Beckett: A Guide For The Perplexed

BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED JONATHAN BOULTER

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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 © Jonathan Boulter 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Jonathan Boulter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-9267-8 (hardback) 978-0-8264-8195-5 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

We need a dreamworld in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit. —Paul Feyerabend, Against Method BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCE

Samuel Beckett (1906–89) is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. Born into a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin, Beckett studied Modern Languages (French and Italian) at Trinity College, earning a B.A. in 1927. In 1928, after a short and unsuccessful stint as a teacher at Campbell College, Belfast, Beckett became lecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris replacing Thomas MacGreevy, the person responsible for introducing Beckett to James Joyce. Beckett was massively influenced by his fellow Irishman’s writing and in fact published an essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’) in 1929, the same year that he published his first short story ‘Assumption’. In 1934, while living in London, Beckett published More Pricks than Kicks, a collection of short stories and in 1936 he completed his novel Murphy (which was published in 1938). In 1937, Beckett moved to Paris and made France his permanent home until his death in 1989. Beckett’s early works, including the novel Watt (published in 1953), the last novel to be written in English before Beckett turned to writing in French in 1946, failed to attract much critical attention.1 It was while Beckett was writing his first novel trilogy, which includes Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), that Beckett produced his most famous work and indeed the play that was 1

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to transform twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot (composed 1948–49). Beckett said that this play was essentially written as a diversion, a ‘relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time’.2 The two-act play, featuring the now iconic tramps waiting for this Godot who never will appear, was revolutionary and contributed in no small part to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Waiting for Godot, a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’,3 as Vivian Mercier famously put it, radically questions the grounds of its own genre. That is to say, Beckett presents a drama that overturns audiences’ basic assumptions. There is no character development, no plot of any consequence, no clear progression of any narrative content or action: it is a play staging the anticipation of action rather than action itself. Initially, the play baffled audiences; when first performed in the United States (having been billed as the ‘laugh hit of two continents’4) people flocked out in droves. Eventually, however, it became clear that Beckett’s work, if not traditionally dramatic, did speak to what was perceived to be a recognizable condition in the 1950s: anxiety. In some senses, and this is true for all of Beckett’s work, not simply Godot, Beckett is interested in analyzing the human being at moments of intense self-awareness and anxiety (and what is anxiety if not a condition of extreme self-consciousness?). Godot spoke to a generation that recognized itself as anxious for meaning, for significance. And although it is perhaps too easy to historicize Beckett’s work for interpretive comfort, we should notice that his major work (including the first trilogy and the drama of the 1950s and 1960s) was produced in a context of great shock and protracted anxiety: the Second World war had recently ended, the truth of the death camps had begun to be fully known, and the growing conflict between the West and the Soviet Union served as a constant reminder of the threat of total nuclear annihilation. Indeed, Beckett’s Endgame (1957), which takes place seemingly after some great catastrophe (the world has been ‘corpsed’, to use Clov’s horrific word) speaks directly, as the great critic Theodor Adorno argues, to a post-Holocaust world.5 For all its difficulty Beckett’s work thus does speak to its time, does present, if read carefully, a diagnosis of the twentieth century; read from another perspective the work becomes symptomatic of the twentieth century. That is to say, Beckett’s work could only have been written in a century that witnessed such massive scenes of destruction and brutality. 2

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INTRODUCTION

Beckett produced Waiting for Godot while creating his most important and influential body of prose work: the first trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. If Waiting for Godot revolutionized drama, this prose trilogy did the same to the novel. Indeed we may argue, as does A. Alvarez, that in these works Beckett essentially ‘assassinates’ the novel form.6 If Waiting for Godot removed the drama from drama, these novels removed all comfortable signposts from narrative: coherent plot, stable character, events occurring in identifiable space and time. It is clear that Beckett is not primarily interested in telling ‘stories’ in any conventional sense here; indeed, one cannot even really suggest a novel like The Unnamable—which is narrated by shifting, perhaps bodiless, personalities in what may be some kind of afterlife—has a story at all. In later works like How It Is (1961), All Strange Away (1963–64), Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), and the second trilogy (which includes Company [1980], Ill Seen Ill Said [1981], and Worstward Ho [1983]), Beckett offers texts which seem to dismantle the generic markers between prose and poetry to the point where it becomes clear that his main concern is simply (but what a word!) language itself and the way human experience is bound up in the linguistic. My interest in this Guide will be to suggest that this obsession with language, in the way we know and are known by the world via languages themselves perhaps ineffective and failing, is the through-line connecting Beckett’s work, both in prose and drama. In this sense, and I will return to this point in detail, Beckett’s career is an elaborate and nuanced commentary on a statement by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all’ (Truth and Method: 443). Beckett’s work revolutionized twentieth-century literature. Certainly, to write a conventional play would prove rather more difficult after Waiting for Godot, Endgame, or the later more stylistically avant-garde work. Dramas like Happy Days (1961), which sees a character buried to her waist (later to her neck) in the earth; or Play (1963), in which three characters interned in urns are forced, unaware of the others’ presence, to speak about the nature of their tortured relationship; or Not I (1972), in which a disembodied mouth frantically spews out a narrative of assault and madness; or Breath (1969), a 35-second play featuring a stage filled with rubbish and the sound of a cry at birth and death, all challenge notions of what constitute ‘drama’ as such. Playwrights like Harold Pinter (who acknowledges Beckett 3

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as his master), Edward Albee, and Sarah Kane, are all massively influenced by the plays: their experiments with form and staging are all responses to Beckett’s elaborate and relentless critique of dramatic convention. And equally, we need to recognize the influence of Beckett’s prose on twentieth-century fiction. Beckett’s first trilogy, as well as his later prose, has had enormous influence on writers who in their turn have become important in the progression of twentiethand twenty-first-century prose. Paul Auster (whose New York Trilogy can be read as a direct postmodern rewriting of Beckett’s first trilogy), J. M. Coetzee (who in fact wrote his PhD dissertation on Beckett’s Watt), and John Banville (who in works like The Book of Evidence shares Beckett’s fascination with the workings of the possibly deranged mind) all claim an artistic inheritance from Beckett’s singular vision: their representations of the inner self—psychotic, traumatized—can be traced to Beckett’s interest in the solitary and marginal figure, reduced in possessions and body, negotiating a path through a hostile or indifferent world. BECKETT’S STYLE

It is precisely this quality of singularity that readers key into when encountering Beckett’s work: there is simply nothing remotely like Beckett in the world of literature. While Beckett’s early work (Murphy, More Pricks than Kicks, the posthumously published Dream of Fair to Middling Women7) bears traces of Joyce’s influence (as seen in what is, for Beckett, unusually energetic even playful, prose), his later work—the turn to which I locate in 1953’s Watt (written between 1941 and 1945)—is uniquely Beckett’s. While it is perhaps unfair to summarize and distill the qualities of a writer’s work, we can make a few general comments here. Beckett’s work always, even as its most extreme limit of uncanniness and strangeness, is relentlessly humorous, if darkly so. At moments of extreme despair on stage a character will offer a line that will make us laugh, uneasily. In Waiting for Godot, for instance, Vladimir and Estragon witness Pozzo’s brutal treatment of Lucky; they then have this brief exchange: Vladimir: That passed the time. Estragon: It would have passed in any case. Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly. (40)

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At moments of extreme pain in the novels a character will deflate his despair with irony. Malone, alone and dying in his bed, for instance, offers this: ‘My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent. There is virtually nothing it can do. Sometimes I miss not being able to crawl around any more. But I am not much given to nostalgia’ (Malone Dies: 180). This brutally amusing writing alleviates the gloom of the Beckett play or novel, but it does add a certain uncanny frisson to our experience of the work: why are we laughing at this? How can there be humor in such a depleted world? In an interview Beckett once said: ‘If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable’ (220).8 Beckett is the master of mixing light and dark, of humor with pain, of the recognizable with the unfamiliar. The result is a kind of writing that is consistently disorienting but not strange enough to be fully alienating: we do recognize and respond to something in the work, a quality perhaps of shared suffering, of shared despair and, be it ever so humble, shared compassion. Readers often remark on the particular quality of Beckett’s sentences, especially in the prose. Unlike that of his early master Joyce, Beckett’s mature prose is crystalline in its concision. Indeed, Beckett once remarked on the difference between Joyce’s method of composing and his own: ‘we are diametrically opposite because Joyce was a synthesizer, he wanted to put everything, the whole of human culture, into one or two books, and I am an analyzer. I take away all the accidentals because I want to come down to the bedrock of the essentials, the archetypal.’ 9 In Damned to Fame Knowlson quotes Beckett’s views on Joyce: ‘ “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it . . . I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding” ’ (319). And thus while Beckett’s sentences are easily enough read (we may have to look up the odd word now and again),10 there is a slow-burn quality to this writing, as meanings and resonances come to light, and apply pressure, long after we have passed over

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the individual words. The famous line from Malone Dies, ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’ (186), is an example of a sentence which snags our attention with its peculiar use of a word or idea. Nothingness, radical absence, the sentence suggests, is the most pressing reality with which we must deal. The sentence’s circularity and repetition, moreover, uncannily transfers absence into presence: nothing thus becomes something as we feel its real claims on us. The sentence brilliantly demonstrates how a single word can shimmer with multiple resonances: the first use of the word ‘nothing’ is very different from the second. Indeed, the word seems simultaneously to have casual and deeply philosophical meanings all of which fold into each other and are exchanged. Malone, aware of the effects of his own words, offers this commentary on this sentence: ‘I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech . . . They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark’ (186–87). Another related uncanny effect occurs when Beckett offers an idea only to negate its claims immediately: ‘Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live’ (Malone Dies: 189); ‘I am dead, but I never lived’ (Texts for Nothing 11: 333); ‘Say a body. Where none’ (Worstward Ho: 471). The final lines of Molloy are perhaps the most famous example of Beckett’s selfcontradictory, self-cancelling rhetoric: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). The effect, a dizzying one, is to keep the reader consistently on her interpretive toes, preventing her from settling on any comfortable or comforting meaning. This effect reaches its terminal point in Beckett’s late prose, in texts like Worstward Ho. Beckett here forgoes conventional grammar, character, plot, and story and presents language itself as character (in this way we are justified in asserting, as suggested, that language is always Beckett’s main concern). The language of the late texts is contradictory and produces familiar vertiginous effects: Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they. Dim void shades all they. Nothing save what they say. Somehow say. Nothing save they. What they say. Whosesoever whencesoever say. As worst they may fail ever worse to say. (478)

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Surely this is some of Beckett’s most challenging, most difficult writing. But if we listen to it carefully we can attend to themes he will explore throughout his career. We can hear Beckett’s obsessive return to the rhetoric of ‘nothing’; we encounter his interest in ‘failure’ as a trope of writing; we see his interest in moving past the barriers of conventional language to explore the limits of what can be said and not said (or missaid) in language which is itself dead or spectral: ‘void shades’. Beckett, for all his difficulty, can be read clearly because, as I explore in detail below, his writing gives us the interpretive clues we need. An interpretive dizziness is a given when reading Beckett: what we do with that dizziness, how we choose to interpret our moments of uncertainty, becomes our task, our obligation.

THE DIFFICULTY OF READING BECKETT: GENRE, NOTHINGNESS, THE POSTHUMAN BODY Genre

The year 2006 was the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth. At various festivals and conferences his works were performed, discussed, and criticized. Indeed, even the mainstream media, usually oblivious to the work of the literary avant-garde, took notice if only to recycle the primary critical clichés about Beckett’s work: it is bleak, difficult, and ‘about’ the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. This last cliché, given at least tacit support by Beckett himself, is one this Guide will in part seek to dismantle, but for now we need to acknowledge the truth of what is generally perceived about Beckett’s work: its uncompromising difficulty.11 We are presented, in both the drama and prose, with unfamiliar and seemingly unreadable situations: two tramps on a near-empty stage, waiting; a blind tyrant, accompanied by his crippled parents and a peevish servant, yearning for his life (and the play he seems to know he is in) to end; a play in which a mouth, speaking in near incomprehensible language, is the main ‘character’; an old man, lying in bed, telling stories until he dies. And one could go on, and we shall here, listing the myriad difficulties posed by Beckett’s work. At a basic level, however, we notice one common feature of these texts, one link which may be our interpretive entry point: they all deliberately dismantle generic expectation. That is to say, every Beckett text defies our notions of what a play or a novel should be doing. If we recognize this generic ‘decomposition’ 7

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as Beckett’s primary method of problematizing interpretive protocols, we come to an important initial realization: Beckett’s texts resist being interpreted and categorized and this may in fact be what they are about, the problem of interpretation itself. This Guide thus will begin with an analysis of the way Beckett manipulates genre in his work. Waiting for Godot, for instance, is a drama in name only: if the root of the word ‘drama’ is the Greek for ‘action’, Beckett is deliberately writing a drama that is not, in fact, a drama at all (nothing happens in the play; or, more precisely, nothing happens: the experience of nothingness is what the play is about). The novels of Beckett’s first trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) again, are novels in name only: as this trilogy progresses, there is a diminishing of plot and a removal of all identifiable characters within identifiable space and time. Beckett’s late prose and drama blurs the distinction between genres: How It Is, a ‘novel’, reads like poetry; A Piece of Monologue (1982), a ‘play’, reads like a short prose story; Beckett’s last major work, in the so-called second trilogy (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho), reduces the very language of prose to nongrammatical clauses, and places ‘characters’ (who function merely as grammatical indices, may indeed only ‘be’ disembodied grammatical indices) in locations that are beyond life and death. It is my suggestion that the trajectory of Beckett’s career as dramatist and novelist traces a systematic deconstruction of the very premises of drama and prose, a deconstruction that witnesses the simultaneous and systematic dismantling of the self, or subject, who would rely on narrative as a means of self-understanding. I propose here to suggest that this deconstruction, this dismantling of all received structures of subjectivity and narrative, be it in prose or drama (and his characters on stage are only ever telling stories), is the major theme of Beckett’s work and, of course, the cause of the major difficulties in the reading of this work. Once we understand that Beckett’s method is to call into question the very premises of drama and prose, we may be better able to understand what I see as his major purpose: to call into question all those methods—narrative being the primary one—we have of understanding ourselves. Genres come ready built with meaning and expectation: plays and novels have structures—beginnings, middles, endings; character and plot ‘development’; settings—that readers naturally assume should be in place. Plays and novels have recognizable 8

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characters and tell stories that, while perhaps confusing and challenging, assume what we can call ‘knowability’. That is, these narratives are assumed to reflect a recognizable reality, one to which the reader can orient herself. A central, if unspoken, assumption of what is called classic realist literature, is that narrative itself is a natural and authoritative way of communicating reality.12 Language, in other words, is the adequate vehicle for representing reality, and most importantly, for representing the self; in classic realist fiction, crucially, the self— think, for instance, of Dickens’ David Copperfield—precedes language and uses it, controls it, to transcribe his reality. Beckett is working to reveal all these expectations as artificial and constructed. He indicates that we construct ourselves as selves in the stories we tell, the histories we construct, and thus his dismantling of these narratives is his way of examining the very fragility, the very constructedness, of the human and human understanding itself. Narrative and other generic conventions are ways of controlling experience, of shaping experience; they are not unproblematic reflections of experience. In the end, however, by systematically reducing narrative to its essence, to what he calls its ‘worsening words’, Beckett discovers the persistent essence of the human, whose narratives ‘fail again’ and ‘fail better’, but who is insistently present in that failure, if only as a trace, specter, or ghost of itself. My argument, ultimately, is that for all Beckett’s seeming difficulty and negativity, his novels and plays work systematically to celebrate, if in an inverse way, the human subject who will not cease to narrate and who will, thus, always be. REDUCTION TO THE ESSENTIALS: NOTHINGNESS AND THE POSTHUMAN

To begin, perhaps we should acknowledge that while Beckett’s work explores questions concerning the fundamental nature of the human, Beckett himself will seem to be of little help to us in interpreting that work. Although he has offered some important, if opaque, critical insights into what appears to be a personal philosophy of art and life, Beckett tended to resist offering direct interpretations of his work, resisted offering what a character in his novel Watt calls ‘semantic succour’ to his readers, his actors, his directors. When, for instance, Alan Schneider, a friend and director of many of Beckett’s plays, asked for Beckett’s interpretation of Endgame, Beckett replied ‘I simply 9

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can’t write about my work, or occasional stuff of any kind’. He went on to excoriate journalists and critics: But when it comes to these bastards of journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind . . . 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. (No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider: 24) It is curious to note the way Beckett resists interpreting his work yet at the same time provides something of a clue to reading: his work, he says, is a ‘matter of fundamental sounds’. One way of understanding this comment, and certainly this is the way I tend to read his work, is to notice how Beckett tends to strip away all excess on stage and page: he is after an analysis of the fundamentals, the core, or ‘essence’ of what maps out human experience. There is no accidental word or occurrence in a Beckett text, no distraction from the real business of trying to understand what it means to be. Hence, for instance, a novel like Malone Dies, where there is only one character, immobilized in bed and thinking about his impending death. Here Beckett is asking a crucial, perhaps the fundamental, question: What does it mean to exist, to be, at the moment when your life is on the verge of flickering out? Can we recognize what it truly means to be alive, what we may call the fundamental impulse of being, only when life itself is about to cease? Beckett pares plot, character, and language down to its essentials, stripping away the ‘meat’ (of both prose and character) to examine life lived at extreme limit points. Indeed, as I have indicated, in later texts such as Worstward Ho, the first sentence of which reads ‘On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on’ (471), Beckett reduces plot and character so radically that it is possible to say that we have text where grammar, itself functioning at the limit of comprehensibility, indicates a subjectivity on the verge of nothingness. By writing about fundamental sounds Beckett presents himself as an intensely curious and courageous writer. Curious about the precise nature of the human being, Beckett takes himself and his readers to the extreme limits of humanity and asks us, obliges us, to look carefully at ourselves at moments of crisis. These moments of crisis 10

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work in Beckett as points of fundamental, if compromised and opaque, revelation: it is here, at the point where the world ceases to make sense or correspond to one’s presuppositions, that the real, the fundamental interpretive and ethical questions arise: How do I go on in the face of this crisis of meaning? What is my responsibility to myself and others when meaning collapses? These moments of the collapse of meaning, of the crisis of interpretation, are central to Beckett’s work (indeed we may say they comprise the totality of the work) and to his philosophy of art. In some ways Beckett’s real interest is in the encounter, existential, artistic, and interpretive, with what he importantly refers to as ‘Nothing’. The experience of nothing, the nothingness realized in the boredom of Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot (the first line of which is ‘Nothing to be done’), the nothingness that threatens our interpretive security, what Clov in Endgame calls the ‘zero’ point of meaning, the nothingness of loss and absence that informs so densely the later trilogy, is one that paradoxically (how do you write about ‘nothing’?) articulates and motivates Beckett’s own work. In 1949, Beckett published Three Dialogues, a series of pseudodialogues between ‘B’ and ‘D’. B, who critics identify as Beckett himself (rightly I believe), offers what has become perhaps the most often cited entry point into Beckett’s own work. B has been discussing modern art and comes to offer his own view of the proper subject matter and motivations of the modern artist: B.—Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D.—And preferring what? B.—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. (556) A number of things are crucial here. First, notice how B expresses a weariness with artistic convention, how the idea of ‘doing a little better the same old thing’ bores him (this is an idea to which we will return). It is clear even relatively early in his career that Beckett would not be creating conventionally familiar art. Notice, second, how the 11

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word ‘nothing’ gathers a kind of incremental resonance in this final sentence, how it becomes clear that nothing, to speak perhaps paradoxically, becomes something, something to be explored as a theme, as a reality (we may recall that line from Malone Dies: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’). As this astonishing sentence concludes Beckett acknowledges a personal ethical obligation as an artist, an obligation to observe, analyze, and express these moments when the nothing arises—perhaps even against his own will—and appears to nullify meaning, to threaten our comfort, to erase our grasp of the real. ‘POSTHUMANISM’

To have based a career on the exploration of ‘nothing’ may seem perverse to some. Certainly the reader’s encounter with Beckett’s various representations of the void, of absence, of loss will be a difficult one for the simple reason that Beckett’s world is difficult to bear. And some readers over the years have found in Beckett’s work a certain ruthless, perhaps even a cold inhumanity. If we trace the trajectory of Beckett’s work, on both stage and in prose, we do notice that his systematic reduction of things, what I have suggested is his reduction to the ‘fundamentals’, does involve the reduction of the human self, what I will in this study be referring to as the ‘subject’. Notice how for instance, in the drama, we move from fully embodied subjects in Waiting for Godot, to the less physically able characters in Endgame (Hamm is blind and crippled; Clov can only walk in a stiff-legged gait; Nagg and Nell both have lost their legs), to characters immobilized in urns in Play, to the disembodied Mouth of Not I. A similar trajectory holds in the first prose trilogy: Molloy, whose body is failing yet able; Malone who is immobilized in bed; the unnamable, who may simply be a brain in an urn. In the later prose texts, it is difficult even to determine precisely the nature of the human and the status of its body, ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in’ (471). Beckett seems to strive throughout his career to rid his work of the body, to work thus toward what we may call a kind of posthumanism. Posthumanism can be defined as that strand of philosophy which radically critiques the idea that the individual subject is the center of all things, the beginning and end of all knowledge and experience: this is therefore a radical critique of Humanist philosophy which would 12

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posit the human’s reason and rationality as being transparently available to the thinking subject. Posthumanism begins by countering Humanism’s belief that the human is self-producing, self-coincidental, that it is somehow responsible for the production of its world and its experience of the world. As a philosophy, posthumanism can be traced to many sources, but the thinking of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud is crucial. Each worked to suggest that the human subject is not self-producing or self-coincidental, but is, rather, produced by its culture (Marx), its language (Nietzsche), and its unconscious drives and instincts (Freud). Posthumanism strives to understand the precise economies of these forces and asks questions like these: How is the human subject to rather than the master of language? How does the subject negotiate her relation to the drives—toward Eros, Thanatos—that Freud posits? How can the subject free itself, if at all, from the cultural forces of capital, ideology, and religion, forces which precede and exceed the subject’s experience? These are all Beckett’s questions and he will work out answers in plays like Happy Days and novels like Murphy and The Unnamable, texts which are about how the subject negotiates a relation to culture (Happy Days), to the drives (Murphy), to language (The Unnamable). But we should also note how Beckett’s posthumanism becomes uncannily literalized in his middle-to-late-period drama and prose. Beckett is interested in exploring the very limits of the human, the very essence of what constitutes the human. To this end Beckett will push the human past our common conceptual boundaries; that is to say, at times he moves his characters into the space of death, of what is, perhaps, a kind of afterlife. In the prose this thematic begins with Malone Dies, a novel tracing the moment a man passes into inexistence; in the drama, it begins with Play, which sees three characters in what appears to be an afterlife (the characters are in funeral urns) bickering over the narrative of their past lives; in the second trilogy we can easily imagine, indeed should imagine, that the speakers of the texts, as well as the figures that appear in the narratives, are specters, ghosts. I explore the figure of the ghost, the specter—the literal posthuman—in detail in my final chapter, but I just wish to indicate here how Beckett’s interest in paring things down to the essentials leads logically to an interest in the specter, the ghost, which becomes the image of the human after all things have been stripped way. Precisely, the ghost becomes a trace, 13

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a mark, of the human’s passing out of existence but—and this is absolutely central—the ghost is an insistent reminder of the human that once was. The specter, in other words, serves to recuperate the human even as the human passes into oblivion: the specter thus becomes what Slavoj Zizek calls the ‘indivisible remainder13’. To put it bluntly, for Beckett the total elimination of the human is a total impossibility. Perhaps, Beckett suggests, we can only find the nature of the human, what he calls ‘the bedrock of the essentials’, at the moment the human exchanges one state for another, one reality for another. Perhaps only the absence of the human (the specter) truly reveals what has been the human’s true nature. And what is for me fascinating, and crucial, about this process is the way Beckett eliminates the human at precisely the same time as he eliminates, denatures, and deconstructs, narrative form itself. In some ways Beckett is arguing that language itself must be eliminated in order for the specter, the ghost, the posthuman, to appear: language must be eliminated in order for the truth of the human to be known. We may see in this reduction a kind of cruel treatment of the human, a perverse interest in illness and decay, but I think this would be a fatal interpretive error. Certainly Beckett’s work implies that the body is always a liability, something that will inevitably fail (an hilarious line from Malone Dies suggests this: ‘If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window’ [212]). But we must notice that the body, or signs of the body, never fully disappears from Beckett’s world. The persistence of the body, the fragmented body, the disembodied body, is one of Beckett’s major themes and one that poses some of his most interesting interpretive questions and challenges: why does Beckett work to reduce and fragment the body? How are we to interpret fragments of humanity? One answer to these questions relates to what I have said above about Beckett reducing things to the fundamentals in order to understand the essence of the human: in Play and Not I, Beckett seems to be suggesting that these characters really only are their voices, really only are, to be more precise, their narratives. What matters to them, at this specific place, at this specific time, is their ability—perhaps their compulsion, their obligation—to speak. Beckett would seem to be suggesting that the totality of the body, at this specific moment, is not terribly important to the subject as she tries to understand her present situation. But, as I suggest, we do notice that Beckett never 14

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fully removes the body, or the signs of the body (voice, for instance), entirely: the stories his characters tell, his work seems to imply, are written on and through the body. Stories are translated, in other words, by the body. Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they are not fully postcorporeal. Another way of putting this idea, admittedly one of Beckett’s most challenging, is that subjectivity—that sense the human has of itself as a thinking, interpreting creature—is fully dependent on the body. Subjectivity is embodiment: you are your body and your body’s desires, as much as you are your mind. And thus while the body is an impediment and will always decay and fail, the body cannot disappear in Beckett because the self, and the self’s understanding of itself, would as well. There is, as I read it then, a kind of dark compassion in Beckett for the compromised body, for the crippled and the ill: there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying, painful, body. Our questions, as readers of Beckett, must now become: if the self understands itself through the compromised, spectral, body, what kinds of interpretations will it make? If the self understands the world through its fragmented, posthuman body, what kinds of interpretations of the world can be made? ‘POSTHUMANISM’: A PROVISO

These are all Beckett’s questions but I wish to offer something of a proviso before continuing. I suggested above that Beckett is striving for a ‘kind of’ posthumanism. I think it is best always to use terms provisionally with Beckett for surely one of the effects of his work is to call absolutely into question the very idea of stable categories, stable oppositions (‘human-posthuman’). Perhaps it is best here, at the outset, to suggest that his work critiques the idea of the human and the posthuman equally. Precisely, by discovering the persistence of the human even in its most denuded form, Beckett essentially collapses the opposition ‘human-posthuman’ to the point where the terms become interchangeable, and hence almost meaningless. That is to say, for Beckett we are always already posthuman insofar as we are controlled by discourses (history, ideology, language) preceding and exceeding us; we are always already posthuman as we discover that our bodies are sites of inevitable failure and collapse; we are always already posthuman insofar as the idea of a singular 15

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self is an illusion. Beckett acknowledges these ideas early in his career; in Proust (1931) he acknowledges that the self is not a stable subject but rather that the ‘individual is a succession of individuals’ (515); moreover, ‘The subject has died—and perhaps many times—along the way’ (513). My use of the term ‘posthuman’ then is something of a convenience, a way of speaking ‘about’ or ‘around’ the peculiarities of the Beckettian subject, the subject who always must negotiate his reality via systems of thought—language being the primary—whose parameters and protocols are always just beyond his full control. THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

Beckett’s manipulation of genre, his reduction and dismantling of the subject, his relentless interest in the various aspects of ‘nothingness’ (loss, absence)—he calls this his ‘fidelity to failure’ (‘Three Dialogues’: 563)—lead, as I have been suggesting, to some fairly acute interpretive difficulties. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher of the hermeneutic school (and student of Martin Heidegger), suggests that all real interpretation, or ‘hermeneutics’, begins with identifying a specific location of doubt or unease in a text. As he writes in Philosophical Hermeneutics: ‘The real power of hermeneutical consciousness is our ability to see what is questionable’ (13). We need, in other words, to be able to ask the proper questions of texts. But in Beckett our problem becomes seemingly intractable because everything in the text appears to be questionable. How are we to interpret texts that seem, paradoxically, to offer so many questions and then resist or foreclose the possibility of answering those questions? How, in other words, are we to read Beckett? I will suggest here, in ways that look back to Beckett’s own sense of obligation (recall his sense, expressed in Three Dialogues of the ‘obligation to express’), that our interpretations of Beckett should begin by paying careful attention to the ways in which his texts anticipate our difficulties and perhaps offer some guidance. If we are puzzled by certain things—Who are these characters? What are their histories? Where and when exactly are these stories occurring? What exactly does it all mean?—we should recognize that our perplexity with the text is mirrored by the characters’ own perplexity about their worlds. The reader’s situation of puzzlement is precisely that of the characters and thus we arrive at a crucial observation: Beckett’s texts themselves will set out the ground rules for interpreting his world. 16

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We notice, for instance, that characters in Beckett recognize they inhabit worlds in which meaning seems to have absented itself; they seem even to recognize that the words they use to describe their worlds are no longer meaningful. When Clov is asked by Hamm about the meaning of the word ‘yesterday’ he erupts: ‘That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent’ (122). The opening lines of The Unnamable see a character asking questions of himself that surely become the reader’s: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (285). In the novel Watt, the eponymous main character comes up against the extreme limits of interpretation and begins to lose his grip on reality. Watt’s loss of the real begins when he notices that it is difficult to pin meaning down, and in a question that goes to the heart of the matter the narrator asks: ‘But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend?’ (227). To recognize what is questionable in Beckett is to recognize that the question is being asked in the text, by the text itself. Our interpretive task here is not to shy away from the difficulties in these texts but to recognize how interpreting that difficulty becomes, in some fundamental way, the main theme of Beckett’s work. Because we must notice something essential about Beckett’s characters: they all are, perhaps even without realizing it, in search of meaning; they all are, in other words, interpretive creatures (just as their readers and audiences are). Beckett’s characters may inhabit a ‘corpsed’ world in which there is ‘nothing to be done’, but they all never cease in the attempt to discover something meaningful. Now, of course, Beckett’s world is not one to offer some kind of easy consolation; this is not a world in which comfort will often, if ever, be found. Perhaps the best description of Beckett’s world is that it is ‘haunted’ by the absence of meaning. This metaphor—one which may account for the recurrence of spectral, ghostly characters in his late drama and prose—suggests not precisely the absence of meaning, but a world in which meaning did occur, where meaning once existed. Beckett’s characters exist in a world where only spectral traces of meaning exist: this is the twilight of meaning, the memory of meaning. The pain of the Beckett character is in the realization that meaning once did exist; and because it once did exist, there is a sense, and not necessarily a positive one, that it can be captured again. 17

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Beckett’s characters thus function in a state of profound regret and agony—often repressed and disavowed—over what might have been. In Krapp’s Last Tape, for instance, Krapp retraces his past history through tape recordings of his own voice to revisit a moment of possible, though now forever lost, happiness. Krapp’s own voice, his own history, is spectral because his recordings are of a dead and irretrievable past, but one which clearly still haunts him now. In what is surely one of Beckett’s most painful—and intensely compassionate moments—we see how a ghostly history brutalizes Krapp: Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited . . . Here I end this reel. Box . . . three, spool . . . five. Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. (229) Beckett does not, as the critical cliché may have it, merely represent a world of absurdity, a world without meaning. This is a world that continually feels the claims of the past, of history. And there is a meaning in discovering these claims, a meaning in recognizing one’s indebtedness to the past, a meaning in realizing that one’s obligation is to come to terms with these claims and debts. THEORETICAL APPROACH: THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE UNWORD’, MELANCHOLY, AND THE ARCHIVE

Part of my purpose here in this Guide is to provide ways of making sense of Beckett’s difficult work. One way I will proceed will be to draw on the work of philosophers, theorists, and critics whose ideas allow us to understand the complexity of Beckett’s universe. I will here be drawing on the likes of phenomenologists Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas, marxist Theodor Adorno, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. I believe that the work of these theorists can effectively unpack certain interpretive problems in Beckett just as I believe that certain moments in Beckett—I think of Mouth’s entry into language in Not I—can effectively illustrate the interpretive problems in the work of some theorists (indeed I will use Not I to illustrate Lacan’s difficult notion of the Real). My intention is not, therefore, simply to read Beckett through a particular theory 18

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but to imagine that there is a mutual process of interpretation and interrogation occurring between theorist and fiction. THE GERMAN LETTER

I also believe, perhaps naively, that Beckett himself is his own first and best critic. As I have mentioned Beckett offered few critical commentaries on his work over the years but those that have come down to us—as for instance, Three Dialogues—are of great value to any reader. In the latter chapters of this study I will be referring often to Beckett’s German Letter of 1937 and especially to his notion of the ‘literature of the unword’, a concept I think is central to the progression of his work. I wish, therefore, to take some space here and outline the importance of this Letter. In 1936 Beckett traveled to Germany on what essentially was an art holiday: he visited several art galleries and, although angered by the Nazi regime’s censoring of art it considered decadent, he was greatly impressed—and influenced—by the work he saw. The trip served as a kind of spiritual and philosophical awakening, as his diaries attest. The German Letter is part of a correspondence between Beckett and a friend (Axel Kaun, whom he met in Germany) written three months after his return to Dublin. In the Letter Beckett speaks of the need to move past received discourses and conventions, to liberate himself from traditional languages and forms. I quote at some length: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (171–72) 19

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In my estimation the full implications of the Letter, which for me is Beckett’s artistic manifesto, will not be realized until the later novels (especially the trilogies), but we should recognize how Beckett’s stated impatience with traditional form resonates into even the early prose and drama. Beckett’s disdain for ‘official English’, for ‘Grammar and Style’, things as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit, speak to a frustration, a boredom even, with the logic and trajectories of the nineteenth-century novel. He speaks, further, to how music and painting have found ways of moving beyond traditional form in order to represent silence and absence (things not associated with representative art); he suggests that language itself must be shattered in order to reveal what was previously unrepresentable. And while Beckett’s manifesto sounds avant-garde, his idea that language is a veil to be torn apart looks back to the Romantics and their notion that poetry works to reveal the unseen. Beckett’s ‘my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart’ echoes Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and his sense that poetry lifts ‘the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ (117). There is, of course, a world of difference between lifting and destroying the veil—the difference, perhaps, between the Romantic and the Modern!—but Beckett’s desire as a writer is a familiar one: his work will attempt to show the world in a new way. In my reading, Beckett’s tearing of the veil becomes the perfect metaphor for the process of revealing, overtly, self-consciously, and critically, the implications of art, here the novel and drama, in a new way. THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE UNWORD’

In the last paragraph of the Letter Beckett suggests that this process of destroying language, of revealing its ‘terrible materiality’ (172) will eventually lead to what he calls a ‘literature of the unword’ (173). I wish in what follows to suggest that Beckett’s entire career as a writer finds its beginning and end, its ground and goal, in this idea, stated in 1937. A literature of the unword is, obviously, a contradiction in terms, a paradox, an aporia (to use the Derridean construction); a literature of the unword is an attempt to use language to silence language (he calls it ‘An assault against words in the name of beauty’ [173]). His aim, essentially, is to find a means of decomposing and moving beyond language, to shatter language into a kind of erasure 20

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of itself (this attempt to eliminate language is geometrically proportional to his attempt to eliminate the body, as we will see). My argument is quite simply this: throughout his career Beckett is searching for the means to put an end to literature, to put an end to writing, to put an end to his own desire to write. The trajectory of his work, from the early drama and prose to the late, is one of radical reduction, of working to find a means to literature’s end. In the drama we move from the fully embodied drama of Godot to the late ghostly plays where often language does not even feature; in the prose we move from the playful garrulousness of Murphy to the shattered syntax and diminished grammars of Worstward Ho.14 It is precisely because Beckett’s work is grounded on such complex philosophical contradictions—a writer writing literature out of existence: impossible!—that I believe we must have recourse to the various theoretical and philosophical traditions that arose simultaneous with Beckett’s own development as a writer. My theoretical approach in this Guide can perhaps best be described as promiscuous but I tend to think that a deconstructionist psychoanalysis is the best way of proceeding with Beckett, at least for me. To illustrate what I mean here—and by way of concluding this Introduction— I wish to outline two concepts which will prove critical in my reading of especially the drama. MELANCHOLIA

A major theme in Beckett is that of memory, of characters, like Krapp or Hamm, haunted by the ghost of memory. At a basic level the Beckett character lives in a protracted state of regret and loss, a state he or she may not even recognize as such. History, the past, impinges profoundly on the character and, as Beckett writes in Proust, threatens continually to ‘deform’ him. In 1917 Sigmund Freud published an essay that has recently come to be seen as a crucial diagnosis of a contemporary cultural condition. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud attempts to come to an understanding of how the subject deals with trauma and loss. There are, he theorizes, two responses to loss, to the loss of a loved one, or the ‘loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, or so on’ (252). The first and most healthy is what he calls mourning. Mourning is a process by which the loss is comprehended and accepted, ‘worked through’, to use his terminology. Mourning is the 21

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normal way one must deal with trauma and loss, with what Freud beautifully terms the ‘economics of pain’ (252). Precisely how the subject overcomes loss is not known by Freud—it is a difficult process; it is ‘work’—but eventually the mourner accepts that the loved one, with whom he may have identified, is no longer here to makes claims on him. Melancholia, on the other hand, is an abnormal response to loss and situates the subject in a continual position of narcissistic identification with the lost object. In other words, the melancholy subject cannot accept that her loved one is in fact gone and works pathologically ‘to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object’ (258). What this means is that the past—loss, trauma—continually works its way into the present moment because the subject cannot move past it. More troubling is the idea that the subject does not wish to allow loss to recede into history but desires continually to maintain a connection to the traumatic moment. In some ways the subject maintains this pathological state—which may in fact not be so pathological after all—because the traumatic moment is important for her, may in fact have shaped who she is. We may diagnose a great number of Beckett’s characters as being melancholic in Freud’s sense. They are haunted by the past and some, like Krapp, Hamm, and Winnie, deliberately attempt to reconnect with a past that includes moments of loss and extreme pain. In other words, the function of memory in Beckett is largely melancholic precisely because the characters acknowledge, consciously or unconsciously, that they are the products of a past which has mercilessly defined them as suffering subjects. Beckett’s characters cling so relentlessly to the past because, for reasons we will explore, the present moment is devoid of significance; the agonizing past may brutalize but in it are the traces, the historical fragments of identity and meaning. THE ARCHIVE

Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, drawing heavily on Freud, offers a second related concept that I will use to read these characters’ relation to history, loss, and trauma. In Archive Fever, Derrida analyzes the concept of the archive as a way of coming to an understanding of the way the subject negotiates its relationship to history, to the past, and the future: the archive is, thus, a means by which Derrida tries to understand the human as a being situated in time, feeling the 22

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claims of the temporal. Perhaps the best way to define the archive is as a conceptual or material space of memory. The mind can serve as an archive just as a library or physical monument can. Derrida suggests that the archive is a place of commandment and commencement, a place where events of the past are documented authoritatively as marking the beginning of something, a life, a culture, a civilization. Archives are spaces of preservation, conservation but also of creation: a culture’s understanding of itself—a subject’s understanding of itself— is created within the space of the archive. It is clear that the archive is a way of materializing, making concrete, the past. And if history is largely, or can be largely, the narratives of conquest, defeat, and violence, the archive is also going to function as a space commemorating trauma and loss. It strikes me therefore that the archive—as a space that maintains a continual relation to the past—is always already a melancholy space. What I wish to suggest here, in specific relation to Beckett’s work, is that the Beckettian subject becomes a literal embodiment of what I have elsewhere called the ‘melancholy archive’.15 The Beckettian subject, immobilized and fragmented—think of Winnie, buried to her neck in earth in Happy Days; of Mouth in Not I; of Malone in Malone Dies; of the figure in Company—is always a historical subject, a subject, more precisely, subject to, history. She is continually remembering, sometimes against her will, what has occurred in the past; she is continually attempting to recapture a past she may not fully comprehend. And it is the Beckettian body which becomes the primary repository for these remains, these traces, of history. The character may exist—as in Happy Days, or Endgame—at what appears to be the end of human culture, but she—her body—maintains the archival traces of that lost culture. The images Beckett gives us in his drama and prose—a disembodied mouth, a body immobilized in a wheelchair or the earth, people in urns—are images that concretize the idea of memory as embodied or archived. I suggested above that for Beckett subjectivity—the sense of who we are—is fully dependent on the body. What Freud and Derrida allow us to understand is the way subjectivity in Beckett is fully dependent on history and archived memory. Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia, together with the Derridean reading of the archive, are concepts that will prove useful in reading an author whose work is at a profound level always about the past, a past which may have receded into forgetfulness but whose claims are still being felt. In its strangeness Beckett’s work presents 23

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numerous difficulties, but as we shall discover he never abandons his reader or audience completely. First, as I have mentioned, his characters—who at times become our surrogates, our uncanny doubles—express much the same confusion about their worlds as the reader; as such, the strangeness, because shared, becomes in a sense normalized. Second, and perhaps more important, Beckett’s work keys into fundamentally recognizable situations. We all are creations of histories we may not recognize, or wish to recognize; we all at times disavow our pasts even as we feel the pressures of history; we all, in other words, are historical—in Freud’s terms, melancholy— creatures. Beckett’s work is crucial because it relentlessly, remorselessly, compels us to confront the profound claims that history must make upon us all. As we come to recognize the claims of the past and realize the extent to which history constructs the human subject, we begin to understand that Beckett’s work, at times seemingly so strange, seemingly inhuman, is only ever a compassionate attempt to comprehend humanity itself.

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