Chapter 1Towards an aesthetic of abstraction

Beckett’s abstract style: Preliminary orientations

It is a commonplace within Beckett criticismthat Play (1962–1963)1 is the first example of adistinct new ‘late dramatic style’. In S.E.Gontarski’s summary (1997: 93), for example:

From Play onward Beckett’s stage images would growincreasingly de-humanized, reified and metonymic,featuring dismembered or incorporeal creatures. Itbecame a theater finally static and undramatic in anytraditional sense. It is a theater of body parts andghosts, a theater striving for transparency ratherthan solidity. And the playing space is alwaysdelimited, ritualized, circumscribed, framed. Theproscenium arch is central [...] to these works,defining and emphasizing the playing space,delimiting the margins so that the works from Playonward make little sense performed on more modern,fluid or thrust stages or in the round. They are asmuch paintings, snapshots, or since they are texturedand three-dimensional, as much bas-relief sculpturesas drama.

These observations are apt, yet they remain posthoc. As my next chapter will demonstrate,Beckett himself saw Play as an aestheticbreakthrough, and specifically one that had led1 Dates of composition for Beckett’s works are given

in parentheses.

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him towards an ‘abstract’ formal language. Thisstudy accordingly takes its cue from Beckett inarguing that the concept of ‘abstraction’ is anindispensable one for analysing the stylisticdevelopment of the late works for stage andscreen.

However, this concept is far from self-explanatory. Furthermore, Beckett used it in avariety of ways, on occasion even dismissively.Indeed, the evidence suggests that before Play,Beckett did not think of his work in terms of‘abstraction’. Neither did he take a particularinterest in ‘abstract’ art per se – although, aswe shall see, some of the works that drew hisattention were in fact of this kind.

The key to understanding Beckett’sstatements on abstraction, as well as themarked shift towards an ‘abstract language’ inPlay, is Beckett’s own aesthetic standpoint: hisinsistence on the inescapability of the‘rupture of the lines of communication’ (D 70)between subject and object, and the ‘ferociousdilemma of expression’ (PTD 110) that followsfrom it. This provided him with a definitecriterion by which to judge artistic styles andindividual works. He considered abstract stylesvalid in so far as they emerge from acontinuous, unflinching confrontation with thisdilemma: thus, an increasingly abstract formallanguage may become necessary for an artist asthis confrontation proceeds to new levels ofcomplexity. However, inventing such a languageis by no means an aim in itself.

This also indicates how Beckett’s own‘turn’ should be understood: as a necessarydevelopment from the point to which hisartistic trajectory had brought him. This

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chapter will attempt to define that pointthrough a selective review of core features ofhis aesthetic thought and its manifestation inThe Unnamable (1949–1950) and in the pre-Playdrama. We shall see how Beckett’s charactersare caught in an inscrutable, inhuman,ultimately irrational system, against whichthey painfully struggle in vain. In Play, wherea spotlight extorts the same rapid, fragmentedresponses from three urn-bound and highlydepersonalised figures twice over, thecharacters may easily be regarded as puppet-like products of an utterly indifferentschematism. This explicit and structurallydecisive foregrounding of the ‘system’ involvesa fundamental shift of emphasis, which drawsattention to the characters’ epiphenomenalinsubstantiality: Gontarski’s ‘dehumanisation’,‘reification’, ‘dismemberment’,‘incorporeality’ and ‘ghostliness’ all emergefrom this shift.

Chapter 2 will explore two analogies to theformal language developed in Play, bothsuggested by Beckett himself as comparativereference-points: Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, and Vassily Kandinsky’s earlyabstract painting. While I do not considereither of these formal models to be decisiveinfluences upon Beckett’s shift by themselves,they do provide two specific and complementaryways in which his new language may becharacterised as ‘abstract’. This analysis willalso show that any ‘abstract language’ mustdevelop specific technical means of achievingnew kinds of expressive force if it is to beartistically effective after having abandonedthe resources of more traditional forms. In

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Play, this entails that the emphasis on‘insubstantiality’ is counterpointed by aparadoxical sense of weakness, failure anddistress (those crucial Beckettian keywords) inthe face of this condition itself. We shall seehow new technical possibilities for significantintercutting and the ‘musical’ repetition ofmotifs in Play are exploited to convey amounting implicit anguish at the characters’entrapment within a dead language and clichédroles – in fact at their very inability tocommunicate. The analysis cannot, then, beallowed to conclude either in exclusivelyformalist terms (‘Beckett’s interest inpatterns’) or philosophical concepts(‘Beckett’s demonstration of theinsubstantiality of identity’). This theme isfurther pursued by examining Beckett’s creativeevolution towards an ‘abstract language’ indrafts towards Play and Come and Go (1965). Thismaterial reveals a continuous dialectic betweenan emphasis on formal schematisation and thereduction of realist background, and efforts tocompensate for the resulting losses ofexpressive force by utilising new technicalpossibilities.

In addition to providing an indispensablebackground for detailed analysis of Beckett’snew formal language in Play, my focus in thepresent chapter on the origin of that shift inhis aesthetic thought and practice also drawsattention to another sense of ‘abstraction’which will be important for my argumentthroughout this book. This is abstraction as‘distillation’. On the most obvious level, theforegrounding of an inhuman schematism in Playcondenses years of artistic engagement with the

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idea of an irrational Will, or nothingness, or‘incoherent continuum’ at the heart of reality.More specifically, we will discover a massiveweight of significance surrounding the simplestmovements, gestures, postures, images,structures, objects and words in these latepieces for stage and screen, which reflectsBeckett’s practice of ‘abstracting from’ a widerange of individual sources as a continualmeans of artistic rediscovery.

In keeping with his general habit ofbringing artists as diverse as Paul Cézanne,Jack Yeats, Franz Marc, Karl Ballmer, and Bramvan Velde into the ambit of his own ‘violentlyextreme and personal point of view’ (PTD 103)by finding the ‘dilemma of expression’ at workin them all, Beckett’s sources (drawn from art,music, religion, philosophy, psychology,literature and personal biography) are alwaysappropriated to the developing needs of hisabstract style. In spite of this seamlessintegration, however, there is to my mindlittle doubt that Beckett’s use of specificsources (whether from memory or from notes)during the writing process, so evident in hisallusion-saturated early work (see Pilling 2004and Ackerley 2004), was carried on into hislater period in submerged form.2 This2 This conviction is supported by a broader

realisation by scholars of the continuing importanceof the learning and experience garnered by Beckettduring his years of intellectual formation in the1920s and 1930s. An important influence here has beenMatthew Feldman’s work on the ‘interwar notes’.Feldman crucially dislodges the assumption thatBeckett read ‘everything’, and conclusivelydemonstrates the centrality of certain closelystudied synthetic texts (chief among them Wilhelm

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assumption necessitates empirical research; andwhile some of my hypotheses about Beckett’ssources are no doubt riskier than others, theyare all intended to be open to falsification orsupplementation by documentary evidence. Thisapproach will enable us to see how thesesubmerged sources often function as anunderlying ‘scaffolding’,3 motivatingparticular structural choices. The topic ofabstraction-as-distillation will therefore alsoprove a crucial one for understanding theactual development of Beckett’s formal languagein these late works for stage and screen.

Chapters 1 and 2, then, concentrate onBeckett’s aesthetic thought and the initialdevelopment of an ‘abstract dramatic style’ forthe theatre, respectively. Chapter 3 analysesBeckett’s first pieces for film (Film, 1963) andtelevision (Eh Joe, 1965) as attempts to adaptthe formal language of Play to new media, theactive spotlight becoming an active camera.While neither attempt was finally successful,surrounding records demonstrate a continuingconcern with achieving a quality of‘abstraction’ on Beckett’s part.

Chapter 4 traces the emergence of a newcompositional focus in Not I (1972), That Time(1974–1975) and Footfalls (1975), which no longer

Windelband’s 1901 A History of Philosophy) and specificextracts from texts to the task of unearthingBeckett’s sources. Furthermore, Feldman documentsthat Beckett returned to his notes again and again(see especially his comments on Beckett’s 21 November1957 letter to Alan Schneider, Feldman 2006: 32–3).

3 J.D. O’Hara’s useful term for ‘the basic structuresof thought that uphold Beckett’s works’ (1997: 1).Feldman (2004: xi n.3) points out that Becketthimself used the term in Proust (PTD 11).

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depends on the foregrounding of a particularstructural device. Instead, Beckett relies onthe internal tensions created by a series offormal divisions: between a disembodied mouth,the broken speech it delivers, and a silentdjellaba-clad figure in Not I; between a mutehead seemingly hovering in mid-air and thevoices which assail it from three sides in ThatTime; and, in Footfalls, between a ghostly, grey-clad pacing woman and the offstage voice of themother, as well as between four sharplycontrasting scenes which unsettle all in-ferences about what exactly is being enactedbefore us. While these stage-images have apronounced Expressionist flavour, Beckett isalso reshaping this tradition by splitting hisfigures into multiple images, narratives, andvoices. Expressionist Angst, derided assentimental by Beckett in his ‘German Diaries’(1936–1937), is displaced by a sense ofdetachment, numbness and absence. This is akinto pathology, and Beckett’s 1930s notes onpsychology define several mechanisms of psychicdivision, along with a psychoanalytical pictureof the mind as a conglomerate of inheritedtraumas, originating in the trauma of birth;this congenial vision directly impactedBeckett’s shaping of these plays.

Chapter 5 shows how Beckett’s abstractstyle was transferred to television in Ghost Trio(1975) and ...but the clouds... (1976) by means of a‘painterly’ circumscription of the image,possibly inspired by the interiors of the Dutchseventeenth-century artist Johannes Vermeer.The use of fragments from Beethoven and W.B.Yeats, and allusion to the Lady of theeleventh- and twelfth-century troubadours and

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Dante, paradoxically converge on a distinctlyanti-Romantic analysis of desire as inherentlyunfulfillable.

Finally, Chapter 6 examines A Piece ofMonologue (1977–1979), Rockaby (1980), OhioImpromptu (1980), Quad (I & II) (1981), Nacht undTräume (1982) and What Where (1983) in relationto Beckett’s rediscovery (initially in theprose work Company [1977–1980]) of GottfriedWilhelm Leibniz’s theory of ‘monads’, anunderestimated presence within Beckett’sthought. His appropriation of Leibniz as‘scaffolding’ for these pieces became a richquarry for formal innovations, allowing him torework the topics of the self’s hermeticsolitude, porous insubstantiality, andineluctable involvement in an inhuman, non-rational system. Furthermore, the self-reflexive analysis of ‘Beckettianness’ in thesepieces is underpinned by the idea of themonadic self: the artist is ultimately shown tobe entangled, in the very act of writing, inthe same condition as his invented figures.

Beckett on abstraction: Documented attitudes

Since Beckett’s references to ‘abstraction’before Play are sometimes polemically negative,it seems advisable to begin this review byciting one which will enable us to put thisattitude in context. During his visit toHamburg in 1936, at the home of the son of the

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late art critic Max Sauerlandt, Beckett saw ‘alot of [Christian] Nass. He does not interestme. The will to escape from “abstraction”, thatis senseless, that ends in photography’ (GD 26November 1936).4

These quotation-marks are also to be foundelsewhere in the diaries: they signal ascepticism on Beckett’s part towards artisticefforts to bypass the world of objects entirelyfor the sake of a self-sufficient formalismproductive of ‘pure’ balances or harmonies ofcolour and shape. For example, Beckett praisedKandinsky’s Träumerische Improvisation (1913), whichhe saw at Ida Bienert’s Dresden house on 7, andagain on 15, February 1937, for being ‘thebiggest and brightest and least “abstract” I haveseen – a magnificent work’ (GD 7 February 1937,my italics).5 The negative reference here isclearly to the idealised geometricalconfigurations of Kandinsky’s later Bauhausperiod (1922–1933). Beckett had previouslydismissed a ‘small room full of “abstractions”’(GD 23 January 1937) by Kandinsky in theMoritzburg gallery in Halle (including theGiftgrüne Sichel [1927]).6 Also, another ofBienert’s Bauhaus Kandinskys,7 grouped together4 My thanks to Mark Nixon for supplementing my

transcription.5 Beckett’s encounter with this work is mentioned in

DF 252. I give German names for works Beckett saw inGermany throughout this study.

6 Beckett does not give any names, but this work(acquired in 1929 and appropriated by the Nazis notlong after Beckett’s visit) is mentioned in Romanus(ed.) 1985: 52.

7 According to the catalogue (Grohmann 1933), hercollection included Spitzen im Bergen (1927), Schwer undLeicht (1930), Weiß auf Schwarz (1930), Grauer Kreis (1923),

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with two Mondrians called Komposition (c.1922–1925, and 1925) in her late husband’s study, isdescribed sarcastically in his diary as a typeof bourgeois ornament: ‘2 Mondrian and aKandinsky, whose organics aid her meditations,if they do not go with the furniture’ (GD 7February 1937). Eleven years later, Beckett’sattitude had not changed; in the 1948 ‘Peintresde l’empêchement’, he summarily dismisses the‘estimables abstracteurs de quintessence[estimable abstractors of quintessence]Mondrian, Lissitzky, Malevitsch, Moholy-Nagy’(D 135) from serious consideration. Similarly,in a 1949 letter to Georges Duthuit, hedescribes two contemporary movements – thedecorative colour harmonies of post-Delaunay-style painters such as Jacques Villon, Jean-René Bazaine and Alfred Manessier on the onehand, and the Paris School heirs ofConstructivism and de Stijl on the other – asforms of masturbation, ‘the pure manstuprationsof Orphic and abstract art’ (in French, trans.George Craig, cited in Gunn 2006: 15). Acentral motivation behind this whole traditionof self-conscious ‘purity’ or ‘quintessence’ isthe imitation of some form of cosmic harmony,from Mondrian’s aim of ‘direct representation’of the ‘original unity’ shown by ‘pure vision’to be the ‘enduring force in all things’ (1987:48), to Bazaine’s emphasis on the‘interpenetration’ or ‘profound kinship’between ‘man and world’ (cited in Haftmann1976: 332). This, as we shall see, is aprofoundly alien emphasis for Beckett.

Brücke (1930), Starr (1931) and Verschwimmend (1932),all Bauhaus works.

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It seems likely, then, that Beckett wouldhave sympathised somewhat with Nass’s impulseto avoid this type of scare-quoted‘abstraction’. Yet a willed flight into mimeticrealism, with its servile, photographic attemptto ‘transcribe the surface, the façade’ (PTD79), is no alternative. This is so not leastbecause the realist attitude is for Beckettessentially naïve:

Le ‘réaliste’, suant devant sa cascade et pestantcontre les nuages, n’a pas cessé de nous enchanter.Mais qu’il ne vienne plus nous emmerder avec seshistoires d’objectivité et de choses vues. De toutesles choses que personne n’a jamais vues, ses cascadessont assurément les plus énormes (D 126).

The ‘realist’, sweating before his waterfall andcursing the clouds, still enchants us. But we wouldprefer him not to bother us with his talk ofobjectivity and the observation of things. Of all thethings nobody has ever seen, his cascades arecertainly the most enormous.

The word ‘abstract’ derives from the Latinabstractus, meaning ‘drawn away’; among thesenses given by the OED are derivation,extraction, removal, separation, and withdrawalfrom the contemplation of present objects, frommaterial bodies, from practice, or fromparticular examples of something. Beckett ispointing out that all painting is at one removefrom the cascading flux of perception, and atanother remove from an ultimately inscrutable‘reality’; in this particular sense,‘representational’ and ‘non-representational’styles may both be said to be ‘abstract’,irrespective of the painter’s intentions. The‘abstractors of quintessence’ and the naïve

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realist are in fact at one in thinking thatthis situation – the ‘rupture of the lines ofcommunication’ between subject and object (orthe ‘breakdown’ of both) used as a criterion ofauthentic poetry in the 1934 review ‘RecentIrish Poetry’ (D 70) – can be somehow ignored.On the other hand, there can be any number ofways of responding seriously to this situation,which may involve the use of a representationalor a non-representational idiom, or somecombination. Shane Weller’s discussion (2005:62f) of ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ ablyfocuses this issue:

Rather than freeing the artist to pursue someabsolutely non-representational art, recognition ofthe object’s resistance to representation inauguratesan art whose theme or matter will be that resistanceitself: ‘Est peint ce qui empêche de peindre’ (D136). Art will therefore be forever in mourning forits object: ‘deuil de l’objet’ (D 135). This art ofmourning will be endless precisely because theobject’s resistance to representation can neither beovercome nor ignored. Abstract art – grounded in thenotion that art can simply free itself from theobject – is not art at all: ‘Il semble absurde deparler, comme faisait Kandinsky, d’une peinturelibérée de l’objet. Ce dont la peinture s’estlibérée, c’est de l’illusion qu’il existe plus d’unobjet de représentation, peut-être même de l’illusionque cet unique objet se laisse représenter’ (D 136).8

8 Weller’s final quotation may be translated asfollows: ‘It seems absurd to speak, as Kandinsky did,of an art that has freed itself from the object. Thatfrom which painting has freed itself is the illusionthat there exists more than one object ofrepresentation, perhaps even from the illusion thatthis unique object lets itself be represented’.

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My only disagreement here is with Weller’scontention that Beckett condemns abstract artas such: as we shall see, Beckett stronglyapproves of some painters, such as Karl Ballmerand Bram van Velde, whose work contains onlyresidual gestures towards figuration.9 The willto escape from ‘abstraction’ and the will toindulge in it are equally senseless. Yet anabstract formal language may still becomenecessary for the artist who attempts toconfront the ‘one object of representation’that there is left after art has freed itselffrom the illusion that there can be any realismthat is not remote from ‘reality’; this object,the ‘only terrain accessible’ to the artist, is‘the no man’s land that he projects aroundhimself, rather as the flame projects its zoneof evaporation’ (1949 letter to Duthuit, inFrench, trans. George Craig, cited in Gunn2006: 15).10 Furthermore, since the underlying9 As for Kandinsky, he is on Beckett’s list of ‘the

great of our time’ who bring light to ‘the issuelesspredicament of existence’ (D 97). It is Kandinsky’srhetoric that Beckett is attacking in Weller’s lastquotation, not necessarily the painter’s work assuch.

10 This letter provides striking evidence of theconsistency of Beckett’s concerns over time andacross art-forms; he recalls coming out with ‘anangry article on modern Irish poets, in which I setup, as criterion of worthwhile modern poetry,awareness of the vanished object. Already!’ (toDuthuit, 1949, cited in Gunn 2006: 15). In ‘RecentIrish Poetry’, Beckett had written: ‘The artist whois aware of [the “rupture”] may state the space thatintervenes between him and the world of objects; hemay state it as no-man’s-land, Hellespont, or vacuum,according as he happens to be feeling resentful,nostalgic, or merely depressed’ (D 70).

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drama of the artist’s struggles in this obscureregion, and the ‘absurd and mysterious drivetowards the image’ (‘d’absurdes et mystérieusespoussées vers l’image’ [D 123]) that theyconvey, here become far more important than anyindividual material or technique employed, onemight argue that to conceive oneself asoccupying this terrain is already to haveactively ‘drawn away’ from whatever is actuallypresented on the canvas.

This idea of the canvas as a site where thedrama of the authentic artist’s navigation ofthe ‘no man’s land’ which surrounds him isconcretely enacted in fact provides the basisfor a much more positive conception ofabstraction on Beckett’s part, in distinctopposition to his polemic against the‘abstractors of quintessence’. This conceptionis already formulated in his German diary.However, this complex formulation needs to beunderstood against the background of hisencounter with the art of Karl Ballmer.

Commenting on Ballmer’s painting Kopf in Rot(c.1930),11 Beckett wrote:

Wonderful red Frauenkopf, skull earth sea and sky, Ithink of Monadologie and my Vulture. Would not occurto me to call this painting abstract. A metaphysicalconcrete. Nor Nature convention, but its source,fountain of Erscheinung [Appearance]. Fully aposteriori painting. Object not exploited toillustrate an idea, as in say [Fernand] Léger or[Willi] Baumeister, but primary. The communicationexhausted by the optical experience that is itsmotive and content. Anything further is by the way.Thus Leibniz, monadologie, Vulture, are by the way.

11 Reproduced in Wismer (ed.) 1990. My thanks to MarkNixon for identifying this picture.

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Extraordinary stillness. His concern with Renaissancetradition (GD 26 November 1936, cited in DF 240).

The bulk of the canvas (the entire left-handside, the lower region, and a little more thanhalf the right-hand side) is a crude unevenred, with a few dirty streaks of yellow, greenand blue; the upper right-hand corner is anuneven light blue, with streaks of green. Thered is thickened in the central region, forminga border which indicates the neck and the veryelongated shape of the ‘head’. Within thisborder (literally in red) is a tripartite‘facial’ area: at the bottom, light red withroughly horizontal stripes which might vaguelyhint at mouth and nasal area; in the middle,darkish blue with some green, and with morestripes in black, suggesting two possible eyesand perhaps a forehead at the border betweenthis and the uppermost area; and finally alight blue. These three areas can also be seenas ‘earth’, ‘sea’ and ‘sky’, with the‘forehead’ line marking the receding horizon(hence perhaps ‘Renaissance tradition’). Thepainting clearly has the barest of claims tofiguration; yet Beckett is at pains to denythat it is ‘abstract’ in the sense of thegeometrical games of a Léger or a Baumeister,who for him simply illustrate pre-formedconcepts. Instead Ballmer’s ‘object’ – meaninghere the painting itself, the ‘opticalexperience’ – is primary, and any suggestion ofthe ‘Erscheinung’ of things found in naturedoes not depend on any conventional mimesis,but emerges in the form of hints created by theself-consciously rough application of red,blue, yellow, green and black. Such hints are

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secondary, or a posteriori; the concrete act ofpainting, the concrete fact of paint, comesfirst. Yet however ‘by the way’ he finallydeems it, Beckett also infers the presence of aspecific thematic in the work, which makes itsvery ‘concreteness’ a ‘metaphysical’ one. Thisis associated with Leibniz’s theory of ‘monads’and with Beckett’s own poem ‘The Vulture’(published 1935). Briefly, the relevantfeatures of the ‘monad’ are its‘windowlessness’, or utter simplicity andisolation from all other monads, and its natureas a ‘mirror’ of the entire universe,registering and containing all representationspotentially, though without conscious‘apperception’. The appearance of an ‘outerworld’ of nature is generated from inside themonad itself, as perceptions pass from‘virtual’ to ‘actual’; but no monad will everencounter anything (or anyone) genuinely‘other’.12 In ‘The Vulture’ (CP 9), the bird is‘dragging his hunger through the sky / of myskull shell of sky and earth’; sky and earthare solipsistically enclosed within the skull,and the hunger for contact with a world outsidethe skull is impossible to satisfy; allexperience undergoes a deathly translation intomere subjective appearance, ‘till hunger earthand sky be offal’. Beckett clearly found anacute awareness of the ‘rupture of the lines ofcommunication’ between subject and object inBallmer’s painting. Yet Ballmer’s ‘skull earthsea sky’ image does not, for Beckett, simplyillustrate a concept. This solipsistic image

12 An extended treatment of Beckett and Leibniz isgiven in Chapter 6.

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itself derives from an explicitly painterlyact: an act which produces a world, but whichsimultaneously turns that world into ‘offal’,immuring itself in subjectivity through thevery generation of ‘appearances’. It was thisimplicit drama in Ballmer’s work – his‘stillness and the unsaid’ (GD 26 November1936) – that principally captured Beckett’sattention.13

In conversation with the art historian RosaSchapire, Beckett formulated a vision ofabstract art which appears to be modelledprecisely on Ballmer’s ‘fully a posterioripainting’:

Her raptures over [Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s] latestwork, esp. watercolour landscapes. I disagree withall she says, on subject of abstract painting,

13 Beckett later read Ballmer’s pamphlet Aber HerrHeidegger! (1933), recording those parts of Ballmer’s‘superb’ closing quotation from Rudolf Steiner thathe felt elucidated the painter’s work, e.g. ‘DasWesen der ganzen übrigen Welt schöpfe ich aus mir, u.mein eigenes Wesen schöpfe ich aus mir [The essenceof all the rest of the world I create (or: extract)from out of myself, and my own essence I create (or:extract) from out of myself]’ (GD 20 March 1937).Beckett here asks ‘Where does this differ from theMonadology?’, and goes on to comment that ‘The objectthat he paints is the concrete real spirit of theconcrete real Ballmer, Nature come to herself, the“Wesen der Dinge [essence of things]”’. Thus,Ballmer’s painting is ‘not a mindlessness beforeNature, because that is “Vorgang ohne Wesen [processwithout essence]”’, nor is it ‘abstract’ (in thesense, as we have seen, of a Léger or a Baumeister),‘because that is “Wesen ohne Vorgang [essence withoutprocess]”’; Ballmer’s resistance to both thesestances is evidently at the core of Beckett’sinterest.

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Ballmer, Brouwer, Giorgione, Signorelli & so on. Forher all Metaphysik is by def. ‘seelisch’. Pfui!Ballmer therefore too intellectual, too ‘Klug’ to bemetaphysical. S.R. of course metaphysical. I say butwhat about the metaphysic of say Descartes. And soon. On my antithesis, that painting is abstract whenreality is post sum, the best examples would be Dalíand Italian primitives. Why not (GD 26 December1936).14

Schapire’s supreme criterion of value seems tohave been rooted in the German Romantic notionof Nature as Spirit: Schmidt-Rottluff’spainting is ‘soulful’ because his landscapesseem to her to communicate this pantheisticmetaphysic.15 Against this view, Beckett posesthe ‘metaphysical concrete’ of Ballmer’s art:here, ‘metaphysics’ does not mean an immersionin Nature-as-Spirit, but rather the world-corroding scepticism of a Descartes, capable ofviewing all phenomena as illusory exceptthinking itself. Now, contact with ‘reality’,with a world outside the mind, feebly salvagedby Descartes by means of the wild hypothesis ofthe pineal gland, is as we have seen decidedly‘post sum’ – inessential, of secondaryimportance – in Ballmer’s Kopf in Rot: instead,the act of generating appearances from paint isprimary. If Schapire suggested in conversationsome version of the common idea that the valueof abstract art is to put us in touch with aspiritual reality through a purified harmony ofcolour and form, Beckett’s ‘antithesis’, that‘art is abstract when reality is post sum’,

14 My thanks to Mark Nixon for supplementing mytranscription.

15 For further discussion of German Romanticism, seeChapter 5, pp.179–85.

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would here precisely assert the primacy of thepainterly act as a concrete response to theimpossibility of contact with ‘reality’. Ab-straction is, as we have seen, here positivelyconceived in terms of an active painterlygrappling with the condition of all art asirremediably ‘withdrawn’ from such contact.

This interpretation is indirectly supportedby a later use of the phrase ‘post sum’ byBeckett: responding to an exhibition of theworks of the painter Max Klinger, he lamentedthat ‘Throughout concepts [are] projected on tocanvas (i.e. on the world), the opticalexperience post sum, a hideous inversion of thevisual process, the eye waiving its privilege’(GD 28 January 1937). If this is an‘inversion’, and the correct order of priorityis that all concepts should be merely ‘by theway’ (like monads and ‘The Vulture’ inBeckett’s response to Ballmer, and unlike the‘illustration of ideas’ in Léger and Bau-meister), then it seems natural to infer thatBeckett’s earlier characterisation of reality as‘post sum’ in (at least some) abstract art musthave reflected a version of the correct order ofpriority, involving the primacy of the opticalexperience. This characterisation cannot there-fore have been a negative one: on the contrary,it suggests a positive ideal of abstract art.Beckett closes his diary entry with an acknow-ledgement that he and Schapire have beentalking completely past each other; hersuggestions of the contrived surrealist dream-world of Salvador Dalí and the heavilydoctrinal paintings of the

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thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ‘Italianprimitives’16 as ‘examples’ of his own novelconception of abstract art are so far from themark as to elicit only a resigned ‘why not’.

We have noted Beckett’s decisive antipathytowards the self-sufficient formalism of the‘abstractors of quintessence’; yet we have alsoestablished his approval of the use of anabstract language as long as this is conceivedas a means of responding to the ‘rupture of thelines of communication’ between subject andobject; and we have further explored thepossibility that the notion of a ‘metaphysicalconcrete’ in Ballmer’s art, emphasising theprimacy of the act of painting and the opticalexperience as a specific outworking of thedisconnect between painter and world, may atone stage have been proposed by Beckett as amodel for a more authentic abstract art.However, it is obvious that Beckett had no wishto propound any systematic theory of abstractart; his interest is entirely focused onconcrete artistic struggles taking place withinthe ‘no man’s land’. In fact, his deference tothe ‘optical experience’ became so marked inhis art criticism that these texts tend todepict critical description itself as a kind ofviolation.17 This trend is particularly evident16 This term, coined in the nineteenth century, was

used about Italian painting before Raphael, roughlyfrom Giotto (1267–1337) to Fra Angelico (c.1395–1455),to denote the allegedly more ‘primitive’ state ofpainting before the sixteenth-century Italian HighRenaissance. My thanks to Gervase Rosser for thisinformation.

17 His texts tend simply to assume that the artist isresponding to the ‘rupture’, while also denying therelevance of commentary. For example, Jack B. Yeats

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in his writings on the Dutch painter Abraham(‘Bram’) van Velde:

Nous avons affaire chez Abraham van Velde à un effortd’aperception si exclusivement et farouchementpictural que nous autres, dont les reflexions sonttout en murmures, ne le concevons qu’avec peine, nele concevons qu’en l’entraînant dans une sorte deronde syntaxique, qu’en le plaçant dans le temps (D125).

In the case of Abraham van Velde, we are dealing witha striving towards apperception so exclusively andfiercely pictorial that we others, whose reflectionsare reduced to mere murmurings, are only just able toconceive of it, are only able to conceive of it bydrawing it into a kind of syntactic round-dance, byplacing it in time.

There is no doubt that Beckett sees van Velde’sart as responding to the ‘rupture’ no less thanBallmer’s: the Dutchman is said to start fromthe realisation that ‘I am unable to see theobject in order to represent it because I amwhat I am’ (‘Je ne peux voir l’objet, pour lereprésenter, parce que je suis ce que je suis’[D 136]). He attempts to paint ‘the impediment-eye’ (‘l’empêchement-oeil’ [D 136]), the thingwhich prevents him from seeing. But there is animportant difference of emphasis here in thedominant preoccupation of these texts – andespecially the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit –with the utter impossibility and necessaryfailure of this project itself. For Beckett,van Velde’s is an art that not only confronts

is said to be an artist ‘from nowhere’ who ‘submitsin trembling to the unmasterable’; yet the very ideaof a ‘gloss’ is denied by ‘images of such breathlessimmediacy as these’ (D 149).

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the ‘one object of representation’ left for theartist; it also comes closest to actuallyshedding the illusion that the ‘no man’s land’could ever be represented. He is an artist who‘fails, as no other dare fail’ (PTD 125); whileother artists, ‘literally skewered on theferocious dilemma of expression’, continue to‘wriggle’ (110) by making ‘a new occasion, anew term of relation’ out of ‘impossibility’itself (125), Beckett’s van Velde submitsentirely to the condition of having ‘nothing toexpress, nothing with which to express, nothingfrom which to express, no power to express, nodesire to express, together with the obligationto express’ (103). We will soon return to thetopic of the ‘nothing’, and the paradox thatany attempt to express or approach ‘it’ mustfail because of the very enactment of thatattempt itself. At this point, I only wish tonote that a central purpose of this aporeticrhetoric, which finally leaves poor van Velde‘incapable of any image whatsoever’ (113), isprecisely to resist any implication thatconceptual generalisations about the ‘dilemmaof expression’ can replace artisticconfrontation with this condition from within:the hypothesis of van Velde’s ‘fidelity tofailure’ (125) even in the face of thetemptation to make this fidelity itself a newindex of achievement thus functions here as asymbol of the ultimate inescapability of thatcondition, and the endlessness of the task ofconfrontation itself.

Beckett reacted strongly, even vehemently,to attempts by journalists, critics, academics,directors and actors to reduce his own work toany mere illustration of concepts. To Alan

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Schneider, he famously characterised his workas a matter of ‘fundamental sounds (no jokeintended) made as fully as possible’, with‘Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, togetheras stated’ being ‘all I can manage, more than Icould’ (AS 29 December 1957, D 109). This mayin fact have been rooted in a fear that hischaracters and fictional worlds would beunderstood as nothing but ‘abstractions’:

Nor is [Waiting for Godot], for me, a symbolist play, Icannot stress that too much. First and foremost, itis a question of something that happens, almost aroutine, and it is this dailiness and thismateriality, in my view, that needs to be broughtout. That at any moment Symbols, Ideas, Forms mightshow up: this for me is secondary, is there anythingthey do not show up behind? In any event there isnothing to be gained by giving them clear form. Thecharacters are living creatures, only just livingperhaps, they are not emblems. I can readilyunderstand your unease at their lack ofcharacterisation. But I would urge you to see in themless the result of an attempt at abstraction,something of which I am almost incapable, than arefusal to tone down all that is at one and the sametime complex and amorphous in them.18

18 Letter to Karl Heinz Caspari, 1953; in French,trans. George Craig, cited in Gunn 2006: 14.

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This sense of ‘abstraction’ as a type of emblemor allegory – ‘that glorious double-entry, withevery credit in the said account a debit in themeant, and inversely’ (D 90) – is, then, yetanother one of which Beckett remained extremelywary. And not without reason; in the 1950s and1960s, he seems to have been acutely aware ofthe tendency to assimilate his work to theconceptual apparatus of French existentialism.Theodor Adorno, with whom Beckett appears tohave discussed this issue in Paris in theautumn of 1958, points out that for Beckett ‘absurdity is no longer an “existentialsituation” diluted to an idea and thenillustrated’ (1991: 241), as in the Sartreanthesis-play:19 ‘To this kind of unacknowledgedabstraction, Beckett poses the decisiveantithesis: an avowed process of subtraction’(246).20 These statements to Caspari and Adornodemonstrate a continuing anxiety to avoid thesimple identification of his own artisticproject with any metaphysical thesis; and whilehis concept of the ‘metaphysical concrete’ inBallmer in fact had the exact opposite

19 Two later statements to Charles Juliet, 29 October1973 and 11 November 1977 (CBV 148, 165), confirmsBeckett’s long-standing scepticism towards the easyexistentialist rhetoric of ‘absurdity’, e.g. ‘It isabsurd to say that something is absurd. That is stilla value judgement. It is impossible to protest, andequally impossible to assent’ (165).

20 My thanks to Shane Weller for alerting me to theAdorno material in this paragraph, originally broughtto his attention by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s 9 February2006 talk ‘Beckett’s philosophies and Beckett’sphilosophers’ at the Florida State University Beckettcentenary conference.

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intention, it is not difficult to understandwhy he did not make any systematic use of it.His favoured term in 1958 for the direction inwhich his work was going seems to have been‘subtraction’. This certainly implies areduction to essentials: Beckett’sunaccommodated men and women of the pre-Playdrama are placed in essentially simplesituations, caught up in their everydayroutines, preoccupied with their materialwants; for only this will elicit ‘fundamentalsounds’ of a kind which does not tone down thecomplexity and amorphousness of these only-just-living creatures. Yet he may also havehinted at a complementary meaning to Adorno,one closely allied to the notion of continuous,inescapable confrontation with the ‘dilemma ofexpression’. Adorno learned from Beckett thathe ‘views his task as that of moving in aninfinitely small space toward what iseffectively a dimensionless point’ (1997: 224).This comment seems to me to be of the same castas his later remark to Charles Juliet that ‘Iam up against a cliff wall yet I have to goforward. It’s impossible, isn’t it? All thesame, you can go forward. Advance a few moremiserable millimeters’ (25 October 1968, CBV141).

It was, I believe, the internal dynamic of‘subtraction’ in this latter sense thateventually led Beckett towards his own‘abstract language’ in Play. This yields threemethodological consequences. First, a survey ofthe shaping of Beckett’s ‘dilemma ofexpression’ is needed to understand how‘impossibility’ and ‘failure’ combine with theimperative of ‘advancing’ within an ever-

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decreasing space, towards an unreachable‘dimensionless point’. Second, we must explorehow this thematic became an enabling one forBeckett, providing him with a definiteaesthetic criterion for judging others’ art andhis own as well as a specific formal ideal of‘disintegration’; for it was his use of thisprinciple as an increasingly explicit matrix ofstructural organisation in the pre-Play dramathat prepared the way for Play itself. Third,given the fierce scepticism that has beendocumented here against the ‘abstractors ofquintessence’ on the one hand, and the notionof abstraction-as-allegory on the other, we mayinfer that Beckett’s later willingness todescribe his own development in terms of‘abstraction’ indicates an entirely newconfidence that he has discovered a way toavoid both formalism and the possibility ofconceptual reductivism. Therefore, any adequateanalysis of Beckett’s own ‘metaphysicalconcrete’ in Play must be acutely responsive tothe primacy and irreducibility of the dimensionwhich corresponds to the ‘optical experience’in painting: the moment-by-moment texture ofaudience experience.

The ‘dilemma of expression’: A background sketch

It is immediately obvious from the above use ofterms such as ‘subject’, ‘object’ and‘representation’ that Beckett’s formulation of

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the ‘dilemma of expression’ contains aprominent philosophical component. That said,his philosophical reading does not seem to havebegun in earnest until at least after he hadfinished a degree in modern languages atTrinity College, Dublin, in Michaelmas term1927, and probably not until his time aslecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure inParis, 1928–1930.21 A letter to Thomas MacGreevyin July 1930 – during Beckett’s writing of hiscritical study Proust (1930) – is the earliestrecord of his reading of Schopenhauer (chieflyThe World as Will and Representation [1818]), whoseinfluence on his own work Beckett lateracknowledged on several occasions.22 In thisletter, Beckett emphasised that he was ‘notreading philosophy, nor caring whether he isright or wrong or a good or worthlessmetaphysician’; instead, what interested himwas an ‘intellectual justification ofunhappiness – the greatest that has ever beenattempted’ (cited in DF 119). While anyextended attempt to map Beckett’s earliestreading would be beyond the scope of this book,it is important to note here that from a veryearly stage, his interest in particular authorsseems to have been motivated to a considerableextent by precisely this wish to justify hissense of global ‘unhappiness’– or, as hefrankly told J.D. O’Hara, his ‘pessimism’(quoted in O’Hara 1997: 3). Thus, before21 The first reference in DF (96) to any philosophical

influence is to Beckett’s meeting with Jean Beaufretin 1928.

22 E.g. TM 21 September 1937 (cited in DF 268), uponre-reading Schopenhauer: ‘I always knew he was one ofthe ones that mattered most to me’.

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entering into a more specifically philosophicaldiscussion of the ‘rupture of the lines ofcommunication’ between subject and object, anattempt should be made to describe more closelythe attitudes underpinning Beckett’sphilosophical interests.

The distinctiveness of Beckett’s pessimismis brought out most clearly when consideringhis rejection of the (Protestant) Christianityhe was taught as a child and may have acceptedin some form at least until 1923–1924, theacademic year in which he began his TrinityCollege degree under the tutelage of thevigorously anti-clerical Thomas Rudmose-Brown.23

James Knowlson argues that what particularlyvexed Beckett regarding Christianity andprobably finally caused him to lose his faith,was the religious attempt to justify individualsuffering as somehow potentially redemptive interms of a grand cosmic scheme.24 Knowlson23 It is uncertain exactly when Beckett abandoned

Christianity – or even if he ever considered himselfa believer. He wrote to MacGreevy that he ‘never hadthe least faculty or disposition for thesupernatural’ (10 March 1935), and said to Tom Driverthat he had ‘no religious feeling’ (though once, athis first Communion, a ‘religious emotion’), andbecause his religion was merely ‘irksome’ to him, hegave it up (1961: 24); but Knowlson reports that heremained a total abstainer from alcohol, probably forreligious reasons, as late as 1927 (DF 72).

24 Knowlson (DF 68), Driver (1961: 24) and Atik (2001:33) all record Beckett’s acute personal sensitivityto human ‘distress’ (his favoured word here). ToHarold Pinter in 1961, opposing the idea that hiswork was mainly formalist, he said: ‘I was inhospital once. There was a man in another ward, dyingof throat cancer. In the silence, I could hear hisscreams continually. That’s the only kind of form my

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describes Beckett’s outrage upon hearing asermon by his father’s friend, Canon Dobbs, onvisiting the sick in 1926: the only thing hecould tell them was that ‘the crucifixion wasonly the beginning. You must contribute to thekitty’ (DF 67). This, as Knowlson points out,forms the background to the poem ‘Ooftish’:‘offer it up plank it down / Golgotha was onlythe potegg / cancer angina it’s all one to us /cough up your T.B. don’t be stingy [...] we’llmake sense of it we’ll put it in the pot withthe rest / it all boils down to blood of lamb’(Beckett 1977: 31).25 Here, Beckett rejects withbitter irony the idea that Christ’s sacrifice –and presumably with it the promise ofresurrection and eternal life – could ever‘make sense’ of the individual and universal‘distress’ to which he was so acutelysensitive. Knowlson points out that Beckett hadat this time recently read Voltaire’s Candide(1759), and suggests that ‘Canon Dobbs seemedperilously close here to Doctor Pangloss withhis argument that evil, pain and suffering areall part of a divine plan that we simply cannotunderstand (in Alexander Pope’s words “Alldiscord, harmony not understood / All partialevil, universal good”’) (DF 68).

Beckett did not, however, simply set asideChristianity; whatever his protestations ofunbelief, his work remains haunted by hisnative religion. Vivid personal memories,explicit theological references, echoes of theKing James Bible, of Dante and of numerousother Christian authors, fragments of hymns and

work has’ (quoted in Bair 1990: 560).25 Knowlson notes that this poem is doubtless much

earlier than its 1938 publication date (DF 68).

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prayers, obscene jokes, refractions of theimage of the crucified Christ and other symbolsof faith, the frequent location of charactersin purgatorial or hellish settings, and thealmost obsessive juxtaposition of patterns ofissueless repetition with eschatological ideasof resurrection and salvation – all thesefactors, which can be found across Beckett’soeuvre, suggest an art vitally concerned withcontinually re-exorcising this ‘familiarmythology’.26 This is perhaps most evident inthe recurring images of an obscure divinebeing, partly completely indifferent, andpartly, or perhaps for that very reason, atorturer. In Watt (1941–1945), Sam and Wattfeel ‘nearest to God’ when feeding baby rats totheir mothers (W 153); in Mercier and Camier(1946), the deity is ‘omniomni, the all-unfuckable’ (MC 26); in Waiting for Godot (1948–1949), he is shrouded in ‘the heights of divineapathia divine athambia divine aphasia’ (CDW42). In Play, this figure has turned into amechanised, oblique ‘eye of God’, a revolvingspotlight which remains utterly unresponsive tothe characters’ increasingly desperate pleasfor acknowledgement. Moreover, as noted inChapter 2, the spotlight itself was for Beckett26 Beckett said to Colin Duckworth that his uses of

Christianity amounted to the use of ‘a mythology withwhich I am perfectly familiar’ (quoted in Duckworth1972: 18). In the only book-length study of the topicof Beckett and religion, Mary Bryden argues that ‘thehypothesised God who emerges from Beckett’s texts isone who is both cursed for his perverse absence andcursed for his surveillant presence. He is by turnsdismissed, satirised or ignored, but he, and histortured son, are never definitively discarded’(1998: 2).

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ultimately as bound to its game as thecreatures it plays with.

The impact of Christianity-as-antagonistupon Beckett’s intellectual and literarydevelopment is a topic which, in my view,deserves more scholarly attention. My ownconviction is that Beckett’s attraction towardsa view of suffering as unredeemable, towardsnotions such as ‘irrationality’ (PTD 32), ‘theincoherent continuum’ (DFMW 102), ‘chaos’(Driver 1961: 23), or ‘nothingness’ (D 171)rather than divine Reason as the governingprinciple of reality, and towards a conceptionof individual consciousness (and with it humanfreedom) as an epiphenomenon of this primarychaos, is fundamentally shaped by a continuousagon with Christian beliefs.

The degree to which such attitudes wouldhave been confirmed and systematised byBeckett’s encounter with Schopenhauer will beevident from a brief review of some centralfeatures of his philosophy. Schopenhauer’sstarting-point is Kant’s ‘Copernicanrevolution’: the categories of space, time andcausality cannot be inferred from experience,because they are the necessary (a priori)preconditions for any phenomenon to appear inexperience at all.27 However, Schopenhauersharply criticised Kant for ‘his illegitimateassumption of the noumenon [or thing-in-itself]as a kind of invisible object, spatiallylocated, causing experiences’ (Magee 1991: 95).For Schopenhauer, ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are27 Schopenhauer reduced Kant’s elaborate system of

categories of pure reason to his own fourfold‘principle of sufficient reason’. See Magee 1991: 29–31 for a summary.

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ultimately two names for the same thing;namely, the phenomenal world. He affirms‘idealism proper; in other words [...] theknowledge that what is extended in space, andhence the objective, material world in general,exists as such simply and solely in ourrepresentation, and that it is false and indeedabsurd to attribute to it, as such, an existenceoutside all representation and independent ofthe knowing subject, and so to assume a matterpositively and absolutely existing in itself’(Schopenhauer 1966b: 4). The thing-in-itself,therefore, must be wholly different incharacter from phenomena. Given thislimitation, it becomes extremely hard to talkabout ‘it’ at all. However, Schopenhauer doesmake progress from this point by observing thatthere is one material object – our bodies –which we know from the inside as well as fromthe outside. Furthermore, he argues that theactivity of our consciousness consists in actsof willing. This does not mean that ourconscious willing somehow independently causesany of our actions. On the contrary, they arethe direct outcome of the sum total ofmotivations at any given point, most of whichnever even reach consciousness.28 Nevertheless,the insight that we ourselves (being objects)are driven by acts of will still constitutesthe best clue we have as to the inner nature ofthe thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer thereforeinfers that the best name for the noumenon,‘that of which all representation, all object,is the phenomenon, the visibility, the

28 See Magee 1991: 125–7 for a discussion of thispoint.

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objectivity’ (Schopenhauer 1966a: 110), isWill, which in itself is an unindividuated,blind striving: ‘It appears in every blindlyacting force of nature, and also in thedeliberate conduct of man, and the greatdifference between the two concerns only thedegree of the manifestation, not the innernature of what is manifested’ (110).

For Schopenhauer, it follows from thisaccount that, from the point of view of humanexistence, life as such is ceaseless suffering:

Now the nature of man consists in the fact that hiswill strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so onand on; in fact his happiness and well-being consistonly in the transition from desire to satisfaction,and from this to a fresh desire. [...] For the non-appearance of satisfaction is suffering; the emptylonging for a new desire is languor, boredom (260).

Hence, just as ‘the life of our body [is] onlya constantly prevented dying’, so ‘the activityof our mind [is] a constantly postponed bore-dom’ (311). From this perspective, consistentoptimism appears to Schopenhauer as ‘wicked’,and as a ‘bitter mockery of the unspeakablesufferings of mankind’ (326).

In consequence, aesthetic contemplationbecomes highly important to Schopenhauer’ssystem as it represents one way to escape –albeit only momentarily – from the prison ofour being. He interprets the common feeling ofbeing transported beyond oneself in aestheticexperience quite literally: instead ofenclosing the object within the ambit of ourneeds, we here step out of the cycle of willingand become a ‘subject of pure, will-lessknowing’ (250). The highest literary art for

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Schopenhauer is tragedy, for here we can seethe inevitable suffering of mankind, or the‘antagonism of the will with itself’ (253). Itsheroes are not atoning for individual sins, butfor ‘original sin, in other words, the guilt ofexistence itself’ (254). The greatesttragedians realise this, and finally renouncenot merely life, but ‘the whole will-to-liveitself’ (253). An even more elevated status isgiven to music, which abstracts completely fromevents, and in its movement between tension andresolution presents the quintessence of theemotional life ‘without the motives’ (261).Schopenhauer goes so far as to assert that ‘wecould just as well call the world embodiedmusic as embodied will’ (262–3); for at itsbest, music is the most direct expressionavailable to us of the Will itself.

Aesthetic experience entails, then, atranscendence of egocentric willing; however,it is a short-lived one, and the painfulactivity of life soon resumes. In turn,Schopenhauer’s theory of ethics advocates twoways of acting on the insight that we are, inour inmost nature, one with the Will itself,indeed that ‘everyone has all the sufferings ofthe world as his own; indeed he has to lookupon all merely possible sufferings as actualfor him, so long as he [...] affirms life withall his strength’ (353). Schopenhauer’s firstethical stage is compassion; for the sufferingsof others start to affect the individual almostas much as his own, and he takes steps to stillthe aggressiveness of his own egoism, and toalleviate others’ pain. The second stage,asceticism, goes even further by demonstratinga revulsion against the will to life as such;

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the ascetic suppresses all natural impulses,receives sufferings with indifference, andmortifies his own body so as to ‘graduallybreak and kill the will’ (382). When such aperson dies, ‘the inner being itself [...] isabolished’, and ‘for him who ends thus, theworld has at the same time ended’ (382). Insuch exemplary cases, we glimpse the ‘finalgoal’ (411), the end of everything: ‘what remainsafter the complete abolition of the will is,for all those who are still full of will,assuredly nothing. But also conversely, tothose in whom the will has turned and denieditself, this very real world of ours, with allits suns and galaxies, is – nothing’ (411–12).

It is evident from this account thatBeckett would have found in Schopenhauer analternative ‘mythology’ which runs contrary tothat of Christianity on almost every point: atsome indefinable stage, Chaos (the irrationalforce of the Will) inexplicably individuateditself into this phenomenal world ofsuffering;29 desire and hope do not ultimately(as in Plato and Aquinas) point us towards theGood, but are instead chains which fetter us toexistence. In the end, the only ‘aim’ worthpursuing is the extinction of all willing andthe return to nothingness.

Beckett’s immediate enthusiasm for thisworld-picture may be gauged by its extensive

29 Schopenhauer admits to being unable to explain whythe undifferentiated Will should differentiate itselfinto a multiplicity of appearances at all. He alsoholds that the Will is fully present in eachindividual thing. Each one of us thus manifests themystery of the origin of phenomenal existence as such(see Schopenhauer 1966a: 331f).

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employment in Proust.30 Proust’s characters are,for him, ‘victims and prisoners’ of Time (PTD12–13), driven by a ‘thirst for possession’ ofobjects of desire ‘by definition’ insatiable,but which is also impossible to satisfy becauseof the ‘unceasing modification’ of theindividual’s personality ‘whose permanentreality, if any, can only be apprehended as aretrospective hypothesis’ (15). Because ‘thesubject has died – and perhaps many times’ onits way to so-called ‘attainment’ (14), no realprogress can be made; thus, ‘the observerinfects the observed with his own mobility’(17). Beckett refers with approval to the‘wisdom of all the sages’, that which ‘consistsnot in the satisfaction but in the ablation ofdesire’ (18); he also quietly borrowsSchopenhauer’s view of tragedy as unconcernedwith human justice, being instead an‘expiation’ of the ‘original sin’ of ‘havingbeen born’ (67). However, this situation –essentially that of the phenomenal division ofthe Will against itself – is normally occludedfrom the subject by the mechanism of Habit,‘the generic term for the countless treatiesconcluded between the countless subjects thatconstitute the individual and their countlesscorrelative objects’ (19). Here, Beckettemploys another Schopenhauerian distinction:while Habit is associated with ‘the boredom ofliving’ (19), there are also artisticallyfertile transition-periods between its suc-cessive adaptations, when immersion in Habitgives way to ‘the suffering of being’ (19). In30 This connection is well known, and my discussion

here lays no claim to originality. See e.g. O’Hara1997: 13–33.

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this state (as when Proust’s narrator mustsleep in an unfamiliar room), objects become‘detached from the sanity of a cause, isolatedand inexplicable’ (23).

However, in spite of this extensive (andoften unacknowledged) borrowing fromSchopenhauer, Beckett’s focus in Proust is farfrom philosophical; that is to say, he is notengaged in an attempt to conceptualise thestructure of reality, but is instead applying acertain world-picture to an analysis ofProust’s 16-volume Remembrance of Things Past(1909–1922). This is significant becauseBeckett’s interest appears to lie almostentirely in envisaging the predicament ofinherently ‘multiple’ and ‘mobile’ subjects(and their objects of desire) within thephenomenal realm. This emphasis is especiallypronounced in his interpretation of theProustian notion of involuntary memory. Beckettnotes that, in stark contrast to the merelyutilitarian (and thus Habit-bound)functionality of voluntary memory, an episodeof involuntary memory is a chance associationbetween a present event and an aspect of thepast that remained unconscious at the time. Thepast sensation in its fullness (‘new preciselybecause already experienced’ [74]) here rushesin on the subject: an ‘extratemporal essence’is being communicated to an ‘extratemporalbeing’ (75). Beckett relates this ‘mysticalexperience’ (93) directly to Schopenhauer’sexalted view of music as capable of momentarilyreleasing us from the cycle of individualwilling to contemplate the Will itself, ‘the“invisible reality” that damns the life of the

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body on earth as a pensum and reveals themeaning of the word “defunctus”’ (93).31

However, Beckett clearly regarded the‘Proustian solution’ (75) to the problem ofimprisonment in temporal existence as dubious;32

in fact, the very notion of a solution came toseem suspect to him, and he derides Proust forhis ‘Romantic’ eagerness to ‘accomplish hismission, to be a good and faithful servant’(81). In two later conversations with CharlesJuliet, this attitude is further specified:

No, he hasn’t read the oriental philosophers andthinkers.– They offer a way out, and I didn’t feel that there was one (24October 1968, CBV 141).

Over the last four centuries, mankind seems to havebeen determined to create a reassuring and gratifyingimage of itself, and it is precisely this, I observe,that Beckett has done his best to destroy. He pointsout that he was not the first to do so: he waspreceded by Leopardi and Schopenhauer, amongothers... I press my case.– Yes, he concedes, perhaps they did still have some hope of an answer,a solution, while I haven’t (1 November 1977, CBV 165).

31 A ‘pensum’ is a set task, and ‘defunctus’acknowledges its completion; Beckett is alluding toSchopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena II, ch.XII, § 157(O’Hara 1997: 29). O’Hara points out that Becketthere ‘has darkened even Schopenhauer’s pessimism’(29), for while Schopenhauer anticipates a releasefrom the ‘pensum’, Beckett focuses only on how it‘damns’ the life of the body on earth.

32 See Nicholas Zurbrugg’s thorough discussion ofBeckett’s reaction against the Proustian ‘mysticalexperience’ in Proust itself and in Dream of Fair toMiddling Women (1988: 145–72, 190–216).

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Beckett thus seems to have rejected not onlyProust’s ‘mystical experience’ (closelyrelated, as just noted, to Schopenhauer’s viewof music), but also the other ‘way out’suggested by Schopenhauer (partly inspired hereby Hindu and Buddhist thought); namely, theascetic denial of the will-to-live. Beckett’santi-religious sentiment is, it seems to me,strongly at work here: for the point of boththese ‘ways out’ is that they promise access toa perspective from which the cycle of willing,and thus all suffering, can be seen as illusory.This may well have struck Beckett as butanother form of the religious attempt toexplain it all away.

In my view, Beckett’s acceptance (howeverimplicitly and tentatively) of the quasi-mythical picture of individual, phenomenalexistence as an emanation of the ‘incoherentcontinuum’, blind Will, chaos, or nothingnesson the one hand, and his pessimistic doubt, onthe other, that there is any ‘way out’ of thatexistence, together form a necessary backgroundfor understanding his conception of the‘rupture of the lines of communication’ betweensubject and object and the ‘dilemma ofexpression’ that ensues. The following notefrom Beckett’s Dream Notebook summarises this‘rupture’ and points us towards a source –Jules de Gaultier’s From Kant to Nietzsche (1900) –wherein this connection is brought out withparticular clarity:

Curiosity focussed on relation between the object & itsrepresentation, between the stimulus & molecular disturbance,between percipi and percipere (DN 165).

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To propound the problem of Cognition means to wonderand be concerned for the first time about therelation between objects such as we perceive them andobjects as they may be; it means suspecting for thefirst time that the object may differ from itsrepresentation. [...] With growing disquiet one comes toperceive that the molecular movement in the brain[...] is still no more than a means of perception,thus a new screen between the object and knowledgethereof. At what instant and how does the subject ofknowledge itself arise? How is the subject opposed tothe object, percipere to percipi? (Gaultier 1961: 13f)

Gaultier further argues that:

one cannot conceive a state of knowledge without astate of representation, without a subject confrontedby an object. Outside of these conditions the termknowledge is for the mind devoid of all meaning, allintelligibility. [...] On the other hand, it isimpossible to attribute to the Being in itself thedistinction into object and subject: that would beidentifying it with the world as representation andwould, therefore, amount to abolishing it (74f).

Accordingly, he concludes that ‘knowledge isnot an apanage of Being, and that there is anessential antinomy between existence and knowledge’ (75).The problem set out here is that all ‘means ofperception’ and all attempts at gaining‘knowledge’ already presuppose the division ofthe noumenon into subjects and objects. Withinthe phenomenal world, subjects are confrontedwith nothing but a ‘representation’ or‘screen’, never with objects themselves;conversely, the notion of a stable subject ofknowledge is scarcely less questionable. Thisbasic conception would certainly have been fam-iliar to Beckett from Schopenhauer, whoreferred to the phenomenal realm as the ‘veil

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of Maya’:33 however, Gaultier seems to go evenfurther in questioning our ability to affirmanything at all about the noumenon. His‘antinomy’ means that even identifying thenoumenon as Will is dubious for the mere reasonthat it is an inference, which affirms thesubject-object bifurcation by enactment. Thus,the picture that emerges here is one ofinherently unstable ‘subjects’ completelyunable to establish real contact with any‘object’ of desire, perception or knowledge;furthermore, any attempt to escape thissituation (by attaining some form of union withthe Thing-in-Itself) must fail simply becauseit remains an act of will, requiring somedegree of perception and knowledge.

It is but a short step from the notion ofan essential ‘antinomy’ between the noumenonand the concept of knowledge to a fundamentalcriticism of all means of expression –including all forms of language – as inherentlyinadequate, imprisoning subjects in thephenomenal realm. Beckett’s reading of (partsof) Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache(1901–1902) probably around May 1938, wouldcertainly have confirmed this point for him,rather than first alerted him to it.34 MatthewFeldman (2006: 138–46) has convincingly arguedthat Mauthner’s relentless focus on thisproblematic crucially influenced Beckett’swriting of Watt, a novel obsessed with the lackof correspondence between word and world33 Feldman (2004: 199–208) discusses Beckett’s

possible use of this Hindu image. 34 Feldman (2006: 126–31) demonstrates that Beckett

read Mauthner at Joyce’s instigation as Joyce wascompleting Finnegans Wake in 1938.

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(exemplified by the famous ‘pot’ episode, W78–9). In our context, Mauthner represents afitting extension of the line of argumentadvanced via Schopenhauer and Gaultier. WhileMauthner praises Schopenhauer highly as a ‘poetof thought’, he also argues that the latter’ssystem culminates in ‘word superstition, in amythological person, in the will’ (vol.II,p.478).35 Much like Gaultier, he further arguesthat:

Whatever the human may dare to do through superhumanstrength in order to discover truth, he always onlyfinds himself, a human truth, an anthropomorphicpicture of the world. The last word of thought canonly be the negative act, the self-destruction ofanthropomorphism, the insight into the profoundwisdom of Vico: not everything is intelligible to men (Vol.II,p.479).

Thus, Mauthner explicitly admits that the‘logically consistent nominalism’ which headvocates – ‘according to which the recognitionof reality is just as much denied to the humanbrain as the make-up of the surface of stone’ –is ‘not a provable world-view’ (vol.III,p.615):

It would not be nominalism if it pretended to be morethan a feeling, than a disposition of the humanindividual facing the world. And in this frame ofmind we are denied even a thinking through to aconclusion of [...] this teaching, because all

35 Beckett made two sets of notes on Mauthner, in TCD10971/5/1–4 (a verbatim typescript of vol.II, pp.473–9 of the Kritik) and other assorted transcriptions inRUL 3000; Appendix D in Feldman (2004) gives Englishtranslations of these passages (by Detlef Mühlberger,emended by Erik and Judith E. Tonning), which I quotehere.

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thinking takes place in the words of the language andthinking dissolves into itself when the nebulousnature of words has become clear to us (Vol.II,p.479).

While Mauthner clearly proceeds from the ideathat our thought and language cannot grasp‘reality’, he also recognises that thisconclusion cannot even be consistently statedfrom his own premises, since ‘reality’, or‘Thing-in-Itself’, are themselves mere words.Only a ‘feeling’ remains after the finalphilosophical enterprise of ‘Sprachkritik’ haseroded itself away.

It is easy to see how the trajectoryfollowed here might appear to involve one‘failure’ after another: ‘subjects’ are asunstable as ‘objects’, and because of thisdisconnection no desire may be attained; allattempts to escape this situation still involveperception, knowledge and language, and socannot but misfire. In fact, the very attemptto describe our situation, by whatever means,must itself ‘fail’. Beckett’s constant use ofterms such as ‘failure’, ‘weakness’,‘ignorance’, ‘inability’ and ‘despair’ abouthis own artistic project confirms the centralimportance of this kind of assessment for histhinking.36 However, a comment made to CharlesJuliet in 1973 pinpoints an important tensionhere. In response to Juliet’s suggestion that‘the artistic enterprise is inconceivablewithout rigorous ethical standards urgentlyheld’ (CBV 148), Beckett answered:

36 To Lawrence Harvey, Beckett stated that his workessentially aimed at getting at the ‘authenticweakness of being’ (DF 496).

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– What you say is correct. But moral values are not accessible and notopen to definition. To define them, you would have to make valuejudgements, and you can’t do that. [...] You can’t even talk about truth.That is part of the general distress (29 October 1973, CBV148f).

Here Beckett explicitly adds the broadlyepistemological dilemma I have attempted todescribe above to the catalogue of the world’swoes. But this leads, quite simply, to acontradiction in terms: moral values or truthsare ‘not open to definition’, and that is a terriblesituation. This, in my view, strongly suggeststhat the two principal strands of Beckett’sthought are strictly speaking irreconcilable.The notion of an actually accessible, trulyvalid standard of moral goodness leads straightto the idea of a universal Reason at the mostfundamental level of reality. But if this is tobe rejected, and all our judgements – andindeed reason itself – are to be regarded asproducts of a primary chaos, the moraljudgement inherent in the very definition andcondemnation of suffering is itself baseless.37

From this perspective pessimism itself isultimately ‘groundless’, because all suffering– and indeed all ‘failure’ – is merelyillusory. But for Beckett, this ‘perspective’(closely akin to the Nirvana of Easternmysticism) is unattainable, for we remaintrapped within the phenomenal world; and this inturn somehow becomes ‘part of the generaldistress’.

37 See C.S. Lewis, ‘De Futilitate’, in Lewis 2002:261–73, and Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (2002:248–9), for philosophical elaborations of this point.

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The purpose of these remarks is not,however, to offer a philosophical critique ofBeckett, but simply to point to the fact thatthe intertwining of these two poles –metaphysical, world-generating ‘chaos’ andindividual weakness, failure and distress –became for him a creative matrix which enabledhim to go on producing artistic work. The shiftingbetween ‘aspects’ in a typical Gestalt figuresuch as ‘Ruben’s Vase’ seems to me an apt imagefor the perceptual effects of thisintertwining, in that ‘figure’ and ‘ground’cannot both be clearly in focus simultaneously.A broad schematisation must suffice to clarifythis analogy. On the one hand, any ‘direct’attempt by a Beckett character to focus on theChaos, and perhaps to reach towards a finalpeace or silence beyond phenomenal being, isshown as enacted in and through language andtherefore as reproducing a version, howeverresidual, of a suffering human presence. But onthe other hand, while characters are oftenplaced in obviously painful circumstances,their suffering is also defamiliarised by beingdepicted as stemming from their status assubjects within the phenomenal world; they mayundergo a thoroughgoing erosion of identitywhich makes their very presence appear as an(almost completely) illusory product of anobscure, impersonal process. Beckett’s ownpithy encapsulation of the back-and-forthmovement that he referred to as the ‘one theme’of his life (DF 631) vividly expresses the feltinescapability and unending nature of hisartistic project:

to and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

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from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by wayof neither (CSP 258).

Confronting the ‘incoherent continuum’ in art

The thematic of ‘failure’ did not at all leadBeckett to abandon writing as a pointlessenterprise, or to assess all (artistic)expression as equally worthless. Instead, theidea that art is authentic to the extent thatit somehow confronts the ‘dilemma ofexpression’ provided him with a highly flexibleaesthetic criterion with which to criticallyencounter and learn from an extremely widerange of past and contemporary art, as well aswith a specific artistic ideal of his own. Itis, for example, quite clear that, for Beckett,any art which is in this sense to be true toour condition cannot commit ‘the grotesquefallacy of a realistic art – “the miserablestatement of line and surface”’ (PTD 76),because the ‘realists and naturalistsworshipping the offal of experience’ (78) areconcerned only with the world of objects andour desires as they appear under the sway ofHabit, and not at all with the inherent‘impenetrability’ of self and unself. Also tobe condemned is the Romantic impulse totranscend this division in favour of someversion of pantheistic unity between individualand universal Spirit; indeed, the very ideathat nature might be somehow ‘alive’ andaccessible to human emotions or expressions is

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roundly dismissed by Beckett as mere‘anthropomorphism’. I will here examine two ofBeckett’s attempts to grapple with the questionof what an artistic language containing therequisite self-critical awareness of the‘dilemma of expression’ might actually looklike: the first in a 1934 letter to MacGreevyon Cézanne, and the second from the well-known1937 letter to Axel Kaun on Beckett’s own idealof a ‘literature of the unword’.

Although the present context does notpermit detailed consideration of Beckett’s 8September 1934 letter to MacGreevy (partiallyreproduced in DF 196–7), it is worth quoting atsome length, as it demonstrates how Beckett’sapplication of his aesthetic criterion couldgenerate a breathless flow of associations witha very wide range of artworks:

What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all theanthropomorphized landscape – van Goyen, Avercamp,the Ruysdaels, Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & CromeYellow Esq., or paranthropomorphised by Watteau sothat the Débarquement seems an illustration of‘poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu’elle soit en montant’,or hyper-anthropomorphized by Rubens – Tellus inrecord travail, or castrated by Corot; after all thelandscape ‘promoted’ to the emotions of the hiker,postulated as concerned with the hiker (what animpertinence, worse than Aesop and the animals),alive the way a lap or a fist is alive. Cézanne seemsto have been the first to see landscape and state itas material of a strictly peculiar order,incommensurable with all human expressionswhatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities ofvitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur,but personality in its own terms, not in Pelman’s,landscapability. Ruysdael’s Entrance to the Forest – there isno entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest,

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its dimensions are its secret & it has nocommunications to make. [...]

And the Impressionists darting about & whining thatthe scene wouldn’t rest easy! How far Cézanne hadmoved from the snapshot puerilities of Manet and Ciewhen he could understand the dynamic intrusion to behimself and so landscape to be something bydefinition unapproachably alien, unintelligiblearrangement of atoms, not so much as ruffled by thekind attentions of the Reliability Joneses. [...]

Perhaps it is the one bright spot in a mechanisticage – the deanthropomorphizations of the artist. Eventhe portrait beginning to be dehumanised as theindividual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone& his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplastor God, incapable of loving or hating anyone buthimself or of being loved or hated by anyone buthimself.

Beckett’s mention of ‘atomism’ is rooted in hislongstanding interest in Democritus of Abdera(460–360 BC) and the pre-Socratics moregenerally. Democritus’s theory – realityconsists of the motion of atoms in the void;the psyche, too, is a product of such motion;and we thus have no access to things inthemselves within the flux of perception38 –fits fairly seamlessly into the world-picturealready examined above, except that whereDemocritus affirms the accessibility of atomicarrangements to experiment and reasoning,Beckett (perhaps with greater consistency)insists that they remain ‘unintelligible’.Beckett’s objection to the various types of38 Beckett’s notes point out that for Democritus,

‘Matter in its form and motion is that which alone istruly real, and the entire mental and spiritual lifeis a derived phenomenon’ (TCD 10967/76, cited inFeldman 2004: 296).

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‘anthropomorphism’ cited in the letter isprecisely that they conceal the‘unintelligibility’, ‘alienness’ or‘incommensurability’ of landscape vis-à-vis‘all human expressions whatsoever’. Cézanne’slate style is described as a radical advanceupon that of classical Impressionists likeManet, whose ‘snapshot puerilities’ – orattempts to capture a moment of subjectivevision – is for Beckett self-evidently proble-matic because there can be no accessible‘scene’ to paint in the first place. The MontSte. Victoire was perhaps Cézanne’s mostobsessive motif, which he painted in allseasons and from a variety of angles. Thisintensive reworking is emblematic of Cézanne’sincorporation of more than one perspectivewithin his paintings as well; according toCharles Altieri’s summary of a range ofcritics, Cézanne’s art ultimately investigates‘the nature of our own mobility as observers’(1995: 185), or how ‘our looking is a complexof retentions and projections, a searchingaround an object in space and in memory’ (185).Beckett’s interpretation of this style is thatCézanne understood his own process of vision asa ‘dynamic intrusion’ into his selectedlandscape. Every work thus grapples anew withthe essential ‘alienness’ of all landscape,since the awareness that he is seeing, not themountain or the woods, but a multiplicity ofscreens or veils separating him from them, mustremain ineradicable. As Knowlson points out,citing a letter to MacGreevy from the followingweek, Beckett also praised Cézanne’s self-portraits because of the sense they convey ofhis ‘incommensurability’ not only with

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landscape, ‘but even with life of his ownorder, even with the life [...] operative inhimself’ (TM 16 September 1934, cited in DF197). In short, neither landscape nor self isapproachable, because both are, in the finalanalysis, products of inhuman forces. It seemsthat for Beckett Cézanne’s work, incourageously enacting the inevitable failure ofsuch attempts at approach, stages a series ofconfrontations between the ‘individual’ and thoseinhuman forces generating both self and world.But this, in turn, means that ‘the individual’somehow subsists here, even if only as aresidual site for the suffering involved in the‘feeling’ of being ‘more & more hermetic &alone’, devoid of access to either the love orthe hate of others.

In his 9 July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun,39

Beckett describes his own medium of language asa ‘veil that must be torn apart in order to getat the things (or the Nothingness) behind it’(D 171).40 Cézanne – surely a centralreference-point for Beckett’s allusion to theadvances already made in painting and music, towhich the continuing ‘lazy ways’ (D 172) ofliterature compare poorly – created a form inwhich the alienness of landscape (and self) to‘all human expressions whatsoever’ could bemanifested. A similar view of the manifestationof an inhuman ‘something or nothing’ (D 172)within a mode of human expression also governsBeckett’s reflections about the ideal of afuture ‘literature of the unword’ (D 173). The39 I refer here to Martin Esslin’s translation, but

occasionally approach Beckett’s German directly.40 The ‘veil’ here is almost certainly a reference to

Schopenhauer’s ‘veil of Maya’ (see note 33 above).

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question under discussion throughout Beckett’sletter is: what operations might one attempt toperform within language that would enable it tosomehow point towards its own origin inincoherence and unintelligibility? Thisformulation should make plain the reason forBeckett’s scepticism against all regular,natural uses of language: these aim preciselyat coherence and understanding, and are deeplyrooted in the utilitarian practices of thehuman life-world. His reference to the‘terrible, random materiality of the wordsurface’ (‘fürchterlich willkürlicheMaterialität der Wortfläche’ [D 53]) capturesboth this recalcitrant involvement of languagein the material realm and the arbitrariness ofthe word-world relation itself.

Accordingly, in order to be ‘mostefficiently used’ (D 171), language must be‘misused’ (D 172): one must aim to ‘bore onehole after another in it’ (D 172). But how?Beckett’s central analogy for the kind ofprocedure he has in mind derives fromBeethoven’s Seventh Symphony.41 Here, he argues,the ‘tone surface’ (‘Tonfläche’) is ‘dissolved’(‘aufgelöst’) by being ‘eaten away by greatblack pauses’ (‘von grossen schwarzen Pausengefressen’) (D 53). For pages of notes, hewrites, we cannot perceive anything except‘einen schwindelnden unergründliche Schlündevon Stillschweigen verknüpfenden Pfad vonLauten’ (D 53): a dizzying (or:lying/fraudulent) path of sounds connecting41 Beckett’s view of Beethoven is already fully formed

in DFMW 138–9; this 1932 date once again underlineshow early Beckett’s essential aesthetic concepts wereformulated.

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unfathomable abysses (or: bottomless gullets)of silence. Beckett’s German is complex.42

‘Schwindeln’ is not normally, as here, used inthe present progressive in either of the twomeanings adduced in my translation, except inthe idiom ‘schwindelnden Höhen’ (‘dizzyingheights’), to which Beckett is no doubtalluding. However, a word which doesunproblematically take this form is‘schwindend’ (‘fading’); thus, it seems that atriple pun may be involved here. Furthermore,the word ‘Schlünde’ (‘abysses/gullets’) refersback to the earlier ‘gefressen’ (‘eaten away’):the almost visceral activity of the silencesupon the music makes each individual note seemsuspended at a dizzying height above a hungryabyss. Finally, we should note the transitionfrom ‘Tonfläche’ to ‘Laute’. A ‘tone’ isimplicated in a well-ordered progression,whereas a ‘sound’ may be a disconnectedoutburst; Beethoven has, for Beckett, found aform which questions the very coherence of‘tones’ by leaving them poised on the brink ofbeing mere ‘sounds’, but which still somehowmanages to connect them, to ‘get from point topoint’ (DFMW 102). Quite a number ofassociations have by now accumulated aroundBeckett’s parallel notion of a possibledissolution of the ‘Wortfläche’. Words, too,can perhaps be arranged in such a way that theybecome poised between intelligibility and near-incoherent outburst; that an active, corrosivesilence is sensed within them; that they can befelt as poised dizzyingly above this abyssal

42 My thanks to Judith E. Tonning for providingvariant renderings of this dense passage.

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silence, as both emerging from and constantlyfading back into it. Beckett cautiouslysuggests that before this ideal may beattempted, it is necessary to ‘invent a methodby means of which this mocking attitude towords may be put into words’ (‘eine Methode zuerfinden, um diese höhnische Haltung dem Wortegegenüber wörtlich darzustellen’ [D 53]). Inthis ‘dissonance between the means and theiruse’ (D 172), it may, he writes, becomepossible to ‘feel a whisper of that final musicor that silence that underlies All’ (D 172).Again, it should be emphasised that this methodof ‘dissonance’ aims to stage an encounter withwhat is alien to language from within language;but this, as we have seen, must by definitionentail some residual form of continuedinvolvement in the phenomenal realm, and mustre-enact – in however attenuated a form – thedivision between subject and object.

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Disintegration and system in Beckett’s fiction and drama

While there is no shortage of the ‘mockingattitude to words’ in the intervening worksbetween this 1937 letter and the March 1949 toJanuary 1950 writing of The Unnamable, thelatter’s sustained elaboration of the rhythmsof a ‘meaningless voice which prevents you frombeing nothing, just barely prevents you frombeing nothing and nowhere’ (T 374) neverthelesspushed the ideal of a ‘literature of theunword’ to an extreme, after which Beckettfamously spoke of a crisis in his writing: ‘Inthe last book – “L’Innommable” – there’scomplete disintegration. No “I”, no “have”, no“being”. No nominative, no accusative, no verb.There’s no way to go on’ (quoted in Shenker1956: 148).

In The Unnamable, then, Beckett makes aconceptual leap from his previous fiction:

All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not foolme. They have made me waste my time, speak of them,when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spokenof me and me alone (T 305).

The voice presents itself as the origin ofthese and other Beckett figures. For thisshadowy, quasi-authorial narrator, the aim ofgenerating characters in the first place wasalways that of its own self-undoing. However,now a more ‘direct’ and paradoxical mode isattempted: speaking of ‘me and me alone’ inorder to reach a (projected) ultimate silence –beyond time and space, subject and object,

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thought and utterance. Beckett here confrontsthe residual dream of a complete transcendenceof the principium individuationis first formulated inProust. Indeed, one way of describing TheUnnamable is as a staging of the most extreme‘break-out attempt’ from the prison of beingand language in Beckett’s work so far. However,it is of course necessary to start from within,by means of language and the life-world –otherwise there would be no problem to dealwith in the first place. Hence, a ‘method’ isneeded:

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do,in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure andsimple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidatedas uttered, or sooner or later? (293).

The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one mayspeak of facts, not only that I shall have to speakof things of which I cannot speak, but also, which iseven more interesting, that I shall have to, Iforget, no matter (294).

In every story, every statement and counter-statement, a distance must be made evident. Noneof these can represent the ‘unnamable’ drivebehind discourse itself; they are meretemporary approximations, to be ‘invalidated asuttered’. The resulting mood of self-reflexiveanguish is often tinged with comedy – as in thebreakdown here of the sentence that seems readyto cap the definition of the ‘procedure’.

The effect of this is to consistentlychallenge the sense that the narrative voice,in spite of its hyper-consciousness, exercisesany real control here. This additional level ofdisintegration is perhaps comparable to the

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‘corrections’ used as a structural principle inNot I: ‘what?...not that either?...nothing to dowith that either?...nothing she couldthink?...all right...nothing she couldtell...nothing she could think...’ (CDW 382).There seems to be a similar – though moreimplicit – ‘presence’ in the novel, answeringevery one of the narrator’s programmes of‘self-undoing’ with not that either, forcing thevoice onwards till the final ambiguity of ‘youmust go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (T418).43 While a discussion of this complex textas a whole is beyond the scope of thisargument, I do wish to suggest that we find anoverall progression in its focus, from theworking-out of abortive programmes (e.g. theinvention of ‘delegates’ such as Mahood orWorm), to a more direct confrontation with this‘presence’ towards the end of the book:

there I am the absentee again, it’s his turn againnow, he who neither speaks nor listens, who hasneither body nor soul, it’s something else he has, hemust have something, he must be somewhere, he is madeof silence, there’s a pretty analysis, he’s in thesilence, he’s the one to be sought, the one to be,the one to be spoken of, the one to speak, but hecan’t speak, then I could stop, I’d be he, I’d be thesilence, I’d be back in the silence, we’d bereunited, his story the story to be told, but he hasno story, he hasn’t been in story, it’s not certain,he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable,that doesn’t matter, the attempt must be made, in theold stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his…(417).

43 Shane Weller points to ‘the blank space thatfollows the words “I’ll go on”’ (2005: 112).

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This attempt to focus on ‘the absentee’ isitself riddled with rapid verbal shifts (‘buthe can’t speak’, ‘but he has no story’, ‘it’snot certain’ – variations on not that either),which in turn leads to another project, that offinding ‘his’ (abortive) story. The mountingdesperation here makes abundantly clear thatthe residual ‘I’ still somehow suffers thecondition of being unable to merge with thisopaque ‘other’, who remains intrinsicallyinaccessible to analysis, imagination andlanguage.

According to H. Porter Abbott, the‘destruction of formal implications of time andspace and the creation of a prose ofcancellation and omission’ in The Unnamable hasstill ‘produced a version of self – not theself that the speaker seeks, but perhaps thelast expressible. This is the self as process –a constant evolution and devolution of thoughtsand questions’ (1973: 135). Furthermore, in thefinal analysis, ‘Formal disintegration, nomatter how fiercely pursued, still eventuatesin form’ (137). For Beckett, one way of ‘goingon’ beyond the impasse of The Unnamable was thusimplicit in that work itself, as well asalready exemplified in Waiting for Godot (finishedin January 1949): namely, to envisiondisintegration itself as an underlying,inscrutable system or process, and to turn thisinto an explicit principle of structuralorganisation.44

44 Shane Weller rightly argues that what Beckett’slater works show us ‘is not chaos, not the sheerabsence of forms and identities, but precisely abreaking down of forms and identities, a process ofdisintegration’ (2005: 55).

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We know that the medium of theatre offeredBeckett a relief from prose-writing: ‘You havea definite space and people in that space.That’s relaxing.’45 The inherent limitations ofthe form may have attracted him: by contrast tothe nearly complete freedom of prose (to e.g.abandon characters and topics, or to amputatesentences), in the theatre, actors must be seenand heard, the stage-space always presents adefinite image, and a framework of acts andscenes is required.46 In terms of myschematisation of the ‘poles’ in Beckett’swork, theatre clearly lends itself to aconcrete foregrounding of individual weaknessand distress. But how does one convey a con-comitant sense that this relative‘definiteness’ itself ultimately emanates froman inhuman Chaos? Beckett’s answer in Godot,Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days was tosubject the characters and their activities toa formal process of disintegration.

The structural frameworks of Godot andEndgame are based on combined repetition andrundown. As one critic famously quipped, inGodot ‘nothing happens, twice’.47 Vladimir andEstragon appear in the same desolate place inboth acts, bound to their task of waiting, andin the final tableau of each act they propose togo yet do not move. Pozzo and Lucky appear inboth acts, and so does the boy-messenger whoclaims to represent the elusive Mr Godot.45 Beckett to Michael Haerdter during rehearsals of

Endgame in 1967 (quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld1988: 15 [in German, authors’ translation]).

46 This is a summary of points made in Reid 1969: 20.47 Vivian Mercier, ‘The Uneventful Event’ (1956);

cited in Boxall 2001: 13.

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Moreover, the deliberately vague references totime create a sense of ‘perpetual present’(Kennedy 1991: 28). Yet the situation in thesecond act has also clearly degenerated: Pozzohas gone blind, and Lucky is dumb; the games ofVladimir and Estragon have become moreartificial and desperate; and the growing needfor escape from their situation is emphasisedby the (unsuccessful) testing of the capacityof Estragon’s belt for a hanging just beforethe end.

In Endgame, rundown is all-pervasive. ‘Nomore’, ‘zero’ and ‘corpsed’ are keywordsechoing across the play. The inhabitants of therefuge on stage – the blind, wheelchair-boundplayer-king Hamm, his servant and (adopted) sonClov, and his decrepit parents Nagg and Nell –may be all that is left of Nature, and theirlast resources (from pap to painkillers) arequickly running out. However, Clov’s openingrituals evoke a long chain of past and futurerepetitions. This sense of interminability infact becomes part of almost every gesture,speech and dialogue: for instance the routineof checking for any residual life outside, theinterminable exchanges about whether Clov isgoing to leave, or Hamm’s histrionic attemptsto finish his story. The sense that we arewitnessing a cycle of stale games that havebeen played out before – and may resume evenafter the closing tableau – infects our senseof Hamm’s efforts to make an end in his ‘lastsoliloquy’ (CDW 130). He goes through a seriesof explicitly theatrical gestures as he divestshimself of his gaff, toy-dog and whistle;briefly resumes his story; cites a littlepoetry; calls twice to his father; and places

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his handkerchief across his face, as at theopening.48 However, his actions are framed byhis own awareness that he is involved inanother game (‘Me to play’ [132]), and by thecontinued presence of Clov. This inability tocut short the process of ending should beunderstood in the light of the crucial refrain,‘Something is taking its course’ (98, 107). Thecharacters are part of a cycle they cannotcontrol, an ending which never finally ends.

In Godot and Endgame, Beckett underminesexpectations of significant plot-developmentand a closing resolution. Instead, thedisintegrative processes of ‘waiting’ and‘ending’ are constantly being foregrounded. Theprojects, ideas and games of the characters aredefined in opposition to the ‘something’inexorably ‘taking its course’. It is easy tosee that this sense of being trapped in a netagainst which one can only struggle in vain(vividly exemplified by Lucky’s dance in Godot)remains essential to Krapp’s Last Tape and HappyDays as well – so I restrict my comments hereto a very basic statement.49 In the former play,Beckett condenses repetition and rundown intothe juxtaposition (and quasi-dialogue) betweenKrapp and his tape-recorded former self. Thefinal words we hear are those of the youngKrapp, affirming that he would not want evenhis best years back, since he prefers thecreative fire in him now; as the tape runs onin silence and the lights fade, Krapp staresmotionlessly before him. Here is another48 This account is indebted to Kennedy 1991: 62–6.49 For further comment on Happy Days and Krapp’s Last Tape,

see Chapter 2, pp.55–7 and Chapter 5, pp.179–85,respectively.

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‘victim and prisoner’ of Time, whose slowdeterioration (which may run on beyond theplay) makes a mockery of all formerpretensions. In Happy Days, Winnie, trapped inher mound of earth first to the waist and then,in the second act, to the neck, is also subjectto a cycle of decay; and that powerful stage-metaphor cannot be domesticated even by herindomitably optimistic chatter and elaboratestrategies for getting through her day.

In these four plays, then, Becketttransformed the insight that imitating aprocess of disintegration itself requiresstrict formal control into an approach topractical play-writing. The plays are allconceptually based on a contrast between theabortive projects and survival strategies ofthe characters on the one hand, and thepatterned rundown in which these ‘versions ofself’ are enmeshed on the other. In Play, hewould push this insight still further, bymaking an underlying ‘process’ into an evenmore explicit and autonomous ‘system’,controlling each and every fragmentedutterance.

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