence in and of itself), the happiness in question stands on shaky ground. Similarly, the “[f]arewell to farewell” is not as definitive as the narrator would like it to be, since in doubling back on itself it also prolongs its deliberately tedious endlessness. Likewise, the “[f]irst last moment” cannot but raise a question: the first of how many now that the end has “begun”? Furthermore, to the extent that the void here is said to be something one may “breathe,” it is not quite as void-like as one imagines it to be, throwing the euthanasic29 conclusion off-course and forcing us to entertain the possibility that it may all be a sham, a fantasy not unlike those that preceded it. And was not the ghostly old lady already dead? 28  John Keats, “Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December,” in Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41. 29  Beckett’s characters and narrators typically long for a blissful death—a “good” death, per the etymology of the word euthanasia—yet they are inexplicably held back by something that spurs them to live on, despite what they believe to be their better judgment. They can likewise be said to suffer from a form of Stockholm syndrome, with all the thorny ethical dilemmas this controversial diagnosis entails.

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Even the end of saying is “ill said,” as though illness subsisted beyond the very death that impels it. Death is therefore impossible: one must go on and on and on, even once the threshold to end all thresholds is reached, von Schwelle zu Schwelle,30 to quote Paul Celan. As in Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus,”31 whose protagonist must forever hunt death and be hunted by it, there is a violence to this purgatorial movement, which is similar in many ways to what Blanchot calls “eternal rehashing” (le ressassement éternel), because it gestures toward the impossibility of relief. Is there an end to our unremitting torment or torture? Beckett cannot give a simple answer to this question, let alone an affirmative one, and so his writings dwell within the penumbra of a violent undecidability, which he foregrounds in Ill Seen Ill Said not so much by naming it outright as by stressing the narrator’s failed attempts at suppressing it or repressing it, since there is no question that psychoanalysis plays a significant part in the novella’s framing of the work of mourning. Therein also lies the most openly political facet of the novella, and of Beckett’s writings in general, namely the fact that his characters—be they retelling or retold or both— are invariably under duress at the hands of another who wields a greater power, as though the restrictive logic of Oulipo were applied to their very bodies (by no means categorically distinguishable from their minds, save as bygone, parodic echoes of Cartesianism). Their longing for thingness— for death as such, to go back to “Le Monde et le pantalon”—is thus both the source of the preordained suffering to which they are beholden, and their apparent escape route. * * * A final question remains: what does this all mean for us, as readers and witnesses, as voyeurs and ventriloquists, and hence as enablers of the crucible that is Ill Seen Ill Said? As we’ve seen, and as Beckett readily reminds us whenever he breaks the fourth wall,32 works of literature require us to work: the subject–object distinction becomes moot within the res literaria, which is a monstrous fusion between a human and a nonhuman, 30  Paul Celan, From Threshold to Threshold, in Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). 31  Franz Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus,” trans. Edwin and Willa Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 226–30. 32  Imagination Dead Imagine, with its imperative to imagine the unimaginable, is perhaps the most spectacular instance of this structural device in Beckett’s writings.

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between a text and its reader—it is a thing in the uncanniest sense of the term. As such, we necessarily bring something to bear in the process of reading and being read by the work, which means that it is altered, even infected by our gaze and/or our hearing, thus redoubling the novella’s titular illness. And as the COVID-19 pandemic has abundantly made clear, in case we had forgotten it, there is an inescapably political dimension to the work of illness (and to virology in general) because it thrives on bodies coming together—on “company,” to cite the title of the novella immediately preceding Ill Seen Ill Said in Beckett’s oeuvre, with which it is occasionally said to form a second trilogy alongside Worstward Ho. By dramatizing the very acts of seeing, reading, and saying, Ill Seen Ill Said involves us, directs us, in a quasi-cinematographic sense. It puts us in the narrator’s position as he attempts to resist the vise into which he is locked, and therefore compels us to share his plight. Our position as we discover the text, one brushstroke at a time, is also his; his ignorance is our ignorance, and so we go on, seemingly in tandem. So much so, in fact, that the ghost of a story being retold here almost absolves us of history— of our (hi)story—in keeping with a logic of suspension of disbelief that is haunted by l’art pour l’art, a residually Romantic conception of aesthetics Beckett never entirely disavowed. It is therefore tempting to read the predicament into which his characters are thrust in ahistorical or at the very least existentialist terms (i.e., this is “how it is,” quite simply, and so one goes on because one goes on, tautologically). Yet the parasitical identification the work actively seeks to accomplish by inhabiting and haunting the reader, who then enables it to go on in the most basic sense, falls short. Indeed, the reader is always torn between (at least) two readings: what one might call the “absolute” reading, on the one hand, and the “exemplary” reading, on the other, with the proviso that the two go hand in hand. The absolute interpretation of Ill Seen Ill Said is tantamount to absolute music: it is a literalist approach, which assumes that the novella means exactly what it says—no more and no less. It is corroborated by various statements made by the author himself, such as his provocative contention to Alan Schneider regarding Endgame: “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.”33 In other words, he acknowledges that headache-inducing  Samuel Beckett, “Letter to Alan Schneider, December 29, 1957,” in Disjecta, 109.

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interpretations are always a possibility, yet advises against them, pinning the responsibility on his readership. As for its rival, the exemplary reading, it quickens the demon of analogy beyond the confines of the text proper, and deliberately draws out its “overtones”: the letter is thus revealed to never be literal enough, and so the headaches become a foregone conclusion as one’s mind rushes to parse the text as though it were but an example of something else, to be inscribed within a broader—social, historical, political, philosophical, psychological, etc.—context. Either Ill Seen Ill Said is sui generis, telling us absolutely everything it knows about itself and hence all we need to know about it as readers, or it is an instance of a more “universal” suffering, one that I may personally identify with (e.g., as a widower or one who is in the throes of an illness or witness to that illness, etc.), thus exceeding the text qua text. As such, to go on does not carry quite the same meaning depending on where we let the emphasis fall. Indeed, we are faced here with a tug of war between the work’s seemingly generic neutrality—its (very literal, in this instance) attraction to the vacuum or void—and the context(s) to which I am bound, whether knowingly or unknowingly, as I read it. Thus, by pushing back against the hegemony of the mimetic, realist tradition in fiction, Beckett’s writing pointedly distinguishes the space of literature from history understood as a compendium of faits accomplis, as evidenced by his wariness toward immediately recognizable place names and eminently historical figures and/or events. Yet to the extent that the reader is required to step in to “complete” the work, as it were, to prod it onwards, its blanks are not so much filled—indeed, this cannot be done without erasing its otherness or thingness outright—as they are acknowledged as ever-­versatile openings, which call for a multitude of possible readings. As ever, neither hermeneutic model is fully satisfying, neither quite accounts for the perseverance that Beckett’s writing enacts. One may go on analyzing this movement forever. In lieu of a conclusion, suffice it to reiterate, once again, that “something” (whatever it might be) undeniably takes its course in Beckett’s oeuvre. But what goes on—the thing as such, the work of death and hence of mourning—is an enigma, for lack of a better word, in keeping with what Mallarmé dubbed “Le Mystère dans les lettres”34 (“Mystery in Literature”). Yet this is by no means a metaphysical enigma, one that would point toward a quasi-­ theological Absolute to be elucidated by a hieratic interpreter—rather, it is  Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Mystère dans les lettres,” in Œuvres complètes, t. II, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 229–34. 34

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necessarily flawed, for it is bound to be ill seen and ill said. As such, the endless speculation it requires on our parts, as readers and writers (and spectators and listeners), is merely the least ill that can be said as we go on.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. On Beckett. Ed. and trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983. ———. Endgame and Act Without Words. New York: Grove Press, 1958. ———. How It Is. New York: Grove Press, 1964. ———. L’Innommable. Paris: Minuit, 2004. ———. Mal vu mal dit. Paris: Minuit, 1981. ———. Nohow On. London: John Calder, 1989. ———. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 2009. ———. Watt. New York: Grove Press, 1970. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Celan, Paul. Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, translated by Pierre Joris. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Clément, Bruno. L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit and translated by Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories, edited by Nahum Glatzer and translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Keats, John. Selected Letters, edited by Robert Gittings. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Krimper, Michael. “Beckett Ongoing and the Novel,” New Literary History 51, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 67–92. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Langlois, Christopher. Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres complètes, t. I.  Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. ———. Œuvres complètes, t. II. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Waldrop, Rosmarie. Blindsight. New York: New Directions, 2003.

Beckett’s Figural Language: A Reconfiguration of the Sensible Nadia Louar

“fait voir ce qu’est voir”1 “My work was created only by elimination; destruction was my Beatrice,”2 Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to Eugène Lefebvre in a letter dated May 27, 1867. Beckett uses similar language in a letter to Barney Rosset at the time of composing Comment c’est to describe his own modus operandi: “I rely a lot on a demolishing process to come later and content myself more or less with getting down elements and rhythms to be knocked hell out of when I am ready.”3 In his 1961 novel, Beckett divests the “I” of its 1  Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 14; “makes visible seeing itself,” Discourse and Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 9. 2  “Je n’ai créé mon œuvre que par élimination, la Destruction fut ma Beatrice.” Quoted in Discours, Figure, 63. My translation. 3  George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 3, 1957–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 230.

N. Louar (*) Department of French and Francophone Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_4

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narrating authority and foregrounds a performing voice that obediently transmits what it hears: “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it.”4 The coercive citational practices devised in this redoubtable piece of prose both mirror the relentless lesson and pensum inflicted on Beckett’s recalcitrant narrators and mimic his own self-imposed rewriting practices. Anthony Cordingley adroitly shows how the sadistic pedagogies deployed in the novel critique the mind-­ numbing routine of a foreign language education based on “the recitations of verb conjugations, mnemonics for grammatical rules, and […] translation exercises.”5 This method of inculcation through habituation, or dressage, recurs under various scenarios across Beckett’s works and covers the full gamut of social and cultural practices. Pim’s sadistic pedagogies,6 Molloy’s training of his mother, Lucky’s regurgitations, heads talking on cue, Mouth’s logomania, to highlight a few, partake of a domestication that Beckett’s undisciplined creatures often stubbornly resist. The narrators’ loss of fluency and the de-socialization of characters in the postwar fiction exemplify a visceral reluctance to conform to conventional expressions and attitudes. As the narrator of The Unnamable announces, “Nothing will remain of all the lies they have glutted me with.”7 This purging of ingurgitated knowledge is not only a structural metaphor in the economy of a narrative that enacts its own linguistic disintegration. It also captures the practice of disremembering8 that characterizes Beckett’s writing until the very end of his career. “I work on, with failing mind,” he writes in 1980, “in other words, improved possibilities.”9 This stymied poiesis, or way to undo things, culminates in Worstward Ho, the wondrous poetic stutter that further instantiates Beckett’s “tattered” syntax.10 From the linguistic skepticism of Watt to the aphasic rhythm of What is The  Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove, 2012), 7.   Anthony Cordingley, “Beckett’s ‘Masters’: Pedagogical Sadism, Foreign Language Primers, Self-Translation,” Modern Philology 109, 4 (2012), 510–43, 522. 6  See Jean-Michel Rabaté, Beckett and Sade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); See chapter 4, “Comment Sade: The Sadean Pedagogy of Love in How it is” (41–50). 7  Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove, 1958), 325. 8  As Beckett criticism amply shows, body dismembering and dis- and/or mis-remembering are organically linked in his œuvre. 9  George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 4, 1966–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 527. 10  Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose (New York: Grove, 1995), 169. 4 5

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Word, to the “meremost minimum”11 of his late works, the author has tirelessly interrogated the “arbitrary and capricious habits of expression”12 that sediment into artistic languages. If his early fiction dramatizes scenes of socialization and ridicule social rituals,13 his later works abandon these “stultifying” forms of expression, to use Jacques Rancière’s term, to create a language able to thwart its intrinsic idiotism.14 That Beckett experimented with various languages, genres, and media to eschew his cultural inheritance and counteract deadening habits of mind is part of an enduring critical paradigm predicated on destitution. Matthew Feldman underscores the paradoxical situation in which “one of the most erudite writers of the twentieth century” finds himself as he embarks on his famous artistic quest for ignorance.15 “Quite simply,” Feldman explains, “Beckett’s meticulously cultivated protestations of ignorance were deeply learned.”16 The author’s use of the word “ignorance” in his celebrated declaration of anti-Joycean aesthetic indicates in fact the methodical deprivation of studiously accumulated knowledge. If the author’s turn to French in his postwar fiction elicits some form of linguistic and cultural dispossession,17 his project to turn away from the “loutishness of learning”18 and the multifaceted strategies of divestment he deploys to this aim amount to much more than casting aside an immense erudition. Rather, it signifies the unlearning of habitual modes of perception and a radical reconsideration of sensory experiences. Beckett’s distrust in the senses as organs of perception dovetails with the linguistic skepticism remarkably deployed in Watt and The Unnamable. His “demolition process” may be thus usefully compared to the phenomenological 11  Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 103. 12  Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 13  See my “bilingual explorations” in Jean-Michel Rabaté ed., The New Samuel Beckett Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 231–247. 14  In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière describes the process of stultification as “inherent to any relation in which one intelligence is subordinated to another.” (In Jacques Rancière Key Concepts, 28); in the original French version, he uses the term abrutissement. 15  Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of The Interwar Notes (London: Continuum, 2009), 7. 16  Ibid., 20. 17  “He feared erudition swamping the authenticity of a work, and constantly warned against that danger for other artists, having had to escape from it himself” (Feldman 2009, 10). 18  Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 2014), 7.

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reduction which Edmund Husserl conceptualized as “an invalidation, inhibition, and disqualifying of all commitment with reference to experienced objects.”19 A comprehensive look at how this reduction unfolds in Beckett’s œuvre reveals indeed a shift toward morphemic language and eidetic imagery—let us think here of the echolalia and synecdochic figures of Beckett’s haunted theater, both as linguistic tropes and dramatic characters. James Knowlson, quoting Werner Spies, aptly describes the minimalist decor of Beckett’s dramaticules in terms of “visual abstinence,”20 As his theatre develops, especially from Happy Days (1962) and Play (1964) onwards, the images that Beckett creates also become increasingly static, concentrated and spectral. They hover somewhat precariously on the fringes of materiality; yet they remain exceptionally powerful, bold, even startling.21

In Beckett’s esthetic terms, this reduction or epoché, signifies isolation and suspension.22 In his epistolary elucubrations with Georges Duthuit, which opens wide a window into his artistic preoccupations, Beckett identifies Van Velde’s novelty in his ability to “repudiate relation in all these forms”23—these forms being founded on a predetermined and naïve relation between the artist and the outside world: It is not with this or that order of opposite that it refuses, but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of. … What interests me is what lies beyond the outside-inside where [the painter] does his striving, not the scale of the striving itself. … I am only trying to point to the possi-

19   See Richard Schmidt, “Husserl’s Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20, no. 2 (1959), 238–45. 20  James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 41, 43, 44. 21  Ibid., 47. 22  Conor Carville introduces an interesting distinction between the pictorial gesture of isolation and suspension of ‘the thing’ and the phenomenological epoché. He contrasts the “epistemological image” of phenomenology and the “ontological” image that emerges in Beckett in his critique of Van Velde’s painting (200). It is important then to reiterate here that the correlation I establish between epoché and suspension in this particular context has to do with the order of the visual image on the retina: it concerns the capacity or the ability to see the thing as it is. 23  Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 140.

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bility of an expression lying outside the system of relations hitherto held to be indispensable to anyone who cannot be content with his own navel.24

The absence of relation between the artist and his object which Beckett theorizes in both his early criticism devoted to literature and his postwar essays on painting delineates a phenomenological approach to perception that precisely rejects “the equalization of the visual world,” in Jean-­ François Lyotard’s apt phrase.25 The philosopher’s phenomenological analysis of the process of seeing posits that the eye does not see, it recognizes, rectifies, and accommodates its visual space according to preconceptions.26 What is perceived by the human eye is construed through the interpretative act of seeing. This interpretation is the result of a training of the eye. Lyotard refers to two pioneers of curvilinear perspective, Albert Flocon and André Barre, to illustrate the contingent conditions of visual perception: Education and habit stimulate the desire to see reality correspond to concepts. Our eye and our brain rectify distortions, to the extent that this can be done without too much violence to verisimilitude, to real space and to the coherence of our spatial logic. In visual perception there is a very complex and flexible play among the object, its retinal image, and its mental representation.27

As Beckett also observes in his own analysis of habit in Marcel Proust’s Recherche, “nor is any direct and purely experimental contact possible between subject and object, because they are automatically separated by the subject’s consciousness of perception, and the object loses its purity and becomes a mere intellectual pretext or motive.”28 In other words, the observer infects the observed with his disciplined vision. If the senses are thus policed and perceptual experiences modeled through cultural and social inculcation, Beckett’s aesthetic project based on unlearning—and here, the term project is best understood in the sense of a phenomenological 24  George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 140–1. 25  Discourse and Figure, 152. 26  Ibid. 27  Quoted in Discourse, Figure, 426. 28  Samuel Beckett, Proust, New York: Grove Press, 56.

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intentionality, not as a pre-established plan29—necessarily calls for a defamiliarization of the acts of seeing, hearing, and experiencing the sensible world. As we know, Beckett’s art works on the nerves of the reader, the viewer, and the performer, so as to affect sensory receptors. If Not I is the example par excellence of a new regimentation of sense perception, Beckett’s literary bilingualism and its ghost writing practices trigger spectral figurations and haunted voices that radically alter perceptual habits in his entire œuvre.

“Pour faire remarquer moi” The radical alteration in the perceptible world of Beckett may be productively interpreted through the lens of Rancière’s philosophies of art and reconsidered in the context of an esthetic regime of art that creates new modes of sense perception. Indeed, according to the French philosopher: “What in fact characterizes this regime is the idea of a specific form of sensory experience, disconnected from the normal forms of sensory experience.”30 This new regime of identification of art signals the collapse of the mimetic norms of the representative regime. It puts an end to a model that, according to the philosopher, historically attached a way of doing and a way of experiencing art. As he explains: “Art in the aesthetic  A necessity of writing which crystallizes in an “intentional structure” (Michel Contat, “Une idée fondamentale pour la génétique littéraire: l’intentionnalité. Une application au cas d’un projet abandonné par Sartre d’une pièce de théâtre sur le maccarthysme,” in Pourquoi La Critique Génétique? Méthodes, Théories, eds. Michel Contat and Daniel Ferrer (Paris: CNRS, 1998), 111–167, 115). In its phenomenological meaning, intentionality is distinguished from the textualized or psychological intention. Raymond Abellio, who is inspired by the work of Husserl and Martin Heidegger, offers a definition which seems to me to fully understand the Beckettian project; he speaks of a global structuring intentionality, “an intentionality encompassing all the intentionalities dialectically formed in them” (Raymond Abellio, La Structure Absolue: Essai de phénoménologie génétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 99). But, in more elementary terms, one could just as easily speak of a creative impulse for which “the possible replaces the telos” (Michel Espagne, “Les enjeux de la genèse,” Études françaises 202 (1984), 103–122, 118). In a letter to Barbara Bray, Beckett perfectly describes this phenomenological emergence of his writing as “of a thing that is done as it is done” regardless of what he wants to do (“The thing makes itself as it goes, but that’s not the point alas”) (The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 3, 222). 30  Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 173. 29

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regime finds its only content precisely in this process of undoing, in opening up a gap between poiesis and aisthesis, between a way of doing and a horizon of affect.”31 Beckett’s self-translations crystallize this gap by confounding principles of imitation and transparency and by introducing an equivocity at the core of his practice. His equivocal methods of unwriting and rewriting his own works—whether in another language, genre, media, or in the course of his revisions—usher in a heterology that defies anchoring: they cannot be easily traced back. Instead, they summon ghostly resonances, ventriloquists, and revenants that defy common sense and disengage, or deactivate, habits of thought and perception. The sensoryscape—that is, the picture or representation of senses—achieved by Beckett’s bilingual language thus defuses the customary ways in which one is prompted to perceive and translate one’s perception into namable (preconceived) notions. It is in this sense that Beckett’s œuvre redistributes the sensible as Rancière conceives it. Read through this prism, Beckett’s revising processes become part of a conceptualization of art that exceeds the discursive and intelligible order of verbal language. In fact, his struggle with the written medium allows him to draw from his extraordinary visual memory and knowledge of art to probe the anamorphic potential of language. Anamorphosis consists in distorting an image until it is unrecognizable at first sight. It only becomes “readable” when it is looked at from another point of view. In other words, it makes visible a disappearance. Of all the figures that constitute the figurality of Beckett’s art, or its figural language as I conceive it, anamorphosis is most instrumental in substituting representation for enigmatic presence. In Ill Seen Ill Said this artistic transmutation becomes an exemplary Beckettian injunction: “Not possible any longer except as figment. Not endurable.”32 But before examining further how Beckett’s esthetic regime and practices manifest in his œuvre, it is crucial to understand the scope and function of Beckett’s bilingual writing. In a previous work,33 I have theorized Beckett’s literary bilingualism and defined the phenomenon as a hyperonymic process34 that affects all strata of his writing. To put it simply, I  Ibid., 16. My emphasis.  Nohow On, 74. 33  See Figures du bilinguisme (Minard, 2018). 34  Hypernym or hyperonym is a linguistic term that denotes a relation of a broader category to a narrower category that it encompasses, such as in ‘trope’ in relation to ‘metaphor.’ 31 32

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showed that Beckett’s bilingualism operates like a figure of speech that extends to the entire œuvre. Hence, the author’s departure from the monolingual norm provides a structural model for further deviations either from generic confines or from restrictions pertaining to certain media. A figure of speech is by definition a deformation. It signifies both a formal anomaly and a new form of expression. Considering Beckett’s literary bilingualism as a generating figure rather than a mere linguistic competence helps to shed light on an artistic expression that constantly reworks both itself and its object to neutralize the inertia of habits. The oxymoronic principle of “failing better” partakes of this reverse pensum which, as Worstward Ho best illustrates, contracts the space of the sayable and opens it to new visual and audible configurations. “Taking the morpheme and phoneme for a reductive walk” as Paul Klee did the line in his painting,35 Beckett devises an “impossible prose”36 comprised of eidetic images, poetic sonorities, and agrammaticalities37 that trouble its legibility but require the reader’s eye and ear. The inter- and trans-medial qualities of Beckett’s works stem precisely from that fact. They compel a retraining of the senses and offer themselves to new perceptual approaches.38 Beckett’s prose thus overthrows the regime of intellection to appeal to acts of seeing and hearing. Relying on a constellation of equivocal figures in all their various manifestations—figures of speech or of thought, anthropomorphic, prophetic, or deceitful, to name a few—Beckett creates a language that “stirs” from the field of idiotism39 and enters the realm of the  Discourse, Figure, 219.  Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, and Maurice Harmon, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 421. 37  In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari expand the definition of style, or rather the absence of style, to asyntacticality and agrammaticality (asyntaxie, agrammaticalité). They thus describe agrammaticality as “the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode—desire” (p. 133). Michael Riffaterre also offers a definition that helps elucidate Beckett’s writing: “l’agrammaticalité: non pas la faute de grammaire (sens étroit) mais toute altération de n’importe lequel des systèmes du langage, morphologique, syntaxique, sémantique, sémiotique” In “L’intertexte Inconnu.” Littérature. “Agrammaticality is not only grammatical (in the narrow sense) but any alteration of any of the language systems, be it morphological, syntactic, semantic, or semiotic: my translation.” 38  See Lucy Jeffery’s Transdisciplinary Beckett (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022) for further reading on this topic. 39  In both senses of an idiomatic expression and as what cannot be translated into another language. 35 36

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figural. Like Stéphane Mallarmé with Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, Beckett with his bilingual œuvre “deprives articulated language of its prosaic function of communication, revealing in it a power that exceeds it: the power to be ‘seen,’ and not only read-heard; the power to figure, and not only to signify.”40 The figurality which Jean-François Lyotard identifies in Mallarmé’s revolutionary poem in his seminal Discourse, Figure perfectly characterizes Beckett’s writing. His work dismisses Cartesian trammels of perception (the eye cannot see; only the mind can)41 and conceives of a figural language that disrupts mechanized sensory experiences. Beckett, as his young alter ego Belacqua announces, “is not concerned with normal vision, when word and image coincide.”42 His main concerns reside in the possibilities of representing human perception when it is not overridden by linguistic priority. Both his synesthetic and incorporeal approaches to language, which he fully exploits in his theatre, are instrumental in figuring new modalities of subjectivity and sensibility. Interpreting Beckett’s bilingualism as a figure in both its denotations as an anomaly in the order of discourse and an event in the field of perception offers a more comprehensive understanding of the specific regime of identification of Beckett’s art. It helps elucidate how Beckett’s art construes the relation between art and reality, reworks the criteria of what constitutes a work of art, and conceives of a sensorium within which his art can be newly experienced. This sensory experience is a foil to that of the “tourist,” as described by a prescient Beckett in Proust, “whose aesthetic experience consists in a series of identifications and for whom Baedeker is the end rather than the means.”43 Rather, it is one of forgetting; but not quite. It is indeed imperative for Beckett as an artist to say, hear, and see “against previous knowledge.” As French philosopher Gaston Bachelard flawlessly put it: “Whenever we look back and see the errors of our past, we discover truth through a real intellectual repentance.”44  Discourse, Figure, 61.  “ce n’est pas l’œil mais l’esprit qui voit.” 42  Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder, 1996), 170. 43  Proust, 11. 44  Gaston Bachelard and Mary McAllester Jones, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen, 2002), 25. “En revenant sur un passé d’erreurs, on trouve la vérité en un véritable repentir intellectuel. En fait, on connaît contre une connaissance antérieure” La Formation De L’esprit Scientifique; Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance Objective (Paris: Vrin, 1969), 14. 40 41

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Disremembering and Dismembering “All that goes before forget” writes the autofictional narrator of Enough. The disremembering process that opens the narration of this residual prose piece dramatizes an art of writing that erases memories previously recalled but, as always in Beckett’s bilingual world, not quite. This revisionist principle regiments Beckett’s rewriting practices. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon’s analysis of a short dramatic fragment entitled “Bare room” highlights the play on elaboration and retraction that characterizes Beckett’s composition. From a genetic point of view, the most remarkable ‘performance’ in this fragment is the cancellation of the literary authority, the name ‘Shakespeare’, which is emblematic of Beckett’s use of intertextuality—his way of alluding to past meanings but simultaneously undoing the allusion’s capacity to affirm these meanings.45

Genetic criticism shows that Beckett’s revising process consists in obfuscating contextual determination and altering intertextual references. It is not merely “a question of elimination” as the narrator of The Unnamable curtly put it.46 It is about salvaging the élan vital of the words against their petrification by the canon. Indeed, if the authority of the “old masters” is sedulously dismissed, their memory lingers in the text as an inciting prompt. The Earl of Gloucester’s speech in King Lear as the prompt for the composition of Worstward Ho is probably one of the most famous examples of intertextual trigger as it is practiced in Beckett’s bilingual œuvre. The notion of intertextuality developed by Julia Kristeva is founded on the principle that a literary text is a reformulation of the same content in different enunciative situations. An author is thus constantly reworking another text. Beckett’s histrionic claim that there is “nothing to express” simply means that there is nothing new to express. His practice of self-translation stands as the performance of this “impotence,” to use his own word. His heterodiegetic remarks in his self-translated texts allude to their prior existence in another language and partake of the emblematic interworking of his writing.47 In the Bakhtinian world in which Kristeva 45  Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, “Performance and Beckett’s ‘Bare Room,’” Journal of Beckett Studies 23, 1 (2014), v–xi, vii. 46  Three Novels, 1968. 47  Beckett often signals his presence and activity as a translator in his self-translated works.

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theorizes the notion, intertextuality means that a text simultaneously points toward another text and departs from it. In Beckett’s writing, this dual movement implies contextual displacement and dis(re)membering. The perilous interdependence of one Beckettian text upon another is beautifully described in Mal vu mal dit: “De quel seul mot en dire le changement? Attention. Moindre. Ah le beau seul mot. Moindre. Elle est moindre. La même mais moindre.”48 In this masterwork49 of elegiac observation, the arresting image of a shriveling female figure seemingly morphing into (white?) stone illustrates the de-facing and dis-figuring processes necessarily involved in the act of seeing and saying (“moindrement”50). What then, where then, when then, who then—the unanswered questions of an inenarrable story—may only [ne que!]51 be said and seen, in its felicitous French version: “inchangés en pire.”52 Hence, what remains to be seen and said are “figments,” “bits” and “scraps”53 rendered (returned even) to the elucubrations of an unreliable mind: She is vanishing. With the rest. The already ill seen bedimmed and ill seen again annulled. The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries. […] Quick how ever ill said before it submerges all. Light. In one treacherous word. Dazzling haze. Light in its might at last. Where no more to be seen. To be said. Gently gently.54

Only the dimness in which the figure rapidly drowns holds out the gentle promise of remembrance. Only when and where the light fades and no longer sheds its distorting reflections may scenes and images of past lives be fleetingly envisioned—not as they were, but as they might have been. The visions of a face thus appear “in the last rays” of light55 before 48  Samuel Beckett, Mal vu mal dit (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 66. “Less. Ah the sweet one word. Less. It is less. The same but less,” Nohow On, 91. 49  I agree with Ruby Cohn and consider Mal vu mal dit as one of the most extraordinary works of Beckett’s œuvre. See A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 363. 50  Mal vu mal dit, 63. 51  The French restrictive locution “ne que” becomes a defining narrative principle in Mal vu mal dit. It is not as explicit with “only” in the English version of Ill Seen Ill Said. 52  Mal vu mal dit, 67. “Unchanged for the worse,” Nohow On, 92. 53  Nohow On, 74. 54  Ibid., 88. 55  Ibid., 69, 88.

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it dissolves into the dark holes of memory figured in the prose as the hole of an eye. A smile? Is it possible? Ghost of an ancient smile smiled finally once and for all. Such ill half seen the mouth in the light of the last rays. Suddenly they leave it. Rather it leaves them. Off again to the dark. There to smile on. If smile is what it is.56

The eidetic images triggered by these ecliptic moments of reminiscence do not refer back to an ascertained reality but to sensory and emotional experiences contemporaneous to the act of recollection, that is, to the act of rewriting. In Proust, Beckett speaks of the esthetic unrecoverability of reality that may only “be apprehended as retrospective hypothesis.”57 The hypothetical lens through which the observer-narrator-author experiences reality or recaptures his own past coalesces in the interplay between light and darkness; it ultimately crystallizes in the blackening of the white sheet of paper methodically cut into pieces: The sheet. Between tips of trembling. In two. Four. Eight. Old frantic fingers. Not paper any more. Each eighth apart. In two. Four. Finish with the knife. Hack into shreds. Down the plughole. On to the next. White. Quick blacken.58

Beckett’s Spectropoetics Beckett’s tales of remembrance herald a disjointed time, which is best described as a haunting contemporaneity or a haunting present. It bestows all the mourning flavors and sensations of a past, but one that lingers as present. This “past present” or out of joint time conjures up “bedimmed”59 figures and heterotopias that lead to hypothetical modes of being. Hence, presence in Beckett’s work often appears phantasmatic. In his late prose and drama, to remember means to hear disembodied voices and see roaming specters. This form of conjuration constitutes a creative act founded on Beckett’s echolalic artistic practices. The specific modality of subjectivities they trigger is in fact modeled on the spectralization of the other  Ibid., 89. My emphasis.  Proust, 4. 58  Ibid., 93. 59  Ibid., 88. 56 57

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l­anguage that remains present in each of his self-translated texts. Beckett’s bilingual poetics—to capture in this term the revising principles of composition and the relationships between art and life that they establish—invites a form of sensory experience that “figuralizes” its perceptions, affects, and emotions. This particular experience is described by Lyotard as a figural event. The description he offers is central to an understanding of the figurative quality of Beckett’s œuvre as I define it here, and hence worth quoting in its entirety: To lend an ear to an event is the most difficult thing in the world. An event is not what occupies the front of the newspapers. It is something that supervenes, that comes out of nowhere. As such, this thing is still nothing: we don’t know how to explain it or even to name it. We are not ready for it, we don’t have what is needed to welcome or to account for it in a system of signification, what is needed to identify it. And yet, if it occurs, it must touch some “surface” where it leaves its trace: a consciousness, an unconsciousness, individual or collective. Perhaps it even had to invent this surface in order to leave such a trace. This trace is not comprehensible immediately. It is a strange trace, a trace of strangeness, awaiting its signification, although the event has already occurred. This is why it is difficult to “lend an ear” to the event: it has already passed even before it is clear what it is.”60

This remarkable quotation, which I extract from a communication on musical art entitled (unsurprisingly) “The Inaudible,” reveals a fundamental structural connection between the figural and the spectral. This connection allows me to redefine Beckett’s bilingualism as a spectropoetics. To return to Rancière’s terminology, I would say that Beckett’s prose and drama reconfigure the territory of the seeable and the sayable. His figural language deflects the narrative bias of images and prompts an agrammatical expression that disavows figurative and referential renditions and preconceptions. In his discussion with Duthuit, Beckett states that the “assumption underlying all painting,” which we may extend to all artforms, “is that the domain of the maker is the domain of the feasible.”61 In his role as art critic, Beckett lets his guard down and criticizes an

60  Jean-François Lyotard, Textes dispersés. Miscellaneous Texts, ed. Herman Parret (Leuven: Leuven University, 2012), 201. 61  Disjecta, 142.

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established hierarchy of artistic expressions that activate predictable emotions,62 that is, a specific way of doing—a poiesis—and a specific way of being which is affected by it—an aesthetic. The automaticity that according to the author characterizes these “dreary” and “puny” ways of doing and feeling may be thus best described as an anesthetic.63 Beckett’s spectropoetics situates art on a radically different plane, one that involves a departure from the numbness of habitual or regimented sensations. In fact, the world of habit is without feeling, and without feeling, there is no art. In its original sense, aesthesis means “to perceive through the senses, to feel.”64 By the same token, anesthetic means “insensate, without feeling.” For Beckett, the impetus is, on the contrary, “all feeling.” He often claimed that his art did not rely on intellection but on sensations, feelings, and affects. In one early and famous interview with Gabriel D’Aubarède, he explicitly states: “All I am is feeling. ‘Molloy’ and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.”65 The poetics of failure which came to readily characterize Beckett’s art signaled how unfamiliar, even foreign it was to an audience who had preconceived notions of art. Hervé Serry’s account of the rejection of Beckett’s short stories and of Molloy by the publisher Le Seuil in 1947 casts light on the initial misapprehensions of Beckett’s literature at the time. What Beckett graciously explained as “a sort of indecency … an ontological indecency”66 appears in fact to his readers as a “radical disorientation.”67 As Serry shows, what Beckett offered was incompatible with the perceptual coordinates of the readers. The cognitive shock that his prose elicited is significantly captured by one of them, in a stultifying idiom: “There’s an elephant walking over a set of crystal wineglasses inside it.”68 In his introduction to the Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, Stanley Gontarski also underscores the “newness” of 62  See Martha Nussbaum, “Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love,” Ethics 98, 2 (1988), 225–254. 63  As he famously put it in his critique with Georges Duthuit: “an art […] weary of […] doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road” (Disjecta, 139). 64  https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=ANESTHETIC. 65  Quoted in Brigitte Le Juez, Beckett Before Beckett (London: Souvenir Press, 2010), 160. 66  Quoted in Hervé Serry and Helena Scott, “A Publishing Decision under Constraint: Samuel Beckett and Le Seuil Publishers in 1947,” Journal of Beckett Studies 21, 1 (2012), 65–87, 83. (p. 63, note 39). 67  Ibid., 78. 68  Ibid., 71.

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Beckett’s drama and “the degree of difference that [a play like] Waiting for Godot represented, how ‘foreign’ a play it was.”69 The fiasco of the now canonical play as well as other purported failures that Beckett encountered in his career as an artist came precisely from the fact that his works defied familiar protocols of reading and interpretation. His early (de)creative strategies, among which “sinning against a foreign language” is the most explicit—as his performative utterance, “pour faire remarquer moi” playfully attests—were exercises of unlearning. They laid the groundwork for a new regime of art that troubles sense perception and enables the principles of “impotence and ignorance” in artistic creation. In Rancière’s theory, “The aesthetic state is a pure instance of suspension, a moment when form is experienced for itself.”70 This particular regime of art is governed by a foreign, alienated and heterogenous power that disrupts “ordinary connections” and alters the perceptual coordinates. In other words, it introduces a new sensorium that reorders the relationships between art and life. This disruption in Beckett’s artworld manifests in queerious morphemic injunctions71 that lessen, spectralize, defy, and interrogate the ontological status of the representee as well as alter its relationship with the representer. Among the many affixes that disable Beckett’s language such as dis-, de-, un-, less-, and inform the cluster of familiar Beckettian themes, trans-, and poly-, are instrumental in displacing the focus of the representation. The figures of trans-lation in Beckett’s art indicate indeed alternative modes of referentiality that deflect reality to point toward otherworldly ontologies. The polyphonic and polymorphous forms of textuality that make Beckett’s œuvre—what genetic criticism investigates to elucidate Beckett’s art of making—foreground in fact a regime of visibility and audibility and establish the hauntology, another word for figurality, at the core of his bilingual literary production.72 69  Gontarski, S.  E., “Toward a Minoritarian Art,” The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 1–13, 2. 70  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2006), 23. 71  I combine the ‘queer’ and ‘curious’ qualities of Beckett’s writing to coin the word ‘queerious’ in order to illustrate the full significance of the departure from the norm that the author’s literary bilingualism achieves. 72  Audibility and visibility are precisely the two sensory experiences that Beckett underscores in Joyce’s Work in Progress: “the beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone, since its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as on its audibility,” Disjecta, 27–28.

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Pilling, John. Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Beckett and Sade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. ———. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. ———. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2006. Riffaterre, Michael. “L’intertexte inconnu.” Littérature 41 (1981). 4–7. Rockhill, Gabriel and Philip Watts. Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Schmitt, Richard. “Husserl’s Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20, no. 2 (1959). 238–45. Serry, Hervé, and Helena Scott. “A Publishing Decision under Constraint: Samuel Beckett and Le Seuil Publishers in 1947.” Journal of Beckett Studies 21, no. 1 (2012). 65–87. Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. “Performance and Beckett’s ‘Bare Room.’” Journal of Beckett Studies 23, no. 1. (2014). v–xi.

Rêve de transfert collective: Beckett’s Resurgent Unanimist Dream Jean-Michel Rabaté

My point of departure is that rare thing, a text by Beckett that we know existed and then disappeared: his short dissertation in French literature, the thesis on Pierre-Jean Jouve, Jules Romains and Unanimisme that he dashed off in the summer of 1928 in order to get a coveted research prize from Trinity College. Earlier, Professor Thomas B. Rudmose-Brown had introduced his eager star student to French modernism. Rudmose-Brown first made him discover Marcel Proust and André Gide, then Léon-Paul Fargue, and Valery Larbaud, next to canonical authors like Jean Racine, Maurice Scève, and Louise Labé.1 Finally one important and new author 1  See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 65. Hereafter DF.

J.-M. Rabaté (*) Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_5

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was recommended by Rudmose-Brown to his protégé: Pierre-Jean Jouve, who then was reaching some notoriety. Quite surprisingly, Jouve is rarely mentioned in connection with Beckett.2 If Beckett had decided to write on Pierre-Jean Jouve instead of Marcel Proust, we might have a different history of modernism. In the middle twenties, Jouve had changed significantly, elaborating an original blend of Catholic mysticism and psychoanalysis. Rudmose-Brown had also suggested that Beckett read Jules Romains, the founder of Unanimism. With Jouve, he pointed to a more powerful and subtler writer. Indeed, Beckett confided that he had a “passion” for the earlier poems written by Jouve.3 “Earlier” is key here, because Jouve rejected his first poetic period. He even prevented his first collections of poems from being reprinted after his conversion to psychoanalysis and to Catholicism. Beckett appears less inspired by Jules Romains’s dogmatic theses about la vie unanime and the basic tenets of Unanimisme than by the work of Pierre-Jean Jouve that left traces in his first short story. As we will see when comparing “Assumption” with Jouve’s Paulina 1880, I believe that a diffuse Unanimism remained a lasting, even resilient influence, in Beckett’s entire work. It seems that one of Jouve’s prose poems had framed in advance Beckett’s visit to Paris, that two-year academic appointment that led to a later exile. Indeed, Jouve poses crucial questions about the value and purpose of such a stay: Paris 1922. This furious city, low and slimy: is it worth your remaining in it? You who are going to live ten years in it. Around us, like a bad dream, it has sadly remained the same all through the wars. In the city, where will you save yourself? (En elle, où te sauveras-tu?)4

Jouve is punning on the double meaning of “se sauver,” “to save oneself” and “run away”—as Beckett would do with his witty Gallicism “fuck

2  Knowlson is an exception, and he gives a good synthesis of the main tenets of Unanimisme in DF, 86–87. See also Brigitte Le Juez, Beckett Before Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Lectures on French Literature, trans. Ros Schwartz (London: Souvenir Press, 2007), 18. 3  DF, 86 and n634. 4  Pierre Jean-Jouve, Tragiques, suivi du Voyage Sentimental (Paris: Stock, 1922), 202. My translation.

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the field,”5 a literalization of the slang phrase “foutre le camp” (to “beat it”). Here, Jouve’s anguished question heralds the jagged rhythms of Beckett’s departures and returns to the French capital, a city from which he would flee suddenly before returning until he settled there. Rudmose-­ Brown was the implicit addressee of Beckett’s Franco-English pun: “I have not yet said anything to Ruddy about fucking the field,” in which we perceive the guilt Beckett experienced when he renounced the academic career to which he had been destined. “Paris 1922” appears in Tragiques, suivi du Voyage Sentimental published in Paris in 1922. The short poem might have acted as a warning and a portent. Beckett had read two of Jouve’s novels, Le Monde désert and Paulina 1880, both giving torrid accounts of the paradoxical entanglements of erotic love. Indeed, Jouve was one of the French writers Beckett wanted to meet in Paris: “I graduated in ’27 and started doing a thesis on Unanimisme. I met Jouve in Paris when I came here. I was a great admirer of his early works. He occupied a big place in my scrappy work on Unanimisme, which I was supposed to do after leaving Trinity.”6 We don’t know anything about this meeting. Unhappily for the young Beckett, the timing was quite wrong: the year 1928 was the watershed year for Jouve, who, having gone through psychoanalysis, had decided that he would be a new man, a new writer, and that he would repudiate anything he had published before. As he wrote in a later memoir: “I had to change everything, I felt, I had to start everything again. Everything had to be forged again (refondre), as life itself began, in a rigorous isolation; with one single directing principle: invent my own truth.”7 Before the war, Jouve was closely linked with the Unanimist group. He often met with writers and artists who were inspired by the theories of Jules Romains. During the war, he worked as a nurse in a hospital where he fell gravely ill; recuperating in Switzerland, he found another mentor in Romain Roland, and wrote pacifist texts. A major change came from his second wife, the psychoanalyst Blanche Reverchon, who had met Freud and translated him. Jouve was one of the first French writers, next to André Gide, to understand and defend psychoanalysis when French 5  Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 84. Beckett was to resign from Trinity College in January 1932. 6  Beckett, Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, ed. James and Elizabeth Knowlson (New York: Arcade, 2006), 39. 7  Pierre-Jean Jouve, En Miroir (Paris: Mercure de France, 1954), 28. My translation.

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psychiatry rejected it, a position shared by Beckett who later turned to psychoanalysis to analyze his crippling symptoms with Wilfred Bion. Jouve had immersed himself in the literature of Christian mystics and converted to Catholicism. He chose the year 1925 as the starting point for his “authorized” works that began with the poems of Noces and the 1925 novel Paulina 1880. Traces of Beckett’s admiration for Jouve abound in his first short story, “Assumption.” This is most perceptible in the style. Here is a typical excerpt: In the silence of his room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound. He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord. Its struggle for divinity was as real as his own, and as futile. […] By damming the stream of whispers he had raised the level of the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur of the torrent that must destroy him.8

“Assumption” was the first short story published by Beckett; it accompanies his essay on Joyce (“Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce”) in the double issue 16/17 of transition. This was a most visible number that was issued in June 1929; among other exciting features, it contained the collective manifesto proclaiming the “Revolution of the Word.” Here is how Beckett began a productive collaboration with Jolas and his group. However, “Assumption” sounds quite different in tone, evincing a style that clashes with the rest of the avant-gardist texts one finds in this issue. At the same time, it engages in a dialogue with the revolutionary theses of the review. In a typical manner, Beckett begins by foregrounding the protagonist’s difficulty to express himself. The story begins thus: “He could have shouted and could not” (CSP, 3). Beckett’s first foray into prose narrative brings us back to a Romantic topos, the stereotype of an intense sexual climax that kills one of the partners. Poe had treated it in a Gothic manner and Robert Browning had followed suit with his famous “Porphyria’s Lover.” Here, it is the male protagonist who dies at the end, carried away by a storm triggered by the orgasmic scream of his female lover. 8  Samuel Beckett, “Assumption” in The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1989, edited by Stan Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 4–5. Abbreviated as CSP.

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The protagonist is described as a solitary artist who takes refuge in an absolute, meditative silence. Wishing to obtain a creative solitude, he fears the voices of other people that sound too shrill and aggressive. The description of his efforts to withdraw from human society combines ironical allusions to Robert Browning and Unanimisme: “Just as the creative artist must be partly illusionist, our whispering prestidigitator was partly artist. A member of the Browning Society would say that he played on the souls of men as on an instrument; a unanimist, that he imposed his personality on a group” (CSP, 4). This sounds all the more ironical as the protagonist keeps shying away from any group. The silence created by the artist exceeds the initial aim of being “an amused experiment in applied psychology” (CSP, 4). However, such a silence is not produced by sleep, beatitude or simple quietude; it is conflicted, anxious, replete with feelings of dread and horror. The young man barely leaves his room in an effort to achieve a paradoxical unity of sound and soundlessness. He is aware that sooner or later a scream will be heard, and that this will undo all his efforts: “In the silence of his room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound. He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord” (CSP, 4). In fact, he is waiting for the “torrent that must destroy him,” which arrives when “the Woman came to him” (CSP, 5). Sexuality and repression, society and withdrawal, nights filled with nightmares, we recognize many of the symptoms Beckett was to complain of later when in psychoanalysis with Bion. What Beckett owed to Jouve was the awareness of the destructive power of sexuality. He had no idea how to harness its potential, but he would follow the same course a few years later by resorting to psychoanalysis. In “Assumption,” the capitalized “Woman” is both antagonist and desired object. She appears as a ghost or ghoul, her description heaps up details that call up a vampire. But she keeps returning every evening, and this loosens “yet another stone in the clumsy dam” (CSP, 6) he has erected. What cannot be construed other than ecstasy after having had wild sex is presented as loathsome and terrifying. Here is the ending of the story: Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment.

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Then it happened. While the woman was contemplating the face she had overlaid with death, she was swept aside by a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea. They found her caressing his wild dead air. (CSP, 6–7)

The woman’s lovemaking is perversely intent upon destruction; the Artist who is aware of this perversely becomes an accomplice in his lethal dissolution. Sex literalizes here the concept of a “petite mort,” an orgasmic little death acquiring cosmic proportions. Hence the irony of the title, for an “assumption,” which is usually understood as the miraculous lifting of a dead person taken up to the heavens by angels, and mostly reserved for feminine characters like Holy Mary, applies here to a literal death of the artist, which can call up Flaubert’s notion of an Author who vanishes by becoming impersonal. Suggesting something like a Joycean Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Young Man, Beckett tries to get rid of a concept of impersonality that modernist poets like Eliot were using to return to neo-­ Classicism. If one pits the abstractions of the Artist and the Woman against each other, of course, Woman has to win. The image of a scream à la Munch, an artist Beckett was familiar with, leaves us with an elemental fury unleashed as the “scream of nature,” which had been Munch’s original title, a far cry from the vision of an “endless verbal germination, maturation, putrefaction” (Disjecta, 29) presented as model in the critical essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress that accompanied “Assumption” in transition 16–17. However it is crucial to note that the ending does not tell us who the originator of the fateful scream is: it cannot be the Woman, for she is “swept aside” by it; moreover, it cannot exactly be the Artist: even if the scream came from his mouth, his own ego seems to have no share in its utterance. A systematic treatment of the fin-de-siècle or post-symboliste “Romantic Agony” was provided by another book that Beckett was to read closely, Mario Praz’s La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. It was published one year later in 1930, and Beckett would plunder it in his Dream notebook. Praz gave names to this lethal Lady like La Belle Dame sans Merci, the Eternal Feminine, Walter Pater’s Fatal Woman, the Lady of the Rocks, Tannhäuser’s Venus, Swinburne’s flagellating idols of perversity. At the same time, this deliquescent fiction of a terminal scene of lovemaking keeps a link with the attack on Rebecca West that we find in

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the middle of “Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce.” Beckett takes sides with the “dozen incredulous Joshuas,” those 12 Apostles of the gospel of experimentalism contributing to the “exagmination” of Joyce’s work. These apostles or disciples are presented as “springing their tuning-forks lightly against finger-nails that have not yet been refined out of existence.”9 Joyce would have survived and resisted the insinuation that he should be “refined out of existence,” as he believed earlier in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”10 “Assumption” would thus offer a sarcastic commentary on the artist’s godlike impersonality: the disappearance of the Author can only be achieved if he is sent up (in all the meanings of the phrase) in an erotic climax. Beckett seems to have anticipated the issue occupying Roland Barthes in 1967, when the latter saw the “death of the author” as indispensable to bringing about the “birth of the reader,” but treated it as an orgasmic apotheosis, a paroxysm calling up chronicles of sexual passion going beyond death, like the notorious 1976 film by Nagisa Ō shima, In the Realm of the Senses. Of course, in 1929, Beckett could only imagine the woman fondling a lock of hair, but it is not that far from the severed penis that the appositely named Sada Abe clutches at the end of the movie. Beckett needed a similarly bloody Mary as a counterpart for the Apostles who, it was said, were present to witness her official “Assumption.” The fact that the adjective “unanimist” is slipped in, albeit humorously, in the story should provide a key: it accounts for its mannered and hyperbolic style. This ending betrays echoes of Jouve’s impassioned prose, which blended mysticism and eroticism. One could compare Beckett’s final paragraphs with a passage from Paulina 1880, in which we see how Paulina, who used to have sex with the married Count Michele Cantarini but also felt overwhelmed by guilt over the sin of sexuality, finally finds herself free to enjoy lovemaking because the count’s wife has died. Then Paulina indulges her sexual urges but remains convinced that she has been damned anyway:

9  Samuel Beckett, “Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce,” in Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), p. 27. 10  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 2013), 215.

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Paulina surrendered to the new love with the ardor of a demon. My perdition. My perdition. Don’t speak any more. Don’t speak any more. Because we are going to die. She prayed endlessly. She prayed above and beyond. No more unity, no hope for unity. An eternal rending. Life as the hurricane of perdition. Now: my last moments. Branches broken off, roads torn up, houses in ruins, Christ felled athwart the ground. Strike once more, and with the same hand bestow a terrible joy, dear God. Don’t leave me a second deprived of fury and ordeal. I’m not tired of suffering. Still some parts of my being have not exploded under the pain. … Let your executioner strike, and strike, and strike!11

Here is how Jouve conveys the whirl of emotions leading Paulina to her fateful decision: she decides that she must shoot her lover with a gun that she buys; she hopes that the murder will destroy the temptation to which her wounded flesh keeps yielding. Beckett has remained faithful to this rhetoric of pain and passion in his first story, which is why its tone and style feel at odds with the linguistic experimentalism of the review that carried it—transition. I would moreover suggest that Unanimisme, understood as a literary movement, a sensibility, and a way of writing, provided more than a short-lived stylistic influence on Beckett. The fundamental tenet of Unanimism was that individuals could not be abstracted from the group; energy vibrates more intensely when condensed in a crowd. Beckett was well acquainted with the poetry of Unanimisme. He owned the first volume of the Anthology of French poetry, Robert de la Vaissière’s Anthologie poétique du XXème siècle from 1923. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon give us the list of poems marked with a vertical line in pencil, which means that they interested Beckett.12 Out of the 20 authors that Beckett distinguishes in the abundant selection, four were viewed as having been unanimist at the time: Roger Allard, René Bizet, Georges Duhamel, and Luc Durtain. The best known today is Duhamel, who in “Ode to a Few Men” (Ode à quelques hommes) takes on a Whitmanian ring to sound a typical unanimist theme. Duhamel identifies his new life in Paris, away from the lyrical images of his childhood in the countryside, as a deliberate choice: he knows that he want to be welcome by those whom he calls his 11  Pierre-Jean Jouve, Paulina 1880, translated by Rosette Letellier and Robert Bullen (Evanston: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 1995), 163. Translation modified; Pierre-­ Jean Jouve, Paulina 1880 (Paris, Mercure de France: 1959), 231. 12  Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon (eds.), Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76.

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“companions,” whose intermingled lives he intends to share. Here is the site elected by a specifically modern romanticism one finds throughout Unanimisme. Big cities become the only places where a poetic epiphany can happen. Human fraternity on a larger scale replaces the lyricism of fields, hills, dales, valleys, and little villages. Beckett also highlights the remarkable poem by Durtain, “A Harbor” (Un port), in which we move from a superb imagist evocation of the masts of boats, the sailors and dockers busy around them, to an exalted praise of human collectivity: Par ici comme il y a de l’homme, bon dieu ! Comme il y a de l’homme par le monde, comme il y a de l’homme!13 Around here, what a quantity of humanity, my god! How many men there are in the world, how much humanity there is!

Beckett had not underlined but read poems by two other unanimistes, René Arcos and Georges Chennevière.14 They are both forgotten today, which is a pity—there is a lot to gain from a reading of their poems that stress the factor of human fraternity in spite of the artist’s solitude. There is a secret: to see all things as other people endowed with a soul. As Chennevière puts it in “Preface,” one of the poems in the 1923 anthology: See, a soul is here and remains with you, The world inflates each object, You are not alone. You know the force that animates And the secret that transfigures, You are the master.15

Unhappily, Beckett did not keep the second volume of Robert de La Vaissière’s anthology in which poets like Jouve, Romains, and Vildrac were gathered. Nevertheless, one cannot observe a real influence of these 13  Luc Durtain, “Un port,” Anthologie poétique du XXème siècle, ed. R. de La Vaissière, vol. I (Paris: Crès, 1923), 147. 14  Knowlson mentions that Beckett had read poems by Georges Chennevière, who had written an influential treatise on versification with Jules Romains, Petit Traité de Versification (Paris: Gallimard, 1924). See DF, 86. 15  Georges Chennevière, “Préface,” in Anthologie poétique du XXème siècle, vol. I, 78. My translation.

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texts on the poems that Beckett wrote in English during the twenties. The impact of Joyce and other avant-gardistes was too strong. My guess is that these earlier literary frequentations were reactivated only when Beckett began writing in French, first in the poems of the thirties, then in the short stories written just after WWII. One of these poems, entitled “Ascension,” keeping a distant echo of “Assumption,” begins with a typically unanimist theme: woken up from his isolation, the poet overhears the neighbors, and the distant hum generated by sport fans watching a soccer game, either in a stadium or on the radio, is compared with a religious ceremony: Ascension à travers la mince cloison ce jour où un enfant prodigue à sa façon rentra dans sa famille j’entends la voix elle est émue elle commente la coupe du monde de football toujours trop jeune en même temps par la fenêtre ouverte par les airs tout court sourdement la houle des fidèles

Ascension through the thin partition the day when the prodigal child prodigal in a specific manner came back to the family I hear the voice it is emotional it discusses the football World Cup always too young at the same time through the open window through the air wafting

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in a low murmur the swell of the faithful16

One of the recurrent motifs of unanimist writers was to shift the locus of lyricism from Nature to collective life in big cities. They extolled the power of human beings to create new energy by a qualitative jump, or rather by postulating a transformation of the quantitative into the qualitative. It would even be enough to add individual energies with people who in themselves were totally unremarkable: their “souls” would be multiplied and attain the highest creative force. One sees this in the first novel written by the founder of Unanimisme, Jules Romains’s Mort de quelqu’un, a book that Beckett had read and appreciated as a student. Romains’s modernist novel, The Death of a Nobody (1911) attempts to give a shape to his unanimiste program. Romains took as his anti-hero the most common and banal person—a man who had no story to tell, because nothing ever happened to him. The story begins very much like the story narrated by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, his ironical “Parable of the plums,” in which we follow two old maids who want to get a view of Dublin by climbing up Nelson’s pillar. They get giddy from the heights, focus on eating their plums, and spit out the stones between the railings.17 Jacques Godard, a widower and pensioned retiree for the last five years, lives alone and very isolated in Paris. One day on an impulse he decides to visit the Panthéon. He climbs up to the top of the building, looks at the sights and is astonished by the size and complexity of Paris. After a while, he manages to discern the roof of the building in which he lives near Ménilmontant. Suddenly, this vision brings a belated illumination: Godard grasps that he has not really been alive all these years! How many things had followed the windings of those streets, driven and directed by how many different forces! What criss-crossing of interests and relationships, just like the iron trusses reinforcing a block of concrete! And nothing of all this life had ever passed the threshold of his little widower’s flat! “I never go out. I never amuse myself. I don’t exist!”18 16  Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems, ed. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (London: Faber, 2012), 94. 17  James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. H. W. Gabler (New York, Random House, 1986), 119–122. 18  Jules Romains, The Death of a Nobody, translated by Desmond McCarthy and Sydney Waterlow (New York: Huebsch, 1914), 3. Hereafter, DN.

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Aware of all that he has missed in his most banal life as a locomotive driver, he realizes that not only he does not count for any of those people, but that it would make absolutely no difference if he died. Gazing at Paris, he must conclude that he is nobody. However, this is the very premise that the novel aims at debunking. To understand this, Godard has to die, which he does very soon: having caught a cold on top of the Panthéon, he feels sick for one week and dies alone of pleurisy. His inert body is discovered by the concierge, who passes the news to all those he meets. Romains is intent upon showing that subjective death is not an ending but a beginning. If Godard has indeed died on page 12, he begins to live on in other people’s memories from that point on. His ghostly aftermath spreads from his neighbors, his parents still alive in their village, their small community, and then the Parisians or passersby who know nothing about him. The banal death of an anonymous citizen ends up releasing collective forces, finally bringing about a non-religious ecstasy or transfiguration. For Romains, events exist only if they are experienced collectively: once they are shared by a group, they take on a life of their own. Godard, who is a retired pensioner from the French railway system, had been a model worker and an insignificant widower who had lost touch with his village in Auvergne, and never visited his by now very old parents. It is his solitary death, paradoxically, that breaks his solitude. A new conviviality emerges, people chat in the landings, and new groups are being formed: “But now the house fermented. From Godard’s body had escaped, with his last sigh, an energy of which the house had need. People who met between the landings were careful to salute each other” (DN, 22). There is no idealization of the way these neighbors chat and feel sorry. Here is a revealing snatch of dialogue in which two women insist that Godard has died alone: Like an animal! Yes, like an animal. I don’t call that passing away! No, indeed, I call it rotting away! (DN, 23)

Romains knows that there is a bit of schadenfreude in this renewed conviviality: “The inhabitants of the house enjoyed lingering in groups on the landings. They pounced upon this death with a joy they would not admit to” (DN, 23).

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This calls up the strange mixture of compassion and exhilaration that seizes Celia in Murphy after the Old Boy, a retired butler and fellow lodger who used to pace up and down the floor in the room above her, has committed suicide. The silence to which she had not been accustomed generates a curious sense of bliss and oblivion: Now the silence above was a different silence, no longer strangled. The silence not of vacuum but of plenum, not of breath taken away but of quiet air. The sky. She closed her eyes and was in her mind with Murphy, Mr. Kelly, clients, her parents, others, herself a girl, a child, an infant. In the cell of her mind, teasing the oakum of her history. Then it was finished, the days and places and things and people were untwisted and scattered, she was lying down, she had no history.19

Celia has exchanged places with Murphy and imitates him, rocking naked in his rocking chair, spurred along by the death of this neighbor, retrieving a “paradisial innocence” from which no-one, not even Murphy, can expel her. In Romains’s novel, the evolution is more progressive. Once all the neighbors learn about Godard’s solitary death, they pool some money for a funeral crown. A very old father arrives in Paris to attend his son’s funeral. A study in banality turns into an investigation of the dynamics of the social world. This culminates with the funeral; at one point, the little group reaches an avenue in which the police and trade-union strikers are fighting. They observe a truce as all salute the procession. When the mourners go into the chapel, the dead man assumes the proportions of a vital force: “The dead man was now so great that he needed no one any longer. To think of him was not to do an act of charity but to yield to a force. He gathered himself together and was created anew. He was the master” (DN, 122). The presence of a crowd reassures the priest who was doubting his vocation! The “nobody” becomes one with the group. The mass expresses Life as such. Romains evokes a material soul dissolving and reconstituted, moving in eddies until it creates a collective spirit: Like a whirlwind shut in by the walls of a ravine, the dead man swirled round and round within the boundaries of the chapel, while the little seated congregation was gripped in a kind of frenzy of parturition, with organ music as the voice of its vagitus. … The movement was so violent that it could almost  Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 148–149.

19

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be seen. Beneath the friction of the whirlwind, the air was sizzling and smoke streamed up the centre of the chapel as from an overheated axle.20

Romains’s dominant theme is that human community condenses the essence of Life. Individuals find strength in this awareness if they can only merge with the collective spirit now and then. Moments of group ecstasy allow people to blend with a continuous life. Personal tragedies, collective catastrophes or social movements all lead to such a realization. We see these insights gathered in Romains’s theoretical essay A Manual of Deification. Romains states that one should look for unconscious forms of unanimist life in streets, squares and monuments. New forms of life appear all the time in cafés, restaurants, libraries, theaters, churches. The function of literature is to bring this collective mind to a superior stage of self-­ awareness, but this can be relayed by political action. A political awakening starts if a human group becomes conscious of its collective life; the point is to have the others share this enlightened consciousness. It seems clear that such a dogma is parodied when Unanimism turns into a funny “concentrisme” in Beckett’s spoof. The invented writer Jean du Chas has allegedly launched a movement called “Concentrisme”: the coining astutely links the theme of a “concentration” of energy with the recurrent egocentrism betrayed by Romains. Beckett feminizes the movement, since “chas” is also the name for the female sexual organ, which is once more suggested by the slang word of “con” (cunt). A metonymic sliding from con to concierge by way of cierge (church candle) may account for Jean du Chas’s fascination for “concierges,” a fascination that he shares with the dying and delirious Descartes of “Whoroscope.”21 Beckett evokes an empty life that resembles those of the “nobodies” described by Romains and his friends: Cette vie, telle qu’elle se dégage, vide et fragmentaire, de l’unique source disponible, son Journal, est une de ces vies horizontales, sans sommet, tout en longueur, un phénomène de mouvement, sans possibilité d’accélération ni de ralentissement, déclenché, sans être inauguré, par l’accident d’une naissance, terminé, sans être conclu, par l’accident d’une mort.22

 The Death of a Nobody, 123–124. Translation modified.  See CP, 42. 22   Samuel Beckett, “Le Concentrisme,” in Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), 38. Translation mine. 20 21

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This life, as it can be gathered, empty and fragmentary as it is, from the single available source, his Diary, is one of those horizontal lives, without any summit, flat and pure lateral movement, no possibility of acceleration or slowing down, triggered without being inaugurated by the accident of a birth, and ended, without being concluded, by the accident of a death.

Like du Chas, like Christ, and perhaps like Godot, Godard’s immortality is achieved because he has died in a social context that monumentalizes whatever remains of him. The collective spirit appropriates his insignificant death in order to forge the unity of social cohesion. All this is true of du Chas whose innate banality does not prevent him from absorbing the verbal productions of the avant-garde. This is why his Nachlass, those scraps of philosophical remarks he has left, consists of quotes from the fake proverbs invented by the Surrealist poets Benjamin Péret and Paul Eluard, as Bernard-Olivier Posse has shown.23 The maxims that are reproduced by the anonymous editor of du Chas’s works, like “et il faut battre sa mère pendant qu’elle est jeune” (“one must beat up one’s mother when she is young,” a parody of “il faut battre le fer tant qu’il est chaud”) and “mourir quand il n’est plus temps” (to die when there is no more time, a parody of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “mourir au temps voulu,” or “to die at the right time”) all come from the slim publication of 28 pages, the 152 proverbes mis au gout du jour.24 It was fitting that Beckett should use Péret and Eluard without quoting them: they were working on proverbs, sentences without any author or originator, the direct expression of a collective spirit. If du Chas is fascinated by concierges, he betrays another unanimist feature: French concierges had one main social function, spreading rumors. However, this possibility appears to be negated by the sentence that states: “De vie sociale, pas une trace,”25 “No trace of any social life.” In fact, the idea is qualified, modified by a further precision:

23  Bernard-Olivier Posse, “Le Principe Citationnel dans la première oeuvre de Beckett,” Samuel Beckett, n.7, Samuel Beckett, un écrivain de l’abstraction, edited by Llewellyn Brown (Paris: Minard, 2020), 49. See Disjecta, 38, for these same proverbs attributed to du Chas. Curiously, Beckett does not quote proverb number 33, “La concierge pique à la machine,” which may explain the theme of concierges. 24  Benjamin Péret and Paul Eluard, 152 proverbes mis au gout du jour (Paris: La Révolution Surréaliste, 1925). 25  Disjecta, 38.

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De sorte que du Chas avait une vie sociale comme vous avez une vie centripète, à savoir, inconsciemment et indifféremment, ce qui équivaut à dire qu’il en était exempt, car l’indifférence et l’inconscience ne cadrent guère avec la tradition sacrosainte de la cave et la peur et l’ignorance et la solidarité crispée sous le tonnerre. Excluant et exclu, il traverse l’élément social sans le juger.26 So that du Chas had a social life the way you have a centripetal life, which means unconsciously and indifferently, which is tantamount to say that he was exempt from it, for indifference and unconsciousness do not fit with the saintly tradition of the cave, with fear and ignorance and transfixed solidarity under the thunder. Excluding and excluded, he traverses the social element without judging it.

In this facetious rendering of the Unanimiste program, we see the same indifference to values accompanying a pure enjoyment in collective life as such. This is the main function of a group for the Unanimistes (which is why some critical readers had objected that there was a danger of populism, if not of fascism, in Romains’s formulations). The immediate pleasure taken in participating in a collective ethos was supposed to be self-sufficient. Here it is contrasted with Giambattista Vico’s picture of the origins of civilization, with his primitive giants huddling together in a cave, afraid of the thunder that they took for the voice of a terrifying father-god. From Romains’s first novel Beckett learned a great lesson in narrative technique: it is not necessary for a story to stop with the death of the hero. Any hero can continue being very much alive in the story after his death. We see this in Murphy, a novel in which two chapters follow after the demise of the eponymous hero, and even more in the short story “Echo’s Bones,” which begins by introducing a dead character, the ghost of Belacqua who seems very much alive. The text begins in a memorable manner: “The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck.”27 This insight also sketched the program for a narrative that revolves around the endlessly announced death of the narrator which appears quite obviously in Malone Dies. The postulation that a certain unanimist life could be grasped by an effort of the mind remained present in Beckett, and was never negated in  Ibid., 38–39.  Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones, edited by Mark Nixon (London: Faber, 2014), 3.

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the name of the individualism that most of his characters exhibit. It may sound counter-intuitive to claim that Beckett was marked by Unanimisme, a literary movement whose doctrine was that the individual must dissolve in the crowd, given the numerous instances of quasi-solipsist narrators in his fiction. However, if we consider later works like How It Is, The Lost Ones, or Quad, the principle of multiplicity reappears: the serial mourners moving up and down in the cylinder, the almost infinite numbers of torturers and victims crawling in the mud, the anonymous dancers who avoid a central square, all testify to the resilience of an opposite principle, the insight that life is experienced more fully when stylized as a collective gesture than stemming from individual subjectivity. I’ll limit myself to How It Is, because it is in the third part of the novel that the clash between group mentality and the isolation of the author appears most visibly. The first two parts focus on the relationship between the narrator and Pim. The third marks the ending of that relationship and the discovery that they are not unique but caught up in an endless multiplication. The panting voice realizes that it is not a single voice but one among many others: “quaqua the voice of us all who all all those here before me and to come alone in this wallow or glued together all the Pims tormentors.”28 A few pages later, a series of numbers are proposed to quantify this multitude: “at the instant I reach Pim another reaches Bem we are regulated thus our justice wills it thus fifty thousand couples again at the same instant the same everywhere” (HIT, 112). The numbers vary enormously from a hundred thousand (HIT, 112) to millions: “millions millions there are millions of us and there are three” (HIT, 114), from “499997 abandoned” (HIT, 114) to “999999” (HIT, 117) or “814326 to 814345” (HIT, 119). There is then a sort of vertigo of counting that generates sudden spurts of utterances that end up baffled, stymied, abortive, ending each time in an inconclusive clash between a single principle of justice and seemingly haphazard series of people: so neither four nor a million nor ten million nor twenty million nor any finite number even or uneven however great because of our justice which wills that not one were we fifty million not a single one among us be wronged not one deprived of tormentor as number 1 would not be not one deprived of victim as number 50000000 would be assuming this latter at the  Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 107–108. Hereafter HIT.

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head of the procession which wends as we have seen from left to right or if you prefer from west to east (HIT, 123)

We can be reminded of the funeral procession wending its way through Paris in Death of a Nobody. At the end of the novel, an unnamed young man meditates on the dead man now safely buried (and perhaps living on), foreseeing his own impending death that corresponds with the end of the narrative, his death as another “nobody.” This is more or less what seems to take place at the end of How It Is, at a moment when the narrator renounces to count: “in other words in simple words I quote on either I am alone and no further problems or else we are innumerable and no further problem either” (HIT, 124). In a draft in French, Beckett calls this endless procession moving from West to East a “dream of collective transference” (rêve de transfert collective [sic]).29 Here lies the last trace of the Unanimiste dream, against which the assertion of the solitude of the narrator appears all the more poignant and desperate. A Unanimiste logic of the collective mind and body attacks the pre-Copernican anthropocentrism that Beckett always debunked mercilessly. Following a parallel evolution, Jouve had refined the rhetoric of Romains’s universalism, which was his way of giving a creative response to the mass slaughter of the trenches of WWI. Beckett who could find solace neither in Christian existentialism nor in psychoanalysis, would have to refine his Dantean sadism. The novel’s conclusion confesses its fictional status (“all balls” HIT, 144 and 145) without destroying the dynamic tension between the collective fantasy of a voice made up of the other voices and the reality of a single panting suddenly turning into a scream. Although the tone is very different, we are not so far from the dilemma of “Assumption.” The narrator of How It Is cancels his previous calculations about the quasi infinite numbers of the travelers, torturers, and victims. He sees the absurdity of postulating an unfair divine Justice organizing these endless and sickening tortures. If all derives from the panting of a single subject lying down in the dark and telling himself weird stories in order not to panic facing ineluctable death and solitude, we just glimpse, as we do in most of Beckett’s poems, the uncovering of the infinite, to quote Alain 29  Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, “Appendice de Comment C’est, troisième partie,” in Samuel Beckett, Comment C’est/How It Is /Et L’image, A critical-genetic edition, edited by Edouard Magessa O’Reilly (New York: Routledge, 2001), 587.

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Badiou’s spirited reading in The Immanence of Truths.30 We no sooner glimpse it than it is lost or “re-covered.” Dante’s Hell remains as the other version of the unanimiste utopia of universal fraternity. This hell confesses to its “unreason,” which is the site chosen by Beckett quite early for his work, the “enfer d’irraison d’où s’élève le cri à blanc, la série de questions pures, l’oeuvre.”31 Here is the minimal ontology chosen by Beckett. It would prove relevant and resilient later when he would have to cope with the scandalous news of the death camps and the moral absurdity of modern wars. Then the question is not justice but survival. An inverted Unanimisme would provide the background, the inverted dream companion, the dark mirror of Beckett’s relentless exploration of what it means to be writing at all. If no one is truly alone when writing, no writing subject can be assured of being alive or dead in that process.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. The Immanence of Truths. Translated by Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Beckett, Samuel. The Collected Poems. Ed. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling. London: Faber, 2012. ———. The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1989. Ed. Stanley Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. ———. Disjecta. London: Calder, 1983. ———. Echo’s Bones. Ed. Mark Nixon. London: Faber, 2014. ———. How It Is. New York: Grove Press, 1964. ———. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957. Chennevière, Georges and Jules Romains, Petit Traité de Versification. Paris: Gallimnard, 1924. Durtain, Luc. Anthologie Poétique du XXème siècle Vol. 1. Ed. R. de La Vaissière. Paris: Crès, 1923. Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Lois More Overbeck (eds.). The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Jean-Jouve, Pierre. En Miroir. Paris: Mercure de France, 1954. ———. Paulina 1880. Paris, Mercure de France: 1959.

30  See Alain Badiou, The Immanence of Truths, translated by Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard, London, Bloomsbury, 2022, 193–210. 31  Samuel Beckett, “Les deux besoins,” Disjecta, 56. I translate: “… the hell of unreason from which the white-hot scream rises, the series of pure questions, the work.” A whole essay could be devoted to the sequence of these enigmatic words.

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———. Paulina 1880. Trans. Rosette Letellier and Robert Bullen. Evanston: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 1995. ———. Tragiques, suivi du Voyage Sentimental. Paris: Stock, 1922. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin, 2013. ———. Ulysses. Ed. H. W. Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ———. with Elizabeth Knowlson (eds.). Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett. New York: Arcade, 2006. Le Juez, Brigitte. Beckett Before Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Lectures on French Literature. Trans. Ros Schwartz. London: Souvenir Press, 2007. Nixon, Mark and Dirk Van Hulle (eds.). Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. O’Reilly, Edouard Magessa (ed.). Comment C’est/How It Is /Et L’image, A critical-­genetic edition. New York: Routledge, 2001. Péret, Benjamin and Paul Eluard. 152 proverbes mis au gout du jour. Paris: La Révolution Surréaliste, 1925. Posse, Bernard-Olivier. “Le Principe Citationnel dans la première oeuvre de Beckett.” In Samuel Beckett, no. 7, Samuel Beckett, un écrivain de l’abstraction. Ed. Llewellyn Brown. Paris: Minard, 2020. Romains, Jules. The Death of a Nobody. Trans. Desmond McCarthy and Sydney Waterlow. New York: Huebsch, 1914.

Beckett’s Unwarranted Miracles: Pascal, Geulincx, Kleist Gabriel Quigley

In his speech presenting Samuel Beckett with the Nobel Prize for Literature, Karl Ragnar Gierow emphasizes the positive imprint left behind by Beckettian negativity: “degradation of humanity is a recurrent theme in Beckett’s writing and to this extent, his philosophy, simply accentuated by elements of the grotesque and of tragic farce, can be described as a negativism that cannot desist from descending to the depths. To the depths it must go because it is only there that pessimistic thought and poetry can work their miracles.”1 Gierow’s description of Beckett’s “negativism” evokes Theodor Adorno’s view that Beckett’s works insist on the freedom 1  Karl Ragnar Gierow, “Samuel Beckett,” in Nobel Lectures: Literature 1968–1980, Tore Frangsmyr and Sture Allen, eds. (London: World Scientific, 1993), 19–21, 20.

G. Quigley (*) Department of Comparative Literature, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_6

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of the object, redemption, and utopia by displaying the ubiquity of unfreedom, impossibility, and inhumanity in a post-Auschwitz world. This view has become customary in Beckett criticism, which interprets his representations of impotence, ignorance, and weakness as negative affirmations of a better world to come. While Beckett’s works certainly testify to suffering—as some of his earliest writing indicates, notably his essay on the 1944 destruction of Saint-Lô entitled “The Capital of the Ruins”—this interpretation overlooks the affirmative dimension of Beckett’s writings, or what we could describe as Beckett’s “positivism.” In this chapter, I would like to introduce a reading of Beckett that runs counter to traditional interpretations: a Beckett who affirms the wonder, awe, and stupefaction yielded by simply being in the world, or to use another term from Gierow’s speech, a Beckett who says yes to the miracle. To explore this side of Beckett, I will focus on the obscured but constant principle of what I describe as a paradigm of “minor event” in Beckett’s works, one that extends from his earliest writings on Marcel Proust to his later engagement with Heinrich von Kleist: the occasion. This notion of “the occasion” comes from the seventeenth-century philosopher Arnold Geulincx, whose philosophy of Occasionalism obsessed Beckett during the 1930s and resurfaces throughout Beckett’s literary works, critical essays, and correspondence. For Geulincx, every single occurrence takes place as a miraculous intervention by God. Every occurrence is thus an “occasion” for God’s omnipotence, such that the world is comprised of infinitesimally microscopic, radically contingent, and constant miracles. Critics have discussed Geulincx’s role in the shaping of Beckett’s aesthetics of impotence, inability, and ignorance. But these studies either identify Geulincx as a fleeting reference in Beckett’s corpus, or have referred to Geulincx’s ethics as the inspiration for Beckett’s negativity. I propose a different interpretation of the role of the occasion in Beckett’s works that hinges on its connections to Pascal and Kleist, and which draws attention to a Beckett who affirms the “the contingencies of the contingent world.”2 By genealogizing Beckett’s engagement with the concept of the occasion, I show how its obscured significance extends beyond Beckett’s encounter with Geulincx. Additionally, I argue that, for Beckett, the occasion means that the world is not only the arena for our finitude—it is also a site of constant potentiality, one lit up by the miraculousness of the most ordinary occurrences. 2

 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove, 1970), 168.

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I begin by situating Beckett’s discussions of miracles and subjectivity in Proust (1930) within the context of Pascal’s discussions of miracles in the Pensées (1669), which provided Beckett with a paradigm for conceiving the limitations of both causality and the human will. This interest in the Pascalian miracle is at the foundations of Beckett’s subsequent obsession with the philosophy of Arnold Geulincx, according to whom every moment is a miracle. Through a close reading of How It Is (1964) alongside Beckett’s Philosophy Notes, I draw attention to Beckett’s splicing of the Pascalian miracle with the Geulingian occasion, while also showing how Beckett employs the paradigm of the occasion as the justification for everyday wonder. Beckett’s interest in this positive dimension of Geulincx’s philosophy, which is often neglected by critics in favor of Geulincx’s emphasis on human finitude, leads to Beckett’s later fascination with the notion of grace that Kleist discusses in his essay, Über das Marionettentheater. Although critics have commented on this continuity between Geulincx and Kleist, I show how this connection demonstrates that Beckett affirms impotence, ignorance, and involuntariness as the correlative conditions of inhabiting a Geulingian cosmos filled with wonder. This correlation is most apparent in his later art criticism, in which he posits an ethics of stupefaction. From the “magic” of involuntary memory, to the amazement yielded by the simple act of shifting a tin of sardines from one hand to the other, to the marionette’s uncanny grace, Beckett shows how the world is a constant site of potentiality in which even the most ordinary moments are events.

Pascal, Miracle In his burlesque of biographical criticism entitled “Concentrism” (1930), Samuel Beckett describes the fictitious aesthete Jean du Chas as someone who suffered from obstructive “crises of negation” in his youth. As du Chas puts it in his journal, “here I am all grown up, and despite myself and despite everything […] these unwarranted miracles [miracles immotivés] are not at all to my taste.”3 Du Chas’ notion of an “unwarranted miracle” that takes place “despite [one]self” echoes Beckett’s description of involuntary memory in the monograph on Marcel Proust that he had written only a few months earlier. Here, Beckett describes involuntary memory as “an unruly magician [who] will not be importuned. It chooses its own 3

 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 2001), 37. Translation mine.

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time and place for the performance of its miracle.”4 He returns to this description throughout the monograph, claiming in another passage that Marcel’s involuntary memory of his grandmother yields “miraculous relief and clarity that no effort of deliberate rememoration can impart or restore.”5 In a later section, Beckett describes Marcel’s involuntary memory of the Baptistry of San Marco, which takes place while Marcel is crossing the Geurmantes’ courtyard, as “the miracle of the courtyard.”6 Involuntary memory is thus purely “accidental,” as Beckett emphasizes by stating, “if by accident, and given favourable circumstances […] if by some miracle of analogy the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication […] then the total past sensation […] comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion.”7 This identification of involuntary memory with a “miracle of analogy” emphasizes both the distance between “past sensation” and “immediate stimulus” and their contingent correspondence. In each of these passages, Beckett refers to types of occurrences that take place on their own, unwilled and uncaused, as “miracles.” Beckett also refers to miracles in a passage on the topic of desire, in which he emphasizes that desire happens during miraculous coincidences between the subject’s desire and the object’s desirability: what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire […] even suppose that by one of those rare miracles of coincidence, when the calendar of facts runs parallel to the calendar of feelings, realisation takes place, that the object of desire (in the strictest sense of that malady) is achieved by the subject, then the congruence is so perfect, the time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration.8

Beckett’s theory of desire as something voided of volitional content is illustrated throughout his works, which are filled with characters who desire things without knowing why—from Molloy, who feels an unexplained need to return to his mother’s home, to the narrator of First Love, who utters the fatalistic maxim after leaving his lover, “you either love or  Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove, 1978), 20–1.  Ibid., 29. 6  Ibid., 53. 7  Proust, 54. 8  Ibid., 3–4. 4 5

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you don’t.”9 But crucially for Beckett, the fact that desire amounts to a “miracl[e] of coincidence” attests to the fact that “the subject has died– and perhaps many times–on the way.”10 This principle reappears in his essay “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), which he wrote shortly after the publication of Proust. He begins his essay by announcing the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object. The thermolaters–and they pullulate in Ireland– adoring the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjurable and unchangeable, never at a loss to know when they are in the Presence, would no doubt like this amended to breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing–rupture of the lines of communication.11

The link between the “death of the subject” in Proust–yielded by the fact that the agency of the subject is restrained by involuntary memory and desire–and “the breakdown of the object/subject” in “Recent Irish Poetry” illustrates the significance that Beckett attributed to the miracle. For Beckett, a miracle happens precisely beyond, against, and despite the faculties attached to subjectivity, such as remembering, thinking, and desiring. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle point out that Beckett’s library contained a copy of the Pensées de B. Pascal (Edition de 1670), first published by Ernest Flammarion in 1913 […] the 1670 edition of the Pensées, mentioned between brackets on the title page, is the so-called Port-Royal version. In the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, Beckett extracted mainly passages from the following chapters: ‘Des Juifs’, ‘De Jésus-Christ’, ‘Preuves de Jésus-Christ’, ‘Grandeur de l’homme’, ‘Réflexions sur la géometrie’.12

As Anthony Cordingley observes, Beckett’s edition of Pascal’s Pensées is unique because of its inclusion of a biographical “Notice sur Blaise Pascal” that discusses various events in the writer’s life.13 One of these events is the  Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove, 2007), 36.  Proust, 3. 11  Disjecta, 70. 12  Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle (eds.), Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 130. 13  Anthony Cordingley, “Beckett’s Ignorance: Miracles/Memory, Pascal/Proust,” Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 33, No. 4 (2010). 9

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near-death experience that took place in 1648 when his carriage nearly fell into the Seine, a moment that Pascal reputedly described as a miracle leading to his “first conversion” to Jansenism, prior to the “second conversion” of the “night of fire” recounted in “Mémorial.” But the notice also mentions “the Miracle of the Holy Thorn” (“Le miracle de la SainteÉpine”), a miracle that Pascal references in his defense of faith in the Pensées. This miracle happened to Pascal’s own niece, Marguerite Périer, who was a resident at the convent at Port-Royal. Marguerite suffered from an incurable fistula of the eye, which miraculously disappeared overnight after it was touched by a relic that was given to the convent, a thorn from Christ’s crown. Beckett’s edition of the Pensées recommends Charles Augustin Sainte-­ Beuve’s Port-Royal (1840), which describes the Miracle of the Holy Thorn as “the clap of thunder that suspended everything.”14 Letters that Beckett wrote during the composition of Proust indicate that he was reading the author’s work. He states in a 1932 letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy, “I have a great admiration for Sainte-Beuve & I think his was the most interesting mind of the whole galère but I can’t help regretting that it was applied to criticism.”15 Beckett also recommends Sainte-Beuve’s novel Volupté, while nevertheless stating that Sainte-Beuve’s critical writing underwent “a rather horrible process of crystallisation into a plausible efficiency of method.”16 It’s unclear whether Beckett read Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, which was first published in 1954, but Beckett’s criticism of Sainte-Beuve compellingly resembles Proust’s disapproval of Sainte-­ Beuve’s biographical method of literary criticism. Further evidence of Beckett’s familiarity with Sainte-Beuve’s discussion of the Miracle of the Holy Thorn can be found in his later work, Comment c’est/How It Is (1961/1964). In one passage, the narrator states, “to speak of happiness one hesitates those awful syllables first asparagus burst abscess but good moments […] never a plaint an odd tear inward no sound a pearl vast tracts of time natural order.”17 The narrator’s references to a “burst abscess,” “an odd tear,” and “a pearl” (which the narrator links to the 14  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal III (Paris: Hachette, 1848), 173. My translation. 15  Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 1, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds.(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 145. 16  Ibid. 17  Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove, 1964), 25.

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name Marguerite: “marguerites from the Latin pearl”18) allude to Sainte-­ Beuve’s description of Marguerite’s fistula of the eye: “en bonne médicine, en bonne pathologie, la petite Marguerite avait non pas précisément une fistule, mais une tumeur lacrymale causée par l’obstruction du canal des larmes,”19 “according to proper medicine, proper pathology, the young Marguerite did not have a fistula precisely, but a lachrymal tumor caused by an obstruction of the tear duct.” These references to Sainte-­ Beuve’s Port-Royal in How It Is, along with the fact that Beckett was reading Sainte-Beuve during the composition of Proust, indicate that Beckett was likely reading Port-Royal while he was describing the miracle of involuntary memory. As a result, Sainte-Beuve’s thorough account of the significance of miracles in Pascal’s oeuvre and life would have informed Beckett’s use of the term for describing moments of subjectivity “over [which] we [have] the least control.”20 For Pascal, the entire edifice of Christianity rests on miracles as both proof of God’s existence and signifiers of God’s will: as he puts it in a famous line from the Pensées, “nature is an image of Grace, and visible miracles are images of the invisible.”21 As Hent de Vries observes, this means that Pascal transforms the notion of the miracle into an apologetic for faith: “as Pascal adds in the Pensées, the lasting miracle shows itself and is indirectly confirmed in the miracles which follow it as non-formal tautologies or non-synonymous substitutions, which form its apologia […] The miracle is an apologia, even if it disavows an entire situation–if not every situation–or an entire tradition that precedes it.”22 As expressions of God’s will, every miracle expands or alters the parameters of truth by contradicting what was previously held to be true. For Pascal, miracles are thus not isolated acts of divine intervention, but entire rearrangements of natural law. By claiming that every miracle has a global effect, Pascal anticipates the work of later philosophers including Geulincx, Malebranche, and Leibniz, who in addition to appearing in Beckett’s works, each defend the subordination of natural law to the will of God. But the Pascalian background for Beckett’s references to miracles in Proust also connect  Ibid., 77.  Sainte-Beuve, 178. 20  Proust, 4. 21  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176. Trans. modified. 22  Hent de Vries, Miracles et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 50. Trans. mine. 18 19

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Beckett’s accounts of involuntariness and the limitations of subjectivity to Jansenist doctrine surrounding human powerlessness. According to Jansenism, miracles justify Augustinian doctrine concerning fallenness by displaying the limitations of human ability in the face of divine intercession. But miracles were also used by Jansenists to prove their favor in the eyes of God, especially after their movement was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. The Miracle of the Holy Thorn served as the principal proof of God’s favor by virtue of the fact that it took place in the Jansenist stronghold of the Port-Royal Abbey. Beckett’s familiarity with this history is indicated by the lectures that he gave on Racine at Trinity College Dublin, which were recorded in notes taken by his former student Rachel Dobbin. In these notes, Beckett refers to how Racine “reconciled himself with Jansenists in Port Royal in [Phèdre]–probably thought Jansenists would pay him better shelter than Louis XIV,” while distinguishing Pascal from more radical Jansenist thinkers: “Jansenism–limits main free will. Pascal wrote against it.”23 For Beckett, miracles are thus colored by the Pascalian, Jansenist, and Augustinian commitment to the futility of the human will in the face of God’s omnipotence. Yet Proust also displays the positive side of this doctrine, namely that human inability is the counterpart of the radical contingency of divine intervention. Beckett describes the miracle of involuntary memory as “magical,”24 yielding “relief and clarity,”25 which “comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion.”26 In line with Pascal’s theory of miracles, the fact that memory and desire happen in spite of the will is precisely what makes them so deserving of wonder. Immediately following the publication of Proust, Beckett began a concerted period of rigorously reading and transcribing passages from textbooks of philosophy, most notably Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy (1892). Windelband identifies Pascal as a “mystic” whose work develops Augustine’s doctrine of grace. Beckett copied Windelband’s summary of this doctrine: “in the doctrine of predestination […] the absolute causality of God suppresses the free will of the individual. The latter is refused both metaphysical independence and also all spontaneity of action; the individual is determined either by his nature to sin or by grace to the  Cited in Cordingley, “Beckett’s Ignorance: Miracles/Memory, Pascal/Proust,” 134.  Proust, 20–1. 25  Ibid., 29. 26  Ibid., 54. 23 24

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good.”27 Windelband’s summary of Augustine’s doctrine of grace recalls Beckett’s formula in Proust for the radical contingency that complements the futility of the will: “when the subject is exempt from will the object is exempt from causality.”28 In Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, Beckett would encounter a philosophy entirely based on the object’s exemption from causality as the result of the subject’s exemption from will. The principal founder of this philosophy in the West would remain a reference for Beckett throughout his life: Arnold Geulincx.

Geulincx, Occasion In a section entitled “Substance and Causality,” Windelband introduces Geulincx as a philosopher responding to the far-reaching metaphysical problems [posed by Cartesian philosophy], which in the second half of the seventeenth century called forth an extraordinarily vigorous movement of philosophical thought, a movement in which the new principles entered into manifold antithetical combinations with the principles of medieval philosophy. Out of the Cartesian school rose Occasionalism, of which Geulincx and Malebranche are the chief representatives.29

According to Windelband, Occasionalism argues that “the true ‘cause’ for the causal connection between stimuli and sensations, and between purposes and bodily movements, is God,” or as Beckett puts it in his Philosophy Notes: “true functions in causal relations are not causae efficientes, but causae occasionales. The ultimate ‘cause’ for causal connection between stimuli and sensations, purpose and action, is God. This is Occasionalism.”30 Windelband’s summary indicates clear affinities between Occasionalism and Pascal, notably the emphasis on God’s omnipotence in contradistinction to human finitude. Central to both accounts of divine omnipotence and human finitude is the axiomaticity of the miracle, or in Geulincx’s terms, “the occasion.” 27  Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts (London: Macmillan, 1893), 285. 28  Proust, 73. 29  Windelband, 379. 30  Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle (eds.), Samuel Beckett’s Philosophy Notes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 321.

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Windelband argues that Geulincx advances the “occasion” as a solution for “the vulnerable point in the Cartesian philosophy,” namely the “influxus physicus between mind and body.”31 Geulincx’s solution to the problem of mind–body interaction posed by the Cartesian split between extended and nonextended substance was to propose that interaction does not take place between substances. Instead, Geulincx claims that nonextended substance operates independently from extended substance, and extended substance is moved solely by God’s will. God is thus the single force of causality in the world, responsible not only for the movement of bodies, but also for all extended phenomena. Every single effect in the world is an “occasion” for God’s intervention, or as Beckett puts it, every efficient cause is an occasional cause. This reasoning leads Geulincx to the remarkable conclusion, transcribed by Beckett, that “it is no less miraculous when by the power of His will my tongue is made to flap in my mouth as I utter the word ‘Earth’ than if that same power were to make the Earth shake at the utterance of the same word.”32 For Geulincx, the fact that the cosmos is comprised of constant, infinitesimally minute, and radically unpredictable events means that the human—with its intricate and contingent harmony of body and mind—is the example of miraculousness. Faced with this amazing synchrony, the individual is led to the conclusion that “among all the stupendous miracles with which God favours me on this scene, I myself, the spectator, am His greatest and most enduring miracle.”33 Geulincx illustrates the separation between body and mind by using the analogy of two synchronous clocks: He who imparts motion to matter and has given laws to it is the same one who has formed my will, and yoked together these diverse things (the motion of matter and the decision of my will) in such a way that when my will wishes, such motion as it wishes appears; and on the other hand when motion appears my will wishes it, without either causing or influencing the other. It is the same as if two clocks agree precisely with each other and with the daily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the other also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all that without any causality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but rather on  Windelband, 414.  Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, trans. Martin Wilson and eds. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 335–6. 33  Ibid., 336. 31 32

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account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have been constructed with the same art and similar industry.34

As this analogy demonstrates, the mind is free to will, desire, and reflect, but this mental activity has no effect on the external world. What appear to be causal connections between mental activity and bodily motion can only be explained by God having willed this harmony into existence. All appearances of mind-body interaction thus reduce to, borrowing a phrase from Beckett’s Proust, “rare miracles of coincidence.” This separation between the mind and the body leads Geulincx to assert the ethical maxim that Beckett would invoke throughout his career: ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis. Martin Wilson translates this maxim as “wherein you have no power, therein neither should you will.” Anthony Uhlmann points out that the maxim has often been translated by Beckett critics as ‘Where one is worth nothing one should want nothing.’ The Latin, ‘valeo’ carries the meaning both of ‘to be able to, to have force’ and ‘to be worth.’ Beckett makes use of both senses, in what seem to be translations of this in his works. He uses the formula where one is ‘worth nothing’ in Murphy, and alternatively, where one ‘can do nothing’ in The Unnamable.35

But both translations of Geulincx’s maxim insert “should,” whereas a more felicitous translation would simply be “wherein you can do nothing, therein you will nothing.” The ethical system that he develops on the basis of this principle is thus less prescriptive than it is therapeutic. He illustrates this therapeutic aspect with an analogy that Beckett cites in Molloy, of someone being able to move eastward on a ship that is moving irresistibly westward. While our minds are free to desire, will, and reflect, this mental activity inevitably encounters the limitations imposed by the fact that God’s will controls all physical activity. Instead of struggling to assert power where one has none, or to move the ship eastward when it is moving irresistibly westward, Geulincx recommends aligning one’s will with God’s. In a discussion of the significance of valere in Geulincx’s maxim— which can mean “to be strong, powerful, and healthy”—Jean-Michel Rabaté points out how “it is crucial to remember that health is also a  Ibid., 232.  Ibid., 305.

34 35

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concern for Geulincx’s Ethics, even as he promotes humility as the key to virtue.”36 As Rabaté puts it, “how can I build an ethics if my actions appear as so many miracles sent by God? What benefit can one derive from this insight? Beckett and Geulincx answer that ‘humility’ offers a ‘human’ and ‘earthly’ basis upon which one can found an ethics aiming at curing vices and delusions.”37 This “curative” dimension of Geulincx’s ethics reinforces the fact that rather than demanding abstention from willing, a more careful reading indicates that his philosophy centers on the fact that willing was never there to begin with. Every motion takes place where I have no power and no will, which means that every movement is involuntary. Critics have identified references to Geulincx in such works as Murphy (1938), Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), The Unnamable (1958), Rockaby (1981), and even Film (1965), not to mention Beckett’s letters and interviews. But as a way of connecting Beckett to the specifically miraculous aspect of Geulincx’s philosophy, I would like to turn to more hidden references in his later work, How It Is (1964). Although How It Is was written several decades after Beckett was reading Windelband, Pascal, and Geulincx, the text is nevertheless filled with references to miracles and Occasionalism. The words “miracle” and “miraculous” appear in six passages from the English translation, alongside references to “occasions” and the Occasionalist philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. The manuscript for the text contains even more references to miracles, including the following passage that was later removed from the final French version: “tant d’autres choses que je n’ai pu nommer, tout ce que j’ai, que j’avais, c’est loin tout ça, tout sauf le cordon préservé par miracle,”38 “so many other things that I could not name, all that I have, that I had, all that’s far away, all except for the cord preserved by a miracle.” As Cordingley points out, these references to miracles splice Occasionalism with Pascal by combining references to Occasionalism with allusions to the Miracle of the Holy Thorn. But Cordingley insists that these references to Occasionalism only “reflec[t] with a malicious irony the sadistic, mechanistic universe of How

36  Jean-Michel Rabaté, “‘Vale!’: Psychoanalysis, Value, and Literature,” in The Values of Literary Studies, ed. Rónán McDonald (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 155–171, 160. 37  Ibid., 161. 38  Samuel Beckett, Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image: A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, ed. Edouard Magessa O’Reilly (Milton Park: Routledge, 2001), MS 269. All trans. Mine

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It Is,”39 while the references to Pascal are meant to lampoon Jansenist pietism. Cordingley’s interpretation overlooks how certain references to miracles in How It Is demonstrate a conception of the miracle that is not reducible to its coercive potential or pious connotations. Instead, these references express what Geulincx describes as the stupefying wonder of beholding the miraculous taking place in the most minor actions. In one passage, the narrator Pim, now reunited with his torturer Pom, describes lying by his partner’s side: “or turn over on his back or side no rancour in me any more no wish any more for anyone to have to do without ceasing and without ceasing not be able huge cymbals giant arms outspread two hundred degrees and clang clang miracle miracle the impossible do the impossible suffer the impossible most certainly not.”40 Cordingley argues that this passage describes Pim’s inability to wake up Pom, which would remain impossible even if he were to use “huge cymbals.” But this literal interpretation of Beckett’s prose neglects its more connotative, if not allusive, aspects. “Not be able,” for example, evokes the “being able to do nothing” of nihil valere, especially when it is followed by “do the impossible.” Moreover, the manuscript for How It Is reveals that Beckett added “do the impossible” to replace the even more Geulingian phrase “what is not beyond my powers.”41 But by succeeding “clang clang miracle miracle,” the phrase “do the impossible suffer the impossible” is also syntactically suggested to be the former’s logical entailment. This succession evokes the steps in Geulincx’s reasoning: the omnipresence of miracles entails the impossibility of action. This passage alludes to Geulincx more directly, however, by invoking his clock analogy. As previously stated, Geulincx describes the synchrony between body and mind as analogous to “two clocks [that] agree precisely with each other and with the daily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the other also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all without any causality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other.”42 By identifying each “clang” with a “miracle,” “clang clang miracle miracle” distantly echoes the chiming of the two harmonious clocks that Beckett discovered in Geulincx’s Ethics. 39  Anthony Cordingley, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), 173. 40  How It Is, 64. 41  Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image: A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, 80. 42  Geulincx, 232.

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In an earlier passage from How It Is, the narrator also describes mind– body interaction as something facilitated by “little miracle[s].” As the narrator is sitting, watching his hands, he reflects: “if I was born it was not left-handed the right hand transfers the tin to the other and this to that the same instant the tool pretty movement little swirl of fingers and palms little miracle thanks to which little miracle among so many thanks to which I live on lived on.”43 On the one hand, the tin of sardines is a modernized allusion to Christ’s “miracle of the five loaves and two fish.” This allusion is reinforced by other passages in the text, including the narrator’s reference to “a celestial tin miraculous sardines sent down by God,”44 and “the lamb black with the world’s sins the world cleansed the three persons […] the blue cloak the pigeon the miracles.”45 But the narrator’s stupefaction at the “little miracle” of the “pretty movement little swirl of fingers and palms” also alludes to Geulincx’s stupefaction at the wondrous harmony of the body and the mind. Geulincx privileges the movements of the hands as an example of this harmony, in a passage that Beckett transcribed: at the command of my will (here the action is within me) my hands may move in a corresponding way (and here the action is outside me, and now translated into my body, not indeed by me but by him who can do this) so as to grasp and pick up certain stones and pile them up into what I am pleased to call a house or tower […] I am a mere spectator of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust. I neither construct nor demolish anything here: the whole thing is someone else’s affair.46

Echoing the fascination that Geulincx attaches to being “a mere spectator of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust,” the narrator of How It Is also describes the subtlest movement of the hands— shifting a tin of sardines from one hand to the other—as a “little miracle.” The manuscript for How It Is reinforces this allusion to Geulincx, which includes the line: “par les doigts et les ma paumes alors donc le voir un miracle littéralement ce n’est pas trop dire,”47 “by the fingers and the ha palms so then to see it a miracle literally it’s not too much to say.”  How It Is, 35.  Ibid., 48. 45  Ibid., 70. 46  Geulincx, 34. 47  Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image: A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, 349. 43 44

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Beckett’s Philosophy Notes indicate that he viewed Pascal and the Port-­ Royal school as the immediate forerunners of Occasionalism: “of Cartesian school are Jansenists of Port-Royal […] also the Mystics (Blaise Pascal 1623-62): Pensées sur al Religion and Pierre Poiret (1646-1719): De Eruditione Triplici; Solida Superficiana et Falsa). Development to Occasionalism proceeds in Louis de la Forge, Clauberg and Cordemoy, but finds its complete development in Arnold Geulincx (1625-69).”48 Beckett’s notes also trace Occasionalism to the Jansenist union of Descartes and Augustine by observing relation between Cartesianism and Augustinianism quickly recognised: Jansenists and Fathers of the Oratory, living in Augustinian-Scotist atmosphere, were friendly to new philosophy […] old opposition between Augustinianism and Thomism was renewed in controversy over Cartesianism. To meet this attack the Cartesians (Louis de la Forge and Malebranche) insisted on connection with Augustine. Geulincx reduces self-activity to immanent mental activity of man.49

These notes show that Beckett viewed Occasionalist philosophy as the development of Jansenism’s incorporation of Cartesian metaphysics (the split between extended and nonextended substance) and Augustinian theodicy (grace and predestination). De Vries also draws attention to Occasionalism’s inheritance of Augustine when he states that “the description and interpretation of the miracle and of Augustine’s–if not Thomas’– belief in miracles tends toward a minimal and more metaphysical version of what will later be called Occasionalism […] after all, the fundamental idea which organizes Augustinian and Thomistic thought is that of the ultimate freedom of God in relation to his own creation, of his potestas absoluta in the face of his potestas ordinata.”50 But in both Proust and How It Is, the Pascalian, Jansenist, and Geulingian emphasis on the limitations of the human will are not represented as fundamentally oppressive. Instead, these limitations are once again shown to be the correlative conditions of a world lit up by events, a world in which anything can happen, and the fact that anything is happening at all is miraculous. In virtue of their radical contingency, unpredictability, and dissociation from the will, even the most minor moments, such  Philosophy Notes, 302–3.  Ibid., 323. 50  Miracles et métaphysique, 210. 48 49

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as moving a tin of sardines from one hand to the other, are deserving of wonder. In the final period of his career, Beckett would explicitly interpret this wonder at the world that takes place “despite [one]self”51 in terms of Kleist’s understanding of grace.

Kleist, Grace In a 1956 letter to Mary Hutchinson, Beckett describes Geulincx’s Ethics as containing “frightful kitchen latin but fascinating guignol world.”52 Geulincx’s cosmos is a “guignol world” because all motion is enacted by God, and actions only take place “to what degree it seems fitting to God, in accordance with the laws laid down by His free decision, and dependent on His will.”53 But Beckett’s description of the Geulingian cosmos as a “guignol world” is also compelling because of its metaphorical specificity, given that Beckett could have described the Occasionalist world by referring to any of Geulincx’s analogies that Beckett inserts in his literary works. By describing the Geulingian world as one filled with puppets, Beckett reveals the inspiration for his later interest in Heinrich von Kleist, author of “On the Marionette Theater” (Über das Marionettentheater). Beckett first refers to Kleist’s essay in a 1969 letter to Barbara Bray in which he describes the actor Martin Held, who was then performing in Beckett’s German production of Krapp’s Last Tape, as lacking any “natural neatness or grace in the Kleistian sense.”54 Beckett refers to the essay again in his correspondence with Bray when he states, “Got the Kleist Marionetten theater (extraordinary) and other essays.”55 A week later, Beckett writes to say that he had “read Kleist’s marvellous [sic] essay on Marionetten theatre [sic] with unforgettable anecdote of duel with bear.”56 Nixon and Van Hulle point out that Beckett owned a 1968 reprint of Über das Marionettentheater that had been given to him by the actor Nancy Illig, who acted in Beckett’s 1963 and 1965 productions of Spiel and He,  Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 2001), 37. Translation mine.   Cited in Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 200, note 47. 53  Geulincx, 335–6. 54  Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 4, George Craig, Martha Down Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), 169. 55  Ibid., 180. 56  Ibid., 185–6. 51 52

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Joe. In addition to searching for Kleist’s memorial in Wannsee in 1969, James Knowlson describes how during rehearsals of Happy Days in 1971 Beckett “was anxious to ensure that all of Winnie’s movements should be as crisp, precise and economical as possible. He argued that precision and economy would produce the maximum of grace, quoting Kleist’s essay on the Marionetten theatre to reinforce his argument.”57 Moreover, in 1976 Beckett referred Kleist’s essay to Knowlson and Ronald Pick to “illustrate what he said about the relations between the economy and the grace and harmony that he wanted to see in the movements of the protagonist of Ghost Trio.”58 Kleist’s essay takes the form of a dialogue between a puppeteer and his friend. The puppeteer explains to his friend that a puppet is more graceful than any actor, thanks to the grace yielded by the marionette’s lack of self-­ consciousness. He states, “it would be almost impossible for a man to attain even an approximation [of the grace] of a mechanical being. In such a realm only a god could measure up to this matter.”59 To illustrate his theory, the puppeteer gives the example of a young man who used to be very handsome before he became obsessed with imitating the Spinario or “Boy with Thorn.” According to the puppeteer, the young man’s affectations ultimately spoiled his natural beauty. In terms that evoke Geulincx’s negotiation with Cartesianism, the puppeteer thus distinguishes between the “organic world” of nature—which, as Kleist knew, Kant also designated as the domain deprived of freedom—and the domain of contemplation: “we can see the degree to which contemplation becomes darker and weaker in the organic world, so that the grace that is there emerges all the more shining and triumphant.”60 Grace is yielded by abandoning the will and submitting instead to what Windelband describes in his summary of Augustine’s doctrine of grace as “the absolute causality of God.” Beckett marked a central passage in Kleist’s essay: Und der Vorteil, den diese Puppe vor lebendigen Tänzern voraus haben würde?

57  James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 584. 58  Ibid., 632. 59  Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Thomas G. Neumiller, The Drama Review 16, No. 3 (1972): 22–6, 24. 60  Ibid., 26.

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Der Vorteil? Zuvörderst ein negativer, mein vortrefflicher Freund, nämlich dieser, daß sie sich niemals zierte.—Denn Ziererei erscheint, wie Sie wissen, wenn sich die Seele (vis motrix) in irgend einem andern Punkte befindet, als in dem Schwerpunkt der Bewegung. And the advantage, that this puppet would have ahead of living dancers? The advantage? First of all a negative one, my excellent friend, namely that it never hesitates.—Because affectation appears, as you know, when the soul (power of motion) is in any other point besides motion’s center of gravity.61

Kleist’s puppeteer here emphasizes that a puppet has an advantage over living dancers because living dancers tend toward affectation, which is caused by locating the soul (the vis motrix or power of movement) anywhere other than where the body is naturally inclined to fall. A puppet gives itself up to gravity, allowing its movements to be conducted by nature rather than volition. Precisely by falling, the marionette achieves what Beckett describes in a note appended to Kleist’s text as the “göttliche anmut des gliedermanns,”62 the “divine grace of the marionette.” The word Gliedermann, here emphasized by Beckett, is often translated to “marionette,” but Kleist’s decision to use Gliedermann instead of Marionette (as it appears in the title) foregrounds Glieder or “parts, members.” A condition of the marionette’s “göttliche anmut” or “divine grace” is its disarticulation, its fracturing into separate, independently operating parts. Similarly, Geulincx’s philosophy departs from Cartesian metaphysics by affirming (rather than seeking to resolve) the disarticulation of body and mind. For Geulincx, the appearance of the mind making the body move amounts to a coincidence between the wills of the individual and of God. Just as the grace of the puppet is yielded by its susceptibility to gravity, Geulincx argues that body–mind interaction is literally a falling together or co-incidence of the mind and divine will. In his essay “Beckett’s ‘Guignol’ Worlds: Arnold Geulincx and Heinrich von Kleist,” David Tucker argues that Beckett’s earlier formulation of the Geulingian cosmos as a “guignol world” inspired his interest in the puppet theater of Heinrich von Kleist. However, Tucker also distinguishes Geulincx from Kleist, arguing that “a Geulingian ‘guignol world’ […] is

 Samuel Beckett’s Library, 97. Trans. mine.  Ibid.

61 62

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arguably a much crueler place than that of the Kleistian puppet-world,”63 given that Geulincx emphasizes how grace is indissociable from imprisonment in our bodies. As a result, Tucker claims that “bringing Kleist into contact with this imagining of puppetry would allow Beckett to present a new, unique world of both grace and horror,” one that combines “Occasionalist disconnection and the horror it engenders” with the “graceful action […] of steady, Kleistian puppet-like unselfconsciousness.”64 Yet Tucker’s interpretation rests on the negative conclusions of Geulincx’s metaphysics rather than its affirmation of a world filled with miracles. In opposition to Tucker’s interpretation, Thomas Dommange argues that the continuity Beckett establishes between Geulincx and Kleist illuminates how Beckett viewed Geulincx as a thinker of miraculous contingency.65 As Jean-Michel Rabaté explains in a discussion of Dommange’s essay, “by splicing Kleist’s meditation on the uncanny grace of puppets in the ‘Marionettentheater’ of the world and divine grace, once the principle of causality has been abolished, we are offered the chance of the comical and touching grace of automata animated from the outside. Grace, miracle, and comedy blend together–this defines the site of Beckett’s later plays and texts.”66 The fact that Beckett connected the Geulingian occasion to Kleistian grace shows that his later works are underpinned by a commitment to “the permanent miracle” which, in Rabaté’s words, corresponds with “a view [that] destabilizes certainties, frees us from determinism or the principle of causality. If causality does not regulate the world or our actions, we are free, as Kant and Schopenhauer both observe. The principle of sufficient reason is replaced by a principle of insufficient reason– which leaves room for an unexplained grace.”67

63  David Tucker, “Beckett’s ‘Guignol’ Worlds: Arnold Geulincx and Heinrich von Kleist,” in Beckett/Philosophy, Matthew Feldman, Alexander Gungov, and Karim Mamdani, eds. (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2015), 235–260, 257. 64  Ibid., 258. 65  Thomas Dommange, “Geulincx ou la mécanique de l’ineffable,” in Notes de Beckett sur Geulincx, ed. Nicolas Doutey (Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2012), 229–258. 66  “‘Vale!’: Psychoanalysis, Value, and Literature,” 159–160. 67  Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Love and Lobsters,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 158–169, 164.

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Beckett, Wonder Beckett transcribes the word “ineffable” (ineffabilis) seventeen times in his notes on Geulincx. Geulincx defines the word by saying that “something is said to be ineffable not because we cannot think or speak of it (for this would be nothing, nothing and unthinkable being the same[…)] but because we cannot think or encompass with our reason how it is done. And in this sense God is ineffable not only in Himself but in all His works.”68 Consequently, Geulincx emphasizes that literally every moment is ineffable because every occurrence is a miracle enacted by God. Beckett copies Geulincx’s annotations: “6. I am but a spectator of the World. 7. Nevertheless, the World itself cannot produce that spectacle for me. 8. God alone can produce that spectacle. 9. And He does so in such an ineffable and incomprehensible manner that among all the stupendous miracles with which God favours me on this scene, I myself, the spectator, am His greatest and most enduring miracle.”69 The imprint of Geulincx’s logic of ineffability can be observed in Beckett’s literary works, notably Watt’s insistence on “eff[ing] the ineffable,”70 but also the aggressive “effing” that takes place in his 1959 radio play Embers: “MUSIC MASTER: [Violently.] Eff! Eff! … MUSIC MASTER: [Frenziedly.] Eff! Eff! [He hammers note.] Eff! [He hammers note.] Eff!”71 For Geulincx, ineffability does not fundamentally result from human finitude, nor is it tied to a negative theological belief in the metaphysical incommensurability of God with existence. Instead, Geulincx claims that the ineffability of the World results from the stupefying sublimity of its miraculous spectacle. In his discussion about contemporary art with Georges Duthuit entitled “Three Dialogues,” Beckett articulates ineffability in terms of the inaccessibility of “the occasion”: “the occasion appears as an unstable term of relation [and] the artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so […] All that should concern us is the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to.”72 Here, Beckett subtly combines the Geulingian occasion—the  Ethics, 334.  Ibid., 336. 70  Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove, 2009), 50. 71  Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove, 2009), 67. 72  Disjecta, 145. 68 69

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miracle that forecloses the subject’s power—with the aesthetic concept of the occasion celebrated by Goethe and Hegel, namely the privileged moment that incites artistic production. For Beckett, the artist can no longer represent the occasion—a notion that is continuous with his accounts of the death of the subject in Proust and the incommunicability between the subject and the object in “Recent Irish Poetry”—which is why Duthuit responds by asking whether the artist can make “the occasion of his painting […] his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express.”73 But Beckett indicates his dissatisfaction with this position, which dialectically preserves the artist’s ability to represent by making ineffability the object of representation, when he describes it as an “ingenious method […] for restoring [the artist], safe and sound.”74 If the ineffability of “the occasion”—whether as art’s “term of relation” or as Geulincx’s micro-miracle—escapes even our attempts to name this ineffability, what should we do when faced with a world lit up by contingency, miracles, the event? Four years after writing “Three Dialogues,” Beckett was asked to write a short text for an exhibition of paintings by Jack B. Yeats at the Galerie des Beaux Arts, an artist whom he had earlier described as “with the great of our time, Kandinsky and Klee, Ballmer and Bram van Velde, Rouault and Braque, because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.”75 Commenting on such paintings as Two Travellers (1942), The Music (1946), and On the Move (1950), Beckett states that “in images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occasion [il n’y a ni place], no time given, no room left, for the lenitive of comment. None in this impetus of need that scatters them loose to the beyond of vision […] None in this final mastery which submits in trembling to the unmasterable.”76 Beckett wrote “Hommage à Jack B. Yeats” in 1954, shortly after witnessing the casualties of ideologies of mastery, power, and domination firsthand: from the dying in the Red Cross hospital at Saint-Lô, memorialized in his 1946 essay “The Capital of the Ruins,” to his fallen comrades in the renowned Gloria network of the French Resistance. Beckett’s insistence on submission to the unmasterable is thus irreducible to resignation, apathy, or political quietism—all forms of abdication that Beckett himself  Ibid., 143.  Ibid. 75  Ibid., 97. 76  Ibid., 149. 73 74

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never practiced. Instead, Beckett’s privileging of the unmasterable constitutes an ethical refusal of the ideology of mastery that not only laid siege during World War II, but which also forms the edifice for the imperialism, racism, and despotism that he continued to resist. By tapping into Pascal, Geulincx, and Kleist, Beckett proposes an ethical alternative to the ideology of mastery: resist injustice, but also refuse the transformation of this resistance into a triumphalism of the will. As he puts it in the conclusion of his homage to Yeats, rather than seeking to master the unmasterable, one must “s’incliner simplement, émerveillé,” “merely bow in wonder.”77

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. “Trying to Understand Endgame.” Trans. Michael T. Jones. New German Critique 26 (1982): 119–150. ———. “Trying to Understand Endgame.” In Notes to Literature II. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 241–74. Anderton, Joseph. Beckett’s Creatures. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954. ———. How It Is. New York: Grove, 1964. ———. Murphy. New York: Grove, 1970. ———. Proust. New York: Grove, 1978. ———. Nohow On. London: Calder, 1989. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. London: Calder, 1996. ———. Comment C’est How It Is and / et L’image: A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique. Ed. Edouard Magessa O’Reilly. Milton Park: Routledge, 2001a. ———. Disjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder, 2001b. ———. First Love and Other Shorts. New York: Grove, 2007. ———. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces. New York: Grove, 2009a. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 1. Eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009b. ———. Three Novels. New York: Grove, 2009c. ———. Watt. New York: Grove, 2009d. ———. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 2010. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 4. Eds. George Craig, Martha Down Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Cordingley, Anthony. “Beckett’s Ignorance: Miracles/Memory, Pascal/Proust.” Journal of Modern Literature 33, No. 4 (2010): 129–152.

 Ibid.

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———. Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. De Vries, Hent. Miracles et métaphysique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018. Dommange, Thomas. “Geulincx ou la mécanique de l’ineffable.” In Notes de Beckett sur Geulincx. Ed. Nicolas Doutey. Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2012. 229–258. Geulincx, Arnold. Ethics. Trans. Martin Wilson and eds. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Gierow, Karl Ragnar. “Samuel Beckett.” In Nobel Lectures: Literature 1968–1980. Eds. Tore Frangsmyr and Sture Allen. London: World Scientific, 1993. 19–21. Herren, Graley. “Beckett on Television.” In A Companion to Samuel Beckett. Ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2010. Oxford: Blackwell. Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre.” Trans. Thomas G. Neumiller. The Drama Review 16, No. 3 (1972): 22–26. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New  York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Lewis, Jim. “Beckett et la caméra.” In Revue d’esthétique: ‘Samuel Beckett’. Ed. Pierre Chabert. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1989. 371–9. Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937. New  York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Nixon, Mark and Dirk Van Hulle (eds.). Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Samuel Beckett’s Philosophy Notes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Trans. Honor Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Love and Lobsters.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Ed. Dirk Van Hulle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015a. 158–169. ———. “‘Vale!’: Psychoanalysis, Value, and Literature.” In The Values of Literary Studies. Ed. Rónán McDonald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015b. 155–171. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. Port-Royal III. Paris: Hachette, 1848. Tucker, David. “Tracing ‘a literary fantasia’: Arnold Geulincx in the works of Samuel Beckett.” Dissertation, University of Sussex, 2010. ———. “Beckett’s ‘Guignol’ Worlds: Arnold Geulincx and Heinrich von Kleist.” In Beckett/Philosophy. Ed. Matthew Feldman, Alexander Gungov, and Karim Mamdani. Stuttgart: ibidem, 2015. 235–260. Windelband, Wilhelm. A History of Philosophy. Trans. James H.  Tufts. London: Macmillan, 1893.

Philosophy in the Flesh: Feeling, Folly, and Animals in Beckett William Broadway

In a 1961 interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède for Les Nouvelles littéraires, when asked what relevance contemporary French philosophy had for his work, Samuel Beckett expressed reservations regarding philosophical readings of his literary texts. He stressed that, after all, he was only a novelist, not a philosopher, and went so far as to claim not to have read or understood philosophy at all: “I never read philosophers […] I never understand anything they write.”1 Pressing him, d’Aubarède remarked, “the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.”2 In response, Beckett denied the general idea of a key that could unlock the meaning of his texts and distanced himself from the specific notion of his 1  Gabriel D’Aubarede, “Interviews with Beckett (1961),” trans. Christopher Waters, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, eds. L. Graver and R. Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 217. 2  Ibid.

W. Broadway (*) Department of English, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_7

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work as philosophical: “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.”3 When asked then what reason he had for writing, he replied, “I haven’t the slightest idea. I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.”4 Beckett’s repeated disavowal is puzzling, given the longstanding association of his work with philosophy. While conceding that Beckett was “quite right to insist that there is no handy key, existentialist or logical positivist, to his work,” John Fletcher notes that “this does not mean that he [had] not read widely and deeply in philosophy, or that he [had] not borrowed heavily, if quite eclectically, from the writings of many philosophers.”5 Fletcher is not wrong. To be sure, Beckett was neither by training nor by vocation a philosopher. Nevertheless, his claim not to have read philosophy is easily debunked by available biographical and archival evidence. As a matter of record—documented in letters, conversations, and his published works, both literary and critical—we know that Beckett took an active interest in the history of Western philosophy, a fact he did not conceal from other critics and confidantes. He occasionally even directed critics to particular sources or otherwise provided clues to the philosophical import of his work, as when he suggested to Lawrence E. Harvey “that if he were a critic setting out to write on the works of Beckett […] he would start with two quotations: one by Geulincx: ‘Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis,’ and one by Democritus: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing.’”6 Notwithstanding the ample evidence of Beckett’s engagement with philosophy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation about scholars of Dostoevsky— that they “are apt to forget that [he] is first and foremost an artist (of a special type, to be sure) and not a philosopher”—could be applied to certain tendencies within the field of Beckett studies.7 What Beckett rejected was the simplistic notion, proposed by d’Aubarède and repeated by some  Ibid.  Ibid. 5  John Fletcher, “Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers,” Comparative literature Vol. 17, No. 1 (1965), 43. 6  Lawrence E.  Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 267. 7  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, introduction by Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 4. 3 4

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critics, that there is a philosophical master code that can be used to decipher the hidden meaning of individual texts or his entire body of work. My aim is not to reject the relevance of philosophy for understanding his work. Without naively taking him literally at his word or deferring uncritically to notions of authorial intent, I want to reconsider the possible significance of his interview remarks in Les Nouvelles littéraires, to which I will have occasion to return in what follows. While they should not be accepted without qualification, his comments on the relation of philosophy to literature, if themselves not exactly offering the “key” to his work, are consistent with a continued reluctance on his part to have his literary writing translated into philosophical terms.8 In the affirmation of feeling and folly, his remarks offer an aesthetic insight into his creative methods and thematic preoccupations. Ultimately, as I will show, they reflect an attentiveness in his work to the issue of animals. According to the official version of events, Beckett’s moment of dawning self-awareness and maturation as an artist—the fabled day when he discovered his own folly—is thought to have occurred sometime during the final weeks of the Second World War. He experienced what he later described to James Knowlson as a creative epiphany, which would lead to a major shift in his approach to writing. During the interwar period, he had enjoyed limited critical and commercial success as a writer and had struggled against a reputation as an author of abstruse works of fiction largely imitative of Joycean experimental techniques. The early reception of More Pricks Than Kicks was mixed at best, and reviewers inevitably drew unfavorable comparisons with the work of Joyce. One critic snarked, “Mr. Beckett has imitated everything in James Joyce—except the verbal magic and inspiration.”9 Sometime after the war, he experienced what Knowlson has called a “revelation” that enabled him to escape Joyce’s influence and pursue his own path as a writer. He described the experience to Knowlson in the following way: “I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge 8  Beckett expressed similar reticence about philosophical interpretations of his work in an interview with Tom Driver: “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.” Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, 219. 9  James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 177.

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and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”10 Knowlson adds, “In speaking of his own revelation, Beckett tended to focus on the recognition of his own stupidity […] and on his concern with impotence and ignorance.” C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski have similarly characterized the moment as a pivotal event and “watershed for [Beckett], ignorance and impotence affirmed in an uncompromising vision of human existence as folly.”11 In this familiar account of his artistic development— which has achieved near mythic status among Beckett scholars—the discovery of impoverishment, impotence, and ignorance marked a decisive turning point in his literary career, precipitating the series of major prose works that would come to comprise the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. The abandonment of reason and the acceptance of folly would become central themes and compositional strategies pervading all of Beckett’s subsequent work. In his aesthetic statement “Three Dialogues” (1949) loosely based on conversations he had with the writer and art critic Georges Duthuit and published in the journal transition in 1949, Beckett theorized the dilemma of the modern artist confronting creative impotence and epistemological doubt. He diagnosed the situation of the artist as one in which “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.”12 He later reformulated the problem in Molloy (1951), in which the protagonist explains the impossible task of expression he has been assigned: “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”13 Taken together, Beckett’s statements in “Three Dialogues” and Molloy, along with his remarks in the interview with Les Nouvelles littéraires, articulate “folly” as an aesthetics of uncertainty and resignation of authorial control in response to the futility of artistic expression. A closer inspection of the original French text of the interview reveals an important ambiguity lost in the English translation: “J’ai conçu Molloy  Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, 319.  C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 51. 12  Beckett, Disjecta (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 139. 13  Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 23. 10 11

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et la suite le jour où j’ai pris conscience de ma bêtise.”14 Although rendered in the English translation above as “folly,” the word bêtise, derived from the Old French beste and cognate with bête, carries an association with the bestial that would not have been lost on Beckett. Ackerley and Gontarski follow translator Christopher Waters in rendering bêtise as “folly,” though they do note that it means “something between stupidity and animal existence.” However, the narrowly anthropocentric gloss they give Beckett’s remarks as expressing his “uncompromising vision of human existence as folly” minimizes the connection to animal existence.15 The choice to translate bêtise simply as “folly” eliminates the ambiguity and occludes the association with animality. As a result, in the English translation of this much-cited statement, the reference to animals is made illegible. In what follows, I will explore how philosophical abstraction may be inimical to the recognition of feeling, and how the demotion of intellect and the elevation of folly may be related to a state of being between stupidity and animal existence. * * * Since its inception, the field of Beckett studies has given special attention to the relationship of Beckett’s work to philosophy. Most scholars have responded to his claim to ignorance in philosophical matters with justifiable skepticism. In spite of Simon Critchley’s assertion that Beckett’s writing is “particularly, perhaps uniquely, resistant to philosophical interpretation,” there is a general feeling that, on the contrary, his work is highly conducive to philosophical interpretation.16 Throughout his literary career, he returned again and again to certain core philosophical concepts and themes. His fiction, drama, and poetry contain numerous references and allusions to figures and ideas spanning the entire philosophical tradition. His works display an uncommon philosophical erudition, giving readers and critics the impression of a comprehensive grasp of the history of Western philosophy, from ancient to modern. As Ruby Cohn remarks, “however vituperatively [Beckett’s heroes] may insist upon their ­ignorance, 14  Gabriel d’Aubarède, “En attendant Beckett,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires 16 February (1961), 7, emphasis added. 15  The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought, 51. 16  Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 141.

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they, like their creator, reveal an impressive fund of knowledge garnered by a compulsively examining mind.”17 However, scholars have sometimes exaggerated the depth and the breadth of his philosophical knowledge or the degree to which his work is indebted to philosophical sources and procedures. John Calder, author of The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, predicted that “what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message.”18 As an example of critical overreach, Calder’s characterization of Beckett’s literary texts as mere containers for philosophical ideas is especially reductive and simplistic. A similar tendency toward overstatement can be found in more rigorous examinations of Beckett’s relationship to philosophy. P.J.  Murphy claims that the novels Murphy and Watt reveal Beckett’s “very extensive and thorough readings” of Spinoza and Kant, respectively.19 He insists that his work displays a “fundamental indebtedness” to these two philosophers in particular, and he speculates that if there is any doubt as to their direct influence on his first two novels, it is only because “Beckett went to a great deal of trouble to mask these fundamental allegiances.”20 Such ascriptions of debts and allegiances risk treating Beckett’s work as little more than the literary demonstration of abstract philosophical concepts. More recent scholarship has questioned many of the assumptions about the extent of Beckett’s philosophical knowledge and the singular importance of philosophy for his work. Newly available archival materials, such as his letters and personal library, present a more complex picture of his philosophical education and commitments. It has been established by Knowlson, Matthew Feldman, and others that Beckett’s knowledge of philosophy was derived mainly from secondary sources such as Archibald Alexander’s A Short History of Philosophy and Wilhelm Windelband’s two-­ volume A History of Philosophy. Feldman has shown that Beckett had not read Spinoza until after completing Murphy and that allusions in the novel to Spinoza “are derived from [Windelband’s] A History of Philosophy.”21 17  Ruby Cohn, “Philosophical Fragments in the Works of Samuel Beckett,” Criticism Vol. 6, No. 1 (1964), 33. 18  John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder Publications, 2001), 1. 19  P.J. Murphy, “Beckett and the Philosophers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 224. 20  “Beckett and the Philosophers,” 233. 21  Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (London: Continuum, 2006), 50.

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In their forensic study of his personal library, Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle report that, of the eleven-volume set of the complete works of Kant that Beckett owned, the introductory volume by editor Ernst Cassirer is “[t]he only volume that shows traces of a sustained effort to read from cover to cover.”22 What is more, however significant its impact on his artistic or intellectual development, philosophy was but one domain of knowledge that commanded his attention. Nixon and Van Hulle place his reading in philosophy within a larger set of intellectual interests that includes literature in English, French, German, and Italian as well as classics, myth, religion, science, music, and art. These findings complicate earlier accounts of Beckett’s total philosophical mastery and the intellectual loyalties to individual philosophers that Murphy attributes to him when he writes of Beckett’s “fundamental indebtedness” to Kant and Spinoza. Critics such as Feldman, Nixon, and Van Hulle are part of a recent “genetic turn” in Beckett studies, which, through access to Beckett’s letters, notebooks, and drafts, has sought to shed new light on his processes of composition and has revived interest in questions of his literary and intellectual inheritances. Such archival scholarship has often produced important results and valuable discoveries, and it has gone some way toward advancing an alternative account of Beckett’s exposure to philosophy. The revised picture of Beckett’s relationship to philosophy offered by genetic criticism has renewed important questions about critical methodology, responsible reading, and how we interpret the role that philosophy plays in Beckett’s work. Still, there are compelling reasons for reading Beckett alongside philosophy, and his texts invite, encourage, and sometimes demand such readings. To reiterate, I do not mean to argue against reading Beckett’s work philosophically or to advance the baseless and unsupportable thesis that he was philosophically ignorant or uninspired by philosophical thinking. Rather, I am interested in how Beckett, whom Dermot Moran has tentatively referred to as “the most philosophical of twentieth-century writers,” made use of philosophical materials for his own aesthetic purposes, and what implications his repurposing of philosophy has for how we read his literary texts.23 22  Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138. 23  Dermot Moran, “Beckett and Philosophy,” in Samuel Beckett–100 Years, ed. Christopher Murray (Dublin: New Island, 2006), 93.

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Nixon and Van Hulle remark that Beckett’s interest in philosophy was “often visual, rather than purely abstract.”24 The aesthetic sensibility that informed his reading of philosophy is indicated in a December 1933 letter to Thomas MacGreevy in which he disparages Leibniz as “a great cod” but admits he is “full of splendid pictures.”25 He found more to admire in Schopenhauer, explaining in a July 1930 letter to MacGreevy that his interest was based in large part on Schopenhauer’s influence on other writers: “I am not reading philosophy, nor caring whether he is right or wrong or a good or worthless metaphysician. An intellectual justification of unhappiness—the greatest that has ever been attempted—is worth the examination of one who is interested in Leopardi and Proust.”26 Philosophers like Leibniz and Schopenhauer held value for Beckett less for the concepts they coined or the systems they constructed than for the artistic possibilities their works inspired. Statements such as these reveal an aesthetic, rather than conceptual, orientation toward philosophy and accord with the emphasis Beckett gives to feeling over thought: “I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling.” Richard Begam has written that Beckett’s work represents “a turn away from epistemology and toward aesthetics, a turn away from philosophy—at least as it has traditionally been conceived—and toward literature.”27 Similarly, I propose that Beckett’s literary texts show an effort to move beyond knowing (episte ̄me ̄) and toward feeling (aisthe ̄sis); beyond reason and toward folly; beyond humans and toward animals. * * * According to Feldman, one philosopher in particular whose impact on Beckett has been greatly overstated is René Descartes. He argues that Cartesian interpretations—long a hallmark of Beckett criticism—are often premised on dubious assumptions about Beckett’s familiarity with the life and work of Descartes or his intellectual affiliation with Cartesian philosophy. Through an empirical inspection of Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes,” he concludes that Beckett’s knowledge of Descartes was much more limited  Samuel Beckett’s Library, 129.  Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 172. 26  The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1: 1929–1940, 33. 27  Richard Begam, “Samuel Beckett and Anti-Humanism,” REAL: The Yearbook in English and American Literature Vol. 13 (1997), 301. 24 25

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than previously believed and was acquired in the main from secondary sources including biographies, summaries, and digests. He maintains that, while Descartes’s influence on Beckett is worth noting, by overemphasizing its significance, scholars have neglected more important influences. Feldman finds that Beckett’s notes on Descartes fail to convey the same interest and enthusiasm he demonstrates in his letters when discussing Schopenhauer, for instance. Speculating that “Beckett’s knowledge of Cartesian philosophy was superficial and anecdotal,” Feldman makes a forceful case that the critical tradition has exaggerated the overall importance of Descartes for understanding Beckett.28 If other scholars have overstated the significance of Descartes, Feldman risks negating his significance entirely. There is ample countervailing evidence that Descartes was indeed a formative influence on Beckett, both directly and indirectly, and a central figure in his curriculum of philosophical self-education. Knowlson reports that Beckett studied Cartesian philosophy with help from Jean Beaufret, who taught philosophy at the École normale supérieure and lent him books by and on Descartes.29 His first published work, the long poem Whoroscope, draws heavily from J.P. Mahaffy’s biographical study of Descartes and alludes throughout to obscure details from his life and thought. Post-Cartesian philosophers such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, whose work Beckett also studied, accepted and extended the basic premises and conclusions of Cartesian metaphysics. Ultimately, Descartes exerted an incalculable influence on the course of modern philosophy, introducing questions and problems to which subsequent philosophers of the rationalist tradition such as Leibniz and Spinoza responded. He remains one of the central figures in the history of philosophy, and even when he was not the sole originator of certain philosophical problems, his name is the one most often associated with them. The concept of mind-body dualism, so central to the Beckettian problematic, remains the Cartesian concept par excellence and the one most often associated with his name. Moreover, as the putative father of modern philosophy, Descartes provides an important philosophical touchstone for discussions of animals. His philosophy advances a conception of the human being that has been both highly influential and roundly critiqued, especially in light of recent philosophical and scientific reconsiderations of animal consciousness and  Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes,” 46.  Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, 104.

28 29

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subjectivity. By positing a mind-body dualism that corresponds to a human-animal dichotomy, he epitomizes a modern philosophical discourse of anthropocentrism against which posthumanist critiques have been aimed. In his treatises and correspondence, he promotes a version of speciesism that has been used to justify morally questionable practices, such as the use of animals for research and experiments. He is unique among philosophers in being closely associated with cruelty against animals, and his practice of vivisection has earned him posthumous infamy and the moral condemnation of animal rights proponents.30 More to the point, his views on animals have implications for how we interpret the presence of animals in Beckett’s work. Looking at Beckett through the lens of animals allows us to rethink his relationship to Descartes and reconsider the viability of reading each alongside the other. The essential distinction between humans and animals is not an incidental point for Descartes: it is the logical extension of his philosophical first principles. His argument for human exceptionalism is predicated on a hierarchical opposition between mind and body, thought and feeling. He maintains that the capacity for thought is an exclusive endowment of human beings, constituting an absolute difference between humans and animals. In Discourse on the Method, he postulates that “[reason] is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts.”31 All human beings, regardless of cognitive impairment, are capable of “arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood.”32 The ability to speak “requires very little reason,” and yet “there is no other animal, however perfect and well-­ ordered it may be, that can do the like.”33 Although he concedes that, because “the human mind does not reach into their hearts,” we cannot establish with certainty that animals do not possess the capacity for 30  In his correspondence, Descartes reports conducting live dissections of animals, as when in one letter he describes performing vivisection on rabbits and fish in order to disprove current theories about the circulation of blood. In another letter, he boasts, “I have spent much time on dissection during the last eleven years, and I doubt whether there is any doctor who has made such detailed observations as I.” René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79–85 and 134. 31  Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham and Robert Stoothoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21. 32  Selected Philosophical Writings, 45 33  Ibid.

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thought, he sees no compelling argument that they do and dogmatically assumes they do not.34 Consequently, he infers from their speechlessness not merely that animals “have less reason than men, but that they have no reason at all.”35 Descartes’s arguments regarding the cognitive and linguistic incapacity of animals inform his views on the treatment of animals and the kinds of treatment that are morally permissible. He grants that animals appear to experience sensation “in so far as it depends on a bodily organ.” However, he distinguishes the internal “feeling of pain” from the “external movements which accompany this feeling in us.”36 While animals do display external signs that seem to communicate the experience of pain, such signs are the mere mechanical responses of living automatons. As he explains in the second chapter of Meditations on First Philosophy, sensual experience— the awareness of “bodily things as it were through the senses”—is cognitive in origin.37 When human beings experience a painful sensation, the feeling is registered by the mind; it “exists only in the understanding” and cannot be explained “without reference to the [rational] soul.”38 Although animals may exhibit similar external movements that seem to indicate painful sensations, because they lack understanding, there is no internal feeling to which these external movements can correspond and thus no experience of “pain in the strict sense.”39 The fact that animals do not have rational souls and cannot experience pain disqualifies them from moral consideration and “absolves [human beings] from the suspicion of crime when they eat or kill animals.”40 It is likely that Beckett would have encountered a discussion of Descartes’s views on animals in J.P. Mahaffy’s Descartes, which (as noted previously) Beckett read and from which he derived most of the details

 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, 365.  Selected Philosophical Writings, 45 36  The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, 366 37  Selected Philosophical Writings, 83 38  The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, 148 39  Ibid. 40  The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, 366 34 35

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included in Whoroscope.41 In a chapter examining the “the nature of man” as a composite of mind and body, Mahaffy gives special consideration to Descartes’s views on animals. For Descartes, the vital functions of both human and animal bodies—such as the circulation of the blood and the digestion of food—can be understood in purely physiological terms as the involuntary workings of “skillful automatons” that “admit of none but a mechanical explanation.”42 Because they lack rational souls, animals are little more than machines that respond without intelligence or volition to external stimuli. Mahaffy summarizes Descartes’s beliefs about animals as follows: Hence the lower animals, in which we have no reason to assume the infusion of a rational soul, as they use no language, and perform no actions which cannot be proved the direct result of their material organism, are mere animated machines, in whom the signs of joy and grief, of anger and fear, are merely signs of a motion in their animal spirits similar to that which is sometimes induced in us by external objects, without the participation, and against the judgement of the mind.43

Mahaffy does not merely present Descartes’s ideas about animals without bias or further comment. He condemns Descartes’s materialist account of animal life as a rationalization for his experiments on animals, asserting, “it led Descartes and his followers to a reckless indulgence in vivisection, merely to witness the internal structure of the animated machine, as we should take to pieces a watch.”44 He blames Cartesian mechanics for underwriting the cruel and inhuman treatment of animals, and he notes that his followers even denied animals the capacity to feel pain: “[they] kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing 41  Deirdre Bair traces the composition of Whoroscope to Beckett’s reading of Adrien Baillet’s two-volume La Vie de Des-Cartes, writing that “Whoroscope follows Baillet’s life so closely that it is more a prose monologue than poetry.” Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Touchstone, 1978), 103. However, comparing the poem with its sources, Francis Doherty has shown that, while Beckett may have borrowed some material from Baillet, “the amount of material which can unequivocally be said to be taken from Baillet is small, compared to that which can be shown to be taken from Mahaffy.” Francis Doherty, “Mahaffy’s Whoroscope,” Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1992), 28. 42  J.P. Mahaffy, Descartes (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwell and Sons, 1902), 175. 43  Descartes, 175–176. 44  Descartes, 178.

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at any compassion for them, and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.”45 Mahaffy’s study of Descartes is especially remarkable for the attention it gives to animals, the tone of moral censure with which it imparts Descartes’s views on animals, and the stark image it evokes of indifference to the suffering of animals. Given Beckett’s heavy reliance on Mahaffy as a secondary source, it makes sense that his work would demonstrate an abiding concern with the suffering of animals. * * * As a precursor to Molloy, “Dante and the Lobster” (1957) interrogates issues of animal alterity, sentience, and suffering with a pathos that is often underexamined by critics.46 The text questions anthropocentric standards of moral worth by considering the ethical standing of a species of animal whose nonmammalian form of life and Lebenswelt seem particularly remote from our own, but whose pain and suffering the narrator refuses to ignore or deny. An inverted retelling of The Divine Comedy, it begins in the morning with Belacqua Shuah stumped by an obscure passage in the Paradiso and ends at night in an infernal basement kitchen deep in “the bowels of the earth.”47 The mock-Dantean tripartite plot is structured around three errands Belacqua has to perform throughout the day: “one, lunch; two, the lobster; three, the Italian lesson” (6). Beginning and ending with scenes of purchasing and preparing food, the story foregrounds issues of culinary preferences, practices, and ethics. Coming between lunch and his Italian lesson, the lobster is the central, “incalculable factor” around which his itinerary and the narrative revolve.48 The narrative climax occurs when Belacqua delivers the packaged lobster to his aunt, who briskly opens the parcel and lays the animal prone and  Descartes, 180.  Hugh Kenner has little to say about the suffering and death of the lobster. In his reading, the lobster’s fate serves as a symbol for the agonizing death that awaits everyone. “No Beckett death is quick” is his universalizing takeaway. Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (Syracuse University Press, 1996), 51. More recent treatments that consider the lobster on its own terms: Katherine Ebury, “Nonhuman Animal Pain and Capital Punishment in Beckett’s ‘Dante and the Lobster,’” Society & Animals Vol. 25 (2017), 436–455; Thangam Ravindranathan, “Bating the Lobster,” differences Vol. 28, No. 1 (2017), 64–93; and Naho Washizuka, “Pity and Objects: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Dante and the Lobster,’” Journal of Irish Studies Vol, 24 (2009), 75–83. 47  Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 15. 48  More Pricks Than Kicks, 11. 45 46

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exposed upon the table. He is shocked and sickened to discover that the lobster is still alive and moving: Suddenly he saw the creature move, this neuter creature. Definitely it changed its position. His hand flew to his mouth. “Christ!” he said “it’s alive.” His aunt looked at the lobster. It moved again. It made a faint nervous act of life on the oilcloth. They stood above it, looking down on it, exposed cruciform on the oilcloth. It shuddered again. Belacqua felt he would be sick.49

No more involuntary than the automatic motion of Belacqua’s hand raising itself toward his mouth, the “faint nervous act of life” signals to Belacqua (and to the reader) the possibility of animal sentience. “All this time,” he mutters to himself, intimating the realization that what he has taken to be no more than an inanimate object—a “long knobby brown-­ paper parcel”—has been a living thing all along.50 He is further horrified upon seeing his aunt assemble her “hideous equipment” in preparation to cook the lobster: “What are you going to do?” he cried. “Boil the beast” she said, “what else?” “But it’s not dead” protested Belacqua “you can’t boil it like that.” She looked at him in astonishment. Had he taken leave of his senses? “Have sense” she said sharply, “lobsters are always boiled alive. They must be.” She caught up the lobster and laid it on its back. It trembled. “They feel nothing” she said.51

Her words carry the force of an imperative, as inexorable as a judicial decree: all lobsters must be boiled alive. The comparison with capital punishment has been prefigured by references to Pilate, Christ, and the “cruciform” position of the lobster lying on the table, as well as earlier references to McCabe the Malahide murderer whose “petition for mercy” has been rejected and who is to be executed the next morning.52 Questions of compassion and mercy have also been on Belacqua’s mind throughout the day. During his afternoon Italian lesson, he asked his tutor for help  More Pricks Than Kicks, 15.  More Pricks Than Kicks, 13. 51  More Pricks Than Kicks, 15. 52  More Pricks Than Kicks, 12. 49 50

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translating a line from Canto 20 of Inferno, in which Virgil rebukes Dante for pitying the condemned sinners and explains the impiety of compassion that calls into question divine justice.53 Like Virgil correcting his protégé, his aunt chastises Belacqua for his lack of sense. In spite of his aunt’s assurances that lobsters “feel nothing,” Belacqua’s words convey an inchoate sympathy for the lobster, an emotional response prompted by the mute appeal of the animal before him. Confronted by the living presence of the lobster, he grasps its concrete existence as an embodied being with the capacity to feel and suffer. For a fleeting instant, he experiences a moment of sympathetic union with the animal; yet his imagination recoils before the thought of the gruesome end that awaits it. The narrative point of view, which has been focalized primarily through his perspective, briefly enters that of the lobster: “In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of enemies, it had breathed secretly. […] Now it was going alive into the scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.”54 The quotation from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” recalls the poet-speaker’s attempt at imaginary identification with the bird; yet as in Keats’s poem, the reverie cannot be sustained, and Belacqua’s attempt at sympathetic identification with the lobster ultimately falls short. He seeks solace in the comforting belief that its death will be quick and painless—that, as his aunt insists, it will “feel nothing.” The story concludes with an insinuation of the slow, painful death in store for the lobster. As he looks on in pity and resignation, Belacqua consoles himself with the thought that “it’s a quick death”—a consolation the interjecting narrator denies the reader: “It is not.”55 As previously stated, scholars have long observed the presence of Cartesian or Post-Cartesian ideas throughout Beckett’s work. More recently, responding to the growing field of literary animal studies, scholars have also begun to focus on representations of animals and

53  “Qui vive la pietà quand’è ben morta.” Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol 1, Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert Durling, introduction and notes by Ronald L.  Martinez and Robert M.  Durling (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 304. As Sam Slote observes, the interpretive crux of the line is that pieta means both “piety” and “pity.” Sam Slote, “Stuck in Translation: Beckett and Borges on Dante,” Journal of Beckett Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (2010), 20. 54  More Pricks Than Kicks, 16. 55  More Pricks Than Kicks, 16.

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human-animal encounters in Beckett.56 Given the unique association between Descartes and animals—that is, given the central importance for his philosophical project of establishing an essential distinction between the human and the animal, as well as the notoriety of his vivisectional practices—it is striking that almost no one has considered the relationship between Beckett and Descartes through the prism of animals. One notable exception is Steven Connor, whose seminal article entitled “Beckett’s Animals” anticipated many of the current debates around Beckett and animality. Connor equates Beckett’s beliefs about animal sentience with those of Descartes: specifically, he argues that Beckett’s works present a radical separation between humans and animals that bars any possibility of transspecies contact or commonality. Writing that “Beckett’s attitude towards animals seems to derive from the views of Descartes, the philosophical mentor of his early years,” he contends that “Beckett follows Descartes” in viewing the animal as but a mere bête machine, an automaton lacking both reason and feeling.57 Echoing Descartes’s statement that “the human mind does not reach into [animals’] hearts,”58 Connor emphasizes the “unknowability of the animal world” and the sense of profound alterity “beyond the reach of human language and intention.”59 He concludes that, for Beckett, animals are “fundamentally unknowable” to us and therefore that “our assumptions about their sufferings [are] mere anthropomorphic delusions.”60 As a result, although animals in Beckett are frequently victims of violence or cruelty, Connor claims that the reader is denied “sentimental identification” with animals or the “indulgence of pity.”61 Furthermore, Beckett’s philosophical position toward animal suffering is reinforced by the austerity of his prose style. We are “prohibited by the coolness of Beckett’s prose” from identifying sympathetically with animals or from viewing the bodies of dead animals “as anything other than the debris of mortality.”62 By contrast, I argue that Beckett imagines

56  Mary Bryden, ed., Beckett and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jean-Michel Rabaté, Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 57  Steven Connor, “Beckett’s Animals,” Journal of Beckett Studies Vol. 8 (1982), 40. 58  “Beckett’s Animals,” 39. See note 34. 59  “Beckett’s Animals,” 30. 60  “Beckett’s Animals,” 40. 61  Ibid. 62  “Beckett’s Animals,” 33.

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instances of animal suffering and death that evoke sympathy and fellow-­ feeling while also avoiding anthropomorphic assumptions.63 In particular, Molloy attests to the primacy of feeling through the dual themes of animals and embodiment. The two-part structure of the novel mirrors binaristic pairings of mind and body, thought and feeling, human and animal, that the novel unsettles without, however, entirely bridging the fissures between them. By mocking the processes of ratiocination and the impotence of reason, while giving expression to the failure of language to express, Molloy troubles the properties thought most distinctive of the human being: reason and language. Dispossessed of material possessions as well as the trappings of humanity, the human co-protagonists are made to endure suffering and deprivations that endow them with an attunement to feeling and the body and a sensitivity to the lives and deaths of animals. The novel represents the perverted application of Cartesian reasoning to logical yet maniacal extremes. Molloy employs the resources of his mind with mathematical rigor yet toward demented ends, as in the stone-­ sucking scene, in which he explains how, having sixteen stones and four pockets, he is able to devise a scheme ensuring that each stone is sucked only once within a single rotation from pocket to pocket, so that he sucks “not haphazard, but with method.”64 In another example, toward the end of his journey to locate his mother, finding himself lost in a dark wood, Molloy recalls reading somewhere “that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle.”65 He reasons that his best course of action is “to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line”: “And if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.”66 Molloy’s “system” is a parodic inversion of 63  Shane Weller proposes an alternate way of reading animal otherness in Beckett. Like Connor, he identifies a radical alterity to animals in Beckett’s texts. However, he also locates a countervailing expression of human sympathy in the face of animal suffering that appears “at odds with that sense of radical—even infinite—difference which also characterizes the human being’s relation to the animal in Beckett.” Beckett’s texts exhibit dual tendencies to “insist upon the distinction between human and animal” and to allow for the possibility of an ethical response directed toward animals. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s work embodies an ethics of feeling that foregrounds regard for the suffering of animals. See Shane Weller, “Not Rightly Human: Beckett and Animality,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui Vol. 19 (2008), 214, 215. 64  Three Novels, 68. 65  Three Novels, 79. 66  Ibid.

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Descartes’s comparison of the methodical thinker to a traveler who, “upon finding himself lost in a forest, should not wander about turning this way and that, and still less stay in one place, but should keep walking as straight as he can in one direction, […] for in this way, even if he does not go exactly where he wishes, he will at least end up in a place where he is better off than in the middle of a forest.”67 Formally complementing the irrational content is the haphazard structure of Molloy’s narration: instead of a cogently organized structure consisting of a series of separate paragraphs, each one representing a discreet unit of thought, the digressive and rambling narration consists of a single, unbroken monologic discourse. Molloy serves to illustrate an irrational excess of reason and to parody the conception of the human as essentially a “thinking thing,” undercutting the pretensions of Cartesian rationality and demoting reason from its position of primacy. In place of the mind, Beckett elevates and explores the experience of embodiment, in all of its vicissitudes and indignities. Molloy expounds on matters related to his body with frankness and at length—its functions, dysfunctions, and degradations. Throughout his narrative, he observes the progress of his several infirmities and ailments, regularly monitoring “[his] body, to see if anything [has] changed.”68 Recounting his gradual physical disintegration, he contrasts its regularity and predictability while at the seaside with the rapid acceleration of his decline that he later experiences. He is particularly “absorbed” by the “metamorphosis” of his one relatively good leg.69 Focusing on the character of Molloy, I want to suggest that his attentiveness to embodied experience and pain makes him particularly attuned to the suffering of animals, and that his physical and existential proximity to animals is mediated through sensation and feeling. The novel contains an abundance of animal references and representations, reflecting a range and diversity of animal life and the prominent role animals play in the narrative. More than abstractions, symbols, or emblems of human existence or experience, animals are represented concretely and with a precision of detail that gives them a physical presence and dimension normally reserved for descriptions of human characters. Molloy displays a particular awareness of and attentiveness to animals. Recounting the night before beginning his journey to see his mother, among his  Selected Philosophical Writings, 32.  Three Novels, 63. 69  Three Novels, 74. 67 68

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recollections, he mentions seeing cows grazing “in enormous fields, lying and standing, in the evening silence. […] They chew, swallow, then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the next mouthful. A neck muscle stirs and the jaws begin to grind.”70 Such descriptions of animals serve no apparent narrative or symbolic purpose other than representing animal life in its particularity and multiplicity. At once “neither man nor beast,” Molloy occupies a disjunctive position between ontological categories and is frequently associated with animals and animality.71 After accidentally killing the dog Teddy by running over him with his bicycle, he “take[s] the place of the dog” by becoming a surrogate pet to Lousse.72 He continues to identify with Teddy, and when he manages to leave Lousse’s house, he imagines that she links his absence with that of her deceased animal companion: “she did not try to hold me back but she went and sat down on her dog’s grave, perhaps, which was mine too in a way.”73 As a vagrant surviving on the margins of society, he is likened to some “foul beast” or other vermin, hiding in its lair from bloodthirsty human hunters, waiting to be exterminated.74 As his physical condition gradually deteriorates, he becomes altogether unable to walk, abandoning “erect motion, that of man” and reduced to “crawling on his belly, like a reptile.”75 Above all, Molloy demonstrates a particular attentiveness to the suffering and death of animals. Shortly after his arrest and subsequent release for vagrancy, he encounters a team of donkeys pulling a barge: “Toiling towards me along the tow-path I saw a team of little grey donkeys, on the far bank, and I heard angry cries and dull blows. […] My eyes caught a donkey’s eyes, they fell to his feet, their brave fastidious tread.”76 In this passage, there is a tension between the spare, unsentimental style and the feelings of pity and sympathy the description elicits. Physically vulnerable and accustomed to rough treatment at the hands of humans, Molloy expresses a quiet sympathy with the donkeys being subjected to the “angry cries and dull blows” of the human driver. In an echo of the Levinasian

 Three Novels, 4–5.  Three Novels, 15. 72  Three Novels, 42. 73  Three Novels, 54. 74  Three Novels, 62. 75  Three Novels, 83, 84. 76  Three Novels, 22. 70 71

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“face to face”77 encounter between A and C that opens the novel, he meets one of the donkeys eye to eye, and the silent exchange between human and animal bespeaks a fleeting moment of transspecies connection. He is affected by the “brave fastidious tread” of his “little feet,” the repetition of diminutives expressing a sense of affection and affiliation. The simplicity of the syntax and diction conveys an understated emotional response to the sight of animal suffering, and the passage illustrates an attention to and identification with animals. Scenes like this one are presented not as an “anthropomorphic delusions” but events of interspecies communication that transcend language. His connection to animals is perhaps better appreciated when contrasted with his usual sense of epistemological and linguistic alienation from human beings. He often struggles to apprehend the world and others in it, perceiving people, objects, and rooms but “darkly,” as when he describes a waiting room in the police station as “dark and full of people […] dark forms crowding in a dark place.”78 He feels an urge to follow A but can see him “only darkly,”79 and while staying with Lousse, in the room where he sleeps he is able to see “but darkly.”80 Beyond the inability to perceive clearly his surroundings, he is incapacitated in the full functioning of those faculties that, according to Descartes, are most distinctly human: reason and language. He struggles to understand, and make himself understood by, other human beings. Recalling the time when a child thanked him for handing him his marble, he notes that the child’s words “engraved themselves for ever on my memory, perhaps because I understood them at once, a thing I didn’t often do.”81 For Descartes, all human beings, “however stupid and insane they may be,”82 possess and exercise the capacity for language—that essential property which distinguishes them from animals. As for Molloy, he understands what is said to him only after “repeated solicitations,” while his own voice sounds like nothing so much as the “buzzing of an insect.”83 The brief encounter with the donkeys is immediately followed by an extended scene illustrating his concern with the suffering and death of  Three Novels, 5.  Three Novels, 19. 79  Three Novels, 7. 80  Three Novels, 39. 81  Three Novels, 45. 82  The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, 366. 83  Three Novels, 45. 77 78

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animals. Molloy has spent the night in a ditch, and when he awakens, he finds himself being watched by a shepherd and his dog. He experiences the event in the past, and narrates it in the present, with a clarity that is unusual for him. He explains: When I wake I see the first things quite clearly, the first things that offer, and I understand them, when they are not too difficult. […] I knew at once it was a shepherd and his dog I had before me, above me rather, for they had not left the path. And I identified the bleating too, without any trouble, the anxious bleating of the sheep, missing the dog at their heels. It is then too that the meaning of words is least obscure to me, so that I said, with tranquil assurance, Where are you taking them, to the fields or to the shambles? […] I heard the shepherd whistle, and I saw him flourishing his crook, and the dog bustling about the herd, which but for him would no doubt have fallen into the canal. All that through a glittering dust, and soon through that mist too which rises in me every day and veils the world from me and veils me from myself.84

Given his usual condition of linguistic and epistemological impairment, the encounter with the shepherd and his flock is all the more striking for the clarity of his perception and communication. The scene occurs at a moment when the epistemological veil that normally separates him from the world has become transparent. No longer seeing the world through a glass darkly, he is able to perceive objects and sounds with a clarity and distinctness that echoes the Cartesian standard for indubitability. The sense of clarity is complemented by the religious quality imbuing the scene, as though it were an epiphanic vision. Molloy remains troubled by the question of the eventual destination of the sheep, “wondering if they had safely reached some commonage or fallen, their skulls shattered, their thin legs crumpling, first to their knees, then over on their fleecy sides, under the pole-ax, though that is not the way they slaughter sheep, but with a knife, so that they bleed to death.”85 For Molloy, the imagined dead bodies of the sheep are more than the mere “debris of mortality,” as Connor claims: they are subjects of concern born of their shared conditions of embodiment, vulnerability, and finitude. To the extent that animals are ultimately unknowable, they nevertheless elicit feelings of sympathy in the human protagonist. The sympathetic response toward  Three Novels, 24–25.  Three Novels, 25.

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animals is not achieved by means of intellection but rather reached through corporeality and feeling. Contrary to the claim that there is a complete absence of relationship between humans and animals in his work, Beckett imagines the possibility of transspecies connection, often in contrast with the disconnection and estrangement that typically characterizes interactions between human characters. Far from agreeing with Descartes, Beckett portrays ways of relating to animals that transcend cognitive modes of apprehension. While animals are presented as epistemically unavailable to human beings, Beckett offers feeling as an alternative mode of access between humans and animals. Molloy stages moments of transspecies communion, however fleeting or elusive, and depicts efforts to cross ontological and epistemological divides without completely erasing the differences between humans and animals.

Bibliography Ackerley, C.J. and S.E.  Gontarski. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. New York: Grove, 2004. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol 1, Inferno. Ed. and trans. Robert Durling. Introduction and notes by Ronald L.  Martinez and Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. D’Aubarede, Gabriel. “En attendant Beckett.” Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 16 February, 1961. ———. “Interviews with Beckett (1961).” Trans. Christopher Waters. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. Eds. L.  Graver and R.  Federman. London: Routledge, 1979. Bair, Deidre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Touchstone, 1978. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson. Introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta. New York: Grove, 1984. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1. Eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. ———. More Pricks Than Kicks. New York: Grove, 1972. ———. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1955. Begam, Richard. “Samuel Beckett and Anti-Humanism.” REAL: The Yearbook in English and American Literature 13 (1997): 299–312. Bryden, Mary (ed.). Beckett and Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder, 2001.

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Cohn, Ruby. “Philosophical Fragments in the Works of Samuel Beckett.” Criticism 6, No. 1 (1964): 33–43. Connor, Steven. “Beckett’s Animals.” Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (1982): 29–44. Critchley, Simon. Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London: Routledge, 1997. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. ———. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated John Cottingham and Robert Stoothoff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Doherty, Francis. Journal of Beckett Studies 2, No. 1 (1992): 27–46. Ebury, Katherine. “Nonhuman Animal Pain and Capital Punishment in Beckett’s ‘Dante and the Lobster.’” Society & Animals 25 (2017): 436–455. Feldman, Matthew. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. London: Continuum, 2006. Fletcher, John. “Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers.” Comparative Literature 17, No. 1 (1965): 43–56. Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. Syracuse UP, 1996 ———. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Mahaffy, J.P. Descartes. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwell and Sons, 1902. Moran, Dermot. “Beckett and Philosophy.” Samuel Beckett–100 Years. Ed. Christopher Murray. Dublin: New Island, 2006. 93–110. Murphy, P.J. “Beckett and the Philosophers.” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 222–240. Nixon, Mark and Dirk Van Hulle. Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human. New York: Fordham University Press: 2016. Ravindranathan, Thangam. “Bating the Lobster,” differences 28, No. 1 (2017): 64–93. Slote, Sam. “Stuck in Translation: Beckett and Borges on Dante.” Journal of Beckett Studies 19, No. 1 (2010): 15–28. Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Washizuka, Naho. “Pity and Objects: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Dante and the Lobster.’” Journal of Irish Studies 24 (2009): 75–83. Weller, Shane. “Not Rightly Human: Beckett and Animality.” Samuel Beckett Today/aujourd’hui 19 (2008): 211–222.

“The Golden Moment”: Enclosure, Fugitivity, and Broken Immanence Michael Krimper

How are we inclined to read the drive of endless striving and perseverance that marks Samuel Beckett’s postwar shift to an aesthetics of failure? Insofar as his first-person narrators at once survive and unceasingly recount their stories of survival, they seem to imply a futile drive to escape from the material conditions of a ruined world. Those narrators, more specifically, are subjected to violent social and natural forces that have expelled them from their homes, if they had ever belonged anywhere in the first place, compelling them to depart and wander in search of some sort of escape, whether refuge, stillness, or silence. As vagrants, idlers, fugitives, or disembodied and errant voices, they constantly run from the police and the law; from landlords, priests, bureaucrats, officials, and caregivers representing larger structures of control; from mobs and crowds of people in the streets; from charitable and carceral institutions of enclosure organized around

M. Krimper (*) Department of French and Gallatin School, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_8

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the discipline, surveillance, and management of life.1 They try to elude the biopolitical  mechanisms of subjugation that have nonetheless already turned them into mere things, nothing, even less than nothing, their existence rendered worthless and disposable, not quite human. And it is this systemic reduction of being to the poverty of appropriated and exploited life—life captured by globalizing configurations of sovereign power in the modern era—to which the ongoingness of Beckett’s fractured narrative voices bears witness and against which it protests. Beckett’s narrators cannot stop trying to escape from the world despite the impossibility of so doing. In telling their stories of flight without having the capacity to narrate much of anything, they at times convey and undergo overpowering experiences of self-dispossession, emptying, and abjection whereby they are cast outside themselves and become other. They glimpse, touch, or feel an opening onto somewhere else, a region outside that remains inappropriable, at a slight remove from the world in the midst of the world. And for a moment, it would seem, they refuse and break out of the spaces of confinement they are usually compelled to inhabit. To illustrate such an impossible departure outside in this chapter, I want to consider the ecstatic vision of self-relinquishment and dispersal in “The End” (1946), the “golden instant” of release in Molloy (1951), and the impersonal and anonymous language of the narrative voice extending from The Unnamable (1953) to Not I (1972). In this cluster of work spanning genre and media, Beckett experiments with a literary and aesthetic form of perseverance that is inseparably tied to what Georges Bataille called the informe, approximated as “formless” or “unforming,” and that is characterized by failure. The drive to escape, for Beckett, fails to bring life into contact with a transcendental beyond that would somehow redeem, save, or repair the incompleteness of meaning or the precariousness of finite existence. Rather, it exhibits what is beyond the world, nothing but the infinite openness of the outside, which is to say, nothing. In this way Beckett traces an oscillation between an attachment to and a detachment from the world whereby it is incessantly put under erasure, suspended, and imagined otherwise from the standpoint of the outside sketched by the absolute negativity of artistic or literary creation. As Peter Boxall has pointed out, the negativity of Beckett’s literary aesthetic at once 1  For a recent study of the importance of enclosure in Beckett’s work, see James Little, Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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acknowledges and resists what there is.2 And, to borrow a term from Jean-Luc Nancy, one could say further that it stages an art of disenclosure (déclosion), whose aim is to show the gaps, holes, and intervals within and without the work, thereby exposing the groundlessness on the basis of which the totalizing enclosure of the world is founded and maintained in late capitalist modernity, an undercurrent flowing elsewhere.3 Beckett’s art of disenclosure thus embraces the mutual entanglement of things, words, creatures, forces, elements, and pulsations that comprises the materiality and finitude of our shared common existence bereft of the property relations constituting the subject. It fashions and attunes us to the common, or the impropriety of being-in-common, at the interstices of both the work and the world. The fugitive movement of escape improvised by Beckett, I will argue, therefore affirms a broken immanence—an immanence with an outside—indicating an ethico-aesthetic mode of engagement at a distance from and yet conjoined with politics.

Ecstatic Visions Midway through “The End”—in the first version of which Beckett abruptly decided to switch from English to French language writing—the narrator comes to squat in an abandoned, ramshackle shed on a private estate. He has already been expelled from multiple residences, including an unidentified religious or medical institution, a basement apartment, a farm, the streets, and wherever else he might have resided beforehand. He begs for money in a nearby village where one day a Marxist orator interpolates him before the crowd and preaches, all the while advocating the moral value of work and self-uplift, the dehumanizing effects of charity: “a crime, an incentive to slavery.”4 From the perspective of the orator, the 2  See Peter Boxall, “Towards a Political Reading,” Irish Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2002): 159–170. Nevertheless, unlike Boxall, I would argue that the mode of engagement coinciding with Beckett’s literary aesthetic of failure should be understood as ethical and not strictly political. 3  Nancy maintains that disenclosure consists in the “dismantling and disassembling of closed bowers, enclosures, fences [des clos, des enclos, des clôtures]. Deconstruction of property—that of man and that of the world.” See Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), 160–61. 4  Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose (New York: Grove, 1997). Hereafter SP.

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narrator is nothing but a “leftover,” an orphaned dog destined for the pound, “old, lousy, rotten, ripe for the muckheap,” a “living corpse,” like thousands of others (SP, 94). To develop the terms of this Marxist discourse, we could say that the orator counts him as a member of the Lumpenproletariat or rabble, designating the surplus population that falls out of the work force of capitalism and, devoid of labor power, cannot contribute to the dialectical struggle for liberation pursued by the proletarian class. And yet, the narrator is not captured by the orator’s interpellation reducing him as it were to a piece of shit and quite ironically, while retreating back to the estate, discerns the latter as a “religious fanatic” or “escaped lunatic” (SP, 95). This encounter prefaces the final scene of the story in which the narrator lies down in the shed, freed from any obligation to work, and has ecstatic visions of self-relinquishment from the violence of humanity in addition to the laws and social codes governing the established order. What animates the narrator’s ecstatic visions is not only an ever-­ intensifying state of solitary idleness, but also the way he inhabits the interstices of the estate’s closed spaces, making them available for common use rather than the ownership of property. Though the estate, the narrator observes, is “enclosed with a wall” (SP, 95) and locked gates, one side is exposed to the riverfront where the silhouette of the nearby village buildings appears on the horizon. He opts to make his bed in an old boat stored within the shed, placing it upside down so as to contend with the rats and cover himself as much as possible. In this coffin-like space, the narrator pierces an opening and stares into the dark. “Flat then on my back,” he remarks, “I saw nothing, except, dimly, just above my head, through the tiny chinks, the grey light of the shed” (SP, 96). There, absorbed in a wakeful stillness and vigilance, the narrator listens to his surroundings at once from within and without: the gulls feeding on sewage; the water lapping against the waves; the rain crashing onto and falling through the roof of the shed; the howling of the wind; and his own bodily noises too, especially the oozing of farts. “I was very snug in my box,” he says, for all of these sensations “composed a rather liquid world” (SP, 97) in which sounds, images, desires, feelings, inclinations, and thoughts intersperse. But the narrator’s apparently neutral contentment in this closed and yet open space of respite where he is derelict and destitute, “so indolent and weak” (SP, 98), cannot last. Other violent sensations and memories rise to the surface: “I felt them hard upon me, the icy, tumultuous streets, the terrifying faces, the noises that slash, pierce, claw, bruise” (SP, 98). Even

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in the sensory deprivation chamber of the boat, the narrator’s body is still fundamentally exposed to its environs and to itself, never fully sequestered. For the body is formed and unformed not as a hermetically sealed monad but in and through its openings to the outside, such as the skin, eyes, ears, mouth, anus, and sex organs. Furthermore, the narrator’s sense of being carried outside himself, of taking lines of flight from multiple sites of enclosure, increases with the body’s need to expel waste. “So,” he continues, “I waited till the desire to shit, or even to piss, lent me wings” (SP, 98). He dwells in his own excrement, dirtying the refuge of his “nest,” alongside the droppings left by other animals. The expulsive processes of self-dispossession and abjection introduce a zone of indifference that unsettles any rigid distinction between self and other: “To contrive a little kingdom in the midst of universal muck, then shit on it, ah that was me all over. The excrements were me too, I know, I know, but all the same” (SP, 98). The narrator thus generalizes his tragicomic condition as a lump of excrement, the Lumpen, suggesting not only that he lives in the impropriety of his own shit, the shit which others estimate him to be, but also that the entire world, indeed the universe, is made of shit anyway. The narrator’s hermitage, rather than an escape from the shittiness of the world, becomes more so a deep immersion in the universal muck that we all are. As Annabel Kim proposes in a recent study on the excremental in modernist French literature, including Beckett, the “universal materiality” of shit indicates “a sign and vector of radical equality.”5 This is because the excremental for Kim defies the principles of appropriation and unlimited accumulation, and is characterized instead by the drive of expulsion that others the self and can in turn fertilize an altogether different potential for transformative growth. If bodies always rid and separate from themselves, then they cannot be fully possessed, incorporated, assimilated, and rationally mastered within the confines of either acquisitive space or the abstract subject. In light of this reading of the literary excremental, Kim asserts a nonidentitarian political stance of embodied and concrete universalism based not on the general equivalence of subjects within the juridico-legal apparatus of the State, but on the acknowledgment of the other, the other each self is, as part of humanity. However, somewhat at odds with this approach, I would contend that Beckett’s linguistic play with scatology avoids recuperating waste back into any economy of growth 5  Annabel Kim, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon in French Literature (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2022), 14. Also see her insightful chapter on Molloy (77–104).

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and exchange, for it always leads to sustained decay, expenditure, and diminishment, that is, to degrowth. Amid the impoverishment and abjection of the universal muck, he exhibits how things and words intermingle by means of their contact and passage at the edges they share in common. Beckett offers in this way not exactly a politics, but an ethos of being-in-­ common bound to embrace the equality without common measure of singular and plural entities, decentered from the objectifying powers of human subjectivity. Though the narrator had already been cast out and excluded from the reproductive network of sociality, he goes on to affirm his displaced place of abjection. He welcomes more precisely a way of living and dying and surviving as a deformity expelled from the social body, “the unsociable” (SP, 97), incapable of being integrated into the whole. Drawing from Bataille’s study of heterology and the informe in his renegade surrealist journal Documents (1929–30), one could argue that the modern social body works to constitute itself and establish its own sovereign authority by virtue of expelling whatever group is deemed abject, converted into waste, and rendered fungible. And yet, the abject remains as an unrepresentable and inassimilable fragment of the outside eliding the juridical and scientific discourses that purport to recognize, know, and manage it. Its amorphous processes of fragmentary breakdown and dissolution safeguard an alogical difference foreign to the totalizing homogeneity of the social order whose claim to universalism always conceals its normative privileging of a specific ethnonational, racial, linguistic, religious, or cultural identity. For Bataille, heterogeneous groups harbor the unstable potential and chance of insurgency, since they embody and communicate the boundless reservoir of refusal at the heart of the inappropriable, linked to a non-economy of unproductive expenditure, loss, and waste. This is why the abject can neither be fully appropriated by the mechanisms of sovereign power that marginalize, oppress, and threaten to exterminate surplus populations like the Lumpen, nor fully expelled by them either. Instead, the self-expropriation of the abject furtively escapes capture by the law, as well as by the biopolitical and necropolitical configurations of sovereignty encompassing moreover colonial and racialized regimes of power. That the narrator, as a miserable and abject figure, continues to waste away in the midst of the universal muck is ultimately what precipitates his ecstatic visions. He is alone in the boat, or at least sees himself that way, carried by the water’s ebb and flow. The shore recedes, as the lights on the horizon fade, and the boat starts to toss with foam washing aboard: “the

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sea air was all about me” (SP, 98). Shards of memories from childhood pierce the visions, and he glimpses images of his father, which evoke unrequited desires for familial intimacy and care, “a gesture of protective love” (SP, 99). He sees the mountains, the lights on the buoys, red and yellow, and the glow of the shrubs burning from a fire he had lit. Watching it all from his bed, so it seems, he drifts with the tides and the frenzied currents of language and sensation casting him out. As the visions unfold, we can no longer be certain where the narrator is located, whether he is still lost in his thoughts, feelings, and memories or back in the shed. Here or there, though, he recounts how he pries open the plug in the boat, lets the waters rise gradually around him, and takes a pill promising calm, maybe death. Increasingly submerged, he imagines the extreme forces of the elements closing in on him and breaking his body down, as illustrated by the chilling passage at the end: It would take a good half hour, everything included, barring accidents. Back now in the stern-sheets, my legs stretched out, my back well propped against the sack stuffed with grass I used as a cushion, I swallowed my calmative. The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the utmost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on. (SP, 99)

It is worth noting Beckett’s metaphorical use of a heart contraction to depict the ecstatic vision of self-relinquishment and emptying. If the elements of the sea, sky, mountains, and islands crush the narrator in a “might systole,” then his body becomes imbricated in a tremendous contraction that releases the entire organism’s blood flow, the propulsive energy coursing through the shared common existence of all things, dispersed at the limits of space. Thus, once overtaken by the confinement of numerous closed spaces—the boat, the shed, and the elements of the cosmos, as much as the story or work of literature too—the narrator is assailed with a flood of emotion, language, and thought that rids him of himself; he is self-expelled and expropriated. Unable to begin or end a story in the likeness of his life, but at the same time unable not to, he is divested of subjectivity, scattered afar, and diffused with the rest of the universal muck. What is staged in and through this fruitless mystical experience is neither the fusion of total immanence nor the narrative closure of finality

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associated with death. On the contrary, we are moved to feel an infinite opening onto the outside—that is, nothing—which leaves life, work, and the world undone.

The Moment of Release From the postwar novels to the plays, Beckett will continue to reiterate how fugitive movements of escape evoke such immanence with an outside. Consider Molloy, for example, the first of the three novels, where another vagrant seeks in vain the stillness of respite. Molloy too is expelled from his home, wherever that may have been, and is constantly on the run. But his body is also failing him; he is constrained to crutches, an irregular pacing of motion and rest, which lends propulsion to the fluctuations of the narrative voice. Molloy is in this way subjected to the inevitable processes of corporeal and linguistic decomposition from which there is no escape whatever he might try to do or say. And yet, at a certain juncture, he experiences a “golden moment” of release, of letting go, closely resembling the ecstatic visions of “The End.” One of the few readers of Beckett to highlight these experiences is Bataille, who draws our attention to the golden moment in his review of the novel, titled “Molloy’s Silence” (1951), described at the outset as “the most unabashedly unbearable story in the world.”6 Following the publication of this extraordinary compliment in Critique, Bataille and Beckett would meet in person for the first time, most likely through the intermediary of Georges Duthuit, who collaborated with them both. Duthuit not only invited Beckett to contribute to the revived journal Transition in the late 1940s, but also actively participated in Bataille’s avant-garde groups from the 1930s, namely The College of Sociology and Acéphale, both of which examined the interconnected questions of the sacred, sacrifice and sovereignty—questions that, as we will see, would also concern Beckett in his literary enactment of the golden moment. Bataille initially characterizes Molloy as a “vagabond,” “derelict,” and “wretch” [misérable]. Yet the drifter’s steady descent into a much more indeterminate state of existence, if not nonexistence, ends up signaling the “unnamable,” Bataille specifies, “no less mute than death” (MS, 56). As 6  Geoges Bataille’s essay “Molloy’s Silence” was renamed “Georges Bataille in Critique,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage,Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds. and trans. Jean M. Sommermeyer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 55. Hereafter MS.

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abject, Molloy materializes into that which is “essentially indistinct” at the limits of human language and being. Bataille elucidates this liminal transfiguration of the narrator under the sign of the informe, thereby registering how Beckett’s experiments with new formal techniques aim, as the latter put it in a 1961 interview, to “accommodate the mess,”7 that is, the exceedingly formless and unforming processes of base matter in the universe. Those techniques arrest the ordinary usage of words, discharge their meaning, and communicate by means of the “silence” (pauses, ellipses, and gaps) that puts the subject under erasure and lays existence bare. What those irruptions of silence transmit is “the most meager and inevitable of realities,” Bataille clarifies, “that fundamental reality continually soliciting us but from which a certain terror always pulls us back, the reality we refuse to face and into which we must continually struggle not to sink, known to us only in the elusive form of anguish” (MS, 55). The anguish elicited by Molloy, he continues, shows the existence we tend to avoid in the “absence of humanity.” It exhibits, in other words, the “anonymous region of what is” (MS, 56) lying outside the human subject. What fascinates Bataille, inducing an elusive form of anguish, is the “sordid wonder” of Molloy. Equivocating between attraction to and repulsion from its horror, he is compelled to give up the distance from which literary criticism usually guarantees the objective assessment and interpretation of a text. Bataille conveys instead his own participatory experience of reading the novel, urged at first to identify with the figure of Molloy before losing himself within the impossibility of doing so at the threshold of the impersonal and anonymous region of being or nonbeing. He then invites you, as the reader, to similarly become aware of this zone of indiscernibility within and without the self, invoking the Molloys you have likely met outside: the transients and wretches, the stranded and homeless, the banished who come and go, out of work and deprived of refuge. This passage warrants to be read in full: If I were indifferent to cold, hunger, and the myriad difficulties that overwhelm a man when he abandons himself to nature, rain, and the earth, to the immense quicksand [l’enlisement] of the world and of things, I myself would be the character Molloy. I can say something more about him, and that is that both you and I have met him: seized by a terrified longing, we 7  Beckett interviewed by Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4, no. 3 (1961): 24.

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have encountered him on street corners, an anonymous figure composed of the inevitable beauty of rags, a vacant and indifferent expression, and an ancient accumulation of filth [l’envahissement séculaire de la saleté]; he was being, defenseless [désemparé] at last, an enterprise, as we all are, that had ended in shipwreck [à l’état d’épave]. (MS, 55)

Nothing in language, Bataille claims, can grasp such an anonymous figure “whose speech, sustaining him, might have made him human,” but condemns him to an indifferent and silent state of misrecognition. “It would delude us,” he maintains, returning “us to some appearance of humanity, to something other than this absence of humanity heralded by the derelict [l’épave] dragging himself through the streets, who fascinates us” (MS, 56). Bataille, like Beckett, has recourse here to the nondialectical technique of bathos. The linguistic play of difference improperly lowers what is negated rather than raising it to a higher stage of self-consciousness for the sake of knowledge acquisition. Absorbed in the filth of the universal muck, Molloy defies recuperation back into any teleological narrative of self-development, improvement, or salvation; the enterprise of being, on the contrary, is shattered. For Bataille, this debasement of language disturbs the domain of propriety, undermining the integrity, property, and enclosure of the subject. And, in confronting the impropriety of what cannot be comprehended, it occasions senses of the unknown, of nonknowledge. Bataille thus alerts us to the finitude at once constituting and rendering destitute what we are: vulnerable and defenseless beings consigned to ruin, to death. At this point, Bataille inserts a lengthy footnote in which he recalls a personal encounter he had as a young man with a “vagabond” at a train station. It is as though his fascination with Molloy pushed him to grapple with the fiction through an autobiographical subtext tracing his own search for the unnamable. The literary status of this subtext is uncertain though. After all, on what basis could we decide whether it is autobiographical or fictional? Akin to Moran, Bataille tracks the whereabouts of Molloy only to come up short. “Yet the memory he left with me,” Bataille confides, speaking of the vagabond at the train station, “and the amazed terror it still arouses in me, continue to remind me of the silence of animals” (MS, 63). He goes on to explain that this chance encounter had prompted him to write a story where someone happens to kill the drifter in the countryside, just as Moran carelessly murders a stranger in the woods. According to Bataille, such representations of violence implicate a

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desire to identify and fuse with the animality of the victim without employing the mediated language of recognition. For the sublation of finitude to the level of the concept blinds dialectics and the self-­production of the human subject to the absolute negativity of destruction, or the sacred horror of death, at its source. Any effort in writing to understand the silence of animals (to approach Molloy “as mute as death”) must fail though, because the staging of the literary scene of murder merely parodies, as in a comedy, the literal act of sacrifice. Nevertheless, that Molloy takes up the impossible demand of expressing the unnamable and keeps failing to do so is what ends up evoking, in and through language, the silence of animals. As Bataille puts it, Beckett “no longer reduces writing to a means of expressing his intention,” but “consents to respond to possibilities given, though chaotically mingled, in those deep currents that flow through the oceanic agitation of words, results of its own accord, yielding to the weight of destiny, in the formless [l’informe] figure of absence” (MS, 57). So, as we read, we follow the twists and turns of Molloy’s itinerant wandering on the verge of becoming or unbecoming a formless and unforming figure of absence. When idly hunching over his bike, stumbling in the forest on crutches, arrested by the police, crawling in the mud, or sunken in a ditch, Molloy passes through the permeable borders of seemingly closed spaces. “No longer able to walk,” Bataille observes, “he continues his journey crawling like a slug” (MS, 61). Beckett, for his part, depicts Molloy’s crawl as a reptilian maneuver freed from the trials of human labor at the limit between rest and restlessness. “For he who moves this way, crawling on his belly, like a reptile, no sooner comes to rest than he begins to rest, and even the very movement is a kind of rest, compared to other movements, I mean those that have worn me out.”8 Neither human nor animal, or both at once, Molloy goes where nobody belongs. But when Molloy falls into a ditch at the end of the forest, voices from nowhere reach out to him. They tell him “not to fret, that help is coming. Literally [Textuellement].” They appeal to him by name: “Don’t fret Molloy, we’re coming” (TN, 85). Once he lets go and sinks down to the bottom of the ditch, he hears birds, or thinks he does, and memories of his life come racing back; he glimpses the elements too, rain and sunshine, spring weather. There, the narrator muses, he could stay, seized by the 8  Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1997), 84. Hereafter TN.

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voices, words, senses, and memories coming from somewhere else, transporting him outside. The first half of the book concludes with this scene of broken immanence, not so different than the great cosmic systole experienced by the narrator of “The End.” Molloy gives himself over to a moment of release in which horror and rapture mingle together in the ecstasy of self-dispersal where nothing comes to save him, and he embraces being unsaved, nonbeing. This evokes what Molloy calls earlier in the novel the “golden moment” [instant doré]. On crutches, his inability to get going initiates “brief moments of the immemorial expiation.” There is an arhythmic stride punctuating the fugitive movement of escape: “my progress reduced me to stopping more and more often, it was the only way to progress, to stop” (TN, 73). And, while being dragged to the police station due to the crime of loitering, Molloy listens to a “distant music” as if, he says, “I had been someone else” (TN, 17). Upon the “languid ending” of “the forenoon’s toil,” an interval of respite in the middle of the day, Molloy wonders whether anyone else could be put in his place. He wonders whether anyone could acknowledge his unrecognizable state of physical and mental abjection, his life captured by the law and other unseen forces of structural violence. At the cusp of no longer knowing or remembering where he is going and where he comes from, Molloy asks: Was there one among them to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was [j’étais peu] then from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain [et dans ce peu quelle puissance], as of hawsers about to snap? It’s possible. Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my old poisons I struggled towards them, safely bound. Under the blue sky, under the watchful gaze. Forgetful of my mother, set free from the act, merged in this alien hour [l’heure des autres], saying, Respite, respite. (TN, 17)

With the golden moment, Beckett puts forward an aesthetic and literary strategy of substitution, in proximity to Levinas’s transcendental view of ethical responsibility for the other, but immanent. What Molloy inquires into is the prospect of affirming the nonrelation to the other as the shared separation, distance, and passage between us. Exhausted by the search for his mother, beaten by the police and the crowd, hardened by the elements, all the while compelled to hear the voices dictating to him the exigency to persevere, Molloy relinquishes himself to the infinitesimal lightness of

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respite, of forgetfulness and peace, a kind of bliss in which time undergoes a series of mutations. The alien hour of respite never fully occurs and in not yet coming, elicits a delay that precedes and forestalls the ordeal of subjectivation, opening onto the temporality of nonarrival in the break of the present. Perhaps Bataille’s reading, as a mix of criticism, autobiography, and fiction, answers Molloy’s query about the ethical prospect of substitution in the hour of others (“to put himself in my place”). To bear witness to the dehumanizing forces of subjugation and more generally to the enterprise of being, shattered to pieces “as we all are,” Bataille assumes a dual task. He seeks not only to lay bare the horror of what there is, but also to communicate and share out the excess of refusal stemming from the inappropriability of finite coexistence.9 “Would the felicities of poetry be accessible to someone who turns away from horror?” Bataille asks. “Would authentic despair be any different from Molloy’s golden moment in the hands of the police” (MS, 62)? The joy and horror of the golden moment on the one hand provide testimony of the prevailing configuration of sovereign power and violence in the modern era, and on the other hand undermine it from the perspective of that which fugitively departs outward and avoids capture. Bataille elaborates similar instants of self-relinquishment and release in terms of “the sovereign operation” in his wartime writings gathered together under the title of the Summa Atheologica, drawing on the instances of laughter, silence, and sacrifice. Against mastery, the sovereign operation contests all authority, including its own. It suspends the pragmatic circuit of discursive thought, meaning-making, and instrumental rationality that consists in subordinating being to the goal-oriented logic of action and projects in the future. And its unproductive expenditure of surplus energy, channeling the uncontrollable play of forces in the universe, declares right here and now the insubordination of sovereign existence freed from the work of the subject. Beckett, for his part, would have been familiar with Bataille’s approach to sovereignty from his collaboration with Duthuit for Transition. He most likely read Bataille’s essay treating Gabriel Marcel’s statements on 9  Whereas several commentators confirm the political stakes of testimony in Beckett, I am underscoring its ethical implications within the context of his literary aesthetic of failure. See above all Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination (London: UK.  Cambridge UP, 2017), 130–183; Marjorie Perloff, “‘In Love with Hiding’: Samuel Beckett’s War,” The Iowa Review 35, no. 1, (2005): 76–103; and Terry Eagleton, “Political Beckett?,” New Left Review, no. 40 (2006): 67–74.

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Christian mystical experience, by way of Madeleine Deguy and Saint Catherine de Siena, titled “The Ultimate Instant,” published in the first issue of the journal in 1948. “Poetic frenzy, religious emotion, like laughter and sensuality,” Bataille suggests, “have in themselves a value detachable from the meaning we assign to them, a sovereign value which is ‘in the service of nothing and nobody.’”10 With an emphasis on sacrificial communion, Bataille asserts that the sovereignty bestowed onto the ultimate instant does not reveal the transcendence of the beyond as the promise of everlasting life or the perfection of being, but uncovers nothing. Before the void of death, it precipitates an overwhelming wave of sensations leading to self-dispersal and emptying. Additionally, not so long after finishing Molloy, Beckett translated an excerpt of Bataille’s preface to Justine by the Marquis de Sade for an issue of Transition that never appeared in print.11 There, Bataille dwells on the contestatory nonpower of the sovereign operation within the space of literature and teases out the propensity to destroy as a fundamental part of the cosmos under the sign of the sacred: “the desire deep within us to consume and bring to ruin, to make a fire of our resources, […] the sole determinants of our sovereign attitudes, that is to say those which are gratuitous, without utility, ministering to themselves alone and never subordinate to results.”12 In Bataille’s view, the strand of modern literature inaugurated by Sade safeguards an experience of disequilibrium in and through language whose unemployed negativity undermines the autonomous and self-sufficient subject. Its deregulation of the senses pushes the possibilities of human being to its utmost limits where it cannot help but fall apart, and where it cannot help but revolt, in face of the impossible. Could we then draw a correspondence between Bataille on the sovereign operation and Beckett on ecstatic visions and moments of release? Notwithstanding their evident affinities, Beckett cautions against Bataille’s desire to enjoy total destruction in a 1950 letter to Duthuit: “Greatly 10  Georges Bataille, “The Ultimate Instant,” trans. Thomas Walton, Transition Forty-Eight (1948), 67. 11  On Beckett’s efforts for the seventh issue of Transition on Sade, see my preface and article included in the special issue I edited for the Journal of Beckett Studies, publishing his lost translations for the first time: “The Lost Volume of Transition: Beckett, Duthuit, Sade” and “On Sade’s Sovereign Excess: Beckett Translating Blanchot and Bataille,” Journal of Samuel Beckett Studies 31, no. 1 (2022), 1–5; 95–110. 12  Georges Bataille, “Vice is Perhaps the Heart of Man,” trans. Samuel Beckett, Journal of Samuel Beckett Studies 31, no. 1 (2022): 51–55.

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enjoyed your lack of enjoyment of the all-purpose disaster [le désastre à tout faire], à la Bataille.”13 The phrase “le désastre à tout faire,” which as Jean-Michel Rabaté proposes can also be rendered as “the disaster of doing everything,”14 implies how the enjoyment of unemployed negativity is bound to re-establish and shore up the sovereignty of the subject. By contrast, Beckett proclaims to enjoy Duthuit’s “lack of enjoyment.” Maybe the bliss of the golden moment could be elaborated as the suspension of destructive jouissance, just as Beckett formulates elsewhere the self-­ canceling levity of “the laugh laughing at the laugh.”15 Otherwise joy before the dying other, or before the world and humanity brought to ruin, would risk becoming complicit with the violence that the executioner brings to bear on the body of the victim. Bataille, nevertheless, is at least partially aware of the dangers raised by the sovereign operation, for he insists on the powerless refusal of used up language (e.g., the groan of the vagabond), and the exigency whereby writing recoils from the final silence that would put the power of death back to work for the purpose of completing the narrative (e.g., Molloy). Consequently, the golden moment would have to render inoperative the sovereign operation of sacrificial communion and destruction. It would have to neutralize the modern configuration of sovereign power and violence, all the while exhibiting the inappropriable remainder of finitude out of which resounds a common spirit of nonsovereign revolt, insurgency, and uprising. From within spaces of enclosure, Molloy is already a fugitive and outsider “set free from the act” in the “alien hour,” incessantly escaping the sovereignty and law of political institutions, apparatuses, and disciplinary procedures that control and manage life. In the interval of golden moment, fugitivity lets the self dissociate from itself, reach out toward the other, and give way to the infinite openness of the outside. What this broken immanence alerts us to are the edges of the outside we share in common, where bodies, things, and forces neither possess nor appropriate but touch and pass through one another. Beckett’s aesthetics of failure, or inoperativity, therefore implies an ethics of the common at a distance from and yet still linked to the domain of politics. This is because the ethos of 13  Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Vol. 2: 1941–1946,Georg Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn. and Lois More Overbeck, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011), 186. 14  Jean-Michel Rabaté, Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), 90. 15  Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove, 2009), 48.

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being-in-­common, its aesthetic forming and unforming of the space that lies outside, exceeds, interrupts, and surrounds the regulating principle of politics. It defies the mechanisms whereby politics subjects the living to the prescriptions and social codes of governance, in view of shaping the form of social organization, determining the identity of a people, and thereby enclosing the common.

The Outside The narrative voice of Molloy flows from this region of the outside, which urges the narrator to keep speaking and going on under the threat of the impossible, becoming ever more intense in Malone Dies and at its most extreme in The Unnamable. For a section of the last of the three novels, the narrator’s speech is emitted out of a jar placed within a crack of the earth near a Parisian bistro. In the jar resides a deformed creature, neither human nor animal (or insect even), whose mouth, or some other hole, cannot stop blabbering in search of silence. Beckett hereby shows how the opening of the unnamable source of the narrative voice coincides with a closed space exposed to the outside. While the speaker’s body is now physically immobile, its disembodied voice becomes increasingly mobile as it tries to escape from the site of its constriction. What distinguishes the narrative voice of the Unnamable then is that it endures for a sustained interval the experience of self-relinquishing and release we have elaborated in terms of the ecstatic vision in “The End” and the golden moment in Molloy. It becomes detached from any “I,” any subjectivity whatsoever, and yet it is precisely out of this zone of depersonalization that words uninterruptedly flow, at once composing and decomposing the story. Although the flux of the impersonal narrative voice traverses Beckett’s literary and aesthetic output after the three novels, he explicitly reframes it two decades later in the play originally written in English, Not I (1972). Through the medium of theater, Beckett explores another way of staging the disembodied mouth whose outpouring of words once again dismantles spaces of enclosure and shatters the narrative, recounting the story of a life spent dying. We could locate the opening of the voice from the very first lines of the monologue assigned to the Mouth: “ … out … into this world … this world … tiny little thing … before its time … in a godfor—… what? … girl? … yes … tiny little girl … into this … out into this … before her time … godforsaken hole called … called … no

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matter … parents unknown … unheard of ….”16 The Mouth retraces the origins of her birth coming both out of and into this world—a world which is shortly thereafter suspended and crossed out, leaving solely the demonstrative this—by means of a repetitive cycle of erasure and reinscription. The origin, even if it seems to designate the vaginal birth canal corresponding to the maternal, is dislocated, forgotten, expelled, lost, out of time. The Mouth articulates the delay of the interval between the immemorial time prior to the birth of a  life and the awaited endlessness of dying. Hence the negation of Not I in the title of the play, for this voice is other than mine, as stressed in the refrain that calls into question over and over again the “I” and points to the third-person pronoun “she,” someone else: “… what? … who? … no! … she! …”17 But the questions “what?” and “who?” gather more momentum, provoking the Mouth to give up “she” and let “it” be heard in her place. What Beckett attunes us to here is the sensuous matter of language, of words uttered on stage, rather than its function of meaning-making derived from the capacities of the subject. We feel and listen to the cacophony surging out of a mouth removed from the body of a missing little girl, a tiny little thing crying out into the dark. She gains lucidity of her living and dying, of her enormous hardship and suffering, of the violent sovereign forces that made her a subject and still subjugate her, as well as of her ecstatic resilience and survival once she abandons herself over to the other. Beckett thus resituates his approach to the materiality of the mouth as a sheer opening that ruptures spaces of confinement. His stage directions request that the theater be pitch black so that the mouth alone is dimly illuminated by a spotlight, appearing out of a hole cut in the curtain raised about eight feet on stage. The Irish actresses Billie Whitelaw and Lisa Dwan have both relayed the enormous challenge of performing this role, which pushed them to the limits of their abilities due not only to the mental and verbal dexterity required to undertake an approximately ten- to fifteen-minute rapid-paced monologue without rest, but also to the physical constraints placed on the immobilized body behind the curtain. Whereas Whitelaw would reportedly practice with her head strapped to a dentist’s chair, one time collapsing during rehearsals, Dwan leaned on banisters to train her mouth to chatter, as Beckett had wanted, “at the speed of thought.” In a photo taken backstage at the Royal Court Theatre  Samuel Beckett, The Collected Short Plays (New York: Grove, 2010), 215–16.  Ibid., 217.

16 17

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in London where Dwan performed Not I in 2014, we can see her arms restrained behind a metal bar and her head strapped into an oval gap placed atop a vertical wooden plank.18 In her performances of the role, Dwan remarks, she was also blindfolded, with her ears plugged, the body held captive so that the mouth could take flight. These instruments of physical constraint enact the conditions under which the mouth’s self-relinquishment and release of words become possible, even though such an overflow stems from the inability to speak, leading to consecutive moments of breakdown, interruption, and failure. The body’s steady detachment from the captivity of enclosure and forms of systemic violence consists of immanent responsiveness to a call from the outside, marked as the other, unconditional, or inappropriable. In response to this infinitely demanding exigency, the mouth expels an intermittent rhythm of words syncopated by the senseless noises of gasps, screams, pauses, breaths, laughs, and groans. It insists on the breaks of the murmur and buzzing in the ear at once within and without, giving voice to the liminal region of the outside over which no one has ownership and which is nevertheless shared in common. What we hear is not the self-assured language of the personal voice intending to express or constitute one’s own proper identity, heritage, and filiation in terms of property, but the impersonal and anonymous language of the narrative voice through which the already fragmentary subject collapses and perseveres in collapsing, as it takes leave elsewhere without ever arriving. It is in this way that Beckett improvises an aesthetic and ethical movement of fugitivity. He affirms the insurgent potential sustained by a fugitive departure out of the world—the world turned outside itself, disposed to being sensed, imagined, and fashioned otherwise, in common.

Bibliography Bataille, Georges. “Georges Bataille in Critique,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman and translated by Jean M. Sommermeyer, 55–64. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

18  In 2015, Lisa Dwan delivered a speech about her collaboration with Whitelaw at the Enniskillen International Beckett Festival in Ireland, later published under the title “Mouth Almighty: How Billie Whitelaw Helped Me Find Beckett and ‘Not I,’” American Theatre (May 14, 2016): https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/04/12/mouth-almighty-howbillie-whitelaw-helped-me-find-beckett-and-not-i/ (accessed June 3, 2022).

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———. “The Ultimate Instant.” Translated by Thomas Walton. Transition Forty-­ Eight (1948): 60–69. ———. “Vice is Perhaps the Heart of Man.” Translated by Samuel Beckett. Journal of Samuel Beckett Studies 31, no. 1 (2022): 51–55. Beckett, Samuel. Interview by Tom Driver. “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4, no. 3 (1961): 21–24. ———. The Collected Short Plays. New York: Grove, 2010. ———. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. New York: Grove, 1997. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Vol. 2: 1941–1946. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011. ———. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable. New York: Grove, 2009. ———. Watt. New York: Grove, 2009. Boxall, Peter. “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading.” Irish Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2002): 159–170. Dwan, Lisa. “Mouth Almighty: How Billie Whitelaw Helped Me Find Beckett and ‘Not I.’” American Theatre, May 14, 2016, https://www.americantheatre. org/2016/04/12/mouth-­almighty-­h ow-­b illie-­whitelaw-­helped-­me-­f ind-­ beckett-­and-­not-­i/ (accessed June 3, 2022). Eagleton, Terry. “Political Beckett?.” New Left Review, no. 40 (2006): 67–74. Little, James. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Kim, Annabel. Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon in French Literature. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2022. Krimper, Michael. “Introduction: The Lost Volume of Transition: Beckett, Duthuit, Sade” and “On Sade’s Sovereign Excess: Beckett Translating Blanchot and Bataille.” Journal of Samuel Beckett Studies 31, no. 1 (2022): 1–5, 95–110. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. London: UK. Cambridge UP, 2017. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B.  Smith. New  York: Fordham UP, 2000. Perloff, Marjorie. “‘In Love with Hiding’: Samuel Beckett’s War.” The Iowa Review 35, no. 1, (2005): 76–103. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Think Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human. New York: Fordham UP, 2016.

Sans Cesse: Beckett, Proust, Knausgård Stefanie Heine

In his 1931 essay on Marcel Proust’s Recherche, Samuel Beckett outlines a “physiology of style”1 based on the “organic eccentricities”2 of memory and habit, an aesthetics anticipating central elements of his own later prose writings, as well as the contemporary literary phenomenon of Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp.3 To be more precise: what “goes on” in and 1  Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 214. 2  Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 8. Hereafter P. 3  Resonances between Knausgård, Proust and Beckett with regard to memory and habit have been pointed out by critics, for example, Danny Byrne, “Review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Vol. 3,” Music & Literature (June 3, 2014) https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2014/5/27/karl-ove-knausgaards-my-struggle-vol-3 (accessed May 4, 2022). Relations between Knausgård’s Min Kamp and Proust’s Recherche have, for example, been investigated by Taylor Johnston, “The Corpse as Novelistic Form: Knausgaard’s Deconstruction of Proustian Memory,” Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 3 (2018): 368–382; and Olivia Noble Gunn, “Growing Up: Knausgård on Proust, Boyishness, and (Straight) Time,” Scandinavian Studies 92, no. 3 (2020): 325–347.

S. Heine (*) Department of Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6_9

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across Proust, Beckett, and Knausgård results from a nexus between the habitual functioning of the body’s organs and a specific kind of memory incorporated in writing—a nexus traced in Beckett’s analysis of “perhaps the greatest passage that Proust ever wrote—Les Intermittences du Cœur” (P, 25). This type of memory does not fully coincide with Proust’s famous mémoire involuntaire; Beckett’s interest in “extreme cases” of memory (P, 18) draws attention to a number of interlinked minor derailments of memory, physiology, and habit that have a textual afterlife in Beckett’s prose and beyond. Les Intermittences du Cœur is of particular interest to Beckett in featuring not only “a central appearance of the motif” of involuntary memory, “but also an application of the erratic machinery of habit and memory as conceived by Proust” (P, 25; my emphasis). The wording here is crucial: it designates a slight but significant variation of what Beckett presents as Proust’s dynamics of habit and memory. This dynamic is outlined as follows: “real” memory and habit are mutually exclusive; habit’s dullness can only produce the “monochrome” and “arbitrary” (P, 19) images of voluntary memory, which “contains nothing of the past” (P, 20). In contrast, “the action of involuntary memory is stimulated by the negligence or agony of Habit” (P, 22; my emphasis). The memories through which the past can be recovered are “stored” in a “dungeon of our being to which Habit does not possess the key” (P, 18). The idea of an “application of the erratic machinery of habit and memory” implies something more, and slightly different: (1) that the machinery of both habit and memory tend to be erratic, and (2) that both memory and habit have machinic traits, that is, traits that are commonly associated with the routines of habit, but not with the “explosive,” “immediate” (P, 20), “mystic experience” of involuntary memory (P, 22). Moreover, “application” suggests that the erratic quality in question (which, as we will see, involves errors or glitches) is more than thematic in the chapter Beckett is going to analyze. Les Intermittences du Cœur seems to be a setting where involuntary memory articulates itself as “a neuralgia rather than a theme” and “emerges” as disruption of the “nervous structure” of the text (P, 22). The themes of memory and habit in Proust and Beckett have been extensively studied; what I want to trace in this chapter is a specific “machinery,” a constellation of textual “neuralgias” tied to these themes that surface on the formal and material level in the writings of Proust, Beckett, and Knausgård. To do so, I first have to elaborate on the specific kind of involuntary memory Beckett discovers in Les Intermittences du Cœur: “[i]n extreme

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cases memory is so closely related to habit that its word takes flesh, and is not merely available in cases of urgency, but habitually enforced. Thus absence of mind is fortunately compatible with the active presence of our organs of articulation” (P, 18; my emphasis). Let me point out two implications of these sentences: (1) in the “extreme cases” outlined, memory and habit are not mutually exclusive; (2) memory is articulated through the body while the mind is absent. These “extreme cases,” I want to argue, become models for Beckett’s grotesque speakers, articulating their “organic eccentricities” ceaselessly in a space beyond active memory and consciousness; and they set the stage for Knausgård’s saga of dull habits. In all cases, the intertwining of memory, habit, and physiology is acted out on the corporeal-material dimension of the respective texts.4 In his essay on Proust, Beckett introduces habit as a mitigator that protects from external and internal threats: “Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-­conductor of his existence” (P, 7–8; my emphasis). The outside world or “environment” is as much a danger as one’s “own organic eccentricities,” and habit shields from both. Beckett elaborates on this by stating, “[h]abit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit” (P, 8). The dog habitually takes bodily discharge back in. Having in mind a long cultural history that ties breath to life and the spiritual domain, humans tend to forget that they constantly exhale waste, and inhale an environment—habit lets us breathe and live on unworried while sucking us into its dreary lull. The “automatic adjustment of the human organism to the conditions of its existence” (P, 9) through habit involves its own organic oddities, or eccentricities. We find a graphic account of this in a passage that Beckett cites from Les Intermittences du Cœur. The room in Marcel’s hotel in Balbec, which appeared as a “cavern of wild beasts, invested on all sides by the implacable strangers” (P, 13) during his first visit, is “reduced to docility” when he revisits it. “Habit has been reorganised”: Proust describes this “operation, which we must always start afresh” as “longer and more 4  When commenting on the influence of Bergson’s notion of habit on Beckett, Ulrika Maude notes that for Bergson, habit “functions as low-order memory” because the “repeated actions amassed in the body” that form habits “do not represent the past, they merely act it” (Bergson quoted by Maude). See Maude, “Beckett and the Laws of Habit,” Modernism/ modernity 18, no. 4 (2011), 815. What interests me here are the ways in which correlations of the body, memory, and habit “act” on the respective texts’ bodily-corporeal dimension.

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difficult than the turning inside out of an eyelid, and which consists in the imposition of our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of our surroundings” (P, 26).5 In Proust’s comparison, rendering the “inferno of unfamiliar objects” familiar requires a brutal bodily “eversion”: “le retournement de la paupière.”6 The effect of the operation, which dislocates the visual organ, is a further displacement: externalizing our “familiar soul,” imposing it on that of the unfamiliar surroundings. This process corresponds with the meaning of “eccentric” in the context of physiology: “transferring” something from inside the body “to the external world outside it” (OED Online). In order to see the “terrifying” outside as something familiar, we have to block our eyes with our own everted eyelids, render our vision inoperative, and become blind to the terrifying operation of our organs, over and over again. If we saw this operation, it would make our own body appear unfamiliar, or, rather, make transparent the unfamiliarity of a body we never possessed in the first place. Likewise, the image of imposing “our own […] soul” on the environment, renders the “familiar” strange: the “soul” now presents itself in the manner Jean-Luc Nancy explores, as “the body outside itself.”7 The soul becomes a flipside of Nancy’s “intruder,” the transplanted heart, which makes the host a stranger to him or herself,8 separating the “I,” whose body it now sustains, from itself, turning it into something unfamiliar.9 If one takes the images Proust uses as seriously as Beckett does, the operations of habit are organ and soul transplants; the cost of familiarity is 5  Beckett quotes Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume Two, trans. Frederick A. Blossom (New York: Random House, 1932) 119. Hereafter RII. When Eve Sedgwick cites this passage, she concludes that habit, as “banal and precious opiate, […] makes us blind to—and thus enables to come into existence—our surroundings, ourselves as we appear to others, and the imprint of others in ourselves.” See Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 139. Building on her emphasis on the constitutive function of habit, I want to draw attention to the bodily inversion/eversion this involves. 6  Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu V, Sodome et Gomorrhe II (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), 188. Hereafter RV. 7  Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 126. 8  Ibid., 167. 9  Ibid., 163. Parts of this chapter draw and further elaborate on research published in my book Poetics of Breathing: Modern Literature’s Syncope. Nancy’s notion of the “intruder” and the “body outside itself” as well as his concept of “syncope” were g for my investigation of breath. In the book, I also discussed some of the passages from Beckett’s Malone Dies and The Unnamable that I investigate here; however, the focus was different and more limited to breath.

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a radical defamiliarization; being shielded from the horrors of one’s own interiority and exteriority is premised on losing any sense of “one’s own,” on becoming an extruder. In Beckett’s account, defamiliarization becomes death; he describes the “operation of habit” as a murderous pact: “Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals […] the pact must be continually renewed” (P, 8). Whenever the pact is renewed, the “old ego dies hard” (P, 10) and a new ego emerges. What makes Les Intermittences du Cœur an “extreme case” is that the shattering interruption of memory does not occur in the moment when the pact is renewed and the “individual” is “exposed to […] reality” (P, 10), in the interval between one ego dying and another being born. It happens in a moment when “[h]abit has been reorganised” (P, 26) and reveals its “own organic eccentricities” (P, 8; my emphasis): the often grotesque mechanisms involved in creating habit’s mitigating effect, which are usually overlooked. Let us now look at Les Intermittences du Cœur more closely. When he is bending down to take off his shoes, the “mysterious action of involuntary memory” (P, 26) suddenly hits Marcel, and he “become[s] conscious” that that his grandmother is dead, “[l]ost for ever” (RII, 114). This realization is extremely belated and goes hand in hand with a narrative displacement: the grandmother died a year ago, an event narrated roughly 300 pages earlier. The paragraph of Les Intermittences du Cœur, in which the “recall scene” is told, starts abruptly with the dramatic sentence: “Complete physical collapse” (RII, 113); or in the original: “Bouleversement de toute ma personne” (RV, 176). This is immediately followed by the account of Marcel stooping down: “On the first night, as I was suffering from cardiac exhaustion, trying to master my pain, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots” (RII, 113). In the English translation Beckett cites, “physical collapse” (my emphasis) is closely tied to “cardiac exhaustion,” and thus the title’s intermissions of the heart. This link is not as obvious in the French original, as the sentence “Bouleversement de toute ma personne” (my emphasis) might relate to Marcel’s heart problems, or—and more likely—the impact of the memory triggered. It is significant that in his summary of the event, Beckett leans toward the emphasis in the original and presents the heart problem as a side-note, as a syntactic intermission: Marcel “stoops down—cautiously, in the interest of his heart—to unbutton his shoes” (P, 26). Reflecting on what happened in this moment, Marcel notes that “with the troubles of memory are closely linked the heart’s intermissions” (RII, 114). This

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invites us to read the passage as another classic example of involuntary memory: habit fails to establish the protective shield against a disturbance inside the body and memory is unleashed. Such a reading is especially encouraged by the English translation, which suggests that Marcel’s “cardiac exhaustion” (my emphasis [“crise de fatigue cardiaque,” RV, 176]) is a “[c]omplete physical collapse” (my emphasis). However, Marcel does not experience a “complete” heart failure, a syncope in the medical sense: the “cardiac exhaustion” causes pain of the kind Marcel habitually deals with and knows how to “master” (RII, 114). Far from collapsing, he is on his feet, bending down slowly so as not to increase the pain. Habit seems to do its work just fine; the machinery of the body suffers from a minor, manageable crisis, triggering a minor convulsion: “I shook with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes” (RII, 113). Marcel is not aware of what causes this stream of tears; the experience is not linked to a specific, conscious painful memory. Something is slightly out of joint. Beckett’s “extreme cases” are motivated by these smaller interruptions rather than the “complete collapse.” Such minor interruptions—caused by a crisis of habit itself—“take flesh” in the text we are reading. We already get a sense of slight disturbance in the elliptical introductory sentence: “Bouleversement de toute ma personne.” The missing verb makes it impossible to locate the sentence temporally. If we read on, we notice that it refers to what is about to be told, before the fact. “Bouleversement de toute ma personne” (my emphasis) implicates a reversal of order in the narrative sequence and thus mirrors the narrator’s upheaval in the words on the page. Through this narrative displacement, the sentence anticipates and mirrors the belatedness of Marcel’s realization that his grandmother is dead. The account of this realization ties the “bouleversement” to an organic eccentricity, a swollen heart about to burst: “I had only just discovered this because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time, alive, authentic, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever” (RII, 114). This marks the moment when narrative chronology is about to shatter, and we encounter a jumbled series of transposed physiological-textual disturbances. “Transposition” offers itself as a term to capture the textual-physiological moments I am describing, as it refers to a transference, an “interchange of position” which implies a misplacement and, in an anatomical sense, an “[a]bnormal position of the organs of the body, e.g. the heart being on the right side” (OED Online).

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The first intermittence du cœur we can parse in the text is a transposition of the literal “crise de fatigue cardiaque” to the figural level in the formulation “gonflant mon coeur à le briser” (RV, 179). The emotion tied to the almost bursting heart is triggered by a temporal displacement, Marcel’s belatedly “feeling” his grandmother “for the first time” (RII, 112). If we look closely, we notice another temporal oddity at work here, which is also heart related. A little earlier, we read a slightly different version of Marcel’s realization: “for the first time since that afternoon in the Champs-Elysées on which she had had her stroke, I now recaptured, by an instinctive and complete act of recollection, the living reality” (RII, 113; my emphasis). The organic gives way to a temporal eccentricity: the first time now is simultaneously a second time, “the first time since”; these “troubles of memory” are indeed “closely linked with the heart’s intermissions.” In precisely this moment, we encounter another heart-­transposition: a leap form Marcel’s cardiac exhaustion to a disturbance of the grandmother’s cardiovascular system. This is only one in a series of leaps I will have a closer look at. Before doing so, I want to specify the extent to which these leaps are expressions of the “erratic machinery of habit and memory.” The experience of recapturing the grandmother’s “living reality” is, as Marcel explains, enabled by “installing alone in us the self that originally lived” it (RII, 114). He “once again” becomes the “self” that “had not existed since that evening long ago when my grandmother undressed me after my arrival at Balbec” (RII, 114)—the evening when the hotel room was a cavern of wild beasts because habit failed to do its work. In the act of bending down to take his shoes off, Marcel is thrown back to a moment years earlier when he did exactly the same thing, and his grandmother soothed him. The present I switches back to a former I “without loss of continuity,” “as though there were in time different and parallel series” (RII, 114). Taking up Proust’s formulation without citing it while adding a significant detail and highlighting an ambiguity in the French original that got lost in translation, Beckett sums this moment up as follows: “As though the figure of Time could be represented by an endless series of parallels, his life switched over to another line and proceeds, without any solution of continuity, from that remote moment of his past when his grandmother stooped over his distress” (P, 27; my emphasis). Both of Beckett’s deviations from the English translation of the Recherche are conceptually relevant for the particular mechanism of habit and memory.

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(1) According to Beckett, the series of parallel lines in time to which Marcel switches over when he bends down is endless. (2) This switch is not, as the English translation of the Recherche puts it, “without loss of continuity” (RII, 114), but “sans solution de continuité” (RV, 178; my emphasis). “Solution” in French can implicate that either continuity is not dissolved or continuity is not granted (as resolution)—the latter is emphasized in Beckett’s literal translation of the French original. If we take a closer look at the way in which Marcel switches between different timelines, we observe that his leaps are left hovering between continuity and interruption. Installing a past self into the present self breaks the pact of habit: it resurrects a self that had to “die hard” so that the order of habit can be restored. The consequence is not a breakdown of habit, but a glitch: things get out of place, like the eyelid turned inside out, or the soul imposed on the surroundings. In other words, the very mechanisms of habit, which function through an in-built “erratic” quality, become transparent. At the moment Marcel bends down, the chronology of time as well as the sequence of a series of timelines is disrupted, which is precisely what perpetuates them: shifted from “behind” to “parallel,” the past is no longer past but continues, goes on. Here we come back to the link between habit and organic eccentricities, specifically Marcel’s cardiac fatigue. Fatigue as well as the heart play an important part in Deleuze’s discussion of habit in Difference and Repetition. For Deleuze, “passive synthesis” is a process “prior to all memory and all reflection.”10 He introduces habit as an instance of passive synthesis and uses the terms as if they were interchangeable: “These thousands of habits of which we are composed” (DR, 78); “the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed” (DR, 74). The passive syntheses that constitute habit consist of two elements that happen simultaneously: contraction and contemplation. To clarify these terms, Deleuze gives the example of the heart’s beating: “the heart no more has (or no more is) a habit when it contracts than when it dilates” (DR, 74): in this case, contraction and dilation are two active muscular elements. In the context of passive synthesis, that which enables an active articulation like the heartbeat in the first place and which lies at the basis of recognizable repetition, “contraction” means that the heartbeats are drawn together as a sequence “lub-dub-lub-dub” by a contemplating mind or “soul” which anticipates that “lub” is followed by “dub.” This passive 10  Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 71. Hereafter DR.

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synthesis of repetitive heartbeats “constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that ‘it’ will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case” (DR, 74). Usually, contraction and contemplation coincide: “It is simultaneously through contraction that we are habits, but through contemplation that we contract” (DR, 74). Deleuze mentions a specific situation in which this simultaneity is interrupted while passive synthesis continues: “Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart” (DR, 77; my emphasis). Here I will depart from Deleuze’s text and investigate how variants of the moment when a discord pervades passive synthesis figures in Proust, Beckett, and Knausgård. In Proust’s Recherche, Marcel’s cardiac fatigue marks an “extreme case” of habit, or, in Beckett’s terms, a modification of the regular mechanisms which makes transparent that the contract of habit involves somewhat derailed contractions. According to Deleuze, contraction “qualifies an order of repetition” (DR, 77); in Proust, the chronological order and temporal sequences are disrupted. Moreover, as I will show in the following, the “expectation that ‘it’ will continue […] assuring the perpetuation of our case” (my emphasis) is modified in the physiological-textual complex Proust presents. Concerning the heartbeats of a living being, the expectation that “it” will continue is accompanied by a limit: at some point, it stops. In contrast, Proust anticipates a sense of endless continuation which is then pushed to different extremes by Beckett and Knausgård. Let us turn back to Marcel’s switches to parallel life-lines in the state of cardiac fatigue: bending down to take off his shoes transports him to his first visit to Balbec, triggering the delayed realization of his grandmother’s death. This opens the gate to another parallel line, witnessing a stroke she had on the Champs-Elysées. After Marcel suddenly realizes that she has died, the grandmother and her illness seem to become omnipresent. Marcel learns from the hotel manager at Balbec that during their holiday a year earlier, when the grandmother seemed perfectly healthy to him, she was already experiencing syncopes which she deliberately attempted to hide. The director’s account of these strokes conjoins with an organic and a linguistic eccentricity. Prone to mispronouncing words, he talks of the grandmother’s “sincup” (RII, 129), or “simecope” (RV, 208). This mispronunciation repeatedly reminds Marcel of the heart failures anticipating his grandmother’s death. “‘Sincup’ was a word which, so pronounced, I should never have imagined, […] but

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which in its strange sonorous novelty, like that of an original discord, long retained the faculty of arousing in me the most painful sensations” (RII, 129). The distorted sound of the mispronounced word, which Beckett calls an “absurd malapropism” (P, 30), thus has two temporal implications: it is associated with something original, and with a kind of ongoingness, a repeated incitement of bodily sensations (“long retained”). The linguistic eccentricity of “symecope” ties the organic medical syncope to fatigued passive synthesis, in which what usually goes together comes apart, is “malapropos,” badly placed, and repeated incessantly. The lapsus linguae in a nutshell captures the dynamics in which an interruption of the novel’s narrative time lapse coincides with literal and metaphorical intermissions of the heart. Let us now trace further lapses of the “simecope,” perceived as an “original discord”—a discord which already becomes noticeable in the word syncope itself, in its two contradictory parts implying unity and separation at the same time. In the time she had her “simecopes” during the first visit to Balbec, the grandmother insisted on having her photograph taken. Marcel realizes that what he interpreted as vanity had been an attempt by his grandmother to give him something to remember her in the moment she was confronted by her impending death. As Beckett poignantly summarizes, “she had been very particular about her pose and the inclination of her hat, wishing the photograph to be one of a grandmother and not of a disease” (P, 30). But for Marcel, the memory unleashed upon looking at the photograph again, is something else, something that is not captured in it: “a contraction of her features” caused by Marcel’s wounding words that “had pierced her” (RII, 115). Marcel’s error, his misinterpretation of the situation, evokes the bodily “contraction” caused by words, which constitutes the memory. Moreover, what makes up the memory’s perpetuation is a switch or displacement of hearts, which sets loose a ceaseless loop of blows: But never should I be able to wipe out of my memory that contraction of her face, that anguish of her heart, or rather of my own: for as the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them. (RII, 115; my emphasis)

Memory consists of a ceaseless striking or blowing that emerges in the moment when their hearts contract, when “her heart” and “my own” are drawn together.

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Yet another transposition of the heart, this time within Marcel’s body, is described shortly after, when he falls asleep. The world of sleep modifies the “operation” of habit in the memory as triggered by Marcel’s cardiac fatigue. The memory of the grandmother recurs inside Marcel’s dropping off or sleeping body, when the eye turns inward and opens the curtains on an internal drama. In the following passage, we hear an echo of the comparison of habit’s work to the eyelid turned inside out: “My drooping eyelids allowed but one kind of light to pass, all rosy, the light of the inner walls of the eyes. Then they shut altogether. Whereupon my grandmother appeared to me, seated in an armchair” (RII, 129). What follows is a little drama narrated in great detail: Marcel can hear his grandmother breathe; she appears feeble and absent from herself; it turns out that she has already been dead for a year already; he recounts word for word a dialogue between him and his father about her erratic behavior, etc. It is a classic dream narrative, unremarkable if the setting were inside Marcel’s unconscious mind. What makes the scene slightly disturbing is its localization within the unconscious body: the images appear against “the light of the inner walls of the eyes,” which echoes and turns around the bodily eversion of the eyelid inside out. I will now turn to a passage that stages a reversal of “eccentricity” in the physiological sense of transposing the body’s inside to “to the external world outside it”: the outside world turned inward, expanding in the bodily organs. When his “eyes closed to the things of the outer world,” the temporally displaced realization of the grandmother’s death, which, as we remember, for Marcel implies encountering her “for the first time, alive, authentic, making [his] heart swell to breaking-point” is described as an “agonizing synthesis of survival and annihilation,” which is “reflected, refracted,” and made translucent in his inner organs (RII, 116): “refléta, réfracta la douloureuse synthèse de la survivance et du néant, dans la profondeur organique et devenue translucide des viscères mystérieusement éclairés” (RV, 183). In the next sentence, the synthesis is located in a setting that displays syncopal qualities, connection, and rupture: “World of sleep in which our inner consciousness, placed in bondage to the disturbances of our organs, quickens the rhythm of heart or breath because a similar dose of terror, sorrow, remorse acts with a strength magnified an hundredfold if it is thus injected into our veins” (RII, 114; my emphasis). Finally, the outer world is transposed onto the disturbed organs: the body’s inside becomes grotesquely enlarged, turning into a landscape through which the sleeping Marcel wanders erratically until his breath fails and his heart petrifies:

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[T]o traverse the arteries of the subterranean city, we have embarked upon the dark current of our own blood as upon an inward Lethe meandering sixfold, huge solemn forms appear to us, approach and glide away, leaving us in tears. I sought in vain for my grandmother’s form when I had stepped ashore beneath the sombre portals; […] the darkness was increasing, and the wind; […] Suddenly my breath failed me, I felt my heart turn to stone; I had just remembered that for week after week I had forgotten to write to my grandmother. (RII, 116; my emphasis)

This is a convergence of organic eccentricities on various levels: the landscape metaphorically transposed to the internal organs results in a bizarre image; Marcel is split into two (at least): the dreaming “I” and a second one (or more? who is “we”?), who is outside of himself while still inside his own body; and consequently we are faced with “disturbed organs” within organs: an unlocatable respiratory failure and a heart turned to stone. Is it the heart of sleeping Marcel, or the one wandering in his organs that petrifies? In whose body does the petrification of the heart take place? When the drama of the grandmother’s loss is replayed in the sleeper’s organs, the intermissions of the heart produce a mise en abyme effect where inside and outside reflect and refract each other back and forth endlessly. The last instance of an “endless” series of “parallel lines” I want to look at here is another, this time bigger leap from Marcel’s heart to the grandmother’s body. In the scene where the grandmother dies, which is narrated much earlier than the Intermittences du Cœur, a transposition of landscape into the body’s organs coincides with a syncopal rhythm in the cardiovascular system. To ease her breathing, the dying grandmother receives a supply of pure oxygen. The description of her labored breath— an interruption of the smoothly functioning habits of bodily organs— recalls the cavern of beasts Marcel encounters in the unfamiliar room when he first visits Balbec: Marcel perceives “a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of wild beast which […] lay panting, groaning, making the blankets heave with its convulsions.”11 The oxygen supply, which is supposed to restore habit’s passive synthesis, then reveals an “erratic ­ machinery,” the work of passive symecope. The grandmother’s cyborg-like body, a breathing machine acting “as purely mechanical” (RI, 957) as the

11  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One, trans. C.K.  Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1934) 957. Hereafter RI.

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panting animal-body before, produces an incessantly interrupted flow of musical sounds: Accompanied on a muted instrument by an incessant murmur, my grandmother seemed to be greeting us with a long and blissful chant, which filled the room, rapid and musical. […] Now and then it seemed that all was over, her breath stopped, whether owing to one of those transpositions to another octave that occur in the breathing of a sleeper, or else from a natural interruption, an effect of unconsciousness, the progress of asphyxia, some failure of the heart. (RI, 963)

Artificially enhanced breathing generates an “agonizing synthesis of survival and annihilation,” which “reflect[s], refract[s]” what is happening in Marcel’s disturbed inner organs when the memory of grandmother’s death comes back while he is sleeping: the outside is transposed inside the grandmother’s body; a landscape expands in her respiratory system: [M]y grandmother’s breath no longer laboured, panted, groaned, but, swift and light, shot like a skater along the delicious stream. Perhaps with her breath, unconscious like that of the wind in the hollow stem of a reed, there were blended in this chant some of those more human sighs […] the chant […] seemed at times to stop altogether like a spring that has ceased to flow. (RI, 959–960; my emphasis) […] but already, as if a tributary were pouring its current into the dried river-bed, a fresh chant broke out from the interrupted measure. (RI, 963; my emphasis)

The disturbed conceptual boundaries between outside (the wind, spring, tributary, even a skater moving on a stream) and inside (the physiological process of breathing) at first sight seem like an inversion but turn out to result from a hyperbolic depiction of what breath usually does: leaving the body, mingling with the environment and bringing the environment into our body. This unrestricted current of air, caught in a syncopal rhythm involving transpositions of the environment, releases “a countless throng of […] memories” (RI, 963). From Marcel’s observing perspective, his dying grandmother seems to have entered that “unknown region” (RII, 114) where memories dwell—a prelinguistic state where language and the human being as a conscious self, personality, or identity, is only in process of being constituted. The memories stored in this “unknown region,” Marcel observes, “preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our

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consciousness” (RII, 114). The Recherche pretends to manage on a textual and formal level what our consciousness cannot: creating a simultaneity, a coincidence or parallel of disparate temporal and spatial elements that “recur […] as a neuralgia rather than a theme.” The text stages the “erratic machinery of […] memory” as an “endless” series of parallels pervaded by displacements “without any solution of continuity.” My reading above might involve a mistake: reading figural language literally. Interpreted as metaphors or similes, there is nothing particularly odd about a heart swelling to “breaking-point” or turning into stone; the “arteries” of the body’s “subterranean city”; or the breath flowing like a spring or stream. But I wonder about the operations our reading habits have to perform in order to familiarize the disturbing literal meanings. When Beckett comments on Proust’s style, he focuses on a different aspect of his metaphors: their ceaseless continuation. The “chain figure of the metaphor,” Beckett argues, results in a “tiring style” which strains the body rather than the mind: “One’s fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor” (P, 68). Beckett does not say why exactly the chain of metaphors causes physical exhaustion. Maybe it is the fatigue of dealing with ceaseless difference and repetition, a fatigue that, speaking with Deleuze, “marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart” (DR, 77). Maybe it is because we unconsciously keep turning our eyelids inside out in order to reorganize the displacements we are faced with into digestible literary images. Displacement not only infiltrates the nervous structure of the text through figurative language; it often also creeps right to the surface. Let us end the discussion of Proust by looking more closely at the oxymoron of “the happy plaint of [the grandmother’s] breathing” (RI, 963) or “plainte heureuse de la respiration” (Proust 1937, 34) which pours out “light” and is “troubled” at the same time (RI, 963). In the French original, the almost simultaneous contrast between the hiss of the oxygen that “ceased for a few moments” and then keeps on flowing “without end” (RI, 963) is expressed in a chiastic structure on the acoustic level: “Le sifflement de l’oxygène cessa”; “la plainte heureuse de la respiration jailissait […] sans cesse.”12 Soundwise, “cessa” is a defective reversal of “sans 12  Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu IV. Le Coté du Guermantes II; Sodome et Gomorrhe I (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 34. Hereafter RIV.

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cesse,” the same letter, a, undergoing a change in the chiasm. In the near-­ chiastic arrangement, almost identical sounds are reversed and meaning is turned around, producing a concurrence of elements that contradict, interrupt, reflect, and refract one another: sans cesse, cessa. Echoes of such semantic, acoustic, and visual syncopes—“Tout cesse, sans cesse”13; “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”14—pervade Beckett’s writing, to which I will turn in the next section. * * * The perpetuation of failure, fatigue, and organic eccentricities is a well-­ known and well-investigated trademark of Beckett’s work. If we trace these elements back to Proust and Beckett’s reading of the Recherche, we find more than common topoi. The eccentricities, displacements, and inversions we often encounter in Proust’s figural language become literal and embodied in Beckett’s speakers. The “absurd malapropism” of “symecope” turns into malaproposed bodies of literary figures that keep on speaking ceaselessly on the verge of falling out of consciousness, bodies whose parts are badly placed, simultaneously cut and connected. I will give just two examples from the trilogy. 1. Malone Dies echoes the Recherche when the speaker motionlessly awaits his death that will never occur: the “white eggs of the eyes stare into space. […] But at long intervals they close […]. Then you see the old lids all red and worn” (TN, 233–234). As in the Recherche, seeing one’s own eyelids from the inside becomes a stage or screen for further images. The speaker in Malone Dies sees “the heaven of the sea and of the earth too, and the spasms of the waves from shore to shore all stirring to their tiniest stir” (TN, 234). The physical inner eye opens to a vast environment (heaven and earth), which the speaker then physiologically partakes of: “I was still alive and breathing in and out the air of the earth” (TN, 234). In a next step, the speaker observes an “imposition” of his body onto this environment. He feels his “extremities” becoming eccentric “parts to recede, in their respective directions” (TN, 235). Hyperbolically magnified, the feet “are beyond the range of the most powerful telescope” (TN, 235), and the fingers and the penis expand accordingly. Standing up, the  Beckett, Le Monde et le Pantalon (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 35.  Beckett, Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (London, Montreuil, New York: Calder, 1997), 418. Hereafter TN. 13 14

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body would “fill a considerable part of the universe” and the “spasms of the waves from shore to shore” are echoed in a ludicrous description of stirrings in its digestive system: “if my arse suddenly started to shit at the present moment, which God forbid, I firmly believe the lumps would fall out in Australia” (TN, 235). Habit in the Proust essay usually establishes compromises between “the individual and his environment” and “the individual and his own organic eccentricities”: individual, environmental and organic eccentricities are conflated in Malone Dies. Instead of shutting down when death is nearing, the habits of breathing, “the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed,” the habits of living, keep going on relentlessly. Fatigued by their own operations but unable to stop, they turn to themselves, exposing their own machinery in the nervous system of the text by means of auxesis. 2. In The Unnamable, we meet an embodiment of the speaker, whose extremities literally recede: unlike the speaker in Malone Dies, this one is shrunk to the minimum: “only the trunk remains”; the immobile head, placed in a jar, speaks as ceaselessly as his tears flow, disconnected from any emotions.15 The speaker’s bodily state is a somewhat hyperbolic opposite of auxesis: radical impoverishment. The head in the jar is only one of the “figures” (TN, 398) the speaker is split into—figures who wane like his former limbs while the speaking never stops. The speaker in The Unnamable is caught in a loop resembling the ceaseless series of “parallel lines” Marcel encounters in the Recherche due to organic eccentricities. The novel is in places a drastic illustration of Beckett’s claim that “life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals.” In The Unnamable, the pact to kill off old selves is “continually renewed,” revealing an “erratic machinery of habit and memory.” Speculation about the condition of memory links a failing “respiration […] sans cesse” to endless speech, while “figures”—possibly former selves—depart:

15  In an article focusing on visceral processes in Beckett’s work, Maude analyzes “disconnected” tears in a way that resonates with my reading here. Focusing on a sentence from How It Is, “the heart bleeds you lose your heart drop by drop weep even an odd tear inward,” she argues that “‘tear’ is also the homograph of another noun, a ‘tear’ as in a ‘rupture,’ which further adds to the materiality and viscerality of the line that conflates emotional and physiological pain, the heart bleeding ‘drop by drop’ an odd tear [tiɘ(r)] or tear [tɛɘ(r)] inward.” See Maude, “‘All that inner space one never sees.’ Beckett’s Inhuman Domain,” Samuel Beckett Today / Samuel Beckett Ajourd’hui 32 (2020), 267.

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[I]f I had a memory it might tell me that this is the sign of the end […]. Then the breath fails, the end begins, you go silent, it’s the end, short-lived, you begin again, you had forgotten, […] these figures just to give you an idea, talking to you, about you, about them, all I have to do is listen, then they depart, one by one, and the voice goes on, it’s not theirs, […] there was never anyone but you, talking to you about you, the breath fails, it’s nearly the end, the breath stops, it’s the end, short-lived, I hear someone calling me, it begins again, that must be how it goes, if I had a memory. (TN, 398)

The way in which the reflection on memory is presented here textually is inseparable from what memory is in the unnamable’s world. Memory only exists in the conditional mood, performatively enacted through habitual, ceaseless speaking, and repetition of the same words over and over. What Beckett sees as “extreme cases” of memory in Proust becomes the condition of possibility of memory as such for the unnamable: “so closely related to habit that its word takes flesh, […] habitually enforced” through the speaker’s disturbed “organs of articulation.” This becomes more explicit further on: I say that in order to say something, in order to go on a little more, you must go on a little more, you must go on a long time more, you must go on evermore, if I could remember what I have said I could repeat it, […] I have to keep on saying the same thing and each time it’s an effort […]. And yet I have memories, […] I never saw him [Mahood], and yet I remember, I remember having talked about him, I must have talked about him, the same words recur and they are your memories. It is I invented him, him and so many others, and the places where they passed, the places where they stayed, in order to speak, since I had to speak, without speaking of me, I couldn’t speak of me, I was never told I had to speak of me, I invented my memories, not knowing what I was doing. (TN, 399; my emphasis)

Memories are the “same words” recurring; they do not preexist but are— paradoxically—invented in the moment of being reiterated absentmindedly. This form of speaking sans cesse is what makes the subject and its “succession of individuals” possible in the first place. In an earlier passage, the habitual enforcement of repeating “the same words” happens not in the “organs of articulation” but, by means of a familiar idiom, in the heart: “you say any old thing, more or less, more or less, […] that’s why they always repeat the same thing, the same old litany, the one they know by

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heart” (TN, 377). Memories are produced “by heart”—a displaced heart that departs from the fatigued speaker’s body later in the text, along with the “self”: But it’s not I, it’s not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, […] that takes the heart out of you, your heart isn’t in it any more, your heart that was, among the brambles, cradled by the shadows, you try the sea, you try the town, you look for yourself in the mountains and the plains, it’s only natural, you want yourself, […] it’s not love, it’s not curiosity, it’s because you are tired, you want to stop, travel no more, seek no more, lie no more, speak no more. (TN, 403; my emphasis)

Here, the repetitive language determining the physiology of the text produces an organic eccentricity—a transposition of the heart to the landscape—which in Proust, read through Beckett, results from the operations of habit. Here, we encounter another, extreme version of Marcel’s cardiac fatigue: a fatigued speaker in search of his self and heart in the vast expanses of the sea, mountains, and plains. This recherche is an infinite loop: because he is speaking ceaselessly, the I is tired of speaking, and because he is tired, he is unable to stop while slipping into the impersonal speech of “you.” An endless series of intruders constitute the “I” by breaking it apart: the I, you, or it ceaselessly re-produces the selves and eccentric organs it has to chase after through speaking in an attempt to re-member what pulls them apart at the same time. “Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart” (DR, 77), Deleuze argues. In Beckett’s fatigued speakers, the body and self “come apart” while the contemplating mind on the verge of unconsciousness keeps going, anticipating an endless repetition of words that both constitute and diffuse the speakers. Deleuze conceives of Beckett’s speakers as “larval subjects”: “Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self […]. In all his novels, Samuel Beckett has traced the inventory of peculiarities pursued with fatigue and passion by larval subjects” (DR, 78–79). The “organic eccentricities” I traced in Beckett constitute, exhaust, and dissolve the speakers to an extent that “subject” might no longer be an adequate term for them. Entangled in a mode of speaking that recalls Deleuze’s claim “we are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying

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‘I,’”16 the “I” in The Unnamable is rendered eccentric and starts addressing itself in the second person. At the end of the novel, the perpetuated fatigue of speaking on culminates in a syncopal back and forth between you and I: “you must go on, that’s all I know”; “you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on”; “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on (TN, 418). This might best be described as an impersonal mode of speaking embodied in the punctuated rhythms of the letters on the page. * * * A heart out of place opens the first book of Karl Ove Knausgård’s series Min Kamp, which explicitly draws on Proust’s Recherche, and in which “the habit of saying I” results in a tiring pile of relentlessly recorded memories of the author’s life. The first words of the first novel, A Death in the Family, present life as the habit of an eccentric organ: they are written from the perspective of an isolated heart, anonymous and disconnected from a concrete body: “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”17 In the Norwegian original, the opening sentences are arranged in an imperfect chiasmic structure, recalling Beckett’s “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” and Proust’s respiratory “sans cesse”/“cessa”: “FOR HJERTET ER LIVET ENKELT: det slår så lenge det kan. Så stopper det.”18 Beating (“slår”) and stopping (“stopper”) are embedded between the words “så” and “det”: “det slår så […]”/“så stopper det.” Knausgård thus creates a rhythmical circuit in which the heart’s stopping reverberates with its own beating; if we read the sentence to its end, and stop for a second, the last “det” throws us back to the earlier “det,” a stop leads back to beating and so on, sans cesse. What seems like a smooth repetitive pattern on the text’s surface (visually and acoustically) is interrupted by grammar and semantics. The word “så,” which co-creates the chiastic structure, has different meanings in the first and second part of the sentence, and belongs in each case to a different class: it functions as an adverb first and then as a conjunction. The slight error of reading the two instances of “så” as an exact repetition is 16  Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), x. 17  Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1. A Death in the Family (London: Vintage Books, 2014), 3. Hereafter MS. 18  Knausgård, Min Kamp 1. (Oslo: Forlaget Oktober, 2010), 7. Hereafter MK.

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built into the structure which keeps the heart from stopping, presenting an “application of the erratic machinery of habit” to the text’s physiology. Here, the syncope’s cut/connected structure is layered: heart failure is visually, acoustically, and semantically articulated in a syncopal rhythm— or, more precisely, a “symecopal” rhythm based on the non-identity of “så” and “så.” In the subsequent microscopic view of the heart as it ceases to beat, Knausgård further establishes a rhythmical rubric for the book as a whole. The meticulous descriptions of what happens to the body when the heart’s “pounding action will cease of its own accord” anticipate the book’s narrative strategy and pace: stretching out minute details that do not usually attract maximal attention. After the heart has stopped beating for good, life and death keep operating according to the pact of habit: These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman’s agreement, to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. (MS, 3)

The subsequent description of processes inside a body magnified and expanded into a vast landscape recalls the organic eccentricities in Proust and Beckett: The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body’s innards cannot be halted. […] [T]they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Haversian canals, the crypts of Lieberkühn, the islets of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s capsule in the kidneys, Clark’s column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity to which end its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable buckets stretching up the hillside. (MS, 3–4)

Knausgård’s landscape of organs evokes the Norwegian geography and climate which is the main setting of the book: a rugged, hilly terrain of “canals,” “islets,” and “moist darkness.” The entire novel thus performs a

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Beckettian/Proustian operation of habit: it stages itself as organic eccentricity, a transposition of the body’s inside “to the external world outside it.” The organscape of the opening passage becomes the environment of the book’s setting. Descriptions of hills and forests set the atmospheric tone, darkness is omnipresent, and its interplay with light is the novel’s visual rhythm. Repeated descriptions of car lights are a prominent feature of the text, and in in the lengthy passages focusing on the protagonist’s teenage years, these cars are driving up and down hills, their headlights punctuating forested gloom. The novel’s pace often resembles a “stationary vehicle”: we’re supposed to be moving but nothing is going on, major parts of the storyline are “deprived of activity.” In Knausgård’s rendering, desolation is a main trait of the small towns in Norway the protagonist and his family lived in when he was young. We arrive “at the heart” of the first volume of Min Kamp: the death of the protagonist’s father and the childhood and teenage memories surrounding it. The desolation and emptiness marking the motionless heart in the beginning (in the Norwegian original, the houses are “tomme,” empty, rather than “deserted,” [MK, 7]) coincide with the representation of the father’s death. The town where the father died repeatedly hits the protagonist with its emptiness when he returns for the funeral: “everything under the sky seemed indifferent, resistant, open, vast and empty. How many such open, empty days had there been when I used to walk around here” (MS, 339)? “Everything is open, everything is empty, the world is dead” (MS, 340). The house in which the father died is in a desolate state: piles and piles of empty bottles are the only remainders of his last life phase, reducing him to his alcoholism. This condition also withholds from his sons the exact circumstances of his death. They can only speculate: “‘What do you think happened? […] Did he just fall asleep?’/‘Probably,’ Yngve said./‘His heart stopped?’/‘Yes’” (MS, 334). The simplest and most generic explanation of the father’s passing leads back to the novel’s opening sentence: “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.” As in Proust’s Recherche, the interrupted heart is tied to an interrupted narrative structure through chronological displacement: the description of the heart in the beginning is followed by a reflection on the unease triggered by dead bodies, which, now “belong[ing] to death,” are “[a]t one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky” (MS, 4). During another meditation on death much later, in the second part of the book, the narrator recounts the experience of seeing a dead body for the first time, adding “My father

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had died” (MS, 250). After a description of the father’s corpse in the morgue, the story around the father’s death is told, including a detailed account of what the protagonist and his brother experience during their trip to their father’s house before they visit the morgue. Toward the very end of the novel, we encounter the dead body in the morgue again, which is followed by a second visit to the morgue, and a third description of the corpse, with which the novel ends: And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the table lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water. And death […] was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. (MS, 490)

We are back to the beginning, back to the heart that simply stopped beating, caught in a loop where bodies transposed onto things and landscapes are “produce[d] over and over.” The deserted, isolated heart at the outset also ties the emptiness surrounding the father’s death to a lack in the protagonist’s memory. In one of the most Proustian scenes of the novel, Karl Ove reflects on his observation that something is wrong with his ability to remember: Until I moved to Stockholm I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern whereby every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me […] But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. […] Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it. (MS, 224)

The protagonist’s memory has become syncopal: what has so far been an “unbroken” flow, a “continuity” of memories “connected” to “landslides of feeling” is now severed from emotions. Like the heart in the beginning, Karl Ove’s memories are “deprived” of motion, they “no longer stirred”

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anything in him. A lack of emotion also accompanies the protagonist’s reaction to the news that his father has died—“with the troubles of memory are closely linked the heart’s intermissions”: “All I could think was that I couldn’t think about what I should be thinking about. That I didn’t feel what I should be feeling. Dad’s dead, I thought, this is a big, big event, it should fill me to the hilt, but it isn’t doing that” (MS, 256). The absence of emotion around memory and the father’s death symptomatically surfaces in isolated words that are almost mechanically repeated: “Dad’s dead”; “Pappa er død” (MK, 237). The sentence keeps cutting into the text as a dull refrain—in the English translation sounding even more monotonous than in the Norwegian original—sometimes staged like a stammering nursery rhyme: Død, død, pappa var død. Død, død, pappa var død. (MK, 231) Dead, dead, dad was dead. Dead, dead, dad was dead. (MS, 258)

These words go hand in hand with a physiological articulation that seems “habitually enforced” rather than emotionally motivated: Karl Ove’s recurring erratic bouts of crying, recalling the streaming tears of Marcel and the head in the jar. In the most self-reflective passage at the end of the novel, these ongoing tears become a matter of writing (more specifically, writing the novel we are currently reading): The first time I realised what I was writing really was something, […] was when I wrote a passage about dad and started crying while I was writing. […] I wrote about dad and the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I could barely see the keyboard or the screen, I just hammered away. […] My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him […]. It wasn’t a ­question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth. (MS, 482)

The novel stages itself as an “application of the erratic machinery of habit and memory”: writing as mindless, blind hammering doesn’t bring forth the missing emotions that would motivate the accompanying tears’ ceaseless flow: still, “nothing about” the father “touched” the narrator; the emptiness of “something not existing” still prevails. Having reached this

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point at the end of the novel, we know that the desired continuity and coherence of memory has not been restored through writing: a “mystic experience” of involuntary memory never occurs. Instead, we encounter an apparently ceaseless series of “extreme cases” that are so closely tied to habit that they “take flesh” and invade the text’s “nervous structure.” Knausgård, Beckett, and Proust share the premise that memory cannot be restored through writing, that what has been lost continues to be lost, articulating itself habitually in its brokenness: through malapropisms, linked to temporal, narrative, and metaphorical displacements in Proust; through absentminded reiteration of “the same words” in Beckett; through the disconnect of the past and emotion, which disturbs the continuity of life and narrative sequence in Knausgård; and through syncopal constellations on the text, which surface in all cases. As I have shown, the “extreme cases” of memory Beckett traces in Proust shape the aesthetics of the three authors in various modulations of “organic eccentricities” in which the heart often plays a central part. That being said, it is also important to stress the obvious: in general, Proust’s, Beckett’s, and Knausgård’s literary styles are hardly comparable; they draw on diverging conceptions of the body, and approach the relation between life and writing differently. Whereas Proust, in Benjamin’s words, “did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered,”19 Knausgård insists that his writing practice cannot be separated from his life.20 These relations are reflected in the authors’ respective narrators (with whom they share their names, Marcel and Karl Ove); in contrast, Beckett’s speakers seem removed from their author, dissolving into textuality. The “ongoingness” of an “erratic machinery of habit and memory” in Proust, Beckett, and Knausgård is tangential: converging at some moments, diverging at others, forming “endless series of parallels” “sans solution de continuité.”

Bibliography Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London, Montreuil, New York: Calder, 1997. ———. Le Monde et le Pantalon. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990. ———. Proust. New York: Grove Press, 1957.  Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” 202.  See Knausgård, “The Shame of Writing about Myself,” The Guardian (February 26, 2016) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/karl-ove-knausgaard-theshame-­of-writing-about-myself (accessed August 21, 2022). 19 20

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Benjamin, Walter. “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, 201–215. New  York: Schocken Books, 2007. Byrne, Danny. “Review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Vol. 3.” Music & Literature. June 3, 2014, https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/ 2014/5/27/karl-­ove-­knausgaards-­my-­struggle-­vol-­3 (accessed May 4, 2022). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 1991. ———. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Johnston, Taylor. “The Corpse as Novelistic Form: Knausgaard’s Deconstruction of Proustian Memory.” Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 3 (2018): 368–382. Knausgård, Karl Ove. Min Kamp 1. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober, 2010. ———. My Struggle: Book 1. A Death in the Family. Translated by Don Bartlett. London: Vintage Books, 2014. ———. “The Shame of Writing about Myself.” The Guardian, February 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/karl-­ove-­ knausgaard-­the-­shame-­of-­writing-­about-­myself (accessed August 21, 2022). Maude, Ulrika. “‘All that inner space one never sees.’ Beckett’s Inhuman Domain.” Samuel Beckett Today / Samuel Beckett Aujourd’hui 32 (2020): 255–271. ———. “Beckett and the Laws of Habit.” Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): 814–821. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Translated by Richard A.  Rand. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Noble Gunn, Olivia. “Growing Up: Knausgård on Proust, Boyishness, and (Straight) Time.” Scandinavian Studies 92, no. 3 (2020): 325–347. OED Online, Oxford University Press, adj., n., “eccentric,” https://www.oed. com/view/Entry/59245?redirectedFrom=eccentric (accessed April 26, 2022a). ———. n., “transposition,” https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/205037?redirec tedFrom=transposition (accessed May 3, 2022b). Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu IV.  Le Coté du Guermantes II; Sodome et Gomorrhe I. Paris: Gallimard, 1937. ———. A la recherche du temps perdu V.  Sodome et Gomorrhe II. Paris: Gallimard, 1929. ———. Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One. Translated by C.K.  Scott Moncrieff. New York: Random House, 1934. ———. Remembrance of Things Past, Volume Two. Translated by Frederick A. Blossom. New York: Random House, 1932. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Index1

A Ackerley, C. J., 122, 123 Adorno, Theodor, 95 Alexander, Archibald, 124 A Short History of Philosophy, 124 Arcos, René, 83 Aristotle, 22 “Assumption,” 76, 78–81, 84, 92 B Bachelard, Gaston, 65 Bacon, Francis, 50 Badiou, Alain, 18, 28, 39, 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 120, 120n7 Bataille, Georges, 144, 148, 150–153, 150n6, 155–157 Documents, 148 informe, 144, 148, 151, 153 Beaufret, Jean, 127

Bêtise, 123 Bion, Wilfred, 78, 79 Blanchot, Maurice, 39, 49, 51, 51n26, 53 Boxall, Peter, 144, 145n2 Browning, Robert, 78, 79 C “The Capital of the Ruins,” 96 Cartesianism, 65, 109, 111 Cascando, 38 Cassirer, Ernst, 125 Celan, Paul, 53 Chennevière, Georges, 83 “Preface,” 83 Cohn, Ruby, 123 Coleridge, Samuel, 59n12 Come and Go, 28

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Krimper, G. Quigley (eds.), Beckett Ongoing, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42030-6

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INDEX

“Concentrism,” 88, 97 Connor, Steven, 134, 135n63, 139 Cordingley, Anthony, 58, 99, 99n13, 102n23, 106, 107, 107n39

Eluard, Paul, 89 “The End” (short story), 144, 145, 150, 154, 158 Endgame, 39, 54 Enough, 66

D da Vinci, Leonardo, 45 Dante The Divine Comedy, 131 Inferno, 133, 133n53 Paradiso, 131 “Dante and the Lobster,” 131, 131n46 D’Aubarède, Gabriel, 119, 120, 123n14 De Vries, Hent, 101, 101n22, 109 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 64n37, 170, 171, 176, 180 Democritus, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 43 Descartes, René Discourse on the Method, 128 Meditations on First Philosophy, 129 Difference and Repetition (book), 170 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 120 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 65n42 Duhamel, Georges, 82 Durtain, Luc, 82, 83 Duthuit, Georges, 45n16, 60, 69, 114, 115, 122, 150, 155–157 “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,”, 24 Transition, 150, 155, 156 Dwan, Lisa, 159, 160, 160n18

F Fargue, Léon-Paul, 75 Feldman, Matthew, 59 Film, 106 Flaubert, Gustave, 80 Footfalls, 28 From an Abandoned Work, 40

E Eagleton, Terry, 155n9 “Echo’s Bones,” 90 Eh Joe, 27, 31, 110 Eliot, T. S., 51

G Geulincx, Arnold, 95–116, 120, 127 Ghost Trio, 111 Gide, André, 75, 77 Gontarski, S. E., 122, 123 Guattari, Félix, 64n37 H Happy Days, 60, 111 Harvey, Lawrence E., 120, 120n6 Hegel, 32, 32n39 Heidegger, Martin, 42, 47, 121n8 How It Is/Comment C’est, 16, 16n2, 26, 27, 44, 91, 92, 97, 101, 106–109, 178n15 I Ill Seen Ill Said, 37–56, 63, 67n51 Imagination Dead Imagine, 53n32 J Jansenism, 100, 102, 109 Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 75–79, 81–83, 92 Noces, 78

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“Paris 1922,” 77 Paulina 1880, 76–78, 81, 82n11 Joyce, James, 51, 71n72, 78, 80, 81, 84, 121 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 81 Ulysses, 85 Work in Progress, 80

Leopardi, Giacomo, 126 Levinas, Emmanuel, 137, 154 L’Innommable, 20, 38 Little, James, 144n1 The Lost Ones, 91 Lyotard, Jean-François, 57n1, 61, 65, 69

K Kafka, Franz, 53 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 22–25, 28, 30, 31, 50, 124, 125 Critique of Judgement, 16, 31 Critique of Practical Reason, 24n22, 27n30 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 25, 28 “What is Enlightenment?,” 24n21 Keats, John, 52, 133 Kenner, Hugh, 131n46 Klee, Paul, 64 Kleist, Heinrich von, 95–116 Knausgård, Karl Ove, 163–186 A Death in the Family, 181 Min Kamp (My Struggle), 163, 181, 183 Knowlson, James, 60, 121, 122, 124, 127 Krapp’s Last Tape, 16, 21, 110 Kristeva, Julia, 66

M MacGreevy, Thomas, 24, 100, 126 Mahaffy, J. P., 127, 129–131, 130n41, 130n42 Mal vu mal dit, 40, 49, 67, 67n49, 67n51 Malebranche, Nicolas, 101, 103, 106, 109, 127 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 44, 45, 48, 50, 55, 57, 65 Malone Dies, 90, 106, 122, 122n13, 158, 166n9, 177, 178 Marais, Marin, 48 Maude, Ulrike, 165n4 Molloy, 70, 105, 106, 120, 122, 131, 135, 140, 144, 150, 151, 153, 156–158 More Pricks Than Kicks, 121 Morin, Emilie, 23 Munch, Edvard, 80 Mündigkeit, 24, 32 Murphy, 30, 87, 90, 124

L Lacan, Jacques, 25 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 22, 26, 46 Larbaud, Valery, 75 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 101, 126, 127 “Le monde et le pantalon,” 49, 53

N Nacht und Träume, 17n3 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 26–28, 46, 145, 145n3, 166, 166n9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29 Nixon, Mark, 125, 125n22, 126 Not I, 62, 144, 158–160 Nussbaum, Martha, 70n62

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O Occasionalism, 96, 103, 106, 109 Ō shima, Nagisa, 81 P Pascal, Blaise, 43, 95–116 Péret, Benjamin, 89 Perloff, Marjorie, 48 Philosophy Notes, 97, 103, 109 Play, 60 Praz, Mario, 80 Proust (book), 65, 68 Proust, Marcel, 61, 75, 76, 96, 97, 100, 126, 163–186 Q Quad, 91 Quignard, Pascal, 48 R Racine, Jean, 102 Rancière, Jacques, 59, 59n14, 62, 63, 69, 71 “Recent Irish Poetry,” 99, 115 Rockaby, 106 Romains, Jules, 75–77, 83, 85–88, 90, 92 A Manual of Deification, 85 Mort de quelqu’un (The Death of a Nobody), 85 Rough for Radio II, 31 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas B., 75–77

S Sade, Marquis de, 156, 156n11 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 100, 100n14, 101 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 121n8 Schiller, Friedrich, 22, 31 Schneider, Alan, 54 Schopenhauer, 126 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 166n5 Spiel, 110 Spinoza, 124, 125, 127 Stirrings Still, 29 T Texts for Nothing, 17–20, 26, 27 Thingliness, 32 “Three Dialogues,” 122 Transition, 78, 80, 82, 122 U Unanimisme, 75–77, 79, 82, 83, 85, 91, 93 The Unnamable, 20, 25, 37, 38, 40, 58, 59, 66, 105, 106, 122, 122n13, 144, 158, 166n9, 178, 181 V Van Hulle, Dirk, 125, 125n22, 126 Van Velde, Bram, 49, 60, 60n22 Vico, Giambattista, 78, 81, 90 W Waiting for Godot, 16, 71 Watt, 58, 59, 114, 114n70, 124

 INDEX 

Weller, Shane, 135n63 What is The Word, 58–59 What Where, 26, 28, 31 Whitelaw, Billie, 159, 160n18 Whoroscope, 127, 130, 130n41 Windelband, Wilhelm, 102–104, 103n27, 106, 111, 124 A History of Philosophy, 124

Wordsworth, William, 59n12 Worstward Ho, 17, 19–20, 25, 26, 28, 38, 51, 54, 58, 64, 66 Y Yeats, Jack B., 19, 24, 115, 116

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