Samuel Beckett_ecology of Negation

8/11/2019 Samuel Beckett_ecology of Negation

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P A U L S A U N D E R S

Samuel Becketts Trilogy and theEcology of Negation

In his struggle to proceed without being too disgusted with hisown verbiage, Becketts Malone cannot bring himself to employthe conventions of realism in his descriptions of the naturalenvironment one might say that he refuses to be a nature writer.A few sentences after Malone launches into a description of ties between urban and rural economies, he abruptly concludes, I cantdo it (Beckett, 1958, 196); likewise, one of his last efforts to describea landscape in detail ends with the exasperated excoriation, Tohell with all this fucking scenery (Beckett, 1958, 278), which isalmost a statement of programme for Becketts Trilogy as a whole.As Malones ornery attitude illustrates, Becketts prose work is atodds with the kind of ecocriticism most prominently advanced by Lawrence Buell (2001, 2005) who insists that environmentalrealism allows for greater delity to ecological issues. In fact,Becketts work presents us with a negative ecology that claimsquite the opposite: that it is the conventions of realism and thecommon sense view of nature it supports that are implicated inthe domination of nature. Becketts ecology is negative in Adornos

Journal of Beckett Studies 20.1 (2011): 5477Edinburgh University PressDOI: 10.3366/jobs.2011.0005 The editors, Journal of Beckett Studieswww.eupjournals.com/jobs


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56 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S

reiterating what Timothy Morton has controversially identied asan ecocritical clich that the subject object/binary, which radicalecologists identify as the root of modern ecological calamity, must be dissolved he does not offer much insight into Becketts ratherambivalent and self-reexive relationship with this idea, nor doeshe draw enough attention to how the modernist peculiaritiesof Becketts concept of nature inform his negotiation of it.Drawing on insights from Herbert Marcuse, a theorist who seemstemperamentally at odds with Beckett but who actually sharesmany of his concerns, 2 and from Mortons inuential reassessmentof ecocriticism in Ecology Without Nature, this article attemptsto provide a more comprehensive account of Becketts negativeecology and to reect on its strengths as well as his own immanentcritique of its weaknesses.

Habit, Ignorance, and the Suffering of Being: Proustand Part One of Molloy

In his early essay Proust Beckett suggests that there is a necessaryrelationship between negativity and a deeper experience of nature.

Here Beckett proposes a surface and depth ontology comparableto Sanford Schwartzs matrix of modernism, where quotidianreality is produced by limiting what Nietzsche termed the chaosof sensations and creating a more useful, more intelligible, andmore comfortable, but by no means more real world. 3 His essayis also suggestive of Bergsons claim in Matter and Memory thatthe nervous systems primary function is not to reveal reality, butto limit it, to edit it so to speak, into useful forms that allowfor self-preservation and ontological security (436). The objectiveworld we inhabit is thus one of habit, a compromise effected between the individual and his environment (Beckett, 2006, 515)where utility rather than actuality literally determines the nature of things. Habits instrumental reications are operative in biologicaltime as the organisms drive to self-preservation, and in historicaltime as Marcuses reality principle the historical constructionof human subjectivity and external nature. 4 For Beckett we canovercome habit and return to pure sensation only by cultivating


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Becketts Trilogy and the Ecology of Negation 57

a kind of enabling ignorance, which in the context of his discussionof Proust is associated with the unedited upsurge of involuntarymemory.

Beckett connects emancipation from habit and its hardwiredfunctions with the experience of an ambivalent sort of freedom:

The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness,it was also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform thatsecond function, when it is opposed by a phenomenon thatit cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiarconcept, when, in a word, it betrays its trust as a screen to spareits victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and the victim,now an ex-victim, for a moment free, is exposed to that reality(Beckett, 2006, 517).

He describes this freedom almost ecstatically, in prose that couldhave been written by Marcuse himself save for its insistence thatthe revelation of being the stuff of nature as it appears outside of the imperative to use and produce is identied as the source of apeculiar kind of misery rather than pleasure:

for a moment, the boredom of living is replaced by thesuffering of being . . . that is, the free play of every faculty.Because the pernicious devotion of habit paralyses ourattention . . . our current habit of living is . . . incapable of dealing with the mystery of a strange sky or a strangeroom, with any circumstance unforeseen in her curriculum . . .[But when] the atrophied faculties come to the rescue . . . themaximum value of our being is restored (Beckett, 2006, 516).

For Marcuse the free play of faculties (1964, 240) (he uses thesame phrase as Beckett) can achieve reconciliation with nature because it is commensurate with the dissolution of the rigid dualitydividing dominant, sovereign subject from passive, inert object; forthe more gloomy, Schopenhauerian Beckett it allows for renewedaccess to being in the form of suffering which paradoxicallyyields to peaceful receptivity after the subject is jarred out of its complacent belief in its own sovereignty and the stability


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of the reied world it projects. For both writers, despite theirdifferent dispositions and vocabularies, the negation of nature asit is represented and experienced in the twentieth century allowsfor a breath of what Beckett describes as the only paradise thatis not the dream of a madman (2006, 544) a realm of peaceand vague potentiality beyond the veneer of convention. For Jonathan Bate it is this passiveness (2000, 278) before being, thiseschewal of instrumentalism, that signies progressive ecologicalconsciousness, if not political environmentalism.

Molloy, an abject character with privileged access to the chaosof sensations, invokes the possibilities inherent in negation whilesimultaneously invoking its failure to have much of an impact onthe society it challenges. Molloy embodies the enabling ignoranceBeckett invokes in Proust: he is free from habit because he ismostly devoid of assumptions regarding the world around himand cannot internalise social norms. 5 Molloys external world isas unstable as his subjectivity: he fails to endow his world withproperties that would allow him to travel through it with greaterease and to relate his experiences to others. At times Molloy lookslike a grotesque and comically ineffectual deep ecologist, such aswhen he forget[s] to be and fuses seamlessly with the roots andtame stems (Beckett, 1958, 46) in Lousses garden while being

kept under her care like a household dog. Reecting on the lackof stability that surrounds him while gazing through a windowat the shifting boughs of a tree, Molloy concedes, It was I whowas not natural enough to enter into that order [the order of natural causes] and appreciate its niceties (Beckett, 1958, 44). Inthis passage Molloy distances himself from nature, but by naturehe means nature as disclosed by the natural sciences nature asa system of laws and drives and the nature of convention orconsensus reality. While Molloy is indeed distant from scienticnature and common sense nature, he is identiable with nature- being in his very failure to enter into the niceties of these modesof experience and representation. In short, from the perspectiveof Becketts ecological modernism, Molloy is unnatural precisely because he is too much like nature.

Molloys ability to respond to the interpellations of interlopersand authority gures, to distinguish forms from the formlessnessthat underlies them, and to tell a story rooted in a consensus


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most importantly, to walk like him, with little rapid steps, his headup, his breathing even and economical, his arms swinging, lookingneither to left nor right, apparently oblivious to everything andin reality missing nothing (Beckett, 1958, 128); he authorises onlyone pastime, the study of botany, whereas indolence and play are banned despite Morans own secret sympathy for gazing at plantsin their innocence and simplicity (Beckett, 1958, 99). Moranstyrannical attitude towards his son parallels his attitude towardsthe world he captures in his reports. However, his authority is farmore tenuous than he can admit to himself. Early in his narrative itis already clear that he is haunted by disturbing phantoms:

I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blooddrains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging,avoiding one another, assails me on all sides . . . each pinpointof skin screams a different message, I drown in the sprayof phenomena. It is at the mercy of these sensations, whichhappily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work.It is thanks to them that I nd myself a meaning. (Beckett,1958, 111)

Later in his narrative, Moran associates this experience with Molloyand divulges that he has long apprehended and unsuccessfullystalked an inner and an outer Molloy (115), phantoms representingwhat Moran must repress in order to maintain his productivityand sense of security, his world of solid[s] in the midst of other solids (Beckett, 1958, 108). Like Woolfs Mr Ramsay fromTo The Lighthouse, Moran nds meaning only in preserving thestable reality that he knows is relentlessly threatened by unrealphenomena, but, in ghting this battle self-reexively, has alreadyconceded defeat.

Upon entering the Molloy country, which for Molloy wasdensely forested, Moran nds only meagre copses and barrenelds (134) but gets lost in an abstract wilderness which threatensto dissolve his world. Moran is initially horried by the sprayand realises that he is in danger of offending Youdi, but latersurrenders himself to the beauties of the scene (Beckett, 1958, 145)and luxuriates in its gradual destruction of his selfhood and world


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and the concomitant onset of paralysis in his legs. By choosingto masturbate in a forest clearing, to yield to the fatal pleasureprinciple (Beckett, 1958, 99) rather than to doggedly pursue hisobjective, Moran has, in Marcusian terms, rejected the repressiondemanded by his reality principle and immersed himself in theinnocence and simplicity (Beckett, 1958, 99) of the aestheticdimension. Thus the dissolution of Morans ordered world and hisability to negotiate it in a seamless yet disconnected style liberateshim from Youdi and allows him to experiment with a new attitudetowards his environment. When he nally returns to his homeafter living like an animal for an indeterminate span of time, heelects to give up being a man, to live in the garden with the wild birds, and to listen to an alternate voice associated not only withhis own inner life, but also with the non-human language he cannow hear emitting from all things.. His thoughts about his bees aresynecdochic of his greater transformation:

And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study allmy life, and never understand . . . for me, sitting near mysun-drenched hives, it would always be a noble thing tocontemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of a man like me, exiled in his manhood. And I would never domy bees the wrong I had done my God, to whom I had beentaught to ascribe angers, my fears, desires, and even my body(Beckett, 1958, 169).

To use an imperfect term supplied by deep ecology, Moransexperience of nature is no longer anthropocentric: he has given uptrying to understand and to dominate, and has instead opted to be receptive to nature-being, to let things be, a stance that eithercorrects the mistakes of history or is frivolous and meaningless(Beckett, 1958, 169).

Morans role in Molloy is reminiscent of the role of the (strawman) realist in treatises of modernist aesthetics such as Beckettsown Proust: his deceptive over-condence and sense of securityand his corresponding gait and demeanour are parodic of thepretensions of realism, which Beckett explicitly links with habitin his essay. After his paralyzing metamorphosis, however, Moran


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reports that description is contrary to his principles (Beckett, 1958,150) and violently murders an avatar of his earlier self who comesin search of his own elusive Molloy, infuriating Moran with hisimperious questions and inadequate descriptions (151). Moransinsistence that he will no longer attempt to imprison the birdsin the language of his past reports, that he will attune himself to their language, and that he will nd a new language withwhich to speak of them, ties this metamorphosis to a renewedunderstanding of language and representation. 7 At best realism,which is after all idiomatic, reproduces not reality but conventions,a now familiar critique that is associated with poststructuralism but which found an earlier expression in modernist aesthetics.Indeed, looking at Molloy as a critique of realism allows us to seethat it is something of a belated allegory for modernism itself, anallegory that reproduces the successes and the failures of an entiremovement. It is also an allegory of what I term modernist ecology:the novels well known nal lines I went back into the houseand wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.It was not midnight. It was not raining (Beckett, 1958, 162) linktwo features of modernist ideology, anti-referential aesthetics andhigher mimesis, with the relinquishment of control over nature,suggesting that modernist modes of representation are deeply

ecological, that they are ecological in form while realism can beecological only in content.Morans transformation illustrates the incompatibility of the

logic of modernist ecology with realist ecocriticism because it isthe earlier Moran who describes his region realistically, insists hisson practice botany, and prides himself on faithfully capturinghis environment in reports a Moran who shares something withBuells ecocritic who is associated with instrumental dominationand monadic detachment from nature. But what are we to thinkof an ecology of ignorance for which, to modify Becketts wellknown dictum, to think ecologically is to fail? What kind of ecologywould celebrate Molloy, who passively communes with nature- being but knows next to nothing about the scientic ecologistsnature and would not care much for the environmental activists?The ethos of ignorance Beckett invokes through his haplesscharacter does challenge the ecocidal status-quo within its ownhorizon by negating the vilied reications of realist nature and


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is aligned with the mode of proto-ecological critique PatrickMurphy and David Roberts identify as romantic modernism (xi).However, perhaps it is Moran rather than unnatural Molloy who best embodies the logic of Becketts ecology. Morans modernistproject, which departs from renewed ignorance in the spirit of receptive failure, is portrayed as a break from an abstract sourceof oppression, a break which suggests that new ways of being-in-the-world might be possible, though his narrative can only hint atwhat such a reorientation would entail. For the most part Beckettworks within the horizon of the pre- Silent Spring nineteen-fties,portraying his nascent ecology as it might appear through theeyes of the twentieth century at large: as abject and ineffectual asnothing.

The question remains: what is the value of Becketts ecology,which appears damnably metaphysical from a contemporaryviewpoint, especially considering that it admits its own failurein advance? And if it does fail, can it nonetheless enrich ourunderstanding of environmental issues in a way that discourses of common sense or realism cannot? In order to answer this questionIll have to move on to the next two novels in the Trilogy, but rstIll look back to Watt , a novel that explores the limitations of theproblematic kind of ontological change that might be allowable for

Beckett.

The Possibility of Change (without Change?) in Watt

The notion of a kind of change that is at once profoundand meaningless, revolutionary and without consequence iscentral to Watt . Watt tells the story of its titular charactersservitude/apprenticeship at the mysterious Mr. Knotts house andthe concomitant collapse of his nave empiricism. Knott whosename suggests negativity (not) and a perplexing or irresolvableimpasse (knot) has, like Godot, often been interpreted interms of an allegory of apophatic religion that identies himas the unknowable godhead. Yet there are consistent andstrong suggestions that the elusive Knott represents modernistnature-being, which, like the godhead of negative theology, is


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apprehensible but lacks positive qualities. For instance, Knottclimbs the trees on his wild grounds like an animal (198) and iscompared to a tree himself (57); he emits bizarre sounds withoutsymbolic meaning that sometimes suggest birdsong or the soundof owing water (147); he favours taking his meals in a form thatreduces their discrete components to a homogenous broth (87);he assumes a different aspect every time he appears, yet he cannever be seen clearly or described with precision (one of Wattsendeavours is to see him face to face, though he is frightened of what he might encounter) (146147); and attempts to understandhis motivations are mocked for their anthropomorphic insolence(Beckett, 1959, 202). The servants in Knotts house are charged withcaring for this weird master, but their duty seems to entail nothingmore than bearing witness to a mystery that ultimately revealsnothing to them other than nothingness itself the amorphousepistemological darkness behind outward appearances.

One of the novels most striking passages is a monologuedelivered to Watt by Arsene, another of Knotts servants and Wattspredecessor, upon his arrival at the house; here Arsene offers hisown enigmatic account of what is to be discovered at Knotts andforeshadows the reversed metamorphoses (Beckett, 1959, 44) thatwill transform Watt over the course of his stay. Arsenes speech

centres around a seemingly trivial experience he undergoes in oneof the rare moments of leisure he can steal at the house. Speakingof Watt as a generic representative of Knotts servants, Arsenedescribes how Watt will nonetheless eventually lose his grip on therealm of common sense appearances and come to sense himself dissolving into the surrounding environment in the manner of Molloy:

He feels it. The sensations, the premonitions of harmony areirrefragable, of imminent harmony, when all outside him will be he, the owers that he is among him, the sky the sky that is

above him, the earth trodden the earth treading, and all soundhis echo. (Beckett, 1959, 41)

Yet this ecological revelation will remain conned to rare momentsof rhapsody, and will by no means replace the more pragmatic


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orientation required to get through the work required for survival.Nonetheless, Arsene does nd enough unproductive moments toeventually achieve the parodic bodhi8 he ostensibly advances as theultimate endpoint of engagement with Mr. Knott an ambiguousrevelation that strikes him as he smokes his pipe against arock wall, listening to sights and sounds that demand nothing,ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing (Beckett,1959, 39) and his account does not foreclose the possibility thatthe seemingly subjective experience of ontological change mightindeed be capable of producing actual as opposed to apparentchange.

Leaning against the wall, Arsene feels a sudden qualitativechange, a change other than a change of degree (Beckett, 1959, 44),that seems to alter things fundamentally while effecting no changeon another register. He remains convinced that the change is notmere subjective fancy:

To conclude from this that the incident was internal would, Ithink, be rash. For my how shall I say? my personal systemwas so distended at the period of which I speak that thedistinction between what was inside it and what was outsideit was not at all easy to draw. Everything that happenedhappened inside it, and at the same time everything thathappened happened outside it . . . The sun on the wall, sinceI was looking at the sun on the wall at the time, underwentan instantaneous and I venture to say radical change of appearance. It was the same sun and the same wall, or solittle older that the difference may be safely disregarded, but sochanged that I felt I had been transported, without my havingremarked it, to some quite different yard, and to some quitedifferent season, in an unfamiliar country. (Beckett, 1959, 44)

This passages collapse of subjective and objective transformationmakes it emblematic of ecological change writ as rupture andreform of the reality principle. While Arsene can clearly detect ashift in his own relationship to the object world, he cannot convincehimself that there is any ground to distinguish between alteredsubjectivity and altered objectivity indeed the change is thought


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to have affected not subject or object per se, but the [h]ymeneal(Beckett, 1959, 43) barrier or tympanum (to use a term fromThe Unnamable) that articially separates them. The rupture of thetympanum delivers Arsene over to what he calls existence off theladder (Beckett, 1959, 43), a condition where reliable boundaries between self and other cannot be maintained, and a glimpseof what lies behind convention is consequently granted.Arseneequates this experience with the forgotten horrors of joy (Beckett,1959, 43): it allows him to joyfully discover the contingency of habit,which is at the same time a horric unveiling of nature-beingsrefusal of the principium individuationis the abyssal, Dionysianquality of nature which so captivated Nietzsche and its relatedcapacity to both expand and devour the apprehending subject.

Timothy Morton calls the blur of subject and object, inner andouter that Arsene apprehends ambience. For Morton, ambience isthe goal of much of ecological writing inasmuch as such writingattempts to create an impression of a circumambient world anenvironment that is material and physical, though somewhatintangible (33). It is also the goal of much of philosophicalmodernism; Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, forexample, are all environmental thinkers inasmuch as they are allpreoccupied in their own way with our immersion in nature-being,

something that is not quite a thing, yet not quite nothing, not quitea tangible thing over there, yet not quite a projection of the mind(Morton, 56). For Morton, while ambience is valuable because itinterferes with attempts to set up a unied, transcendent naturethat could become a symptomatic fantasy thing (77) in otherwords because it mediates against problematic realist accountsof nature it fails as a practical way of thinking ecologically because its insistence on abject nature makes it impossible tolocate any kind of object to safeguard; indeed, and here Mortonuses Kristevas language, ambience is the very genotext (in myterms, nature-being) from which the phenotext (nature over there,nature as a congeries of objects) emerges in the rst place. 9 While,as Kristeva intimated, the unveiled genotext has revolutionarypotential because it destabilises the symbolic order of the phenotextand draws attention to its constructed character, it certainly cannotoffer any kind of ethical guidance, something nature is reportedto do in much of nature writing and environmental ethics alike.


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Ethical choices are therefore always left to the human subject in theend, which, like the world of work, continues to hold sway afterMarcusian reconciliation seems to have been effected.

So for Morton, while ambience is liberatory, it is also anideological dead end, or at best it is a relatively innocuousepiphenomenon with potentially misleading instructive value.Morton appositely describes its endpoint: The ultimate fantasyof ambience is that we could actually achieve ecology withouta subject. Ecological awareness would just happen to us, asimmersively and convincingly as a shower of rain (183). 10 Thisassessment would seem to foreclose the possibility that ambienceis essential for ecology in the nal analysis, and to deny thevalidity of Arsenes experience of ontological change. Such changeis real in the sense that there is nothing authoritative to check itagainst (or rather that there is nothing but the authority of habitto check it against), but it appears to be mere fantasy when it isnot experienced collectively (a utopian event that never comes).Morton would be wrong about ecology if spontaneous collectiveontological change were possible, and perhaps this is the hopethat sustains modernist ecology even in Becketts work its mostmoribund version, and self-reexively so. Yet Becketts work ismaniacal in its pursuit of ecology without a subject, to use

Mortons term, even as its willingness to recognise the inevitablereturn of the subject might otherwise position it as the verykind of enlightened Cartesianism (180) Morton advocates as analternative to the problematic vagaries of ambience. Nowhere isthis tendency to juxtapose the most radically negative experimentsin ecology without a subject with the inevitability of the Cartesianpicture more evident than in last novel of the Trilogy, whichexplores the most extreme limits of modernist ecology.

The Unnamable and the Impossibility (and Necessity)of Modernist Ecology

The Unnamable answers to the various impasses Ive identied withfurther paradoxes: ontological critique is the deepest and the mostuseless mode of ecological critique; ecology without a subject isimpossible and indispensible; modernist ecology must be practiced


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because it cannot be practiced. Each of these paradoxes celebratesthe modernist project, specically its experimental attempt tohonour the radical alterity of the object world while harnessing itsenabling nothingness to provoke a kind of ontological revolution;however, each paradox also ironically undercuts this aim, andindicates the failure of ecological modernism. Still, if The Unnamablecontends with the paradoxes of modernist ecology, its ultimateconclusion is that one must push doggedly onward, towards agoal that is always being unmasked as impossible that the truthof modernist ecology lies not in locating something concrete orpracticable but in its willingness to pursue a horizon that neverdraws any nearer. If The Unnamable has something of interestto offer ecocritics, it is that this esoteric pursuit can serve asa valuable supplement to the worldly machinations of practicalenvironmentalisms and to the politicised realism of naturalist andenvironmental justice ecocriticism.

The Unnamable creates a narrative voice that is itself the ab- jection of nature-being it imagines ecology without a subjectand lets ambience itself speak. If Molloy, Watt, and MalonesSapo/Macmann are lik e or come to live as if they were nature-being,The Unnamable is nature-being. However, he 11 should not beconfused with the Kantian thing-in-itself, which is inaccessible

even to him, even though he identies with it; as my discussionof Arsenes monologue implied, this is because nature-being isexperienced as an ambient blend of subject and object, or negatedsubjectivity (and therefore objectivity), while the thing-in-itself isradically unthinkable and unrepresentatable: nature unperceived,without even a dissolved or revolutionised subject. While in Wattnature-being may have seemed radically Other, The Unnam-ables unusual perspec relative (and only relative!) proximity tothe humanist subject. The Unnamables speculation that he is atympanum which demarcates the borders of subject and objecteven as it allows these realms to blend into each other suggests asmuch:

Perhaps thats what I am, the thing that divides the worldin two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside,that can be as thin as foil, Im neither one side nor the other,Im in the middle, Im the partition, Ive two surfaces and no


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thickness, perhaps thats what I feel, myself vibrating, Im thetympanum, one the one hand the mind, on the other the world,I dont belong to either. (Beckett, 1958, 383)

The Unnamable cannot be named in a language that insists on adivision between subject and object since he exists between them;and later he denies that there are two realms to divide in the rstplace there are not two places, there are not two prisons (Beckett,1958, 410) although these realms continue to assert themselvesnonetheless, however altered. The stuff of common sense natureis entirely absent from this narrative there is not even a scrapof nature to talk about (Beckett, 1958, 394) but it is importantto remember that The Unnamables movement away from natureis a movement towards nature, that is to say towards himself,nature-being, and ultimately the unknowable thing-in-itself. Hisdilemma is that, unlike in Malone Dies where Malone nds freedomin death, not even the peace of nothingness is possible anymore: hemust speak, and thus he must serve as his own oppressor even as,like Malone, he embarks on a liberatory project of self-realizationthrough the mutilation of language which will attempt to eschewall forms of domination.

Morton argues that a sustained ambient narrative is impossible,

since the subject and object inevitably resurface from theunnamable blur. The perpetual cycle of self-abnegation andself-assertion that marks The Unnamables narrative (which isequally the appearance and disappearance of things) suggests asmuch, even though he dreams of nally grinding this cycle toa halt. However, the fact that ambience, even if it is admittedas an existential reality, is impossible to sustain as a mode of representation (or practical action) does not mean that thereis nothing to be gained from attempts to get beyond subjectand object, and Morton acknowledges as much. If we acceptAndrew Biros reading of Marcuses work, which insists thatbasic repression, the essential alienation required for survival,ensures the failure of subject/object reconciliation only in the mostextravagant, terminal sense (195), it becomes apparent that theambient imagination is not so much about collapsing any andall distinctions between subject and object, but about overcomingonly the surplus repression (Marcuse, 1966, 35) that sustains the


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metaphysics of domination. 12 In this sense, and here I depart fromMorton to some extent, the fact that ambience ambience thatwould achieve some kind of terminal closure cannot be sustainedas a reality principle is not particularly important as far as itspotential as a mode of ecological critique is concerned. Beckettdraws our attention to its failure not to totally discredit it, butto acknowledge its limitations and ideal character. His characterstry to live sustained ambience, and this teaches us something of importance even if they fail or are destroyed in the process.

The Unnamables project is best understood in these terms.Even as he narrates from the position of ambient nature-being,he has not fully realised the impossible task of conquering basicrepression. This fantasy and terminal reconciliation is always afantasy could only be realised if he could become Worm, hisnal creation, the anti-Mahood (Beckett, 1958, 346). Worm isthe true thing-in-itself; his appearance draws attention to therelative familiarity of nature-being, which is revealed not to beso antithetical to the subject after all (because, unlike Worm, whois radically Other, it is the subject as much as the object). Evendescribing Worm, or bringing him up at all, humanises him (360)and thus destroys him. While nature-being is realised through thenegation of realist nature, any realization of Worm would mean his

cancellation: even in a blur of ambience, where all boundaries have been exploded and no distinctions remain, Worm is elsewhere.Hence, given my use of the term ecology, there can be no ecologywhere Worm is concerned, because there is no relationship betweenWorm who is not even the blur out of which subject and object areextracted and anything else in the rst place. Worm cannot be thesubject of ontological change: unlike relations between subject andobject, he is unchanging (346). Not even a revivied (or mutilated)language can speak of him. Yet the purpose of the Trilogys ecologyof negation is not only to explode the phenotext, but to nd Worm,to speak Worm, and, in The Unnamable, to nally become Worm.The novels nal statement is a testimony to the needfulness andimpossibility of its aim:

he must be somewhere, he is made of silence . . . hes the oneto be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the oneto speak, but he cant speak, then I could stop, Id be he, Id


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never subjectively experience the utopia it dreams of engendering(Agamben, 6). 13 While Beckett is certainly no systemic Hegelian,The Unnamables fantasies about Worm, as Ive suggested, in-dicate the same: if he were Worm, there would be no ecology,no prospect or need for ecological change he would be thesilence. And, as an ecological project or otherwise, this is literallyunfathomable.

However, continually striving for something impossible doesprovide a kind of insurance that reconciliation will remain openas a problem. If the movement toward ambience results insome semblance of a coherent ecology, the movement towardsWorm resists such formulations and ensures that any account of what constitutes basic and surplus repression will be challengedwithout rational limitation. Marcuses notion of fantasy sheds lighton the mythic function of this endeavour: for Marcuse fantasypreserves, against regnant accounts of the real and conceivable, animpossible attitude (1966, 165) that will not accept even the mostindispensible forms of alienation and domination. The wisdom of this stance lies in its ability to preserve a utopian ecological vision,to make sure reconciliation always lies just over the horizon, andultimately, as Fredric Jameson puts it (speaking of social change),to provoke the mind to a schematizing activity of the . . . political

imagination which has not yet found its concept (88). Interestingly,deep ecologys aspirations appear in a new light when they areinterpreted in terms of fantasy: the positive ideal of ontologicalchange acts, rather counter-intuitively, as an inbuilt deconstructiveimpulse, forcing us to incessantly question the concepts that wouldguide any environmentalist project. The real goal for deep ecologyis, on this interpretation, to make sure that we are always inthe process of limiting the metaphysics of domination (and, as aform of ecological thought experiment rather than the universalstraw man of ecological critique, exposing the danger involved inentrusting the future of the natural world to political agents forwhom it can be nothing other than an imperilled resource, evenwhen this appears inevitable). The Unnamable suggests that this isequally a goal of modernist ecology, which is in this sense an earlyand more vital expression of deep ecological thought.


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Epilogue: The Perils of Being Blind to Mahood

When The Unnamables persona Mahood is conned to a jar andused by an enterprising restaurateur as a piece of raw materialto prop up a menu, he is surprised to discern that while thepeople of the town look at him, no one seems to really see him.Reecting on his own invisibility, Mahood realises that, despite thefact that he seems to embody something outside of his societyspurview something genuinely antithetical his power to start arevolution or even a minor stir is rather limited:

Though not exactly in order I am tolerated by the police. Theyknow I am speechless and consequently incapable of takingunfair advantage of my situation to stir up the populationagainst its governors, by means of burning oratory during therush hour or subversive slogans whispered, after nightfall, to belated pedestrians the worse for drink. And since I have lostall my members, with the exception of the onetime virile, theyknow also that I shall not be guilty of any gestures liable to beconstrued as inciting to alms. (Beckett, 1958, 327)

In Mahood we recognise the plight of the modernist who

endeavours to change the object world through artistic vision, andalso the at once starkly limited and sublimely limitless domainof Bates ecopoetics, those literary experiments in being-in-the-world which can push us to experience nature differently, yetcannot directly spell out manifestos or engage in environmentalpolitics. 14 The peril of denying the relevance of these experimentsis that they preserve both a corrosively critical and a utopianelement in ecological thought, and, at least in Becketts case, avoidcomplacent positivism, which is an ecological problem in its ownright regardless of the political imperatives that undergird anygiven manifestation of it. Similarly, the explicit or tacit tendencyto advance realism as a more ethical or ecological mode of representation, the political and pedagogical practicality of thisposition notwithstanding, risks closing off valuable avenues of critique and sties the ecological imagination. Surely, as Morton


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contends, ethical choices are best entrusted to enlightened subjectsfunctioning in a consensus reality (a public sphere) with ontologicalunderpinnings that might appal some of the more zealous amongthe ecological modernists, but rapprochement between such ethicalor political realism and ecopoetics is still required for a truly vitalecological culture (in the academy or otherwise). As such it isimportant to recognise that it is the impossible attitude of Beckettsnovels, their failure to be practically ecological and the signicantpitfalls of this failure, that, in a nal paradox, makes them sosurprisingly indispensible as ecological experiments, in their owncontext and in todays.

N O T E S

1. My conception of a modernist form of ecology is closely tied tothis formal tendency in philosophical and aesthetic modernism, which isexemplied in Becketts Trilogy. When I speak generally of modernism ormodernist ecology I have this particular tendency in mind, which of coursecannot account for the ever expanding multiplicity of modernisms broughtto light by contemporary scholarship. The extent to which this version orinterpretation of modernism is ecological is developed throughout thisarticle.

2. Adorno is certainly the more obvious choice for discussing Beckettand ecology (or Beckett and modernism for that matter), and muchof value has been written concerning Beckett, Adorno, and questionsof nature, for example Nigel Mapps excellent chapter No Nature, NoNothing: Adorno, Beckett, Disenchantment in Adorno and Literature. Whilework on Adorno and Beckett certainly informs this article, I nd thatcombining Beckett and Marcuse offers some valuable new insights intoBecketts ecological thought.

3. Nietzsche posits a realm of conceptual abstraction making up thestuff of everyday experience and scientic knowledge a reality thatis arranged, simplied, schematised, interpreted through and through

(1969, 263264) subtended by a chaos of sensations, a sea of forcesowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally ooding back(1969, 550) with no coherent purpose or stable form. In his classicThe Matrix of Modernism Schwartz shows how this kind of distinction between stable forms and unedited experience appears in manyimportant philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,


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11. I refer to The Unnamable using the masculine personal pronounonly to avoid the grammatical confusion involved in repeatedly using it,which is more appropriate for obvious reasons (though The Unamabledoes primarily refer to itself as if it were gendered male).

12. For Marcuse, surplus repression and its correlative surplusalienation are created by society, whereas basic repression the editingrequired to create an object world is fundamental for the survival of thehuman organism, and would exist even in a perfect society. Biro suggeststhat Marcuses utopia can only be understood in terms of the eradicationof surplus repression, not in terms of total, terminal reconciliation betweensubject and object, even if visions of terminal reconciliation are instructiveas ecological mythologies (see my discussion below).

13. Kojve writes: The disappearance of Man at the end of History isnot a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been fromall eternity: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or givenBeing. What disappears is Man properly so called that is, Action negatingthe given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object (citedin Agamben, 6).

14. In The Song of the EarthBate drawsa distinction between ecopolitics,programmatic, exoteric environmental politics, and ecopoetics, esotericliterary experiments working on the ontological register (266). Accordingto Bate ecopoetics have an indirect relationship with politics but, likemodernist aesthetics, cannot function effectively when they are subsumedto them.

W O R K S C I T E D

Adorno, Theodor (2000), Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed.R. Tiedermann, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford UP.

Agamben, Giorgio (2004), The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell,Stanford: Stanford UP.

Barry, Elizabeth (2006), Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Clich , New York:Palgrave MacMillan.

Bate, Jonathan (2000), The Song of the Earth, Cambridge: Harvard UP.Beckett, Samuel (2006), Proust. The Grove Centenary Edition Volume IV:

Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, ed. P. Auster, New York: Grove Press.Beckett, Samuel (1958), Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,New York: Grove Press.

Beckett, Samuel (1959), Watt . New York: Grove Press.Bergson, Henri (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S.

Palmer, New York: Zone Books.


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Biro, Andrew (2005), Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation fromNature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond, Toronto:University of Toronto Press.

Buell, Lawrence (2001), Writing for an Endangered World, Cambridge Ma.:Harvard UP.

Buell, Lawrence (2005), The Future of Environmental Criticism, Oxford:Blackwell.

Davies, Paul (2006). Strange Weather: Beckett from the Perspective of Ecocriticism, Beckett after Beckett, ed. A. Uhlmann and S. E. Gontarski,Gainsville: University of Florida Press.

Harrison, Robert Pogue (1993), Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Chicago:U of Chicago P.

Jameson, Fredric (1994), The Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia UP.Kristeva, Julia (1986), The Kristeva Reader, ed. T. Moi. Oxford: Blackwell,

1986.Mao, Douglas (1998), Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production,

Princeton: Princeton UP.Marcuse, Herbert (1978), The Aesthetic Dimension: A Critique of Marxist

Aesthetics, Boston: Beacon Press.Marcuse, Herbert (1966), Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into

Freud, Boston: Beacon Press.Marcuse, Herbert (1964), One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of

Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort,

trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Morton, Timothy (2007), Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental

Aesthetics, Cambridge: Harvard UP.Murphy, Patrick and Peter Roberts (2004), The Dialectic of Romanticism:

A Critique of Modernism, New York: Continuum.Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968), The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans.

W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage.Uhlmann, Anthony (1999), Beckett and Poststructuralism, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Wordsworth, William (2004), Guide to the Lakes, ed. E. de Slincourt,

London: Frances Lincoln.

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Samuel Beckett_ecology of Negation