Andrea Oppo

Philosophical Aesthetics
and Samuel Beckett

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
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Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Preface 11

Chapters

1 The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett: Essays and Writings 23

1.1 Beckett as Essayist: An Introduction 25
1.2 From Dante to Proust: The Literary Criticism Years 32
1.3 In Dialogue with Van Velde: Painting and Philosophy 53
1.4 Towards an Aesthetics of Disintegration 74

2 Adorno: Interpreter of Beckett 85

2.1 'Trying to Understand Endgame 88
2.2 Beckett in the Ästhetische Theorie 105
2.3 The Antinomy of Aesthetic Semblance 118
2.4 Beckett Beyond Adorno 135

3 The Cul de Sac of Critique:

Beckett's Late Work via Postmodern Philosophy 149
3.1 Beckett and the End of Modernity:
A Philosophical Perspective 154
3.2 Where Art Once Resided: The 'Penultimate Images' 177
3.3 The Final (Mute) Shot 191
3.4 The Result of an Art without Qualities 204
4 If the Body is Able to Think: Towards a Philosophy of Theatre 109 Acknowledgements
4.1 From Eye to Ear: A Differantial Shift 211
4.2 The Self as Object: Philosophy on Stage 224
4.3 Notes from Stagings: Beckett with Grotowski 237
With thanks to Dr Brian O'Connor and Professor Richard Kearney for their
4.4 Self on the Brink 250 guidance and support during the writing of my PhD research thesis, which
this work originates from. Special thanks are owed to Laurence Gambella for
Bibliography
2
53 his precious help in revising my English. Finally, I am grateful to the editorial
team at Peter Lang for giving me support in the preparation of this book.
Index 263
Preface

'How could I write, sign, countersign performatively texts which "respond"

to Beckett? How could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic
metalanguage ?'
J A C Q U E S DERKIDA, Acts of Literature

'So they build up hypotheses that collapse on top of one another, it's human,
a lobster couldn't do it'
S A M U E L B E C K E T T , The Unnamable

According to commentators generally, there are two ways of identifying

philosophy in Beckett. The first, in some sense 'genetic', relates to the intel-
lectual influences which certain philosophers, Descartes, Geulincx, Berkeley,
Kant and Schopenhauer et al., exercised over him. Their philosophical fin-
gerprints clearly mark Beckett's texts and match his biographical details. The
second, lacking any such tangible testimony, must necessarily be inter-textual -
a theoretical re-assembling of Beckett's oeuvre, connecting him to other con-
temporary philosophical thinkers, especially Heidegger, Sartre, Wittgenstein,
Adorno, Deleuze, Blanchot and Derrida. Some of these philosophers are
linked directly, having written about Beckett, others indirectly, through a
sort of'elective affinity'.
The first approach concerns the early years of Beckett's life and immedi-
ately introduces the question of foundationalism, which during this period
was manifestly the writer's main interest. The rationalist world of Descartes
played an important part in the development of the young Beckett, as too
his almost certainly 'accidental' discovery of Geulincx and Occasionalism.
As Beckett's publisher and close friend John Calder pointed out: 'Descartes
was a natural starting point for any student of French, as was the theological
world of Dante for anyone studying Italian literature. Beckett's first tutor at
Trinity College was Dr Arthur Luce, a philosopher who had written much
about both Descartes and Bishop Berkeley; these soon became potent influ-
ences on Beckett's thinking and writing'.1

i John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 4.
II Preface
This attraction to a philosophical quest for truth ä la Descartes, i.e. the
search for a first principle from which rational discourse might proceed, seems
to set the scene, together with a number of Dantesque images and situations, for
Beckett's early novels. This is certainly the case with Dream of Fair to Middling
Women (written in 1932 and published posthumously in 1993), More Pricks
than Kicks (1934) and Whoroscope, a poem, more ironic than philosophical,
penned in 1930, whose protagonist is an elderly Descartes, working as house
philosopher to Queen Christina of Sweden.
The real importance Beckett afforded to the philosophical problem of
foundationalism and the significance it had for each of these novels is, how-
ever, difficult to assess with any certainty. Thus, the Irish critic Vivian Mercier,
when discussing Beckett's early works, suggests that: 'Although Beckett's criti-
cal intelligence instantly perceived some of the possibilities latent in the use of
philosophic ideas as structural conveniences, his creative imagination did not
immediately learn how to make use of this insight'.2 He continues: 'Whoroscope
was based upon the biography of Descartes, not his philosophy; it was not
until Murphy that Beckett imagined a protagonist who conceived and lived
his life in accordance with certain theories put forward by Descartes and
Geulincx'.3
From the forties onwards, in fact - the great period of his English and
French prose fiction - a general philosophical mood begins to permeate all
Beckett's works, rendering them easily comprehensible, without the need for
the complex categories of Cartesian rationalism, Democritus's materialism or
ontological substance in Kant and post-Kantian idealism. Paul Davies in his
work on Beckett's prose of the period affirms that:
Beckett's fictions confront a civilization which is the theatre of (amongst other things)
a conflict between two powerful forces. One is the rational(izing) principle, cogito, abstract
reasoning, the conscious mind, will and design, determinism, positivism, the imposition
of extrinsic order. The historical index of this force is the Cartesian Enlightenment and
the empirical tradition [...] Beneath, above and against this force, is the opposite force,
often hidden, as yet inaccessible to conscious will: a sense of a primordial spring of life,
which does not respond to analysis.4
1 Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett. The Classic Study of a Modern Genius, London: Souvenir
Press Ltd, 1977, p. 166.
3 Ibid.
4 Paul Davies, 'Three novels and Four Nouvelles: Giving up the Ghost be born at last', in
The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. by John Pilling, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994, p. 43.
Preface 13
Though oversimplifying things slighdy, the dualism described here is a perfect
example of how philosophical Beckettian prose texts have become by this time.
This concurs with the general tendency of foundationalism to seek indubi-
table and evident, i.e. self-evident, knowledge. Rene Descartes' 'Cogito ergo
sum' epitomizes this tendency, attempting to establish what might be called
a transcendent critique and rationalist epistemology. Later on, Kant extends
the concept, using transcendental critique to examine how this 'I think' can
acquire any knowledge by asking what preconditions make it possible to engage
in the critique in the first place. Finally, as Simon Critchley underlines, 'when
the voice in The Unnamable writes, at the beginning of its exhausting 112-page
final paragraph, "I, of whom I know nothing", one might well want to pursue
the question of the "I" in Beckett and the continual conversation that it has
with the "Not I" [...] and how this issue becomes the veritable Brennpunkt of
post-Kantian idealism and romanticism - What a broadening of the mind!'5
The focus of such an interpretation, Critchley continues, would naturally be the
problem of the subject in and after Kant and, therefore, the whole question of
the status of philosophy; for - he concludes - although such a reading 'would
not be foolish or fallacious and might even offer an illuminating historical anal-
ogy between the discourses of modern philosophy and modernist literature,
nonetheless one feels that even such a clever interpretation inevitably both
lags behind the text that it is trying to interpret and overshoots it'.6
This entire difficulty in understanding Beckett's work in the light of its
inner philosophical references is also treated in a study by P. J. Murphy, entided
'Beckett and the philosophers'.7 Murphy argues that, despite a phenomenal
growth in Beckettian studies over the last three decades, 'the whole question
of Beckett's relationship to the philosophers is pretty obviously in need of a
major critical reassessment'.8 While agreeing with Mercier in recognizing the
5 Simon Critchley, 'Know Happiness - On Beckett', in Very Little... Almost Nothing. Death,
Philosophy, Literature, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 144.
6 Ibid.
7 P.J. Murphy, 'Beckett and the Philosophers', in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed.
by John Pilling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. On this subject see also:
John Fletcher, 'Samuel Beckett and the philosophers', Comparative Literature, 17 (1965),
pp. 43-56; Ruby Cohn, 'Philosophical fragments in the works of Samuel Beckett', in
Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Martin Esslin, Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965; and from the same author P.J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett:
Language for Beingin Samuel Beckett's Fiction, University of Toronto Press, 1990.
8 P. J. Murphy, 'Beckett and the Philosophers', op. cit., p. zzz.
II Preface
philosophical importance of Murphy, which represents the groundwork for
later breakthroughs especially in Beckett's post-trilogy creation,9 he also com-
ments on how 'Kant's influence on Beckett has been almost totally underes-
timated - until very recently, significant references being relegated to a few
footnotes - and how, indeed, Watt is a Kantian novel'.10 Finally, he points
to the transition from Schopenhauer to Kant to create a new, fertile way of
comprehending the philosophical roots of the Irish writer.
The first method of interpreting Beckett's philosophical Weltanschaaung,
outlined at the beginning, constitutes the main and broadest basis on which
to undertake a serious work on this subject: Descartes,11 Schopenhauer (who
seems to have exercised great influence on Beckett's Proust of 1931),12 Geulincx
(quoted in Murphy), to a lesser extent Spinoza and Berkeley,13 and eventually
Kant seem to be the philosopher who inspired Samuel Beckett most, accord-
ing to the references and quotations present in his novels.
But what did Beckett himself say about all these theories ? In one of his rare
interviews, granted in 1961 to Gabriel D'Aubarede of Les Nouvelles Litteraires,
as ever with considerable reluctance, he engaged in a spirited piece of dialogue
with his interviewer:
'Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?'
'I never read philosophers.'
'Why not?'
'I never understand anything they write.'
'All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists' problem of being may afford a
key to your works.'
9 See Sighle Kennedy, Murphy's Bed: a Study ofReal Sources and Surreal Associations in
Samuel Beckett's First Novel, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1971; Samuel Mintz,
'Beckett's Murphy, a "Cartesian Novel"', Perspective, 2.3 (1959), pp. 156-65; Michael
Mooney, 'Presocratic Scepticism: Samuel Beckett's Murphy Reconsidered', ELH, 49 (1982),
pp. 214-234.
10 P. J. Murphy, 'Beckett and the Philosophers', op. cit., p. 229.
11 See Edouard Morot-Sir, 'Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems', in Samuel Beckett: the
Art ofRethoric, ed. Edouard Morot-Sir, Howard Harper, Dougald McMillan, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1976.
12 In this regard P. J. Murphy argues that in Proust 'it is as if Beckett had just put down The
world as will and representation as he began to write it' (P. J. Murphy, 'Beckett and the
philosophers', op. cit., p. 234).
13 Film, written in 1963, begins with Berkeley's maxim Esse estpercipi ('To be is to be
perceived').
Preface 14
'There's no key or problem. I wouldn't have had any reason to write my novels if I could
have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.'14
Vivian Mercier suggests that Beckett's answers were strongly influenced
both by the fact that he was not in 'forthcoming mood', and that, by the time
of this interview, he was not reading philosophy at all.15 Perhaps more plausi-
bly, since D'Aubarede mentioned only contemporary philosophers specifically,
Beckett deliberately chose to confine his comments to them.
Whatever the truth of this episode, Beckett's words introduce us directly
to the second aforementioned way of interpreting his work philosophically -
as already implied, to some extent, in Simon Critchley's affirmation.
*
In November 1930 Beckett delivered a witty lecture in French entitled
Le Concentrisme, at Trinity College Dublin, about a 'non existent' French
poet, Jean du Chas. 16 Beckett invented an entire life story - mostly coincid-
ing with his own - for this imaginary poet, the founder of a similarly fantastic
literary movement called 'le concentrisme'. Du Chas was described as being
the author of a Discours de la Sortie or Discourse on Exits, an obvious play on
Descartes' Discours de la Methode. The debate which followed this lecture
was intended to explain how a writer's thought could be misinterpreted by
systematizing and founding it on logical assumptions. Thus, Beckett affirmed:
'What is crystal clear is that, if you insist on rigidifying the Idea of which he
speaks, on concretizing Kant's Thing-in-itself, you would be devaluing to the
level of a vaudeville by Labiche the art which, like a resolution of Mozart's, is
perfectly intellegible and perfectly inexplicable'.17
14 Gabriel D'Aubarede, 'Les Nouvelles Litteraires', 16 February 1961,1,7. The present transla-
tion is by Christopher Waters and it is taken from Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage,
ed. by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, London, Henley and Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 217.
15 Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, op. cit., pp. 160-161.
16 The episode is taken from Beckett's biography written by James Knowlson, Damned to Fame.
The Life ofSamuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury Publishing pic, 1997, pp. 121-122.
17 See Samuel Beckett, 'Le Concentrisme', in Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic
Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, London: Calder Publications, 2001, pp., 35-42 (first
published 1983). The English translation of this sentence is by John Pilling, quoted in
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life ofSamuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 122.
II
Preface
Without denying the influence which Descartes' principles exerted over
Beckett, if this means a method which fails to take other factors into account
(in ancient Greek, 'method' literally means alongside the road'), 'then Beckett'
as Richard Begam observes sagaciously 'declines to make the trip, heads for
the exit, looks not for the way in but the way out'.18 In fact, the predisposi-
tion for an immediate 'way out' becomes a touchstone of Beckett's subsequent
literature so that, like du Chas, his whole thought might be called a 'Discours
de la Sortie'. Further on in the lecture on 'Concentrisme', as James Knowlson
points out, Beckett continually restated to his student listeners that 'true art
has nothing to do with the Cartesian clear and distinct and that ultimately it
stirs in the murky waters of the inexplicable'.19
Aware of the Trinity College lecture or not, many critics still interpret
Beckett as a philosopher of the second variety, i.e., according to the inter-textual
connections in his thinking which, in radical opposition to 'concentrisme',
could well be said to be Vc-centric'. However, this second mode of reading
the writer has to contend with the enormous quantity of commentary it also
produced - almost unthinkable for a single author - in which a wide variety of
different philosophical categories are present, such as existentialism, structural-
ism, post-structuralism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. with the result that
it is practically impossible to summarize it in a short preface such as this.
If, on the one hand, this just seems to show how all the works of Beckett
are 'naturally' philosophical, on the other hand there is an obvious problem
about the credibility of such an assertion. Moreover, this approach poses the
more general difficulty of how Beckett, or any writer, can be reduced simply
to philosophical classifications, with all literary study thus running the risk
of being overtaken by an omnivalent, one might say omnivorous philosophi-
cal discipline.
The real enigma in all that has been said, however, remains the Beckettian
texts, which seem determined not to submit to any categorization, though
crying out for it. According to Simon Critchley, this peculiar resistance to
philosophical interpretation is rooted in the fact that 'his texts continually
seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the philosopher by showing them-
selves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations [...] something
18 Richard Begam, 'Beckett and Postfoundationalism, or, How Fundamental are those
Fundamental Sounds ?', in Beckett and Philosophy, ed. by Richard Lane, New York: Palgrave
Publishers Ltd, zooz, p. iz.
19 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, op. cit., p. izz.
Preface 17
essential to Beckett's language is lost by overshooting the text and ascending
into the stratosphere of metalanguage'.20 This is a point with which Jacques
Derrida would certainly agree: he sees any interpretative practice as a dredging
machine through which a literary text is fed to process a coherent meaning.
The problem, however, is that water and silt inevitably slip through the teeth of
the machine and, as Derrida writes, 'la matrice transcendentale laisse toujours
retomber le reste du texte'.21 It might well be implied that the search for medi-
ated meanings within a self-deconstructive writer like Beckett - who more
than any other emptied from within the concept itself of meaning - is precisely
what must be avoided. The identification, if not of a real 'method', at least of an
acceptable starting point in dealing with Beckett, as well as a way of listening
to and dialoguing with his texts (not, as often happens, taking them out of
context) are undoubtedly the two main difficulties with this approach.
Among the quasi-infinite 'pigeon-holings' of Beckett within one or other
current of contemporary thought, not to mention the innumerable ways of
reading his works 'philosophically', there is one current which is structurally
more salient: that composed of the contemporary continental philosophers
who have tried to interpret, in their own works Beckett's oeuvre (or a part of
it) as philosophical.22 While there is no guarantee, of course, that what they
have written about him was really his thought, it is also true that, examining
Beckett's own references and indications without a guide - as we saw before -
can lead even more easily down the wrong track. Furthermore, this external and
authentically philosophical 'eye' on the personality of the Beckett - especially
coming from interpreters such as Adorno, Deleuze, Blanchot, and the so-called
'Derridean critics'23 - places him rightly within the history of philosophy and
with much greater authority than freelance commentaries.
zo Simon Critchley, 'Know Happiness - On Beckett', op. cit., p. 141.
zi Jacques Derrida, Glas, Trans. J. P. Leavey Jr and R. Rand, Lincoln and London, Nebraska
University Press, 1986, p. Z05.
zz Richard Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., is a recent and useful work that offers
an interesting overview on the relation between Beckett and continental philosophers.
Z3 See in particular Angela Moorjani (Abysmal Games in the Novels ofSamuelBeckett, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 198z), Steven Connor (Samuel Beckett: Repetition,
Theory and Text, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), Thomas Trezise (Into the Breach. Samuel Beckett
and the Ends of Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 9 0 ) , Carla Locatelli
(Unwordingthe World: Samuel Beckett's Prose Works After the Nobel Prize, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) and Richard Begam (Samuel Beckett and the End
of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 9 9 5 ) . These authors were among the
II
Preface
However, in most recent criticism, there are two main theoretical frame-
works (perfectly compatible with each other) according to which Beckett's
work has been interpreted: on the one hand, a psychoanalytical and, above
all, Lacanian position; on the other, a deconstructive, literary and Derridean
(but also with abundant references to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition)
theory of signs and references. Nevertheless, while these have been and con-
tinue to be valuable approaches, it must be observed that they are limited, in
that they render Beckett's work too idiosyncratic and specialized, and often
ignore the more general issue of his art as a whole, of his questioning wider
themes such as the truth and meaning of a work of art. In this sense, the start-
ing point of this study must needs be a return to Beckett, primarily - to his
own writing, before and rather than searching for an interpretation of his
works. At a second stage, it aims to give to Adornos often ignored reading
of Beckett, its proper centrality and importance. Adorno is, in fact, the true
nerve centre of this work.
This book will look into a variety of aspects of Samuel Beckett's philosophy
and proceed by analyzing the readings these thinkers produced of his liter-
ary works. More especially, it will consider the question of his thought as a
'philosophy of art' - not in the Hegelian sense, of course, but more generally
as aesthetics, with the problem of art at the centre of philosophical reflection.
Accordingly, a title for this study such as 'Samuel Beckett and Philosophical
Aesthetics', with the Irish writer named first, would not be quite accurate,
since Beckett is more an object of interpretation in contemporary aesthetics
rather than a protagonist.
The principal aims pursued by this work are two-fold: first, to reconstruct
Beckett's philosophical aesthetics exhaustively, on the one hand, by reading
the author's own writings on the subjects of art-theory, aesthetics and literary
criticism (See Chapter i) and on the other, by analyzing in order of importance
and development, the main essays of'Beckett philosophers', commencing with
the fundamental texts of Adorno (Chapter 2) and concluding with single
comments by French thinkers such as Derrida, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou
(Chapter 3). In conclusion, Chapter 4 will consider an alternative 'way-out'
towards a philosophy of theatre, in relation to late Beckettian thought.
The second, more theoretical aim of this work - in some sense a conse-
quence of the first - derives directly from Adornos hypothesis: to demonstrate
first to inaugurate a criticism on Beckett based on Derrida's post-structuralist theory
(see at this regard Chapter 3, notes 6 and 79, and the whole section 1.4).
Preface 19
the centrality of the idea of artistic truth in Beckett's aesthetics, in order to
situate this correctly within the contemporary philosophical context. The
same idea that Lambert Zuidervaart considers the crucial theme in Adornos
Aesthetic Theory represents equally the heart of Beckett's thought. 'Truth con-
tent' (Wahrheitsgehalt) indicates the point of encounter of an irresolvable con-
flict between the Adornian claims of human autonomy on the one hand, and
the need for historical meaning, on the other. Adornos words in this regard
are thus seen to be highly significant: 'Beckett's plays are absurd not because
of the absence of any meaning, for then they would be simply irrelevant, but
because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history'.24
It is in this 'trial' that the truest philosophical work of Beckett can be
found. A work that, as will be demonstrated in this research, passes through
three main stages. The first stage will be defined as the 'aesthetics of disintegra-
tion', in which the meaning is put on trial (see Chapter 1). The second stage
is characterized by the refuge of the aesthetic semblance (Chapter 2), and the
third stage by the return to subjectivity (Chapter 3). Such a tripartite approach
to Beckett's aesthetics must be considered not only as a development within
the much broader context of his literary output, but also as a inner scheme of
many of his individual novels and plays.
In the long and controversial history of the relation between the idea of
art' and 'truth', Beckett, following Heidegger's affirmation of art as the 'origin
of truth', dedicates his whole work to questioning that truth, an area which
had never previously been explored. He puts the meaning genuinely 'on trial'
and eventually concludes that an absurd play is still a play. It does not lack
all meaning. The more specific problem of avant-garde art is addressed by
Adorno: every authentic negation of meaning ends up as something appar-
ently meaningful.
Where art runs short in content, it still retains its form. And in this 'it
remains', in the persistence of'I'll go on' where 'I can't go on', in what Derrida
calls the 'work-character', the 'signature' of Beckett's oeuvre, finally, in that
which once nobody considered worthy of theoretical interest, also lies the
last port of call for philosophy: the body.
This body, whose quintessence - as in Beckett's Film - is expressed by a
single open 'Eye', is the final signature of the truth at the time of the entire
14 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: The Athlone Press Ltd, 1997, p. 153.
II Preface
disintegration of meaning. But the Eye - Beckett ultimately finds out - is
still an I.
* an inner, theoretical progression: the triad Meaning-Illusion-Subject repre-
The first chapter of this study is concerned with the analysis of the aesthetics
of Samuel Beckett. In particular, section I.I deals with a general introduction
to the historical problems of 'interpreting Beckett' and to the fundamental
shift represented by the publication, in 1983, of his essayistic writings, rela-
tively unknown up to that point. In section 1.2 the writings of Beckett as a
literary critic will be analyzed and discussed in chronological order, starting
from his first work in 1929 'Dante... Bruno...Vico ...Joyce', continuing with
the full-length study Proust (1931), and finishing with his short literary and
journalistic reviews (1934-38). In the third section of this chapter, Beckett's
ideas concerning art criticism will be commented upon, particularly his words,
written on different occasions from 1949 onwards, concerning the painting of
his friends, the brothers Geer and Bram van Velde. Finally, as a sort of sum-
mary and conclusion of the previous analyses, a number of major aspects of
the Beckettian aesthetics - and more specifically, the main characteristics of
Beckett's art before Godot - will be dealt with in the fourth and last section
of this chapter.
Chapter 2 investigates Adornos interpretation of the philosophical poten-
tiality of Beckett's work. In the opening section of this chapter Adornos essay
on Endgame will be analyzed, which was also his first study of Beckett. As will
be seen, the early Adornian reading of Beckett - whose importance influenced
all his aesthetic thought decisively - starts from the possibility of a critical
analysis of a 'non-traditionally critic approach' to modern art. In this respect,
the concept of'meaning' and its irreversible, historical crisis is crucial and
which modern art must necessarily reflect. The second section will consider
the role and relevance of Beckett within Adornos Aesthetic Theory. The focus
of Adornian investigation seems to move, here, from the crisis of meaning to
the crisis ofillusion, which, as the defining characteristic of the artwork (Huhn),
calls for redemption by philosophical aesthetics. In the third section, together
with a small number of issues concerning Aesthetic Theory, what is probably
the heart of the 'crisis of illusion' will be discussed, i.e. the inner antinomic
process between a socially produced origin and the claim of autonomy. As will
be seen, the different response to the crisis of - what will be defined as - the
'refuge of art', marks a decisive point in relation to Adorno and Beckett. Finally,
in section four, after summarizing the points of coincidence and divergence
Preface 21
between the two authors, the development of Beckett's theatrical output in
the light of Adorno s aesthetics will be shown. This analysis is also marked by
sents, in fact, the hidden aesthetic framework of both Beckett and Adorno,
as well as of this chapter.
Chapter 3 will attempt to outline the final development of Beckett's philo-
sophical aesthetics through a number of indications found in Derrida's works
along with other 'Derridean readings', including those of French thinkers such
as Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, appearing principally over the last
twenty years, and which have become predominant within recent Beckettian
criticism. In particular, the first section will introduce the postmodern recep-
tion of Beckett in the last twenty years (mostly in the light of Derrida), in
relation to his prose texts and, in particular, The Unnamable. After considering
briefly Derrida's direct decision not to write about Beckett (§ 1.1), Maurice
Blanchot's contributions (§ 1.2) concerning the Irish writer will be analyzed,
as well as a number of the main concepts (such as 'repetition', 'signature', 'trace',
and differance) which, according to a number of critics, link Derrida's works to
Beckett's, and the Beckettian oeuvre to the wider contemporary philosophi-
cal debate on the 'end of modernity' (§ 1.3 and § 1.4). The second section will
return briefly to the problem of mimesis and 'copy/original' in relation to
twentieth-century literature, and also to the issue of'post-modern' imagination
and narrative (§ 2.1). The peculiar position of Beckett's prose works will also
be examined in terms of a 'breach' (following Trezise's definition) between
what will be termed 'penultimate and ultimate images' (§ 2.2). Successively,
with regard to the Beckettian narrative and, more significandy, to his television
works, Gilles Deleuze's idea of'aesthetics of exhaustion', i.e. the 'three langues'
will be discussed, through which, according to Deleuze, Beckett achieves
the aesthetic'epuisement du possible' (§ 2.3). The third section will examine a
series of questions about the final period of Beckett's narrative output. In this
sense, the emergence of a possible 'opening' towards the 'event', outside text,
will be dealt with in relation to Badiou's non-conventional reading of Beckett
(§ 3.1). Additionally, a further difference with Joyce's prose, via Derrida, will
be also considered in this regard (§ 3.2). Finally, the issue of Subjectivity will
be emphasized through the analyses of a few commentators of Beckett's final
prose works (§3.3), together with the highly symbolic and significant American
experience of Film (196s), which, more than many other work, provides a
number of illuminating insights on the problem of subject (§ 3.4).
 Preface
In conclusion, Chapter 4 will consider a number of extra-textual and the-
atrical issues related to the later activity of Beckett as a playwright. The first
section of this chapter will examine some consequences of Beckett's choice
for an aesthetics of the unword' and particularly the shift from an eminently
linguistic 'visual angle' towards the effective primacy of sound and music, as
well as the relationship these have with the concepts of time and space. The
second section will look at the later of Beckett's major dramas in order to ana-
lyze a number of symbolic structures of his theatre, more specifically, the role
of the body/object on stage and the author's continual interrogation of the act
of representation. Finally, the third section will consider diverse aspects of the
body in Beckett's plays in relation to various witnesses to his stage directions
and to the significant experience attained in this sense by Jerzy Grotowski
and the Laboratory Theatre.
CHAPTER I
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett: Essays and Writings
As Derek Attridge suggests in commenting on Jacques Derrida's interest in
literary texts, the question "What is literature ?' is, after all, a philosophical, not
a literary one, since it is concerned with what distinguishes literature from all
that is not literature. Equally, literary theory has always consciously worked
under the sign of philosophy. When speaking of the general aesthetics of an
artist, or a writer, this is, however, particularly true; one has only to consider
the origin of this term itself, deriving from Kant and the modern philosophi-
cal tradition. Thus, at times it seems like one is straining to add the adjective
'philosophical' to the word aesthetics', in order to clarify the exact point of
analysis - since every form of aesthetics is or should be originally and intrinsi-
cally philosophical. Any discourse on aesthetics is necessarily a discourse on the
theoretical basis of art and aesthetic experience. The other perspective is that
of literary criticism. It is the same difference between the pre-condition and
the achievement of art, namely, the difference between the two questions 'how
or under which circumstances art happens ?' (literary perspective) and'what or
where is art?' (philosophical perspective). Methods, sources, occasions, his-
torical birth and circulation of the 'event' of art, on the one hand; theoretical
conditions and premises for an epistemology of art, on the other.
Needless to say, in dealing with an author like Beckett - half artist and half
philosopher, divided between the literary achievement of his work and the
quest for the meaning within it - these two ways are closely inter-connected.
\et, when considering his philosophical role in twentieth-century thought -
one of the aims of this first chapter - it is perhaps a little dangerous to draw
any kind of conclusion directly from the literary works, since, given their
cryptic and ambiguous nature, one could have him say almost anything. With
Beckett, the risk of losing the real nature of his work, through philosophizing
too much over abstract concepts taken from single passages of text or lines
spoken by his characters, is always present. In fact, this has already happened
several times. Therefore, it has become a sort of quasi-necessity that a new
philosophical study of Beckett, after so many 'jumbled' interpretations have
been produced, should start from his essayist writings, from a fully historical
2-4 CHAPTER I
as well as literary point of view, being a more solid basis of investigation. Only
at a later stage of this chapter (see § 1.4) will these writings turn to a proper
philosophical analysis, of Beckett's place in the history of modern (philosophi-
cal) aesthetics in particular.
Although analysis in this chapter is necessarily limited to the early period
of Beckett's activity - essays were not written after the early fifties - it is none-
theless important in order to be able to determine the main (perhaps abso-
lute') theoretical starting point of his research, i.e. the critique of the question
on meaning. This is crucial, since it not only confirms the accuracy of the
readings on Beckett by Adorno and the French philosophers (see Chapters 2
and 3 respectively), but also defines the entire Beckettian output and reflec-
tion on art as related radically to the problem of truth. 'Meaning on trial' is,
to all effects, the first step in Beckett's philosophy: the beginning of a process
that will increase until it completely exhausts the fundamental negativity of
meaning which is, in turn, the negative coincidence of art and truth. From here
derives the essential theme of this study: i.e. that the Beckettian aesthetics is
essentially an 'aesthetics of truth', to be considered in terms of the age-old issue
of the relation of art and truth, of which Beckett's works are at the same time
the apex and ultimate exemplum. In this sense, the biographical information
analyzed in this chapter is much more redolent of Beckett's thought than is
usually true of a merely historical investigation. In fact, Beckett's refusal to
explain the meaning of his plays - his, so-to-speak, 'hide-and-seek' game with
criticism, as well as the consistently controversial reception of his oeuvre, are
key themes, directly linked to the contents of his work. Here, more than ever,
'inside' and 'outside', art and life, aesthetics and truth, tend to overlap.
The following section 1.1 is concerned with a general introduction to the
historical problems of 'interpreting Beckett' and to the fundamental shift
represented by the publication, in 1983, of his essayistic writings, relatively
unknown up to that point. In section 1.2 the writings of Beckett as a literary
critic will be analyzed and discussed in chronological order, starting from
his first work in 1929 'Dante... Bruno... Vico ...Joyce', continuing with the
full-length study Proust (1931), and finishing with his short literary and jour-
nalistic reviews (1934-38). In the third section of this chapter, Beckett's ideas
concerning art criticism will be commented upon, particularly his words,
written on different occasions from 1949 onwards, concerning the painting
of his friends, the brothers Geer and Bram van Velde. Finally, as a sort of sum-
mary and conclusion of the previous analyses, a number of major aspects of
the Beckettian aesthetics - and more specifically, the main characteristics of
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Beckett's art before Godot - will be dealt with in the fourth and last section
of this chapter.
1.1 Beckett as Essayist: An Introduction
1.1.1 Problems of Interpretation
When Waitingfor Godotwas first performed in Paris, at the Theatre de Babylone
on 5 January 1953, reactions from the press, audience and fellow-writers were
either mixed, confused or even enthusiastic. But what suddenly seemed clear
to many of those present was that such an event represented a radical shift
in the tradition of modern Western theatre. On that occasion - relates John
Fletcher1 - the great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-87) had stated that
the premiere of Godot had the same impact as the first staging, in Paris forty
years earlier, of a play by Pirandello. Beckett's influence on theatre over the
last five decades has been, without question, as important as that of Pirandello
in the first part of the century.
Since then, the fortunes of Waitingfor Godot throughout the world have
been, if anything, even more astounding. These days, it is acknowledged that
Godot has become one of the greatest modern plays, with Beckett himself
exerting an immense influence over modern theatre, both as writer and direc-
tor. In particular, such pre-eminent figures as Harold Pinter, Peter Hall, Tom
Stoppard, and Peter Brook recognize the huge debt they owe to him.
While refusing, on the one hand, the psychological realism of Chekhov,
Ibsen and Strindberg, or the tradition of ironic and comic realism of the Anglo-
Irish theatre (think of Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Behan), or again, on the other hand,
the 'pure theatricality' of the body as conceived by Artaud, the Beckettian plays
turned to a different idea. As Michael Worton points out, 'the central problem
they pose is what language can and cannot do'.2 Language is no longer offered
i John Flctcher, About Beckett. The Playwright and the Work, London: Fabcr and Faber,
1003, p. 36. For an overview of press reactions to the 1953 s premiere of Waitingfor Godot
see Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage,
op. cit., pp. 88-115.
1 Michael Worton, 'Waitingfor Godot and Endgame: Theatre as Text', in The Cambridge
Companion to Beckett, op. cit., p. 68.
 2-4 C H A P T E R I
in them as a vehicle for the direct (or indirect) communication of a message,
but rather as a 'grammatical, syntactic and - especially - intertextual force to
make the reader/spectator aware of how much we depend on language [...]?
In other words, while the concept of'crisis' was certainly not absent in theatre
up to this point, Beckett introduced the 'crisis of theatre' itself. Thus, Worton
comments, 'in the context of twentieth-century theatre, his first plays mark the
transition from Modernism with its preoccupation with self-reflection to Post-
Modernism with its insistence on pastiche, parody and fragmentation'.1
Nevertheless, at the same time as Godot was continuing on the wave of its
own success, particularly after being staged in London, 'a flurry of articles and
letters to editors' - recalls John Fletcher - attempted to answer the question
'What does the play mean?', a question to which Beckett himself, at the time,
repeatedly used to answer in the same way: 'It means what it says'. He was over-
whelmed by this question many times, and also that of another crucial issue:
'Who or what is Godot ?'. With admirable coherence, Beckett, throughout his
life, reiterated the same reply that he had once given to his American director
Alan Schneider: 'If I knew, I would have said so in the play'.5 And when Colin
Duckworth suggested so articulately in his book that the characters of Godot
represented a modern version of Dante's Purgatory, he responded: 'Quite alien
to me, but you're welcome'.6 Adding also: 'I produce an object. What people
make of it is not my concern [...] I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical
introduction to my own works [...] '.7 Another time he asserted that 'the early
success of Waiting for Godot was based on a fundamental misunderstanding,
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 69.
5 See Alan Schneider, 'Waiting for Beckett', in John Calder (ed.), Beckett at Sixty, London:
Calder and Boyars, 1967, p. 38. As a confirmation of this point, see also the interview made
by Joan Stevens with Roger Blin - the director of the world premiere of En attendant
Godot-. 'He [Beckett] didn't talk about "Godot" or "God". On the contrary, he said he
didn't know what God meant [...]' ('Interview with Roger Blin by Joan Stevens', in Lois
Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994,
p. 305). This document is also Blin's only interview about Beckett.
6 Quoted in Colin Duckworth (ed), 'Introduction to Samuel Beckctt', En Attendant Godot,
London: George G. Harrap, 1966, p. LIX.
7 Ibid.,pp.XXIV-XXV.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
critics and public alike insisted on interpreting in allegorical or symbolic terms
a play which was striving all the time to avoid definition'.8
Whether what Beckett had insistendy declared is true or not, it is worth
pointing out that such a 'misunderstanding' did clearly exist and has provoked
a fundamental instability in Beckettian scholarship, though neither a uniform
nor a classic position has ever been formed in his regard, in any case.9 Certainly,
the fact that he was unwilling to supply the necessary analytic (or even basic)
tools to understand his thought left the field relatively open for academics to
elaborate often the most varied theories.
Hence, as has been observed, the more Beckett refused to provide a code
to decipher his works, the more the volume of studies on them (articles, special
journal editions, essay collections and books) has steadily increased, so much
so that, in 1994, the compilers of a survey on Beckett criticism affirmed that
'it has been projected that by the end of the century it will equal the literature
devoted to Napoleon and Wagner'.10 In the same way, it could be said that the
more audience and readers have seemed to appreciate Beckett's works, the more
strongly they have called for an explanation of them. The fact is, however, that
the works per se have cried out for explication.
The issue of Beckett's refusal to explain his work would probably merit a
separate chapter, along with the history of the highly infrequent interviews
given by him. In a survey of these, John Fletcher shows how Beckett, in this
regard, was firmly determined that he would never talk to the papers nor give
8 Quoted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical
Heritage, op. cit., p. 10.
9 According to David Pattie, Beckett criticism, from the first publication of the trilogy to
the present, has gone through four main stages marked by multiple and conflicting read-
ings. However, he adds, it is only since the mid-1990s, when new biographical information
came out, that such division has begun to reach a certain uniformity (see David Pattie,
The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge, 1 0 0 0 ,
pp. 103-104).
10 Murphy, Huber, Werner, Breuer, Rolf and Schoell, Koll (eds), Critique of Beckett Criticism:
A Guide to Research in English, French and German, Colombia, S C : Camden House,
1994. P- 3- Further evidence of this is provided by John Calder (1001): 'The number of
books written about Samuel Beckett reputedly comes sixth in the world bibliography, after
Jesus, Napoleon, Beethoven, Wagner and James Joyce, all iconicfigureswho have attracted
a large cult' (John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 148).
2-4
CHAPTER I
interviews.11 Likewise, he never 'promoted' his latest book or play, nor appeared
on any television chat show. Nevertheless, especially during the early years of
fame, Beckett was quite willing to talk to students and university teachers,
providing them with any biographical information which they needed and
answering any questions related to the publication history of his writings. At
the same time, it was implicidy clear that he could not discuss with anybody
the meaning of his work. This is also the situation which numerous academ-
ics found, in that period, when arranging appointments with him for their
research. Among them we find a number of the major critics who later wrote
several studies on his work, such as John Pilling, James Knowlson and John
Fletcher himself. 'If the conversation did stray into areas that he did not like
- recalls John Pilling - he registered discomfort by hanging his head or wring-
ing his hands - such economy marked his every move'.12 Another time - as
happened to James Knowlson, the writer of the only authorized biography
published in 1996 - after being asked for the meaning of the title Mal vu mal
dit (III Seen III Said), Beckett protested, 'You know I do not really like to talk
about my work'.13 Then, when Knowlson apologized for having violated this
'golden rule' in talking to Beckett, he also realized once and for all that there
was no way to 'get to the point' with him. Such a rule was even more implicitly
valid among Beckett's closest friends, including many professional colleagues,
publishers, producers and actors, such as Roger Blin, George Devine, John
Calder, Alan Schneider, Barney Rosset, but also Martin Esslin and Harold
Pinter. These were the people with whom, according to John Calder (who also
was one of them), he could relax and enjoy a conversation or a drink without
being harassed by questions about art and literature.
It is also true that sometimes, almost by chance, he spoke more deeply
about himself and his thoughts, as happened to Andre Bernold - a Frenchman
who, unlike other academics, had no questions that he wanted to ask about
the work. The two of them would converse about ordinary, everyday matters:
in these conversations, as another biographer recalls, Beckett 'seemed to take
a "tireless interest" in the elementary things of existence, in sleep, comings
11 See John Fletcher, 'Survey of Interviews Given by Beckett', in About Beckett, op. cit.,
pp. 51-95.
11 Quoted in John Fletcher, About Beckett, op. cit., pp. 55-56.
13 Ibid., pp. 59-60.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
and goings, what form of heating Bernold had in his room [...]'.14 Therefore,
when Bernold decided to give an account of this friendship, LAmitie de Beckett
(199z), 15 it became one of the most valuable sources of information about the
writer's last years. His relationship with the press and journalists, however,
was another matter: 'One of the reasons why there are so few press interviews
compared with other authors [...] is that it was very difficult for journalists to
get an appointment to see Beckett. It was, however, made a lot easier if they
were permitted to eavesdrop on rehearsal [...]'.16 Beckett's aversion to newspa-
per people was motivated, as he remarked several times, by the fact that they
distorted everything he said. Despite this, at least some of them succeeded
in gaining access to him. Thus, we have the so-called 'rare interviews' such as
those often-quoted made by Gabriel D'Aubarede (Les Nouvelles Litteraires,
1961), Tom Driver (Columbia University Forum, 1961), Hugh Hebert {The
Guardian, 1980) and Brian Appleyard {The Times, 25 February 1984).
On another occasion, coinciding with the Broadway production of Waiting
for Godot, in 1956, he gave an interview to an American journalist of the New
York Times, Israel Shenker, only on condition that his words were not quoted
direcdy - but, evidendy, he was betrayed, and this interview became the source
of many famous as well as, in some case, controversial sentences by him. 17
Yet, sometimes, these interviews are more relevant as 'literary profiles' of the
Beckettian personality - as seen through the eyes of the author of the article,18
than Beckett's own words, which, as usual, are often short and sibylline, adding
other enigmas to his already enigmatic works.
14 Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: the Last Modernist, London: Harper Collins, 1966,
pp. 569-570.
15 Andre Bernold,VAmitie de Beckett, igjg-igSg, Paris: Hermann, 1991.
16 John Fletcher, About Beckett, op. cit., p. 71.
17 Such as 'I preferred France in war to Ireland in peace', but also other sentences about
Joyce and Kafka (New York Times, 5 May 1956, section 1, pp. 1 and 3. Also reprinted in
Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage,
op. cit., pp. 146-149).
18 The Irish novelist Edna O'Brien recorded her impressions in an article published on Sunday
Times Magazine (6 April 1986), on the occasion of Beckett's eightieth birthday. The profile
of Beckett written by his friend, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran, which gives
numerous valuable insights into the kind of person Beckett was, is also remarkable (see
E. M. Cioran, 'Encounters with Beckett', Partizan Review, 1975, in Lawrence Graver and
Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, op. cit., pp. 334-340).
2-4 CHAPTER I
i.i.z 'Disjecta (1983)
In such a context, it is no surprise that when in 1983, Ruby Cohn - another
remarkable figure among Beckett's scholars - convinced him to allow his early
critic essays to be published, the event would hardly escape public attention.
The volume - whose title Disjecta was chosen by Beckett himself - is a collec-
tion of miscellaneous writings on art and literature (articles, literary reviews,
commissions for periodical publication, published commentaries on his own
work, private letters and a dramatic fragment), which, before then, were unpub-
lished or had only been published obscurely and, therefore, available only in
few libraries. The editor Ruby Cohn has grouped this material by subject, as
follows: 1) Writings on aesthetics z) Literary criticism 3) Art criticism.
Along with the essay Proust (1931) this miscellany of criticism constitutes
almost the entire output of Beckett as an essayist - all gathered in the pre-war
period. As critics have noted, despite the fragmentary nature of Beckett's early
discursive writings, they are nonetheless founded upon fairly coherent systems
of philosophy and aesthetics. In this regard, as Rupert Wood points out, 'it is
possible to outline the loose assemblage of aesthetic theories and philosophi-
cal ideas that form their point of departure, but it is extremely difficult to see
what happens to these ideas and where they end up'.19 This is due to the fact
that 'these pieces represent the start of a deconstructive process whose logical
conclusion is not to be found in recognizably discursive writing at all [...]'.2°
For the same reason (i.e. the muteness towards which they inherendy tend) it is
pointless to judge them as a critical key to give meaning to the rest of Beckett's
works. As Wood goes on to suggest, they must be read for what they originally
were, i.e., introductions to texts or pieces of literary journalism. 'After all - he
adds - however self-revealing we imagine them to be, Beckett's critical works
are not about his own work, and they are often not even about writing at all'.21
In this sense, the best perspective to approach these works would be to con-
sider what Beckett intends to abandon, rather than achieve in them: 'those
very things which, as critic or writer, he cannot do, say, or know'.22
19 Rupert Wood, 'An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist', in The Cambridge Companion
to Beckett, op. cit., p. 1.
20 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 1.
iz Ibid. Eventually, Wood concludes, 'Beckett's discursive writings lie on a continuum with
at one end relatively stable and systematic philosophy, and at the other a continuously
self-deconstructing and self- consciously Active residue of philosophizing' (Ibid.).
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Quite apart from all this, the first revealing insight given by the volume
Disjecta is that, by the time of these works, Beckett's main concern was aes-
thetics - philosophical aesthetics. While opportunities to find in Disjecta's
essays the direct key to understand Beckett's successive works are few and far
between (which was probably the reason why he gave authorization to pub-
lish it), the book instead provides an interesting view of his theoretical point
of departure. The author's reflection is thoroughly focused on the origin as
well as the meaning, possibility, and achievements of art per se (particularly,
poetry, literature and painting - with only few hidden references to music).
In short, art as a philosophical problem.
While nowadays very few scholars doubt that Beckett is at core a philo-
sophical writer, the problem of'which philosophy?' is he concerned with
remains. From the many salient references in his texts, it has been always seemed
obvious that philosophical tradition in Beckett is to be found along a line
connecting Descartes and Occasionalism with Schopenhauerian and Kantian
philosophy. But while, on the one hand, a reading of Beckett's thought accord-
ing to the tradition of a Philosophy of Language, Being and Subjectivity - of
which one of the best examples remains P.J. Murphy's Reconstructing Beckett:
Language for Being in Samuel Beckett's Fiction - is certainly interesting and
desirable, it is also true that Disjecta opens up another possibility, which seems
to be more convincingly related to the entire Beckettian output and which
also puts the author in a new light.
With regard to this second direction, the philosophical aesthetics of
Samuel Beckett must be considered in the post-Heideggerian contemporary
context - following Heidegger's crucial essay 'The Origin of the Work of
Art' (1935), represented principally by the two authors Theodor Adorno and
Jacques Derrida. In particular, as will be shown, the early Beckettian writings
on art and literature, contained in Disjecta, demonstrate an extraordinary
affinity with the interpretation that Adorno would give to his plays a number
of years later.
This Beckett-Adorno union, therefore, has a doubly revelatory character
for contemporary philosophical aesthetics. On the one hand, underlining
Adornos point of view, it must be regarded as a confirmation of the entire
construction of Aesthetic Theory, of which Beckett as an artist is for Adorno
a touchstone. On the other hand, from Beckett's perspective, the Adornian
model represents the theoretical basis from which his philosophy starts and
develops up to a certain point. It is at this point, characterized by a 'return to
subjectivity', that Derrida and certain other French thinkers support Adornos
 2-4 C H A P T E R I
interpretation, insofar as it develops and brings to maturity the Beckettian
aesthetics.
In conclusion, more than 20 years after their publication, Beckett's writ-
ings are probably waiting for a more stable situation within the thought of
the author, which, for this reason, cannot but be considered as a philosophical
aesthetic thought.
The hypothesis of our research is that such a philosophical aesthetics
represents the authentic background of Samuel Beckett - the underlying sce-
nario in which all other philosophical analyses can be included. Among these,
in special way, we find his early concern with Foundationalism (Descartes,
Geulinx, Dante),23 and above all - as suggested by P.J. Murphy24 - a Kantian
reading of his work. Along with Adornos view, the conditio sine qua non of
this scenario is for Beckett the relation between art and truth, i.e. the fun-
damental pre-condition for which art is originally marked by its metexis, as
Adorno would say, i.e. its 'participation' in truth. In the early Beckettian essays
on aesthetics, this radical 'quest for truth' emerges as the inner motif of art
as well as its most authentic and original nature. As will be seen, it is also the
decisive turning point of Beckett away from his masters Dante, Joyce and
Kafka. In other words, it is the beginning of Beckett.
1.2. From Dante to Proust. The Literary Criticism Years
1.2.1 The Joycean Path
L. N. Tolstoy, as an old man, once said that, as far as he was concerned, the
events of his entire life did not match those of the early years of his existence.
The same thing could perhaps be said for the first two years (1928 to 1930)
spent by Beckett in Paris in comparison with the rest of his life.
It is difficult to imagine a place in history like Paris in the 1920s, which
gathered together an explosive mixture of so many new cultural tendencies,
not to mention intellectuals, artists and political communities - in short,
23 See Richard Begam, 'Beckett and Postfoundationalism, or, How Fundamental are those
Fundamental Sounds?', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit.
24 See P.J. Murphy, 'Beckett and the Philosophers', in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,
op. cit.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
the greatest human talents from throughout Europe and the entire world,
all engaged in renewing every aspect of life in the name of'modernity'. Such
personalities as Joyce, Picasso, Mondrian, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky,
Chagall, Dali, Giacometti, and many others were attracted to Paris as a sort
of magnet. Obviously, Paris was also the home of the most important French
figures of the time - Bergson, Mauriac, Valery, Gide, Cocteau and Antonin
Artaud, who, together with Roger Vitrac, founded the Theatre Alfred Jarry in
1927. In such a context, described beautifully by Lois Gordon,25 Beckett arrived
in Paris, at the end of September 1928, on an exchange scholarship, taking up
an English teaching post at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He soon
became involved with some of Paris's lesser known magazines where he was able
to earn money doing translations or writing literary reviews. The list of these
numbered The Exile, Little Review and, later, Tambour and This Quarter, but
in particular Maria and Eugene Jolas's prestigious magazine transition, which
during that time was chiefly associated with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
While transition is nowadays remembered for having published an extraordi-
nary group of artists like Joyce himself, Valery, Hemingway, Breton, Picasso
and many of the above-mentioned, it remains most famous for having marked
the beginning of the 'Revolution of the Word' through its seventeen instal-
ments of what was later entided Finnegans Wake. A series of issues during 1928,
1929 and 1930 were devoted to the 'Language of the Night' and 'Revolution
of the Word', also including Jung's essay 'Psychology and Poetry' and, a few
years later, the 'Poetry is Vertical' manifesto,26 which Beckett himself, inter
alia, subscribed to. Jolas's ideology is summarized well by Samuel Putnam's
words in the February and June 1929 issues: 'We are still living in an epoch of
25 Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett 1906-1946, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1996. See especially Chapters 2 and 3. See also James Knowlson, Damned
to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., pp. 87-119. For a general overview on the
early Beckett see John Pilling, Beckett Before Godot. The Formative Years (1929-1946),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and Jean-Michel Rabate (ed.), Beckett
avant Beckett. Essais sur lejeune Beckett (1930-194$), Paris: Presses de l'ficole normale
superieure, « Accents »,1985.
26 'Poetry is Vertical' in transition, 21, Mars 1932, pp. 148-149. As subscribers of this manifesto
appear: Hans Harp, Samuel Beckett, Carl Einstein, Eugene Jolas, Thomas MacGreevy,
Georges Pelorson, Theo RutraJamesJ. Sweeney, Ronald Symond. On Beckett's contribu-
tion to the formation of the aesthetic principles of the magazine transition see Dougald
McMillan, 'Samuel Beckett' in 'Transition'. The History of a Literary Era: 1927-1938,
London: Calder and Boyars, 1975.
 2-4 CHAPTER I
transition [...] in the face of a materialistic despotism which places "concept"
before the living imagination, and the force of will before that of life [...]'.27
Hence, the new 'transition' could take form only as a rebellion against all the
'isms' that come and go, and against 'all rationalist dogmas that stand in the way
of a metaphysical universe'. Art, as Jolas proposed in each issue, could provide
salvation to the rationalized world only by unifying the personal inner experi-
ence with the 'social world' and 'cosmos'. Together with the French Symbolists,
the transition group expressed belief in the coherence between the personal
and the external world - Hermes Trismegistus's 'as above/as below' correspon-
dence. Thus, in another manifesto, Jolas described this rebellion as against 'the
hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descrip-
tive naturalism [and the desire to] crystallize a viewpoint'.28 The real and true
art was instead at a 'pre-logical' level, in that 'nocturnal world' popularized by
Herder and Hamann and by both Freud's and Jung's dream researches. The
'Verticalists' eventually called for the hegemony of inner life over outer life,
the unconscious over the conscious: an art which considered making poetry
an 'automatic writing', as the mind was naturally a poetic organ. Therefore, an
art of sudden gaps and connections, of metamorphosis, as in dreams, where
images and meanings are at the same time connected and separated.
By this time, Beckett was to all effects a part of this project. And even
though there is little evidence of this in the texts, this is due to the unique
fact that, at the beginning of his time in Paris, he was more interested in learn-
ing than in expressing his own vision of things. Sometimes, as Lois Gordon
suggests, 'Beckett was like a magnet, absorbing or incorporating from those
he respected specific interests and commitments [...] In these special attach-
ments, he identified with the other so completely that in some ways he became
the other's mirror'.29 It is not so important to determine exactly to which
authors among the diversified currents frequenting Jolas's circle Beckett was
more devoted. As has been said, the direct proofs which would testify to the
beliefs of Beckett's early period as a writer are few. He certainly appears as a
signatory of'Poetry is Vertical'. In another sense, the hero of his first novel
'Assumption', written in this period and appearing in transition, is very close to
this conception of'verticalism', as he aspires to reach the highest point of'inner
27 Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 39 (quoted from transition, 15,
February 1919, and transition 16-17, J u n c 1929). See also Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our
Mistress, New York: Viking Press, 1947, p. 116.
28 Ibid., p. 40 (quoted from transition, 16-17, June l91L))-
19 Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 37.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
and outer revelation': a unique case - Lois Gordon observes - in all Beckett's
oeuvre. However, it is possible to identify at least three names of friends who
influenced Beckett and, from a cultural point of view, impressed his period
in Paris significantly. These were Alfred Peron, a Trinity visiting lecturer from
the Ecole, who, later in 1940, would involve Beckett in the Resistance; Andre
Breton, the major theoretician of the Surrealists,30 who introduced Beckett
to a variety of new art forms as well as to an entirely new body of ideas, from
dream to paradox, to chance and coincidence, which surely interested him
enormously; and finally Thomas McGreevy, 31 an Irish poet and art critic, who
lived in the same quarters as Beckett, on the rue d'Ulm, and introduced him
to the close circle of Dublin expatriates in Paris.
It was McGreevy who introduced Beckett to James Joyce - an encoun-
ter which, needless to say, influenced the young Beckett enormously. As has
been observed by many scholars, despite their differences in age, temper and
reputation, there also had many points in common: They both had degrees
in French and Italian and exceptional linguistic skills; they had many shared
interests, such as a love for Dante, Schubert, Cezanne, a liking for the plays
of John Millington Synge and for Charlie Chaplin films.32 They also shared
an ambivalent feeling toward Ireland, a fervent anticlericalism, and a general
scepticism in all matters related to religion, as well as mundane interests like
smoking, drinking and taking long walks along the Seine to the lie des Cygnes.33
It is no surprise, as Lois Gordon argues, that Beckett, at that time, 'founded in
30 See Andre Breton, 'What Is Surrealism?' in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann
and Charles Feidelson, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
31 Later spelled MacGreevy.
31 On the influence that both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had on Beckett, see the
interesting inteview given by Jack MacGowran (Beckett's favourite actor) to Richard
Toscan, in Richard Toscan, 'MacGowran on Beckett' in Theatre Quarterly 3, no. 11 (July-
September), pp. 15-12.
33 See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 101. On the
relationship between Beckett and Joyce see also: Richard Ellmann, JamesJoyce, new and
revised edition, London: Oxford University Press, 1981; Richard Ellmann, 'Interview with
Samuel Beckett, 18 July 1953 and 21 June 1954, Ellmann Papers (Tulsa); James Joyce to
Valery Larbaud, 30 July 1929, Selected Letters of JamesJoyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, London,
Faber and Faber, 1975; Barbara Reich Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction,
Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press; London, Associated University Presses, 1979. Deirdre
Bair's biography on Beckett {Samuel Beckett: A Biography, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978) is also full of details about Beckett and Joyce friendship, even though
many of the conclusions of this book are often biased and preconceived.
2-4
CHAPTER I
Joyce a fatherly figure who was entirely approving',34 or in the words of Peggy
Guggenheim, he soon acted like a slave' to his idol.
Just over a month after they met, Beckett agreed to help Joyce with some
research for his 'Work in Progress' (which became Finnegans Wake), a collection
of twelve essays on Joyce's work.35 Beckett's essay 'Dante... Bruno... Vico ...Joyce'
(the periods indicate the number of centuries separating each writer from the
other), was given the first place in the volume. This essay was intended to delin-
eate Joyces Italian influences (hence, the choice of Beckett, as he had studied
Italian and Dante in particular at Trinity). It starts with Vico's theory of cyclical
'progression - or retrogression' which is to be interpreted, in Beckett's view,
in accordance with the rest of Joyce's writing, and finishes with an original
parallel between Dante and Joyce.
Significandy, the essay begins with a much-quoted statement about what
literary criticism is: 'The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The con-
ception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the
Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded
ham-sandwich'.36 He continues:
And now here am I, with my handful of abstractions, among which notably: a mountain,
the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics,
and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr Joyce s Work in progress. There is
the temptation to treat every concept like 'a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate', and
make a really tidy job of it. Unfortunately, such an exactitude of application would imply
distortion in one of two directions. Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order
to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole
for the satisfaction of the analogymongers ? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.
34 Lois Gordon, The World ofSamuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 58.
35 Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work In Progress, Paris:
Shakespeare and Company, 1929. Beckett's essay 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce' also
appeared - together with a first piece of fiction entitled Assumption - in transition,
16-17, June 1929. On this essay see Eva Doran, 'Au Seuil de Beckett: Quelques notes sur
Dante... Bruno... Vico...Joyce, in Stanford French Review 5, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 111-127.
36 Samuel Beckett, 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce', in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 19.
37 Ibid.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Evidently, according to Beckett, literary criticism is, first of all, a personal
quest for the truth and the hidden connections in the history of ideas. It is
precisely in this regard that he is ready to begin his own investigation about
Joyce and his Italian philosophic ancestors.
Giambattista Vico (who Beckett defines as an 'innovator') considered
the development of human society as made up of three ages: Theocratic,
Heroic, Human (civilized); with a corresponding classification of language
as Hieroglyphic (sacred), Metaphorical (poetic) and Philosophical (capable
of abstraction and generalization). Eventually, Beckett connects this theory of
Vico's cycles (who, in turn, had developed a great part of this from Giordano
Bruno) with the 'primal spontaneity' of language, myth and human event in
Work in Progress. Vico, according to Beckett, 'is the rationalist, aware of the
natural and inevitable growth of language'.38 As 'in its first dumb form, language
was gesture. If a man wanted to say "sea", he pointed to the sea. With the spread
of animism this gesture was replaced by the word: "Neptune". He directs our
attention to the fact that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has
its verbal expression in one or other of the 30,000 Greek divinities'.39 In this
sense, words have their 'progression/retrogression', says Beckett, as well as social
phases: 'forest-cabin-village-city-academy' is one rough example.
Take the Latin word: 'Lex':
1. Lex = Crop of acorns.
2. Ilex = Tree that produces acorns.
3. Legere = To gather.
4. Aquilex = He that gathers the waters.
5. Lex = Gathering together of peoples, public assembly.
6. Lex = Law.
7. Legere = To gather together letters into a word, to read.40
"The first men', Beckett continues, 'unable to conceive the abstract idea
of "poet" or "hero", named every hero after the first hero, every poet after the
first poet'.41 Vico knows well all this and so he asserts the spontaneity of lan-
guage and denies the dualism of poetry and language. Similarly, poetry is the
38 Ibid., p. 24.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 25.
41 Ibid.
2-4
CHAPTER I
foundation of writing. When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and
written were identical'.42 Precisely when distinguishing between writing and
direct expression, Vico implicidy asserts that 'in such direct expression, form
and content are inseparable'.43 In this light, i.e. in considering the very extremi-
ties of form and content, Vico shows his debt toward Giordano Bruno:
There is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest
possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line [...] Consequently,
transmutations are circular [...] Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the
minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succes-
sion of transmutations.44
In other terms, when the word is the 'maximum of word', it coincides with
its contrary, namely, th t gesture. The connection of all this discourse with Joyce
is perhaps clearer at this point: 'On turning to the Work in Progress we find
that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression - pages and pages of
it'.45 Finally, Beckett declares his famous sentence that in Joyce 'form is content,
content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is
not written at all. It is not to be read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is
to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that
something itself.*6 Eventually, 'when the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep.
(See the end of Anna Livid). When the sense is dancing, the words dance'.47
But how, asks Beckett, do we qualify such a 'general aesthetic vigilance'?
'St Augustine puts us on the track of a word with his "intendere", Dante has:
"Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore", and " Voi che, intendendo, ilterzo cielmovete";
but his "intendere" suggests a strictly intellectual operation'.48 Nonetheless,
here Beckett shows the way in which the 'maximum' coincides with the 'mini-
mum': 'When an Italian says to-day "Ho inteso", he means something between
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., p. 11.
45 Ibid., p. 26. 'And if you don't understand it' he continues, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, it is
because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly
divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to
read the other' (Ibid.).
46 Ibid., p. 27.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
"Ho udito" and "Ho capito", a sensuous untidy art of intellection. Perhaps
"apprehension" is the most satisfactory English word'.49 Both Joyce and Dante,
in fact, 'saw how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language
of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation to a universal
language'.50 Instead of the official Latin, Dante adopted a vulgar form that
could have been spoken by an ideal Italian who had assimilated what was best
in all the dialects of his country. And were one to object that unlike Dante,
whose language was anyway being spoken in the streets of his own town, 'no
creature in heaven or earth ever spoke the language of Work in Progress',51
Beckett's reply is that 'we are inclined to forget that Dante's literary public
was Latin that the form of his Poem was to be judged by Latin eyes and ears,
by a Latin Esthetic intolerant of innovation [...]'."
There is little doubt, at this point, that Beckett firmly believed in the
'Revolution of the Word' manifesto (this concept as interpreted by Beckett
himself is much clearer in the light of this essay) as well as believing in every-
thing that Eugene Jolas achieved with his own activity of publisher. The close
union between Beckett and Joyce in terms of personal friendship and 'appren-
tice-relationship' is also evident. On this relationship much has been written
and, from a purely critical literary perspective, there is certainly a great deal left
to investigate, for instance, the real legacy of Beckett toward his 'master' and
the influence that Joyce's ideas and techniques exerted over the first Beckettian
novels. In this regard, an interesting study by Barbara Gluck opened the way
to an examination of what she calls the apprenticeship writing' of the early
Beckett, which commences with his poetry and incorporating 'the structural
49 Ibid., pp. 2.7-2.8.
50 Ibid., p. 30.
51 Ibid., pp. 30-31.
52 Ibid., p. 31. Furthermore, Beckett concludes, the parallel between the two authors can be
extended to their relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy which treated in the same way
Joyce's work and Dante's Divine Comedy. On the relationship between Beckett and Dante
see Michael Robinson, 'From Purgatory to Inferno: Beckett and Dante revisited' in Journal
of Beckett Studies, no. 5,1979 (Autumn), pp. 69-81; and Mary Bryden, 'No Stars without
Stripes: Beckett and Dante', in Romanic Review (New York), 1996, 87 (4), pp. 541-556.
See also Kelly Anspaugh, 'Faith, Hope and What Was It ?: Beckett Readingjoyce Reading
Dante',Journal ofBeckett Studies (Tallahassee), 1995-1996,5 (1-2), pp. 19-38.
2-4 CHAPTER I
and thematic motif of circular movement that pervades Joyces entire work and
that will come to dominate Beckett's own canon of novels and plays'."
Conversely, from a theoretical point of view, the essay 'Dante...
Bruno... Vico ...Joyce' reveals at least two important aspects of Beckett's posi-
tion. The first seems to be drawn from his friend Thomas McGreevy, who, in
approaching Jack B. Yeats, 'makes abundantly clear that art criticism, to him,
is philosophy'.54 For Beckett as well, admittedly (as he puts it in the opening
words of this essay), identifying the exact historical roots which link Joyce to
the three Italian authors does not matter, since it is precisely the 'neatness of
identifications' that is dangerous for literary criticism. Therefore Beckett goes
in search of an underlying philosophical idea which unifies Joyce with Vico,
Bruno and Dante. As seen, he finds this in the coincidence of extreme realities
(such as body-gesture and ratio at the opposite poles): a coincidence that comes
at the end of a process of progression/retrogression, whose inevitable character
is a unique and primal essence. The second relevant aspect of this essay is there-
fore Beckett's interest in these opposite extremities which, ultimately, would
reveal the same (true) reality. Thus, his fondness can be explained, on the one
hand, for Descartes's and Dante's ultra-rational constructions, and Cezanne's
painting and the Joycean language of the nocturnal world, on the other. In a
certain sense, what Beckett attributes to Joyce insofar as it concerns the 'aes-
thetic truth' is above all his own belief, i.e. that the antithetic poles (minimum/
maximum) of a principle take their movement from the other. Afterwards, as
for Bruno, 'all things are ultimately identified with God, the universal monad,
Monad of monads'.55 It can be assumed that this is certainly the philosophical
aesthetic starting point of all Beckett's research - for it seems quite superficial
53 Barbara Reich Gluck, Beckett andJoyce: Friendship and Fiction, op. cit., p. 53. Gluck offers
a full chapter on three novels, Murphy, Watt, And. Mercier and Camier, which she feels are
emphatically achieved in 'the Joycean shadow'. In particular she usefully brings together
'Dante and the Lobster' with Joyce's "Ihe Dead'. Still on Beckett's and Joyce's common
backgrounds and differences see Seamus Deane, 'Joyce and Beckett', Irish University Review
14, no. 1,1984 (Spring), pp. 57-68; Richard Pearce, 'From Joyce to Beckett: The Tale That
Wags the Telling' in Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 7,198z (Spring), pp. 109-114; Robert
Martin Adams, 'Samuel Beckett' in After Joyce: Studies in the Fiction after Ulysses, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 90-113; and Ruby Cohn, 'Joyce and Beckett, Irish
Cosmopolitans', in James Joyce Quarterly 8, no. 4,1971 (Summer), pp. 385-391.
54 Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 38. See also Thomas McGreevy,
Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Introduction, Dublin: Victor Waddington, 1945.
55 Samuel Beckett, 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 2.1.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
to label, as Rupert Wood does, 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce' essay as simply
'unrepresentative of Beckett's ideas and interests' as it 'was written at Joyce's
behest in order to publicize his forthcoming work'.S6
For Joyce, the convergence between the opposites occurs, in one sense, as
a visionary intensity of the fantasy, in another, as the most realistic perception
of things.57 In this perspective, visionary and material, sea and land, heaven and
earth interact and represent the purest Joycean process of aesthetic creation.
'With this convergence', John Paul Riquelme argues, 'the style of Stephens
thinking not only in A Portrait but also in Ulysses becomes possible'.58 The
young Beckett, as pointed out by James Knowlson,59 had an intense admira-
tion for A Portrait along with all Joyce s works and must have discussed all
these with him at length in order to learn as much as he could.
Evidently, this is a 'different' Beckett from the man and the writer who
revealed himself from the mid-i930s till the end of his life. The turning point
from the Joycean path is something that he would explain in the controversial
interview with Israel Shenker:
With James Joyce, the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material -
perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn't
a syllable that's superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I'm not master of my
material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending towards omniscience and
omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance. I don't think impotence
has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression
is achievement - must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being
that has always been set aside by artists as somehow unusable - as something incompatible
56 Rupert Wood, 'An Endgame of Aesthetics: Beckett as Essayist', in The Cambridge Companion
to Beckett, op. cit., pp. 1-3. In fact, a study by Sighle Kennedy demonstrated how much
the ideas from this period on Bruno and Vico, on the one hand, and Dante and Joyce, on
the other hand, influenced Beckett's first novel Murphy (Sighle Kennedy, Murphy's Bed:
A Study of Real Sources and Sur-RealAssociations in Samuel Beckett's First Novel, Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1971.
57 See the experience that Stephen Dedalus had on the beach - where he imagines the merg-
ing of two realms in his imagining of the moon embedded in earth (see the closing pages
of part IV ofJoyce's A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man).
58 John Paul Riquelme, 'Stephen Hero,Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan:
Styles of Realism and Fantasy' in The Cambridge Companion to JamesJoyce, ed. by Derek
Attridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. HI.
59 See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., pp. 103-113.

2-4 CHAPTER I
with art. I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience
finds it the experience of a non-knower, of a no-can-er [...].6°
But while it is uncertain to outline 'when' and 'under which circumstances'
it happened, it is instead clear 'where' Beckett comes to his conclusion: that
is, in the voluntarily-acted separation of the 'monad' o f f o r m and content, pre-
cisely in the direction of the emptiness of content. When comparing Dante
and Joyce respective Purgatories, Beckett wrote that:
Dante's is conical and consequendy implies culmination. Mr Joyce's is spherical and excludes
culmination [...] In the one the movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents
a net advance: in the other movement is non-directional - or multi-directional, and a step
forward is, by definition, a step back. Dante's Terrestrial Paradise is the carriage entrance to
a Paradise that is not terrestrial: Mr Joyce's Terrestrial Paradise is the tradesmen's entrance
on to sea-shore.61
It seems that Beckett, at a certain point, goes in search of his personal
Purgatory which, unlike Dante's and Joyce's, is neither conical nor spherical
but simply has no form - or better, retains an ancient, illusory form covering
the vacuum of a non-identical reality. Beckett's new revolution is that of'sepa-
rating' after having unified what he calls in the 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce'
essay, the 'primal essence': it is that of putting on trial the content itself of this
essence. As will be seen in the next two paragraphs, and also in Chapter 2,
such separation is the fundamental reason for Beckett's aesthetics - the main
theme of his early theatrical production.
If one moves the discourse onto more philosophical ground, Beckett's
detachment from Joyce is very close to Adornos from Heideggerian aesthet-
ics. The achievement of art becomes the impossibility of art itself. The artist,
'omniscient and omnipotent', 'superb manipulator' of his own material, comes
to be - in Beckett's own terms - a 'non-knower', a 'no-can-er' operator, so that,
ultimately, the territory of art turns out to be something 'unusable', something
that, by definition, is incompatible with art.
60 Israel Shenker, 'An Interview with Beckett', in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, op.
cit., p. 148. (Israel Shenker, New York Times, 5 May 1956, section 1, pp. 1 and 3). See also
Israel Shenker, Words and Their Masters, New York: Doubleday, 1974, pp. 198-199.
61 Samuel Beckett, 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 33.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
However, it would be a mistake to think of Beckett's shift as a rejection
of Joyce s achievements; it is preferable to talk of it as a detachment. Not only
because Beckett, throughout his life, never explicitly rejected the work and
teaching of Joyce, but also because he abandons it precisely when recognizing
its effective powerfulness. As Beckett himself at the end of his life declared
to James Knowlson: 'I had great admiration for him [Joyce]. That's what it
was epic, heroic, what he achieved. But I realised that I couldn't go down that
same road'.62 In this light the analogy 'Beckett-Joyce like Adorno-Heidegger'
is more comprehensible. In both cases, we see a unique starting point and
research which moves from the same ground of the crisis of the epistemic
world, to then turn in two opposite directions. On the one hand, this crisis
develops into a 'positively-revelatory art'; on the other, into a just-as-true but
negative and impotent aesthetic vision of the world. One might say, literally,
a vision against the light.61
In conclusion, when exactly Beckett discovered his own way is still to be
determined. Whereas his first output as a novelist - throughout the thirties -
still closely reflects a clear Joycean influence, it is likely that, at least in his mind,
the discovery happened very soon after meetingjoyce in this initial 1928-1930
period. The final part of the interview by D'Aubarede also suggests another
possible answer:'Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware
of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel'.64
61 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life ofSamuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 105 (Interview
with Samuel Beckett, 17 Oct. 1989).
63 Certainly, here Beckett is radically different from Stephen Dedalus for whom the object
of the artist ultimately is 'the creation of the beautiful', which is, according to Aquinas'
definition, 'the apprehension of which pleases'. Such an artistic apprehension is divided
in three phases: 'Aquinas says: Adpulcritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia,
claritas. I translate it thus: Three things are neededfor beauty: wholeness, harmony, and
radiance' (See James Joyce, A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, Chapter V, in which
Stephen discusses philosophy with the Dean of Studies).
64 Gabriel D'Aubarede, 'Interview with Beckett', Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 16 February 1961,
1, 7, in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. 117.
2-4 CHAPTER I
1.2.2 'Proust' (1931), or the 'Active/Negative Art'
The same spirit that pervaded 'Dante... Bruno ...Vico ...Joyce' is also present
in the following work accomplished by Beckett, the Proust monograph (1931),
commissioned by the publishers 'Chatto and Windus' through the recommen-
dation of Richard Aldington.65 While critics are still divided on how to judge
and classify this work, which in many respects remains largely controversial,66
there are also some undoubtedly coherent key-points in the aesthetic concep-
tion that Beckett has been developing so far.
"The first thing that needs to be said of the Proust volume', points out John
Pilling, 'is that, in Beckett's eyes at least, it was a genuine attempt to say some-
thing about Proust'.67 The book was intended, in fact, as a critical introduction
to Proust, through which Beckett, at that time, hoped to base an academic
career that he himself, no more than nine months later, voluntarily abandoned.
But despite its 'remarkable acuteness', Pilling says, it is not the best available
introduction to Proust: not only because of the total lack of an index and a
bibliography (it does, however, contains a few footnotes and references), but
also because 'it is as much intellectual biography, perhaps, as literary criticism,
an adventure of the mind as much as a foray into belles-lettres'\6>
Beckett never explicitly compares Proust to Joyce, but he approves of both
writers for their fusing of form and content. Nonetheless, as Pilling points out,
65 See James Knolwson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., pp. 113-115.
Tom McGreevy also wrote in the same year a similar volume (on T. S. Eliot) for the same
series. Charles Prentice, senior partner at 'Chatto and Windus', was, to all effects, the
first commercial publisher to 'discover' Beckett. A few years later, he accepted to publish
Beckett's book of stories More Pricks than Kicks.
66 See, on the one hand, Nicholas Zurbrugg (Beckett and Proust, Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1988) who considers Beckett's early monograph on the French author as a mis-
reading of Proust's work, heavily influenced by the reading of Schopenhauer which led
him to stress the pessimistic import of the work of Proust; on the other hand, John Pilling
('Beckett's Proust' in The Beckett Studies Reader (1976-1991), ed. by S. E. Gontarski,
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993, pp. 9-28 which also appeared in TheJournal
of Beckett Studies, I, Winter 1976), who instead sees enthusiastically at this work as a 'crea-
tive encounter between one great writer and another'. See also John Fletcher, 'Beckett et
Proust', Caliban I, janvier 1964, pp. 89-100; and James Acheson, 'Schopenhauer, Proust
and Beckett', Contemporary Literature, 19 (1978), pp. 165-79.
67 John Pilling, 'Beckett's Proust' in The Beckett Studies Reader, op. cit., p. 10.
68 Ibid., p. 9.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Beckett recognizes that Joyce is, for his way of dealing with literary content,
'quintessentially different from Proust'.69 Joyce, Pilling continues, 'operates
on the principle that everything is relevant and does not therefore need to
engage on a quest in search of what has been forgotten. Joyce is "working with
omniscience, omnipotence", and by comparison with him the nervous Proust
is a hesitant and shambling figure, what Beckett would call a non-can-er'.70 It
is thus likely that 'Beckett must have been gratified to encounter a kindred
spirit who had fearlessly pursued the unconventional [...]' 71
Certainly, Beckett shows an appreciation of Proust's ability to generate
what Beckett calls 'the miracle of involuntary memory': 'I do not know how
often this miracle recurs in Proust. I think twelve or thirteen times. But the
first - the famous episode of the madeleine steeped in tea - would justify the
assertion that his entire book is a monument to involuntary memory and
the epic of its action'.72 Whereas voluntary memory is of no use as an instru-
ment of evocation, Beckett says, as it 'provides an image as far removed from
the real as the myth of our imagination or the caricature furnished by direct
perception',73 involuntary memory 'is explosive, an immediate, total and deli-
cious deflagration. It restores, not merely the past object, but the Lazarus that
it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because
less [...] because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its
brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and never
will reveal - the real'.74
For Pilling, it is also undeniable that in Proust 'Beckett's marginal com-
ments are more important than any of the available critical commentaries, or
even that they are more important than the Proust monograph [...] '.75 Among
these commentaries, concerning the crucial surface/depth antithesis, there is
69 Ibid., p. 14.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., p. 15. This is one crucial point in John Pilling's reading ofProust-, i.e. that a 'misleading
tendency' in early Beckett criticism, attempting to derive completely Beckett from Joyce,
underestimated the importance of Proust, whose influence 'is nothing less than essential
to any full understanding of the man already on the way to become the major postwar
writer in the world' (Ibid., p. 25).
72 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder
Publishers, 1999, p. 34.
73 Ibid., p. 14.
74 Ibid., p. 33.
75 John Pilling, 'Beckett's Proust' in The Beckett Studies Reader, op. cit., p. 9.

2-4 CHAPTER I
the much quoted: 'For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection
of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible
spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not
expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude'.76 Here we
find many Beckettian themes at a primordial stage, before he follows his path
with no doubts anymore. His remaining hesitation seems to be the value and
the consideration of art as such. If art does reveal the truest part of our world
- as Beckett indeed believes - Joyce and Proust undoubtedly do the right
thing in pursuing their lines. At the same time, there is something else that
Beckett feels must be expressed: there is a 'zone of being incompatible with
art' and always set aside by artists that he wants to explore. After his work on
Proust it is possible to observe small signs of this: "The only fertile research
is excavatory, immersive, a contradiction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is
active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phe-
nomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy'.77
In the light of the successive evolution of Beckett it is easy to trace in the
previous passages a significant contradiction. While, in fact, art is conceived
as a spiritual, excavatory development in the sense of depth, away from the
surfaces (hence the necessity of the solitude of the artist), this research is also
seen as not expansive, but as a contraction-, for the artist is active but negatively.
A sentence like this might be subscribed to, as far as the later Beckettian aes-
thetics is concerned, only by recalling that it is precisely the 'sense of depth'
- which in this epoch for the 'Joycean' and 'Proustian' Beckett constitutes
the main direction of research - to be put on trial. Art, for the Beckett of
Godot onwards, starts where any profundity has been taken away. Proust is
therefore an intermediate stage in the aesthetic conception of Beckett. Also,
in his previous use of the adverb 'negatively', an 'Adornian appeal' ante litteram
clearly resounds. Henceforth, over the years, Beckett discovers, more than the
'Proustian' - his own pessimism, his own 'negativity', which will undoubtedly
represent the decisive 'map' of his research.
76 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder
Publishers, 1999, p. 64.
77 Ibid., pp. 65-66.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
But for the present moment Beckett argues, with Proust, that art is a
necessity:
For in the brightness of art alone can be deciphered the baffled ecstasy that he [Proust]
had known before the inscrutable superficies of a cloud, a triangle, a spire, a flower, a
pebble, when the mystery, the essence, the Idea, imprisoned in matter, had solicited the
bounty of a subject passing by within the shell of his impurity, and tendered, like Dante
his song to the "ingegni storti e loschi", at least an incorruptible beauty: "Ponete mente
almen com'io son bella".78
Hence, the work of art is 'neither created nor chosen, but discovered,
uncovered, excavated, pre-existing within the artist, a law of his nature'.79 As
for the painter, Beckett says, style for Proust is more a question of vision than
of technique: "Ihe artist has acquired his text: the artisan translates it',80 indeed
'he makes no attempt to dissociate form from content'.81 In this way, Beckett
(along with Proust) goes in search of'an art that is perfectly intelligible and
perfecdy inexplicable'.82 Whereas the second attribute is definitely Beckettian,
the first is mainly dependent on a primary stage of his scepsis.
1.2.3 'Demythologization' and Modernism: The Short Writings (1934-1938)
In 1934 Beckett dedicated to Proust another contribution (entitled 'Proust in
Pieces'), in the form of literary journalism, in which he disapproved strongly of
the considerations made by professor Albert Feuillerat on his work Comment
Proust a compose son Roman. This is only one of several journalistic reviews
(on Rilke, Pound, O'Casey, Dante, McGreevy, Jack B. Yeats and others) that
Beckett wrote in the early 1930s to earn money - along with translations - and
to pursue a career in journalism.
During this period (1933-1935), after resigning a teaching post at Trinity,
Beckett was living in London ('bad' years - 'bad in every way' - 'psychologi-
78 Ibid., p. 76.
79 Ibid., p. 84.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., p. 88.
81 Ibid., p. 92. In this regard, Beckett adds, 'Proust can be related to Dostoievski, who states
his characters without explaining them' (Ibid., p. 87).
 CHAPTER I
2-4
cally and financially' he later commented)83 in the middle of the Depression
that in England lasted from 1931 until World War II.84 Nevertheless, despite the
economic difficulties, the English cultural scene underwent significant reno-
vation mainly thanks to an extraordinary number of technological advances,
especially in radio, films and newspapers, as well as new scientific findings.
Beckett witnessed all these transformations and, during these London years,
had many and varied interests.
His literary reviews reveal, as Ruby Cohn argues, an unusual range of
mastery - music, painting, French, German, Italian, and Irish culture'.85 But
equally a continuation of the Proust tone' for their erudition and lucidity,
having at the same time a general 'unity of (arrogant) tone' in defending the
artist 'against reductive rational criticism'.86 Even though these miscellaneous
pieces are certainly more interesting from a merely historical and literary
point of view, there are also some aesthetic aspects that are worth consider-
ing. It seems as though Beckett in these short writings epitomizes the theme
of the 'Revolution of the word' at a different level. In the crucial 1938 piece
'Intercessions by Denis Devlin', Beckett states that 'art has always been this -
pure interrogation, rhetorical question less than rhetoric - whatever else it may
have been obliged by the "social reality" to appear',87 from which he derives
one of his first full defences of modern art:
As between these two, the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated
and the need that is the absolute predicament of particular human identity, one does not
of course presume to suggest a relation of worth. Yet the distinction is perhaps not idle,
for it is from the failure to make it that proceeds the common rejection as "obscure" of
most that is significant in modern music, painting and literature.
83 Quoted in Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 91. See also S. E. Gontarski,
'Beckett in London', Journal of Beckett Studies (Tallahassee), Winter 1995-1996, 5 (i-z),
p. 167-175.
84 See also James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., "The
London Years 1933-5', PP-
85 Ruby Cohn, 'Notes to Disjecta' in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, op. cit., p. 174.
86 Ibid.
87 Samuel Beckett, 'Intercessions by Denis Devlin' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 91. First published
in transition, April-May, 1938, this is piece is a review of poems by Beckett's friend Denis
Devlin. Here, for the first time, Beckett defines art as the expression of a need.
88 Ibid.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Hence the conclusion that 'the time is perhaps not altogether too green for
the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in
the clear and does not make clear, anymore than the light of the day (or night)
makes the subsolar, lunar and stellar excrement'.89 Here, as Richard Kearney
argues, Beckett is absolutely modern 'to the extent that he compels literature
to reflect upon itself, to question the conditions of its own possibility'.90 Such
a fundamentally critical attitude brings Beckett to the threshold of modern
literature as well as philosophy. It is what Kearney calls the 'demythologising
intellect' of Beckett, i.e., the call for the modern writer (as a critical explorer)
'to demythologise some of the oldest and most revered traditions of intellec-
tual identity'.91 This fact must be considered as much more than the simple
revolution of the (poetic) word-, rather, it is a whole process, a challenge directed
towards the metaphysical and the theological tradition of the western culture.
Eventually, as Kearney suggests, 'Beckett's entire literary oeuvre embodies
a modern critique of traditional notions of identity - whether it concerns
the self, being, language, G o d or one's sense of national belonging'.92 Hie
Beckettian revolution would consist in the fact that he powerfully illustrates
how 'all our rational concepts are ultimately related to an ongoing process of
artistic rediscovery and revision'.93
With regard to the present analysis, this argument would explain the
polemical vein, in many of Beckett's writings from this period, towards some
Irish authors as well as the National Revival. In the 1935 unpublished essay
'Censorship in the Saorstat',94 he accuses Ireland Free Government of hypocrisy
for censoring books and periodical publications, as well as for the removal of
every nude from the National Gallery. Analogously, in 'Recent Irish Poetry'
(1934) he is still more explicit, if this is possible, in condemning the National
Revival of Celtic mythology and tradition (which also will be ridiculed in
Beckett's first novel Murphy of 1938) and those younger Irish poets - he calls
89 Ibid., p. 94.
90 Richard Kearney, 'Beckett: the Demythologising Intellect' in The Irish Mind. Exploring
Intellectual Traditions, ed. by Richard Kearney, Dublin: Wolfound Press, 1985, p. z68.
91 Ibid.
9z Ibid., p. 193
93 Ibid.
94 Saorstat derives from Old Testament 'Saor' or 'Zoar', 'an iniquitous region redolent of
drunkness and sexual indulgence' (Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, op. cit., p. 174). This essay,
commissioned by The Bookman was written in 1935 and published for the first time in
Disjecta (1983).
2-4 CHAPTER I
them 'thermolaters' - who adore 'the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjurable
and unchangeable'.95 According to Beckett, the artist, in order to being aware
of'the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects'96 must
break 'the lines of communication' with his tradition. For the same reason,
he accuses Giovanni Papini, with his 'Dante vivo', to stress in the Dantesque
reading a 'religious and civic sphere',97 the circumstances of having been born
Florentine, embraced Catholicism etc., more than the 'pure artist' per se. In
short, Beckett blames Papini for carrying out a 'reduction of Dante to lovable
proportions': 'But who wants to love Dante ?', Beckett says, "We want to R E A D
Dante - for example, his imperishable reference (Paolo-Francesca episode) to
the incompatibility of the two operations'.98
Admittedly, Beckett searches for the universal - in all its forms. And
it is not by chance that his prose writings in the thirties {More Pricks than
Kicks, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy) are throughout laced
with satirical allusions to Irish characters and place-names. But it would be a
mistake - Kearney again argues - to suppose that Beckett rejected Irishness
in all its aspects: 'What Beckett could not accept was the revivalist idea of
predetermining, inherited identity'.99 In contrast, 'faithful to his specifically
Irish experiences of exile, marginality and dissent [...] Beckett's work might
be said to epitomise, to some degree, a peculiarly Irish cast of mind'.100 In this
sense, the modern author is a sort of nomad condemned to the alienation of
language - to the extraneousness even to his own writing.
95 Samuel Beckett, 'Recent Irish Poetry' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 70. First appeared in
The Bookman, August 1934 (under the pseudonym Andrew Belis).
96 Ibid.
97 Samuel Beckett, 'Papini's Dante' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 80. First appeared in The Bookman,
Christmas 1934.
98 Ibid., p. 81.
99 Richard Kearney, 'Beckett: The End of the Story?' in Transitions. Narratives in Modern
Irish Culture, Dublin: Wolfound Press, 1988, p. 60. Thus, he continues: 'Had he been born
in France, - or any other nation [...] Beckett would no doubt have been equally impatient
with its particular version of cultural nationalism' (Ibid.).
100 Richard Kearney, 'Beckett: The Demythologising Intellect' in The Irish Mind, op. cit.,
p. 193. 'His writing - Kearney concludes - is testimony to the fact that the Irish mind is
no less Irish for dispensing with the mirror of indigenous self-absorption and embarking
on the endless quest for the other' (Ibid.). On this subject see also John P. Harrington,
The Irish Beckett, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991; Eoin O'Brien, The Beckett
Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland, London: Faber and Faber, 1986; and Rodney Sharkey,
' Irish? Au contraireh The Search for Identity in the Fictions of Samuel Beckett 'Journal of
Beckett Studies (Tallahassee), 1994,3 (1), pp. 1-18.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Significandy, the idea of'demythologization', proposed by Richard Kearney
in relation to Beckett, is, above all, a revolution against the notion of identity
- in all fields, from the strict idea of national identity to a wider conception
related to arts, culture, society, politics etc. In other words, it is the Beckettian
quest for the non-identical, i.e. the claim to express - in Adornian terms - the
fragmentariness of the present state of non-identitywhich certainly sets
the Irish writer out among those authors considered by Adorno as authentic
representatives of modern art.
1.2.4 Concluding Remarks
As suggested by 'Intercessions by Denis Devlin' and above all by the crucial
'German Letter' (which will be discussed in § 1.4), it seems likely that the
decisive aesthetic turning point in Beckett's mind happened between 1937
and 1938 (and around ten years later, after Molloy, it will become 'effective' as
a definitive direction).
From then on, he abandoned the Joycean way, the 'nocturnal world', where
everything is all over since 'form is content and content is form' and which
he himself called as 'spherical' with a 'non-directional movement'. As we have
seen, while it is not correct to speak of a 'rejection' of such a vision - since
it is precisely from a deep apprehension of this that Beckett starts out on his
own path - it is also true that, from the mid-i93os on, Beckettian aesthetics
adopts a diametrically opposed posture to Joyce's. There is no better evidence
for this than Beckett's own words:
For some authors writing gets easier the more they write. For me it gets more and more
difficult. For me the area of possibilities gets smaller and smaller [...] The Kafka hero has
a coherence of purpose. He's lost but he's not spiritually precarious, he's not falling to
bits. My people seem to be falling to bits [...] In my work there is consternation behind
the form, not in the form. At the end of my work there's nothing but dust - the namable.
In my last book, L'lnnomable \ The Unnamable], there's complete disintegration, there's
102
no way to go on.
101 A state in which - for Adorno - the 'rational' and the 'real' do not yet coincide (see
Chapter 2).
102 Israel Shenker, 'An Interview with Beckett' ('New York Times', 5 May 1956, Section II,
1-3), in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. 148.
 2-4 CHAPTER I
One could still discuss at length whether and where Joyce influenced
Beckett in his early novels, not to mention how big the Joycean heritage is in
his 'disciple'. It is an undeniable fact, though, that Beckett's path, at a certain
point, turns in a direction which is radically different both from Joyce's and
Proust's. When the way of research is linear (which does not mean 'unidi-
rectional') anything can happen, such as finding perfection or perdition (as
it was, somehow, for Dante, whose world is defined by Beckett as 'conical
implying culmination'), or even 'dust'; or a situation of endgame, of impasse
- like in chess. One might 'falls to bits' - to use Beckett's own words: this is
what might happen even to art and to literature, as the artist is no longer the
master of his own material. If this endgame produced an 'aesthetic effect', it
would be 'in the form' anyway - as he suggests with relation to Kafka. But
this is not the case of Beckett.
After ten years as a literary critic, at various levels and through differ-
ent stages (passing through the Proustian, and Schopenhauerian, pessimism,
culminating in the 'demythologization of the world'), Beckett finally discov-
ers his personal rupture point of the line of communication which tied art to
itself and in this way rendered it spherical and omnipotent - an art that, as for
Joyce, 'the more it knew the more it could'. Thus, from an art of crisis Beckett
turns literally to the crisis of art itself. A crisis that occurs precisely when art
recognizes in itself the closest place to the truth. Philosophically, this has been
compared to the transition effected from a Heideggerian to an Adornian posi-
tion on aesthetics. Given the possibility for art to be a clear mirror of truth, as
a coincidence of inner and outer, a 'monadic' convergence between form and
meaning of things, Beckett (parallel to Adorno) decides to turn to the content
of this truth: 'Which?' - he asks. From 'revelation of a truth' (achieved with
an excavatory, immersive process) art becomes 'pure interrogation' of the same
truth. 'What then does it have to say?' is Beckett's radical question. 'Nothing
to be done' are the opening words of Estragon in Waitingfor Godot - the play
that, significantly, is more than any other situated on the edge of a modern
and a post-modern era.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
1.3 In Dialogue with Van Velde: Painting and Philosophy
A crucial question at this stage remains still open. If Beckett is so convinced that
Joyce's art does reveal the secret and true language of things, since his writing
'is not about something' but 'it is that somethingitself, why and how, therefore,
does this 'something' then become 'nothing', despite, in Beckett's opinion, the
dignity and value of the previous something' remaining intact?
Such a turning point - which, as seen, occurred around 1937-38 - is an
enigma, whose solution is perhaps more difficult than ever, as Beckett left
very few clues here. However, on this occasion, the answer might come from
a field other than literature: after the War, in fact, Beckett's critical interest
switches to painting. This is due to a series of fortuitous events, such as the
meeting with Georges Duthuit, a reasonably famous art critic and writer
and also Matisse's son-in-law, who was starting up the 'new' transition again;
Beckett translated and revised essays and various material for him. As James
Knowlson argues, Duthuit 'over the period from 1948 to 1952, seems to have
taken on Tom MacGreevy s role as Beckett's main confidant'.103 While paint-
ing had been one of the main interests of Beckett even in his youth, it is also
true that during this period Beckett had the opportunity to deepen his knowl-
edge of the subject, as he was introduced to Duthuit s painter friends such as
Henri Matisse, Andre Masson, Nicholas de Stael, Pierre Tal Coat, and Bram
and Geer Van Velde. Some of these, Knowlson attests, 'used to congregate at
Duthuit s office at 96 rue de l'Universite [...] Beckett only came occasionally
to these early evening gatherings. More often, he used to lunch privately with
Georges or call to go over the translations with him in the afternoon'.104 Their
private conversations led directly to the publishing of a remarkable exchange
of their ideas on art. The title of this short essay, concerning the work of three
painters (Pierre Tal Coat, Andre Masson and Bram Van Velde), first published
in transition in 1949, is Three Dialogues.105 However, as Knowlson points out,
this work represents only part of the debate that went on between them in
private and by letter over many months.
103 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 371.
104 Ibid., p. 370.
105 First appeared in transition, December 1949, this essay was subsequently translated into
French by its author.
2-4 CHAPTER
1.3.1 First Dialogue (Tal Coat): The Nothing of Art
In the first of the three dialogues, dedicated to Tal Coat, Beckett advances
the entire issue of the above-mentioned 'something/nothing' antithesis as
follows:
B. - Total object, complete with missing part, instead of partial object. Question of
degree.
D. - More. Hie tyranny of the discreet overthrown. The world a flux of movements par-
taking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation, the painting, the painter. The
fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it
nourished.
B. - In any case a thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience, as
revealed to the vigilant coenaesthesia. Whether achieved through submission or through
mastery, the result is a gain in nature.106
According to Beckett, Tal Coat's painting, along with that of other paint-
ers, is therefore capable of representing the 'total object'- the complete reality,
with all of its parts. This kind of painting, as an authentic work of art, achieves
what is defined as 'the more adequate expression of natural experience', yet, at
the same time, is also something 'revealed'. To Duthuit s objection that such
an art is not only an expression of what already might exist in nature but also
something that the painter discovers, orders and transmits 'on a quite different
plane', Beckett responds that he intended nature as 'a composite of perceiver
and perceived - not a datum, an experience'.107 In short, something more
than nature itself. Nevertheless, Beckett here sets out his strongest argument
against art in general. However 'realer than real' this painting is, being 'the
more adequate expression of the world', Beckett avers that such an adequacy
is still a 'compromise' - precisely like all previous painting.
B. - I do not deplore. I agree that the Matisse in question, as well as the Franciscan orgies
of Tal Coat, have prodigious value, but a value cognate with those already accumulated.
What we have to consider in the case of Italian painters is not that they surveyed the
world with the eyes of building contractors, a mere means like any other, but that they
never stirred from the field of the possible, however much they may have enlarged it.
106 Samuel Beckett, 'Three Dialogues' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 138.
107 Ibid.
I The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order
on the plane of the feasible.108
Like the revolution of the word in poetry, the revolution of painting,
too, appears to Beckett, at this stage of his personal research, as 'limited' or at
least not-so-revolutionary. To the unavoidable counter-question by Georges
Duthuit, 'What other plane can there be for the maker?', Beckett therefore
replies: 'Logically none'. The final sequence of this first dialogue is thus one
of the most famous and oft quoted in Beckettian scholarship:
B. - [...] Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary
of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going
a little further along a dreary road.
D. - And preferring what ?
B. - The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, noth-
ing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the
obligation to express.
D. - But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the
matter of Tal Coat.
B. -
D. - Perhaps that is enough for today.109
It is not strange that Beckett's scholars have cited the previous passage so
frequendy, as it truly condenses his aesthetics in a single concept: art as a need -
a need to express, though no means for such an expression to be realized exists.
Beckett excludes here, in relation to his new way for art, all the possibilities
except that of the 'obligation to express' (as a consequence of a need). Art,
therefore, has nothing 'with and from which' to express anything; it has no
'power', nor even a 'desire'. The first and principal thing that Beckett removes
from art is any possible sense of depth in relation to it, in other words, any inner
movement towards an object which is not completely present in its totality,
whether this be desire, the ability to 'be able', to do a litde better', or the simple
achievement of something. This new art is actually the exact opposite of any
kind of achievement. In Beckett's judgement, the only alternative to the 'old
art' - which, even in all its jumbled directions, is always a 'compromise' tied
to 'the plane of the feasible' - is the 'nothing'; with the sole residuum of the
108 Ibid., p. 139.
109 Ibid.
2-4 CHAPTER I
obligation for this nothing 'to be expressed'. Far from undermining the value
and status of art, such an aut/aut between art and nothing must be consid-
ered as a sincere appreciation by Beckett of the 'revolutionaries' Matisse and
Tal Coat, as well as many other painters and writers (Joyce in primis). There
is no doubt, Beckett constantly reiterates, that their works have 'prodigious
value' and constitute 'the more adequate expression of natural experience'. At
the same time, however much they enlarge the field of the possible and the
'feasible', as Beckett says, none of them ever stir from it.
It is important to stress such a position, i.e. the Beckettian desire for the
most radical revolution of art from the plane of'an enlarged possible to that
of nothing, since the more Beckett continues with his life and work, the more
difficult it is to find, in his words, a reason for this choice. Nevertheless, in
many of his writings one can identify some reference to this nothing as the
truest content of art, often in the form of an adverb or noun - such as 'there',
'out there', 'outside' - which only 'denotes' but can neither describe nor narrate
the object of its reference. Such a 'need to express the nothing', which seems
to emerge as the main character of art, is perhaps more evident in many parts
of Beckett's poetry. For example, in 'Something there' (1974):
something there
where
out there
outside
what
the head what else
something there somewhere outside
the head [...] no
Equally, the desire for the 'totally other' is always clearly present, as in this
late poem dedicated to James Knowlson:
Go where never before
No sooner there than there always
No matter where never before
No sooner there than there always 111
no Samuel Beckett, 'Something There' in Selected Poems, London: John Calder Publishers,
1999, p. 27.
111 Ibid., p. 28.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Or as in 'Brief Dream', dedicated to John Calder:
go end there
one fine day
where never till then
till as much as to say
no matter where
no matter when 112
Significandy, in the very last of Beckett's writings, a poem entitled 'What
is the word', the impossibility to 'reach' the reality with words is the main
theme of a poem which does not even start. 113 It is not by chance that all these
late poems are concerned with the same idea, the impossibility of the word.
The beginning of Beckett's aesthetics coincides in this case with its end: in
the Three Dialogues, he starts from the impossibility of expressing the word,
despite having previously experienced the full possibility of it with Joyce, and
eventually, at the end of his life, he comes to the same point.
In the same way as Hugo von Hoffmansthal's Lord Chandos and Thomas
Mann's Tonio Kröger, Beckett as a writer makes the decision to refuse the
'old art' and turns towards an aesthetic conception in which art has nothing
to express, while nonetheless heading, as if obliged, towards something that is
nothing, or, at least, nothing expressible. There is no point searching for the
theoretical reasons that led Beckett to such an aesthetics of silence: he himself
probably never probed the matter deeply, just as neither Lord Chandos nor
Tonio Kröger ever fully explain the decision to retrace their steps. However,
unlike the latter two, Beckett is obviously not the fictional character of a
novel and his choice, in many senses, is much more radical. As Adorno states
in Aesthetic Theory citing Beckett, 'An artwork is a desecration of silence'}1*
112 Ibid., p. 29.
113 See Samuel Beckett, 'What is the Word', in Stirrings Still, London: John Calder Publishers,
!999. PP- 25-28. For a full analysis of Beckett's poetry the most complete study remains
Laurence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970. See also John Pilling, 'Beckett's poetry', in Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1976, pp. 159-183; Martin Esslin, 'Samuel Beckett's poems' in Beckett at Sixty,
London: Calder and Boyars, 1967, pp. 55-60; and Roger Little, 'Beckett's poems and verse
translations, or: Beckett and the limits ofpoetry', in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,
op. cit., pp. 184-195.
114 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 134.
2-4
CHAPTER I
What constitutes the 'irresistibility of Beckett's work', he adds, is that with
him 'poetry retreated into what abandons itself unreservedly to the process
of disillusionment';115 hence, eventually, his language seeks to withdraw into
silence. It is likely that the main reason for this choice is, above all, an irrational
necessity, a need for such a silence, and for a different art, even though this, as
Georges Duthuit argues in the first dialogue, is 'a violently extreme and personal
point of view'. At the same time, it is precisely Beckett's late poetry that helps
us to define his 'art of the nothing' and of what exactly this nothing consists.
The 'new plane' for the artist, which Beckett refers to in this first of the Three
Dialogues, is the claim to include non-identical reality, for art, from here on,
cannot but be an inappropriate representation of reality. In a certain sense,
its main purpose is that of eluding and resisting the realm of identity, and of
reaching something 'other', where the term 'nothing' must only be seen as a
connotation of'infinite openness' to this reality. In this regard, such a new art
is necessarily identifiable as a need, an obscure feeling, a sense of obligation,
and a desire towards the unknowable, i.e. the only possibility to escape the
conceptuality of identity thinking. Speaking other than in terms of need and
of suffering would mean, in fact, to bring back the non-identity to an identi-
cal status. For Beckett, as David Hesla points out, the new modern painting
'would be expressive of the impossibility of expressing by means of art'.116 But
then again, according to Hesla, this would not be a 'new tendency' of art like
any other: 'the modern artist simply and completely has no expressible world
and no expressible self'. 117 The same concept of'Expressionism' - as an aes-
thetic principle assumed by the contemporary presence and availability of both
an expressible self and an expressible matter - has been invalidated. 'In this
warped and hollow time', Hesla concludes, 'the relation is quite out of joint,
for its constitutive terms are either not present or are present but not available
to the artist'.118 Finally, with regard to Beckett's interview with Tom Driver,
Hesla observes that the problem, in Beckettian aesthetics, is not that 'there
is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with', but rather (as Beckett admits)
that 'there is indeed something to "paint": it is the confusion, the mess'.119
115 Ibid., p. 16.
116 David Hesla, The Shape ofChaos. An Interpretation oftheArtofSamuelBeckett, Minneapolis:
The University of Minnesota Press, 1971, p. 4.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 5.
119 Ibid., p. 6.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
In other words: the non-identity. And it is precisely this 'chaos' that calls for an
impossible expression. This is the new task of art. In this respect, John Pilling
is right when he concludes that Beckett could hardly have better exemplified
Malone's dictum - 'The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief
from its formlessness'.120
This entire question leads from painting towards the problematic of
writing itself and situates Beckett very closely to Adornos philosophy, since,
for the latter, after Auschwitz nobody can write poetry anymore. Beckett does
not explicitly name Auschwitz, 121 but it is perfectly clear to him that a radi-
cally different art, a new revolution of the word is by now a necessity: there are
things that still have no voice and need to be expressed. On the one hand, the
Joycean revolution, as with Magritte or Tal Coat in painting, has given the most
adequate response to identical reality; on the other hand, an artistic expres-
sion whose aim is to match non-identity must necessarily be an 'inadequate
response', in other words, the expression of the nothing. While the Joycean
word was so omnipotent as to embody in itself the same reality, to become
the thing itself- whose truth, as for Heidegger, is therefore 'deconcealed and
set up at work' in the word of art - Beckett's word is completely impotent,
incapable even of going beyond the simplest reference to 'something there',
to somewhere outside'. Eventually, this 'something there' would become the
banner of Beckett's art - the end of the word itself.
Might this still be considered a practicable road for art or is it simply
anti-art'? These are some of the crucial questions with which our research is
concerned. But in order to answer them, Adornos aesthetics and his inter-
pretation of Beckett, that will be dealt with in Chapter z, will represent a key
passage.
110 Quoted in John Pilling, 'Beckett's English Fiction' in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,
op. cit., p. 17.
111 Even though, Beckett too experienced a strong sense of disillusionment and of'fall of
an entire world', after the War - as Lois Gordon suggests in relation to the volunteering
experience made by him with the Irish Red Cross in the town of Saint-Lö in Normandy.
'[...] Beckett, perhaps so more than Joyce, had come to understand the limitations imposed
upon the individual by powerful and eternally unpredictable inner and outer forces - the
limits posed by the absurdity of the human condition' (Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel
Beckett, op. cit., p. 2.01).
2-4
CHAPTER I
1.3.2 Second Dialogue (Masson): The Artist's Temptation
The great difficulty of'painting the nothing' is the theme of the second dia-
logue, this time concerned with the painter Andre Masson.
While Duthuit argues that Masson indeed searches for the void, for the
'inner emptiness' that constitutes the prime condition, according to Chinese
aesthetics, of the act of painting, he nonetheless 'suffers more keenly than any
living painter from the need to come to rest, i.e. to establish the data of the
problem to be solved, the Problem at last'.122 'Two old maladies', replies Beckett,
'that should no doubt be considered separately: the malady of wanting to know
what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it'.123 Duthuit's defence
of Masson begins by saying that his declared purpose is to reduce these 'mala-
dies' to nothing, even though this necessarily must happen by maintaining at
least some premises for producing such an art:
You of course will reply that it is the same thing as before, the same reaching towards suc-
cour from without. Opaque or transparent, the object remains sovereign. But how can
Masson be expected to paint the void? 1 2 4
'He cannot', Beckett replies, and so, he continues, 'the void he speaks
of is perhaps simply the obliteration of an unbearable presence, unbearable
because neither to be wooed nor to be stormed'.125 The fundamental problem
- adds Beckett, again in replying to Duthuit's observation on Masson's great
technical abilities - is that until artists are concerned with the beauty and the
richness of reality they will never be interested in dealing with a totally differ-
ent object, such as the void, the real void. In this regard, Masson is still tied
to a fairly positive art: 'His so extremely intelligent remarks on space breathe
the same possessiveness as the notebooks of Leonardo who, when speaks of
disfazione, knows that for him not one fragment will be lost'.126 Once again,
Beckett expresses urgency for an 'impossible art' as his first concern; this cer-
tainly does not undermine the rest of art, even though in some sense it is what
Duthuit thinks at the conclusion of the second dialogue:
122 Samuel Beckett, "Three Dialogues' in Disjecta, op. cit., pp. 139-140.
123 Ibid., p. 140.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid., p. 141.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett
15
But must we really deplore the painting that admits 'the things and creatures of spring,
resplendent with desire and affirmation, ephemeral no doubt, but immortally reiterant',
not in order to benefit by them, not in order to enjoy them, but in order that what is tol-
erable and radiant in the world may continue? Are we really to deplore the painting that
is a rallying, among the things of time that pass and hurry us away, towards a time that
endures and gives increase ?
B. - (Exit weeping.)127
Yet, here, for the umpteenth time, it is possible to read more than mere
reticence into Beckett's silence. There is a hidden, vital reason in Beckett's
choice of one or other art - but this is a point that will be discussed in the
following paragraph.
1.3.3 Third Dialogue (B. Van Velde): From a Painting of Failure to the Failure
of Painting
Unlike Tal Coat and Masson, Bram Van Velde represents a totally new direction
for Beckett. Apparendy, the Dutch painter accepted the impossibility of any
degree of adequacy in the expression in art, yet his paintings are not concerned,
almost as if advancing a philosophical position, with such an impossibility.
Rather, he is a victim of a sort of'slavery': he is helpless and unable to act - but
he nonetheless acts, 'in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint'.128
D. - Why is he obliged to paint ?
B. - I don't know.
D. - Why is he helpless to paint?
B. - Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.
D. - And the result, you say, is art of a new order? 12 '
What Beckett knows for sure is that there is none, among those whom are
called 'great artists', whose concern 'was not predominantly with his expres-
sive possibilities'. Hence, 'the assumption underlying all painting is that the
J27 Ibid., pp. 141-142.
128 Ibid., p. 142.
129 Ibid.
2-4 15
CHAPTER I The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett

domain of the maker is the domain of feasible'.130 The whole matter relates to Two things are to be underlined here. The first is that for Beckett an expres-
what can be expressed greatly or more limitedly: this is, essentially, what we sive and 'replete' painting (as Mondrian's is in a special way), whose creative
call painting. process is definitively tied to the occasion, is by now out of date, or at the
very least, 'we begin to weary of it, do we not ?' The second is that Beckett has
D. - One moment. Are you suggesting that the painting of van Velde is inexpressive ? nothing against such a painting, indeed, he considers it to be full of geniality.
B. - (Afortnight later) Yes. In the same way, he has nothing against what seems to be the fundamental
D. - You realize the absurdity of what you advance? relation which produces such a picture (possession-poverty), unless it masks
B. - I hope I do. and avoids the truest starting motif of an artist.

Duthuit is well aware of how revolutionary, possibly even absurd, Beckett's
words are here. Van Velde s paintings are declared as wholly inexpressive.
Consequendy, he, as an artist, simplyfails. At the same time - together with
the affirmation that his paintings are merely very different from any paint-
ings that precede them and that they accomplish a totally different order of
art - Beckett would seem to imply, according to Duthuit, that all the other
painters had to wait for van Velde 'to be rid of the misapprehension' they had
fallen under by believing in an expressive art. 'Others have felt that art is not
necessarily expression', replies Beckett, 'but the numerous attempts made to
make painting independent of its occasion have only succeeded in enlarging its
repertory'.132 Therefore, van Velde is for Beckett the first person whose painting
is rid 'of occasion in every shape and form, ideal as well as material'.133
On Duthuit s insistence, Beckett finally provides a conclusive statement
on his credo about art.
B. - There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain
to be said. [...] The analysis of the relation between the artist and his occasion, a relation
always regarded as indispensable, does not seem to have been very productive either, the
reason being perhaps that it lost its way in disquisitions on the nature of occasion. It is
obvious that for the artist obsessed with his expressive vocation, anything and everything
is doomed to become occasion [...].134
All that should concern us is the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as tough
shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the
expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to. The history of painting, here we go again,
is the history of its attempts to escape from this sense of failure, by means of more authentic,
more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee [...]. 135
Beckett's main problem with expressive painting is therefore that, in the
long run, it conceals the truth. By stressing the relation between the work and
the artist, as well as the artist and the occasion, the importance of achieving
something, it simply forgets its original meaning - which is a sense of failure,
of anxiety, of inadequacy. For the same reason Beckett firmly refuses to adopt
an 'aesthetic of failure', he refuses any fidelity to this failure, any desire to seek
a 'new occasion, a new term of relation' concerning this impossibility. He
realizes now that his is not a new, opposite art - but rather, perhaps, anti-art.
The failure is real - as he declares at the end of the dialogue.
I don't know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It seems to have nothing
to do with art, in any case, if my memories of art are correct.136

135 Ibid., p. 145.

136 Ibid. For a recent overview of criticism on Three Dialogues, even though conceived under a
slightly psychoanalytic view, see the issue "Three Dialogues Revisited/Les Trois dialogues
revisites', edited by Marius Buning in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Volume 13, Issue
130 Ibid. 1,1 February 2003. See, in particular, the following articles: Steven Barfield, 'The Resources
131 Ibid., p. 143. of Unrepresentability: A Lacanian Glimpse of Beckett's Three Dialogues', pp. 15-17(13);
131 Ibid. Lois Oppenheim, 'Disturbing the Feasible: Object Representation in Three Dialogues
133 Ibid. with Georges Duthuit', pp. 75-88(14); and David A. Hatch '"I Am Mistaken": Surface and
134 Ibid., p. 144. Subtext in Samuel Beckett's Three Dialogues', pp. 57-71 (15).
 2-4 CHAPTER I
To be an artist is therefore to fail, and yet this seems to have nothing to
do with art as conceived up to that point. This Beckettian paradox leads us
to another crucial relationship, concerning art and truth, which belongs to
Beckett much more than that between the work of art and its expression. This
philosophical aporia only finds its solution in an Adornian consideration of
this relation between art and truth, for art originally reveals ('deconceals',
Heidegger would say) truth, though in way that as soon as it appears it is no
longer recognizable as truth.137 'The truth of discursive knowledge', Adorno
claims, 'is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the
knowledge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with
art'.138 Hence, art is a continuous, hermeneutic process of failure and redemp-
tion from its fundamentally illusory character. If truth were not involved in
the process of art, this would not happen, as art would be simply the achieve-
ment of something - as, according to Beckett, expressive (and, at this point,
'not authentic') art is. The inner truthfulness of art is the problem of art itself:
it is the reason for it tends towards its own failure, to become anti-art, and
nonetheless is obliged to continue to try to express. The Three Dialogues with
Georges Duthuit - which also represent, chronologically, the last word of
Beckett as an essayist - are a kind of endgame of aesthetic theorizing, some-
thing of a terminus in the author's discursive writing. But this does not mean
that their final reason is the end-, on the contrary, end is the key-clue of a new
framework in which art has less than ever, in its history, a rather marginal and
decorative significance.
1.3.4 Beckett and the Van Veldes
Before Three Dialogues, Beckett had already written two essays - 'Lapeinture
des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon' (1945) and 'Peintres de l'empechement'
(1948) - on his friends the brothers Geer and Bram van Velde, two Dutch
painters working in Paris during the post-war period.139 Charles Juliet, a close
137 'Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales: "If you want the absolute, you shall have it, but
you will not recognize it when you see it.'" (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op.
cit., p. 12.6).
138 Ibid.
139 h w a s in '937 that Beckett met Geer and Bram van Velde. At first he was attracted more
by the work of the former; not until after World War II did he decide that the latter was
the greater artist.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
friend both of Beckett and of Bram van Velde, gave a precious account of the
friendship between the two with his book 'Conversations with Samuel Beckett
and Bram van Velde'.140
What Beckett puts forward in the first of these essays is a particular vision
of the relation subject-object in which the painting is a pure object, in this
primitive state, 'un non-sens', which waits to receive a form from the subject.
The subject, on its turn, can never be a pure subject, disinterested in the act
of aesthetic perception, which would be the most desirable condition for a
'pure art'. Accordingly, what the van Veldes realize is the impossibility of rep-
resentation through the irreparable breakdown of subject and object. Geer s
painting escapes from the condition of space, and Bram's from the condition
of time.141 Thus, Beckett discovers here an interesting way to interrogate and
put in crisis the truth of human existence through the 'deconstruction' of
the categories of space and time, which he will later successfully apply in his
theatre, starting very soon with Waiting for Godot.
The problem he deals with in the second essay, 'Peintres de l'empechement',
is instead the research (or loss) of a stable philosophical background for art
precisely starting from the premise of the unrepresentability of art. Instead
of searching for a difficult, though impossible, philosophical justification, he
suggests to create one precisely by affirming the absence of any seriousness
140 Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, English transla-
tion by Janey Tucker, Leiden: Academic Press Leiden, 1995. Juliet, a French writer and art
critic, met first Bram van Velde and through him became a close friend of Beckett. His
conversations with van Velde and Beckett, held between 1964 and 1977, were published
in French in 1986 and in English translation nine years later. Since Beckett and van Velde
rarely met or wrote letters, Juliet in effect functioned as a go-between. In an interview
towards the end of his life, Bram van Velde remembered this about Beckett: 'The friend-
ship with Beckett is the most important event in my life. He had an eye for my work. He
understood my world of painting. And what he could express in words, I expressed with
my paintings' (Ibid., p. 3). Equally, Juliet recalls that he was 'struck by the affection and
admiration he [Beckett] bears Bram. By the fervour with which he talks about him' (Ibid.,
p. 51).
141 'La peinture d'A. van Velde serait done premierement une peinture de la chose en suspense,
je dirais volontiers de la chose morte, idealement morte, si ce term n'avait pas de si fächeuses
associations [...] A. van Velde peint letendue. G. van Velde peint la succession. Puisque,
avant de pouvoir voir letendue, ä plus forte raison avant de pouvoir la representer, il faut
l'immobiliser, celui-la se detourne de letendue naturelle, celle qui tourne comme une
toupie sous le fouet du soleil' (Samuel Beckett, 'La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et
le pantalon' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 126 and p. 128).

2-4
CHAPTER I
in this kind of philosophy. In other words - and this is mainly what the van
Veldes have understood - the aesthetic conditions under which the new art is
founded consist precisely in that which prevents either the subject to see the
object, or the object to be seen by the subject. Since now on, Beckett suggests,
art can return to an old vision of the subject-object problematic, or, following
the van Veldes, try to find a new object through awareness of the conditions
of unrepresentability.
La peinture des van Velde sort, libre de tout souci critique, dune peinture de critique et
de refus, refus d'accepter comme donne levieux rapport sujet-objet. II est evident que
toute oeuvre dart est un rajustament de ce rapport [...] A partir de ce moment il reste
trois chemins que la peinture peut prendre. Le chemin du retour ä vieille naivete, ä travers
l'hiver de son abandon, le chemin des repentis. Puis le chemin qui n'en est plus un, mais une
derniere tentative de vivre sur le pays conquis. Et enfin le chemin en avant dune peinture
qui se soucie aussi peu dune convention perimee que des hieratismes et preciosites des
enquetes superflues, peinture d'acceptation, entrevoyant dans l'absence de rapport et dans
l'absence d'objet le nouveau rapport et le nouvel objet, chemin qui bifurque dejä, dans les
travaux de Bram and Geer van Velde.142
There is a little hope still present here, in Beckett, of finding new condi-
tions' for art - a hope which is destined, as seen, to capitulate definitively in
Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. Yet, this essay touches for the first time a
crucial point of Beckettian aesthetics: a theme, in fact, which must be regarded
as the main theoretical basis of the Beckett of Godot. While the history of
painting, Beckett says, has always been the history of relation between paint-
ing and its object, it is also true that such a relation were continually addressed
towards a falsification of the object itself, e.g. through the 'sense of depth' ('la
sens de la profondeur' or 'la chose que cache la chose').143 But now, it seems
absurd for Beckett to speak, as Kandinsky did, of a 'peinture liberee de l'objet'.
'Ce dont la peinture s'est liberee', Beckett points out, 'c'est de 1'illusion qu'il
existe plus d'un objet de representation, peut-etre meme de 1'illusion que cet
unique objet se laisse representer'.144 What remains, in the end, are two sorts of
'empechement': the 'empechement-objet' and the 'empechement-oeil'. There is
142. Samuel Beckett, 'Peintres de lempechement' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 137 (deliberately pub-
lished in French by the author).
143 Ibid., p. 135.
144 Ibid., p. 136.
15
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett
no better evidence of this breakdown of the subject-object relationship than
the following passage:
Lun dira: Je ne peux voir l'objet, pour le representer, parce qu'il est ce qu'il est. Lautre:
Je ne peux voir l'objet, pour le representer, parce que je suis ce que je suis.14
The van Veldes' painting is above all the analysis of a state of privation'. The
new object of this painting is precisely what prevents, either from the subjec-
tive or the objective side, the representation itself.146 Hence Beckett derives his
own aesthetic conception which, since this essay, not only is concerned with
pure philosophical premises but also with a practical idea of how staging and
representing the empechement of art.147
From this moment, Beckett's aesthetics has indeed a definite target: i.e.
the meaning, the content of any artistic representation. As in his view this is
not absent but 'inexpressible', then art must primarily deal with incommu-
nicability. Nonetheless, while losing its content art retains its form which is
all that can be used to try to express such an impossibility to express: in so
doingfailing necessarily each time. The empechement of art can be accom-
plished only by eliminating any illusion related to the possibility to achieve
both the meaning of object and of subject. In fact, the first thing that Beckett
will remove from his works will be any sense of depth' (unless to keep it for
reducing it to absurd), i.e. the typical illusion given by art that a content is
145 Ibid. Such a 'bankrupt relationship', the 'irreversible rupture' between subject and object,
is much more evident in 'Peintres de lempechement' than in the previous 'La Peinture
des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon'. For an interesting application of this subject
to the Beckettian narrative, see Vincent Murphy, 'La Peinture de lempechement: Samuel
Beckett's Watt', in Criticism 18, no. 4 (Fall), pp. 353-366.
146 See also Bram van Velde s own words: 'The artist has no role. He is absent [...] To be nothing.
Just nothing. It's a frightening experience. You have to let go of everything. Art is taking
risks. A sincere attempt to achieve the impossible, the unknown [...] When you get to the
bottom, youdiscover that there is no room for pride. That's what I paint' (Charles Juliet,
Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, op. cit., pp. 49-50).
147 See the following passage as an interesting anticipation of the Beckettian theatre: 'La
resolution s'obtient chez l'un par l'abandon du poids, de la densite, de la solidite, par un
dechirement de tout ce qui gache 1'espace, arrete la lumiere, par Iengloutissement du dehors
sous les conditions du dehors. Chez l'autre parmi les masses inebranlables d'un etre ecarte,
enferme et rentre pour toujours en lui-meme, sans traces, sans air, cyclopeen, aux brefs
Eclairs, aux couleurs du spectre du noir' (Ibid., p. 136).

2-4
CHAPTER I
accessible' beyond the thing itself. Instead, for Beckett only the 'pure' thing
and the 'pure' subject exist, and there is no communication between them.
Like any symbol, illusion is an anticipation of something, and in art it finds
its best status. Thanks also to the van Veldes' experience, Beckett realizes that
until he does not unmask the illusion of meaning, or, the illusory expectation
that the truth-content of both subject and object can be revealed artistically,
there will never be a new art.
1.3.5 -Art versus Truth
In Endgame, at a certain point, Hamm tells Clov a story:
HAMM: I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a
painter - and endgraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the
asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising
corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! And that loveliness! [Pause] He'd
snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.
[Pause.] He alone had been spared. [Pause.] Forgotten. [Pause.] It appears the case is...
1 148
was not so... so unusual.
The end of the word is the end of the world itself. It is precisely what Plato
intended to avoid by defining art as a mere copy of true reality: in so doing he
wanted first of all to preserve our 'ancient world'. Otherwise there would be
the possibility that the vision of the expressive art was deceptive, for every-
thing that the artist painted was in reality ashes, while 'he alone had been
spared'. In Beckett's mind, the end of the world for painting has certainly
come and Bram van Velde has been the painter who indicated to him such
an event.149 Even tough he never spoke in these precise terms, it is hard not
to think of Beckett's ultimate consideration on the 'old' painting, along with
the 'old' literature (including Joyce in the first instance), as one of this kind:
148 Samuel Beckett, 'Endgame' in The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber,
1990, p. 113.
149 See Bram van Velde s own words: 'Before, painting was on the side of the positive, the
feasible. I have had to go towards what is not feasible [...] If it weren't for this spark (the need
to be, to see and to make others see), it would all be just dust' (Charles Juliet, Conversations
with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, op. cit., p. 96 and p. 53).
15
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett
'It worked, it still works, but it is completely deceitful'. By now, Beckett's
aesthetic axiom is doubdess a sort of'Art versus Truth'. At least, it is the art
that 'can' achieve its own goal to be opposed to truth. Consequendy, if one
wanted to keep the 'truth' in a work, it should be created an art of a radically
different degree - an art whose creator is, in Beckett's words, a 'no-can-er'.
Truth is conceived by Beckett as 'adaequatio rei et intellectus', namely, as a
coherent 'adequacy', a correspondence between the 'thing itself' (res) and its
intelligible/expressible form. But precisely because reality (the content, the
thing itself) is a fundamental 'non-identity', this cannot be expressed in an
identical form - for such an adaequatio is unachievable. For the Vienna Circle
philosopher Moritz Schlick the content of reality per se is inexpressible, just
as much as it is impossible to describe a colour to a blind man; only theform
is accessible and every knowledge is knowledge of a form, of a structure of
language. Nothing expresses anything directly, by virtue of its content, but
only 'by agreement'.150 In this regard, there is no escape from language, from
form. 151 At the same time, for Schlick such an agreement is based upon the
crucial identity between the (form of the) content and a method of verifica-
tion, that is to say, the same concept expressed by Stanley Jevons in his famous
book, The Principles of Science (1874), that 'science begins with the discovery of
identity within difference'. For the analytic philosophy, therefore, 'knowledge
is expression' since it cannot exist an 'inexpressible knowledge'. But this cannot
be true - as Wittgenstein remarks - for art and artworks, whose status is not
that of expressing but rather of'liking' something. Indeed, art is not expres-
sion in any sense, but is something else.152 Analogously, in Beckett's aesthetic
150 See Moritz Schlick, Form and Content. An Introduction to Philosophical Thinking{LccvaKS
1916-1936).
151 It is worth remembering one of the founding principles of the Vienna Circle philosophy
as expressed by Schlick, i.e. that the only way to give a meaning to a statement is to tran-
form it in a proposition. Accordingly, the meaning of A proposition will be the method of
its verification.
152 'What are expressions of liking something? Is it only what we say or interjections we
use or faces we make? Obviously not. It is, often, how often I read something or how
often I wear a suit. Perhaps I won't even say: "It's fine", but wear it often and look at it'
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Lectures on Aesthetics' in Continental Aesthetics, op. cit., p. 212).
For a comparison between Beckett and Wittgenstein see Bruce Kawin, 'On Not Having
the Last Word: Beckett, Wittgenstein, and the Limits of Language' in Peter Hawkins
and Anne Howland Schotter (eds), Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to
Beckett - AMS, 1984 (AMS Ars Poetica, 2), pp. 189-202; and Jacqueline Hoefer, 'Watt'
2-4 CHAPTER I
view, such a discovery of the 'identity within the difference' never happens,
as he continues to struggle with the impossibility to give a form to the chaos
of reality. This is what he declared at this regard in a famous passage of the
interview to Tom Driver:
The confusion is not my invention. [...] It is all around us and our only chance now is to
let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess
you can make sense of. [...] One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak only of
the mess. [...] What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in
art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type
that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The
form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. [...] To find a
form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.153
The Beckettian tension between art and truth is none other than the
dichotomy between the form and the mess. Truth is for Beckett the chaos
that has no voice and has been always embroidered and 'reduced' to a form.
The new task of the artist is therefore to find a form that no longer avoids
the mess. However, whereas Beckett is close to a Wittgensteinian position
in considering the impossibility for both art and aesthetics to express some-
thing as well as for the artistic content to be embodied in a form, he differs
considerably from it as far as the subject of the status of art is concerned. In
fact, Beckett does not see art simply as the realm of Liking and disliking, the
realm of'aesthetic reactions', as Wittgenstein says, but rather as a place in
which something decisive of the human nature can be revealed, even though
this revelation is practically unachievable. He recognizes in the chaos of the
content of art something valuable to such an extent that he dedicates his whole
life to the impossible undertaking of trying to express it. While agreeing that
science is probably the only feasible plane of knowledge, unlike Wittgenstein
Beckett does not consider this as a good reason for giving up the 'unfeasible'
field of an aesthetic knowledge. Like Heidegger, Beckett implicitly believes
in Perspective 11, (1959), pp. 166-81. In this essay, Hoefer allied the linguistic strategies of
Watt to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. See also Mercier, Vivian, 'Poet and
Mathematician', Hermathena: A Trinity College Dublin Review (Dublin, Ireland), 1986,
141, pp. 66-71.
153 Tom Driver, 'Interview with Samuel Beckett' ('Columbia University Forum', Summer
1961, pp. 21-15), in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, op. cit., pp. 218-219.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
that the nature of truth is that of being dominated throughout by a denial-.
that of'imconcealedness'. Specifically, the nature of truth, as the Greek word
aletheia means,154 is deeply enigmatic. 'Truth in its nature is un-truth' - as
Heidegger says: the concealment of it 'conceals and dissembles itself. Yet,
this is never a merely existent place (an expressible,feasible place, as Beckett
would say), but a happening. For Heidegger, in this 'happening' (the work of
art) 'truth occurs precisely as itself in that the concealing denial, as refusal,
provides its constant source to all clearing, and yet, as dissembling, it metes
out to all clearing the indefeasible severity of error'.1SS The nature of truth itself
is a 'primal conflict' in which truth occurs as 'unconcealedness'. Therefore, if
one says that truth happens in Van Gogh's painting - Heidegger points out
- 'this does not mean that something is correctly portrayed' but rather that
this makes 'unconcealedness as such happen in regard to what is as a whole'.156
Hence, the Heideggerian definition of art as 'truth setting itself at work', i.e.
as the deconcealing of the truth of beings happening in the work. This notion
of artistic truth no longer as an 'actual presence' but rather as unconcealed-
ness upon a fundamental concealing of beings - in which, likewise, the work
of art not only is a mere presence but rather what makes this presence pos-
sible - marks a radical caesura from the Platonic concept of art as the sensible
appearance of the Form. In reality, such an idea of art as a 'copy of something',
before Heidegger was never completely overcome. With Heidegger painting is
154 In many writings, Heidegger stresses the etymology of the Greek word aletheia (a-, not
/ -lath-, to be concealed), usually translated as 'truth', as evidence that the Greeks recog-
nized a more basic notion than that of truth as 'correspondence'. See especially Martin
Heidegger, 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth' (1931/32,1940), translated by Thomas Sheehan, in
Pathmarks, Edited by William McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
See also Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, Translated by David F. Krell and Frank
A. Capuzzi, New York, Harper & Row, 1975.
155 Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in Continental Aesthetics, op. cit.,
p. 198. This crucial essay of 1935-6 was later included in Martin Heidegger, Off The Beaten
Track (1950). The main books collecting Heidegger's writings on aesthetics are: Martin
Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin's Affty, Translated and introduction by Keith Hoeller,
Amherst, New York, Humanity Books, 2000; Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin s Hymn "The
Ister", Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington, Indiana University
Press, 1996; Martin Heidegger, Off The Beaten Track, Edited and Translated by Julian
Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002; and Martin Heidegger,
On the Way to Language, Translated by Peter D. Hertz, NewYork, Harper & Row, 1971.
156 Ibid.

2-4 C H A P T E R I
no longer a 'mirror' reflecting Forms, nor simply an autonomous product, but
a performative act - an institution {Einrichtung) given by the contraposition
of enlightenment and concealment. In order to understand Beckett's aesthet-
ics, it is important to observe how he, before turning to an art of impotence,
fully endorses such a vision - by now 'mature' in modern art - of art as the
privileged place of truth, as expressed by Heidegger. This is probably what
Beckett intended when saying that Joyce's writing 'is not about something' but
'it is that something itself. As it was for Heidegger, the origin of art is art itself.
Yet, for Beckett all this becomes problematic when stressing the fundamental
relation that ties this art to truth.
Painting is not a more or less adequate copy, as well as is not even the origi-
nal, but rather the 'origin' of something that, by virtue of the inner struggle
between a non-identical content and the need for an expressibleform, takes
place in the work as its truth-content. Accordingly, the more this opposition
is solved in favour of an adequate form of the painting, the more the event of
art looses its truthfulness. This is what Beckett was probably thinking about
when discussing with his friend Andre Breton on Surrealism, or when looking
at Matisse's or Cezanne's paintings (his favourite). However much they embody
such a fundamental tension as the primary source of their art, that which was
separate (i.e. form and content) in all these paintings becomes somehow a
unity. Eventually, it is only in the works of the van Veldes that Beckett would
recognize for the first time this unity as a double.
Thus, Beckett stands between Wittgenstein and Heidegger as between
the impossibility and the unconcealedness of an aesthetic truth. But eventually,
for him, the latter is more meaningful than the scientific truth and certainly
there is more knowledge in art than in science. In this light, the Beckettian 'I
can't go on, I'll go on' must be considered - the final decision is to proceed
in a Heideggerian direction, though in the specifically negative form given
by Theodor Adorno whose aesthetics is very close to the position adopted by
Beckett. Starting from the impossibility of achieving any expression in art,
Beckett tries to represent the only thing that he can: the impossibility itself.
Admittedly, his art is the representation of what cannot be represented and
Adornos interpretation of it will be, symmetrically, the attempt 'to understand
its incomprehensibility' {Unverständlichkeit verstehen).™
See Chapter z, paragraph 1.1.1.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
Before proceeding, in the following section, to draw some final considerations
about the aesthetics of Beckett from this first period of activity as a writer, it
is worth highlighting a marginal note on his relation with painting. One of
the main reasons that led James Knowlson - as the author himself states in
the preface - to write his biography on Beckett is the hope of bringing out
something new in two particular areas of interest, as with the case of painting
and music, which 'have been least explored in the past forty years of Beckett
criticism'.158 Actually, Vivian Mercier, in his valuable study, attempts to describe
Beckett's art through a set of seven dialectical oppositions (one of these poles
often being almost total neglected with regard to the other),159 already recog-
nized the 'painting-music' dichotomy as crucial for the Beckettian aesthet-
ics. Interestingly, Mercier observes that while all the works up to Murphy are
full of references to painters, after this novel Beckett virtually abandons all
mention of specific painters and works of art. Likewise, it is only after the
completion of Murphy, in 1936, that his knowledge of twentieth-century art
and artists really began, and only then, too, did he publish his texts on art
criticism. Moreover, Beckett's own preference among twentieth-century art-
ists can be gleaned from this: a list of names and personalities who, for one
reason or another, have been described as Expressionists.160 On the other hand,
Mercier again suggests, 'when we turn from painting to music, the effect is one
of almost total antithesis'.161 While in both art forms Beckett is an amateur,
in painting he is passive, whereas in music he is active - a performer on the
piano and on the flute. Equally, while in painting his taste is often unconven-
tional, moving in the direction of the contemporary avant-garde, in music
his preferences remain essentially traditional. Also, Beckett as an adult man -
Mercier concludes - 'developed a wide and deep knowledge of contemporary
painting and sculpture, while showing virtually no interest in contemporary
158 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. XXI. With regard
to music, see Chapter 4, § I.Z.
159 Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett. The Classic Study ofa Modern Genius, op. cit. The seven
oppositions are: 'Ireland/The World', 'Gentleman/Tramp' 'Classicism/Absurdism',
'Painting/Music', 'Eye/Ear', 'Artist/Philosopher', 'Woman/Man'. According to Mercier,
these oppositions could be reduced as part of a wider dialectical opposition between intel-
lect and emotion. The tension between these two terms could not finally be reconciled.
160 Although respected in and for itself, the object nevertheless became for them an opportu-
nity to reveal the inner world of the subject - i.e. the painter or sculptor' (Vivian Mercier,
Beckett/Beckett. The Classic Study of a Modern Genius, op. cit., p. 99).
161 Ibid., p. 113.
 2-4 CHAPTER I
music except when, late in his life, musicians asked for his collaboration'.162
On the one hand, such a hypothesis of a radical difference, present in Beckett,
between a visual awareness and an aural awareness opens up to the following
'Eye/Ear' opposition proposed by Mercier. On the other hand, it might sug-
gest a different direction for Beckett's aesthetic thought (confirmed also by
his own words to Juliet) 163 - a perspective that will be dealt with in the final
chapter of this research.
1.4 Towards an Aesthetics of Disintegration
1.4. i Beckett's Aesthetic Theory
Beckett's shift away from the Joycean as well as Proustian art is mostly evi-
denced by two texts - both written around I937andi938 - which, up to their
publication within Disjecta, never came to public attention.
The first is the by-now famous 'German Letter', an unusually explicit
statement of the Beckettian artistic credo, dated July 9,1937, and sent to Axel
Kaun, an acquaintance made during Beckett's 1936 trip to Germany, who
had proposed Beckett for a translation of the poems by Joachim Ringelnatz
(1883-1934). In this letter Beckett shows how the decisive point of his new
aesthetic choice - from the revolution of the 'word' to that of'un-word' and
silence - is marked by the sincere intention to 'tell the truth', which stands
behind the deception of language.
And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart
in order to get at things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they
seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of
a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain
circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most
efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave
nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after
162 Ibid., p. 117.
163 'I ask if he still spends hours sitting quietly, doing nothing but listen to his inner voice
and observe his inner life. He repeats that the sense of hearing is assuming ever greater
importance as compared with sight' (Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett
and Bram van Velde, op. cit., p.152. "This conversation was held on 29 October 1973).
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep
through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.164
That the quest for truth is the basic principle of this art is testified by the
'be it something or nothing' (i.e. what lurks behind language). Indubitably,
Beckett starts from the need for a truer writing, which is more than the simple'
Joycean language of things: it is rather a language that unveils what lies behind
things and reflects their fundamentally fragmented and disjointed reality.
Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of
being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's
seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of
sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer
is requested. [...] At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which
we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. [...] With such
a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do. There it
seems rather to be a matter of an apotheosis of the word.165
A similar case to Joyce is represented by Gertrude Stein, who, according
to Beckett,
[...] is doubtlessly still in love with her vehicle, albeit only in the way in which a mathema-
tician is in love with his figures; a mathematician for whom the solution of the problem is
of entirely secondary interest, indeed to whom must the death of his figures appear quite
dreadful. [...] On the way to this literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me,
some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage. But it is not enough for the
game to lose some of its sacred seriousness.166
There is perhaps no better example, in order to describe Beckett's new
awareness towards his past experience of the 'Revolution of the Word', than
that of a mathematician for whom 'the solution of the problem is entirely of
secondary interest'. Here, instead, he is entirely concerned with the solution
to the problem, namely, 'how to restore the chaos as true non-identity and not
as an identical (and therefore harmonic) non-identity'? It is, in other words,
164 Samuel Beckett, 'German Letter of 1937', translated by Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, op. cit.,
pp. 171-172-
165 Ibid., p. 172.
166 Ibid., pp. 172-173.
2-4
CHAPTER I
the same, unresolved conflict between form and content. What Beckett in
the second text above-mentioned - an unpublished essay written in French
in 1938 - calls 'les deux besoins': 'Besoin d'avoir besoin et besoin dont on a
besoin, conscience du besoin d'avoir besoin et conscience du besoin dont on
a besoin - dont on avait besoin, issue du chaos de vouloir voir et entree dans
le neant d'avoir vu, declenchement et fin de Tautologie creatrice'.167 Two dif-
ferent instances, both parts of the human being, that finally belong to Beckett
as a radical opposition - as suggested by Vivian Mercier in terms of intellect
and emotion - which cannot be reconciled, but is nonetheless necessary.
For the first time, Beckett speaks of art in terms of a 'need of something'.
Something universal and harmonious, headed towards a general and omnipo -
tent world; and something human and real, which is the 'need itself'. The first
is autonomous, with its inner rules and laws, while the second is tied to all
contingent human necessities. 'Deux besoins, dont le produit fait l'art', says
Beckett. As with Adorno, Beckett recognizes art as both an autonomous and
a socially-produced object. Once the two elements are separated, not art, but
something other, exists. Nevertheless, they never reach a real balance between
them; and, though their interaction has apparently been coherent, up to this
point, ('Dodecahedre regulier, trop regulier, suivant les dimensions duquel
l'infortune Tout-puissant se serait propose d'arranger les quatre elements, sig-
nature de Pythagore [...]'),168 this is however a 'divine figure dont la construc-
tion depend d'un irrationnel'.169 Finally, just as for a mathematical problem, it
is the solution that constitutes the decisive factor, not the preliminary figures:
'Car aux enthymemes de l'art ce sont les conclusions qui manquent et non pas
les premisses'.170 The 'conclusions', namely, the impact-with the 'truth factor',
the 'truth value' of the work of art. Until this time, Beckett had never spoken
so openly about 'chaos' and 'nothing' - i.e. the 'chaos de vouloir voir' and the
'neant d'avoir vu' - with reference to art. Once more, the expression of art is
a chaotic and unachievable need, whereas its content is the nothing of a non-
identical, 'ever-different', 'ever-other' reality. Nevertheless, this contradictory
- some will later say - 'absurd' process is intrinsically connected with the truth:
it is, in fact, the only means of reaching a human truth. Hence Beckett's firm
intention to continue to try to express his art, which, in this regard, is both
167 Samuel Beckett, 'Les Deux Besoins' in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 56.
168 Ibid.
169 Ibid.
170 Ibid., p. 57.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
negation and revelation, impossible object and true subject, an experience of
the (always negative) something wi th in the nothing of artwork. Ultimately, his
approval of picturing the impossibility of painting as well as of writing the
failure of literature - i.e. the de-aestheticization of art, the end of the word,
is not an aesthetic programme, a 'theory' which he ideologically follows, but
a feeling - the last sincere attempt to seek the truth - , an authentic need to
reproduce a fragmented and unrealized self.
As has been already observed, within the framework of twentieth-century
philosophy, such an aesthetics can be situated between that of Wittgenstein and
Heidegger. However, when saying that Beckett stands between Wittgenstein
and Heidegger as between the impossibility and the unconcealedness of an aes-
thetic truth, it is also worth pointing out what radically differentiates his posi-
tion from that of the two philosophers. Unlike Wittgenstein, Beckett does not
believe that art's impossibility to express any part of its content would reinforce
the truth of scientific language as the only reliable description of the human
world. Even less, he thinks - as Wittgenstein does - that the meaning of an
experience is that of transforming it into a proposition, whose truth-value will
be its method of verification; still again, aesthetics is considered to be nothing
more than a convoluted branch of psychology - since it is either a matter of
taste, like and dislike, or hypnotic suggestion. Conversely, in Beckett's view, art
is not as positively 'revealing' as it is for Heidegger.171 Therefore, with regard
to the Heideggerian aesthetic heritage, it is more natural to situate Beckett
within the line of negative aesthetics, whose major figures are certainly Adorno
and Derrida, rather than within the positive side, represented principally by
Gadamer and Ricoeur. Beckett's 'deconcealement' of art's truth is not, as for
Heidegger, the self-establishing of openness in the Open' 172 but is rather, more
akin to Adorno, the irresolvable tension between the form and its content,
whose unique solution resides in a negative way. As for Adorno, modern art
171 See the following passage: 'Art, as the setting-into-work of truth, is poetry. Not only the
creation of the work is poetic, but equally poetic, though in its own way, is the preserving
of the work. [...] The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth. [...] The setting-
into-work of truth thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts
down the ordinary and what we believe to be such' (Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the
Work of Art' in Continental Aesthetics, op. cit., p. 106). The history of critical accounts,
which attempted to examine Beckett's philosophical relationship to Heidegger, is relatively
short. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study as yet that has made a
comparison between Beckett and the Heideggerian philosophical aesthetics.
172. Ibid., p. zoo.
2-4
CHAPTER I
begins with the awareness of the fundamental inadequacy of old artworks
to 'grasp our age', thus for Beckett it is time for non-identity 'to be admitted'
into the aesthetic realm, precisely 'because it appears to be at the very oppo-
site of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to
be [...]'.173 The allusion to this radically different era, in which non-identity
can no longer be neglected or ignored, is as strong in Beckett as in Adorno:
'[...] Now we can keep it out no longer, because we have come into a time
when it invades our experience at every moment. It is there and it must be
allowed in'.174 The task of the artist in our time is therefore that of finding a
new form to accommodate the mess. Though without a real programme or a
fully organized theory, the aesthetics of Beckett starts with a definite target
and an immediate goal to be reached.
1.4.2 The Disintegration of Meaning
It is Beckett himself who uses the word 'disintegration' to describe his works,
as Adorno describes the 'negative dialectic' as a 'Logik des Zerfalls' (Logic of
Disintegration):
At the end of my work there's nothing but dust - the namable. In the last book - L'Innomable
- there's complete disintegration. No "I", no "have", no "being". No nominative, no accusa-
tive, no verb. There's no way to go on. The very last thing I wrote - Textes pour rien - was
an attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration, but it failed.175
These words are taken from the interview with Israel Shenker (1956). By
this time Beckett was writing Endgame, which can be considered a second
important turning point in his personal path of research. After 1961, a further
shift will occur in his theatre, which would turn to the 'dramaticules'. In the
narrative, though, the same process is much faster: in only a few years he com-
173 Tom Driver, 'Interview with Samuel Beckett' ('Columbia University Forum', Summer
1961, pp. 11-2.5), in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. 119.
174 Ibid.
175 Israel Shenker, 'An Interview with Beckett' ('New York Times', 5 may 1956, Section II,
1-3), in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. 148.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
pletes the Trilogy176, and after The Unnamable it seems to him that continuing
to write gets more and more difficult'. Thus, he realizes that what remains of his
narrative texts is 'nothing but dust' and complete disintegration. In this regard,
it seems that the negative way of art that Beckett started off after his detach-
ment from Joyce, first with the reading of Proust (and the discovering of an
'excavatory' but contracted' and ultimately 'negative' art) and later with that
of Kafka - whose 'anti-hero' is certainly 'lost', 'but he's not spiritually precari-
ous, he's not falling to bits'177 - comes truly to its culmination and end. While
Kafka introduced 'the consternation in the form', in Beckett's works 'there is
consternation behind the form'.178 Unlike the other two writers, but also unlike
the whole host of authors that Georg Lukacs puts together as descendants
of a single novelistic line inaugurated by Flaubert,179 Beckett's breakdown of
subject and object - undertaken beyond the text itself rather than the relation
between sense and non-sense - involves another, more radical, breakdown:
that between art and life. In the first relationship (represented among others
by Proust, Joyce and Musil), the crucial setting to the rupture between sense
and non-sense, and inner and external life, is time itself, as reminiscence and
hope: for this reason, the novel progressively becomes a 'novel of the novel'
and ultimately 'anti-novel'. In the second relationship - initiated, according to
Lukacs, by Dostoevsky - the setting is provided by the radical opposition 'life-
art', whose principal polarity remains the possibility/impossibility to express
- in anyway, even in art - the 'being-always-other' oflife. However, between
the extreme attempt at anti-novel and life itself, an essential gap still remains.
This is defined, on the one hand, by a qualitative status of the irreducibility of
life in comparison to art; on the other hand, by an implicit critique oflife in
terms of the pretence of art to represent, and therefore to falsify, the 'living
thing'. At the same time, the 'mute' primacy oflife intrinsically demands rep-
resentation by art, above all as catharsis and the objectification of'suffering',
giving voice to whatever is silent - and this is more or less the entire history of
artistic pretension. Yet, Beckett chooses the opposite direction: in this sense,
as with Dostoevsky previously, he turns literature into philosophy. However,
unlike the Russian writer, Beckett does it from within the Western literary
176 'I wrote all my work very fast - between 1946 and 1950. Since then I haven't written
anything. Or at least nothing that has seemed to me valid.' (Ibid.)
177 Ibid.
178 Ibid.
179 Georg Lukacs, Theory of the Novel (1913).
2-4
CHAPTER I
tradition of the twentieth century and in a direct confrontation with its own
fundamental themes. The result, he avers, after the completion of the Trilogy,
is the complete disintegration of what before was called novel'.
Nevertheless, this 'disintegration' is not a result, and thus, even less an
'unexpected result' for the Beckettian writing. Especially when conceiving
Molloy and Godot, Beckett was clear that he needed a method to pursue 'an
art of a different degree'. He was certainly searching for a way of reproduc-
ing in the form, the impossibility of the form itself - the consternation that
is behind the form. He finally discovers his method through deconstruction
of the meaning of art. Hence, rather than speaking of an art of impotence, or
impoverishment, or again of muteness, it would be more appropriate to call
this first phase an aesthetics of'disintegration'. Disintegration of what - one
might ask? An answer such as 'disintegration of the old, omnipotent art' would
probably be too general, as Beckett's target is indeed more definite.
As for Wittgenstein, the meaning of a proposition is its method of verifi-
cation (that is to say, an axiomatic process that regulates the relation between
both the linguistic content and form), for Beckett, too, the meaning of art is
a kind of'method', through which the aesthetic relation between form and
content can make sense. Such a 'method of art' is, more or less implicitly,
the sense of depth, the 'third dimension', in which all the narrative events are
inscribed: namely, the definition of a coherent (or even incoherent but with
a final purpose) space and time, able to host the elements of narration.
As is well known, Beckett was particularly fascinated by mathematics and
especially by the paradoxes that can be made by using mathematical principles.
'He knew,' - Michael Worton points out - 'that in mathematical theory the
passage from o to i marks a major and real change of state, and that the passage
from i to 2 implies the possibility of infinity [...]'.180 In this regard, Beckett
often extends every event from a state i to a state 2 in order to turn it into a
paradoxical form. "The same is true of Winnie in Happy Days - says Worton
again - who will never be completely covered by her mound just as Achilles
will never overtake the tortoise in Zeno's famous paradox'.181 Until a 'state
n°3' intervenes to bring the paradox back to a physical reality, everything is
reduced ad absurdum. As in Film (1964), the main character Buster Keaton has
a patch over his left eye, which prevents him from having a three-dimensional
180 Michael Worton, 'Waitingfor Godot and Endgame-. Theatre as Text', in The Cambridge
Companion to Beckett, op. cit., p. 70.
181 Ibid.
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett 15
view; similarly, the artist/philosopher puts art on trial precisely by showing
it in two dimensions.
Therefore, the third dimension is the sense of profundity, mainly defined
as space and time, of a literary event. This could obviously be a present situa-
tion, a limited and clear zone, faith or a hope for the future, or even a memory
set in the past. Each of these elements gives the necessary depth for the story
to take place. In the same way, the third dimension literally 'builds' the physi-
cal world: otherwise, with only two dimensions, there would be no reality,
only abstract lines. Also, thanks to this dimension, Achilles can overtake the
tortoise, and all mathematical paradoxes are not ultimately true in physical
reality. But in art and literature, Beckett would say, this is the decisive reason
why chaos can become a harmonic identity. The meaning in art has, so far, been
essentially the possibility that something ('whatever', in principle) artistically
happens in the present, happened in the past, or can happen in the future,
wherever there is an adequate sense of depth - defined in space and time - to
render all this possible. The meaning is the condition for the content of a
representation to become its form, and Beckett puts on trial precisely such a
condition, with a targeted 'attack' on its structure. Since he could not achieve
his goal simply by eliminating both space and time - otherwise his art would
be total non-sense or impotence - as observed acutely by Adorno, he started
off a process that pushes the nature of these two elements to the extreme. In
the end, with Beckett time has become 'a total a priori' (Apriorität) and space
the maximum concretizing of the material objects (Konkretheit). From the
union of these two elements, a reality derives that is reduced ad absurdum and
disintegrated with its mechanisms of compulsive repetition, senseless actions,
and vain expectations - as will become evident, especially in the Trilogy and
Waitingfor Godot.
In particular, the Trilogy is concerned with the problem of writing itself.
Thefirstpiece of it, Molloy, published two years after the dialogues with Georges
Duthuit, is the story of a writer in the act of writing. As David Hesla points
out, 'the trilogy is the execution of the program which Beckett projected for
modern art in his discussion with Duthuit. Thus, in the trilogy, Beckett's art is
concerned with "the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation" between the
aliment and its dispatch, between all that is left to the artist of "the world" [...]
and all that is left to the artist of the "self" [...]'.182 More than ever, the above-
182 David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos. An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett, op. cit.,
p. 90.
2-4
CHAPTER I
mentioned opposition between art and life is explicitly accomplished in these
novels: "Ihe trilogy is not, like Watt, about "nothing" [...] Rather, the trilogy
is "about" the writing of a novel when the author's sense of the nature of the
human existence has invalidated the novelist's traditional material'.183 Hesla's
conclusion concerning his reasoning is something indubitably Beckettian:
"Ihe trilogy is what a writer writes when, horrified and desperate, he realizes
that for him there is nothing about which to write and nothing from which
to write, the felt obligation to write continuing, however, to persist'.184
Not every piece of this early post-war Beckettian output, though, is equiva-
lent to the other: there is a unmistakable path of growth occurring over a very
short period of time, which involves Beckett's art at its deepest level of intensity.
In this sense, Godot and Molloy are more concerned with the disintegration of
meaning, as if it were a real artistic program, whereas Endgame and Malone
Dies with the impasse of art (of theatre and narrative as texts). However, it is
only in this second passage, towards the endgame of art, that Beckett becomes
aware of his truer vocation, and the destiny of his later aesthetics. At the end of
the Trilogy, Beckett - as the painter spoken of by Hamm in Endgame - realizes
that everything is ashes': there is - he says - a total disintegration. Admittedly,
TextsforNothingis an attempt 'to get out of this attitude of disintegration', but
this attempt has failed. From this time on, Beckett himself has the impression,
as he recalls to Charles Juliet, 'that he has less and less left to say and he has
the feeling of almost being able to capture it, or in any case to define it better'.18S
Even the refuge of the 'art of disintegration' - this negative, literally Beckettian
art - is no longer a refuge, as the distance between the subject and object of
art seems to have had an exponential growth over the years. Eventually, in
the last part of Beckett's output, both the expressive impossibility, on the one
hand, and the implicit philosophical call for interpretation, on the other, will
become much more marked, with increasing reference to the subject of this
(non-)expression rather than to the object. But when reminding Juliet of the
very beginning of this process - the first revelation of his own art, Beckett
repeated what he had already declared years before to Gabriel D'Aubarede, i.e.
that only after Molloy he 'became aware of his own folly' and began to write
down what he felt:
183 Ibid.
184 Ibid.
185 Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, op. cit., p. 151
(29 October 1973).
15
The Aesthetics of Samuel Beckett
'It happened one night. And so often, he was prowling around alone and found himself
at the end of a jetty buffeted by storm-force winds. At that moment, everything seemed
to fall into place: the years of doubt, of searching and questioning and failure (in a few
days' time he would be forty) suddenly made sense and it was dazzlingly clear what he
had to do.' [Juliet]
'I caught a glimpse of the world I had to create to be able to breathe.' [Beckett]186
1.4.3 Concluding Remarks
This chapter has attempted to assess, almost entirely on the basis of internal
evidence drawn from his own essays, critical articles and interviews, the nature
and the main problematics of Beckett's aesthetics. Being limited to the works
of Beckett as an essayist, such an analysis (except for considering some later
interviews) necessarily terminates more or less at the beginning of the fifties,
more precisely, on that crucial 1953 premiere of Waiting for Godot.197 From this
moment on, in order to 'protect' his own person and his works from journalists
and critics, Beckett turned to a self-contained silence and decided no longer
to write essays. As has been seen, the analysis carried out so far coincides with
the first phase - of the three considered in this research188 - of the Beckettian
aesthetics, in which the author primarily seeks a method for his new art and
finally identifies it in what, here, has been termed the 'disintegration of mean-
ing'. There is a hidden inner question that permeates all the works of this
period (especially Murphy, Watt, Molloy and Waiting for Godot), i.e. whether
- however destructured, 'disintegrated' in its formerly fundamental compo-
nents - this is still 'art' or not. In this regard, the audience's answer seemed
indeed to be positive. And, one might say, Beckett became Beckett by virtue
of it. Conversely, while, at first, Beckett's own answer is also positive - or at
least, up to that point, he has kept his steps within the paths of art - his is an
186 Ibid., pp. 150-151.
187 After Three Dialogues (written and published in 1949), Beckett writes his last two (and
actually very short) critical essays: 'Hommage 4 Jack B. Yeats' (written and published in
1954) and 'Henri Hayden, homme-peintre' (written in January 1952, first published in
1955). Both these essays are included in Disjecta.
188 Namely: the disintegration of meaning, the endgame of art, and the 'not I' subjectivity.
Ideally, the first three chapters of this work reflect and go deep into the above-mentioned
three stages of Beckettian aesthetics.
84 CHAPTER I
interrogation to art, not to other forms of subjectivity - it is also true that,
starting from Malone dies in narrative and Endgame in theatre, and continuing
with Krapps Last Tape up to the first act ofHappy Days, his recherche progres-
sively changes direction. From here on, everything seems to come, literally,
to an endgame. Beckett discovers art as a refuge that is no longer a refuge.
During the sixties, Theodor Adorno would mainly dedicate his investigation
of Beckett - which is purposely concentrated on the play Endgame - to this
second phase and to such an 'endgame'. More than ever, this is a deeply inter-
rogative and unstable phase for Beckett's art. Here, the ever-uncertain destiny
of art comes to a point where neither can finish or go on; where everything is
already over but not yet concluded; where, ultimately, the call for redemption
coincides with the impossibility of redemption. Significandy, Adorno adopted
Endgame (rather than Waitingfor Godot) as the main paradigm of Beckett's
art. Equally, as John Calder recalls, Endgame was Beckett's own favourite
play.189 The second phase of Beckett's aesthetics takes modern art to its very
limit. Even what might be defined as the ultimate 'point of consistency' of
the Beckettian aesthetic theory, i.e. the impossibility of expression as a pos-
sibility per se, is here put on trial. Indeed, from now on, there is no longer
any certainty. For this reason, in Adornos view, the path taken of art in this
work is more authentic than ever, and his interpretation of its development,
along with the indication of a possible way out of this impasse in terms of a
'redemption of art', is certainly an original hypothesis. Yet, as will be shown
in the following chapter, both Beckett and Adorno take the same matter to
the same extreme, i.e. the endgame of authentic modern art. Undoubtedly,
having reached its limit, art calls out for rescue, and the answer to this call
is up to Beckett himself and to his more authentic interpreters. In a certain
sense, they all are engaged in responding to one question: is this second stage
- namely, the refuge of an 'ended/not-yet-ended' art - a transition area (for
instance, towards philosophy - as Adorno ultimately would conclude), or is
it the 'last place' that something appeared?
189 See John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 144. On Beckett's apprecia-
tion of his own works see also a conversation with Charles Juliet: 'He regards the pieces
generated after 1950 as mere sketches. It is, he says, perhaps only in the theatre that there
may be a few pages that are slightly better than the rest' (Charles Juliet, Conversations with
Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, op. cit., p. 151).
CHAPTER Z
Adorno: Interpreter of Beckett
Among the ranks of commentators on Beckett and his works, the 'Frankfurt
School' philosopher Theodor W. Adorno merits special attention, since the
Irish writer represents for him more than just an optional appendix. Beckett's
Endgame, in particular, is too central to Adornos thought to warrant a sepa-
rate compass. In his essay 'Trying to Understand Endgame' (1961), the play
is presented as the 'final history of the subject' (Endgeschichte des Subjects)
and condenses all Adornos philosophy at a crucial stage in its development.
Adornos later work, Aesthetic Theory (1970), published after his death (1969)
and a sort of last testament to him, was in fact to be dedicated to Beckett.
According to W. Martin Lüdke,1 Beckett's influence on Adornos philoso-
phy can hardly be overestimated, as 'Trying to Understand Endgame' provides
the means for the German philosopher to carve out and develop an authentic
theory of the dialectic enlightenment. Beckett's play - he says - seems to be
like a 'chief witness' for this dialectic's 'logic of disintegration'.2 Equally, from
the opposite point of view, it could be said that Adorno is the only thinker so
far to have provided Beckett's oeuvre with a solid, philosophical foundation.
As Adornos editor and 'disciple' Rolf Tiedemann argued, 'when Adorno came
across Beckett for the first time - it must have been at the beginning of the
fifties, through Waitingfor Godot or perhaps Molloy - a benchmark would be
created in the history of the new aesthetics, comparable to Benjamin's meeting
with Brecht'.3 With the essay 'Trying to Understand Endgame', Tiedemann
continues, 'Adorno brought the interpretation of Beckett to a new level, a
i See W. Martin Lüdke, Anmerkungen zu einer 'Logik des Zerfalls': Adorno-Beckett. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981.
z Ibid., p. 101.
3 See the complete documentation of the relationship Adorno-Beckett in Rolf Tiedemann
(ed.): '"Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn". Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos
Beckett-Lektüre', in Theodor W.Adorno-Archiv (Hrsg.)-. Frankfurter Adorno-Blätter III,
München: Text und Kritik, 1994, p. zz (my translation).
IOO
CHAPTER 1
point of no return for whoever, from that time onwards, should wish to join
this game'.4
Therefore, if on the one hand it seems almost impossible not to begin a
philosophical discussion of Samuel Beckett with Adorno, on the other hand,
as this study is meant to focus exclusively on Beckett, there are undoubtedly
risks in viewing him through the eyes of an intermediary. Firstly, there is the
problem of the labyrinthine nature of Adornian philosophy, which, despite its
impressiveness in one sense, is characterized by a complex, interdisciplinary,
socio-cultural critique of society, in which each individual part is connected to
another. An elaborate mix which, as Lambert Zuidervaart observed, explodes
out in Aesthetic Theory and supplies Adornos fragmentary summa with 'its
larger significance, as well as its resistance to historical classifications'.5 The
second, though by no means secondary problem, is the fact that, for all the
persuasiveness of his analysis, Adorno was simply not Beckett. The overrid-
ing question thus remains: to what extent can one be certain of Beckett's real
thought, especially considering how hermetic and irreducible to explanation
his writings were ? How, in short, is it possible to distinguish Beckett's thought
from Adornos?
The solution to this impasse seems difficult, unless, to avoid the first prob-
lem, the present investigation remains highly theoretical and aesthetic, i.e.,
excluding many of the historical-philological issues Adornos philosophy deals
with, particularly its internal connections. In this way, the focus becomes, as
far as possible, the problem of art itself and its relevance for contemporary
philosophical aesthetics.
The second question, probably 'the' Beckettian problem par excellence, is
not so easily resolved. How does one set about interpreting Beckett's work,
when he himself was the first to brand it 'uninterpretable' ? How do we know
if Adorno is right?
With philology unable to help us, since Beckett purposely armed against
it, the question could largely remain enigmatic, unless to reverse, as Adorno
will do, the terms of the problem. Adorno, who, like Beckett, was keen to
'defend' his texts from simplistic interpretations, undoubtedly endorsed this
enigma: here, once again he showed himself to be different from other Beckett
scholars. He probably was, as Simon Critchley pointed out, 'the philosopher
4 Ibid.
5 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adornos Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion, London: MIT
Press, 1991, p. 10.
101
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett
who has come closest to describing the difficulties of interpreting Beckett and
gone furthest in taking up the challenge that he poses to philosophy'.6
In the following investigation, the question will, therefore, not be how
to understand Adornos thought through Beckett, nor how to read Beckett
through Adorno, but rather to ask how philosophy works in Beckett.
In the opening section of this chapter Adornos essay on Endgame will be
analyzed, which was also his first study of Beckett. As will be seen, the early
Adornian reading of Beckett - whose importance influenced all his aesthetic
thought decisively - starts from the possibility of a critical analysis of a 'non-
traditionally-critic approach' to modern art. In this respect, the concept of
'meaning' and its irreversible, historical crisis is crucial and which modern
art must necessarily reflect. The second section will consider the role and rel-
evance of Beckett within Adorno s Aesthetic Theory. The focus of Adornian
investigation seems to move, here, from the crisis of meaning to the crisis of
illusion, which, as the defining characteristic of the artwork (Huhn), calls for
redemption by philosophical aesthetics. In the third section, together with
a small number of issues concerning Aesthetic Theory, what is probably the
heart of the 'crisis of illusion' will be discussed, i.e. the inner antinomic pro-
cess between a socially-produced origin and the claim of autonomy. As will
be seen, the different response to the crisis of - what will be defined as - the
'refuge of art', marks a decisive point in relation to Adorno and Beckett. Finally,
in section four, after summarizing the points of coincidence and divergence
between the two authors, the development of Beckett's theatrical output in
the light of Adorno s aesthetics will be shown. This analysis is also marked by
an inner, theoretical progression: the triad Meaning-Illusion-Subject repre-
sents, in fact, the hidden aesthetic framework of both Beckett and Adorno,
as well as of this chapter.
6 Simon Critchley, Very little...Almost Nothing. Death, Philosophy, Literature, op. cit.,
p. 147.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
2.i 'Trying to Understand Endgame
Z.I.I Understanding the Incomprehensibility
The German title of Adorno s 1961 essay on Endgame, 'Versuch, das Endspiel
zu verstehen',7 more clearly than its English translation ('Trying to Understand
Endgame' or 'Towards an Understanding of Endgame'), from the outset sets
out to alert the reader to the difficulty of the subject. This time, the author
seems to suggest - as is well noted by David Cunningham,8 even the concept of
understanding itself is problematic and has to be discussed. 'Versuch', 'attempt',
means a different perspective in which our understanding has to be brought
to bear. Modernity and modern works of art aim to express the non-identical,
which is, in fact, repressed by reality's compulsion to identity: the response of
philosophy to such an art must take account of the danger of'bringing what is
at work in these works into the realm of philosophical conceptuality'.9 Hence,
'Adornos decision to respond to the challenge of these works in, as he very
deliberately phrases it, trying to understand them'.10 The claim to interpret
non-identity must necessarily find a different route here: the usual paths of
comprehension, in this case, will not lead us to our destination.
But, as understanding itself belongs to the concept's logic of identity, how
then might one think and read differently in order to pursue an interpreta-
tion of the non-identical? How, ultimately, can philosophy try to understand
Beckett?
7 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame' [1961], translated by Michael Jones,
New German Critique, no. 26 (Spring-Summer 1982), pp. 119-150. The text is quoted here
from the anthology: The Adorno Reader, ed. by Brian O'Connor, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000,
pp. 319-352. It is also contained in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature [1958,1961,1965
and various], vols. 1 -2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991,1991. Adorno worked on this essay from the summer i960 until the spring of
the following year. The text, however, was conceived in its fundamental part in September
1961, after Adornos come back to Frankfurt (see Rolf Tiedemann [ed.]: '"Gegen den Trug
der Frage nach dem Sinn". Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lektüre', in Theodor
W. Adorno-Archiv (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Adorno-Blätter III, op. cit., pp. 26-33).
8 See David Cunningham, 'Trying (Not) to Understand: Adorno and the Work of Beckett'
in Richard Lane (ed), Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 125-139.
9 Ibid., p. 129.
10 Ibid.
101
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett
To avoid any misunderstanding, Adorno starts his analysis by determining
immediately what distinguishes Beckett's oeuvre from Parisian existential-
ism. It is the 'form', he says - conceived, as Sartre did, in the traditional way
of didactic plays - that 'absorbs what is expressed and changes it'.11 However
many similarities can be inferred with Existentialism - e.g., Adorno suggests,
the categories of'absurdity', of'situation' and of'decision', even stretching
as far as something like 'anthropology' - in the Beckettian works 'impulses
are raised to the level of the most advanced artistic level, those of Joyce and
Kafka'.12 For absurdity 'is no longer a state of human existence thinned out to
a mere idea and then expressed in images'.13
In Beckett, Adorno writes,
Absurdity is divested of that generality of doctrine which existentialism, that creed of the
permanence of individual existence, nonetheless combines with Western pathos of the
universal and the immutable. Existential conformity - that one should be what one is - is
thereby rejected along with the ease of its representation. What Beckett offers in the way
of philosophy he himself also reduces to culture-trash, no different from the innumerable
allusions and residues of education which he employs in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon
tradition, particularly ofJoyce and Eliot.14
But what technique does Beckett use to obtain such a result ? How exactly
do his texts succeed in emptying the ancientforms?
The names of Joyce, Kafka and Eliot, enlisted by Adorno, seem only to
refer to the underlying scenario, that of regressive language, which consti-
tutes Beckett's point of departure. He completes and carries the tendency of
the recent novel to the extreme: 'modernism as the obsolescence of modern'
(Modernismus als das Veraltete an Moderne), Adorno writes.
What was decried as abstract according to the cultural criterion of aesthetic immanence
- reflection - is lumped together with pure representation, corroding the Flaubertian
principle of the purely self-enclosed matter at hand. The less events can be presumed
11 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame' in Brian O'Connor (ed),
The Adorno Reader, op. cit., p. 321.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
meaningful in themselves, the more the idea of aesthetic Gestalt as unity of appearance
and intention becomes illusory.15
What that 'illusion' (Schein) will be in reality will be discussed in the next
two paragraphs. For the present, it is important to draw attention to the fun-
damental aim of all Samuel Beckett's life and artistic creation as it is expressed
here by Adorno; the point on which his 'logic of disintegration' (M. Lüdke
again) converges, i.e. meaning, in all its aspects.
The word 'meaning' {Sinn) is multivalent, as Adorno observes in the
following lines. First of all, it denotes metaphysical content {metaphysischen
Gehalt), which objectively emerges per se from the artifact; then, it is the
intention of the whole as a structure of meaning {die Intention des Ganzen als
eines Sinnzusammenhangs)-, and finally the sense of the words and sentences
spoken by the characters. In short, all that is essential for drama is constituted
by this meaning. If meaning is removed, the totality of the drama collapses
but, in doing so, it also shows its real content: 'Through its own organized
meaninglessness, the plot must approach that which transpired in the truth
content of dramaturgy generally'.16 Since such a process of senselessness includes
what Adorno calls 'linguistic molecules' {sprachlichen Molekülen), i.e. all the
rationally meaningful connections of the drama, these themselves are denied
by its structure, which is, in fact, meaningless.
Eventually, Adorno affirms the first decisive premise to his reading of
Endgame, which implies the absolute distance between Beckett and any kind
of philosophical existentialism:
The interpretation ofEndgame therefore cannot chase the chimera of expressing its mean-
ing with the help of philosophical mediation. Understanding it can mean nothing other
than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning
structure - that it has none.17
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 311.
17 Ibid.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
z.i.2 The 'Organisierte Sinnlosigkeit' and a New Rolefor Art
Therefore, if understanding Endgame is precisely 'understanding its incom-
prehensibility' {Unverständlichkeit verstehen), that is to say reconstructing its
(absent) 'meaning structure' {Sinnzusammenhang), this reconstruction is
obliged to pass outside the usual categories of thinking. So isolated, thought
itself no longer pretends to be the structure's meaning. Whereas the old scheme
of understanding was based upon a rigid interpretation of the sign and sig-
nificance of things, its form and meaning, since the very idea of meaning
has now disintegrated, any attempt at philosophical mediation must deal
with the enigma of what content will fill that form. It would obviously, then,
seem important to emphasize the distinction between the terms 'meaning'
{Sinn) and 'content' {Gehalt), yet the use of these two words by Adorno is
often puzzling, as well noticed by L. Zuidervaart. 18 In fact, Adorno himself
gives an explanation of this ambiguity. While enumerating the three pos-
sible denotations for the word 'meaning' in drama (metaphysical content,
intention of structure as a whole and finally the sense of the sentences),19 he
adds that these equivocations point toward a common basis, from which in
Beckett's Endgame a continuum emerges. Since 'metaphysical meaning is no
longer possible in such a substantive way (if indeed it ever was) [...] that afflicts
the form even in its linguistic construction'.20 This is the reason why it is not
crucial, at this stage, to distinguish between Sinn and Gehalt. He continues:
'Drama cannot simply seize on to negative meaning, or its absence, as content,
without thereby affecting everything peculiar to it - virtually to the point of
reversal to its opposite'.21
18 See Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 156. The importance of
defining the status of meaning, in relation to this point, has been also remarked in Leo
Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais, Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
19 Adorno's three denotations of'meaning' could possibly recall three other classic philo-
sophical positions regarding this concept. The first, deriving from Plato's Cratilus reaches
its latest development with Kripke's theory of direct reference. The second, concerning
the 'associated idea' - in opposition to 'expression' - of modern cognitive science and
linguistics (in some way similar to Moritz Schlicks concept of content). Finally the third
position related to the modern philosophy of language, initiated by Frege and completed
by Wittgenstein's Tractatus, whose central point is the truth-condition of a sentence.
10 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 311.
11 Ibid.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
Hie understanding process must now face what Adorno calls the 'organized
meaninglessness' (organisierte Sinnlosigkeit) of authentic modern artworks,
such as Endgame. This time thought 'transforms itself into a kind of material
of second degree, just as the philosophemes expounded in Thomas Mann s
The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, as novel materials, find their destiny
in replacing that sensate immediacy which is diminished in the self-reflective
work of art'.22 In so doing Beckett inverts the tendency of existentialism which
used to 'cannibalize philosophy' for poetic purposes 'as if it were Schiller
incarnate':23 with him philosophy, or spirit itself, 'proclaims its bankruptcy
as the dreamlike dross of experiential world, and any poetic process shows
itself as worn out'.24 Yet, Lambert Zuidervaart pointed out, 'precisely because
it refuses to spout philosophical doctrines, Endgame challenges philosophy
to give an interpretation' which is 'nearly definitive for the relevance of con-
temporary philosophy'.25
Beckett, in Adorno's view, faces this challenge and uses 'thoughts sans
phrase as phrases, as those material components of the monologue interieur
which mind itself has become, the reified residue of education'.26 However,
these 'material components' (Teilmaterialien) are all that remain from the
wreck of meaning. These ruins - simple ruins, apparently only a heap of ironic
and useless rubble, as will be discussed in the following chapters, signify for
Beckett much more than can be supposed here, at first glance. Hence the
impossibility for Beckett in the present situation, according to Adorno, to
deal with interpretation as it has been classically conceived. The irrationality
of bourgeois society resists understanding and the conditions for philosophy
today, or theory in general, are seriously undermined.
Those were the good old days when a critique of political economy could be written
which took this society by its own ratio. For in the meantime it has thrown this ratio
on the junk-heap and virtually replaced it with direct control. The interpretative word,
therefore, cannot recuperate Beckett, while his dramaturgy - precisely by virtue of its
limitation to exploded facticity - twitches beyond it, pointing towards interpretation in
its essence as riddle.
11 Ibid., p. 311.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 151.
16 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 311.
17 Ibid., p. 313.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
One can hardly ignore the force of these words. Modern society no longer
possesses a ratio: the essence of interpretation is nowadays a riddle, an enigma.
'One could almost designate - continues Adorno - as the criterion of relevant
philosophy today whether it is up to that task'.28 In the same way, Adorno is
saying neither that Beckett refuses any interpretation of the world nor that
he believes in nonsense as the definitive truth. On the contrary, philosophy
is called now more than ever to its interpretative task, though in a new sense,
and in a different direction from before.
It is also fundamental to underline in the above passage, the importance
art has for Adorno in this regard. Dramaturgy can interpret that which discur-
sive dialectic no longer can. According to Lambert Zuidervaart, for Adorno
'advanced capitalism contains the emerging thrust of history in general, authen-
tic modern art expresses the core of the history of art, and the reciprocation of
progressive philosophy and modern art generates comprehensive knowledge
of both historical processes'.29 Therefore, 'whereas philosophy can no longer
confidently criticize academic disciplines such as economics and sociology
when trying to understand its own time, authentic artworks such as Endgame
contain a penetrating apprehension of its own time, Endgame calls for philo-
sophical interpretation'.30 Hence, the famous paradox advanced by Zuidervaart
regarding a philosophy which needs an art which needs a philosophy.
Nevertheless, it is essential to observe that, for Beckett, art and literature
are the most representative fields in which the truth of the human condition is
revealed, rather than analogy or secondary aids to theoretical philosophy. That
which Heidegger considered the 'origin of truth' is for Adorno - interpreter
of Beckett - no less important, though in a different way.31 Art is certainly
the 'fons' of truth, namely the mirror which reflects this 'origo'. However, it is
also a cracked mirror that shows through the loss of all qualities of reality its
own negativity: especially since modern art expresses the essence of advanced
capitalist society. Art for Adorno is the possibility of a back lit view of the
18 Ibid.
19 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's'AestheticTheory', op. cit., p. 153.
30 Ibid. And so he continues: "The difficulty of interpreting this play is that it exposes the
irrationality of contemporary society while resisting rational exposition. Endgame is an
enigmatic organon for a philosophy that has transformed Hegel's Phenomenology and
Marx's Capital into a critical phenomenology of culture after Auschwitz' (pp. 153-154).
31 On Adorno's view of Heidegger see Brian O'Connor, 'Adorno, Heidegger and the Critique
of Epistemology', Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 1 4 (1998).
IOO CHAPTER 1
world: the representation of the 'existent' in relation to its infinite openness,
but in a negative way. In fact, the truth-content of the work of art exposes
precisely the negativity of the 'thing': the unceasing possibility, demonstrated
in each moment, to say 'more' about things, while remaining the constant
negation of them.
As in Adorno the 'absence of meaning' is not to be considered nonsense,
nor is the 'negativity' nihilism. A fundamental point that must be understood
for both Adorno and Beckett is the permanence, despite of everything, of a
'structure'. Everything is destroyed but the form. As a result, the world has not,
apparently, changed. However, to understand it, one needs to look at it in some
sense 'against the light', in the negative way repeatedly affirmed by Adorno.
As Brian O'Connor argues in this regard, 'since art cannot explicitly
express the truth about autonomous subjectivity it turns to form, altering
traditional form to release possibilities which are otherwise unavailable to
reified experience'.32 The old meaning-structure, emptied of its content - the
meaning itself, it is still a 'structure'. In the same way, 'there is nothing tradi-
tional about Endgame, yet it remains as art'.33 This art constitutes the ultimate
chance to express a truth: 'It is no longer permissible to write poetry after
Auschwitz, but Endgame indicates the degenerative conditions which allowed
the Holocaust happen'.34 'After the Second War - Adorno continues - every-
thing is destroyed, even resurrected culture, without knowing it; humanity
vegetates along, crawling, after events which even the survivors cannot really
survive, on a pile of ruins which even renders futile self- reflection of one's
own battered state'.35
Beckett's intention is not that of writing a drama on the atomic age which
might hopelessly 'falsify the horror of historical anonymity by shoving it into
the characters and actions of humans, and possibly by gaping at the "promi-
nents" who decide whether the button will be pushed'.36 He keeps all things
32 Brian O'Connor, The Adorno Reader, op. cit., p. 319.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 323. The link between
the Second World War and the crisis of meaning in contemporary society is much better
discussed in Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York:
Seabury Press, 1973, pp. 359-60/366-67: 'Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably the failure
of culture [...] All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage' (Ibid.,
p. 367).
36 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 324.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
nebulous as 'the violence of unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to men-
tion it'.37 In this sense, everything has become 'a total a priori' and the desper-
ate state of the human condition supplies 'with gruesome irony - a means of
stylization that protects that pragmatic precondition from any contamination
by childish science fiction'.38
Therefore, the process started off by Beckett unifies apriority (.Apriorität)
and concreteness (Konkretheit) in a mix destined to blot out what is individual-
ized in space and time, yet still maintaining its own formal access'.
To such acknowledged abstraction, Beckett affixes the caustic antithesis by means of
acknowledged subtraction. He does not leave out the temporality of existence - all exis-
tence, after all, is temporal - but rather removes from existence what time, the historical
tendency, attempts to quash in reality. He lengthens the escape route of the subject's liq-
uidation to the point where it constricts into a "this here", whose abstractness - the loss of
all qualities - extends ontological abstraction literally ad absurdum, to that Absurd which
mere existence becomes as soon as it is consumed in naked self-identity.39
In these lines of rare and illuminating insight, Adorno shows, as few others
did, the mechanism through which the Beckettian text works. The 'escape
route of the subject's liquidation' {die Fluchtbahn der Liquidation des Subjekts)
ends its journey at the terminus of an abstract 'this here' {Diesda), that reduces
human existence literally ad absurdum. A time not squashed by reality - thereby
paradoxically abstract - and a 'concreteness' no longer capable of experience:
this is the horizon of human life in modern times, as shown by Beckett.
Thus a passage of the dialogue between Hamm and Clov:
HAMM: But that's always the way at the end of the day, isn't it, Clov?
CLOV: Always.
H A M M : It's the end of the day like any other day, isn't it, Clov?
C L O V : Looks like it.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., p. 315. Thus in German thefinalsentence of the passage: 'Erverlängert die Fluchtbahn
der Liquidation des Subjekts bis zu dem Punkt, wo es in ein Diesda sich zusammenzieht,
dessen Abstraktheit, der Verlust aller Qualität, die ontologische buchstäblich ad absurdum
führt, zu jenem Absurden, in das bloße Existenz umschlägt, sobald sie in ihrer nackten
sich selbst Gleichheit aufgeht'. (Theodor W. Adorno, 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen'
in Noten zur Literatur, vol. II, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963, p. 195).
IOO
CHAPTER 1
2.1.3 Between Inner and Outer: Beckett's Answer to Existential Philosophy
By this union oiAprioritat and Konkretheit a double movement of undoing is
unveiled here as a foundation stone for the construction of Beckett s plays. It
is no wonder, then, that they have often been defined by critics as 'impossible
texts'. On the one hand, the systematic removal of any particularity as well as
any individuation in space and time (more properly, 'what makes existence
existence rather than its mere concept', as Adorno explains), achieves that 'total
apriori' mentioned above. On the other hand, precisely because of this abstrac-
tion, where neither time nor history are subordinated to reality, everything is
constricted - in a process of subtraction - to Diesda, the 'this here', namely, the
'naked self-identity'. Thus, absolute abstractness and concreteness, the second
being the consequence of the first, together lead to that 'childish foolishness'
that emerges as 'the content of philosophy, which degenerates to tautology - to
a conceptual duplication of that existence it had intended to comprehend'.40 In
all of this, comments Adorno, 'drama falls silent and becomes gesture, frozen
amid dialogues: only the result of history appears - as decline'.41
Is this degenerate art ? Is this entire nonsensical, decadent worldlessness and
infantility, which eventually reduces humans to animality - as Lukacs attrib-
uted to Beckett's work42? Adorno takes up Lukäcs's objection, replying that
'differentiation cannot absolutely or automatically be recorded as positive';43
instead it very easily slides into ideology. With reference to atomic death, a
work that noted death's potential even in ancient struggles would hardly be
appropriate. 'Delicately, Beckett suppresses the delicate elements no less than
the brutal ones [...] Playing with elements of reality, refusing to take a "posi-
tion", and finding joy in such freedom as is prescribed: all of this reveals more
than would be possible if a "revealer" were partisan. The name of disaster can
only be spoken silently'.44
Such categories of differentiation and individuation, the result of the capi-
talist process of alienation, have clearly become transitory. The individualist
position belongs to the ontological tendency of all existentialism - 'even that of
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 316.
42. See Georg Lukacs, TbeMeaningof Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander,
London: Merlin Press, 1963, p. 31.
43 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 317.
44 Ibid.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
Being and Time'-. 'Beckett's dramaturgy abandons it like an obsolete bunker'.4S
With it, Expressionism itself (that of the 'Oh Man' - writes Adorno) becomes
obsolete: since the prison of individuation is revealed as a prison and simul-
taneously as a mere semblance, the position of the absolute subject cannot be
maintained. At the same time, in the opposite way, the binding universality
of objective reality, which might relativize the semblance of individuation, is
'denied art'.
Endgame takes place in a zone of indifference between inner and outer, neutral between
- on the one hand - the "materials" without which subjectivity could not manifest itself
or even exist, and - on the other - an animating impulse which blurs the materials, as
if that impulse had breathed on the glass through which they are viewed [...] Endgame
occupies the nadir of what philosophy's construction of the subject-object confiscated
at its zenith: pure identity becomes the identity of annihilation, identity of subject and
object in the state of complete alienation.46
Whereas in Kafka - he adds - meanings were still beheaded or confused,
Beckett calls a halt to the bad infinity of intentions: their sense is senseless.
This is the answer to existential philosophy, which under the concepts of
'thrownness' and of'absurdity' transformed senselessness itself into sense: 'To
this Beckett juxtaposes no world view, rather he takes it as its word'.47 What
it is left of the absurd, at this point, is no longer a 'universal' but only pathetic
details, a stratum of utensils as in a emergency refuge: ice boxes, lameness,
blindness and unappetizing bodily functions. 'Everything awaits evacuation.
This stratum is not symbolic but rather the post-psychological state, as in old
people and torture victims'.48
Where a permanent individuality and personal identity were presupposed,
everything was in harmony. Removed from their inwardness, Heidegger's states
of being and Jaspers' situations become materialistic. Here Beckett, Adorno
argues, 'proves to be a pupil of Proust and a friend of Joyce, in that he gives
back to the concept of "situation" what it actually says and what philosophy
made vanish by exploiting it: dissociation of the unity of consciousness into
45 Ibid., p. 32.8.
46 Ibid., p. 329.
47 Ibid., p. 330.
48 Ibid.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
disparate elements - non-identity'.49 According to Adorno non-identity is
both the historical disintegration of the subject's unity and the emergence of
what is not itself subject. While Jaspers subsumed the concept of situation
(defined by him as 'a reality for an existing subject who has a stake in it')50
under a subject conceived as firm and identical, in Beckett's view it loses its
existential-ontological constituents: personal identity and meaning.
Here again, the above-explained mechanism of apriority and concreteness
causes the dispersion of all those affirmative elements characterized as 'onto-
logical'. Thus Adorno comments: 'Beckett turns existential philosophy from
its head to its feet [...] The misery of participants in th t Endgame is the misery
of philosophy. These Beckettian situations which constitute his drama are the
negative of meaningful reality'.51
2.1.4 Tbe Collapse of Drama: Aesthetic Components of the Absurd
While the only truth is negative and there is no other life than the false one,
nevertheless non-identical elements are tied to identity in a theatre play, which,
as previously seen, does not abandon the traditional cast of characters. Only
when directed against identity, is dissociation possible at all; otherwise it would
be pure and simple, innocent pluralism. Thus, all the succession of situations
in Beckett 'ends with those obstinate bodies to which they have regressed'.52
In this regard, regression is a subject Adorno considers worthy of further
treatment. 'Psychoanalysis - he says - explains clownish humour as a regression
back to a primordial ontogenetic level, and Beckett's regressive play descends
to that level'.53 Nonetheless, without any place for reconciliation - where one
might laugh, without 'anything between heaven and earth harmless enough
to be laughed at',54 humour itself has become foolish, ridiculous.
49 Ibid.
50 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, trans. E. B. Ashton, Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1970, II, p. 177.
51 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 331.
5z Ibid., p. 334.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid. p. 335.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
C L O V : Things are livening up. (He gets up on ladder, raises the telescope, lets it fall.) It
did it on purpose. (He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.) I see...
a multitude... in transports... ofjoy. (Pause.) That's what I call a magnifier. (He lowers the
telescope, turns toward Hamm.) Well? Don't we laugh?
The jokes of damaged people are themselves damaged: they no longer
reach anybody. 'The only comical thing remaining is that along with the sense
of the punchline, comedy itself has evaporated'.55 As well as humour, dramatic
categories as a whole are also parodied in Beckett's plays. In the era of their
'impossibility', the three Aristotelian unities are retained, but drama itself
perishes. The dramatic components reappear after their demise: 'Exposition,
complication, plot, peripateia and catastrophe return as decomposed elements
in post-mortem examination of dramaturgy: the news that there are no more
painkiller depicts catastrophe'.56
Moreover, the classic dialogues of tragedy, expressing the 'utmost tight-
ening of the dramatic thread', in Endgame are replaced with rapid, mono-
syllabic dialogues, 'like the earlier question-and-answer games between the
blinded king and the fate's messenger'.57 In this sense, Adorno cleverly states
that 'the boundary value of Beckett's drama is that silence already defined as
"the rest" in Shakespeare's inauguration of modern tragedy. The fact that an
"act without words" follows Endgame as a kind of epilogue is its own termi-
nus ad quem™
It is easy, to Adornos mind, to reconstruct the literary ancestors of
Endgame: undoubtedly there was Henrik Ibsen, whose increasing contra-
diction - exemplified in The Wild Duck as well as in the later John Gabriel
Borkmann - between a consistent symbolism and psychological realism is
destined to explode in the inadequacy of his late plays. But also the 'expres-
sionist' August Strindberg with all his symbols that are 'woven into a tapestry
in which everything and nothing is symbolic, because everything can signify
55 Ibid., pp. 335—336. With regard to this point, Simon Critchley raises an objection to Adornos
reading of Beckett's black humour. According to him, there is a general underestimation
by Adorno of the 'subtle but devastating force of Beckett's humour' (see Simon Critchley,
Very Little... Almost Nothing. Death, Philosophy, Literature, op. cit., pp. 157-160).
56 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 337.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
IOO CHAPTER 1
everything'.59 From here, it is only a small step to achieving Beckettian absur-
dity, i.e. to becoming aware of the ineluctably ridiculous nature of such pan-
symbolism. And, as a result, to the understanding that 'not meaning nothing
becomes the only meaning'.60
HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... meaning something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good
one!
I h e play is entirely constructed 'on the ground of a proscription of lan-
guage and it articulates that in its own structure'.61 However the aporia of
expressionist drama cannot be avoided: the impossibility of language to tend
to mere sound by shaking off its semantic element. The discourse can never
completely cast off all similarities to objects. Unlike Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
- claims Adorno - Beckett's Endgame refuses to liquidate the discursive ele-
ment of language through pure sound. Instead, it turns that element into an
instrument of its own absurdity and Beckett 'does that according to the ritual
of clowns, whose babbling becomes nonsensical by presenting itself as sense'.62
In this respect, Endgame seems to apply to drama that which Freud considered
a cornerstone of his psychoanalysis, i.e., the ratio of communication, which
is always also a rationalization; in other words, a defence, in the interest of
self-preservation, of our irrationality. Beckett shows that the contradiction
between the rational facade and the immutably irrational is itself already
the absurd. He only marks this contradiction by making use of the linguistic
structure itself of his plays.
For instance, the syntactic form of question and answer in his dialogues is
systematically undermined. In the question, Adorno notes, one can already hear
the anticipated answer, which condemns the game of question and answer to
empty deception. By virtue of his persistence in the free possibility of language
faced with nothingness of content, Beckett deciphers the lie of the question
mark: the question, in this game, has become rhetorical.
59 Ibid. p. 338.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., p. 339.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
[...] Beckett's dialogues rip up the railroad tracks of conservation; the train no longer arrives
at the bright end of the tunnel [...] The course of the dialogues themselves approximates
the contingency principle of literary production. It sounds as if the laws ofits continuation
were not the "reason" of speech and reply, and not even their psychological encwinement
[psychologisches Ineinandergehaktsein], but rather a test of listening, related to that of
music which frees itself from performed types. The drama attends carefully to what kind
of sentence might follow another. Given the accessible spontaneity of such question, the
absurdity of content (die inhaltliche Absurdität) is all the more strongly felt. That, too,
finds its infantile model in those people who, when visiting the zoo, wait attentively for
the next move of the hippopotamus or the chimpanzee.63
In such a scenario, language becomes polarized. On the one hand, it has
become basic English, or French, or German - single and archaic words; on
the other hand, it is the aggregate of an empty grammar without any refer-
ence to content.
"Ihe logical figure of the absurd' - Adorno concludes - 'which makes the
claim of stringency for stringency's contradictory opposite, denies every con-
text of meaning apparently guaranteed by logic, in order to prove logic's own
absurdity'.64 Indeed, the falsity of logic, with all its schemes, is that of treating
non-identity as if it were identical: as if every reality were consumed in its forms.
Instead, 'the absurd does not take the place of the rational as one world view
of another; in the absurd, the rational world view comes to its own'.65
2.1.5 Hamm and Clov as a Double Musical Fugue
In some way, Endgame can be considered as the ultimate epigone of Hamlet.66
But characters are now denied children's fare, their pap, which is replaced by
a biscuit they - toothless - can no longer chew ('Hamlet is revised: croak
or not croak, that is the question'). Endgame is, therefore, the emblem of a
culture restored after Auschwitz, the last dramatic subject echoing the first:
63 Ibid., pp. 340-341.
64 Ibid., p. 341.
65 Ibid.
66 Following the general premise of this essay, it is of little importance to present some of the
symbolic interpretations of Endgame. Even when Adorno himself, like here (Hamm as
the alter ego of Hamlet), falls into this 'temptation'. See, at this regard, next § 1.4 'Beckett
Beyond Adorno'.
IOO CHAPTER 1 Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101

'Disintegration retrospectively condemns as fictional that continuity of life With a general feeling of indifference ("The ultimate absurdity is that
which alone made life possible'.67 Whereas existential philosophy declares its the repose of nothingness and that of reconciliation cannot be distinguished
'norm' by saying that people can no longer become anything but what they are from each other'),73 the end of the play remains unclear - as if clarity, adds
in reality, Endgame says the opposite. Namely, that self is not self but rather Adorno, would already represent too much meaning. The inexhaustible and
the aping imitation of something non-existent (die äffische Nachahmung eines obsessive repetition of the same answers progressively takes away any reason
nicht Existenten sei). In fact, 'Hamms mendacity exposes the lie concealed in from the questions. Thus, the f o l l o w i n g ^ Without Words - a mime for one
saying "I" and thereby exhibiting substantiality, whose opposite is the content player who is obedient to the imperious blasts of a whistle which send him
disclosed by the "I" [...] What used to be the truth content of the subject - vainly up and down - seems to be, in some sense, the logical conclusion of
thinking - is only still preserved in its gestural shell'.68 Endgame.1* The loss of the centre, parodied in the following dialogue, would
Finally, Adorno argues that Beckett's writing converges with the newest indicate much more than a ludicrous ritual:
musical tendencies 'by combining, as a Westerner, aspects ofStravinsky s radi-
cal past - the oppressive stasis of disintegrating continuity - with the most CLOV: We haven't done the round.
HAMM: Back to my place. (Clov pushes chair back to centre.) Is that my place?
advanced expressive and constructive means from the Schönberg school'.69 In
CLOV: Yes, that's your place.
the same way, Hamm and Clov are denied individuality, though they cannot HAMM: Am I right in the centre?
live without each other. This contradictory equilibrium brings the dialectic to C L O V : I ' l l m e a s u r e it.
a standstill, which makes it impossible to figure out whether the conclusion HAMM: More or less! More or less!
is different or identical to the beginning. CLOV: (moving chair slightly) There!
'As a whole, the play's plot is musically composed with two themes, like H A M M : I'm more or less in the centre?

the double fugue of earlier times. The first theme is that it should end, a C L O V : I ' d say so.
HAMM: You'd say so! Put me right in the centre!
Schopenhauerian negation of the will to live become insignificant'.70 This is
CLOV: I'll go and get the tape.
attributed to Hamm, whose non-identity with himself motivates the course
HAMM: Roughly! Roughly! (Clov moves chair slightly.) Bang in the centre!
of the play.
The second theme is concerned with Clov, the servant, who is not willing
to give up obedience to his impotent master, as 'the insignificant and obsolete Even subjectivity itself is guilty, comments Adorno. 'Original sin is hereti-
struggles irresistably against its abolition'.71 Eventually, 'both plots are coun- cally fused with creation'.75
terpointed, since Hamms will to die is identical with his life principle, while From this he reaches the same conclusion as Beckett: "Ihe end is in the
Clov s will to live may well bring about the death of both'.72 beginning and yet you go on'.76

67 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 343. 'Retrospektiv ver-
dammt der Zerfall die Kontinuität des Lebens, durch die es Leben allein ward, als selber
fiktiv' (Theodor W. Adorno, 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen', op. cit., p. 215).
68 Ibid., pp. 343-344. With regard to this point, see Daniel Katz's essay Saying "I"no more.
Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1999.
69 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame, op. cit., p. 344.
70 Ibid., p. 345.
71 Ibid., p. 346.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid. p. 350. Adorno takes as example this dialogue: 'CLOV: There are so many terrible
things now. HAMM: No, no, there are not so many now' (Ibid.).
74 For an analysis of Act Without Words I, see Chapter 4 § 2.3 of this study.
75 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 347.
76 Samuel Beckett, 'Endgame' in The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber,
1986, p. 126. Endgame was first performed in Great Britain in French as Fin departie
on 3 April 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, directed by Roger Blin (under the
author's supervision) and acted by Roger Blin (Hamm), Jean Martin (Clov), Georges Adet
(Nagg) and Germaine de France (Nell). The play was followed by Acte sans paroles ('Act
Without Words'), by Beckett, a solo mime acted by Deryk Mendel. For some reaction to
that event, see: L. Graver and R. Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage,
IOO CHAPTER 1
Such a figure of speech of epanadiplosis - in which, like a circle, the point
of arrival coincides with the point of departure - completes the discussion
of the endgame of subject s history' (HAMM:'[...] now as always, time was
never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended').77 In the beginning
it was the end itself, and yet there is something more. The next play by Beckett,
Breath (1969), also the shortest he ever wrote, stages in the most synthetic way
this sequence of a circle: a cry followed by an intense light followed by a cry.
By extension, one could identify this scheme as the basis of all of Beckett's
dramas: a light between two opposite, though identical poles, generating a
question, which Adorno attempts to understand. The entire problem, prop-
erly considered ('problem' itself a structure offalse meaning), is in this 'light':
that which, apparendy meaningful, then disappears. Those were the sweet old
happy days of meaning - those written in the 'old style'; those finally that, like
Godot, never 'are' but always 'were' or 'will have been'.78 Nevertheless, such an
illusion is the only side of human truth that can be revealed - though in an
overturned way. This is what Adorno defines as 'das Negativ sinnbezogener
Wirklichkeit': the 'negative of meaningful reality'. The representation of illu-
sion is the sense of the illusory life, which is in fact senseless. It is, in other
words, the (illusory) meaning of meaninglessness.
2.1.6 Concluding Remarks
'Trying to Understand Endgame' surely marks an important turning point in
Adorno's philosophy as well as representing an authoritative basis from which
his successive work follows, especially Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic
Theory (1970). It is equally a remarkable intuition that he perceived Beckett's
worth at such an early stage: the Irish writer was still nearly unknown to large
audiences and much of his later prose and plays had not yet been composed.
Moreover, Adorno's work was the main theoretical interpretation of Beckett
written up to this point: an authentic 'versuch' at understanding his thought
rather than attributing to him an already existing philosophical position.
op. cit., pp. 161-171. See also James Knowlson, Damned to life. The life of Samuel Beckett,
op. cit., pp. 131-140.
77 Samuel Beckett, 'Endgame', op. cit., p. 133.
78 See Winnie's recurrent refrain running through the entire play Happy Days-. 'This will
have been another happy day!'.
Adorno: Interpreter of Beckett 101
Ultimately, an interpretation whose first result, as emerges as the essay devel-
ops, seems to be the awareness of shifting the focus of investigation from the
concept of meaningto that of illusion. As becomes evident in Aesthetic Theory,
the relevance of philosophical research lies here.
2.2. Beckett in the Ästhetische Theorie
2.2.1 An Endless Game
A few years after writing the essay 'Trying to Understand Endgame', Beckett
seems to have entered Adorno's philosophy much deeper, no longer as an
external paradigm but rather as an epitome of it. It could be well said that,
by this time, the 'attempt' to understand Beckett has become a full undertak-
ing, a whole theory of art, though in a sense which could not have been used
easily before this.
Although he seems to be barely quoted in the text, Beckett is placed
instead, as many scholars remarked, at the very core of Adorno's posthumous
and unfinished - and perhaps most ambitious work: Aesthetic Theory. A book
whose opening sentence is more than enough manifesto: 'It is self-evident
that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its
relation to the world, not even its right to exist'.79 In Aesthetic Theory Adorno
attempts to provide a historico-philosophical justification of modernism by
showing the inadequacy of classical aesthetic standards to figure out the frag-
mentariness of the present state of non-identity, that is, a state in which the
79 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 1. Here it is certainly not the place to
mention even a small piece of the huge problematic related to the suffered genesis of this
text and its critical issues, followed by as many troubles with the English editions. In addi-
tion to the difficulties of dealing with a book that Adorno 'concluded but did not finish',
there are also the unavoidable obstacles of the 'paratactical text' - a text that is oriented
not to its readers but to the primacy of the object. In this sense, Aesthetic Theory 'is con-
centrically arranged around a mute middle point through which every word seeks to be
refracted and that it must express' (see 'Translator's Introduction' in Aesthetic Theory, op.
cit., pp. XIV-XV). For some discussions about the English translation of this book see
Bob Hullot-Kentor, 'Adorno's Aesthetic Theory-. The Translation', Telos no. 65 (Fall 1985),
PP- 143-147; and Ae following Christian Lenhardt, 'Reply to Hullot-Kentor' (Ibid.,
pp. 147-151).
 IOO C H A P T E R 1
rational' and the real' do not yet coincide. As Richard Wolin remarked, 'in
Ästhetische Theorie Benjamin's notion of de-auraticization of art becomes
the concept of de-aestheticization [Entkunstung\, which signifies a final dis-
solution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have up until this century
been inseparable from the concept of art itself'.80 Thus, Adorno considers as
authentic representatives of modem art, figures such as Beckett in theatre,
Kafka and Joyce in literature, Schönberg in the field of music, Kandinsky in
painting, Giacometti in sculpture and Mallarme in poetry, to mention only
the most important.
However, before proceeding further, there is still a small premise which
must be investigated.
As has been astutely pointed out by Jay Bernstein, the entire play of
Endgame is an emphatic parody as well as an inversion of Genesis 22.81 While
- on a Kierkegaardian reading - Abraham's sacrifice is par excellence the story
of excessiveness, of the groundlessness of faith, equally, in Bernstein's opinion,
non-identity is 'quickly' recuperated by an angel. In contrast, in Endgame, 'this
new parable of excess, this riddle of the non-identical, Hamm, this (new, last)
God-king-master-father-son-self-subject, finds the father's excessive behavior
intolerable'.82 Nevertheless, according to Bernstein, one should not be tempted
here into an facile psychologism, for this is a parable of the non-identical, of
what cannot be conceptualized, of the truth beyond illusion. So, how might
this narrative of excess end? End and still be excessive?
In his final monologue, Hamm takes up again the story he started to tell at
the beginning, 'whose eventual, deferred completion coincides with the play's
end; indeed, in some oblique way Hamms ability to end his story seems to
be a condition for the play's ending'.83 Instead, the conclusion, Hamms final
words, 'Old stancher! ...you remain', 'are both false (Clov is still there) and a
80 Richard Wolin, "The De-Aestheticization of art: On Adornos Aesthetischc Theorie', Telos
no. 41 (Fall 1979), p. m.
81 Jay M. Bernstein, 'Philosophy's Refuge: Adorno in Beckett' in Philosophers' Poets ed.
by David Wood, London: Routledge, 1990. Some biographical evidence also confirms
Bernstein's remark. While Beckett was writing the first version of Fin de Partie (begin-
ning of 1955), in fact, he was reading the Book of Genesis as well as Baudelaire's poetry
(see James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 406). Both
sources are attested in Endgame.
81 Ibid., p. 189.
83 Ibid., p. 187.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
decisive echo of Hamms first speech. It all may begin again'.84 This is because,
as Bernstein explains, endings, traditionally conceived, require a metaphysical
substantiality that modern art in general must refuse.
Ultimately, Endgame - the final history of the Subject - does not end
at all.
But in so doing it insistently calls for meaning, precisely because it is this
which it resists. An easy rejection of meaning, however, would not account
sufficiently for the work of the play itself.
2.2.2 The Meaning on Trial
Indeed, Zuidervaart points out, 'one task of Aesthetic Theory is to explain and
justify the negative meaning that remains in artworks such as Endgame'.** In
general, he adds,'Aesthetic Theory argues that negation of meaning becomes
aesthetically meaningful when it is realized in the material with which the artist
works. Because such a realization requires form, authentic negation requires
formal emancipation, not emancipation from form'.86
From this he derives one of the most important Adornian assumptions
concerning Beckett, quoted in Aesthetic Theory.
Beckett's plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for then they would
be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history [...]
Artworks that divest themselves of any semblance of meaning do not thereby forfeit their
similitude to language. They enunciate their meaninglessness with the same determinacy
as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning.87
'Beckett's absurd plays' - states Zuidervaart, commenting this passage -
'are still plays. They do not lack all meaning. They put meaning on trial. To do
this as determinately as traditional artworks express positive meaning, modern
artworks must be consistent in their negation of meaning'.88
84 Ibid., p. 188.
85 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 173.
86 Ibid., p. 175.
87 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 153.
88 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 175.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
Here, therefore, we find the capacity of art today in Adorno's opinion:
'Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulates
that once constituted the meaning of artworks'.89 In so doing it does not lack
any of'the same density and unity that once was requisite to the presence of
meaning'.90 This is also the line dividing authentic art, which takes on itself the
crisis of meaning, thus becoming a real negative shape of it, from resigned art
'consisting literally and figuratively of protocol sentences' in which even the
negation of meaning would be 'stubbornly and positively replicated'. Everything
depends, Zuidervaart comments, 'on whether the negation of meaning is
determinate or abstract, on whether the negation has intrinsic meaning or
whether it simply confirms the status quo'.91 Beckett's Endgame is a clear case
of authentic negation in this sense, carries forward a parody of traditional
categories of drama:
What governs Beckett's work, certainly, is a parodic unity of time, place, and action, com-
bined with artfully fitted and balanced episodes and a catastrophe that consists solely in
the fact that it never takes place [...] Ultimately, art is semblance in that, in the midst of
meaninglessness, it is unable to escape the suggestion of meaning.
In Endgame - Zuidervaart again - 'humor becomes black. The hero
becomes anti-hero. Plot is decomposed. The catastrophe is replaced by Clov's
announcing "There's no more painkiller". [...] Beckett's parody draws conse-
quences from Kafka's novels in a way that resembles the serial extension of
Schönberg's dodecaphony. Both Beckett and Stockhausen invert the earlier
generation's contribution'.93
89 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., pp. 153-154.
90 Ibid., p. 154.
91 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 174.
91 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 154.
93 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 174. When commenting,
here, the 'crisis of meaning' in modern music two decades after his Philosophy of Modern
Music - says Zuidervaart - 'Aesthetic Theory continues to assume a historical dialectic with
economic underpinnings, but it places more weight on the relation between metaphysical
and aesthetic meaning than on the relation between social context and artistic import'
(Ibid., p. 170).
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett
101
While this positive negation of meaning, which is not positively sense-
less (as clearly demonstrated by Adorno's aversion to dadaism),94 is the main
requirement of true art, the same can equally be said, on the other hand, for
philosophy.
2.2.3 Versus 'Identity': The Enigma of Art
The task of philosophy is that of being an inappropriate response to the now
infinite disaster: resistance opposed to identity-thinking through the concep-
tual form of philosophy. Here again, the negative perspective is the only acces-
sible way between the two deadly opposites: on the one hand, the dominion
of the concept of identity, on the other hand, pure self-subjectivity. Negative
philosophy must reveal through the positive negation of concept the non-
conceptual of the artwork.
Furthermore, this is a necessity for Adorno because, while authentic art-
works can grasp our age more accurately, more perceptively, than analytic
thought can, precisely because of their claim to include non-identity, this also
requires a philosophical elaboration to allow art to express what philosophy
can no longer say. In other words, there is something enigmatic in modern
art - emerging, says Adorno, out of a historical process - in the persistence
of a truth content in that which has lost its archaic rationality: 'If it no longer
exists for the purpose that it infused with meaning, then what is it?'.95 Such
an elaboration of this enigma, in the necessary form of resistance to the cat-
egories of'identity thinking', is the work accomplished by Aesthetic Theory,
as declared by Adorno:
94 In the following passage Adorno traces the line of demarcation between modern art and
what he calls the 'antiart': 'Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence
of danger [...] Art is thrown back on the dimensionless point of pure subjectivity, strictly
on its particular and thus abstract subjectivity. This tendency was passionately anticipated
by the radical wing of expressionism up to and including dada [...] The dadaist consist-
ently tried to abrogate this postulate; the program of their surrealist successors rejected
art, yet without being able to shake itself free of it. Their truth was that it would be better
not to have art than to have a false one' (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit.,
pp. 19-30).
95 Ibid., p. 117.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
The truth content of artworks is objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every
one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be
achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justification of aesthetics. Although
no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determinations, as is the case with what art
judges, each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless
turns toward interpretative reason.96
Adorno is here aware of all the risks implicit even in merely naming 'inter-
pretation. Therefore he advises:
That great artists, the Goethe who wrote fairy tales no less than Beckett, want nothing
to do with interpretations only underscores the difference of the truth content from the
consciousness and the intention of the author and does so by the strength of the author s
own self-consciousness. Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their
interpretation. Hie claim that there is nothing to interpret in them, that they simply exist,
would erase the demarcation line between art and nonart.
There is a reciprocal and decisive relation between art critique and the
philosophical development of the truth content of artworks. At the same time
'the theory of art must not situate itself beyond art but must rather entrust
itself to its laws of movement while recognizing that artworks hermetically
seal themselves off against the consciousness of these laws of movement'.98
Finally, 'artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The
zone of indeterminacy between the unreachable and what has been realized
constitutes their enigma'.99
Thus the apparent paradox of an art and a philosophy needing each other
is solved: 'Artworks have no truth without determinate negation; developing
this is the task of aesthetics today'.100
Aesthetic Theory is in some way the terminus ad quern of Adorno's compre-
hension of Beckett. The initial attempt to understand his work is now inscribed
in a complex theory in which 'philosophy and art converge in their truth
content', i.e., 'the progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other
96 Ibid., pp. 117-118.
97 Ibid., p. 118.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid., p. 119.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
than the truth of the philosophical concept'.101 Therefore, 'the truth content of
artworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in
itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work in-itself is commensurable
to philosophical interpretation and coincides - with regard to the idea, in any
case - with the idea of philosophical truth'.102 Hence, 'aesthetic experience is
not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy'.103
This is, in short, the philosophical framework that Adorno provides for
modernity, of which Beckett is the most authentic exponent. However, it
is little more than the final seal, at this point, remembering that Aesthetic
Theory - as noted by its editors Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann - apart
from being dedicated to Beckett, should have been given this epigraph from
Friedrich Schlegel: 'What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of
two things: either the philosophy or art'.104
2.2.4 Illusion as the Defining Character of Artwork
At this stage of the analysis of Aesthetic Theory, Zuidervaart once again observes,
there is a paradoxical result which the composer György Ligeti also showed
very well as the dilemma of recent avant-garde art: i.e., complete determina-
tion converges with complete contingency. In other words, complete aesthetic
domination, even in its negative form, would become arbitrary, empty, and
finally impotent. It could be objected against Adorno's attempt to overcome the
recognizing failing of aesthetics that a reverse theory of art, achieved through
the domination of negation, would simply empty and annihilate art itself.
But in reality, explains Zuidervaart, this is not what happens with Beckett's
Endgame, where the negation of meaning is not a complete determination.
It could be said, therefore, that 'authentic negation generates a complex of
meaning that preserves the category of meaning'.105 Here lies a crucial enigma
for Adorno's aesthetics: 'Every authentic negation of meaning ends up seem-
ing meaningful'.106
101 Ibid., p. 130.
101 Ibid., pp. 130-131.
103 Ibid., p. 131.
104 See 'Editors' afterword' (Ibid., p. 366).
105 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 175.
106 Ibid.
IOO CHAPTER 1
That which was going to be the trial of aesthetic meaning, namely, the
centre towards which both Adorno and Beckett's recherche was directed in
order to achieve the truth content of art, encounters something else instead.
'To Adorno's way of thinking, this enigma confirms the illusory character of
art: "Art is illusion in that it cannot escape the hypnotic suggestions of meaning
amid a general loss of meaning". But the illusory character of art is precisely
what prevents it from becoming merely ideological'.107 Eventually, authentic
art cannot escape the hypnotic suggestions of meaning; eventually, it cannot
but end up seeming meaningful.
While, at the time of the essay on Endgame, the focus of investigation
was on the 'crisis of meaning', the emphasis now seems to have moved to a
'crisis of illusion'.
This is, in fact, the position of Thomas Huhn, who, in his essay 'Adorno's
Aesthetics of Illusion',108 argues that modernism itself, in Adornos view, must
be understood as a crisis of illusion. Aesthetic illusion, therefore, is not an
appendage of an artwork, 'but rather its very mode of existence. Illusion is
the defining characteristic of artworks. An artwork is an artwork just so far
as it pretends to be something which is not'.109
But what is it, exacdy, that artworks pretend to be ? 'What artworks pretend
to be' - says Huhn - 'are coherent, meaningful, unified wholes - in a word, they
pretend to being-in-itself. The illusion of art is that it is non-artifactual. The
illusory quality of art conceals the artworks material, historical production'.110
That is to say, the relation between meaning and illusion consists in the fact
that 'meaning is what appears through illusion as the content of an artwork'.111
Meaning is, in short, the 'vehicle of illusion'. As the claim that artworks pos-
sess meaning in them is false and therefore illusory, meaning is by definition
'the illusory content of art'. It is also what produces the coherence of a work
of art. "Ihe falsification or illusion occurs when the artwork proclaims that
107 Ibid., pp. 175-176.
108 Thomas Huhn, 'Adornos Aesthetics of Illusion in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
44 (Winter 1985), pp. 181-189. By reading Adorno's aesthetics as a strong defence of
modern art, Huhn's position converges with Richard Wolin's "Ihe De-Aestheticization
of Art: On Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie' (op. cit.) except that Wolin describes the crisis
of the avant-garde as a crisis of identity, rather than, as Huhn does, a crisis of illusion.
109 Ibid., p. 181.
no Ibid.
111 Ibid.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
meaning - its agent of unification - is not an agent or catalyst but is instead
its content'.112
At the very core of the truth content of art there is illusion {Schein). 'In
modernism what makes illusion a crisis-provoking phenomenon, and further,
what causes illusion itself to undergo a crisis, is precisely the self-conscious
manner in which art attempts to outwit illusion'.113 For Adorno, the failure
of the attempt to dislodge illusion from art would demonstrate the historical
predominance of illusion in art. Consequently, the crisis of illusion is the most
recent manifestation of the crisis of art: authentic modern artworks attempt
emancipation from art itself through a negation of illusion.
At this point, Huhn characterizes the crisis of illusion in Adorno's view
as a result of a particular misconception of spirit, which is also the Adornian
criticism of Hegelian aesthetics: 'Adorno takes Hegel to be correct in identi-
fying spirituality as the vital element in art'.114 In other words, Adorno agrees
that spirit is what animates artworks, but it must necessarily exist as a negation,
not of the Hegelian materiality - which would be nothing but a reification of
spirit itself - but of a socially constructed empirical reality. Hence Adorno's
definition: Art is the social antithesis of society'.
To summarize, 'that spirit animates art means that spirit comes to be
through the artwork and spirit comes to be an artwork'.115 This could be, in
reality, a latter reification of spirit which would betray Adorno's contention.
Eventually, Huhn argues, in order to understand this point it is necessary to
be aware of the correct dialectic of art in Adorno. Art is both phenomenality
(which Adorno takes from Hegel) and objedification (from Lukacs): the correct
conception of spirit in art is a negation through a configuration of an artworks
appearing qualities. This is also the meaning of the Adornian definition by
which the instant of appearance in works of art is the paradoxical union or
balance between a vanishing and a preserving tendency, for artworks are static
and dynamic at the same time. Accordingly, art is something that cannot be
true in terms of its own concept as well as appearing in-itself.
It is in this light that the idea of the 'redemption of illusion', which would
determine the resolution of illusion's crisis has to be considered: 'The agent of
redemption must therefore be spirit since spirit goes beyond the production
111 Ibid.
113 Ibid., p. 182.
114 Ibid., p. 183.
115 Ibid.
IOO CHAPTER 1
of illusion [...] Spirit negates the artworks (and its own) illusory claim'.116
Hence Adorno's conclusion that the illusory character of art is simultaneously
its methexis (participation) in truth.
2.2.5 Double Paradox of Artistic Truth
As is well known, the redemption of illusion is at the heart of the matter of
Zuidervaart s reading of Aesthetic Theory. While - he says - a first aim in inter-
preting this work is to expose antinomies within Adorno's account of artistic
illusion,117 it is also important to say that 'since no artwork has import except
through illusion, the redemption of illusion becomes central to Adorno's aes-
thetics'.118 Therefore, 'even though Adorno's philosophy sees itself as a socially
necessary illusion, his aesthetics attempts a paradoxical rescue of a paradoxi-
cal illusion and refuses to rest with a merely illusory rescue. The crux to this
rescue lies in the philosophical redemption of artistic import, a redemption
that has great significance for all of Adorno's work'.119
According to Aesthetic Theory, despite of everything, a genuine need for
art (called in Negative Dialectics a 'condition of all truth') does indeed exist,
namely, a need to express suffering. To this need, authentic modern artworks
such as Beckett's Endgame give an answer. In order to meet this necessity,
the expression of art must be inexorably negative - as 'inhuman' as society is.
This genuine need for art implies the historical necessity of philosophy: for
Adorno's aesthetics 'tries to help disclose the truth of authentic art despite art's
self-negation in social isolation'.120 While after Auschwitz art can no longer
accept what Marcuse called 'the affirmative character of culture', the existence
of a genuine artistic need raises the question of how illusion, the illusion of
truth, can be redeemed. For Adorno, this call for redemption would transfer
the antinomies of artistic illusion into the double paradox of artistic truth.
116 Ibid., p. 186.
117 Such antinomies Zuidervaart identifies as follows: "The concepts of mimesis and imagery;
the distinctions among artifact, entity, and phenomenon; and the crisscrossing of artistic
image and apparition with relations between reality and art and between the actual and
the possible' (Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 179).
118 Ibid., p. 191.
119 Ibid.
110 Ibid., p. 193
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
On one hand, truth content 'which cannot be a something made, must be
expressed through human making'; 121 on the other, truth, 'which seems to be
a unity, must appear in many particular works of art'.122 Art, in the end, never
meets truth unless, in a paradoxical, incomplete form, through the production
of particular plays or poems or compositions.
Not only does art never reveal the truth, it also never meets it directly.
Artworks speak like fairies in tales - Adorno says: 'If you want the absolute,
you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it'.123
In some way this 'opacity' - as Adorno defines it - of content is peculiar
to our time.
Beckett's refusal to interpret his works, combined with the most extreme consciousness of
techniques and of the implications of the theatrical and linguistic material, is not merely
a subjective aversion: As reflection increases in scope and power, content itself becomes
ever more opaque [...] What is today called a "message" is no more to be squeezed out
of Shakespeare's great dramas than out of Beckett's works. But the increasing opacity is
itself a function of transformed content [...] The darkness of the absurd is the old darkness
of the new. This darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning.124
The truth content in artworks is, therefore, something negative. 'A nega-
tive definition is necessary' - Zuidervaart explains - 'because "truth content"
mediates the non-identical in empirical existence with the precondition of the
possibility of identification'.125 Beyond non-identity being the precondition
of the possibility of identification, it is also the construction of what eludes
the categories of identification. As Adorno once wrote in Negative Dialectics-.
'What is, is more than it is'.126 'Truth, as Adorno conceives it, is ambiguously
nonexistent. That is to say, truth does not now exist, but it could exist and
it could have existed [...] Both the nonidentical and the possibility of truth
111 Ibid., p. 194.
1 1 1 Ibid.
113 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 116. 'The truth of discursive knowledge
is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowledge that is art,
has truth, but as something incommensurable with art' (Ibid.).
124 Ibid., p. 17.
115 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 196.
iz6 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Translated by E. B. Ashton, New York: Seabury
Press, 1973, p. 161.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
are contained in the truth content of artworks. Their truth content is what
artworks are not and what they nevertheless express'.127
Here Zuidervaart underlines an important passage by referring to what
Adorno says about truth content, which cannot be identified directly, but is
mediated in itself, and therefore calls for philosophical mediation. Philosophy,
in this regard, does not achieve a direct process of understanding. The negative
definition of truth content of an artwork must be considered as a process in
which neither the artist's intentions nor the materials and procedures with
which the artists works are representative of it, but rather what Zuidervaart calls
the 'mediated transcendence of spirit'. 'Artworks participate in truth content
by way of their spirit, but their spirit can also be false'.128 In the Adagio move-
ment of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 31, no. 2 in D minor - says Zuidervaart
quoting Adorno - 'hope dawns in such an authentic way that it points beyond
the piece in which it appears'.129 Hence, 'hope is the sonata's emerging spirit,
but, by being beyond the work itself, hope is also the sonata's truth content.
Truth content is that which is not illusory in the artistic illusion'.130 'Under
the pressure of truth content' - Zuidervaart continues - 'sublime artworks
perforate their own thorough logicality, just as Adorno's negative dialectic
thinks against thought'.131 As Adorno explains in a crucial passage of Aesthetic
Theory, 'the truth content of artworks is not what they mean but rather what
decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the
work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical interpretation and coincides
[...] with the idea of philosophical truth'.132 Therefore, Zuidervaart concludes,
'to become aware of the truth content of an artwork is to become conscious of
the entire process from which truth content arises. Philosophy has the special
task of comprehending both the artistic process and artistic truth'.133
Adorno's philosophy is mostly labyrinthine, certainly not a direct path. But
admittedly, for him, as Brian O'Connor remarks, 'the experience of modern
society - its real truth - is that of contradiction, and art must somehow express
12.7 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 196.
12.8 Ibid., p. 201.
119 Ibid.
130 Ibid.
131 Ibid.
132. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., pp. 130-131.
133 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 2.02.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
this. The ways in which it does so are quite oblique in that it provokes the
experience of contradiction without naming society directly'.134
In conclusion, according to Adorno, the definition of art in terms of illusion
is only half correct: art is true to the degree to which it is an illusion of the
non illusory (Schein des Scheinlosen). As Thomas Huhn observes, 'in order for
this last analysis to take place - an analysis which experiences art as a final
recognition of its genuine truth content - philosophy is necessary'.135 Art is
not complete until philosophy gives it its interpretation: this final movement
- which takes place as thought, even though it is not properly a revelation but
instead a negation of a negation (see Zuidervaart's double paradox), can still be
considered as the positive move in the dialectic of truth. After all, philosophy
is the lighter side of art. In Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, it is the positive devel-
opment of Beckett's plays. Since truth content is a potentiality unlocked by
philosophical reflection, Adornos aesthetic model is the counterpart of Beckett
in disclosing such potentiality. While authentic modern art - ofwhich Beckett
is one of the best examples - is a 'negation', philosophy is a 'double negation',
which is somehow positiveness. However, in the first move, the simple nega-
tion (or, if we prefer, Beckett's point of view), this positiveness is not yet seen.
In this sense Aesthetic Theory is a completion of Beckett's art - convincing as
well as appropriate to him - rather than an actual comprehension of it.
Whether we agree or not with this, this does not resolve the question
which Jay Bernstein posed in his essay:
In his first speech we find Hamm saying: "Enough, it is time it ended, in the refuge too".
All is ended outside the refuge, outside the ark of art. But how are things to be ended in the
refuge ? In what sense would it remain, still, a refuge ? It is these questions which circulate
around Hamms narrative, providing it with its thematic and structural significance.136
Such a 'refuge', the last meaningful thing, is undoubtedly the centre of all
Beckett's creation: the last place where it ended. The only certainty is that there
has been an endgame of something: what, is difficult to figure out. For Adorno
there are many possibilities: for instance 'meaning', 'identity', 'Auschwitz', and
all the dialectics between illusion and truth, art and philosophy. For Beckett,
134 Brian O'Connor, The Adorno Reader, op. cit., p. 17.
135 Thomas Huhn, 'Adornos Aesthetics of Illusion', op. cit., p. 188.
136 Jay M. Bernstein, 'Philosophy's Refuge: Adorno in Beckett', op. cit., p. 188.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
indeed, what is the word is the problem - a problem that he, literally, carried
out till the end.
2.3 The Antinomy of Aesthetic Semblance
In order to complete our understanding of the interpretation given by Adorno
to Beckett, it is important to stop for a moment in order to examine more
closely a number of issues concerning Aesthetic Theory and its reception by con-
temporary scholarship.137 In particular, this is true of the three crucial concepts
of mimesis (see § 2.3.1 of this section), semblance and subjectivity (see § 2.3.2),
which all seem to mark significantly - like three different, though consequent
steps - the process of understanding of the artwork in Adorno as well as in
Beckett. Afterwards, in the following paragraph 2.3.3, the position assumed by
Christoph Menke towards Adorno's theory of art will be discussed, leading
directly to the crucial problem of the antinomy of aesthetic semblance'. A cri-
tique of this position - in the light of the three concepts of mimesis, semblance
and subjectivity - is vital for a better definition of the fundamental character
of Adorno's aesthetics, which, in our case, also represents both a paradigm and
development for Beckettian philosophical aesthetics.
Despite the fact that more than three decades have passed since the pub-
lication of Aesthetic Theory and the many translations of Adorno's writings,
nonetheless it was only during the nineties that his aesthetic writings received
the attention they deserved in the English-speaking world. While this is perhaps
due to conspiring circumstances, especially the turning-point of Habermas'
rejection of Adornian Critical Theory, the rise of postmodernism and the
idea of a possible 'end' of philosophy - all of which made Adorno's dialecti-
cal method and paradoxical modernism seem out of date, the time is ripe for
Aesthetic Theory to turn into a classic like Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and
Method, as Zuidervaart argues.
Aesthetic Theory, in fact, brings to a culminating conclusion an entire cul-
tural critique, carried out from the time of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
to Negative Dialectics (1966), eventually indicating how philosophy itself must
become aesthetic. Although with a more critical direction (' Theaestheticizingof
137 See Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds),' The Semblance ofSubjectivity. Essays in
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Adorno: Interpreter of Beckett 101
theory impoverishes a theory of aesthetic),1™ this is the general position adopted
by Rüdiger Bubner who argues that the main concern ofAesthetic Theory is to
analyse the process by which philosophy and art can converge on the ground
of their own internal and autonomous laws, directly opposed each other.139
Therefore, according to Bubner, Adorno's thought finds its definitive expres-
sion in the title Aesthetic Theory, as this posthumously published work 'has
proven to be his true philosophical testament'.140
At the end of a long journey begun by Plato, with Adorno philosophical
aesthetics becomes to all accounts the 'place of truth': a necessary place for
social and human truth to be revealed, not in an instrumental sense - i.e. art
as a way through which truth can be expressed - but rather as an autonomous
sphere ('the origin of truth', Heidegger would say) whose cognitive capacity
sets limits to philosophy.
Adorno achieves his definition of the truth-value of art by reversing the
main Platonic premise on its same terms. While for Plato, art was the copy
of a copy of the truth, namely, a double mimesis of the original, Adorno radi-
cally inverts the mimetic procedure to the extent that the priority of subject
over object is reversed. The paradoxical genius ofAesthetic Theory, Zuidervaart
observes in this respect, is precisely that of turning traditional concepts such as
the notions of mimesis and autonomy, which might seem outmoded nowadays,
into a theoretical cutting edge. An example of this is given by two interesting
essays both of which concern the concept of mimesis in Aesthetic Theory -
Martin Jay's 'Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe' and
Shierry Weber Nicholsen's'Aesthetic Theory's Mimesis of Walter Benjamin'.
With regard to Beckett, the analysis of the fundamental importance of
mimesis in Adorno's theory of art also demonstrates the best line of conver-
gence between the two authors. In this respect, if one was seeking a philosophi-
es Rüdiger Bubner, "The Central Idea of Adorno's Philosophy' in The Semblance of Subjectivity,
op. cit., p.171.
139 But such machinations of antinomies in which everyone needs the other, according to
Bubner, only have the effect of undermining both aesthetics and philosophy.
140 Ibid., p. 148. An opposite view - with regard to Bubner s idea of the centrality of aesthet-
ics in Adorno - is expressed by Brian O'Connor in his book Adorno's Negative Dialectic.
Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, Cambridge: M I T Press, 1004.
According to Brian O'Connor, who proposes in this work a 'concrete critique of appear-
ances' in Adorno's philosophy, the negative dialectic can be seen as the 'theoretical foun-
dation of the reflexivity or critical rationality required by critical theory'.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
cal point of departure for all Beckettian aesthetics, nothing - as showed in
Chapter i - would probably be as revealing as Adorno's notion of mimesis.
2.3.1 Adorno and Mimesis
The concept of mimesis for contemporary thought can easily be associated with
something diabolic, since a large number of thinkers and theorists, normally
labelled as poststructuralist (a vast group ranging from Barthes to Derrida,
Deleuze, Lyotard, and De Man), 141 considered it inherently inadequate as a
means to represent our world. For all them, mimesis, i.e. the search for univo-
cal hidden meanings through the practice of reference and reproduction of
already existing signs, is nothing but a false belief in the fixity of meaning and
the possibility of achieving full presence. Unlike the older Platonic critique of
mimesis, accused of losing contact with a stable notion of truth, here the exact
opposite is on trial: the concern that a mimetic comprehension of truth would
privilege an original version' of it, rather than its infinite duplications.
In contrast with this conception of referential and naturalist aesthetics, says
Martin Jay, the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory considered 'mimesis as a
valuable resource in its struggle to counter the reigning power of instrumental
rationality in the modern world'.142 Therefore, 'not surprisingly, a significant
secondary literature has arisen around the enigmatic concept of mimesis in
Critical Theory, especially in the thought of Adorno, which one commentator
has gone so far as to call the "obscure operator" of his entire system [...]'.143
For Adorno (whose conception is here joined, by Jay, to that of Lacoue-
Labarthe), mimesis has a primarily relational character. It is a way of balancing
the traditional domination of the subject over the object: conceptual thought,
with its process of subsuming particulars under universals, can be understood
141 See in particular Roland Barthes, S/Z, Paris: Seuil 1970, p. 145; Jacques Derrida, "The
Double Session' in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981, p. 145; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Milleplateaux, Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1980, p. 144; Jean-Francois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey
and Mark S. Roberts, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993, p. 69; Paul de Man,
The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 11.
14z Martin Jay, 'Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe' in The Semblance
ofSubjectivity, op. cit., p. 30.
143 Ibid., p. 31.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett
101
as an act of aggression that reduces the uniqueness of the external world to
few essential principles. In contrast, mimesis preserves a more sympathetic and
compassionate relationship of affinity between the object and subject involved.
In Adorno's view, mimetic behaviour does not imitate something but assimi-
lates itself to something. As such, the word itself'imitation' (Nachahmung)
attributes too much importance to the subject, which is thus considered the
source of the meaning it finds in relation to the other. Instead, he prefers the
verb anschmiegen (to snuggle up or mould to) which better underlines a rela-
tionship of contiguity.
Mimesis is not, for Adorno, simply the opposite of reason: it is closer - Jay
argues - to what Habermas once called a 'placeholder' for 'primordial reason',
which, however cannot be satisfactorily theorized without betraying its con-
ceptual status. Aesthetic mimesis, in particular, is the secret language of things
- to say it with Benjamin - which expresses the dissonant resistance to the
harmonizing impulses of affirmative art. In direct opposition to the Platonic
fear that art is duplicitous because it fails to imitate a higher reality, Adorno
states that 'the mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves'.144
As a sort of'homeopathic strategy', Jay continues, 'Adorno seeks to subvert
the dominating, homogenizing power of conceptual thinking by introducing
a mimetic element in his own writing'.145 Without ever reducing philosophy
to a variant of literature, Adorno's idiosyncratic prose style nevertheless recog-
nizes that, unlike music, language cannot avoid a certain amount of conceptual
form. Finally, the dialectical structure of the speculative essay and the infinite
oscillation of the paratactical text, which tries to recuperate all the differences
of objective reality, cannot but coexist in an uneasy equilibrium. With him,
'the melodic and the rhythmic impulses of the work', Jay concludes, are 'never
coming together completely'.146
Like Martin Jay, Shierry Weber Nicholsen also agrees that there is no
better definition than 'an obscure operator' for mimesis, whose peculiar
status - as Frederic Jameson had already observed in Late Marxism - Adorno
144 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 104. Thus Adorno continues: 'Whether
univocally or ambiguously, this law is posited by the initial act of each artwork; by virtue of
its constitution each work is bound by it. It divides aesthetic from cultic images' (Ibid.).
145 Martin Jay, 'Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe' in The Semblance
of Subjectivity, op. cit., p. 36.
146 Ibid., p. 38.
IOO CHAPTER 1
never defined nor argued but always alluded to, as though it preexisted all
the texts.
After analyzing the main occurrences of the term in Aesthetic Theory,
Nicholsen concludes that mimesis in Adorno is basically considered as an
assimilation of the self to the other, thus a kind of enactment - mimetic
behaviour'.147 In the sphere of art and aesthetics, mimesis is for Adorno both
the activity of assimilating the self to the other and the affinity of the work of
art to objectivity. Following Benjamin in this regard, Adorno would locate
mimesis - in Nicholsen's opinion - within the subject's experience: both the
experience of creating and the experience of perceiving resemblances. Adorno
is therefore interested in the objective aspects of the subjective experience, as
evidenced in behaviour. The mimetic experience is precisely that of assimilating
the self to other (object) through mimetic behaviour. To confirm all of this,
there is Adorno's idea of aesthetic receptivity, whose understanding cannot be
a matter of conceptual analysis, but rather an experience of enactment. Like
the performance of a musical composition - in which the performer's activ-
ity is a mimetic one, i.e., he creates an imitation of the work that is written in
the score - every work of art 'can be seen as a dynamic totality that requires
a kind of performance or reenactment by the listener or viewer'.148 Therefore
the subject 'virtually embodies, in a quasi-sensuous mode, the work, which is
the other'.149 But while this conception of an active experiential reproduction
is present in many places in Adorno's aesthetic writings, in Aesthetic Theory
he argues insistently that mimetic aesthetic experience must be supplemented
by philosophical reflection. This is due to the fact that precisely because the
work of art is mimetic rather than conceptual, it has also an enigmatic aspect
which requires discursive meaning. The work of art is enigmatic as it has lost
its purpose; as Kant would say, it has become purposive without purpose.
Mimesis alone transforms verbal language into the non-conceptual lan-
guage of art - as James Joyce, Kafka and other modern writers discovered,
says Adorno. 150 This is none other than art as such - the highest concept of
imitation/assimilation which gives form to its material. The language of art
retains its mimetic nature: by so doing it also underlines its affinity with the
147 Shierry Weber Nicholsen,'Aesthetic Theory's Mimesis of Walter Benjamin' in The Semblance
ofSubjectivity, op. cit., p. 61.
148 Ibid., p. 63.
149 Ibid., p. 64.
150 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., pp. 111-111.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
silence of things. A crucial paradox of Adorno's theory of art concerns the
linguistic character of art, whose greatest aim to give expression to natural
beauty, while facing the impossibility of this expression being anything other
than speechless and mute, since it is not discursive language. This muteness
of art is emphasized by Adorno in Samuel Beckett: 'Aesthetic transcendence
and disenchantment converge in the moment of falling mute: in Beckett's
oeuvre. A language remote from all meaning is not a speaking language and
this is its affinity to muteness'.151
An important point regarding mimesis is its role in deconstructing mean-
ing. In Beckett's plays the meaning can be put on trial precisely through the
active role of the 'obscure mimetic operator' which, one might say, disconnects
its structure (Sinnzusammenhang). This can be done only when the 'imita-
tion' is an objective expression and becomes eloquent in itself. This is also the
special significance Adorno affords to the word 'expression' as the quintes-
sence of mimetic language: 'This is art's mimetic consummation. Its expres-
sion is the antithesis of expressing something'.152 Like the Etruscan vases in
Villa Giulia which are 'eloquent in the highest degree and incommensurable
with all communicative languages',153 the true language of art is mute and this
muteness seems in itself to have meaning - beyond any poetic interpretation.
The Etruscan vases, Adorno points out, resemble speech in their 'Here I am or
This is what I am, a selfhood not first excised by identificatory thought from
the interdependence of entities'.154 In the same way - he adds - 'the rhinoceros,
that mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros'.155
The crisis of meaning - as conceived in the Western tradition - is played
out, in the first instance, on the ground of a mimesis intended by Adorno as
the opposite of the Platonic imitation of Forms. Plato's worst fear, that of
starting a philosophical reflection from sensation instead of the rationality, is
therefore concretized. Nevertheless, as seen above, this element of muteness
for which, in one of his most famous definitions, Adorno says 'the mimesis
of works of art is their resemblance to themselves' is at the same time a mute
enigmatic gaze. As we find ourselves in the domain of the aura - along with
Benjamin - the idea of a mute language of art suddenly appears as a refuge for
151 Ibid., p. 79.
151 Ibid., p. 112.
153 Ibid.
154 Ibid.
155 Ibid.
IOO
CHAPTER 1
the mimetic faculty. The same 'refuge' mentioned by J. M. Bernstein of which
Hamm proclaimed the end. This refuge, Beckett seems to say in Endgame, is
no longer a refuge. For Adorno, the autonomy of art, which is mimetic at its
core, now more than ever calls for a rational connection to reality, otherwise it
would immediately cease to be art, being just one autonomous object among
others. However, this 'call' brings mimesis to face its enigma ('Ultimately,
artworks are enigmatic in terms not of their composition but of their truth
content').156 Evidently - suggests Adorno - the answer to the question 'What
is it all about?' cannot be given by the mimetic experiencing of the work of
art. In the same way as a musician - to use an Adornian example - who per-
fectly understands his score, but in a certain sense does not know what he is
playing, the enigmatic quality of art makes itself invisible to the experiential
understanding of it. Equally, to experience this score by playing it, following
a mimetic procedure, is clearly an experience of truth as well as a challenge to
the rational meaning of the score itself, while at the same time being a refuge
from a more complete understanding of the composition.
Accordingly, Adorno ends by defining the enigmatic quality of art as the
difference between what is experienced from completely outside the work of
art and what is experienced from completely inside it. This enigmatic domain
of difference (or 'zone of indeterminacy' as Adorno calls it)157 can take place
only when the experience of mimesis and assimilation is associated, yet sepa-
rated, from the rationality of philosophical reflection.
Mimesis plus rationality produces a resemblance - the authentic experi-
ence of art - which implies affinity as well as discontinuity between subject
and object. The enigma of the aesthetic illusion or semblance is represented
by that 'zone of distance', the Schein des Scheinlosen, the 'illusion of the non
illusory', from which the objective side of the work is seen as subjective, the
subjectivity nonetheless having an objective semblance.
156 Ibid., p. 117.
157 'Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy
between the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma' (Ibid.,
p. 118).
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 101
2.3.1 Aesthetic Semblance and Subjectivity
With regard to the second issue concerning the philosophy of Adorno, i.e.
illusion or semblance, its importance as the defining character of artworks
(Huhn) has been previously remarked upon. Unlike the Platonic eikon (like-
ness) which is like the original, or any kind of imitation of this - which would
be nothing but an image, the semblance, in the Adornian sense, involves an
element of deceit.1™ This illusory character represents the difference of art-
works from empirical reality. Hence the definition of artworks as objects of
self-imitation, where similarity to themselves distinguishes them from the
status of false realities. At the same time, an artwork is neither a pure thing in
itself nor merely a 'thing'. However independent it may be, it always remains
something produced for others, something with the double character of'arti-
fact' and 'phenomenon'. Explaining it in terms of the musical work, Adorno
affirms that as an artifact the work is represented by the symphony as com-
posed, whereas as a phenomenon it is the symphony as performed or heard.
Both aspects, in continuous contradiction, are essential to the artwork and
present it as a meaningful process. Meaning itself is illusion, however, since
the claim that artworks possess it is false and therefore illusory. Nonetheless,
as has been noted, while such semblance is by definition 'the illusory content
of art', it is also the fundamental character which marks its participation in
truth. According to Adorno, the truth content of artworks is something they
are not, though which they nevertheless express. Hence, art allows something
non-existent seem to exist. The import of truth in art has the illusory character
of something that could exist or could have existed. This truth conceived as a
possibility rather than an actuality is the precondition of all Adorno's identi-
fications: even what does not now exist, is more than its actual non-existence.
Given the necessity of artworks' illusory import, as Zuidervaart points out,
Adorno's aesthetics 'attempts a paradoxical rescue of a paradoxical illusion and
refuses to rest with a merely illusory rescue'.159
The rescue of semblance in Beckett's plays is the rescue of the absurd. The
Beckettian absurd, which incarnates the absurdity of content (die inhaltliche
Absurdität), is in fact the aesthetic result of the double movement of abstrac-
tion and subtraction previously described in § 2.1.
158 See especially the section 'Semblance and Expression' in T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory,
op. cit., pp. 100-118.
159 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 191.
IOO
132. C H A P T E R 2.
As already observed, the redemption of this illusion is - according to
Zuidervaart - the main task of Aesthetic Theory, providing philosophical
significance to the non-discursive resources of the works of art. It is not a
matter of making appearance real, but, on the contrary, it is precisely a way
of maintaining that semblance intact. The more authentic the artworks, the
more aesthetic illusion in them feigns the truth. The rescue of semblance is as
necessary as philosophy, insofar as it must determine if the content of art is
indeed a semblance of truth. In other words, Adorno writes, 'the truth content
of artworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work
in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work in-itself is commensu-
rable to philosophical interpretation and coincides - with regard to the idea,
in any case - with the idea of philosophical truth'.160 Hence Adorno's conclu-
sion that 'aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes
philosophy',161 that is to say, until it is redeemed by it.
As will be discussed in the next paragraph, this is probably the most dif-
ficult point in the juxtaposition of Adorno's theory of art and the work of
Beckett, as nothing at all in Beckett leads one to draw such a conclusion.
However, this is in no way problematic for Adorno's theory, which in this
regard certainly needs no confirmation either from Beckett's intention or
from his work.
Finally, an interesting development of the redemption of illusion, though in
a moral direction, is indicated by Jay Bernstein's essay 'Why Rescue Semblance ?
Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics'.162 As aesthetic sem-
blance, Bernstein argues, takes on 'all the ambiguity and tension that once
was lodged in the hope and despair of the idea of an intelligible world',163 the
intention of rescuing it would mean to provide us with experience of a world
that is constituted by the absence of experience. In short, aesthetic experience
160 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., pp. 130-131.
161 Ibid., p. 131.
162 J. M. Bernstein, 'Why Rescue Semblance ? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of
Ethics' in The Semblance of Subjectivity, op. cit., pp. 177-211. In this essay Bernstein makes
a connection between Adorno's 'Meditations on Metaphysics' in Negative Dialectics and
'the rescue of semblance' thematized in Aesthetic Theory. In conclusion, hefindsan impor-
tant element of'virtue' in Adorno's account, by saying that, aesthetic semblance being the
most objective image of the disenchantment of the world, 'to experience the aura of an
artwork is thus to experience the possibility of experience in its robust sense', that is, 'to
be in possession of the moral image of the world - in semblance' (Ibid., p. 108).
163 Ibid., pp. 194-195.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
by 'feeding on', in Adorno's terms, nothing but the experience of immanence
would also disclose a transcendence 'finally, not vertical but horizontal, a
promise - toward a future habitation of this world'.164
Whereas Adorno's insistence on the (mimetic, illusory and finally true) objec-
tivity of the artwork might be interpreted as a sort of resistance to consider-
ing the artwork as the achievement of subjectivity, instead it probably hides a
different and opposite perspective. This is what Tom Huhn suggests with his
essay 'Kant, Adorno and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic' where he declares
explicidy that 'Adorno closely follows Kant not only in the elaboration of the
subject of aesthetics but also in the subjectivity elaborated in the aesthetic'.165
For Huhn, it is as if'Kant and Adorno are peering at the same phenomenon
from opposite points of view'.166 While Kant, in fact, seeks to found subjectivity
and intersubjectivity by suppressing the view of the object, Adorno's theory
of art focuses on the object of aesthetic judgement, which therefore reveals
itself as subjectivity in its otherness. Far from being an obstacle on the path
of human emancipation, for Adorno the artwork becomes 'the surrogate for
an emancipating subjectivity'.167 As non-appearance it cannot but be a sur-
rogate, that is, an 'afterimage' - which, unlike the full image does not imply
presence and realization but only residue and trace. Indeed, the fundamental
incompleteness of the artwork points to 'the need for an aesthetic theory as
a reminder that, no matter how complete any art object might be taken to
be, insofar as it is an art object its completion is possible only as a return to
subjectivity'.168
The objectivity of the modern artwork, therefore, has to be understood
as the reverse image of universal subjectivity. After the failure of the Kantian
sublime to achieve the Aufhebung of spirit, 'the artwork becomes the objec-
tive counterimage of subjectivity'.169 In a certain sense, the achievements of
164 Ibid., p. 108.
165 Tom Huhn, 'Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic', in The Semblance of
Subjectivity, op. cit., p. 137.
166 Ibid., p. 238. As a confirmation ofthat see Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit.,
p. 97 and p. 109. See especially the whole section 'Art Beauty' (Ibid., pp. 78-100).
167 Tom Huhn, 'Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic', in The Semblance of
Subjectivity, op. cit., p. p. 149.
168 Ibid.
169 Ibid., p. 150.
IOO
132. C H A P T E R 2.
modern art, Huhn says, are to be read as directly proportionate to the failure
of the sublime.
Eventually, avers Adorno, all of this leads to a fundamental (subjective)
paradox of art that produces what is blind, from the redemptive mediation
of reflection, through form. It is as if the blindness does not need to be made
rational but instead to be made up first aesthetically. It is obvious at this point
that such blindness is a mimetic approximation of expression. The Kantian
legacy in Adorno, Huhn concludes, must be considered precisely in this junc-
ture, as also the genius of Kant s aesthetics of beauty 'lies in its recognition of
the absolute necessity of the opacity of the object - and the experience - we
call beautiful'.170 Whereas Kant locates such an opacity of the aesthetic object
in aesthetic judgements concerning natural beauty, Adorno finds it in the art-
work. For Adorno the term Formgefühl (intuitive feeling of form) is hermetic
objectivity that falls on subjective mimetic ability. This ability strengthens
itself, in turn, through its opposite, rational construction. The blindness of
Formgefuhl corresponds, therefore, to the necessity in things.
Finally, the aesthetic semblance reveals itself as a semblance of subjectiv-
ity, even though it can only happen in the illusory character of this objective
semblance that the truth of the subjectivity has its origin. 'Aesthetic expression',
Adorno observes, 'is the objectification of the non-objective',171 or, conversely,
'the nonsubjective in the subject'.172 The origin of truth is in art, but in the
end this truth shows, all the same, the face of subjectivity, although not as an
imitation of the subject itself.
While mimesis has been called the obscure operator of all Adornian aes-
thetics - whereas illusion is indeed its vehicle - subjectivity can be said to be
the 'obscure consequence' of such a process.
170 Ibid., p. 2.55.
171 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. in.
171 Ibid., p. 113.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
2.3.3 Christoph Menkes Objection
If one were to sum up the crux of all Adornian aesthetics in a single phrase,
one might describe it as 'the antinomy of aesthetic semblance'.
Such a duality, which in Adorno is unified as a whole theory - the reason
why it becomes an antinomy - is represented by two lines of tradition already
intertwined in the aesthetics of Kant but fully expressed in Adorno's Aesthetic
Theory.
Set in the wider problematic of the subjective and objective in modern
aesthetics, this antinomy can be defined, as Christoph Menke does in his
book The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, by
the concepts of autonomy and sovereignty of art.
In one tradition, firmly rooted to Kant, the status of aesthetic experience
is considered autonomous as it occupies its own place alongside many other
discourses of differentiated modern reason. It is necessarily delimited to the
sphere of the particular in nature and it is orientated mainly towards the com-
prehension of the aesthetic value of the beautiful.
In the other tradition, mainly represented by Romanticism down to con-
temporary avant-garde movements, aesthetic experience is defined by the
concept of sovereignty. Unlike the autonomy model, in fact, this tradition
confers absolute validity upon artistic experience and considers it a medium
for the dissolution of the rule of non-aesthetic discourses: in other words, art
itself is the vehicle of a critique of reason.
While the modernity of aesthetic reflection always tries to grant full
expression to both sides of this antinomy, it is also very difficult to conceive
them coherently at the same time without subordinating one to the other. In
Menke s view, even though Adorno's aesthetics clearly provides a plausible
model for the formulation of this antinomy, it nonetheless lacks clarity pre-
cisely when defining the aesthetic category of'negativity', which alone could
serve as a convincing basis for redeeming the polarity between autonomy and
sovereignty. In this respect, the deconstructive approach, marked especially
by the influential contribution of Jacques Derrida, can decisively integrate the
concept of negativity in two ways. Firstly, when it criticizes the fusion present
in Adorno's thought between aesthetic negativity and rational discursive nega-
tion - such as that of social critique. In opposition to this, deconstructionism
reconstructs aesthetic experience in its own peculiar logic, by reformulating it
in semiotic terms, i.e. the use and understanding of signs. Secondly and most
significantly, deconstructive theories mean providing a critique of reason in
132. C H A P T E R 2.
terms of a subversion rather than an overcoming of reason itself. In fact one
of the main ideas expressed by Derrida in his Writing and Difference is that art
is not, as in the romantic conception of the term, a positive transcendence of
reason, but rather represents a place of crisis for our reason.173 However, this
can happen only when affording greater weight on the unrestrained negativ-
ity of the aesthetic experience. According to the critique brought forward by
Derrida's deconstructive theory of the text, the aesthetics of negativity betrays
its own penetration into the logic of negativity by remaining aesthetics. 'A rift
emerges', Menke says, 'between the status of the aesthetics of negativity and
its substantive theses as an aesthetics of negativity, a rift that deconstructive
theory seeks to mend'.174 Deconstructivism has brought its criticism into a
general critique of all aesthetics as the 'subjugation' ('making servile') of the
potentialities of negativity. Using an expression from Bataille, Menke com-
ments, Derrida calls that concept of art 'servile' that 'degrades it into a limited
form of discourse among others in opposition to its "sovereign" contents'.175
The restriction of the finality of aesthetic negativity to the enactment of aes-
thetic experience would be in Derrida that which renders art servile, 'because
at the very moment that it recognizes art's negative potential it cheats it out
of its sovereignty'.176
Therefore, Menke concludes, the decisive difference between Derrida's
deconstruction and Adorno's aesthetics of negativity does, in fact, consist in
the sovereign independence that the first grants to it. Whereas for Derrida, the
experience of aesthetic negativity - which is servile in its particularity - also
has a non-aesthetic, sovereign validity as a process of cognition, in contrast, in
Adorno's analysis, such an experience is neither servile nor sovereign but 'unde-
termined'. Adorno 'preserves this tension as the uncircumventable signature of
aesthetic modernity; for him, the continued existence of that negative poten-
tial - which Derrida wants to develop into sovereign independence - depends
173 See Derrida's idea of an 'overpowerfulness', a 'superabundance of meaning' of the aesthetic
object vis-ä-vis every act of understanding (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 73,178, and 189).
174 Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida,
translated by Neil Solomon, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT
Press, 1998, p. 162.
175 Ibid., p. 164.
176 Ibid.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
on sustaining this form of modernity'.177 The main conflict that opposes these
views lies in the different modes of considering the relationship between the
aesthetic experience of negativity and the non-aesthetic discourses related to
it. In Derrida's deconstructive theory they coincide, for the status of aesthetic
experience is raised to a post-aesthetic cognition of negativity. On the other
hand, in Adorno's aesthetics of negativity such a relationship is founded on
the unsolved and unsolvable tension between them.
According to Menke, interpreting Aesthetic Theory in the light of the
'redemption of illusion' (as both Zuidervaart and Huhn do) - which, in the
first place, means to subordinate aesthetic experience to conceptual logic - leads
to the fundamental aporia of losing precisely 'that transrational position from
which, and only from which, it could contribute to the teleological grounding
of the negative dialectic'.178 Instead, a genealogical grounding of the negative
dialectic - 'genealogical' because it would focus its attention not on the satis-
faction of infinite claims but on their genesis - would achieve a non-aporetic
result by pursuing its argument without reference to aesthetic experience.
The false assertion of the satisfiability of metaphysical thought is analyzed by
Adorno in the 'Meditations on Metaphysics' with which he concludes Negative
Dialectics. Here, Menke observes, Adorno recognizes that 'only in the failure
of the satisfaction of absolute claims asserted by metaphysics is the moment
of truth of metaphysics unveiled, which consists in the raising of these claims
are irresolvable claims'.17' In this light, the raising of infinite claims is grounded
in an original experience of the crisis of reason, which, unlike the teleological
approach, 'does not ask for positive instances of the possible satisfaction of such
claims, but rather the structure of the crisis experience in response to which
such claims must be raised'.180 As such, in Adorno's philosophy - according
to Menke - it is preferable to seek out a 'redemption of metaphysics' rather
than a 'redemption of illusion'.
Menkes critique of Adorno is in a certain sense analogous to that of Rüdiger
Bubner in seeing the continuous oscillations between its inner antinomies as
the greatest limitation of Aesthetic Theory.
In particular, Bubner raises the doubt that in order to save art from a
sort of theoretical downgrading, as it is for Hegel, Adorno gives it the aura of
177 Ibid., p. 178.
178 Ibid., p. 116.
179 Ibid., p. 217.
180 Ibid.
132. C H A P T E R 2.
independence and uses it as a deus ex machina, which he hauls in to save the
day for philosophy'.181 From this derives his complicated as well as oscillat-
ing' dialectic that could easily have been avoided 'if Adorno had once for all
given up the dream that it is possible for philosophy to remain itself and at
the same time be different from itself'.182 This is the reason why he concludes,
'the aestheticizing of theory impoverishes a theory of aesthetic'.
Both Menke s and Bubner's positions can be seen as an attempt to bring
Adornian aesthetics back, as it were, either to its connection with the metaphys-
ics of Negative Dialectics™ (Menke) or to its roots at Hegelian philosophy of
Spirit (Bubner). Both, in other words, try to avoid the difficult consequences
of keeping oneself focused on the centrality of the antinomy of aesthetic illu-
sion - as other scholars like Zuidervaart and Huhn do and as is clearly defined
in Aesthetic Theory.
Such an attempt, however, cannot but be puzzling, precisely because it
ignores Adorno's main premise and purpose, coherently maintained through-
out his long and articulated work on this book. Such a premise is condensed
firsdy by the motto adopted by Schlegel, which he wanted to use as an epigraph
('What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the
philosophy or the art'). Secondly, by the very first words of the book already
mentioned ('It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any-
more...'); and finally, by his intention to dedicate it to Samuel Beckett, which
is very significant in this regard.
We have entered the epoch of non-identity - Adorno seems to say - of
which Beckett's art is a valuable symbol, and nothing can be the same as before:
neither the univocal form that was used to interpret things nor its content.
For Adorno, the antinomy of aesthetic illusion - Zuidervaart explains -
mainly occurs between the sublation of external reality and the imitation of
an internal and objective ideal. While the forms and materials of art originate
from social reality, nonetheless artwork does not become a mere likeness, an
afierimage (Nachbild) of society. On the contrary, hermetic artworks pose
181 Rüdiger Bubner, "The Central Idea of Adorno's Philosophy' in The Semblance of Subjectivity,
op. cit., p. 171.
182 Ibid., p. 171.
183 In contrast, it has been often observed that, more than Negative Dialectics, the Dialectic of
Enlightenment holds the key to understanding AdomosAesthetic Theory. See for example
T. Baumeister and J. Kulenkampff, 'Geschichtsphilosophie und philosophische Ästetik',
in Neue Heftefür Philosophie, no. 5 (1973): pp. 74-104.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
as pure art, but in fact they lose their own artistic precondition: the source
of their forms and materials. Accordingly, 'the artwork constantly walks a
tightrope, as it were, between art and society. The artwork would collapse if
either end were cut'.184 In Adornian terms, artworks can be compared to the
phenomenon of fireworks as 'they appear empirically yet are liberated from
the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a
sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up,
vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning'.185 The essential antinomy
of the work of art is that it is free but not completely free; an artifact of the
empirical world but equally something that becomes always other. It is, in fact,
a continuous mediation between art and the empirical.
In the same way the comprehension of art, for it to be true, must reflect
this process.
Admittedly, Adorno wanted to give full expression to what in Kantian
Critique of Judgement is only presupposed: namely, the real antinomic nature of
art - which makes it appear at the same time as both sovereign and dependent;
autonomous and socially produced; true and false; revealing and deceitful.
Likewise, he strongly felt the necessity to avoid the usual solutions given to this
antinomy, which always made one side prevail over the other. He thought he
could achieve his purpose not only by continually affording equal importance
to the two pans of the scales, but also by building up a whole 'paratactical'
text around it, in which every single passage was at the same time the centre
and the periphery of the discourse. Hence, Aesthetic Theory, while being the
instrument of such a critique of the necessary semblance in modern art, it is
also Adorno's critique itself, as Zuidervaart argues incisively, and regards itself
as being, a necessary illusion: the illusion, the semblance of subjectivity.
Adorno's challenge to produce a non-identical though coherent interpre-
tation of the non-identity in authentic modern artworks is that of staying in
that impossibility. The antinomy of aesthetic semblance is not, therefore, an
unexpected consequence of his philosophical discourse, nor even the weakness,
the 'limit' of it - as Menke and Bubner argue - but indeed its strongest point.
Not only is this oscillation ingrained in Aesthetic Theory but also involves the
critique itself, on a level in which the semblance of art transforms itself into
the semblance of subjectivity, and vice versa. By maintaining its course along
that 'zone of distance' which is the truth content of the work, negative dialectic
184 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory', op. cit., p. 180.
185 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 81.
132. C H A P T E R 2.
cannot be considered in its turn as a point of departure of another 'traditional'
epistemological philosophy. The philosophical dialectic could never become a
'dialectic of truth' by taking up Menkes suggestion of considering negativity
per se instead of constantly putting it back in the process of antinomies. This
is the reason why Zuidervaart affirms that, among all the debates, guidelines
and puzzles that fill the labyrinth ofAesthetic Theory, the idea of artistic truth
is perhaps the real point of intersection of all of these. Artistic 'truth content'
{Wahrheitsgehalt), with all its social, political, and historical dimensions -
always very visible in Adorno, represents the crux of aesthetic knowledge and
philosophical interpretation in Aesthetic Theory. The antinomy of aesthetic
semblance is therefore the antinomy of truth.
Zuidervaart goes on to say that within this point of intersection - at the
very core of the Adornian philosophical aesthetics - the interpretation of
Beckett's Endgame can be found as a 'touchstone'. Conversely, it is only by
taking up Adorno's aesthetics from the antinomy of illusion side - exactly as
he did, that is, by stressing the fundamental antinomic nature of the relation
between art and truth - that a philosophical discourse can approach the art
of Beckett. That which one might consider as an impossible undertaking, i.e.
to give an interpretation of Beckett that respected his refusal to interpret his
own works, nonetheless turned out to be possible by 'walking' - as Adorno
did - on the tightrope of the enigmatic semblance of his art. It is only through
this equilibrium between the nothing and truth of art, without relapsing into
one of the two (such as either nihilism or sovereignty of art, or an autonomy
model of aesthetics within sciences), that one can enter into dialogue with
Beckett - to use Adorno's terms - that one can try to understand the organized
meaninglessness of Beckett's plays.
2.3.4 Concluding Remarks
To summarize, mimesis as intended by Adorno - in opposition to Plato's view
- in the form of the primacy of the object over subject, builds up, as it were,
an upside-down history of aesthetics and leads directly to the fundamental
enigmatic nature of art. This illusory character - which Plato himself probably
glimpsed, precisely when demonizing it several times - can be rescued and
preserved at the same time only through a 'redemptive interpretation' supplied
by philosophy. Philosophy and art converge in their truth content, which is,
however, enigmatic: the progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork, in
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
fact, is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept. Nevertheless,
this truth cannot but reveal the mute identity of artworks with themselves,
namely, their capacity to be expressive and eloquent, a silent and meaningless
gaze: like Etruscan vases that are eloquent when communicating nothing
other than 'Here I am'; or like the eyes of animals, Adorno says, especially
apes, 'which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human'.186 It is at
this point that 'complete convergence' coincides with 'complete contingency'
(Ligeti):187 the greater the expression, the greater the muteness; absolute iden-
tity matches absolute non-identity. When it is truly authentic, the expression
of artworks is the non-subjective in the subject: an ambivalence that can be
found in exemplary fashion in Kant's description of the feeling of the sub-
lime as a 'trembling between nature and freedom'. Analogously, art oscillates
between universal alienation and the spirit's self-certainty: in particular - as
Huhn correctly observes, the modern artwork becomes 'the objective coun-
terimage of subjectivity'.
Surprisingly or not, at the very end of the Adornian dialectic of aesthetics
- following the mimetic experience of enactment, the primacy of the object,
the disintegration of all meaning, and finally the expression of authentic art
under the semblance of illusion - the truth of the work of art meets the truth
of the subject. In other words, the aesthetic semblance becomes that which
Zuidervaart calls, appropriately, 'the semblance of subjectivity', which somehow
turns the discourse back to Kant and opens up many other issues, though not
without creating problems for both Adorno and Beckett.
2.4 Beckett Beyond Adorno
2.. 4. i Adorno and Beckett
Towards the end of February 1961, before publishing his essay on Endgame
(originally printed in Noten zur Literatur Ii), Adorno met Beckett in person
in Frankfurt at an evening celebration organized in honour of the Irish writer
by the head of Suhrkamp publishing house, Siegfried Unseld. After an open-
ing speech of welcome from Unseld, Theodor Adorno began to speak and
186 Ibid., p. 113.
187 Ibid., p. 156.
132. C H A P T E R 2.
gave a disquisition on Endgame in terms of loss of meaning and identity, and
decline of the times.188
During their lunch together before this, Adorno had explained to Beckett
his theory about the meaning of the names in Endgame-. 'Hamm', deriving
from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', 'Clov', at once an abbreviation of'Clown' and a
reminder of Stravinsky's 'Ragtime for Eleven Instruments', 'Nell', taken from
Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop, and finally 'Nagg', associated with 'nagging',
nagen in German.
Beckett's reaction to Adorno's theory is thus described by James Knowlson
- reporting Unseld's words:
Beckett said: "Sorry, Professor, but I never thought of Hamlet when I invented this name".
But Adorno insisted. And Beckett became a little angry... In the evening Adorno started his
speech and, of course, pointed out the derivation of "Hamm" from "Hamlet" [...] Beckett
listened very patiently. But then he whispered into my ear - he said this in German but I
will translate it into English - "This is the progress of science that professors can proceed
with their errors!"189
Free of the unavoidably ironic element of the narration stressed by the
biographer, this anecdote is nonetheless revelatory of the differences between
two figures of such personalities as Adorno and Beckett. In fact, this situa-
tion is not as simple as it may appear; it is, as it were, both true and false at
the same time.
On the one hand, it is absolutely necessary for scholars to take seriously
the words Beckett repeated on several occasions concerning the absence of
ulterior motives or hidden meanings in his works. What he declared to Gabriel
D'Aubarede about philosophy ('I wouldn't have had any reason to write my
novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.') was also
repeated by him about the 'age-old' quaestio concerning the derivation of
'Godot' from 'God'. In this regard, Knowlson reports an interesting conversa-
tion held in October 1954, before Waitingfor Godot was staged at the Royal
Court Theatre in London, between Beckett and the actor Ralph Richardson
about the correct way to interpret his character Pozzo:
188 On this as well as the other meetings between Adorno and Beckett see 'Die Begegnungen
mit Beckett in den "Notizen"', in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), '"Gegen den Trug der Frage nach
dem Sinn". Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lektüre', in Theodor W. Adorno-
Archiv (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Adorno-Blätter III, op. cit., pp. iz-z6.
189 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life ofSamuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 479.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
He [Richardson] wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae,
and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition ofhis
condescending to illustrate the part of Vladimir. Too tired to give satisfaction I told him
that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it
in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters. Which I trust puts an end
to that star... I also told Richardson that if by Godot I had meant God I would [have] said
God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.190
For the same reason, with all his actors Beckett always insisted on a quasi-
musical rendition of the text, with great attention paid to the rhythm and the
pacing of the lines, as well as to the physical and vocal presence on stage. His
favourite and most faithful actors, like Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee,
were taught to approach the drama as a practical act rather than a philosophi-
cal proposition that has to be understood before it could be enacted.
In a letter to his American director Alan Schneider, Beckett famously
disavows any kind of critical readings about his art:
But when it comes to journalists, I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis
of any kind... And if that's not enough for them, and it obviously isn't, it's plenty for us,
and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is
a matter of fundamental sounds... made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility
for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And
provide their own aspirin.191
On the other hand, although the names of Beckett's characters and the
titles of his works are not to be investigated as parts of a wider 'exegesis of
meaning', it is also certain that they are not always and simply 'fundamental
sounds'. On the contrary, they often refer - if nothing else but as 'left' though
no longer significant 'pieces' (exacdy as Adorno conceived them) - to some-
thing that (could) have existed and (could) have been significant.
In addition, when saying 'I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved
in exegesis of any kind', Beckett shows that he has fully imbibed the teaching
ofhis 'master'Joyce, who always remained quietly dedicated to his work and
developed silence as a defence against criticism. Finally, Beckett's relation with
the outside world was not so far from Sam White's description, appearing in
an article in the London Standard to mark Beckett's 80th birthday:
190 Ibid., p. 412.
191 Samuel Beckett, 'Letter to Alan Schneider' (December 29, 1957) in Disjecta, op. cit.,
p. 109.
132. C H A P T E R 2.
He [Beckett] has, as far as I know, never given an interview even to drama critics and is
something of a recluse. His conversation among his own small, tightly-knit group of friends
is as monosyllabic as the dialogue in his plays - and when anyone ventures to talk about
these works he shuts up like a clam.
It is, in fact, very unlikely not only to find but also to think of a critical
theory of any kind concerning Beckett's art with which he could have agreed -
and obviously Adorno is no exception. As confirmed by all of his biographies,
Beckett, throughout life, carefully refused either to explain himself or to read
the critical approaches to his works of others. Apart from anything else, he
was not simply concerned with looking for such explanations, as he declared
on a quite extraordinary occasion:
For me the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller's sense. I want neither to instruct
nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a
poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think
in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed. I
couldn't give the answers which were hoped for. There are no easy solutions.192
As the foregoing passage would suggest, Beckett's aversion to providing
any comment about his artistic intentions is also something that goes beyond
a defence against criticism with a self-contained silence. Rather, it is the full
response to a new state of things, made of new dimensions', for which tradi-
tional categories of explanation are no longer useful.
In contrast, Adorno's interpretation of Beckett's theatre, as is well proved,
is everything except either a traditional or 'easy' explanation of the meaning
and the meaningfulness of those plays. It is, instead, the exact opposite: that
is, a theory of art that first of all recognizes the impossibility of any answer
of that kind and tries to fit into the new situation. Furthermore, as far as the
theory of the names of Beckettian characters is concerned, this is certainly a
marginal aspect of Adorno's reading, also only partially expressed within the
essay on Endgame.
191 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 477. Beckett
pronounced these words in Bielefeld, Germany, in a quasi-private conversation with sixth-
form pupils in a bookshop. On this occasion, Knowlson comments, he was probably driven
to forget his own reluctance to speak by the young people's enthusiastic questions. These
comments appeared later in some German theatre magazines.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
There are few elements to enable us to guess the real tone of the conversa-
tion that Adorno and Beckett had in Frankfurt but, as it seems and as logic
might infer, neither of them were interested in receiving the personal approval
of the other. Beckett had no need to listen to a theory that supported his work
nor was Adorno particularly interested in feedback that responded to his
philosophical interpretation - as, by definition, philosophy comes after art.
2.4.1 'Mimetic Call' and 'Meaningon Trial'in the Early Beckettian Theatre
In reality - as it has been also demonstrated by the analysis of Beckett's own
writings made in Chapter 1 - Adorno's reading of Endgame is a very plausi-
ble philosophical aesthetic model, at least, for the earlier and more famous
Beckettian plays as it truly provides a convincing key of understanding within
them and not outside. If any difficulty should arise, it occurs on a 'third level'
of interpretation, as will soon be explained.
The perfect suitability of this aesthetic model to Beckett's plays is firsdy
proved by its ability to respond to the mimetic call of his theatre - which is
definitely and primarily a 'matter of fundamental sounds', without, however,
giving up trying to understand the mechanisms through which these sounds
and gestures generate a certain aesthetic semblance.
It has already been noted how mimesis, as an 'obscure operator', works
at balancing the traditional domination of the subject over the object, by
assimilating the first to the second through an active experience of enactment
- similar to that of the performer of a musical composition who embodies in
a 'quasi-sensuous mode' the artwork, which is 'other' and which, by defini-
tion, resembles only itself.193 Such an aesthetics of receptivity, which in the
first instance transforms verbal language into the non-conceptual language of
art, also produces ipso facto another aesthetics that has already been defined
as of'disintegration'.194 In other words, as the sole meaning of artwork is that
it has no meaning except the resemblance to itself - i.e. its own 'expression' (in
the way Adorno intends this word), the direct consequence is that every other
'old meaning' from then on is systematically put on trial - in a proper 'logic of
disintegration' as expressed by Martin Lüdke. Such a disintegration (Zerfall)
of meaning must be intended as the avoidance of any depth in things, of any
193 Thus Adorno: 'To follow where the hand is drawn: This is mimesis as the fulfilment of
objectivity [...]' (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 115).
194 See Chapter 1, § 1.4.
132. C H A P T E R 2.
reminding power to something other' that is not the thing-in-itself: whether
as metaphysical content (metaphysischen Gehalt), intention, or as the simple
syntactic sense of a sentence. Namely, Zerfall is the quest for the 'limit': that
which Adorno calls the Teilmaterialien, the 'material components' - the ruins
of a no-longer-meaningful reality.
This double movement (mimesis/primacy of the 'expressive' object/enact-
ment of the subject plus logic of disintegration/meaning on trial/quest for the
limit) must be considered as the basis of each of Beckett's theatre works. Hence,
Beckett's plays are both mimetic and rationally oriented to eliminate the old
meanings. They are mimetic with regard to the primacy of the 'secret language
of things' and the subjective enactment to this, whereas they are rational with
regard to the need to remove all meaning in order to be mimetic. This is what
Adorno intended when saying that it is Endgame's incomprehensibility that
has to be comprehended. In this respect, when speaking of the 'primacy of
the object' it is of some importance to ask oneself for 'Which object?'. The
answer to this cannot but be 'the object that resembles to itself', or 'the object
without any external meaning' or even 'the work of art'.195 From this comes
the necessity to avoid or disintegrate any other meaning.
Such a double - though, in a sense, single196 - basic direction of the play
(in Adornian terms: the 'organized meaninglessness' of the plot) is recogniz-
able in all of Beckett's theatrical output. In Endgame (1957) - as correctly
annotated by Adorno - it is represented by the emptying out of the symbols
put into effect, by the simultaneous action ofApriorität and Konkretheit, which
at once eventually render crucial and nonsensical each symbol of this play:
beginning from the title, which refers to chess,197 going on to the objects on
stage, and finishing with the identity of characters.
195 'As Schoenberg said: "After all, I paint a picture, not a chair." [...] In the artwork, the
concept of positive negation gains a new meaning: Aesthetically it is possible to speak of
such positivity to the extent that the canon of historically necessary prohibitions serves
the primacy of the object, that is, its immanent coherence' (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, op. cit., p. 313).
196 As the mimetic call of the play generates the objective disintegration of meaning, which
in its turn attracts attention to itself in a mimetic way precisely by virtue of removing all
meaning.
197 The 'organized meaninglessness' of the plot is constituted by the impossible coexistence
of such a definitive situation, as it is the endgame in chess and the fact that, equally, the
game continues adinfinitum. See: 'HAMM: The end is in the beginning an yet you go on',
(Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, op. cit., p. 116)
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
The same aspect can be identified in his following work Krapp's Last Tape
(1958) by the odd attempt made by Krapp, an old writer close to his death,
to search for his temp perdu in a temporality that is paradoxically actual and
present though located in the past. The classic plot of an autobiography is here
decomposed when Krapp tries to reconstruct his life's events by listening to
some memories recorded on a tape thirty or forty years before. Nevertheless,
these traces not being written memories - as he was a writer - but words said
in the heat of the moment, they do not act as memories at all but rather as
'present-in-the-past' thereby insignificant words. The organized meaningless-
ness (organisierte Sinnlosigkeit is therefore fulfilled by staging the autobiog-
raphy of an old writer, without disposing of any memory as well as of a narra-
tive sequence, but solely of'current' voices recorded in the past. It is a classic
Beckettian text in which the extreme apriority of the situation (no memory,
no time, no written traces) is juxtaposed to the just as extreme concreteness of
a tape recorder that reproduces the reality exacdy how it is. The meaningful-
ness of autobiography is put on trial and finally disintegrated by showing its
ultimate falsity, as it claims to be based on real, single facts but instead it is
none other than a meaningful, narrative structure.
The same destructuring of meaning carried out by superimposing at the
same time apriority and concreteness is so evident in Happy Days (1961) that
no further comment is needed. In this play, the banality of the title along
with the interminable, reassuring, one might say frivolous monologues of
Winnie,198 sometimes similar to the chattering of a middle-aged woman living
in a detached house of London's surroundings, clashes with her current, hor-
rifying physical situation. She is, in fact, embedded up to her waist in the very
centre of a mound, almost engulfed by earth. Throughout the entire play, one
who only listened to her words would never realize the reality of her dramatic
condition. In this respect, there is probably no finer example in Beckett than
Happy Days to indicate the emptying out of meaningful reality. Act Two of
Happy Days introduces a new canon as well as a point of no return in Beckettian
theatre: while in Act One Winnie could still move her arms, just like Nell and
Nagg in Endgame, from this moment on she is embedded up to her neck and
198 Paul Lawley joins together Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days and Play by observing the
centrality to all these three plays of monologue. Read or viewed together as a sequence,
he says, these three essentially monological plays 'chart the increasingly sharp definition of
what Beckett spoke of in 1949 as the artist's "obligation to express" (Paul Lawley, 'Stages
of Identity: from Krapp's Last Tape to Play', in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, op.
cit., p. 103).
132. C H A P T E R 2.
progressively sucked down by the earth. Thus, in his next plays only voices will
be staged - growing ever more abstract, leading to the torrent of words that in
Not I (1972) flows directly from a floodlit mouth - however, no longer with
movement. Analogously, a consistent decrease in the movement on stage was
one of the principal differences between Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
As far as Waitingfor Godot (1952) is concerned, in fact, although other
readings of the relation between Adorno and this play are surely possible - as
James M. Harding's essay proves,199 it is more likely that he considered Beckett's
most famous work slightly less exemplary for his aesthetic conception of the
play as a modern artwork. This does not mean that Adorno did not appreci-
ate Waitingfor Godot - as he several times refers to it within Aesthetic Theory.
Nonetheless, Godot is full of elements that confirm the Adornian interpre-
tation of Beckett, especially that which one might define a fully-organized
absence of action - since every dialogue, while announcing it, never leads to
an action. The centre of Waitingfor Godot is undoubtedly the mimetic critique
to meaning. Moreover, a substantial and, as it were, underground 'call for the
truth' must be seen throughout the play as its deepest motive. A call that is,
once more, primarily mimetic in denouncing the falsity of all meaning and in
reminding us thatfinding is possible only when not seeking. The mimetic call
of Godot to the Adornian 'Diesda', the 'this here', is nevertheless still rather
rational in a way that, though more comprehensible to the audience, could
also become ambiguous.
In fact, too easily, the parodic intent, much more present in Godot than
in any other Beckettian play, along with the fundamental though deceitful
idea that this text transmits (namely, the waiting for someone who will not
come as the meaning of human existence), gave to this play - intentionally
or not - an appearance of meaningfulness which resulted adequate neither
199 James M. Harding, "Trying to Understand Godot: Adorno, Beckett, and the Senility of
Historical Dialectics" in Adorno and 'a writing of the ruins'. Essays on Modern Aesthetics
and Anglo American Literature and culture, New York: State University of N.Y. Press, 1997.
'What follows in this essay - says Harding - is an historicization of Waiting for Godot that
will consider Beckett's drama vis-ä-vis three movements of revised dialectics [...] The first
examines the deterioration of "lordship and boundage" represented in Lucky and Pozzo.
The second examines the structure of the Jewish version of the same dialectic represented
in Didi's and Gogo's relation to Godot. The third examines the crisis in dialectics that
results from simultaneously staging these two dialectical paradigms' (Ibid., pp. 51-53).
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
to Beckett's original intent nor to Adorno's account.200 Therefore, Harding's
proposal of seeing in the theme of the dialectic between mater and slave the
centre of Adorno's interest in Waitingfor Godot must be regarded as true. In this
light, his preference for the more 'extreme' text of Endgame, which is certainly
cleared of all those elements of confusion and thereby repeatedly declared by
Adorno as an authentic modern work of art, is understandable.
2.4.3 Beyond the 'Refuge' of Art. The Crisis ofSubject in the Late Production
Ultimately, the organisierte Sinnlosigkeit of authentic modern artworks which
- as already seen, in 'apriority' and 'concreteness' retains its pillars of strength,
extends ontological abstraction and concrete meaning subtraction literally ad
absurdum to the point where, declares Adorno, subjectivity constricts into
a Diesda, whose nature is properly aesthetic. Here the second passage with
which the Adornian aesthetics works with the plays of Beckett is revealed: the
'refuge' of aesthetic semblance. 'Art' - Adorno writes - 'is a refuge for mimetic
comportment. In art the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy,
to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated'.201
The illusory character of art emerges in Beckett as absurdity, repetition,
and finally as stillness. To simplify, one might say that once the false illusion
of external meaning has been eliminated, the work of art meets the true illu-
sion of its own absurdity.
While Steven Connor gives a complete, semiotic analysis of the element
of repetition in Beckettian texts,202 it is by now well known how Adorno deals
with this point. The most significant change in the passage from his essay on
Endgame to Aesthetic Theory concerns the way of working with illusion in
Beckett, along with modern artworks as a whole, namely the rescue of aesthetic
100 It is interesting to note here the paradoxical situation of a play, such as Waitingfor Godot,
which, on the one hand, as far as its reception is concerned, revolutionized the history of
theatre precisely because of such elements of an inner parody of the theatrical structure
along with the staging of the absurd significance of existence, but, on the other hand,
because of the same elements it is less exemplar to Adorno's aesthetic interpretation.
101 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 53.
1 0 1 "Ihe principle of repetition seems to have acquired a particular power in the cultural era
we have come to know as the "postmodern"; in painting, writing and film, the modern-
ist imperative to "make it new" has been superseded by a desire to recirculate the old or
the already known' (Steven Connor, Repetition, Theory and Text, Oxford: Blackwell,
1988, p. 1).

132. C H A P T E R 2.
semblance and the antinomic process involving, at this stage, art and philoso-
phy - which is also the main task of a philosophical aesthetics.203
In this regard, it should be noted that while from a philosophical point of
view Adornos aesthetic theory can be seen as entirely appropriate for interpret-
ing the semblance of Beckettian theatre, it is also true that it does not follow
Beckett equally as a writer to include his later production - especially that of
his narrative and that which came after Adorno's death.
Moreover, it is not so much the Adornian idea of a (philosophic)
redemption of illusion that is problematic with Beckett204 as the theme of
subjectivity.
Instead of the full dialectic process (though this is always puzzling, unset-
tled, contradictory) in which Adorno involves the subject, Beckett's solution
appears at once more radical and dramatic, or perhaps incongruent, yet cer-
tainly at the same time rather 'linear' than dialectic.
After Happy Days, in fact - as the movement on stage has by now been
banned or, at least, reduced to a minimum and the ever-increasing repetition
of a single element points toward the infinite, Beckett's next plays become
more and more dramaticules, often built up around a unique image or situa-
tion which runs out of its narrative possibility within a few minutes. Hence,
an initial practical issue is the difficulty in staging them.205
In Play (1964), on a stage in almost complete darkness, there are three
identical grey urns from which the heads of the characters (the women and a
man) protrude. Through their speeches a traditional plot is created concerning
a menage a trois, which continues till the end when the stage directions report
'Repeat play', so that an exact replica of the play is staged again, and a third
Z03 See also Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 107.
104 For such a subject, since Beckett simply refused to take any philosophical aesthetics on
his work in consideration, each position is acceptable as long as it is well-grounded in the
text - as Adornos indeed is.
105 Such an obstacle was often overcome by joining together two or three of them - obvi-
ously distorting the author's intention. On the Beckettian dramaticules see Keir Elam,
'Dead Heads: Damnation-narration in the Dramaticules', in The Cambridge Companion
to Beckett, op. cit., pp. 145-166. See also James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes ofthe
Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, London: John Calder, 1979. Beckett's
ways of'undoing' are explored in depth by Carla Locatelli in Unwordingthe World: Samuel
Beckett's Prose Works after the Nobel Prize, op. cit., (Chapter 3: 'Beckett's Theater since the
1970s, pp. nz-153), and by S. E. Gontarski in The Intent of'Undoing' in Samuel Beckett's
Dramatic Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
133
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett
representation starts when the curtain falls. The mechanism of repetition ren-
ders the whole plot less effective, as the audience already knows the lines, and
therefore it merely shows the bleakness of the story told by the three heads/
characters. Come and Go (1965), dedicated to his English publisher John Calder
offers a similar plot with three women in a narrow bench-like seat. While the
running time of Come and Go is only a few minutes, Breath (1969), in which
a cry is followed by a light, followed again by a cry, lasts just 35 seconds. Not
I (1972) is a distressing and obsessive piece of monologue made by a woman
- of whom only the mouth is visible, the rest is in darkness - who has spent a
silent existence while now suddenly feeling the need to speak, which he will
do in an incoherent babble. In That Time (1976) the darkness on stage is total:
three voices come from three different speakers to a Listener's face which is
in the end only barely visible. The voices are recorded, and all three are in
reality the same voice - which is his own. Unlike Krapp, the Listener has no
control over this. Another recorded voice is the main character's counterpart
in Rockaby (1981), in which the same image and the same words are repeated
four times with only slight additions.
With very few exceptions, such as Footfalls (1976) and Catastrophe (1982),
the minimal later Beckettian plot is mainly concerned with darkness, stillness,
and voices. In these dramaticules the earlier 'aesthetics of disintegration', being
involved in the same process of impoverishment, would seem to turn irrevers-
ibly to the most silent stillness, precisely through repetition. What remains
of the impoverished, almost nullified, aesthetic semblance is non other than
a voice, which continues to speak. The 'I', ultimately, is that voice.
The destructive power of the process of emptying out of meaning eventu-
ally becomes auto-destructive, where the last piece left by such a reduction is
exacdy a voice that speaks, along with an eye that sees, and an ear that listens.
These last traces of subjectivity are also the realer, 'survived' things on stage,
continuing - as in a rocking chair - to repeat them more and more faindy
till the end.206
zo6 However for Beckett, Steven Connor argues, 'the centrality of death and the repetition
compulsion which draws near to it is not a matter of a simple instinct for negation. The
forms of repetition which proliferate in his work establish death not as the mere absence
oflife, but rather as the place where the natures oflife, death, difference and repetition
are concentrated and problematized' (Steven Connor, Repetition, Theory and Text, op.
cit., p. 11).
132. C H A P T E R 2.
What Hamm perhaps meant by saying that 'it ended... in the refuge too'
probably referred to art rather than to subjectivity. The 'old refuge'207 of authen-
tic aesthetic, and ultimately 'true' illusion has come to its end. Thus, Endgame
is at the same time the apex and the conclusion of this experience: in the fol-
lowing production the subject is more than ever alone.
After finding out its own truth in the aesthetic semblance - through that
'obligation to express the nothing of art' stated in Three Dialogues with George
Duthuit and also after discovering the truly revealing experience of such a
'nothing' through art - the Beckettian play turns to an endgame without the
possibility of rescue. It seems like art, as a truth dies precisely when recogniz-
ing its truthful origin.
Afterwards, stricdy under the semblance of anti-art, it turns again to sub-
jectivity - though in a way that is still and, ultimately, 'aesthetic'. As if it were
a prophecy, here one finds a crucial enigma identified by Zuidervaart as being
at the basis of all Adorno's aesthetics - i.e. that every authentic negation of
meaning ends up seeming meaningful - transposed to Beckett, that is to say,
every authentic negation of art retains an artistic form.
Thus the fundamental tripartition of the aesthetics of Samuel Beckett
delineated in our research is proposed again, which sees as the hidden map of
the development his art - but often within many single works too - a linear
sequence that starts from the meaningon trial (exemplar in Waitingfor Godot),
then moves to the 'negative refuge of art (as in Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and
Happy Days), and finally turns to subjectivity (as in all later plays).
2.4.4 A Necessary Interpretation for Beckett's Aesthetics
Unlike that which happened in Germany,208 Adorno's interpretation of Beckett
has not, so far, had the impact that it deserves on the English-speaking world's
scholarship. This is perhaps due to the rise during the last four decades of a
2.07 'HAMM: There I'll be, in the old refuge, alone against the silence and... [he hesitates] ...
the stillness. I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion,
all over and done with.' (Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, op.
cit., p. 12.6.)
108 See Jack Zipes, 'Beckett in Germany/Germany in Beckett' in New German Critique, 9.2.
(1981): 156. In this article Zipes provides an interesting account of the reception of Beckett
in Germany, and points out that Beckett is an influential figure as much as Brecht.
Adorno: Interpreter ofBeckett 133
number of poststructuralist and deconstructive studies which, for many rea-
sons, seem more appropriate for the reading of Beckett's texts than the 'out-
moded' Adornian dialectic model. Very often, however, such studies, which
developed the Beckettian problematic into many directions - from semiotic
to psychoanalysis to mysticism to the most varied issues of post-modernism
- rather than clarify or explain Beckett's works have only added more confu-
sion to their comprehension.
Significantly, Derrida in the first place - despite many of the above-men-
tioned commentaries label themselves as 'Derridean' - always refused to write
something direcdy on Beckett.209
However betraying the refusal of Beckett to interpret his own works with
such a complete theory of art, Adorno in some respects restores them to their
own nature. On the one hand, he does not escape the mimetic call of Beckett's
art - for it is essentially a matter of sounds, of gestures, of light and shadows -
from which he starts his analysis by stating that 'it is its incomprehensibility
that needs to be comprehended'. On the other hand, he does not escape the
fundamental call for meaning of Beckett's works either: as clearly proved not
only by the enormous volume of criticism on him but also by the fact that a
'Beckettian play', once staged, is out of necessity to be interpreted.
It is precisely the double Adornian paradox of philosophy and art, as well as
of subject and object, that can support this state of things. Alternately, art and
philosophy, object and subject, respect each other in their own contradictions
- in their own truth. Otherwise, we would have, in an extreme interpretation,
either a mystic or a rational/symbolic view of Beckett plays; in the centre, many
interpretations that subordinate the one to the other. For this reason, Menkes
objection that a semiological, deconstructive, and finally still more negative
reformulation of Adorno's aesthetics would empower his dialectic by getting
rid of many of its antinomies and aporias, is implausible.
Instead - and precisely because of the antinomic structure ofhis thought
- Adorno has the merit of building a discourse on Beckett that leads the
aesthetics ofhis plays back to its real nature: which is truly and ambiguously
philosophical at one time.
In contrast, it is also true that while Adorno gave a philosophical response
to the art of Beckett, he deliberately avoided interpreting Beckett himself. As
seen, in the end - and especially as far as the theme of the subject is concerned,
109 Derrida only gave an interview on Beckett (see the following chapter).
148 CHAPTER 2

their roads slightly diverge. Though he came very close to writing an essay on CHAPTER 3
Beckett's The Unnamable, a novel he greatly admired,210 finally Adorno did
not deal with Beckett's narrative, which more clearly than his plays shows The CulDe Sac of Critique:
the irreversible crisis of subject rather than the crisis of meaning or the sem- Beckett's Late Work Via Postmodern Philosophy
blance of the absurd. Adorno was actually concerned with Beckett's art as
well as Beckett s philosophical significance that was exemplary for the social
and aesthetic process of understanding but, equally, he was not interested in
Beckett's own development as an artist. This is the reason why, for the most
part or perhaps even completely, Waitingfor Godot and Endgame were the
centre of his reflection. Adorno is not an interpreter of Beckett 'in the round', The 22nd of September 2001, only eleven days after the terrorist attack on
but only insofar as he corresponds to his idea of art and artwork. In this sense, the Twin Towers, Derrida was awarded the 'Adorno Prize', named in honour
with regard to Beckett (and not for what Menke intended), Adorno's analysis of Theodor Adorno, and given to works considered to be in the spirit of the
remains to be completed. Frankfurt School. In accepting the prize, Derrida read a speech in German1
In order to see the 'other side of the coin' - the third and final (in Adorno in which, in contrast to the common belief that he does not fit within this
missing) piece of the interpretation of Beckett here proposed, it is necessary philosophical current, he noted some of his essential affinities with Adorno. In
particular, commenting on the different natures of reality and dream - men-
to turn to the reception of his narrative texts, especially by French philoso-
tioning the very moment he received the prize as a possible 'dream' - Derrida
phers. It is here that the 'history of the subject's end' - basically, by eliminating
wondered whether it was really acceptable to draw such a radical difference of
'history' - assumes a form certainly closer to Beckett (though not necessar-
degree between the act of dreaming and the act of believing in dreaming. Are
ily conflicting with the Adornian reading), in terms of death, impossibility,
not they, instead, quite similar - he asked? Moreover, why should any critical
muteness, and namelessness.
discourse on dreams necessarily start from the point of view of wakefulness ?
Apparently, instead of being a paradoxical part of a historical and dialectic
Might it be possible, in other words, to talk about the dream without betray-
process, subjectivity is for Beckett nothing other than a dead-end, or rather:
ing the, dream itself - i.e. its own status of dream? It is, mutatis mutandis, the
something that is not-yet-ended.
same question that concerns the relationship between art and philosophy,
By now, it is evident that Beckett's concern is neither in the 'end' nor
literature and critique, or fiction and reality.2
the 'why' of this state of things, but rather in the 'not yet' which 'retains' this
unbroken dead-end.

1 See the French translation of this discourse in Jacques Derrida, Fichus, Paris: Editions
Galilee, 2002. Derrida kept as the thread running through his speech a dream that Waiter
Benjamin dreamt, 'in French', the 12th of October 1939, while he was interned in the Nievre,
and wrote the same day in a letter destined to Gretel Adorno. This letter is printed in Walter
Benjamin,Ecritsfran(ais, ed. by J. M. Monnoyer, Paris: Gallimard, 1991, pp. 316-318.
2 Fichus (2002), the report of Derrida's speech on the occasion of the 'Adorno prize', is full
210 Even shortly before his death, Adorno expressed the intention to write a big work on of unique coincidences. The award ceremony was arranged for 9/11/2001, being Adorno's
The Unnamable for a fourth and never completed volume of his Notes on Literature. As birthday. After the terrorist attack happened, this was postponed to n days later (hence,
Derrida's speech contains some hidden references to the Twin Towers). Nonetheless,
Rolf Tiedemann remarks, for Adorno, this essay on The Unnamhle should give the same
Benjamin's dream, Gretel Adorno's role in the episode, the content of the dream being
importance to the fourth volume as 'Trying to Understand Endgame' gave to the second
a 'fichu', the reference, made by Derrida, to the precise moment he received the prize as
volume (see Rolf Tiedemann [ed.]: '"Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn". Eine
a possible dream, and even the 'fictional/not fictional nature' of the Twin Towers attack
Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lektüre', in Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv (Hrsg.):
(remarked on in the following months by a number of philosophers such as Habermas,
Frankfurter Adorno-Blätter III, op. cit., p. 34).
 152. C H A P T E R 3
There are two conceivable answers to this problem, says Derrida. The
philosopher (of whom many examples could be cited, from Plato to Husserl)
would say no': it is inconceivable to undertake a responsible and serious dis-
course on dream without being 'awake'. Therefore, 'no' ties the philosopher to
the rational imperative of wakeful consciousness. Philosophy is consequently
an 'awakening', the very act of'being awake'. On the other hand, the poet, the
writer, the painter, the musician, the playwright, and also the psychoanalyst,
would give another answer: they would say 'yes', 'maybe at times'; they would
probably allow for the 'exception', namely, the idea that, either the dream, or
the belief that one is dreaming, discloses something equivalent to a 'truth of
the dream', which also needs to be taken into consideration.
Since he has considered this truth and light (Aufklärung) of a 'dreaming
discourse on dream', Adorno holds a special place in the history of philosophy.
Derrida here admits to appreciating and admiring in Adorno precisely this
'oscillation' concerning his conception of the antinomy of aesthetic truth: i.e.
the fact that he did not cease to hesitate between the 'no' of the philosopher
and the 'yes, maybe' of the artist, thus taking on himself this double legacy.3
According to Adorno, Derrida suggests, authentic philosophy is the very dif-
ference between dream and reality: that which wounds and offends (beschädigt)
the truest dreams, leaving on them the distinct sign of a spot, a stain (Makel).
This is the (Adornian) negativity which philosophy opposes to the dream: it
is a wound of which the most significant dreams keep the scar forever.4 It is
not by chance that the term beschädigt is a key-word for Adorno, appearing
in the sub-title of Minima Moralia-. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben
('Reflections from a Damaged Life'). As Derrida argues, it is important to
underline that these 'reflections' are not 'on' but 'from' a damaged life ('aus'
dem beschädigten Leben), i.e. they are marked by pain and by a particular
wound. Such a wound, damage, beschädigt, is the trait d'union between the
two experiences: what Kafka - Adorno writes in Minima Moralia - observed
in the theatre of Oklahoma and wrote of in his Amerika. Similarly, this is the
key point of Adorno's critique of Jazz (and, consequently, of a certain fetishistic
character of music) as well as of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction. The Adornian critique of every kind of industrial
Baudrillard and Derrida himself) - are all truly representative elements of apoint of inter-
section between the aesthetic categories offiction and reality.
3 On this point see Chapter i, § 3.3.
4 See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflectionsfroma Damaged Life, § 71.
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 3
production of'cultural objects' points to the sovereignty of any authentic
aesthetic experience as a singular and irreplaceable event.
In his 'Profile of Walter Benjamin' (1955), Adorno speaks openly 'about
the paradox of the possibility of impossible' (vom Paradoxon der Möglichkeit
des Unmöglichen) with reference to the creation of a thought which is 'totally
other' than the common relation between the possible and the impossible; a
thought capable of thinking differently from that which our metaphysical tra-
dition prescribed. It follows that philosophy and literature enter into a radical
alliance - radical because grown from the same roots of'infancy' (Kindheit).
The 'abyss of infancy' (der Abgrund der Kindheit) is thereby the unique and
original ground of philosophy: the place 'without defence' which alone pre-
serves the 'oscillating union' (just like the antinomic nature of aesthetic truth
in Adorno's theory of art) of dream and wakefulness.
Within this fundamental and large basis Derrida sees an affinity with
Adorno, beyond the commonly observed fact that both have moved the
Heideggerian aesthetics in a negative direction towards the final 'muteness
of the work'.s Labels aside (such as critical theory, deconstructionism etc.), in
the three stages '1) Truth of art 2) Aesthetic negativity 3) Muteness of the work',
their common origin can be traced - at least as far as philosophical aesthetics
is concerned. In overturning the Platonic position, both Adorno and Derrida
faced the original truth of art and dealt with its inner contradiction, i.e. its
negativity, which ultimately expresses itself in the muteness of the work. On the
same path, they could not but encounter Beckett's oeuvre, which is probably as
evocative for Derrida as for Adorno; but the final answer to this 'muteness' is
different for the two philosophers. Thus, while Adorno turns aesthetics into
philosophy and negative dialectics, the Derridean deconstructionism seeks a
direct correspondence with this muteness. In this sense, as was observed in the
previous chapter, the Derridean approach, espoused with ever-greater success by
many American and French philosophers and critics, seems closer to Beckett's
final perspective. Such a consideration, however, does not refer to the plausi-
bility of the Adornian conclusion for a definitive philosophical realization of
the Beckettian aesthetics, but only to its historical adherence to the real and
conclusive thought of Beckett. Though the deconstructionist approach is to be
considered as less philosophical in the wider sense, it is nonetheless the coherent
continuation - set outside critical philosophy but within the final development
5 In this regard, see again Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in
Adorno and Derrida, op. cit.
152. CHAPTER 3
of Beckett's aesthetics - of a simple attempt to 'respond' to the later Beckettian
texts. In this regard, Adorno's perspective must be seen as the only truly 'criti-
cal ' investigation of the philosophical potential of Beckett's thought. Not by
chance, he stops with Endgame, or the last Beckettian call for a meaning: i.e.
a point at which philosophy can 'technically' still 'intervene'. Conversely, the
analyses of deconstructive critics and philosophers, considered in the follow-
ing sections, begin where such a philosophical perspective is by now at an end,
and where the postmodern and deconstructive approach, in trying to 'follow'
Beckett, investigates 'what remains' of philosophy here, i.e. the philosophical
traces one might find beyond Adorno's end-point. Moreover, another more
general reason why these two approaches are aligned together lies in the idea
of the postmodern reading of Beckett as the 'coherent prosecution of what
Adorno interrupted, i.e. the question of'faithfulness' to a text. Since Beckett's
works prescribe explicitly that they must not be philosophically interpreted,
or, in other words, the fact that everything is in the text, the Beckettian criti-
cism is divided into two principal categories: those who ignore such a request
and those who 'respond' to it. The first type of criticism aims essentially at
a translation of Beckett into philosophy more than an analysis of Beckett's
philosophical tendencies. The second, instead, must face the problematic of
seeking a direct understanding of a text without translating it into any other
(meta-) language. In different ways, though both considering it a crucial point
to 'respond' to this request, Adorno and the Postmodern approaches embody
a direct dialogue with Beckett rather than on Beckett; both, thus, must face
this same difficulty. While Postmodern critics go further than Adorno in
following the Beckettian text, as they respond specifically within field of the
writing and language of Beckett's entire (and mostly later) work, it must be
observed that not all of them remain faithful to the end in this regard. In the
following sections, therefore, analysis will be only, or mainly, of those critics
who attempted most closely 'not to betray' or, in other words, drew the most
'direct consequences' from Beckett's texts.
Along this postmodern and Derridean path, however, criticism of Beckett
is not completely immune from being partially (or totally) caught in the same
impasse of the Irish writer's late works. If this is the case, one might argue with
Adorno, that at least the critique would probably not have betrayed his word
- his 'damaged' (beschädigten) and conclusive word.
This chapter will attempt to outline the final development of Beckett's
philosophical aesthetics through a number of indications found in Derrida's
works along with other 'Derridean readings', including those of French thinkers
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 153
like Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, appearing principally over the last
twenty years, and which have become predominant within recent Beckettian
criticism. In particular, the first section will introduce the postmodern recep-
tion of Beckett in the last twenty years (mostly in the light of Derrida), in
relation to his prose texts and, in particular, The Unnamable. After considering
briefly Derrida's direct decision not to write about Beckett (§1.1), Maurice
Blanchot s contributions (§ 1.2) concerning the Irish writer will be analyzed,
as well as a number of the main concepts (such as 'repetition', 'signature', 'trace',
and differance) which, according to a number of critics, link Derrida's works to
Beckett's, and the Beckettian oeuvre to the wider contemporary philosophi-
cal debate on the 'end of modernity' (§ 1.3 and § 1.4). The second section will
return briefly to the problem of mimesis and 'copy/original' in relation to
twentieth-century literature, and also to the issue of'post-modern' imagination
and narrative (§ 2.1). The peculiar position of Beckett's prose works will also
be examined in terms of a 'breach' (following Trezise s definition) between
what will be termed 'penultimate and ultimate images' (§ 2.2). Successively,
with regard to the Beckettian narrative and, more significantly, to his television
works, Gilles Deleuze s idea of'aesthetics of exhaustion', i.e. the 'three langues'
will be discussed, through which, according to Deleuze, Beckett achieves
the aesthetic' epuisement du possible' (§ 2.3). The third section will examine a
series of questions about the final period of Beckett s narrative output. In this
sense, the emergence of a possible 'opening' towards the 'event', outside text,
will be dealt with in relation to Badiou s non-conventional reading of Beckett
(§ 3.1). Additionally, a further difference with Joyce's prose, via Derrida, will
be also considered in this regard (§ 3.2). Finally, the issue of Subjectivity will
be emphasized through the analyses of a few commentators of Beckett's final
prose works (§ 3.3), together with the highly symbolic and significant American
experience of Film (196s), which, more than many other work, provides a
number of illuminating insights on the problem of subject (§ 3.4).
The initial hypothesis of this chapter is that, what links the thought of
Beckett, Adorno and Derrida on the so-called question of the 'end of moder-
nity', is the common perception of a unique and fundamental 'damage'
(Beschädigung) of our time, of whose first theoretical vision and comprehen-
sion, art is still the most suitable mirror.
152. CHAPTER 3
3.1 Beckett and the End of Modernity:
A Philosophical Perspective
3.1.i Derrida on Beckett
In order to avoid any confusion on this subject, it is important to distinguish
radically what Derrida wrote (or, it would be better to say, 'did not write')
about Beckett from that which others have written on the relationship and
affinity between Derrida and Beckett. In fact, it is perhaps a strange paradox
that, whereas there are several full-length books that one might term 'Derridean
readings' of Beckett, Derrida himself never dedicated a single article to this
subject.6 When, in 1991 - after several books interpreting Beckett 'under
his name' had already appeared - he explained the reasons for his silence
in an interview with Derek Attridge (printed as the opening section ir\Acts
of Literature),1 his words, requested and awaited by many ofhis followers,
sounded like something more than a few simple lines of an interview for
Beckettian criticism. Consequendy, his silence on Beckett was acknowledged
by many critics as particularly significant:
Ihis is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself very
close; but also too close. Precisely because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy
and too hard. I have perhaps avoided him a bit because of this identification. Too hard
also because he writes - in my language, in a language which is up to a point, mine up to
6 In the light of Derrida's writings, the term 'deconstruction' has come to stand for a much
broader range of practices which often have little to do with Derrida's work. The case of
Beckett is more than exemplary in this regard. Steven Connor's book Samuel Beckett:
Repetition, Theory and Text (op. cit.) had a particular impact when it came out in 1988
because it not only made the case for Beckett as a postmodern 'bricoleur' but introduced
a new deconstructive approach to his texts. Such an approach, essentially based on the
modernist/postmodernist dispute, as well as on the attempt to interpret Beckett through
precise deconstructive methodologies, was followed by other important studies. Among
these, the work by H. Porter Abbott Beckett Writing Beckett (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1996) merits a special mention since it tries to read the entire Beckettian oeuvre as
consciously engaged in undoing autography. Whatever the opinion on this 'deconstructive
criticism', it is worth pointing out its total extraneousness to the real thought of Jacques
Derrida, at least as far as Beckett is concerned.
7 Derek Attridge, 'This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida' (1992.), trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in J. Derrida, Acts of
Literature, ed. D. Attridge, London and New York: Routledge, 1992..
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 154
a point (for both of us it is a "differently" foreign language) - texts which are both too
close to me and too distant for me even to be able to 'respond' to them.8
Yet, while the above statement seems to suggest only a sort of personal
impasse, in which the feeling of proximity or even the absolute identification
with Beckett makes it difficult for Derrida to write about him, the following
lines suggest another issue:
How could I write in French in the wake of or "with" someone who does operations on this
language which seem to me so strong and so necessary, but which must remain idiomatic ?
How could I write, sign, countersign performatively texts which "respond" to Beckett?
How could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage? It is very hard.9
It seems here as though Derrida is no longer speaking of the impossibility
of writing on Beckett, but rather of its 'inappropriateness'. While it is certainly
true that when Derrida talks about translating and countersigning a text, he
implies that without at least a minimal distance between the two, there can be
no 'trans' or 'counter' (hence, his fear of responding to a text which he feels too
close to him), there is also a more substantial question of whether one should
or should not do this. Nothing can be added to a text which is 'complete'.
Unlike Joyce or Mallarme, or Kafka, on whom Derrida reflected and wrote
several times, Beckett 'does operations' with the language 'so strong and so
necessary', that it therefore 'must remain idiomatic'. No sign, no response can
or should 'dent' the Beckettian text. This silence of Derrida on an author to
whom he always felt so close, the cul de sac ofhis critical approach, is better
explained when compared to other writers such as Artaud:
[...] In Artaud (who is paradoxically more distant, more foreign for me than Beckett)
there are texts which have permitted me writing transactions. Whatever one thinks of
their success or failure, I have given myself up to them and published them. That wasn't
possible for me with Beckett, whom I will thus ""avoided" as though I had always already
read him and understood him too well.10
8 Ibid., p. 60.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 61.
152.
CHAPTER 3
Apparently, Derrida has found in Beckett the apotheosis of his admoni-
tion 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte', for such a question 'should not be treated as a
philosophical problem outside or above the texts'.11
When I found myself, with students, reading some Beckett texts, I would take three lines,
I would spend two hours on them, the I would give up because it would not have been
possible, or honest, or even interesting, to extract a few "significant" lines from a Beckett
text. The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the
ones that seem the most "decomposed", that's what "remains"finallythe most "interesting",
that's the work, that's the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is
exhausted (and also exhausted, by others, for a long time now, in other modes).
As Simon Critchley points out in this regard, 'the peculiar resistance of
Beckett's work to philosophical interpretation lies [...] in the fact that his texts
continually seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the philosopher by
showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations':13
for 'something essential to Beckett's language is lost by overshooting the text
and ascending into the stratosphere of metalanguage'.14 Hence, as Critchley
assumes, what Derrida seems to be suggesting with his words is that, 'because
one cannot avoid the platitude of metalanguage and the inevitable lagging
behind and overshooting of philosophical interpretation, Beckett has to be
avoided'.15 In this case, there is no possibility of being faithful to the idiom
of Beckett's language, because any kind of general and direct interpretation
betrays this idiom. According to Critchley, what Derrida is suggesting in this
passage is that 'the work of Beckett's work, its work-character, is that which
refuses meaning and remains after one has exhausted thematization'.16 Finally,
'such a remains [reste) would be the irreducible idiom of Beckett's work, its
ineffaceable signature. It is the remainder that is both revealed through read-
ing and resists reading'.17 This is precisely what, in Adornian terms, is the
negative revelation of the truth of the artwork. In this regard, Critchley recalls
II Ibid.
12 Ibid.
Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing, op. cit., p. 141.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., p. 145.
IS
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 157
the example of what Derrida terms in Glas the good metaphor' to describe
his interpretative practice - the 'dredging machine':
What this metaphor shows is that however much the philosophical hermeneut may wish to
elevate a particular literary text into an order of meaning or give a coherent interpretation,
water and silt will inevitably slip through the teeth of the reading machine and remain.
Derrida writes, in a formulation difficult to translate, "la matrice transcendantale laisse
toujours retomber le reste du texte" [...] In this sense, we might say that the goal of Derrida's
reading practices to let the remains remain. You cannot catch the sea in your hands.18
Nevertheless, the goal of a 'pure remains' can never be attained and, as
Derrida remarks in Glas, 'the death agony of metalanguage is structurally
interminable':19 thus, the rhythm of a deconstructive reading 'recognizes both
the impossibility of a pure experience of language, and inadequacy of all meta-
linguistic interpretation'.20 In this respect, Critchley concludes, quoting Derek
Attridge, 'Beckett is a (perhaps, the) paradigm case of a self-deconstructive
writer, and with respect to his work, there is not much lefi to do'.11
The entire question has to be related, in Derrida's own words, to the prob-
lem that Heidegger described in What is Metaphysics? as the difficulty of engag-
ing with 'nothing' - not turning nothing into something. Unlike Adorno's
attempt of'understanding the impossibility to understand', Derrida enters this
nothings the core - without redemption, without a way-out - in so doing fol-
lowing in the footsteps of the late Beckett, who appears from the third chapter
of the Trilogy onwards. As Gary Banham observes, 'the characters who existed
in the earlier volumes Molloy and Malone Dies were treated in The Unnamable
as the fictions they had always been'.22 The dismissal of characters within The
Unnamable culminates in the arrival of a voice which no longer has any iden-
tity attached to it at all. This has to be considered as a radical turning point in
Beckett's scepsis and literary output: from now on his work is above all engaged
18 Ibid., p. 146. The metaphor of the 'dredging machine' is taken by J. Derrida, Glas, trans, J.
P. Leavey Jr and R. Rand, Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986, p. 105.
19 Jacques Derrida, Glas, op. cit., p. 130.
2.0 Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing, op. cit., p. 147.
11 Ibid. On Beckett and Derrida see also the chapter 'On Not Reading: Beckett and Derrida'
in Nicholas Royle, After Derrida, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
1995-
2.2. Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 56.
152. CHAPTER 3
with the nothing, a nothing which is at the same time origin and drift, I and
not I, since - as Derrida says - 'the two possibilities are in the greatest possible
proximity and competition'.23 Speaking of The Unnamable, Maurice Blanchot
writes that 'perhaps we are not dealing with a book at all, but with something
more than a book; perhaps we are approaching that movement from which all
books derive, that point of origin where, doubtless, the work is lost, the point
which always ruins the work [...]'.24 This point, as Banham interestingly remarks,
suggests a connection with the work of Derrida, who has the same difficulty
of ensuring that his works do not simply add to the mapping of entities but
instead "resist" incorporation into the metaphysical positing of beings'.25 This
is exacdy what Derrida explains in his Cinders: 'I understand that the cinder is
nothing that can be in the world, nothing that remains as an entity (etant]. It
is the being [I'etre], rather, that there is [...] remains unpronounceable in order
to make saying possible although it is nothing'.26 The result of this sentence
is tied to the deathly condition of language. The language is, in some way, the
urn of nothing and also its aporetic nature: in other words, the very nature
of aporia is to escape meaning, and this is its meaning.27 This is also what the
voice of The Unnamable affirms at the beginning of its speech:
13 Jacques Derrida, 'This Strange Institution Called Literature', in Acts of Literature, op. cit.,
p. 61.
2.4 Maurice Blanchot, "Ihe Unnamable', 'Nouvelle Revue Fran^aise', October 1953, in Lawrence
Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. no.
Thus Blanchot continues: 'It is this approach to origin which makes the experience of the
work still more dangerous, dangerous for the man who bears it, dangerous for the work
itself. But it is also this approach which assures the experiment its authenticity, which alone
makes of art an essential research, and it is by having rendered this approach evident in the
nakedest, most abrupt manner that "The Unnamable" has more importance for literature
than most "successful" works in its canon' (Ibid.). See also Theodor Adorno who describes
The Unnamable as a 'truly monstrous or genuinely colossal novel' (Theodor W. Adorno,
Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. S. W. Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press,
1991, p. 90).
1$ Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 57.
26 Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. N. Lukacher, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1991, p. 73.
2.7 "The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such. The reservoir of this statement
seems to me incalculable. This statement is made with and reckons with the incalculable
itself' (Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993, p. 78).
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 159
I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me. These few general remarks to begin
with. What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed?
By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or
sooner or later? Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be
quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I should mention before going any further, any
further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.28
Therefore, if Derrida avoids dealing with Beckett directly, it is not because
he wants to avoid aporia, but precisely because he is aware that the Beckettian
path is entirely aporetic. Nevertheless, as will be seen throughout this section,
through Derrida's silence - yet within his thought - a general deconstructive
and postmodern reading of Beckett's works (in particular, his prose works)
has arisen. However, it is precisely when this Derridean reading remains on
the edge of an uncritical and non-preconceived response to Beckett that it can
legitimately accomplish the, as it were, 'post-Adornian task' that this chapter
aims to achieve: i.e. a 'critically inappropriate response'29 or a 'direct transla-
tion' of the final Beckettian 'impossible texts'.
3.1.2 The Work of Undoing the Work. The Repetition
'Cinder' is therefore the Derridean word for nothing, the 'ruins', what remains,
the work-character of (in our case) the works of Beckett: in particular, the
works following The Unnamable. In his study, Gary Banham gave a very clear
definition of the notion of'cinder' in Derrida:
The "cinder" is not part ofwhat can be placed, it lacks being and cannot be approached in
words as it lacks the basic capacity to be expressed in any way other than a reference to the
"thereness" of appearances. This "thereness" is not connected to the relation of beings to
one another but is the "placing" of them within the articulable realm of spacing itself. To
trace spacing, to make the possibility of "presence" appear as founded on nothing: this is
the "cinder effect" that Derrida explores.30
18 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in The Beckett Trilogy, London: John Calder Publishers,
1994. P- 293.
19 In the same way, the critical premise of this inappropriate response to Beckett's works
lies (as seen at the beginning of Chapter 2) in Adorno's claim of a non-traditionally-critic
approach to modern art in order to pursue the interpretation of the non-identical.
30 Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 57.
152.
CHAPTER 3
With regard to this cinder effect' which traces out - in reference to the
'thereness' of appearances - the simple presence as founded on nothing, it is
difficult not to think of Beckett's late poem 'Something There' (1974)» already
mentioned in Chapter i. 31 It is the 'dangerous approach' to 'origin', which
Blanchot speaks of referring to The Unnamable, i.e. 'that neutral region where
the self surrenders in order to speak [...] where it must die an endless death'."
In the experience of nothing there is no place to speak from, no one who can
speak and no identification of anything. With The Unnamable we are at the
very edge of language - as Derrida would say - where the legible-illegible text
remains as a post-scriptum, because 'it is originarily a post-scriptum, it comes
after the event [...]',33 though this 'event' is the nothing. Hence, language comes
after and is in search of nothing, as it is grounded 'on' nothing. Its realm is a
realm of poverty - a poverty which is nonetheless original. Rather than the
edge of language, Derrida affirms, it would be better to speak of'the edge as
language': this 'original cut' is what Blanchot calls 'the origin of the work'. As
Simon Critchley remarks, for Blanchot 'writing is not a desire for the beautiful
artwork but for the origin of the artwork, its nocturnal source; which is why
Blanchot defines the writer as the insomniac of the day.?* 'Between words and
world' - Gary Banham remarks - 'there is the one on whom language bases
itself. This one is termed the speaker/writer. This one is no one. But everyone
is grounded here'." This space of the middle between words and world rep-
resents Blanchot's conception of the 'origin'.
Thus, Banham explains the implicit negativity of this 'origin' according
to Derrida:
The middle between the world and the word is broken. This breakage is the ground of
experience but is not itself experienced as it is not available for a self but only the disin-
tegration of selves can approach it. The breaking as the basis of experience: this is the
"cinder effect" discussed by Derrida [...] The abandonment of nothing is what Heidegger
characterized as the birth of metaphysics [...] To seek after that which has been abandoned
31 See Chapter 1, § 1.3.1.
31 Maurice Blanchot, "Ihe Unnamable', in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds),
Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. 110.
33 Jacques Derrida, 'Saufle nom (Post-Scriptum)', trans. J. P. Leaveyjr, inj. Derrida, On the
Name, ed. T. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 60.
34 Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing, op. cit., p. 32..
35 Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 60.
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 161
by philosophy is the suspensive task of entering the middle between words and world.
Entering through the broken middle into the nothing.36
Accordingly, 'the task of working to undo the work of making cannot be
creating a new craft of holding the language'.37 The voice of The Unnamable is
thrown outside itself, and the aporetic, impossible nature of its identity pre-
vents the voice taking up the role of ultimate oracle of truth. Even death for
Derrida cannot function merely as another name: 'Who will guarantee that
the name, the ability to name death [...] does not participate as much in the
dissimulation of the "as such" of death as in its revelation [...] ?'.38 How might
language, in other words, enable us to know death 'as such'? Would this not
be a new form of positivity, different from the 'poverty' of the original experi-
ence ? Hence, it is not any name or Being that matters but, rather, the repeti-
tion of the unnamable or, as Derrida calls it, the 'cinder effect'. The cinder per
se, as the closest witness of the origin to which we return, is un-named and is
presented by the voice of The Unnamable as essentially a repetition, the repeti-
tion of waiting for that which never arrives. 'If the voice of The Unnamable' -
Banham writes - 'is not captured in the trap of the ultimate naming machine
then it must maintain its poverty [...] This is what is meant by the statement
that the "voice" does not want to be rid of its tormentors. Being tormented
is integral to the poverty of the repetition of origin'.39 Once the 'edge as lan-
guage' as the place of origin has been identified, the place of truth, the espace
litteraire grounded on nothing, it is only in the impossibility of naming this
'neutral region' (as Blanchot would say), in the repetition of this impossibility,
that this space can be maintained as origin. In the loss of name, the respect
afforded to the singularity is named. But a singular 'unnamed' would be still
a recognizable name: this is why the endless repetition of the unnamable is
necessary to preserve the non-identical.
The centrality of repetition in Beckett can also be seen in the thought of
Derrida and Deleuze, for whom the relationship between originality and rep-
etition has become an obsessive theme. Repetition has a double nature in the
work of Derrida. On the one hand, it is a guarantee of the Platonic model of
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., p. 61.
38 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993,
p. 76.
39 Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 64.
152.
CHAPTER 3
original and copy', while on the other, it threatens to undermine it. Whereas
repetition, in fact, is strongly subordinated to the idea of the original, and is
conventionally condemned as inessential, it is also true that the original or
essence could never be apprehended without being copied or reiterated. Hence,
the mutual relationship of original and repetition for Derrida, in terms ofhis
speech/writing dichotomy. As is well known, on a Derridean view, writing,
antagonistic to the immediacy and self-evidence of speech, in the end over-
comes this speech, which depends on the possibility of being written down
or reproduced. Thus, in a sacred text, Derrida says, what is autonomous is not
the Word of God but rather the continuing possibility of being repeated. In a
curious way then, repetition represents the original point of view', as Derrida
puts it: 'Far from letting itself be oppressed or enveloped within the volume,
this repetition is the first writing. The writing of the origin, the writing that
retraces the origin, tracking the signs of its disappearance, the lost writing of
the origin'.40 Analogously, for Deleuze, in the first instance, repetition plays
a crucial part in reinforcing the Platonic idea of essence and identity. But
Deleuze distinguishes two forms of repetition: one which simply reproduces
the original without any distortion ('naked repetition') and another which
adds something to its original ('clothed repetition').41 Yet, at the end ofhis
analysis, Deleuze must admit that the two definitions are closer than one might
think, and that repetition marks the place where difference confirms identity,
the place in which we face the form of an invisible but irreducible difference,
the form, perhaps of'pure difference', ungoverned by pre-existing categories of
representation. The importance of Derrida's and Deleuze's analysis is to show
both the complexity and the inner duality of the field of repetition, which is
important in order to understand Beckett's union of affirmation and negation
in the repetition-compulsion cycle. As Steven Connor argues, for Beckett 'the
forms of repetition which proliferate in his work establish death not as the
40 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978, p. 295.
41 "The first repetition is repetition of the Same [...] the second repetition comprehends
itself as the alterity of the Idea [...] The first is inanimate, the second the secret of our
deaths and lives [...] The first is a "naked" repetition, the other a clothed repetition [...]'
(Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968,
pp. 3 6 - 3 7 ) -
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 163
mere absence of life, but rather as the place where the natures of life, death,
difference and repetition are concentrated and problematized'.42
In Beckett, the 'repeatedly plural' absence of names is the guarantee for
the original, absent but true name: this is, in Blanchot's view, 'the point of
perpetual unworkableness with which the work must maintain an increasingly
initial relation [...]', thus, 'one might say that The Unnamable is condemned
to exhausting the infinite'.43
However, one must ask, who is the subject of such a repetition? Whose
is the voice that repeats the 'cinders' of the Beckettian texts?
In his articles on Beckett44 Blanchot often asks the question 'who speaks
in those works?': if it is neither the 'I' of the author Beckett nor a kind of
controlling consciousness, then who is this 'unnamable'?. For Blanchot, such
a voice can be described as an impersonal, neutral, almost indifferent zone,
which is the same space of the literary experience, namely a place of darkness
and night, where all familiar references disappear and where absence is pres-
ent in the peculiar form of'insomnia', the density of the void. In this regard,
Blanchot appropriates Levinas' idea that the night is the very experience of
the ily a, i.e. 'le morceau de resistance' of the work with Being - the (obscure,
insomniac) relation of the existent to existence. Both for Levinas and Blanchot,
the ily a is clearly expressed in terms of neutrality, impersonality and general-
ity of Being. It is a sort of response to Heideggerian ontology that ruins the
ontology itself. The entire thought of Blanchot, as Simon Critchley suggests,
'remains dominated by the thought of neutrality (le neutre) and wants to block
the passage beyond neutrality into the hypostasis of the subject'.45
However, without going too deeply into the specific problematic of
Blanchot's thought and his relation to Levinas' and Heidegger's philosophy,
remaining rather with his view on Beckett, it must be said that the ily a, as
the annihilation of all existents and the reverting to nothingness - which is
therefore a kind of impersonal and indeterminate presence, la nuit elle-me qui
41 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, op. cit., p. 11.
43 Maurice Blanchot, 'The Unnamable', in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds),
Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, op. cit., p. 120.
44 See Maurice Blanchot, 'Where now ? Who now ?', trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, in The Sirens'
Song: Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot, ed. G. Josipovici, Brighton: Harvester, 1982;
and Maurice Blanchot, 'Notre epopee', in La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, No. 100, 1961,
pp. 690-698, and reprinted in L'entretien infini, Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
45 Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing, op. cit., p. 56.
 CHAPTER 3
152.
veille... fa veille, the opening to a world to the poet in terms of fear - has little
to do with the work of Beckett. 'Who speaks?', asks Blanchot with reference
to Beckett's Unnamable. 'Not I', is the answer. But in Blanchot's 'Not I' there
are too many positive elements which re-establish precisely what Beckett got
rid of. In contrast to what Blanchot thinks, the Beckettian narrative, as an
insomniac, impersonal voice, does not approach the void as the proper space
of literature. The language of Beckett is not 'an unqualifiable murmur' that
lingers like a spectre over the identical reality of everyday. It is the positive
idea of a 'presence' - though disturbing and indistinct, but still present and
active, since the writer is 'the insomniac of the day' - that is problematic with
Beckett.
The Beckettian voices are, rather, themselves simply 'remains', abandoned
pieces, residua, cinders, without a horrific night, an ily a, an annihilation, a
positive torment, or - as Critchley defined it with regard to Blanchot - an
'atheist transcendence',46 to watch over them. The entry into nothing of Beckett
is simply a silent work of unwording the work, in order to let this speak of
its lack of possibility of speaking. This kind of negative (not positive, as for
Blanchot) absence is the place closest to the origin, and it is here that decon-
struction, in Derrida's terms, occurs. It is neither 'absence' nor silence' as such.
"Ihe "real" silence never comes,' - Banham concludes - 'because it has already
gone. The absoluteness of "original" experience lies in its repetition, this rep-
etition is the "self-deconstruction" which Attridge named as the signature of
the work of Beckett'.47
3.1.3 The Beckettian 'Signature'
As has been seen so far, Derrida's project - if ever it were a 'project' - of
directly translating, or grounding, the Beckettian experience of negativity,
on a non-aesthetic, rational discourse through the deconstruction of his texts
is necessarily destined to fail. Unlike Adorno, who has always been search-
ing for the most adequate philosophical framework with which to approach
Beckett, Derrida fails precisely when aiming for a direct translation of what is
somehow already 'translated', complete, already self-deconstructed. In his own
46 See the entire chapter 'Lecture One. Ily a (Ibid.).
47 Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 67.
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 165
opinion, Derrida is right: what can a translator do when the text is written
in his own language ?
'My work is a matter of fundamental sounds [...] made as fully as pos-
sible,' - Beckett once famously declared to Alan Schneider - 'and I accept
responsibility for nothing else'.48 In his post-trilogy work, Beckett discov-
ers, through the theatre, radio, television and cinema, the full resources of a
living and speaking voice. At this point, as Richard Begam argues, 'Beckett's
word play effectively puts the Word or logos back into play'.49 At the same
time, the passage to different media from simply writing, points to a new
decisive interest for Beckett: the relation of voice to text, of speech to writ-
ing. In Derridean terms, especially after The Unnamable - when, what can be
appropriately termed, the Beckettian 'shift' occurs, with the 'I' disappearing
and the subject of Beckett's late works becoming only an equivocal and fugi-
tive voice - one might say that Beckett's prose texts enter differance territory.
Derrida's most famous neologism has its origin from the two meanings of the
Latin verb differre: the sense of'differing' and 'deferring'. To deconstruct lan-
guage is therefore to enter a process in which the meaning of a text is always
'different' from itself and always 'deferred' to an ideal, though never present,
original source. The differance is an invisible trace that relates equally to the
future as to the past. It is a word that means more than a simple identifica-
tion with (or substitution for) something, but rather the preservation of the
absence of an original presence. As Derrida explains, differance can neither be
heard (the French ear does not register a different sound between 'e' and 'a'
in that word) nor read (the eye does not recognize it has a legitimate word),
for it 'belongs neither to the voice, nor to writing, but to the space between'.50
Each authentic trace in language should work in the region of differance and
function as an endless postponement or deferment of its own origin. Authentic
language is, therefore, difference, with the paradox of a language preserving
the differance that preserves language itself from inauthenticity. Therefore,
as Derrida points out, everything in the path of differance is 'strategic' and
'adventurous'. Strategic because no transcendent truth is present outside the
field of writing to govern this field; adventurous because such a strategy is not
48 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, op. cit., p. 109.
49 Richard Begam, 'Beckett and Postfoundationalism, or, How Fundamental are those
Fundamental Sounds?', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 14.
50 Jacques Derrida, 'Differance' in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982., p. 5.
152.
CHAPTER 3
a telos, the rule of the field, but rather - Derrida says - 'blind tactics', 'empirical
wandering', in short, an absence of finality. Moreover, as Adorno identified the
fundamental mechanism of Beckett's art in the paradoxical union of apriority
(.Apriorität) and concreteness {Konkretheit), the greatest abstraction of time
and the largest concretion of space - as also Heidegger analyzed the truth in
art setting itself to work as 'setting up' {Aufstellen) a world and 'setting forth'
{Her-stellen) the earth - in an analogous way Derrida defines differance in terms
of temporisation and espacement. These two elements combine in the sign, the
word differance, which defers its significance to an 'other', always absent. The
differance, Derrida writes, is the 'origin', non-full, non-simple, the structured
and different {differant) origin of the differences. It is not, therefore, a simple
'origin, but an origin which renders the significance possible only on condi-
tion that each element of the language, appearing on the 'scene of presence', is
related to 'something-other-than-itself' and, in so doing, keeping a trace both
of the past and of the future. As Derrida states in Writing and Difference-. 'It is
a non-origin which is originary'.51 What is originary, in other words, is not the
origin itself but its delay or deferral. Hence, as for Blanchot, the impossibil-
ity of answering the question 'Who speaks?', or in Derridean terms, 'Who or
what differs?, 'What is the differance}', derives from the fact that the concept
of'trace' is incommensurate with that of'retention'. It is impossible to think
of the 'trace' starting from the 'presence of present'. The first attribute of the
differance is, therefore, that it is not. Being a differance, the trace is never 'as
such', similar to the condition of a thing-presenting-itself, but with the dif-
ference that as soon as it presents itself it is instandy eliminated. Thus, such
a trace, for Derrida, has no place. The fact of being systematically eliminated
belongs to its structure.
However, as Derrida explains in his essay 'Signature, Event, Context',52
there is a special case, in which the trace can be defined in some sense as the
'pure trace': the signature. The signature epitomizes most distincdy this state of
presence/absence as the proper nature of the trace. The trace of the differance is
the signature, as this maintains, in the present, a form of the past along with a
transcendental form of the maintenance in the future. The signature is always
absent, singular and evident: it is the absolute singularity of a reproducible
event. As Derrida says, 'the pure reproducibility of a pure event'. It has the
51 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978, p. 203.
51 Jacques Derrida, 'Signature, Event, Context', in Margins ofPhilosophy, op. cit.
166
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique
character of the presence of the signature's author, though in the form of its
absence; equally, it has the character of a unique event, though in the form of
its reproducibility. Ultimately, as Derrida concludes, the writing of a text is an
operation of dissemination, always different from the presence of Being and
yet communicating. But certainly not 'existing'. Unless - he underlines - in
the form of a signature, where writing barely exists.
In this sense, Textsfor Nothing (written between 1947 and 1952) can be
considered as the Beckettian signature par excellence. In these short prose
writings, as Richard Kearney points out, it might be said that in a Derridean
point of view 'Beckett pursues his deconstruction with unprecedented ruth-
lessness'." Since the voices in Texts for Nothing cannot escape from themselves
through objective reference or self-effacement, Kearney says, 'then the last
possible resort would seem to be the invocation of a voice that would at once
speak and be silent: a voice of silence'!"* But the possibility of such a silent voice
existing - as Derrida remarked in his essay 'The Voice that keeps Silence' - is
of course its very impossibility, for such a voice would have to be 'at the same
time absolutely dead and absolutely alive'. Beckett's Textsfor Nothing reveal all
the contradictory character of the voice of narration, as a pure contradiction
in which full absence and full presence fully coexist: namely, they represent
the 'pure trace' or 'signature' of the writing.
Thus, the conclusion of the X I I I and final text:
It is not true, yes, it's true, it's true and it's not true, there is silence and there is not silence,
there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything [...] And were there one
day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice
the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark,
as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs.55
'Beckett's writing' - Kearney concludes - 'masterfully deconstructs itself
by directing our attention to itself as writing, that is as a system of sounding
signifiers irretrievably at odds with the ideal of a corresponding silent signi-
fied.'!6 Consequently, 'it is only by deconstructing the word's pretension to
53 Richard Kearney, 'Appendix: Beckett and Derrida', in The Irish Mind, op. cit., p. 358.
54 Ibid., p. 359.
55 Samuel Beckett, Textsfor Nothing, London: John Calder Publishers, 1999, pp. 63-64.
56 Richard Kearney, 'Appendix: Beckett and Derrida, in The Irish Mind, op. cit., p. 360.
152.
CHAPTER 3 The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 169

achieve self-adequation by means of silence, that we can uncover its hidden By the end of seventies, and especially starting from Jean-Francois Lyotard's
publication of The Postmodern Condition (1979),59 followed two years later
self-alienation'.57
by Jürgen Habermas' response 'Modernity Versus Postmodernity',60 and suc-
The deconstruction of the word into the trace or differance is raised to
cessively again by Lyotard's 'What Is Postmodernism?' (198z),61 a great philo-
the status of signature when the writing itself is the subject of the trace or
sophical debate began on the subject of the crisis of'modernity' - broadly
differance. Hence, it follows that as Beckett said that Joyce's writing 'was not
defined as the Western Enlightenment tradition - as also on the exploration
about something but it was that something itself , equally, in Derridean terms,
of a postmodern alternative. In the mid-eighties, other publications appeared
one might conclude that in the Beckettian writing, the signature ofhis texts,
in quick succession, including, in particular, Gianni Vattimo's The End of
is not about the trace (the remains, the residua) but is that trace itself.
Modernity (1985)," followed immediately by Habermas' The Philosophical
Taking for granted that both start from a firm intention not to betray
Discourse of Modernity (1985),63 in which the terms of the question are posed
the text, at this stage, the radical difference between Adorno's and Derrida's
in a very clear way.
approach to Beckett's work is much more evident. While the former speaks in
Leaving aside the polemics that were at the heart of the first Lyotard-
terms of'organized meaninglessness' and of'understanding the incomprehen-
Habermas' dispute, in his book Vattimo focuses instead on tracing and ana-
sibility', the latter seeks a direct (critical) 'translation' by reading the Beckettian
lyzing the philosophical guidelines of our time which, he argues, are marked
text, in its deconstructed pieces, as the pure trace, the pure signature of the
essentially by the phenomenon of the 'overcoming of metaphysics', and whose
author. Yet, as has been seen throughout this section, with Beckett this direct
major 'executors' have been Nietzsche and Heidegger. The really 'new' event,
translation is an impossible task. In the first Adornian way, philosophy is called
according to Vattimo, is not the fall of metaphysics per se, but the fact that
to rescue the muteness of the work of art. In the second, the Derridean - if
both Nietzsche and Heidegger refused to define such an overcoming in criti-
one considers that 'absence is the fundamental mechanism of writing' and
cal terms. In other words, precisely when distancing themselves from the
that 'nothing is outside the text' and that, ultimately, the Beckettian is the
philosophical notion of foundation and Western thought as a thought of
'pure text' - philosophy can only be 'writing about not writing about Beckett'.
foundation, they cannot criticize the same thought using the name of another,
This is precisely what Robert Eaglestone suggests in his essay 'Beckett in the
truer, foundation. If the word postmodernity has a sense, Vattimo argues, it
Wilderness':'[...] Thinking about Beckett's work is a very useful way to judge
lies in detachment, indicated by the prefix 'post', from a fundamental logic of
the capability for crisis of "thinking about literature" and so, in turn, judge
the critical development of philosophy directed towards a perpetually new
its "real movement" [...] because his works do clearly test the limits of our
ideas about what literature is and the what foundations of "thinking about
literature" should be'.58
59 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
60 Jürgen Habermas, 'Modernity Versus Postmodernity 1 in New German Critique 22 (1981),
3.1.4 Which 'End'?
pp. 3-14.
61 Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Note on the Meaning of the Word "Post" and Answering the
The issue of an inadequate critique for inadequate literary texts concerning Question "What is Postmodernism?"', in Innovation/Renovation, ed. Hassan, University of
Derrida on Beckett, which this section has been dealing with, is only a small, Wisconsin Press 1983. On the same debate see also Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern
though singularly significant piece of a more general problematic called by Explained: Correspondence, 1982-198$, ed. and trans. Julia Pefanis and Morgan Thomas,
many authors 'the end of modernity'. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 199z; and Julia Kristeva, 'Postmodernism?',
in BucknellReview 2$ (1980), pp. 136-141.
62. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity. Nihilism andHermeneutics in Postmodern Culture,
57 Ibid. trans. Jon R. Snyder, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991.
58 Robert Eaglestone, 'Beckett in the Wilderness: Writing about (not) Writing about Beckett', 63 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse ofModernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 41. Lawrence, Cambridge: M I T Press, 1987.
 152. C H A P T E R 3
foundation. In this regard, formulas like 'end of modernity' or 'end of history'
must not be intended in a catastrophic or Spenglerian sense, but rather in a
new, non-metaphysic conception of the truth. The real heart of the discussion
is therefore the concept of truth, whose model of interpretation is no longer
that of positive scientific knowledge, but rather that coming from the experi-
ence of art and rhetoric. To think in this way does not mean a subjectivistic
reduction of the idea of truth; on the contrary, it signifies the 'substantiality'
of its historicity. Similarly, the experience of truth is not the appropriation
of an object but a field in which it is possible to move and act. To this extent,
'nihilistic' is only the point of departure of the new philosophical hermeneutic
era. Here, with reference to the definition of a 'philosophy of interpretation'
Gadamer plays a key role, in Vattimo's view, precisely because he gathers the
Heideggerian heritage and seeks a complete understanding of Heidegger's
notion of truth 'setting itself to work'. Gadamer s work, however, though ortho-
doxly Heideggerian, goes too far in a constructivist direction. Successively, the
works of K. O. Apel and H. R. Jauss represent this tendency towards positive
developments even more clearly - almost verging on a philosophy of history
with which not even Gadamer would identify anymore - thus abandoning
the nihilistic origins of Heidegger's philosophy.
Though not explicitly expressed in his book by Vattimo - he barely quotes
Adorno and never names Derrida - the call for another reading of the conse-
quences of Heideggerian aesthetic principles was evident. Besides what one
might call a philosophical hermeneutics of rhetoric and history - embarked on,
after Gadamer, by thinkers like Ricoeur, Jauss, Apel, and Rorty - the space for
a negative development of Heidegger's conception of philosophical truth had
been put out to tender and in very few years, by the end of eighties, Derrida
was acknowledged by many critics to legitimately occupy it. It is no wonder,
therefore, that at the same time the first philosophical interpretations of Beckett
a la Derrida were ready to come out. Hence, within a decade, two books,
explicitly referring to Vattimo's work, dealt with Samuel Beckett at the edge
of the end of modernity.
In 1990 Thomas Trezise published his work Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett
and the Ends of Literature.64 Here he declared Beckett as totally extraneous to
existential humanism, to which he was affiliated from the beginning by criticism
64 Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach. Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature, op. cit.
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 171
'devoted to an exercise in ideology rather than in genuine reflection'.65 On the
other hand, Trezise suggests the comparison of Beckett with such thinkers as
Freud, Bataille, Blanchot and Derrida, because of'their common, if in some
cases entirely implicit, rejection of phenomenology'.66 Therefore, against the
phenomenological approach and within the general framework defined as
the end of modernity, Trezise sees the natural position of Beckett - together
with Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger - in a sustained interest in what, quot-
ing Bataille, he calls a general economy' that remains strictly irreducible to the
universe of phenomenology.67 By 'general economy' Trezise alludes to a form
of thought whose fundamental principle is not negation or separation, but
- in a postmodern hermeneutic perspective - communication or difference.
Accordingly, as he argues with Bataille, general economy corresponds to the
impersonal perspective of an alterity irreducible to any particular or general
identity. Considering the general rule that separation leads to expression in
order to appropriate the world, Trezise places Beckett on the opposite side
of the equation, where 'the task of the writer is rather to open the question
of literature itself as the dispossession of that world, and most notably of its
foundation, the cogito orfirst person'.66 Thus, it is not a positive characteristic
to mark out the art of Beckett, even though it might be a negatively positive
characteristic such as a writing of death or of hopelessness, but rather an omis-
sion, the fundamental 'dispossession' of the world. For Trezise, the fundamental
paradox of Beckett as a postmodern writer arises from such a disposition: i.e.
the fact that, in Husserlian terms, he neither belongs anymore to the realm
o f ' expression as power', where the relation to a certain outside is suspended,
nor to the realm of'indication' as the mediation of irreducibly sensible signs.
Literature has always been moving between these two directions, since the
diverse nature of the sensible world - as Trezise argues - can be recognized
as the same within a sign 'only by virtue of the abstraction or reduction of this
difference, that is, of the sensible world itself'.69 Conversely, 'the aporia or
paradox in which phenomenology finds itself (un)grounded leads Derrida to
65 Ibid., p. IX (Preface). Even though this is actually what Adorno exactly said thirty years
before in his article on Beckett.
66 Ibid., p. X.
67 See especially Georges Bataille, La Notion de depense, Paris: Minuit, 1967.
68 Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach. Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature, op. cit.,
p. 31.
69 Ibid., p. 13.
152. CHAPTER 3
the decisive discovery that the sign both invests its phenomenological reduc-
tion and, as the ineluctable repetition of this reduction attests, ineluctably
escapes it'.70 A writer like Beckett is thus involved in this very aporia caused
by the dispossession of the world, and he consequently writes in an impos-
sible breach between expression and indication, words and world, his writing
therefore being a necessity and an im-possibility, the obligation to speak and
the inability not to do so'.71 Hence his preference for what Adorno calls an
'organized meaninglessness', i.e., what was declared in Three Dialogues to be 'the
expression that there is nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no
power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express'.
The question of the end of literature must not be posed in terms of a failure of
art determined by the dispossession of the world but rather in terms of a fail-
ure that inhabits separation itself. After the end of modernity, or, as otherwise
said, after the end of the power of separation,72 what is proper to literature or
literary language can only be the dispossession of separation itself.
While Trezise ultimately leaves open the final result and possible scenar-
ios ofhis definition of literature as a dispossession, a few years later Richard
Begam returns to the same question in his book Samuel Beckett and the End of
Modernity (1996),73 perhaps the most faithful application, so far, of Derrida's
thought to Beckett's work. This study re-opens the Lyotard-Habermas debate
by focusing on the five major novels of Beckett {Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone
Dies, and The Unnamable) as well as on the claim that these novels provide the
earliest and most significant example of moving beyond the achievement of
literary modernism. Admittedly, Begam distances himself from the tendency
among critics to consider the postmodern as a negation or replacement of
the modern Enlightenment tradition. In this regard, he refers back to what
Vattimo identifies as the real sense of'post'-modernism: i.e. the overcoming of
the very concept of'overcome'. In Begam's words: authentic postmodernism
is a differantial conception of postmodernism itself. To this extent, Beckett's
pentalogy is conceived as a response to the writers who most fully epitomized
modernism, Proust and Joyce: 'Beckett uses these writers as representative
figures, employing them in the five novels as points of reference in his own
70 Ibid., p. 18.
71 Ibid.
7z At a certain point, Trezise defines separation as 'the arche and telos' of the universe of
phenomenology (Ibid., p. 160).
73 Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, op. cit.
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 172
evolving dialogue with the modernism he seeks to overcome'.74 But in the
end Beckett acknowledges that an absolute overcoming of modernism does
not occur, 'for the pentalogy "ends", in effect, by not ending ("I can't go on,
I must go on")'.75 On this precise point, extraneous to any foundational or
anti-foundational perspective, he turns, without pretence, to exploring the dif-
ferantial space that lies between modernism and anti-modernism. 'Replacing
the' narrator and' narrated" with a Derridean ecriture, Begam writes, 'Beckett
inaugurates literary postmodernism not by attempting to overcome modern-
ism but by surrendering himself to a form of absolute textuality, the narrative
equivalent of differance and "unnamability"'.76 However, in a certain sense,
Begam recognizes that his effort to read Beckett through poststructuralism
is aligned with the works of Steven Connor, Leslie Hill and Thomas Trezise.
Nonetheless, he notes an important difference between his own point of view
and their approach to the Beckettian texts: namely, that the above-mentioned
writers still tend 'to essentialize what is antiessential, to foundationalize what
is antifoundational'.77 In conclusion, according to Begam, critics like Connor,
Hill and Trezise read the five novels in ways that are more antimodern than
postmodern, applying a sort of logic of an 'essentialized antiessentialism' to
their reading of Beckett, for 'they consequently emphasize the iterative struc-
tures in the five novels at the expense of their developmental structures'.78
Accordingly, in his study Begam deals with the major Beckettian novels by
showing their evolution in the light of the conception of postmodernism -
as it develops out of Nietzsche and Heidegger - passing through the attack
on the 'cogito' as the rational basis for modernity (Murphy)-, the extended
critique of its literary form, i.e. the autobiography (Watt)-, the exploration of
how some of the traditional oppositions that have traditionally defined literary
representation can be immobilized in a Derridean idea of supplementarity and
differance (Molloy)-, the end of the author, termed by Derrida the 'end of the
book' (Malone Dies)-, and finally the 'end of man' as traditionally conceived
by the Enlightenment and modernist tradition (The Unnamable).
Richard Begam's reading of Beckett, carried out in the light of a quite
orthodox use of Derridean terms and metaphors, has the important merit of
74 Ibid., p. 7.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., p. 9.
78 Ibid., p. 10.
 CHAPTER 3
152.
having purified the critique of his narrative texts from new structures - argued
in the name of an opposite antistructuralism - as well as having marked a
important benchmark in Beckettian criticism. The dividing line is between
those critics who believe that Beckett's art ultimately has a foundation - albeit
'reverted' or nihilist (such as 'the meaning is the absence of meaning'), since
it can be equally structured and critically analyzed in the light of its 'anti-
meaning' - and those critics who believe that there is no foundation at the
base of Beckettian art. Nevertheless, even Begam's approach to Beckett is not
immune from such a re-foundational tendency, if nothing else because it aims
to complete a Derridean translation of Beckett that Derrida himself consid-
ered already complete; or else, because it assigns to the linguistic issue the
very philosophical nature of the Beckettian writings. In this regard, a reading
of Andrew Gibson on Badiou's interpretation of Beckett (see the following
§ 3.3.1) clearly evidences the risk of the neatness of identifications run by those
whom he calls the 'postmodern Beckettians', who above all tend to confuse the
attitude to subtraction with that of destruction. According to Gibson, Badiou's
Beckett is, instead, closer to the Adornian idea of'organized meaninglessness',
which, in the final analysis, does not depend upon a foundation, but is rather a
'desperate', though negatively organized, signal indicating the impossibility of
any indication. Indeed, this signal - without a signifier, without significance
- being thoroughly 'not-self-sufficient' and structurally directed towards its
own endgame, continually and silently calls for rescue, and in so doing (as for
Badiou) is, ultimately, open to the event in its rare authenticity - an event
which is located, in Badiou's view, for Adorno as for Beckett, beyond art.
In the end, as with the Beckettian art, criticism may likewise enter a culde
sac - or perhaps not. It depends on how far this criticism decides to follow and
not betray Beckett's textual path. If'overcoming modernism' means to reach
a new, identifiable point within and beyond the tradition, the word 'end o f ,
in this regard, suggests merely a 'transitional stage' - however important it is
or however representative. Contrariwise, a 'substantial' end does occur when
the spiral of overcoming(s) is broken: i.e. when the supposed new meaning is
out of the orbit of reference and significance, but nonetheless has authentically
arrived at that point. In such a 'there is and there is not' situation, the suspi-
cion that the old happy days of modernism are now ineluctably over, or, worse,
have never existed, also occurs. The second kind of end is not, therefore, an
overcoming of something, but is above all a 'pure text', whose original matrix
is the problem, as well as its final terminus: 'the first and the after' of the text
itself. Moreover, such a suspicion refers to the issue of the imaginary nature
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 175
of art more than to the artwork itself. The following section of this work is
concerned with this problem.
3.1.5 Concluding Remarks
As is by now quite clear, one of the main aims of this study is to trace, with
the help of the philosophers' readings and Beckett's own writings, the genea-
logical tree of the philosophical underlying framework of Beckett's oeuvre.
This has to be placed, as often repeated, within the negative and more truly
'aesthetic' heritage of the late Heideggerian philosophy, which - though in
two radically different ways - was first and foremost accepted by Adorno and
Derrida. However, while, from the late eighties, a number of Derridean read-
ings of Beckett's work, inaugurated by Steven Connor's study (1988), began to
appear79 - mostly in the light of the so-called American deconstructionism, i.e.
a philosophical linguistic approach to the text, from which Derrida in person
on several occasions distanced himself - it is only with Simon Critchley's book
(1997) and Richard Lane's collection of studies (2002) that the two figures
of Adorno and Derrida are linked together in relation to Beckett. Precisely
because of the great distance between the two, such a connection is crucial in
order to find an important point in common between them. As Habermas
argued, 'Adorno's "negative dialectics" and Derrida's deconstruction can be
seen as different answers to the same problem', namely the fact that 'the total-
izing self-critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since
subject-centered reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature
only by having recourse to its own tools'.80 Nevertheless, whatever label one
uses ('end of modernity' or 'beginning of postmodernity'), both testify in an
exemplary way to the complexity of our age, when considering the opposite
79 See note 6 of this chapter. Other readings of Beckett from this period, in the light of
Post-structuralism, are: Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990; Sylvie D. Henning, Beckett's Critical Complicity:
Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988;
and the earlier Angela B. Moorjani, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, op.
cit.
80 See Jürgen Habermas, 'On Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and
Literature', in Philosophical Discourse on Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
Lawrence, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987; quoted here from Continental Aesthetics, op.
cit., p. 507.
152. CHAPTER 3
final results of their path - a dialectical Hegelian position, for Adorno, and
a 'deconstructive' philosophy of literature, for Derrida - as well as their con-
flicting philosophical methodologies and languages. Yet, whereas the affirma-
tion that their thought is an 'aesthetic philosophy' tout court is unlikely - for
both, in fact, aesthetics as such 'has died away' - it is nonetheless true that
an idea of'aesthetic truth' - whose nature has been abundantly investigated
throughout this work - lies at the heart of their philosophical path. On this
precise and original point of their research, Adorno and Derrida met with
the literary figure of Samuel Beckett. Indeed, not only are these two philoso-
phers crucial, directly (Adorno) or indirectly (Derrida), to understanding
Beckett's philosophical position within twentieth-century aesthetics, but
Beckett is also significant as a means of explaining the relationship between
Adorno and Derrida. This might possibly suggest a few less explored fields
of research, such as, for instance, the relation between the late Heideggerian
philosophy of language and Samuel Beckett's narrative, on the one hand, and
a connection between Adorno's Negative Dialectics and the late philosophy
of Derrida, on the other hand.81
To summarize, the idea of the 'end' of modernity, far from suggesting cha-
otic or catastrophic future scenarios, instead exhibits (especially manifest in
Beckett, Adorno and Derrida) a solid gnoseological basis rooted in an idea of
truth that, however ambiguous or deconstructed, is never absent or relativistic
per se. For Beckett, as for Adorno and Derrida, the paradoxical problem is
precisely that, in spite of everything, 'truth exists' - and it is in its simultane-
ously concealed and unconcealed nature that its revelation must be found.
Philosophy becomes interpretation to the extent that the performance of a
musical composition becomes, in Heideggerian terms, the setting to work of
an origin that does not exist and yet exists. However distant from each other
interpretations may be, their origin is the same.
81 For a deeper discussion on parallels and differences between Adorno and Derrida, see
again Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse on Modernity: Twelve Lectures, op. cit.
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 177
3.2 Where Art Once Resided: The 'Penultimate Images'
3.2.1 Twentieth-Century's 'Copy'and 'Original': the 'Second-to-Last'and
'Final' Imagination
It should be evident, at this stage, that the contribution Beckett made to the
emptying and dissolution of any form of meaning (or 'intention', or 'meta-
physical presence') was related to the very concept of truth in art. Although
the 'why' of such a choice - made, as seen in Chapter 1, around 1936-37 - is
still uncertain, there is, on the other hand, historical evidence of the effect it
had on Western culture in the second half of the twentieth century up to the
present. Also clear, perhaps, is the way he achieved this systematic disintegration
of meaning by removing from the basis each possible point of reference which
aimed at restoring a 'new meaning' - whatever that may be - and in so doing
leaving intact only the 'containers' of contents that never were, i.e. the traces of
works of art that never existed. As has been seen, these illegible and unwritable
traces, asforms of nothing, inscribed in the 'marginal' region of the Derridean
differance, are still the only things left of the original aesthetic truth.
Beckett's choice of an aesthetics of impoverishment was not originally
concerned with a classic Platonic duality copy/original, or fiction/reality, or
falsity/truth, but was rather born of an inner opposition to the very Joycean
conception - from which he started and in which he believed - of theformer
'copy' as a truth-holder. Not only, as it were according to the terms of Gestalt
Psychology, does such a copy retain something 'more' than reality itself, i.e.
more than the structure of reality or technique or even dissonance, but none-
theless it allows, in some sense, for a deeper knowledge of the same reality (the
former 'original'). There is an 'extra' significance, mute, like the 'expression' of
the authentic artwork that Adorno speaks about in Aesthetic Theory.82 For a
large (perhaps, predominant) part of the entire culture of twentieth century, to
know reality means to know the dream of reality within us. Post-Heideggerian
philosophy, contemporary literature and psychoanalysis converge in recog-
nizing precisely such a primacy of dreams over things; of time over space; of
the copy over the original. Hence, it is no wonder that within this aesthetics
of the penultimate image one might number a few of the epochal works of
82 See Chapter z, § 3.1. As already observed, for Adorno the adjective 'expressive' (or 'elo-
quent') related to artworks might well coincide with that which Beckett considers in Three
Dialogues the non-expression of a work of art (see Chapter 1, § 3.3).
152.
CHAPTER 3
twentieth century, from the Proustian Recherche to Musil's The Man without
Qualities and Joyces Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, whose main characteristic,
perhaps, is that of a hypertrophic extension and predominance of temporal-
ity over spatiality.83
In contrast, from the same point of view, every time that involuntary
memory, the source of dream, is not involved in any human process, it auto-
matically arouses great suspicion. 'Rationalization', along with every sort of
'aboutism', instead of representing the thing itself directly, is the most likely
clue to a false discourse. It is in this century that the unconscious is declared
the natural organ for poetry and the poetic word (Dichtung) is considered the
natural revelation of philosophical truth (Heidegger). Equally, psychoanalysis
- in its most limited sense - investigates human beings by starting from the
assumption that the entire rational faculty, voluntary acts and words always
(or often) 'lie' - hence, Ricoeur defined it as a 'psychology of suspicion'. In
this way, the 'copy' (dream) is more authentic than the 'original' (principle
of reality) just as the imagination is truer than the real image. In other words
again, the penultimate 'imagined' image of things is realer than the final visu-
ally 'real' image. Thus, for instance, while the penultimate image of a town that
has never been visited is the image produced in our mind about that town, the
final and no longer modifiable image is the real vision of the town. If, in order
to know things, one must first of all have dreamt of them, the 'penultimate
sensation' comes obviously before the last one. All the previous stages are to
be considered as foundational of general knowledge: with them, step by step,
sensitivity and rationality, subjectivity and objectivity, are separately founded
and accorded their reciprocal possibilities. But it is only in the 'penultimate
stage', in the quasi-vision of the things, the quasi-meeting between subject and
object, when the imagined is completely ready but not yet influenced by the
principle of reality, that the projection of subjectivity is pure. It is by stopping
the imagined at this precise point and by preventing its mixture with reality
that 'pure imagination' can come into being and flow uninterruptedly. This
also reveals the fact that such a 'penultimate stage' leads directly towards the
83 To this extent all these writers, with reference to the previous paragraph, can be still named
as 'modern': as they keep still, in any case, a clear foundation of their narrative, even though
this is located in the undefined and unstable nocturnal world of the 'penultimate images".
The difference with Beckett is evident when considering his passage, in the third of the
Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, from an 'art of failure' to the very 'failure of art'
(see Chapter 1, § 3.3).
The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 179
subject, whereas the ultimate' (i.e. the principle of reality) leads primarily
towards the object. In the dialectic between subject and object, the 'last but
one position' is, therefore, the guarantee that the subjectivity will be recognized
and considered per se. Therefore, it is no wonder that in a significant twentieth-
century current of thought, the 'penultimate position of imagination' is the
place of art, the very source of the narrative and of literature, where the copy
rises ideally to the first position and legitimately holds on to the rights of aes-
thetic truth. More generally speaking, in this division between the imaginary
and real world, and the return to subjectivity, we find the core of the question
of narrative, namely, the capacity of human beings to transform history into
stories. For it is literally a division, an interruption, a 'step back' or return to
the penultimate vision, which generates the 'quality', in short the meaning of
art: effectively capable of changing facts into narrative stories. There is always
in any authentic narration, as in any authentic artistic representation, a 'je ne
sais quoi' that brings the listener or viewer or reader to think that, though not
exactly real, the work is indeed more significant than reality itself.
Conversely, Beckett opposes such a general rule, where a more meaningful
fact is also considered more authentic: in other words, the idea that meaningful-
ness is truth. Therefore, from this position, he searches for a truth that has got
rid of meaning. While the penultimate sensations, the density of significance,
generate an art of omnipotence, Beckett's move towards the impoverishment
of art necessarily requires a radically different shift. He chooses the last posi-
tion: reality stripped of all the imaginative steps the generally precede it. This
is certainly an unrealistic operation, as is the stopping of the imagined at the
penultimate position. To consider subjectivity from the point of view of objec-
tivity is, not only unrealistic, but absurd. Evidently, meaning, imagination and
all the human qualities that preceded this excessively realistic last position, call
for a role in all this. Yet, the more they 'knock' on Beckett's door, the more
he refuses to answer it. From the copy as a truth-holder, Beckett turns to the
original, which, however, is no longer the place of truth: hence, in concluding,
he relieves himself of the valuable copy and retains a depreciated original. In this
paradoxical situation stands Beckett, and he is fully aware that the truth he is
searching for neither belongs to the unreal - though meaningful - penultimate
images, nor to the real - though meaningless - last and definitive sensations.
As seen throughout this work, he can 'inhabit' this paradox precisely by staging
a reversed vision of all this framework: i.e. the ultimate dead reality (which for
Adorno are the Teilmaterialien, the 'material components' of the Beckettian
plays) appearing as absurdly significant and the penultimate imagination that
i8o CHAPTER 3
never works and never starts, and is thereby literally meaningless. In short,
Beckett shuffles the cards in order to undermine the apparendy overwhelming
omnipotence of the aesthetics of'penultimate images'. As Adorno understood
perfectly, Beckett conceives of a kind of works where the aesthetic structure
is an 'organized meaninglessness' (organisierte Sinnlosigkeit), which is also the
most valuable guarantee of their authenticity as modern artworks. Precisely
when recognizing the strict bond, in modern times, between this aesthetics of
the 'omnipotent copy' and the truth-value of art, he also identifies the deceit-
ful character of the penultimate images, which never truly reach objective
reality and never seem to exhaust their ever-growing inner tension. Thus, his
organized meaninglessness' position, at the exact point of the contradiction
of an aesthetic truth that is, though neither in the copy nor in the original, is
therefore the coherently non-identical response to non-identity. In contradis-
tinction to the 'new' hypertrophy of subjectivity, Beckett puts all the terms in
the reverse order: as Adorno points out, 'he lengthens the escape route of the
subject's liquidation to the point where it constricts into a "this here", whose
abstractness - the loss of all qualities - extends ontological abstraction liter-
ally ad absurdum, to that Absurd which mere existence becomes as soon as
it is consumed in naked self-identity'.84 The 'this here' (Diesda) is, in fact, the
precise middle point between copy and original, 'penultimate' and 'last', where
both converge but yet are 'differant' from what they were before. In others
words, it is what Deleuze, after Bataille (as Thomas Trezise remarked), called
afelure or 'breach':85 the 'middle' between words and world, whose breaking
- quoting Gary Banham86 - is the basis of experience; or, the 'cinder effect'
discussed by Derrida. It is in this breach that Samuel Beckett writes. To put it
another way, Diesda is the authentic Beckettian signature.
In sum, taking as its lead the very way in which Beckett defines art in his
Three Dialogues, namely as the inexpressive task of an artist who is obliged to
express the nothing, for 'to be an artist is' necessarily 'to fail', it is by now evi-
dent that before and after the language of art there is nothing: Before, in the
penultimate position, the nothing of pure words, the Joycean 'revolutionary'
(in Jolas' circle terms) and hyper-imaginative words, which, being completely
84 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 315.
85 See Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach. Samuel Beckett and the Ends ofLiterature, op. cit.,
p. 33, quoting Georges Bataille, L'Erotisme, Paris, Ed. Minuit, 1957, pp. 104-110; and Gilles
Deleuze, Difference and repetition, Paris: PUE 1968, pp. 116-118.
86 Gary Banham, 'Cinders: Derrida with Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 60.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 181
detached from things, can perfectly epitomize and become those things-, after,
in the last position, the nothing of the world, the pure Being, or Form as Plato
intended it - which has always supposed that our knowledge is founded on
something positive and assured - yet reduced, after the fall of metaphysics, to
its mere materiality. According to Heidegger, the birth of metaphysics is char-
acterized by the search for the original Being as the abandonment of nothing.
Conversely, as seen, the antithetical abandonment of this finding a ground in
being for being, generated the era of modernity from Nietzsche onwards, and
the valuing more of the copy over the original, as well as the nothing over the
being. The Beckettian breach is neither on the one side nor the other: for him,
the language of art neither belongs to the being (world) nor to the nothing
(words), but is 'suspended', after and in quest of nothing. Entering this broken
'via media' between words and world, to seek for what has been abandoned by
metaphysics and avoided by the revolutionaries of the word, is the impossible
task of Beckettian philosophical aesthetics: a perspective which shows all its
proximity to the negative aesthetic thought of Adorno and, more particularly,
of Derrida. In the same terms, in this 'middle way' between the penultimate
and last images, between temporality and spatiality, the question of Beckett
as a postmodern author must likewise be posed.
3.2.2. 'Nothing is "inside" the Text'. Beckett's 'Post'-modern Imagination
Whether as imitative or as original, art has always resided in the penultimate
images - since the pure 'final images' of the world, literally, do not speak
and do not narrate anything. In other words, in spite of the truth-value one
attributes to the 'copy', it is evident that art lies there, and that any art is a copy
and is not the world itself. The fundamental attribute governing this copy is
the imagination, or the faculty of producing ('originally' or not) copied images,
which we call 'art'.
In many ofhis works,87 Richard Kearney has investigated the nature and
historical path of imagination, often emphasizing the inner foundational char-
acter of human thought rather than its, no less important, historical function
for human civilization. Indeed, the basic question posed by narrative, 'under-
87 See, in particular, Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, London: Routledge, 1988;
Poetics of Imagining, London: Routledge, 1991; and On Stories, London: Routledge,
1001.
 152. C H A P T E R 3 The 'Cul De Sac'of Critique 183

stood as the capacity of man to transform history into stories',88 takes one back was for narrative what Heidegger was for philosophical aesthetics. Starting
to the very beginning of Western civilization, where Hesiod invented myths to from this position, Beckett overturns the terms of the Joycean imperative to
recreate history in its entirety, thereby questioning the very condition of pos-
explain the birth and sense of the world. 'Myths were stories', Kearney writes,
sibility of a narration. In addition, the even more fundamental question posed
'people told themselves in order to explain themselves to themselves and to
by Beckett is whether to go on narrating or not; his answer, as is well known,
others'.89 Yet, beyond this purely historical necessity of achieving a 'shareable
is at the same time 'yes' and 'no'. As Kearney points out, such a questioning
world' of contents, stories have always had another more substantially theo-
of the problem of imagination is perhaps best expressed in two of Beckett's
retical reason for their existence. As Kearney argues: 'Without this transition
works: Krapp's Last Tape and Imagination Dead Imagine. In this last short
from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated,
novel in particular, the performative contradiction of the narrator imagining
it is debatable whether a merely biological life (zoe) could ever be consid-
that imagination is dead is revealed through the same title.
ered a truly human one (bios)'.90 To tell a story, i.e. to employ imagination to
coordinate the fragmented sensations scattered over time, and finally to con- Only apparently, though, does the post-Joycean and post-Heideggerian
struct what Dilthey called the 'coming-together-of-a-life', is the fundamental Beckett try to bring imagination to an end, sic etsimpliciter. In fact, as Kearney
puts it, with Beckett this plan is structurally condemned to fail from the outset:
theoretical operation at the basis of the meaningfulness of our world. In this
'For fiction is a self-reflective play which cannot undo itself except by invent-
general sense, where imagination is applied to storytelling, Richard Kearney's
ing another fiction'.94 Beckett's task is not simply, or perhaps not at all, to
conviction that from the very beginning 'nature imitates narrative'91 does not
deconstruct imagination, in the sense of dismantling a structured process -
appear rash. The division of narrative into historical and fictional, or of art in
which would, in the end, be the simplest of possible operations. Rather, the
general into mimetic (pre-modern paradigm) or productive (modern para-
postmodern path of imagination, as read via Beckett, is a complicated task
digm) is only subsequent to the above assumption. Imagination is the initial
that needs further specification.
moment of building one's first identity amidst the surrounding confusion. The
power of imagination is, therefore, primarily a synthetic one. Any analytical Given the ambiguity of the label, naming Beckett a 'postmodern author' is,
investigation comes after the synthetic union of images of the heterogeneous if nothing else, equivocal - unless one considers postmodernity in the narrow
sensible elements, as Ricoeur calls them in Time and Narrative. However, it sense of Lyotard, Kearney and Vattimo, i.e. as everything except an overcoming
of something: a mere afterword to modernity^ - the problem of what remains
is precisely in the modern paradigm of imagination, avers Kearney, starting
of imagination in Beckett's postmodern works is not fully solved. The present
from the post-Renaissance period, that fictional romance reached its apogee, by
question is, therefore, whether the Beckettian signature - the Diesda of the
means of the extraordinary synthetic possibilities offered by this genre. Finally,
texts where nothing stands in the no-man's-land between the penultimate and
in the twentieth century, it was Joyce's Stephen Daedalus who epitomized the
last images - still retains a sort of evocative power of imagination, or is rather
fictional hero wanting to reinvent himself. Afterwards, 'in Ulysses, Joyce fol-
simply the negation of it, in literal terms the real end of the story}
lows Stephen's journey as he struggles to wake from the "nightmare of history"
into a world transmuted by imagination'.92 In so doing, Joyce was probably the
first or most significant writer of his culture 'to wrest fictional triumph from
historical failure'.93 Hence, as already argued, one might conclude that Joyce 94 Richard Kearney, The Wake ofImagination, op. cit., p. 309.
95 Several times Lyotard underlined the fact that the post' of postmodernism does not
signify a 'period which follows', or a movement of'come back or flash back', but rather a
process which works out an 'initial forgetting' (See J-E Lyotard, 'Une Note sur le Post', in
88 Richard Kearney, The Wake ofImagination, op. cit., p. 311.
Le Postmoderne, Paris: Galilee, 1986). Precisely such an 'unconscious infancy' that lies
89 Richard Kearney, On Stories, op. cit., p. 3.
at the very heart of the modernity is what, according to Richard Kearney, 'needs to be
90 Ibid.
retrieved and reworked if we are not to be condemned to an obsessional fixation upon,
91 Ibid., p. 6.
and compulsive repetition of, the sense of its ending' (Richard Kearney, The Wake of
92. Ibid., p. 17.
Imagination, op. cit., p. 27).
93 Ibid., p. 2.0.
2,00
CHAPTER 3
The answer to this question must be searched for in the peculiarly
Beckettian aporia of the within/outside nature ofhis creation. A first con-
sideration leads to the conclusion that Beckett's narrative is certainly not the
'end of the story', because, while it is true that he puts his 'signature' outside
the traditional places of'copy' and 'original', it is nonetheless more true that
this happens solidly within the space of art, and not elsewhere (as, for instance,
for Brecht).
The Beckettian mid-point between the poles of historical (auto-bio-graph-
ical) andfictional (re-creative) narrative unifies and excludes them both con-
temporarily. Yet, this operation does not lie outside imagination. Beckett's texts
or plays are neither the account of a merely biological life nor an imaginative
recreation of it, but are the closest point (not to mention the coincidence)
between the two positions and the exclusion of both. They are the very doubt
about whether the history is false or the story is true. The writer and playwright
here undoes the work to the point that, far from weakening the underlying
framework of imagination, he reinforces it precisely by overcoming the most
traditional barriers of art. As was experienced a number of times by the audi-
ence watching Waitingfor Godot or, to an even greater extent, Endgame, it
was truly difficult to understand whether the impasse of actors, their sense of
bewilderment, was real or fictional. Beckett introduced truth in art in a way
that nobody else did. He did not achieve his goal through the complete iden-
tification with the thing to imitate, as was the case of the 'Living Theatre' of
Julian Beck and Judith Malina - which proceeded by means of the addition
and coincidence of distant parts, since imitation is based on a metaphysical
logic of identity, which does not realize the real nature of truth. In contrast,
Beckett pursued the opposite way: complete extraneousness. The origin is a
non-origin, the truth a non-truth. The result is that the loss is staged and is
real at the same time. The viewers of a play by Beckett as well as the readers
ofhis text do not really know the borders where art begins and life ends, or
vice versa. Their imagination is empowered precisely when being upset by
the impact with truth. While, as seen, truth has an ancient and original bond
with art, with Beckett this bond is broken to the point that art itself cannot
stand the consequences of this unconcealment. For Adorno, it is at this point
that art calls for rescue. The risk in the Beckettian postmodern imagination
is not, therefore, that it will end or exhaust its role - quite the opposite: that
it will be too crucially significant, as Kearney puts it, in the 'return from text
to action', instead of being uniquely self-referential or repetitively mechanical.
In the Beckettian imagination art is truly concerned with truth, since its path
is more than ever unpredictable.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
Finally and most significantly, the Beckettian impossible narrative, the
story that never begins, is ultimately and undoubtedly a story. Even when a
narrator like Beckett barricades every escape route to the imaginative path
and extirpates from that basis any existing 'third dimension' that might render
possible the development of a tale, nonetheless an image still exists, though it
is raised to a different level. The 'remainder which remains when the thematics
is exhausted', as Derrida writes concerning Beckett, the authentic Beckettian
signature, is, in fact, another form of imagination, perhaps its highest form,
being the inverse path of what Richard Kearney defines the fundamental tran-
sition of human life: from nature to narrative. The return from narrative (the
'time enacted and enunciated'), to nature, (the 'time suffered'), is not simply
a regression, but a transformation of a second level: where the 'imaginary'
becomes an 'experience' and where the ethical responsibility of the text lies
with the very authenticity of the subject. The trial of truth Beckett submit-
ted art to throughout his entire life, by means of a systematic resistance to the
production of an imaginative space within it,96 eventually leads to the pure
trace as the unique 'remains' of the text - and consequently to the dead-end
of any criticism that aims not to betray that text. But it is outside the text that
the result of such an art of impoverishment can be fully experienced. While it
is true, for Beckett, that everything is in the text - as he also declared several
times - i.e. that everything 'expressible' (whether artistically or philosophi-
cally or other, as confirmed by the fact that he never spoke other than with his
works) is in the written text (hence, also the poindessness of a supplementary
critique of that text), there is a good reason to believe that for him life is above
all located outside expression. A return to this life is therefore the main aim
and challenge ofhis activity as a writer. Admittedly, this is an impossible task
in the literary field, as he himself stated in Three Dialogues,97 but if one con-
siders the pure imaginative field, the situation changes somewhat. Beckett's
intention is to turn imagination into life, starting from the awareness of the
complete incommunicability of the two fields, for neither from the position
of the penultimate nor from that of the final images can such an operation be
96 See also the chapter concerning Beckett: 'Resisting the Imaginary' in Angela Moorjani,
Towards an Aesthetics ofLessness, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1991, pp. 1 5 7 - 1 9 6 .
97 Once again is illuminating the Beckettian definition of art as 'the expression that there
is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no
power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express' (Samuel
Beckett, Three Dialogues, op. cit., p. 139).
2,00
CHAPTER 3
accomplished. Eventually, in order to pursue his path, he was forced to open
a breach between the two.
As far as Beckett is concerned, the end of modernity does not mean the
death of imagination, but rather the death of a certain idea of art, in some
way stable and reassuring, as an art in which its natural status of copy" was
either imitative or original. Beckett goes beyond this, and in this 'beyond' he
redefines the very concept of art and of the truth-value of art.
3.1.3 Exhausting the Possible Field of Narrative: Deleuze and Beckett
The most substantial of the two articles that Gilles Deleuze dedicated to
Beckett,98 entitled "The Exhausted' (1992), centres on the theme of exhausting
the possibility and space of any narration. According to Deleuze, on a first level
of reading, the entire prose work of Beckett is pervaded by the central concept
of epuisement, 'exhaustion'. Given that 'there is no existence other than the
possible', this is an extreme process in which all possibilities have been drawn
out. Unlike the simple 'tiredness', which is concerned with the realization of
a specific task, exhaustion relates to the whole of the possible. For Deleuze,
exhaustion is something entirely different from the logic of possibility, pro-
ceeding through exclusive disjunctions (day-time/night-time, going out/stay-
ing in etc.). When speaking of exhaustion 'one combines the set of variables
a situation, on the condition that one renounce any order of preference, any
organization in relation to a goal, any signification [...] One no longer realizes,
even though one accomplishes something [...] One remains active, but for
nothing [...] One was tired of something, but one is exhausted by nothing'.99
All Beckett's characters, Deleuze writes, play with the possible without real-
izing it; they are too involved in a possibility that is ever more restricted in its
98 See Gilles Deleuze, "Ihe Exhausted', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. By Daniel W.
Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 152-174
[This essay ('Lepuise') was originally published as a postface to Samuel Beckett, Quad et
autres pieces pour la television, Paris: Minuit, 1992, pp. 57-106]; and Gilles Deleuze, "Ihe
Greatest Irish Film (Beckett's Film)', in Essays Critical and Clinical, op. cit., pp. 23-26
[First appeared in Revue d'esthetique, 1986, pp. 381-82, under the title 'Le plus grand film
irlandais (en hommage ä Samuel Beckett)'].
99 Gilles Deleuze, 'The Exhausted', in Essays Critical and Clinical, op. cit., p. 153.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
kind to care about what is still happening'.100 The entire Beckettian oeuvre is
full of exhaustive series, namely, of a combinatory art of exhausting the field
of the possible, within the space of a narrative, through what Deleuze calls
'inclusive disjunctions'. This occurs most notably in Watt, the 'great serial
novel', in which 'Mr. Knott, whose only need is to be without need, does not
earmark any combination for a particular use that would exclude the others,
and whose circumstances would still be yet to come'.101 For Deleuze, authentic
exhaustion, as achieved in Beckett's works, is not the very death of the self,
which is a formula, like that of a 'lying down work', more suited to tiredness
than to exhaustion. Exhaustion is rather a 'seated work', in which one cannot
recover and no longer stir even a single memory: 'The seated person is the
witness around which the other revolves while developing all the degrees of
tiredness. He is there before birth, and before the other begins'.102
Continuing his analysis of Beckett's aesthetics of exhaustion, Deleuze
makes a distinction between three levels of languages that are able to instanti-
ate the Beckettian'epuisement du possible' in different ways.'Language I' ('this
atomic, disjunctive, cut and chopped language')103 is a language of names -
whose use culminates in Watt - in which 'enumeration replaces propositions
and combinatorial relations replace syntactic relations'.104 Nevertheless, Deleuze
adds, 'if one thereby hopes to exhaust the possible with words, one must also
hope to exhaust the words themeselves'.10S Hence, the need for another lan-
guage, 'language II', which is more similar to a metalanguage, and therefore
no longer made up of names but of voices. It is the problem that dominates
Beckett's writings from The Unnamable onwards: while to exhaust the pos-
sible is related to the words that designate it through inclusive disjunctions,
to exhaust words is related to the Others who pronounce them. Language II
brings into focus the complex question of an Other who speaks, and of other
possible worlds, 'on which the voices confer a reality that is always variable,
depending on the force they have, and revocable, depending on the silences
they create'.106 "The Others', Deleuze goes on to write, 'constitute "stories".
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid., p. 154.
102 Ibid., pp. 155-156.
103 Ibid., p. 156.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., p. 157.

2,00 C H A P T E R 3
The Others have no other reality than the one given to them in their possible
world by their voices'.107 However, this new series of voices falls in the aporia
of the inexhaustible series of all these exhausted beings: 'How can one imag-
ine a whole that holds everything together? [...] How can one speak of them
without introducing oneself into series ?'108 The only way to solve this aporia,
in Deleuze's view, is to seek the limit at an intermediate point within the series.
There is therefore a'language III', he says, which no longer relates language to
its enumerative objects or to the variable voices, but to the moments of'disrup-
tion' ('[...] hiatuses, holes, or tears that we would never notice').109 Thus, it is
connected neither with its linguistic nor phonetic nature, but rather with its
visual character of an aural Image'[...] freed from the chains in which it was
bound by the other two languages'.110
For all these reasons, according to Deleuze, language I was that of the
novels, culminating in Watt; language II 'marks out its multiple paths through-
out the novels (The Unnamable), suffuses the works for theater, and blares forth
in the radio pieces'; 111 whereas language III, born in the novel (How It Is), pass-
ing through the theatre (Happy Days, Act Without Words, Catastrophe), finds
its specificity in Beckett's television plays. As Deleuze argues, this 'outside' of
language, which is language III, is not only the image, but also and above all
the 'vastitude' of space. This language accomplishes its own mission of epuise-
ment, distinct from the first two, in the four pieces for television that Deleuze
considers: in Quad, language III is said to be space with silence, and eventu-
ally with music; Ghost Trio is space with voice and music; ...but the clouds...
is image with voice and poem, and Nacht und Träume is image with silence,
song and music. Language III is here exemplified by the fact that, while not
separated from a linguistic use, the energy of these plays is primarily spent in
other ways than words and voices.
"Ihe exhausted', as Deleuze concludes, 'is the exhaustive, the dried up, the
extenuated, and the dissipated. The last two ways are united in language III,
the language of images and space. It maintains a relationship with language in
its entirety, but rises up or stretches out in its holes, its gaps, or its silences'.112
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., p. 158.
no Ibid.
in Ibid., p. 159.
112. Ibid., p. 161.
201
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique
According to Deleuze (who was particularly interested in Beckett's works for
the visual media), in television there is always something other than words:
something that opens up their surface completely, and reveals visions and
sounds that, with the old language, remained imperceptible. It is precisely
the discovery of this 'other than words' that characterizes the final period of
Beckett's artistic path.
In his works for television, Beckett exhausts space twice over, and the image twice over.
Beckett became less and less tolerant of words. And he knew from the outset the reason he
became increasingly intolerant of them: the exceptional difficulty of "boringholes" in the
surface of language so that "what lurks behind it" might at last appear [...] It is not only that
words lie; they are so burdened with calculations and significations, with intentions and
personal memories, with old habits that cement them together, that one can scarcely bore
into the surface before it closes up again [...] They lack that "punctuation of dehiscence",
that "disconnection" that comes from a groundswell peculiar to art. 113
3.1.4 Beckett's 'post'-Modernity
Although Deleuze only decided to write "Ihe Exhausted' in 1992, as Mary
Bryden points out, his own sensibility had always been very close to the works
of Beckett. 114 In fact, Beckett is often cited in his solo writings as well as in the
two-volume Capitalisme et Schizophrenie written in collaboration with Felix
Guattari. Apparendy, he also shared with Beckett 'a certain fondness for tripar-
tite divisioning'.115 In this regard, Deleuze's conception of the three different
modes of Beckettian expression (language I, language II, and language III), that
go from the exhaustion of words to that of voices and, eventually, images and
space, might well be compared to the basic tripartition of the entire Beckettian
oeuvre, proposed in this study: i.e. a first stage concerned with the disintegra-
tion of meaning, a second with the endgame of art and a third characterized
by a return to subjectivity. In fact, even though - especially in his narrative -
it is not so easy to identify the precise points where one language shifts into
another, it is clear enough that a first phase of the work of Beckett coincides
with the putting on trial of the 'old' meaning of art - achieved principally by
creating what Deleuze terms 'inclusive disjunctions' (the maximum abstraction
113 Ibid., pp. 172-173.
114 See Mary Bryden, 'Deleuze Reading Beckett', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit.
115 Ibid., p. 85.
2,00 CHAPTER 3
and the maximum subtraction, as Adorno would say); a second stage, instead,
concerned with the exploration of the infinite as well as 'impossible worlds of
art', in which Beckett progressively 'dries up the flow of voices' (Deleuze); and
finally a third phase again in Deleuze's words - concerned with 'extenuating
the potentialities of space' and 'dissipating the power of image', which prepares
for the return to the self and the subject.
This third phase of the Beckettian production is, in the end, the most
problematic for understanding the nature of the final result of his aesthetics
of exhaustion (either impotence, or impoverishment, or disintegration) along
with the controversial idea of a return to subjectivity. In this sense, the most
peculiar point which distinguishes the philosophers who interpret Beckett
from most critics, including the often-quoted deconstructive readings from
the mid-eighties onwards, is that the final achievement of Beckettian research
is not as definitive as these same critics argue. In other words, the breach in the
middle between words and world, so keenly sought after by Beckett, whether
it be called differance or postmodern writing, is not, in the end, something that
he manages to stabilize with his work. While with many of the contemporary
studies on Beckett's so-called postmodernity, the general feeling is that his art
reaches an 'alternative' landing place and, in some sense, has control over it,
the philosophers' reading seems to lead to another, more 'unstable' conclusion
- where the final result is more an 'uncertain need' than a real achievement.
For them, though Beckett is master of the direction of his work, he is not,
by the same token, master of its development and final result. While this is
evident with Adorno, Deleuze, Badiou (whose reading of Beckett will be con-
sidered in the following paragraph)116 and Blanchot (see especially his essay on
The Unnamable), Derrida's impasse too, insofar as it stresses the 'completeness'
of the Beckettian text, without the need for counter-signing, marks a radical
rupture with the past and leads us to the consideration that Beckett's art is, in
the end, truly another thing. If this 'other' is authentic, then the last scenario
for Beckett would appear as a shift more than a another (post)territory for art
itself. Significantly, one could argue that, in the mind of all these philosophers,
Beckett went on a radical quest for a non-point and eventually found one. The
sense of his detachment from the original space of art (that of the 'penulti-
mate images'), nonetheless remaining in search of art, is a real, not fictional,
116 On some ideas linking Deleuze's and Badiou's readings of Beckett see Bruno Clement, 'Ce
Que Les Philosophes Font Avec Samuel Beckett' in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui,
1 September 1004, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 119-136.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
loss. The 'post'-modernity of Beckett, if such a thing exists, is that the 'post',
from now on, truly 'happens'; hence, as for everything that happens, it does
not really know its own conclusive destination. This perspective, according
to which the result of the Beckettian aesthetics and art is not achieved even at
this stage, will be the focus of the rest of this investigation.
3.3 The Final (Mute) Shot
3.3.1 Badiou's Beckett
To briefly sum up the entire Beckettian path analyzed so far - first following
Adorno and then the readings in the wake of Derrida - one might say that if
the meaning of art is removed, the totality of the drama collapses, and yet by
means of this negative process it shows its real content. Such a reality of the
content of art, which appears as an endless game whose characteristic is the
repetition ofDiesda, i.e. the very trace of absence, is finally revealed as a return
to subjectivity in the form of authenticity or the quasi-coincidence of art and
life. The end of modernity, for Beckett, turns out to be 'post'-Modernity in
that by losing, on the one hand, the specific meaning-structure in all its defini-
tions (which, in any case, maintain the attribute of'presence'), 117 on the other
hand, the underlying framework is retained, as well as the need - even purer
after this stage - to remain a story', rather than something else.
Badiou's reading of Beckett,118 in this regard, is potentially very important,
as it gives a different vision on the author with particular reference to the 'last
chapter' his work. Moreover, as Andrew Gibson writes, 'it points in a quite
different direction to the postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive
methodologies that have been most significant for the Beckett criticism of the
past decade'.119 At the same time, it does not bring the entire discourse back to
117 See Chapter 1, § 1.2 and, in particular, note 17.
118 See Alain Badiou, Beckett. L'increvable desir, Paris: Hachette, 1995; and Alain Badiou,
'Conference sur la soustraction', and 'Lecriture du generique et l'amour: Samuel Beckett',
in Conditions, Paris: Seuil, 1991. See also the first English translation and collection of all
of Badiou's work on Beckett: Alain Badiou, On Beckett, edited by Alberto Toscano and
Nina Power, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2004.
119 Andrew Gibson, 'Beckett and Badiou', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 93.
 CHAPTER 3
2,00
foundationalism or existential categories that had previously dominated the
scholarship on Beckett. How, then, does he achieve his position?
'It is precisely an ethical turn in Beckett criticism', Gibson argues, 'that
the "different direction" indicated by Badiou makes possible'.120 Badiou comes
back to the very nature of the Beckettian truth, which, in his view, is neither
relative nor historically determined, nor linguistically constructed, but rather
'radical and rare'. Taking a Lacanian position, Badiou distinguishes the search
for truth from that for knowledge, as truth puts in critical position the order
of knowledge and opens gaps in it by means of subtraction. Indeed, subtrac-
tion is the main action of the truth - what reveals and preserves its singularity.
Hence, truth is also defined by Badiou asfidelity to the rare and 'incalculable'
event. The same labour of subtraction, a progressive diminution or elimination
of artistic possibilities, represents the fundamental task accomplished by the
Beckettian writing throughout his whole life.
However, the inevitability of failure is not only evident but also announced
in Three Dialogues as a primary criterion for a new art. According to Badiou,
after Texts for Nothing, it becomes clear that Beckett's aesthetics of subtrac-
tion has led him into an impasse - in so doing accomplishing his premise.
Yet, it is at this point that his work enters on a new path, exposed to alterity,
chance and the unpredictable and 'given' event ('brusques modifications du
donnee'). 121 The more time passes, the more in Beckett both subject and text
open up to the event. As Gibson puts it, 'after the long and patient labour of
subtraction and within the discipline of an "action restreinte", the event arrives
as an addition or supplement'.122 Beckett's new path is mostly evidenced by the
works written from the end of the sixties onwards and, in particular, Badiou
takes WorstwardHo as an important example of what he calls a 'rupture eve-
nementielle' for Beckettian output. From the first line, the 'stable figure of
being' gets definitively lost and trades places with 'a grace without concept'.
As Gibson explains it:
[...] The "on" of Worstward Ho is not to be equated with any existential "will to mean-
ing". It is rather the "on" of saying reduced "a la purete de sa cessation possible", the bare,
minimal reversal of the word "no". In other words, paradoxically, however uncertainly, the
n o Ibid., p. 94.
111 Alain Badiou, Beckett, op. cit., p. 39.
111 Andrew Gibson, 'Beckett and Badiou', in Beckett and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 99.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
event becomes possible as a Beckettian process of repudiation, denial and ascesis moves
towards its completion.123
Oddly, then, the final exit of Beckett would be the 'event', the deliberate
avoidance and exclusion from which, in some sense led him, after Texts for
Nothing, into crisis and impasse. But the final shift towards the event signifies,
in Badiou's view, that the practice of subtraction and diminishment was not
the most representative of the true nature of Beckett's own scepsis. Equally,
Beckett's art would not be a negative expression or representation of the truth,
but rather, as Gibson says, 'a disposition, a way of waiting for a truth, of clear-
ing the ground for it, even conjuring its arrival'.124
Badiou's conclusion is therefore that the persistent labour of an entire life
turns to be for the later Beckett a practice open to an 'ethico-political' aesthetics.
And even though this is radically divergent, as Badiou observes, from the post-
structuralist interpretations of many Beckettian scholars, the idea that Beckett's
principle of limitation is ultimately a mode of action deserves, nonetheless, to
be taken into consideration. A deeper analysis of such a reading would also
offer a further point of comparison with Adorno's interpretation of Beckett's
work. Moreover, Badiou's conclusions about Beckett are an illuminating and
concrete case of what Richard Kearney argued the task of postmodern imagi-
nation, too often reduced to a questionable parodistic play, might be: i.e. 'to
envision the end of modernity as a possibility of rebeginning'.125
3.3.2 Subjectivity and 'Event': Derrida with Joyce
The event as a mode of action towards which Badiou's reading of Beckett
points, is not to be considered, in Derridean terms, as a performative dimen-
sion. Here, most significantly, one appreciates how, in all respects, Beckett
arrived at the opposite position from Joyce. As Derrida argued, the 'yes' that in
Ulysses provides the connection between many of the diverse sequences of the
reading is an 'event brought about by a performative mark', since 'any writing
in the widest sense of the word involves a yes, whether this is phenomenalized
113 Ibid., p. 100.
114 Ibid., p. 101.
115 Richard Kearney, The Wake ofImagination, op. cit., p. 17.
2,00 CHAPTER 3
or not, that is, verbalized or adverbalized as such'.126 Thus in Ulysses, Derrida
continues, 'Molly saysjyes, she remembers yes, thejyes that she spoke with her
eyes to ask forjyes with her eyes et cetera'.127 This very basic 'yes phenomenon',
lying at the roots of any performative dimension as the condition of any sig-
nature of it, 'addresses itself to some other which it does not constitute, and
it can only begin by asking the other [...] to ask it to sayjyes'.12S Or, to put it
another way, 'th eyes says nothing and asks only for another yes, che yes of an
other, which [...] is analytically - or by a priori synthesis - implied in the
first yes'!2'J Joyce's yes ultimately appears as 'monotautological' or 'specular',
or 'imaginary', 'because it opens up the position of the I, which is itself the
condition for performativity'.130 In short, in Derrida's view, the Joycean self-
affirmation of the yes 'can address itself to the other only in recalling itself to
itself, in saying to itselfyes, yes'.111
But, as has been previously discussed, unlike the Joycean minimal and
primal 'yes', which in its ever-growing nature can structurally be translated
or deconstructed, no translation or countersigning applies to Beckett's 'no'.
Similarly, while Joyce's writing - as Derrida puts it - signed every thing that
could happen in advance (since it can legitimately be defined as 'that thing
itself), though on the condition seen above - i.e. that of becoming the other
by means of a monotautological yes addressing to this other by recalling itself
to itself - on the opposite side, the writing of Beckett left, in the end, a trace
of a non-sign of the past. Thus, whereas Joyce transforms, or simply transfers,
the subjective into objective, Beckett goes down the opposite road. Starting
from the Teilmaterialien, the 'material components' of the text, he drives
back towards another subjectivity, as though of a second level', which is not a
metaphysical presence lying behind the textual presence, but rather the same
'after of nothing' which is language and the text itself, but in its incalculable
and fragile counterpart. It is therefore the openness, the setting up of a world
(in Heideggerian words); the very event lying in the Subject as a non-original
origin, thereby 'open', 'rare' and 'incalculable'. Unlike Joyce, the ultimate 'event'
126 See Jacques Derrida, 'Ulysses Gramophone. Hear Say Yes in Joyce', in Acts of Literature,
op. cit., p. 198.
127 Ibid.
128 Ibid., p. 299.
129 Ibid.
130 Ibid., p. 300.
131 Ibid., p. 303.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
of Beckett is outside text, outside any performativity and outside any kind of
objective dimension. In other words, its incalculahility and rarity (Badiou) is
the exact opposite result (or counterpart) of Joyce's capacity to predict and
sign everything in advance. Of Beckett's last mode of action, as intended
by Badiou, i.e. as a disposition, a way of waiting for the truth coming from
a lifelong practice of subtraction, only a faint trace is left in the text. In this
sense, it is clear how with Beckett, for a philosopher like Derrida, 'there is not
much left to do'.
Once Derrida called literature a 'strange institution' whose definition is a
paradoxical task, given that the very nature of the Western modern literature
offers a sort of license to the writer to say everything he wants or everything
he can. This means that 'literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything,
almost beyond everything, including itself'.132 Hence, 'it is the most interesting
thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world', because it 'cannot
be identified with any other discourse'.133 Yet, Derrida goes on to write, 'given
the paradoxical structure of this thing called literature',134 whose definition is
precisely the absence of definition - i.e. its own fragility, 'its beginning is its
end':135 namely, 'its history is constructed like the ruin of a monument which
basically never existed'.136 In this respect, the work of Joyce is intended to
extend as well as to amplify those ruins, in order to finally rebuilding a new
monument. Conversely, Beckett turns from the minimal ruins remaining to
the non-existence itself of the monument. Since these ruins are a merely writable
and speakable trace, it is evident that his final stage is necessarily mute.
132 Jacques Derrida, 'This Strange Institution Called Literature. An Interview With Jacques
Derrida', in Acts of Literature, op. cit., p. 47.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., p. 42.
135 Ibid.
136 Ibid.
 2,00 C H A P T E R 3
3.3.3 The End of Beckett's End Prose'
The definitive disavowal of speech and expression, which is openly declared by
Molloy at the end of the novel,137 and which carries us with Malone Dies - as
Richard Begam puts it - to the 'end of the book', eventually opens up, with
The Unnamable, to what lies beyond, i.e. the 'beginning of writing' - or the
collapse of the narrator/narrated into an undifferentiated third voice. In all
this, as Begam sums up, the pentalogy represent 'an extended application [...]
that "weaves and interlaces" a deconstruction of the Cartesian paradigm with
an exploration of its Nietzschean alternatives'.138 At the same time, 'Beckett's
anti-Cartesianism also involves an anti-Balzacianism, and his work therefore
mounts an elaborate assault on the realist tradition, including its modernist
practitioners, Proust and Joyce'.139 Conclusively, in Begam's view, the main
period of Beckett's prose reflects an equivocal nature as well as central prob-
lem of the end of modernity, with the impossible struggle of overcoming the
logic of critical 'overcoming'. Accordingly, in Beckett's narrative from this
time, the main theme is that of'the protracted ending, of inconclusive conclu-
sions ad interminable terminations'.140 Analogously, in his stories 'every point
of destination becomes a point of departure' and 'every epilogue becomes a
prologue'.141
Moreover, it is worth emphasising that the enduring coma of the word,
progressively exploded out in the pentalogy, and become irreversible after Texts
for Nothing, underwent a further significant stage in the later prose writings of
Beckett, particularly with the these-days called 'second trilogy', i.e. Company
(1980), III Seen III Said (1981) and Worstward Ho (1983), and with his very
last novel Stirrings Still (1988).
Carla Locatelli, in her full-length study Unwordingthe World (1990),142 was
one of the first scholars to explore and connect together all the implications
137 See Samuel Beckett's Molloy, the entire passage starting from the line: 'And when I say I
said, etc., all I mean is that I knew confusedly things were so, without knowing exactly
what it was all about.', in Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,
op. cit., p. 87.
138 Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, op. cit., p. 185.
139 Ibid.
140 Ibid., p. 184.
141 Ibid.
142 Carla Locatelli, Unwordingthe World. Samuel Beckett'sprose Works After the Nobel Prize,
op. cit.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
of the final chapter of Becketts prose works. In her book she suggests that 'it
is not until the completion of the so-called "Second Trilogy" in the 1980s that
the value and scope ofhis "poetics of indigence" could be understood not only
in aesthetic and philosophical, but also in cognitive and theoretical terms'.143
According to Locatelli, in Beckett's later works the 'literature of unword' - that
should never be mistaken for a 'thematics of silence' - 'produces the revela-
tion of the "event-quality" of communication, independent of the degree of
referential assumptions, and shows that any subject can be constituted only
as the perceiver-perceived of an interpreted world'.144 The experience of the
subject, in short, is already a hermeneutics of experience by means of a self-
reflective use of language. Thus, unlike the precedent, 'Beckett's late designa-
tions are not purely mental: the world is given as interpretation, but it is not
the result of an abstraction'.145 What Beckett expresses in these works - already
from Still (1974) and For to End Yet Again (1975) - is the need to produce
a better representation of space through the metalinguistic self-reflection of
discourse. In sum, the dramatic works of the 1970s and the 1980s can be seen
as 'un-representations' against the 'misrepresentations' of the early narrative,
in which, now, subtraction is a real movement affecting visibility. Whereas
Beckett continues to confirm that there can be 'words without acts' but no act
without words, since in prose no one can escape language, the second trilogy,
and particularly Worstward Ho, shows that 'the very expressivity of language
derives from its ineliminable figurality; but speech is not only figure or abstrac-
tion, but is also event, and in this a pure expression of phenomena'.146 This pure
expression becomes, in Adornian terms, 'eloquent in itself, by being in the late
Beckett the 'representation of representation' (as in Worstward Ho), namely,
an ontological excess' in which the 'unwording' is pushed to the extreme.
Hence, as Locatelli concludes, 'the forward drive at the end of this "worst-
ward" movement, that is, at the end of a superlative subtracting, points to an
irreducible knot for the human condition: to the need for representation'.147
In three different stages the second trilogy shows, in Locatelli's view, that, after
the deconstruction of any designation and the structural repetition corroding
143 Ibid., p. IX (Preface).
144 Ibid., p. X .
145 Ibid., p. 9.
146 Ibid., p. 35.
147 Ibid., p. 36.
2,00
CHAPTER 3
any semantic approach, 'what remains, then, is the working of the texts, and
what is made visible is the event of (its) communication'.148
A double event, therefore, marks the entire aesthetic path of Beckett: pri-
marily, the authentic 'impossibility to express', first posited in Three Dialogues
and never betrayed along the years - as many scholars agree; secondarily, the
systematic labour of refusal undertaken by language in order to state this
impossibility. In Adornian terms, the impossibility to grasp non-identical
reality together with the necessity, or the obligation, since another option
is not given, to organize such a meaninglessness. Needless to say, Beckett's 'I
can't go on, I'll go on' is precisely this state of things.
This entire process, involving Beckett's prose language specifically, started
with Molloy, which is, in fact, the crucial turning point of this labour of refusal,
and proceeded towards its own exhaustion. As Daniel Katz explains in his
study on Beckett's narrative, 'if language is problematic, it is not only or even
primarily because it is false, distant from truth or from the truth of Molloy s
experience, but also because it exists only in order to obviate itself, to retract
or redress'.149 As Katz observes, 'going on is no longer the opposite of "standing
still" but rather aform of standing still, a variation on standing still'.150 Likewise,
'in The Unnamable, for example, the final "I can't go on, I'll go on" alternative
would have to be reread as a pseudo-alternative, giving us less the double bind
than a form of nonchoice, of variations on the same', for 'one might well ask
how in Beckett "going on" can really be differentiated from "standingstill"'.151
Accordingly, rather than as an alternative, this juxtaposition could perhaps be
read 'as an oxymoronic constatation of "on-ness"'.152 Nevertheless, as was for
Carla Locatelli, Daniel Katz, too, sees in the later Beckettian prose, particu-
larly in the 'second trilogy' and in Stirrings Still, a significant shift towards
spatiality and directionality, in which, however, the movement toward loss and
death (Katz points out, 'worstward means 'toward the worst, without hope of
attaining it') 153 is a movement through language and within language. In this
148 Ibid., p. 2.26.
149 Daniel Katz, Saying I No More. Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett,
op. cit., p. 158.
150 Ibid., p. 160.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid., p. 169.
153 Ibid., p. 174.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
sense, Stirrings Still can be seen 'as something of a coda of the late trilogy',154
since the ending it gives us condenses almost all the major motifs of the three
previous novels. The very end that Beckett gives us here, the very end of his
narrative, is still a word, though indistinguishable. It is not silence, but 'the
audibility of the word's missingness - an audibility linked with the strange
alternative (already in the title) which is perhaps not one, to either stay still
or stir'.155 In other words, 'to hear that the word is not there, to hear the word
that is not there, seems close to hearing or uttering the "missaying" which at
the end of WorstwardHo "says" "nohow on"'.156
At the end of the end of Beckett's narrative, the two 'events' mentioned
above, the impossibility of expressing, together with the obligation to express
such an impossibility, are reduced to a basic 'said nohow on' which concludes
Worstward Ho. Indeed, the very end of the word, the 'last word', cannot but
be still a word: once again, there is no possibility, within language, to escape
language. Yet, the very fact of this means, as Daniel Katz remarks, that it is
not the problem of nothing that matters in Beckett - and, ultimately, 'it is
only for this reason that it is possible not to say anything'.157 The more lan-
guage is emptied, the more something else is filled. But in the prose, the sub-
ject is the text: though unable to speak, it is 'there'. According to Katz, 'the
materiality of subjectivity can only be experienced linguistically', since 'the
subject is language'.158 Conversely, 'the structuring role often occupied by the
"subject" in the prose is taken by the literal materiality of the scenic space in
the theater'.159
The two events of language seem to call more insistently than ever for
another event, still concerning the subject, but this time external to language.
This, at least, seems to be the very last legacy of Beckett's prose works.
Ibid.,
1 5 4
'55 Ibid.,
156 Ibid.
'57 Ibid.,
Ibid.,
OO
IA
•59 Ibid.
2,00 CHAPTER 3
3.3.4 At the Very Extremity of Subject: 'Film'
Samuel Beckett's only venture into the medium of cinema, Film, was writ-
ten in 1963 and filmed in New York in the summer of 1964, directed by Alan
Schneider and featuring Buster Keaton.160 The film, which has no dialogue,
takes its basis from Berkeley's theory Esse estpercipi, 'to be is to be perceived'.
As Beckett himself remarks in the script, even when all outside perception -
be it animal, human or divine - has been suppressed, self-perception remains:
the 'search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down
in inescapability of self-perception'.161 This is not to be taken, Beckett affirms,
as a real situation but precisely as a 'film', and indeed 'no truth-value attaches
to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience'.162
The whole action of Film consists of a cat-and-mouse game played by
a single character who is sundered into object (O) and eye (E), the former
in flight, the latter in pursuit'.163 E is the camera, O the character on-screen
(Keaton with a patch over one eye), and E pursues O from behind, trying
not to exceed a conventional 45-degree angle beyond which, as Beckett says,
O enters percipi, namely, it enters the visual contact in which O 'experiences
anguish of perceivedness'. 'It will not be clear until end of film', Beckett adds,
'that pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self'.164 In fact, E (the camera)
is nothing else than the same protagonist (O).
In his short article "Ihe Greatest Irish Film (Beckett's Film)', written in
1986, Gilles Deleuze implicitly emphasises the fact that it is one of the few
Irish films of any note attempting to explore a uniquely Irish intellectual tra-
dition. The problematic which Beckett establishes in the script, as observed
above, is that of the 18 th Century Irish philosopher Berkeley: 'Esse est per-
cipi'. Therefore, as Deleuze argues, 'we might imagine that the whole story is
that of Berkeley, who had enough of being perceived (and of perceiving)'.165
160 Film was edited by Sydney Meyers and the cinematography was by Boris Kaufman, both of
whom were preeminent in theirfields,and was produced by Barney Rosset and 'Evergreen
Theater'. For the shooting Beckett made his only trip to America. It was first shown pub-
licly in 1965 at the 'New York Film Festival'.
161 Samuel Beckett, 'Film', in The Complete Dramatic Works, op. cit., p. 32.3.
162 Ibid.
163 Ibid.
164 Ibid.
165 Gilles Deleuze, "Ihe Greatest Irish Film (Beckett's Film)', in Essays Critical and Clinical,
op. cit., p. 13.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
Consequently, he adds, the role of Buster Keaton is that of Bishop Berkeley, or
rather, 'it is the transition from one Irishman to another, from Berkeley who
perceived and was perceived, to Beckett who had exhausted "all the joys of
percipere and percipi"'.166 Even though Deleuze does not explain in what sense
this problematic is to be considered peculiarly Irish, he nonetheless poses the
question as follows:
There must be something unbearable in the fact of being perceived. Is it the fact of being
perceived by a third party? No, since possible perceiving third parties recoil once they
realize they are being perceived, not simply by each other, but each one by himself. Thus
there is something intrinsically terrifying in the fact of being perceived, but what ? 167
For Deleuze, while the first two cases of Film168 are meant as an escape
from outside perception (represented by human third parties but also by
things),169 in the third case, when O 'has nothing but the present, in the form
of a hermetically sealed room in which all ideas of space and time, all divine,
human, or animal images, all images of things, have disappeared',170 all that
remains is the rocking chair in the centre of the room. This strongly symbolic
object, according to Deleuze, 'more than any bed, is the sole piece of furni-
ture that exists before and after man, that which suspends us in the middle of
nothingness (to-and-fro)'.171 But perception (E) still lies in wait behind the
rocking chair and now, for the first time, it surpasses deliberately the 45-degree
'angle of immunity' and goes in front of the character (O). At this moment, E
reveals what it is: i.e., as Deleuze says, 'the perception of affection, that is, the
perception of the self by itself, or pure Affect'. 172 In still other words, 'it is the
reflexive double of the convulsive man in the rocking chair. It is the one-eyed
166 Ibid.
167 Ibid.
168 Deleuze divided Film in three slightly different parts from those considered by Beckett: the
first case is 'the Wall and the Staircase (Action)'; the second case is 'the Room (Perception)',
and the third case is 'the Rocking Chair (Affection)'.
169 'In this regard, things are more dangerous than human beings: I do not perceive them
without their perceiving me, all perception as such being the perception of perception'
(Ibid., pp. 14-2.5).
170 Ibid., p. 25.
171 Ibid.
172 Ibid.
2,00 CHAPTER 3
person who looks at the one-eyed character'.173 Finally, Deleuze concludes:
'This, then, is what was so terrifying: that perception was the perception of
the self by itself, "insuppressible" in this sense'.174 In Deleuze's own words, the
third cinematographic act, the 'close-up' of Beckett, perhaps the third act as
such of his output, is the 'affect' or 'perception of affection', namely, the per-
ception of oneself.
According to Deleuze, Beckett's Film traversed 'the three great elementary
images of cinema', those of action, perception, and affection. Three fundamental
stages or modes of being through which the subject faces and brings into play
its own existence. Nevertheless, only the last is the original.
Similarly, when considered over his whole life, the purification of the
essence of aesthetic truth - which can be seen as the fundamental aim of
Beckett's research - passes through three different stages: in the first place, it
achieves the 'outside meaning'; in the second, the 'outside text'; and finally the
authentic return to subject. Also within Film the Beckettian tripartite research
is present, so that the first part (played in the street) is mainly concerned with
the disintegration of meaning carried out by O (unlike all persons shown 'in
some way perceiving - one another, an object, a shop window, a poster, etc.,
i.e. all contentedly inpercipere andpercipi') l 7 i as a search for the limit and
ultimate materiality of the real (the street, the wall) which guarantees a lack
of profundity and a not being perceived by others, along with the avoiding of
any perception or even any possibility of it. As has been repeated several times,
this first phase is intended by Beckett as an authentic operation of truth and
is achieved, in Adorno's view, by joining together the maximum abstraction
(Apriorität) and the maximum concreteness (Konkretheit) from the usual aes-
thetic components. In this case, the abstraction is provided by the absence of
any sound (except for the 'sssh!' at the very beginning of action, which indicates
the awareness of this intention) as well as by the systematic avoiding of any
perception, real or symbolic, for no story can begin in such a situation. At the
same time, the maximum concreteness is given by O's scrupulous attending
to what is realer than any other things: i.e. the very materiality of the scene
and of his body. Significandy, O tries to reach the point where the things in
themselves lead, without getting involved in any deferment to other worlds.
In the same way, in Waitingfor Godot there are a number of possibilities for an
173 Ibid.
174 Ibid.
175 Samuel Beckett, 'Film', in The Complete Dramatic Works, op. cit., p. 314.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
'in-depth' development or a new beginning of the story and yet the characters
remain at their realest and most 'material' point.
The second phase of Beckett's research, like the second part of the film,
is played in a suspended situation (the stairs in Film). Such a suspension is
the 'to be or not to be' situation for the text, for the work of art, even when
reduced to its most authentic signature, to be perceived 'as such' by others. It
is, in other words, the last possibility or call for expression - in a suspended
place, as are the stairs, between the outside and inside of subject - by means
of a firm admission of the impossibility to express. Here is also the sense of
Krapps and Winnie's monologues, which are precisely 'suspended' in being
destined to receive a reception but also to fall in the void.176 Thus, O's final
possibility of being perceived by a human person, like the reading of a text by
others, turns out to be its final impossibility.
Eventually, in the room (self-identity), O brings this same process to an
end, outside any possible 'meaning' and 'text', by eliminating even the last
residua of them (pictures, windows, animals, photos etc.) and then by show-
ing the 'repeated' absurdity of the process (like the sequence in which O tries
to take a dog and cat out of the room). The final shot of Beckett s Film, with
O and E face-to-face, is somehow also the final experience of the 'anguish of
perceivedness', which is at the same time the revelation of the original experi-
ence. All this is within art, though wordless and soundless, and, above all, it is
extraneous to any expressible, audible, and meaningful art. An art that is not
expression is an experience, where there is no other than the self. The percep-
tion in question in'Esse estpercipi' is the self-perception. Yet, this 'self' is the
origin, our origin: everything that happens here is what the subject is. There
is nothing more terrifying than to discover the last 'behind', behind which
nothing exists except itself: the coincidence of the subject with the subject.
No word, no meaning, no expression, are possible at the origin of all of them.
Nonetheless, in order to get 'there', i.e. to show this very extremity of subject,
not only did Beckett need to do away with any rational discourse and mean-
ingful narrative, or even the same illusion of'expression', but also of the writing
176 In these two 'monological plays', as Paul Lawley call them (see Chapter 1, §4.1, note 192),
the theme of'suspension' between full possibility and full impossibility to express, is
indeed a crucial point. See also Winnie's speech:'[...] What would I do, what could I do,
all day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep ?' (Samuel Beckett,
'Happy Days', in The Complete Dramatic Works, op. cit., p. 145).
2,00 CHAPTER 3
itself. In short, everything that comes after'. For Beckett, it is only in a theatre
stage or in a film that this original event may be shown or shot.
3.4 The Result of an Art without Qualities
Not surprisingly, John Fletcher affirms that Beckett's revolutionary impact on
the twentieth century's theatre is comparable only with that of Luigi Pirandello
(1867-1936) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). However, though they were more
inventive theatrically than Beckett (and certainly Beckett is greatly indebted to
them, not least for upsetting the old ideas about making theatre), as Fletcher
says, 'it is arguable that the changes they have brought about have not been
as far-reaching, nor are they likely to be as long-lasting, as those Beckett has
provoked'.177 It is not, however, in the ground of pure invention, not least in
that of the so-called 'well-made play', that Beckett's stature as a great dramatist
or a literary author in general can be measured. Rather, what is important in
his theatrical as well as narrative output is the fundamental contribution that
he gave to tracing a new way for art in general. While it is likely that Beckett
inherited from the Brechtian 'sociological theatre' a radical tension towards
an art of truth, it is also evident that, unlike Brecht, he decided to realign that
truth within art, since he believed firmly that art was the proper, original place
of truth. Significantly, as Adorno has observed, the materialistic, 'engaged' art,
of which Brecht made a profession, is the least suited to evidencing the engage-
ment itself, as demonstrated by the fact that Kafka's prose, or Beckett's plays,
or again his 'truly monstrous' The Unnamable, produce such an effect that, in
comparison, the 'officially engaged works' seem like child's play. This happens
precisely because such works break from the forms of art that the 'acclaimed'
engagement tries to constrain from outside: they generate the very anguish,
which existentialism and the Brechtian art of alienation (Verfremdung) only
evoke byword. 178 Nevertheless, even though Beckett comes back to aesthetics,
he certainly does not do this in the quest for an art pour l'art, but with the
177 John Fletcher, About Beckett, op. cit., p. 17.
178 See Theodor W. Adorno, 'On the Dialectic of Engagements', in Notes to Literature,
op. cit.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
intention of leading art itself into crisis (as is clearly stated in his 'German
letter'), 17 ' and he remains within this philosophical paradox.
Perhaps John Calder is right when saying that as Voltaire considered
himself to be a literary writer though we think of him today largely as a phi-
losopher, the same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, 'because what future
generations can expect to find in his works is above all an ethical and philo-
sophical message'.180 Beckett is indeed philosophically interesting, as he takes
research within art to the extreme. Like T. S. Eliot's sentence 'Birth, copula-
tion and death' summing up human life, Beckett looks at these three stages of
existence but brackets the middle part in order to emphasize that only birth
and death have real significance, so that the two events become virtually the
same instant. Consequently, his is not an art of'what happens in the inter-
mediate level', literally, that of the living life, of the inexhaustible possibility
of life: for his artistic achievement is not represented by social engagement,
or the materialistic mise-en-scene of reality, nor by the fact of giving pleasure
through an art of mimesis and of katharsis. In short, he does not pursue the
original form of life and death per se, nor their representations in a narrative
space of profundity (the copy of the original life and death) but rather a for-
malization ad absurdum of life and death: an artistic abstraction by means of
the subtraction of art itself. Neither in the original nor in the copy, but only
in the writing of this 'absurdum' do we have even the slightest possibility to
learn something about life and death.
By extending and radicalizing the path of Kafka and Proust, Beckett
achieved what nobody else did: i.e. to systematically remove any 'quality' from
literary narrative, poetry and theatre. His work of undoing the work of art, of
unwordingthe world (as Carla Locatelli put it), is primarily an attempt to 'stage'
an art that has lost its meaning - where meaning is essentially the qualitative,
imaginative, and penultimate space of profundity', space of movement, of any
artistic narration (whether concerning visual arts or poetic/narrative texts or
theatre). Despite its tide, Musil's The Man without Qualities is still, above all, a
search - if not a 'battle' - for meaning; and equally, the compulsion to death in
Melville's Bartleby is indeed deeply meaningful (as the point of view of death
coming to a 'real' end, Bartleby's 'I would prefer not to' is clearly the opposite
179 See Chapter 1, § 4.1.
180 John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 1.
2,00
CHAPTER 3
meaning of life). 181 Beckett was the first to fully explore the very limit of the
absence/impossibility of meaning in art and he is unique in standing on the
very edge between the absolute meaningfulness and meaninglessness of the
work of art. As discussed at length in this study, Beckett searched for the point,
the breach between words and world, 182 where neither art was meaningful,
imaginative, qualitatively alive, nor purely nonsensical and consequently anti-
art'. Instead, his work is simply quantitatively alive, reduced to its dead pieces
and only to these, without any past or future or any rehabilitative perspective:
in fact, without any 'perspective' at all, and therefore, in a full status of coma.
An art without meaning is like a form without content, a narrative without
imagination - without inhabitable places of narration: a being that is but is
not perceived, then is not. In the end, there is no 'other': no other reality, no
other perspective, no other living world. Nevertheless, the answer to the ques-
tion whether this is the reale, nd is again 'no' with Beckett. The endgame of art
that he searched for comes to be an endless game and the finality of death as
a solution turns out to be an ending without end, in which life and death are
indistinguishable. The impossibility of the end recalls the Adornian paradox,
underlined by Zuidervaart, concerning authentic modern art: i.e. that every
authentic negation of meaning ends up as something apparently meaning-
ful. As observed by Badiou, this might be true at another level, i.e. outside
the text and towards the 'event', particularly when considering the indefati-
gable and authentically significant work of Beckett in the light of his own life
('I write in order to be able to breathe', he declared to Charles Juliet) as well
as its continuous collapsing nature, especially after Texts for Nothing - but
not only. In the final analysis, the authentic quest for the truth in art, even
when obtained through the more ruthless disintegration of the meaningful
components of art, shows itself as equally meaningful. More importantly, it
still reveals the appearance of art. Both Adorno and Derrida, along with all
the philosophers this study has dealt with, are in no doubt about it. However,
the final meaningfulness of Beckett's work, precisely because it is originally
tied, with an original bond, to the truth (for the entire Beckettian oeuvre must
181 This is also in evident contrast with the Beckettian - as Blanchot would say - 'impossibil-
ity of death'.
182 As Adorno would say: between the 'artistic autonomy' of art and its 'historical origin'.
Analogously, the Beckettian 'middle' position might well exemplify and give an answer
to the ironical motto ofAesthetic Theory, i.e. that 'What is called philosophy of art usually
lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art'.
The 'Cul De Sac' of Critique 201
be considered within this age-old, fundamental connection between art and
truth), is always and everywhere veiled. There is a precise intention on the
part of the author, in fact - as exemplified in Film by the 45-degree angle that
can never be exceeded by the camera - which prevents the reader seeing the
ultimate ground of the story. Nonetheless, it is in Film that Beckett decides
to unveil his ultimate image. Having dismantled all the penultimate images
(photos, windows, animals, mirrors etc.) which might yet lend profundity
to the scene, the Man/Object (the man as his work, his 'text') discovers the
Eye as his 'I', as his inner Subjectivity that had been pursuing him through-
out. Accordingly, it is not possible to abolish such a final self-perception.
Imagination can be impoverished or rendered impotent up to the point where
it meets its last origin, but not beyond it. This is the reason why the Beckettian
endless game never becomes a real endgame. In this regard, one cannot escape
subjectivity. For Beckett, life and death are false: the coma is the truth. The
point of coincidence between art and life, the point of truth of both, is the
coma. The authentic negation of any meaning is meaningful to the extent that
the Subject still keeps the stillness stirring. But the only possibility for seeing
it is to disintegrate any meaning, as 'O' systematically does for three quarters
of the time in Film, until it sits down in the rocking chair. At this point, the
ultimate Beckettian image is, however, unwritable and unreadable; it has no
sign and no sound, for it can only exist in the zone of differance, where no
translation or counter-signing is possible. More than ever, here, art coincides
with life, for the penultimate imagination, the proper place of art, through
'exhaustion' (Deleuze) becomes an 'experience', where dream and feeling are
not an 'expression' but are dream andfeeling, where action and perception, in
Deleuzean terms, turn back to their origin, i.e. affection. Ultimately, the very
writing of this 'text' is not about the Subject but is that Subject itself.
CHAPTER 4

If the Body is Able to Think:

Towards a Philosophy of Theatre

Up to this point - after analyzing the specific foundations of the Beckettian

aesthetics (Chapter i of this study) epitomized by the intention of achieving
an 'inexpressive art' - the philosophical potential of Beckett's work, or the
way in which philosophy can work with Beckett, has been explored through
two main and different stages. Firsdy (Chapter 2), the attempt to interpret
Beckett's thought following Adorno's perspective, i.e. as a way of'understanding
its incomprehensibility', and therefore as a fully philosophical response to its
'organized meaninglessness'. Secondly (Chapter 3), that which can be consid-
ered as a further stage of this Adornian attempt once a properly philosophical
way has been abandoned, i.e. a post-modern, uncritical and differantial1 'not-
understanding the understanding of its incomprehensibility', as an equally 'full
response' to a text through another text, which aims to be the 'direct transla-
tion' of the first without the mediation of a critically philosophical position.
Conclusively, at the end of each chapter, the achievement of Beckett's
work, aided by the critical interpretations philosophers have given it, is shown
through a triple series of'ways-out', as if it were a real actualization of a 'Discours
de la Sortie':2 out of'expressive art' (Chapter 1); out of'essentialist philosophy',
'identity thinking', and eventually out of philosophy as such (Chapter 2); and,
out of writing, of language, of word itself (Chapter 3). This triplex 'outside'
(outside art, philosophy and writing, dealt with throughout this study, not
only exemplifies the fundamental, underlying reason of Beckett's aesthetics,

i Namely, 'unwritable' and 'unreadable', yet existing only as a vague trace (Derrida) in the
text or as a murmur (Blanchot) in the words.
2. See Beckett's lecture at Trinity College Dublin, entitled 'Le Concentrisme' (1930), on
an imaginary French poet, Jean du Chas, author of a Discours de la Sortie (Discourse on
Exit). See Preface of this study, and Samuel Beckett, 'Le Concentrisme', in Disjecta, op.
cit., pp. 35-42..

2.11 CHAPTER 4
i.e. that nothing is expressible', but also his precise intention3 of undoing t ach
single aspect of whatever could be termed an 'expression', and, by extension,
a 'positive possibility'. In other words, if every expression is a settling of the
non-identical, and therefore a deceit, Beckett chooses what is for him the only
acceptable expression: the counter-deception. He deconstructs, disintegrates
each 'form' in order to restore, e contrario, the neutral (true) non-identity.
Thus, precisely because he has the suspicion that each form is deceitful, in this
way he creates a world of anti-forms about which nothing more can be said.
The progressive 'impotence' of his output, from Godot to the dramaticules,
and from the early novels Murphy and Watt up to the 'Second Trilogy' and
Stirrings Still, is certainly a 'necessity' (as Beckett declared repeatedly) but
also a deliberate choice. Like the character of Film, 'E', Beckett himself avoids
any extraneous perception ofhis work, and in doing so, he stays in maximum
proximity to the furthest limit of a 'solid' two-dimensional reality of the work
itself - where the supposed, and avoided, 'third dimension' is 'meaning'. In
doing so, not only does he 'disintegrate' any positive external interpretation
ofhis oeuvre, but also the very possibility of it receiving any kind of reading
or reception. More and more, from The Unnamable onwards, this tendency
would increase, up to the point in which writing itself, the single word as such
(see What is the Word), is missing.4
But what can exist after an untranslatable, structurally differant, and there-
fore extraneous to any metalanguage, endless end? What else might one still
write about Beckett at this point of the treatment ? Or, to put it another way:
if a further chapter on Beckett's philosophical aesthetics might be written
at this stage, from where should one take one's cue? Is there any other area,
external to the zone of Differance (where it is impossible to cross the thresh-
old of the trace or murmur), in which a translator is still able to countersign
something else on Beckett ?
However unlikely it might seem, another practicable way does exist. In
some sense, the above-mentioned 'out' triplex, emerging as a consequence of
3 See in particular the 'German Letter', in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta., op. cit., pp. 170-173.
4 See Chris Ackerley, "The Uncertainty of Self: Samuel Beckett and the Location of the Voice',
in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 1 September Z004, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 39-51 (14).
According to Ackerley, Beckett's failure to go beyond the final impasse of The Unnamable
is the consequence of an antinomy that cannot finally be resolved, i.e. the impossibility
of locating and identifying simultaneously the Voice (the 'I' or the 'Not-I'). Finally, this
antinomy reflects a fundamental principle of Uncertainty.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
the union - argued by Adorno - of the two Beckettian dimensions of aprior-
ity (Apriorität) and concreteness (Konkretheit) which in the end reduces the
meaning of the work ad absurdum, calls for a final 'in', as a fourth and possibly
'centripetal' dimension. The late Beckettian character, E, even once he has got
rid of any perception and 'third dimension' (the meaning as the possibility of
depth, i.e. of a development, a movement or narration, a 'being other than we
are'), cannot escape a new last presence: himself. At this point, on the one
hand, the cul-de-sac of subject is complete; on the other, here more than ever,
the call for an ultimate 'outside', which is the out of subject', emerges. The rev-
elation of a final and irreducible self-presence together with the incapacity of
'Eye', of'perception', to free itself from itself leads Beckett to consider another
alternative - perhaps non-communicating - field different from the writing
of a text. Hence, from the radical inside/outside, subject/object, mind/body
dichotomy, and having gathered a number of valuable indications from James
Knowlson, Vivian Mercier and H. Porter Abbott, as well as having overcome
the Derridean and post-modern idea, 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte', this chapter
begins. The first section will examine some consequences of Beckett's choice
for an 'aesthetics of the unword' and particularly the shift from an eminently
linguistic 'visual angle' towards the effective primacy of sound and music,
as well as the relationship these have with the concepts of time and space.
Section two will look at the later Beckett's major dramas in order to analyze
a number of symbolic structures ofhis theatre, more specifically, the role of
the body/object on stage and the author's continual interrogation of the act
of representation. Finally, section three will consider diverse aspects of the
body in Beckett's plays in relation to various witnesses to his stage directions
and to the significant experience attained in this sense by Jerzy Grotowski
and the Laboratory Theatre.
4.1 From Eye to Ear: A Differantial Shift
4.1.1 A Reversed Dichotomy
As anticipated in Chapter 1 § 3.5, Beckett considered music as a radically other
plane to narrative and painting. In this regard, many scholars have observed
how the importance of music has been underestimated in Beckett and, in
particular, the peculiar position that the sense of hearing had for him, at a
2.11 CHAPTER 4
certain point, in relation to the sense of seeing. Thus, while the biographer
James Knowlson admittedly wished his study (1996) to serve as an instrument
for understanding how music occupied a decisive place in Beckett's life,5 and
Vivan Mercier posed 'painting/music' and 'eye/ear' as total antitheses within
the Beckettian thought, in his remarkable memoir Andre Bernold affirmed
that the decade following The Unnamable was, for the author, a period of
intense reflection and crisis for his art,6 but also the discovery of the centrality
of music over words.7 In addition, during the seventies he repeatedly declared
to Charles Juliet that for him 'the sense of hearing is assuming ever greater
importance as compared with sight'.8 But what exactly was this radical duality
between seeing and hearing intended by Beckett ? What qualitative difference
was there for him between eye and ear?
It would seem that for Beckett the eye is linked to activity and explora-
tion, the search and appropriation of a world, whereas the ear is a passive organ
that receives any sound from outside without distinction. Oddly enough, as
if it were a game of inverted parts, in painting Beckett was a passive amateur,
whereas in music he was active, playing the piano and the flute. Equally curi-
ous is the fact that while in literature and painting Beckett's taste was defi-
nitely oriented towards contemporary avant-garde and modernism, in music
his interests are quite classical and conventional. That Beckett felt in all its
relevance the difference between these 'two worlds' is evident from the begin-
ning: at least from the 'German letter of 1937', this sort of manifesto of his art,
in which he admitted to perceiving language more and more as a 'mask' or a
'veil' 'that must be torn apart in order to get at things (or the Nothingness)
behind it'.9 Hence his clear decision to pursue a 'literature of the unword',10 as
it were, 'a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards
the word, through words [...]' n When saying that the impossibility of elimi-
5 In fact, in the years following Knowlson's biography several studies appeared on the subject
'Beckett and music'.
6 '(Ja m'est devenu completement etranger. Je ne connais pas cet auteur' (Andre Bernold,
L'amitie de Beckett, op. cit., p. 92).
7 Bernold also reports that Beckett, when asked what he would have done had he not been
a writer, replied that he would have listened to music (Ibid., p. 93).
8 Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, op. cit., p. 152.
9 Samuel Beckett, 'German Letter of 1937', translated by Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, op. cit.,
p. 171.
10 Ibid., p. 173.
11 Ibid., p. 171.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
nating language completely must not impede leaving 'nothing undone that
might contribute to its falling into disrepute',12 Beckett specifically intends
to make it as close as possible to something that is peculiar in music, i.e. the
possibility of the void:
Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of
being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's
seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of
sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence?13
However, having had all of this clear in his mind from 1937, it is equally
evident that Beckett always postponed sound and music to language and words:
in the end, his research was concerned with the possibility of this literature of
unword rather than with music. H. Porter Abbott, who, in recent years, has
paid a great deal of attention to Beckett's interest in music, argues convincingly
that this tendency was reversed in Krapp'sLast Tape (1958), thus bringing to
an end the movement begun with Eleutheria (1947). This shift is ultimately
concerned with the loss of form and the consolidation of a view 'in which
music, both as a formal principal and idea, played a much more central role
than it played in the work of earlier decades'.14 According to Porter Abbott,
while Eleutheria still shows many signs that Beckett intended to compose 'a
script that was at the same time a score', in which the narrative element is still
in first place, 'in Krapp, by contrast, the deployment of a tape recorder was a
masterstroke in the art of interruption, allowing extraordinary flexibility in
the making of a script into a score'.15 In Krapp'sLast Tape, calm overwhelms
the storm of Eleutheria, 'enacting in the process the abandonment of oedipal
linearity in narrative which Beckett had accomplished over the preceding ten
years'.16 Significantly, the two main characters of these plays share the same
surname with the sole difference of a 'p'.
When he [Beckett] came to revive Krap as Krapp, he pushed against his first play, recol-
lecting as always to invent. But in this instance Beckett, in effect, wrote the earlier play out
12 Ibid. And he immediately adds: 'I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today'.
13 Ibid., p. 172.
14 H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett. The Author in the Autograph, op. cit., p. 85.
15 Ibid., p. 80.
16 Ibid., p. 76.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
of his oeuvre. In the process, Krapp became Beckett's implicit statement on dramatic
method. Above all, it solved in rich and wonderful ways the problems of narrative
and the representation of time which had plagued Eleutheria.17
This is what H. Porter Abbott calls the 'autographical project' that
Beckett consolidated over the years, 'when he released his art from teleol-
ogy of narrative'.18 While Krapps Last Tape is a benchmark of this project,19
four years after it was written, Beckett composed the two radio plays Words
and Music and Cascando in which the relation of music and verbal material
is on centre stage. In this sense - and this is the core of the proposal of Porter
Abbott's study - the writing of Beckett is not governed by narrative, is not a
conventional autobiography, but is precisely the intention, to use Gontarski's
phrase, to 'undo' autobiography and transform it into 'autography', which is
in its turn governed only by 'that unformed intensity of being in the present
which at every point in the text seeks to approach itself'.20 The autographi-
cal project is a process that disassembles narrative itself by disassembling 'the
formal equivalent of generative fatherhood',21 i.e. by undoing the illusion of
a sequential time. Accordingly, narrative is the telling of a story based upon
and supported by a particular conception of time and the way we experience
it. For Porter Abbott, time is the crucial difference between narrative and
music, as also between eye and ear:
Time in stories is unidirectional in two senses. The story itself proceeds from a beginning
through a middle to an end. And the story is situated in a world like ours in which time
is understood to proceed in one direction. A story may, of course, be told over and over,
so that the beginning in this sense continually recurs. But such retelling happens outside
the world represented within the telling.22
17 Ibid., p. 67.
18 Ibid., p. 87.
19 It is in a 'space' that, as it were, inexhaustibly exhausts its own potential for silence that
Krapp eventually 'finds' himself, engaged in a compelling performance (rendered explicidy
musical by Marcel Mihalovici's composition of 1961).
10 H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett. The Author in the Autograph, op. cit., p. 18.
11 Ibid., p. 19.
22. H. Porter Abbott, 'Samuel Beckett and the Arts of Time: Painting, Music, Narrative',
in Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, edited by Lois
Oppenheim, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999, p. 8.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
This is, in other words, what has been called in this study the 'meaning' or
the 'third dimension' of art. The whole first part of Beckett's activity as a writer
is intended as a disintegration of meaning in art, i.e., in H. Porter Abbott's
view, as the intention to disassemble narrative through the interruption of
sequential time. While literature has always been at its heart 'auto-bio-graphy'
(stressing with 'bios' the temporal and narrative characteristic of the word),
Beckett introduces the 'autography', by eliminating 'bios' as 'time', and so
bringing back the subject to itself.
Music, on the other hand, is free from unidirectionality: within it, time
no longer has an autobiographical' nature. Quoting Lawrence Kramer, H.
Porter Abbott writes that 'music can neither be nor perform a narrative'.23
Unless it is combined with words (in ballads, musicals and operas), music
itself does not advance the narrative. Whether this is true or not, it certainly
seems that for Beckett music was the least narrative among the arts. 'Perhaps
this disjunction of music and narrative', H. Porter Abbott continues, quoting
Knowlson's biography, 'is at the root of Beckett's dislike of opera'.24 Beckett
could not stand any kind of unidirectionality of time, believing it to be a
deceit, and was determined to interrupt any sequentiality in it, as he writes,
through boring 'one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it
something or nothing - begins to seep through'.25
As seen throughout this study, the third phase of Beckett's aesthetics leads
him to a 'return to subjectivity' in terms of total implosion and the coincidence
of parts, but also of the impossibility of escaping one's own condition. The last
sequence of Film shows the two 'Eyes' (that o f ' E ' and of'O') facing each other
and the revelation of this 'new' self-presence testifies the final Beckettian aporia
of the endless end, i.e. that death is impossible but also life is impossible. If the
revelation of the subject is also the trap of the subject, it is also true that Beckett
arrived at this conclusion through a method (announced, as seen, since 1937)
13 Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995, p. 9.
2.4 H. Porter Abbott, 'Samuel Beckett and the Arts of Time: Painting, Music, Narrative', in
Samuel Beckett and the Arts, op. cit., p. 9. Sec also James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The
Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., p. 191. 'Don't imagine that ballet is music. It is precisely
because the music plays a subordinate role in it that ballet annoys me... To represent music
in a particular way through dance, gesture, decors, costumes and so on, is to degrade it'
(Ibid.).
15 Samuel Beckett, 'German Letter', in Disjecta, op. cit., p. 171.
2.11
CHAPTER 4
aimed at deconstructing time in narrative, but did not consider other forms
of time. In conceiving time in words and narrative as an essentially deceptive
operation, Beckett could not 'decide' what to see with his eye, hence in all
arts related to the eye, he turned out to be, in his own words, a 'no-can-er';
in contrast, he certainly could decide what to listen to and perform in music.
The definition of the art of impotence is not appropriate to his conception of
music. If the ear is the principal organ, there is no need, for Beckett, to pursue
the impoverishment and diminishment of perception. To Charles Juliet who
declared how impressed he was by the silence that reigns in Textsfor Nothing,
defining this 'silence' as'[...] a language devoid of rhetoric or literary allusions,
never parasitized by the minimal stories required to develop what it has to say',26
Beckett replied: "When you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear'.27
Consciously or not, from the beginning of the sixties onwards, he started on
another path and in many cases disavowed his former work: 28 though the
deconstruction of narrative was his chosen domain, he was no longer at ease
there. In order to understand this essential shift towards the outside of language,
it is useful to explore the relationship Beckett had with music when, together
with gesture and body( which will be considered in the following section 4.2),
it was the only field, in his view, extraneous to narrative.
4.1.2 Beckett and Music
As has been said, several literary studies on the relationship Beckett had with
music have appeared in recent years, following Knowlson's biography.29 A
first decisive point, in all these, is the analysis of Beckett's tastes and interests
in music. In this regard, Knowlson reports that Beckett was indeed a lover of
music: a fairly good pianist and an enthusiast listener. Yet, his taste seems to
have been rather conservative. Above all, he loved the classics (Haydn, Mozart
and especially Beethoven) and the romantics (Brahms, Chopin, Schumann
2.6 Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde, op. cit., p. 136.
2.7 Ibid.
18 See a few allusions on that in Beckett's dialogues with Andre Bernold and Charles Juliet
(passim).
Z9 See in particular the two collections of studies: Mary Bryden [Ed.], Samuel Beckett and
Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; and Lois Oppenheim [Ed.], SamuelBeckett
and the Arts. Music, Visual and Non-Print Media, op. cit. (1999).
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
and particularly Schubert). He did not like Wagner, Strauss and Mahler, and
also Bach.30 At the same time, his interest in modern music appears to have
been limited. In general, he disliked every author who subordinated too much
music to storytelling or whatever kind of'forms'. Certainly, his love of music
was a constant ofhis life.
Starting from the analysis of time as the element that distinguishes narrative
from music, H. Porter Abbott observes how Beckett, by creating a temporal
event not in the story but in the real time of the text, writes his prose works
'as a kind of music'. No wonder, therefore, that the first approach to Beckett's
music is precisely within the prose text. He is a prose modernist in the sense
that one cannot become so absorbed in the story as to forget the text; but
while this is a characteristic of all the greatest modern prose writers,31 Beckett,
in particular, solicited the attention of the reader's ear, beginning with the
short unit of repetition, which he frequently adopted in his later narratives,
as is very clear in Ping and Rockaby. In the same way, a musically repetitive
and recursive character is present in many later texts of Beckett, in which 'his
language seems to listen to the sounds it makes, independent of meaning, and
then to redistribute them in new combinations'.32 This is intended to discon-
nect the temporal progression of the work by introducing musical modalities
of reversible time and creating a kind of displacement from the dominion of
the story. For Porter Abbott, Beckett's rhythmic and alliterative prose effects
tend 'to remove us from story time - from that kind of time',33 thus show-
ing the impossibility of the reconstruction of narrative. Therefore, Beckett
incorporates a musical pace within the text with the precise aim of resisting
the pervasive control of the powerful structure that is narrative, or the way
we know time, the 'vector of history'.
Leaving aside the instrumental use he made of rhythm in his prose works,
and coming then to the more specific relationship between Beckett's oeuvre
and music, an original essay by Daniel Albright posits the entire question
30 See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., pp. 163,19z,
194, 496.
31 'As in Woolf, Joyce, Stein, and others, one's attention is split between where the words
are sending us (meaning, action) and how the words are. Much modernist prose is "musi-
cal" in this elementary sense' (H. Porter Abbott, 'Samuel Beckett and the Arts of Time:
Painting, Music, Narrative', in Samuel Beckett and the Arts, op. cit., pp. 17-18).
32 Ibid., p. 18.
33 Ibid., p. 19.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
within a mythological story, that of a challenge between Apollo and the satyr
Marsyas in a music contest, as the poet Ovid tells it in the sixth book of
Metamorphoses.34 The story sets up the antithesis of stringed instruments and
wind instruments, such as the difference between Apollo's lyre, whose vibrat-
ing strings, according to the Pythagorean tradition, are the direct responses
to the ratio of universe, and Marsyas' aulos (a reed instrument invented by
Minerva), which represents the immediacy of expressive music, being in itself
wind, breath, feeling made sound. In the end, Apollo won, and was so enraged
by Marsyas' temerity that he roped him to a tree and flayed him alive':35 in
this way, he establishes that music is essentially a mediated art where direct
expression is the most dangerous goal. In this dialectic of Marsyas and Apollo,
in Albright's view, the Beckettian aesthetics oscillated from time to time: As
a young writer, satirist, and satyr, Beckett illustrated the collapse of form; as
an old writer, Beckett found ways of showing that Apollonian formal invari-
ance could be as purposeless and bleak as formlessness itself'.36 In this sense,
Albright continues, Beckett is quite similar to Arnold Schönberg who, in the
mid-i920s, was 'tired of being Marsyas and decided to be Apollo': 37 therefore,
he abandoned the so-called free atonal style of Erwartung (used from about
1908 to 1913), intuitive and immediate - in which dissonance was the exact
sound equivalent for passion - in favour of the twelve-tone system, which
was 'ostensibly a means for preventing a formation of a key, a musical center
of gravity, within a composition'.38
In reality, Albright's positing of a possible dialectic feeling/ formalism, both
for Beckett and Schönberg, simplifies the state of things significantly. While
34 Daniel Albright, 'Beckett as Marsyas', in Samuel Beckett and the Arts, op. cit., pp. 15-49.
35 Ibid., p. 15.
36 Ibid., p. 46.
37 Ibid., p. 30.
38 Ibid. There is no need to remark on the different position that Adorno has in this regard.
Adorno thinks that the style of Erwartung, or the expressive phase of Schönberg, is from
the beginning radically and qualitatively different from the Western and romantic tradition
of expressionism, as it leads to 'exasperation' the 'principle of the expressive'. Successively,
Schönberg s shift towards the formal innovations of the twelve tone system represents
the 'truly subversive moment' of his composition as it responds to a historic necessity.
The static twelve-tone system confers an aspect of authenticity to music, when facing the
return of the identical, precisely in being outside history (see in particular the section
'Schönberg and the Progress', in Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans.
Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley Blomster, London: Sheed and Ward, 1973).
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
the parallel between Beckett and Schönberg is in many senses acceptable, as
Beckett himself acknowledged,39 it is incorrect to define the late Beckettian
aesthetics as Apollonian, since in such an interpretation of Marsyas' expres-
sivity versus Apollo's invariance, the complex problematic of Beckett's art of
non-expression, theorized in painting as in literature, is missing entirely. It
is possibly less clear when and how Beckett would have changed his mind
in this regard - and, above all, in this way the crucial difference between his
contemporary avant-garde preference in painting and narrative in opposition
to a positively expressionist taste in music is ignored. The real point of the
discussion is that, while the kind of result one might obtain when translating
Beckett's narrative or poetry into music is clear enough, i.e. investigating the
relationship music has with his work, this still leaves intact and unexplored
his own relationship with music. There are many musical compositions based
on or inspired by Beckettian texts - by Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Heinz
Holliger, György Kurtäg, and others. In these cases, composers often try to
make their music Beckett-like by writing a lot of scales, in the belief that such
musical minimalism adequately reflects Beckett's own minimalism. Generally,
these scales are descending, conforming to Beckett's famous 'narrowings of
affect' and 'droopings of mood', as he himself wrote out at the end of Watt.40
Also representing scalar technique is Morton Feldmans music (1987) for
Beckett's Words and Music (1962). This radio play originally had music by
John Beckett (cousin of Samuel), but the collaborators were not satisfied
with the result, and Beckett was curious to hear what Feldman could do.41
Beckett liked the way Feldman used to work and especially, as Guy Debrock
remarks in his article, 'he may have noted Feldman s fascination for sounds in
themselves, a fascination not unlike Beckett's own for the sound of words'.42 A
letter that Feldman wrote to Beckett while composing the music for the opera
'Neither' best evidences this: 'The tone is sung beautifully and there will be
no feeling of a parlando-like approach. She is singing, yet it is not directional.
39 Interviewed by John Gruen, Samuel Beckett once declared: 'Perhaps, like the composer
Schönberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language. Unlike
them, however, I have tried not to concretize the abstraction - not to give it yet another
formal context' {Vogue, December 1969, 210).
40 See Samuel Beckett, Watt, New York: Grove Press, 1959, p. 154.
41 Beckett and Feldman had already worked together on Neither (1977).
42 Guy Debrock, "Ihe Word Man and the Note Man: Morton Feldman and Beckett's Virtual
Music', in Samuel Beckett and the Arts, op. cit., p. 70.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
Time makes the line, the connection. Time itself becomes what is lyrical. It
would be as if she is singing a tune but it's not there'.43 In sum, both Feldman
and Beckett agreed on the same idea of music as a non-communicative event,
i.e. a medium that does not convey any meaning except for its own sound. As
Guy Debrock observes, in this case music is the 'missing link' of'a language
which was silence inasmuch as words were no longer the vehicle of meaning,
but a language nevertheless: a language as gesture'.44 The collaboration between
Beckett and Feldman proves precisely the struggle of Beckett with the relation-
ship of words and music (he had already discussed with his composer-friend
Marcel Mihalovici). Clearly, as Debrock puts it, Beckett was composing music
without himself writing it. Beckett's music, or a different, a differantial lan-
guage, a language as gesture, is virtual music. What Feldman actualized of it
is a melody presented, at first, almost as a childhood song, then mirrored in a
major key, and then again repeated in a slightly altered way. Each note of the
scale is repeated twice, haltingly, and eventually sung, as it were, by someone
holding back tears. As Debrock concludes: 'The music is not telling a story,
nor is it expressing sentiment. It is gesture, begging us, commanding us to
react in some way'.4S
Among other things, in his article 'Skeptical Pictures in the Music of
Company, Daniel Herwitz tries to explain the reason why, Beethoven aside,
Schubert and the romantics were Beckett's favourite composers. This is related
to the fragmentation and dissolution of voices, particularly significant in
Company, which render them anonymous voices, yet also attached to a self.
According to Herwitz, on the one hand, romanticism requires a subject whose
voice, in search for the origins of past memories and in the enharmonic modu-
lations of a Schubert or Schumann, may represent the centre of the work. On
the other hand, for what in psychology may be interpreted to be the condition
of an unformed self, Schubert and the romantics write compositions that are
significandy fragile and hypersensitive, a kind of'solipsistic' music in which, as
Herwitz points out, 'one finds the self alone'.46 In this regard, one might affirm
43 From the Program Notes to a performance of Neither, the Holland Festival, 1992 (quoted
in Guy Debrock, "Ihe Word Man and the Note Man: Morton Feldman and Beckett's
Virtual Music', ibid., p. 71).
44 Ibid., pp. 78-79.
45 Ibid., p. 80.
46 Daniel Herwitz, 'Skeptical Pictures in the Music of Company, in Samuel Beckett and the
Arts, op. cit., p. 104.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
that, in spite of the detachment of voices from the 'I', the text of Company
nevertheless remains within the sphere of romantic music:
This is in virtue of its organic, cyclical and lyrical composition, and its voicing of an "I"
in search of its origins. In Company, memories from childhood and images of crawling,
walking, turning (towards and away), movement in general come to "the one in the dark"
in innumerable variations. This technique by which subjectivity is intensified through
the organic, cyclical variations of material is paradigmatically romantic (having been
"invented" by Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz and extended by Wagner, Mahler, and
Rachmaninoff). 47
As Herwitz writes, the musicality of Company is constituted by its lyri-
cal approach to memory and the way in which formal repetition and cyclical
variation operate in it. Yet, whereas the words of this work show non-other
than the way the mind appears to itself under the form of a picture - and the
subjectivity in Beckett's text is nothing if not trapped in such a picture, 'the
music of Company makes company (while retaining solitude and hence fan-
tasy) and is an "improvement" in the character of life which makes life more
"companionable" '.4S
4.1.3 The Third Language in Action
It is hard to say if and to what extent Beckett's contribution to 'the falling into
disrepute' of narrative language has to do, as H. Porter Abbott argues, with a
particular conception of'time'. Certainly, his target was the (de)construction
of a story, i.e. whatever structure or narration that restrained the fundamental
non-identity of reality. In music, however, despite this being classical or roman-
tic, he did not feel this 'restraining' happened; on the contrary, he felt that the
enormous pauses of Beethoven seventh symphony actually dissolved the sound
surface.49 Beckett emphasizes here the unknown art of dissonances, 'a punctua-
tion of dehiscence', the power of music to open a gap that punctuates nothing
other than the silence of a final ending. As Deleuze argues in commenting on
47 Ibid., p. 105.
48 Ibid., p. 118.
49 See Samuel Beckett, 'German Letter of 1937', translated by Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, op.
cit., p. 172.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
these words, Beckett became increasingly intolerant of words: he suffered the
exceptional difficulty of'boring holes' into the surface of language as could
be done by Beethoven or Schubert with the surface of sound. Necessarily,
for Deleuze, Beckett needed a third language - beyond the first two, which
strove to 'exhaust series of things' and to 'dry up the flow of voices' - which
not only operated with images but especially with spaces.50 Language III is, in
fact, the moment of disruption of language, which is related particularly to the
visual character of an aural Image. "Ihe sonorous image, the music', Deleuze
writes again, 'takes over from the visual image, and opens onto the void or the
silence of the final end'.51 This outside of language is achieved, in Deleuze's
view, particularly in television, which 'in part, allows Beckett to overcome the
inferiority of words [...]'." This can happen in different ways:
[...] Either by dispensing with spoken words, as in Quad and Nacht und Träume; or by
using them to enumerate, to expound, or to create a decor, which loosens them and allows
things and movements to be introduced between them (Ghost Trio, ...but the clouds...)-,
or by emphasizing certain words according to an interval or a bar, the rest passing by in
a barely audible murmur, as the end of Eh Joe-, or by including some of the words in the
melody, which gives them the accentuation they lack, as in Nacht und Träume.53
In any of these cases, according to Deleuze, language III is the achievement
of the outside of language, or the best way for Beckett to dissolve the 'terrible
materiality of the word', which does not mean it is a way-out from language,
but only the last and most complete instrument for exhausting the possible,
i.e. what the French philosopher considers the major and fundamental inten-
tion of his art. Or again, language III could be seen to be the very end of all
possibility: the last phase of Beckett's 'aesthetics of exhaustion', as Deleuze calls
it. The return to subjectivity is here marked by an extension to outside, the
50 See also Moncef Belhadjali and Edward J. Lusk, 'A Statistical Analysis of Beckett's Musical
Metaphors', in Samuel Beckett and the Arts, op. cit., pp. 121-142. The imagery and metaphors
delivered through a musical or visual context, according to Belhadjali and Lusk, provide
the 'dimensional enhancements' to Beckett's works. The same idea is expressed by James
Acheson, with regard to Words and Music, in terms of'intersubjective enhancements'
(see James Acheson, 'Beckett Re-Joycing: Words and Music, in Re: Joyce 'n Beckett, Carey,
Phyllis and Ed Jewinski (eds), New York: Fordham University Press, 1992, pp. 50-60).
51 Gilles Deleuze, 'The Exhausted', in Essays Critical and Clinical, op. cit., p. 171.
52 Ibid., p. 173.
53 Ibid.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
'vastitude of space', rather than a way-out, a loss of the self in space. Thus, in
Deleuze's view, this third language ('which is no longer a language of names
or voices but a language of images, resounding and coloring images'54 and
which finds its specificity in his works for television) fulfils the final inten-
tion of Beckett, i.e. to overcome the language of words, which is 'burdened
with calculations, memories, and stories', to finally reach the secret language
of objects. This last, in its turn, will sometimes 'occur in silence, by means of
an ordinary silence, when the voices seem to have died out'.55 Evidently, this
is the specific language of the late works for theatre, radio and television.
The progressive importance the sense of hearing had for Beckett in compari-
son to the sense of seeing, the opening up to a different conception of time
(H. Porter Abbott) and the centrality of space through the use of disruptive
aural images that open up 'holes' in the surface of language (Deleuze), happen
in a way that is difficult to observe or record. A single 'p', lost and unsounded,
differentiates the two characters Krap and Krapp and marks a significant point
in the Beckettian path of the last two decades: the only addition, within a gen-
eral progression towards diminution and impoverishment. Such a differantial
shift is the same movement from the loss of a linguistic and narrative structure
towards the acquisition of another dimension - spatial and non-directional,
best expressed in a certain kind of music, considered in this section - and in
the use of gesture and body that will be dealt with in the following section.
Though residing, as it were 'by definition', outside any kind of'text' or 'score',
this dimension has a definite existence and lets the philosophical research
of Beckett continue on this new plane. The question remains as to whether
language III leads Beckett to discover a really different dimension or is only
the ultimate link in the chain under which the subject is kept.
54 Ibid., p. 159.
55 Ibid.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
4.2 The Self as Object: Philosophy on Stage
4.2.1 Beyond the Stalemate of Subjectivity
While the subjectivity as intellect or as the Eye that plays an endless cat-and-
mouse game with its Object - i.e. 'visual reality', and primarily 'itself' as a part
of that reality - realizes in the end that this game is a trap for the subject itself
(there is no way of escape and no way to capture anything), it seems, however,
that this stalemate does not exhaust the entire world of the subjectivity. As
observed in the previous section, music and language III (in Deleuzian words)
are the vehicles that allow Beckett to explore another form of self-presence: a
presence in sound and space that finally achieves the dissolution of the word
surface - that literature ofunword hoped for by Beckett himself in the 'German
letter'. Yet, while the entire philosophical aesthetic concern of Beckett could
be summed up as the intention to make the real trap of subjectivity be a trap
in art, or conversely, to make aesthetics reveal to the subject its original and
realest truth (all of this ultimately being the coincidence of art and truth), it
is difficult to include the new dimension of the body and ear as a part of the
same trap; at least, in the same terms of the question.
Perhaps Adorno was right in considering Endgame as the summa of
Beckett's art and thought in epitomizing the 'final history of the subject'
(Endgeschichte des Subjects), with no necessity (as he did) to examine any ofhis
other works. Endgame ends with this stalemate - Hamm and Clov, according
to Adorno, being 'counterpointed' as in a double musical fugue, since Hamms
will to die is identical with his life principle, while Clov s will to live may well
bring about the death of both' ,56 Hence, the theoretical conclusion that 'the
beginningwas the end itself, which Hamm synthesizes as follows:'[...] Now as
always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended').57
Yet, even though the end is in the beginning, nonetheless 'you go on'. Thus,
Endgame is followed by the solo mime Act Without Words: a gesture in music
continues, or completes, or concludes the impasse of the story and words - the
impasse of the subject. For this reason, the role and function of this mime -
called by Beckett himself'in some obscure way, a codicil to End-Game (sic)'58
56 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 346.
57 Samuel Beckett, 'Endgame', op. cit., p. 133.
58 See a letter of August 27,1957, to his American publisher, Barney Rosset. The letter is pub-
lished as a frontispiece in Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of
Samuel Beckettfor and in Radio and Television, Abo, Finland: Abo Akademie, 1976.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
- as well as the shift of the focus of the Beckettian aesthetic search for the self
from 'language' to 'body', represent some of the leading motifs that will be
investigated in this section. Even Martin Esslin, in his famous and pioneering
study, stated that Beckett's use of the dramatic medium shows that he has tried
to find means of expression beyond language'59 and that on stage 'one can reveal
the reality behind the words, as when the actions of the characters contradict
their verbal expression'.60 In general, for Esslin, while language in Beckett's
plays serves to express the 'breakdown', the disintegration of language itself,
his use of the stage 'is an attempt to reduce the gap between the limitations
of language and the intuition of being [...]'." Yet, it is arguable whether this
last coda, this transmigration from mental to physical or thing-like categories,
which is also an indubitable fascination with a hors-texte that he already felt
and expressed in the much-quoted 'German letter', is also a new beginning
or simply, as for Deleuze, the last way to exhaust the field of possibilities. In
other words: Is this transcendent and pre-linguistic reality, as when Beckett
spoke to Charles Juliet at the age of sixty-two, the attempt to bring back to
life what he himself called an etre assassine, killed before he was born,62 or the
definitive disembodiment of the T, for what overcomes the text?
Daniel Katz, who, in his study on Beckett's prose,63 concludes that the end
of his narrative, is still a word, though indistinguishable, also argues that, in
these texts, the materiality of subjectivity can only be experienced linguisti-
cally, since 'the subject is language'.64 Yet, since undoubtedly Beckett's entire
work - as Martin Esslin remarked - 'can be seen as a search for the reality that
lies behind mere reasoning in conceptual terms',65 it is true that 'in the theatre
he has been able to add a new dimension to language'.66 This implies that for
Beckett prose and theatre are not simply two equivalent media for examining
59 Martin Esslin, 'Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self, in The Theatre of the Absurd,
London: Methuen, 2001, p. 85. This essay was first published in 1961.
60 Ibid., p. 86.
61 Ibid.
62 See Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde, op. cit.,
p. 138.
63 See Chapter 3, § 3.3.
64 Daniel Katz, SayingI No More. Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett,
op. cit., p. 182.
65 Martin Esslin, 'Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self', in The Theatre ofthe Absurd, op.
cit., p. 88.
66 Ibid.
 2.11 C H A P T E R 4
the question of the subject. Katz s suggestion, in this regard, is that 'the struc-
turing role often occupied by the "subject" in the prose is taken by the literal
materiality of the scenic space in the theater',67 and also that 'the "subject" of
the prose is replaced not by the "character" but by the stage in the theater'.68
Katz leaves open the working hypotheses for an investigation of the aspects
of Beckett's theatre in order to examine to what extent the 'scenic space' is
representing the linguistic cogito in the prose, and, most importandy, to look
at what else one might find behind or beyond linguistic reality. It is here that,
in the largest sense, the Beckettian stage, or the 'I' in Beckett's theatre, could
begin to be constructed.
4.2.2 Thinking Differentlyfrom Thinking: The Body in Beckett's Later Theatre
If the Beckettian subject - as Daniel Katz has argued - is not represented by
characters but by the stage as a whole, it must be said that this appears above
all as a space open upon darkness: an element always present in his plays from
which image and then speech will emerge. In general, as many commentators
have noted, on Beckett's stage the space acts both as a frame ('the stage rep-
resenting itself as stage, as performance'),69 which always persists and remains
- no matter what happens to the characters, and as an element that continu-
ally recalls the absence of what eludes the framework of representation. Such
a division symbolizes two levels of representation and, by extension, of the
identification of the self, which are the verbal and the scenic. The 'character'
of Beckett's plays, too - which in Film was already made up of two parts: Eye
(pursuer/perceiver) and Object (pursued/perceived) - in most ofhis late theat-
rical features is divided into voice(s) and body. Most of the bodies appearing in
Beckett's plays are tied to relations of authority within the theatrical apparatus
(text, author, director, audience), so that they are subject to laws of discipline
and often also to physical restriction (i.e. they cannot move or leave the stage
space - at least for the duration of the performance). In many cases, they are
also hampered by physical disabilities. In another sense, the bodies generally
tend to be fragmented and denaturalized - mouths and heads suspended in
67 Daniel Katz, Saying I No More. Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett,
op. cit., p. 181.
68 Ibid.
69 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, op. cit., p. 114.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
darkness, costumes and gestures stylized, in order to underline Beckett's use of
the body as a pure object of perception rather than the centre of identity.
In such a situation, the body, dissociated from its normal function of
indicating an individual identity, seems to become the place of a struggle for
specular possession: it is simultaneously an object to be manipulated through
discipline and submission, and a space that eludes and resists linguistic control.
In some sense, it appears to be an authentic threshold between self and other,
internal and external: a border zone between subject and object that is often
presented as surrounded by darkness where the image is never shown but always
perceived as unstable and in need of being defined. This point of intersection,
which is neither self nor other - or, in Katz's view, is the subject in space, the
subject who has acquired his spatial dimension - is not essentially a static,
stable and unified place, but within it everything (the opposition between
darkness and light, the usual boundaries, the materials of representation) is
destabilized and ambiguous. In short, the body on Beckett's stage is both the
place of the struggle for control and mastery, as well as the 'between spaces'
zone of maximal perceptual instability of the drama.
In her remarkable study, Anna McMullan focused on the development in
Beckett's use of stage space in relation to his later dramas and, in this respect,
she takes Play (1962), where three heads are forced to narrate their texts under
the interrogation of the Light, as a significant starting point of this process.
In particular, McMullan writes, 'Beckett's presentation of the body in Play
and in subsequent plays belies any stable or unitary concept of self which the
narratives may attempt to establish'.70 The illusion of unity, of self-mastery, of
escape from the chaos in which each subject started and was born, is, in the
text and structure of Play, overwhelmed by the awareness of the fundamental
disunity or 'abyss' that appears within fragmented images of the body, which
is literally turned into an object.
The protruding heads are severed from the rest of the body and the image itself is in three
separate parts - Beckett specifies in the stage directions that the three urns should not
touch. Even more radically than in the preceding plays, Play resists investing the image of
the body with the truth of individual identity. Not only urns are identical, but the faces
are almost entirely deprived of any animation or individual features.71
70 Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial. Samuel Beckett's Later Drama, London: Routledge,
1993, p. 18.
71 Ibid., pp. 19-20.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
Moreover, while the Light is indubitably a figure of authority, in the repeti-
tion of the entire play its power seems to be subjected to the cycles of repeti-
tion like the figures, and it fails to make an ordered and meaningful narrative,
so that it finally 'becomes indistinguishable from the activity of narration, or
uttering'.72 "Ihe referential value of the verbal text', McMullan goes on to write,
'is therefore increasingly undermined, as the speech of the figures becomes
materialized as utterance'.73 The repetition of the play verbatim stresses the
fact that the text becomes sound without meaning, where individual stories
and thoughts are reduced to mere 'things', thus marking probably the first
complete overcoming of the body in Beckett's theatre versus language. Finally,
'the hell of judgement and the search for meaning becomes a meaningless
play or replay'.74
Increasingly, as Stan Gontarski argues, in his later dramatic works Beckett
plays 'his stage characters with and especially against narrative, stage action
played against speech or text'.75 In their own way, which is not the ability of
language but rather the very physicality of their presence, the bodies of char-
acters resist the text solely by virtue of themselves. To the power of thought
and reason and the authority of speech and significance, they oppose them-
selves as presence, by means, as it were, of the thinking of 'not thinking' (i.e.
'not meaning', neither indicating nor aiming to be anything other than what
they are) against the thinking of the text. If thought is a pretence to in-form
the infiniteforms of the world, and through the narration of a story to confer
them from outside a meaning (the indication of what they are), in such a way
as to catalogue and describe them as identities and differences, and finally draw
from the narration of the story a 'History' (society), and from the description
of the 'identical' an 'Identity' (subject); the bodies, inversely, are the victims,
the counter-parts, the objects of this process. As pure objects they cannot
but oppose their physical materiality, which persists and goes on being itself,
i.e. a thing interpreted from outside, but never a significance or identity as
such. This, indeed, is a form of rebellion of the inside against the outside: a
determined as much as unmotivated revolt of the body versus mind; a way
of opposing itself, the thing-per-se, to meaning. In some sense, an 'intention',
71 Ibid., p. 2.3.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., p. 2.4.
75 S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 173.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
but not intended or directed by thinking or reason. Hence, a stark contrast is
derived in terms of authority and passive rebellion, which is clearly evident
in the plays now to be considered.
In That Time (1975) and A Piece of Monologue (1979), Beckett's target is
more than ever the structures of identity and the focus is, above all, the desta-
bilization of the textual and visual images used to shape the subject and his-
tory. Individual and historical identity seems here to be nothing more than a
series of interchangeable masks and discontinuous frames of existence, where
it is impossible to perceive anything other than a general ambiguity. As James
Knowlson points out, 'Beckett was very much aware that That Time lay "on the
very edge of what was possible in the theatre" '.76 Yet, the traditional categories
of identity are undermined in these plays precisely because of the juxtaposi-
tion of scenic and textual forms and spaces, so that absence and presence,
past and present, space and time are, ultimately, indistinguishable. In That
Time in particular, this juxtaposition of opposed elements is paradoxically
achieved through the separation ofvoice(s) from listener. This division between
voice/text - which is the only access to history and memory as narration and
description - appears as the only instrument capable of finding meaning in
things - and the listener/perceiver is closely related to the questioning of the
traditional categories of space and time. As Anna McMullan remarks, in this
play 'the stillness of description is interrupted by the impossibility of arrest-
ing motion, either that of the body or that of time, while the experience of
time is frequently presented in terms of spatial difference'.77 Beckett ultimately
'exploits these two modes, yet also confuses them, so that if time is spatial-
ized, space is also infused with time'.78 The element of the body in That Time
is represented by the continual movement or physical displacement of the
protagonist within the narrative, which is a search for shelter from the trap of
signifiers. The juxtaposition here is stressed by the difference between a text
that aims to possess images of existence and a body deprived of any posses-
sion and authority: "Ihe dissolution of the images within the text is paralleled
by the silence of the voices on stage, also engulfed by space and silence once
the text has ended'.79 Nevertheless, as McMullan concludes, the smile of the
76 See James Knowlson, Frescoes of the Skull, James Knowlson and John Pilling (eds), London:
Calder, 1979, p. 119.
77 Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial. Samuel Beckett's Later Drama, op. cit., p. 53.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., p. 59.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
Listener at the end of performance is unexpected and open to a number of
interpretations, once more unsettling the audience, confronting them with
the uncertain and the unknown'.80
In A Piece of Monologue, the diverse range of identities emerging in That
Time is reduced to a series of almost identical reflections. The stage image,
too, reveals an entire human body rather than its mere fragments, as in Not I
or That Time. The human figure is juxtaposed between two other objects: a
globe-shaped lamp and the pallet of a bed. Although the voice, in this case, is
'within' the body, its stillness on stage and status as a visual form, highlights
the difference between the subject of speech and the body-object. "Ihe objec-
tification of the body', McMullan writes, 'is accentuated through the direct
parallel with the inanimate lamp which is of the same height and size as the
speaker and whose globe is compared to a skull [...]'." The complete stasis of
the body contrasts with the vivacity assumed by the lamp and, significantly,
the only movement on stage, apart from the speaker's lips, is the gradual fading
of the lamplight at the end of the play. In general, the characteristic of A Piece
of Monologue is a wide series of oppositions (birth/death, light/darkness,
and movement/stillness) which are juxtaposed in order to generate a general
sensation of instability. The final lines of the text stress the lack of presence
throughout the protagonist's existence, his entire life made uniquely of shad-
ows: 'Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost...he all
but said ghost loved ones [...] The globe alone. Alone gone.'82
Beckett's last plays for the stage, Catastrophe (1982) and What Where
(1983), written about two decades after Play, return to the questions of repre-
sentation, authority and coercion exercised upon the individual body. In par-
ticular, Catastrophe83 is set in a theatre and focuses on the training of an actor's
body to represent an image of catastrophe to an audience. The spectacle in
preparation consists of the revelation of the body of the Protagonist as a visible
object, progressively exposed and dissected, placed upon a plinth, remaining as
motionless as a statue, to produce an image of human suffering, or catastrophe.
Unlike many other plays of Beckett from Happy Days onwards, in Catastrophe
80 Ibid., p. 60.
81 Ibid., p. 61.
81 Samuel Beckett, 'A Piece of Monologue', in The Complete Dramatic Works,- op. cit.,
p. 419.
83 Written in French, this play was dedicated to Vaclav Havel, by that time incarcerated for
his writings, which contributed to label it as a 'political' play.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
the stage space appears fully lit, as if, here more than elsewhere, the play focuses
on the visible rather than the dark surroundings of the stage - and this 'visible'
is, relentlessly, the speechless body of the Protagonist. This play is evidendy
concerned with the act of looking, interrogation and the power relations this
involves. Two 'spaces' are opposed on this stage: on the one hand, the space of
power (to which there are implicit references here in the figure of the Director
who calls for Light, like the Divine Creator), on the other hand, the human
figure, the Protagonist, representing the repressed (in a sense, 'unrepresented')
space of suffering (like the sacrificial victim, the crucified body - as Christ's,
exposed to the gaze of the audience). Nevertheless, towards the end of the play,
the body of the victim manifests some expressions of revolt, which prefigure
the final gesture: after being the object of the audience's gaze throughout the
play, the Protagonist finally raises his head (despite the Director's certainty
that he will not do it) and fixes the audience with a stare ofhis own, until the
end of the spectacle is countersigned by applause. The same audience appears,
through this gesture, the 'slave' of the Director, as it is accepting the image he
created; yet, at the same time it sympathizes with the Protagonist and his final
resistance, in this case marked by an equal and contrary gaze. Here, as Anna
McMullan points out, 'through the power of the look, the subjected body in
Catastrophe becomes a resisting body, while the play as a whole exposes the
apparatus of spectacle in its collusion with forces of authority and subjection'.84
This struggle underlines one important characteristic relating to the body in
Beckett's plays: the intrinsic/inner opposition, perhaps even rebellion, towards
the Light, or Voice, or Gaze coming from outside.
The same external figure or voice, despite the various adaptations Beckett
made for stage and television, is the agent of control over the characters' bodies
in Beckett's last play, What Where, whose world premiere was directed by Alan
Schneider in New York, in 1983. The text of this play, which evinces many
similarities with Roughfor Radio II, deals with the search for a 'key phrase' that
will discover the truth and identify presence or identity. Moreover, it considers
the continual deferral of this truth, perpetuated in an interminable series of
interrogations, alongside the victim's inability to say 'what' and 'where'. The
series of repetitions which follows, constituting the fundamental structure of
What Where, undermines at many levels the identification of speech with the
presence of an author as creator, and the perception of a homogenous space
84 Ibid., p. 33.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
on stage. As he did occasionally, Beckett here uses technology (in various ways
for the television and theatre productions) to construct a number of different
stagings and series of spaces, created precisely by the game of repetitions. Once
more, the divorce between perceiver and perceived is both emphasized and
perpetuated, and the general perception of a lack of unity, of the replacement
of identity with difference, is the final result of this. In McMullan's view, the
play can be read not only as a parody of creation, but of history as a struggle
for mastery over knowledge, or over meaning',85 where Beckett's use of repeti-
tions 'questions the very notion of identity and presence'.86 Again, however, as
was equally evident in other works of Beckett, there is always a gap between
the visual focus of the play, the text or voice recorded in the script, and the
non-visual, unrecorded emotions that pass through the medium of music and
the gestures of the body. The same repetitions, in fact, are a means of staging
the paradoxical centrality of the loss of the spatial centre as well as stressing
the persistence of desire, the need to 'go on' and 'rebel'.
From the very first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953, Beckett
realized the advantage that a theatre's physical presence could give to his lit-
erary creation. Though Beckett's work with actors started and evolved away
from emotional emphasis, the theatre became for him, ever more significantly,
a medium through which he could go beyond the text and the use of voice and
image. The bors-texte of Beckett is characteristically marked by the persistent
physicality of characters on stage. In his play rehearsals, he often suggested
the actors concentrate attention on the 'persistence' of their presence, espe-
cially their body, beyond the formal limits of art. This is manifestly evident
in Catastrophe, as noted by H. Porter Abbott, where the Protagonist, when
'outlasting the canned applause that concludes the play, seems to outlast the
play itself'.87 Beckett assigns to the physical, unwritten, out-of-textual, and
silent, presence on stage the specific task of'persistence', i.e., in literal terms,
the alter ego of subjectivity - the discontinuity of the distinctive integrity of
the 'I', which is also the subversive, and moral, phase in this final period of
Beckettian research.
85 Ibid., p. 43.
86 Ibid., p. 40.
87 H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett. The Author in the Autograph, op. cit., p. 47.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
4.1.3 An Act Without Words
It is likely that the discovery of Self as divided into Eye and Object, or the
coming out of this new dimension/presence that resists the authority of lan-
guage, lies at the heart of Beckett's famous sentence, referring to himself as the
writer of the Trilogy: 'It has become completely foreign to me. I don't know
this author'.88 As has been seen, from the beginning of the sixties onwards, this
opposition between mind (intended primarily as language) and body (intended
as physical gesture and presence on stage) would increase up to the extremes
of the almost unperformable last plays - where the dichotomy is so strong as
to undermine the same identity of the drama. Nevertheless, this increasing
tendency to counterbalance, not to mention oppose, words and physical pres-
ence, i.e. the verbal authority of a subject and the scenic remission of an object,
may well have been announced from the first performance of the Beckettian
masterpiece Endgame, where the peculiar coda to the play, 'in some obscure
way' (as Beckett said), anticipated all that has been said so far.
When it was staged for the first time in 1957, the mime Act Without Words
/was branded by a number of critics 'a little too obvious and pat', or 'over-
explicit', 'over-emphasized', as such, for many years it was relatively ignored.8'
Not even Adorno seemed greatly interested in lingering over it, since he dis-
missed it pithifully as 'a kind of epilogue' to Endgame like 'its own terminus ad
quemI90 In reality, ./4c/ Without WordsIAxziAy contains a number of significant
cues to the later Beckett and, most importandy, acts as an authentic 'codicil
to Endgame, namely, the 'counterpart' that is juxtaposed to the endgame of
subjectivity,91 investigated throughout this chapter. As Stan Gontarski wrote,
'rather than an obvious, unparticularized mime about illusion or mirage,
Beckett has created here one of his most subde and compact images of the birth
of existential humanity, of the existential artist, with all the ironies inherent
88 See note 5 of this chapter. See also Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and
Bram Van Velde, op. cit., pp. 147-148.
89 See Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1961, p. 147; Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett,
New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1967, p. 191; and John Fletcher and John Spurling, Beckett:
A Study of His Plays, New York: Hill and Wang, 1971, p. 118.
90 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 337.
91 This endgame of the self' cannot be better expressed than in Adorno's own words: 'Endgame
posits the antithesis, that precisely this self is not a self but rather the aping imitation of
something non-existent' (Ibid., p. 343).
2.11 CHAPTER 4
in the coincidence of birth and death'.92 The protagonist is thrown, born, into
a hostile environment from which he cannot exit and in which he cannot
succeed. At the beginning he appears to be a thinker but, because nature is
hostile to him, he is ill-equipped to fight the external forces. Consequendy,
he tries to survive, securing some water in the desert with what he has, i.e.
his hands; these he examines attentively, his prehensile thumbs and fingers,
and his mind. He invents a number of tools (scissors, ropes, cubes), but when
he learns to use them freely, enabling him to exit the scene, they are confis-
cated. The rather obvious allegory that critics have seen here is that of a man
(Adam, Tantalus?) punished for his ambition. Yet, as Gontarski argues, this
play retains a number of peculiar anomalies that suggest a significant shift from
the usual Beckettian works. Apart from the fact that there are no words for
the first time, in Act Without Words I 'the protagonist remains through most
of the play active, healthy, even athletic, not an avatar of Belacqua, Murphy
or Watt, nor one of the paraplegics, nor even a bowed Clov'.93 He does not
suffer physical deterioration and his final immobility, Gontarski says, seems
willed. 'Unlike Waitingfor Godot, moreover, where we are never sure of Godot's
existence, here a force outside humanity certainly exists. The protagonist, like
Jacob, wrestles with it to confirm its substance, its fundamental materiality'.94
Finally, 'the action of the mime is linear, apparently terminal, not the unusual
Beckettian circle'.95 According to Gontarski, whereas in the end the superior
force seems to defeat the protagonist, the particular climax of the play (in
which the beginning coincides with its terminus) may suggest not a pathetic
defeat, but 'conscious rebellion, a deliberate, willful refusal to obey'.96 In this
final refusal to struggle for the most elemental of man's needs, he 'breaks free
of need the way Murphy never could. Man, in a frenzy of (in)activity, is born
- free. If at first we saw man created by another, we end with Man creating
himself'.97 Interestingly, Gontarski deduces that the element of 'rebellion',
the struggle between the protagonist and the more powerful outside force,
91 S. E. Gontarski, '"Birth Astride of a Grave": Samuel Beckett s^rt Without Words F, in The
Beckett Studies Reader, edited by S. E. Gontarski, Gainesville, University Press of Florida,
1993, p. 30 (first published in TheJournal of Beckett Studies, No. I, Winter 1976).
93 Ibid., p. 31.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., p. 31.
97 Ibid.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
suggests the final point of equilibrium in the total uncertainty: the birth of
this man begins when the play ends, when outside forces have won. Birth and
death are at the same point, the self, thus divided - where it is impossible to
predict who will defeat the other.
Perhaps the body in Beckett is subjected hopelessly to the voice of the 'I'
in the same way as subjectivity was trapped within itself - and language is the
jailor. Yet, the body does constitute, at least in principle, precisely because is
a mere 'thing', the only possibility of escaping such a dominion of authority.
Its opportunity for release passes through the rebellion of the body, based
on a way of thinking other than thinking - the thing as thing, which stands
against language and thought opposing them with its 'not thinking', which
is nonetheless an existing thing, a thing that still 'goes on'. This 'act without
words' is founded on the fact that the body is, in any case, 'other', an 'other'
subjected and oppressed, but still other. Therefore, while Beckett's conception
of the understanding, in Adorno's terms, the fact that 'not meaning noth-
ing becomes the only meaning',98 and his artistic credo meant to express the
impossibility to express, or to 'unword' literature, the Beckettian conception
of body in the work of art matches this state of things but from the opposite
side. In fact, the body is the 'opposite side'. Language and mind, and words,
being the expression of an impossibility (to express), the body is, conversely,
the expressive impossibility of a possibility (of being). Nevertheless, the active
side of being, in a sense, is the only Beckettian 'on' that can be a real 'on'. While
'thinking', in Beckett, works towards a 'truth operation' in order to purify itself
from mystification, and in so doing, tends to become a thing (a sound, or a
form, or a pure sequence) in itself, one might say, in contrast, that if the body
were able to think, it would not think at all but would simply exist as such. A
serious reflection on Beckett's philosophy of the body opens up to a consid-
eration of, rather than the 'yes' of the 'no', i.e. the positive form of negation,
namely, understanding and language, what lies behind all this, i.e., the negative
forms (as bodies are in the Beckettian plays) of a positive possibility. Only in
this precise sense, i.e. as a revelation and an experience of such a 'possibility'
produced by the impossible exposition and affirmation per se of the body on
stage, a Beckettian philosophy of theatre can be thought of - but certainly not
as a theoretical-philosophical discourse on theatre. Although the body is, by
definition, subject to the mind - the mind is language; is linguistic expression;
98 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand Endgame', op. cit., p. 338.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
is identical explanation and narration of things, and therefore the mind is the
'identity', the very 'I' of the subject - and cannot exist separately from it, it
is also true that, as 'object', the body exists in a different relation towards the
mind than that which the mind has towards the body. And in this qualitative
difference, which is silent and inexplicable, lies what for Beckett lies behind
language. That which body opposes to language is what Adorno calls an 'aes-
thetic expression', i.e. an expression that 'comports itself numerically, just as
the expression of living creatures is that of pain'.99 For Adorno, this expression
'is the suffering countenance of artworks',100 i.e. the characteristic of authentic
art that 'closes itself off to being-for-another [...] and becomes eloquent in
itself'; 101 in other words, it is 'the antithesis of expressing something', since
'the true language of art is mute, and its muteness takes priority over poetry's
significative element'.102 Intrinsically, the body acts against language, and in
this rebellion lies the possibility indicated by Beckett, the mystery of the 'I'll
go on': the second part, in any sense, of his research.
However, more than a theoretical discussion, this 'outside-text dimension',
related to acting and the use of the body in theatre, can be better observed in a
particular field, i.e. the way in which Beckett as director used to stage his plays.
Here, as is the 'practice' of Beckett, according to his 'guidelines' for acting,
a number of clues will lead to a spontaneous comparison between him and
other directors - in particular, when these happened to stage his plays - in
order to define exactly the Beckettian philosophical position, i.e. that of the
'aesthetics of truth' expressed in his theatre. In the following section, Beckett's
way of directing will be analyzed and commented upon, with the help of a
number of important playwrights and directors who, in many cases, worked
with him. Successively, a comparison with the director and theatre theorist
Jerzy Grotowski will be useful in order to emphasize the peculiar conception
of Beckett's theatre in terms of the body.
99 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. no.
100 Ibid., p. in.
101 Ibid., p. i n .
101 Ibid.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
4.3 Notes From Stagings: Beckett with Grotowski
As already seen, this chapter deals with a number of'extra-linguistic' features,
concerning the later period of Beckett's artistic output, in order to catch a
glimpse of - what might be termed - the outside of Beckett's 'discourse on
exits'. While the final Beckettian 'aesthetics of the unword', by this stage, has
truly achieved the aforementioned muteness of the work, with each and every
minimal residuum of a word or of an expression being nothing other than the
remainder or seal of the authentic and final silence of things, there is still a
'context' in which the Beckettian 'mute work' finds a place. This entire chapter,
as a sort of appendix to a philosophical study on Beckett - where philosophi-
cal (or any other kind o f ) discourse, is now exhausted - is intended to provide
supplementary information on the final, mute result of his philosophy and
art-theory. After exhausting meaning, what remains is the 'body': the bare
'corpus' of reality, which was once in-formedby that meaning. The body, just
like the authentic work of art, is realbxsx mute - and Beckett's entire effort as a
writer is perhaps directed to preventing, in every way possible, such a muteness
from being brought back to words. Hence, the initial theme of this chapter,
which investigates all the hors-texte dimensions of the late Beckettian world
that might provide a 'context' for this muteness. In this regard, an important,
though not decisive, extra-textual witness, unaddressed thus far, is the practi-
cal staging of a play as intended by Beckett. The entire following section aims
to clarify 'in practice', the way in which Beckett conceived of the text-body
relationship on stage, through the testimony of those who worked with him,
and comparison with the director and art-theorist Jerzy Grotowski - a figure
who during the sixties and seventies was as famous as Beckett, and whose
name was most closely associated with the primacy of the body over mind and
text. Concerning the main thesis of this study - because of the many ways of
interpreting the words 'truth' and 'authenticity', particularly in theatre - this
section's conclusion aims at a the clarification, and removal of possible misin-
terpretations, of what the Beckettian 'aesthetics of truth' is in practice.
4.3.1 Beckett Canon of Directing
How did Beckett direct his own works? What were his direction notes, his
indications to actors, so as to fully express his texts ? In what sense did he inter-
pret the relation between a text and its actual performance ? Most importandy,
2.11 CHAPTER 4
is this of any help in understanding the ultimate philosophical aim of his
research?
When interviewed by Lois Oppenheim, Antoni Libera103 once numbered
what he considers the most significant points of Beckett's way of directing his
own productions:
i. Approaching a play (both text and stage activities) as if it were a musical score. Perceiving
everything in formal categories. Establishing how many times a given theme, word, or
gesture reoccurs. Insuring that all types of repetitions are like echoes, refrains - that is,
seeing to it that they are performed in exactly the same or a very similar manner.
i. Attempts at bringing out the melody and rhythm of the text. Treating each text as if it
were poetry. Proper placing of logical accents.
3. Avery precise designing of the stage movements, as if in a ballet. Measuring the number
of steps taken, establishing such details as over which shoulder the actor turns around,
with which foot he begins to walk, how long (in seconds) the pause is between one
movement and the next.
4. The pace of acting and speaking. The majority of the plays were intended to be acted
or played quickly (allegro, presto). Playing Beckett's plays too slowly kills them. Pauses
marking a falling silence should be distinctively different from pauses that mark a change
of tone (or topic).
5. Bringing out comic elements, which are a mixture of Irish humor and classics of the
silent movies (Chaplin, Keaton).
6. Bringing out sadness and lyricism, with all their delicate shades. No black gloom.
7. The spirit of German romanticism: paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, the music
of Franz Schubert, German romantic poetry (as a source of inspiration, not simply to
\ 104
use).
Although he was not a disciple, in the strict sense, of Beckett-as-director, as,
for example, Pierre Chabert and Walter Asmus were, Libera here demonstrates
a deep knowledge of what he calls the 'Beckett canon of directing'. Though the
elements enumerated by Libera point towards a quite pedantic way of direct-
ing - this is nonetheless the truly Beckettian way. Since Beckett's plays have
very elaborate and detailed stage directions, the problematic of director free-
dom in relation to their mise-en-scene has always been highly complex. James
103 Antoni Libera has directed a number of Beckett's plays in his native Poland, in England
and in Ireland. He has also translated most of Beckett's work into Polish and written
several pieces on the Irish writer.
104 Interview with Antoni Libera, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett, op. cit.,
pp. 108-109.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
Knowlson relates that, particularly during the years following his Nobel prize,
which obviously made Beckett 'fashionable', several productions throughout
the world raised a number of disturbing aesthetic and legal questions.105 Tom
Bishop, a literary critic and long-time friend of Beckett, argues that 'while
Beckett was alive, a certain restraint, due to world-wide respect for the author,
gave relative protection to the work. But now that he is gone, what will pre-
serve the integrity of the plays?'106 As Lois Oppenheim observes, while it is
true that 'Roger Blin and Alan Schneider, Beckett's foremost first-generation
directors',107 though strikingly different in their artistry (the former resolutely
antirealist, the latter pure Stanislavsky), did see themselves as 'invisible orches-
trators', as for them the role of director was that of'playwright's surrogate',
in contrast, many others suffered such restriction greatly, in some cases even
openly contesting it, claiming that the director has to be an interpreter of the
play rather than a mere executor.
Accordingly, the question of directors as 'conductors' or 'composers' sig-
nificantly impacted upon the staging of the Beckettian plays. On the one hand,
there are the most faithful collaborators and friends of Beckett who applied
what was indicated in his texts verbatim. In a detailed essay, entided 'What
Does a Director Do ?', Alan Schneider explains his credo in this way: 'For what
a director does, basically, is take the playwright's bare words, together with
105 See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, op. cit., pp. 691-696.
106 'Will we have to live through a musical comedy version of Godot or perhaps a Happy Days
with the actress in a wheelchair?' (Tom Bishop, abstract of an article in progress quoted
in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett, op. cit., p. 5).
107 See Ruby Cohn, 'Animateurs de Beckett: Roger Blin, Alan Schneider', in Samuel Beckett
Revue d'Esthhique, Ed. Pierre Chabert, Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1990. This essayprovides
an excellent overview of the differences between the two foremost directors of Beckett
and offers particular insight into Blin's non-conventional directing. Roger Blin (dead in
1984), actor and director, was the first to direct the work of Samuel Beckett: he staged the
world premieres of En attendant Godot (5 January 1953, Theatre de Babylone, Paris) and
Fin departie (3 April 1957, Royal Court Theatre, London). Alan Schneider was artistic
director at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C., and from 1976 to 1979 director at the
Juilliard Theater Center in New York City. He was the director of many productions of
Beckett in the U.S. from the first staging of Waitingfor Godot until his death in 1984. For
an overview of the correspondence between the two during all these years see No Author
Better Served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Maurice Harmon
(ed.), Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
his stage directions [...] and try to clothe them in flesh and blood reality'.108
Similarly, Roger Blin: 'What is a director? Nothing; he shouldn't be talked
about; his personality shouldn't exist; he shouldn't seek a style [...]'.109 But even
such an eminent playwright as Edward Albee, who directed a few Beckettian
plays, points out that the author does not need any 'help' nor 'improvement':
'The director's responsibility with Beckett is to put what is on the page on
the stage with absolute clarity'.110 On the other hand, there are some direc-
tors who approached Beckett's indications not without uncertainty. Walter
Asmus, who assisted Beckett in directing Godot ax. Riverside Studios in London
(1984) and worked with him on several television productions in Germany,
confessed: 'My way of directing is very different [...] I tried Beckett's way the
very first time, but I failed, and I had to find my own'. 111 Joseph Chaikin, who
acted and directed a number of Beckettian works, from Endgame to Textsfor
Nothing, distinguishes between Beckett the writer and the director and does
not feel the need to pursue his 'canon' slavishly, since, for him, 'as a writer, he
is wonderful, a genius. But the directing, though it is very clear, is only average
and not inspired'.112 Pierre Chabert, another 'first-hand' apprentice of the Irish
writer, both as an actor and as a director, argues that, though Beckett taught
him 'precision and the most unequivocal simplicity', as a director of a play,
one 'cannot simply apply Beckett's ideas as though they were a mathematical
formula',113 but 'must find an equilibrium that ends toward something more
human, something that has a more spontaneous feel of it'.114 In this regard,
for Chabert, the stage direction of any text is always more an 'interpretation'
than a quasi-mechanical application of it. An extreme case, in this sense, is
represented by JoAnne Akalaitis, whose staging of the play Endgame in a
subway provoked a negative reaction on Beckett's part, 115 and openly posed
108 Alan Schneider, 'What Does a Director Do?', in New York Theater Review, (Spring-Summer
1977), p. 16.
109 Roger Blin, inteview in Arts (2,4 February 1950); cited in Lois Oppenheim [ed.),Directing
Beckett, op. cit., p. 3.
no Interview with Edward Albee, ibid., p. 87.
HI Interview with Walter Asmus, ibid., p. 42.
iiz Interview with Joseph Chaikin, ibid., p. 12.7.
113 Interview with Pierre Chabert, ibid., p. 75.
114 Ibid., p. 74.
115 JoAnne Akalaitis directed Endgame at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) in
December 1984, and Beckett's radio play Cascando adapted for the stage. These events
upset very much Beckett who tried to bring an injunction against the performance of
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
the problem of interpreting the Beckettian theatre ('as a director', Akalaitis
says, 'you create the play. The script is the starting point. The script is dramatic
literature. The script is not the play. The play is an event'). 116
Yet, leaving aside the issues on artistic freedom' and 'aesthetic license' in the
relationship between author and interpreters, as well as the specific questions
concerning Beckett's own stagings as director (on which - Lois Oppenheim
observes117 - stories abound, but many of them myths), 118 the real point of
theoretical interest here is the way Beckett conceived the event of performance
in relation to his texts. The rigidity of his rules and the severity of the rehearsal
process, actually leave very few doubts about it. Rather than a sort of neurotic
fixation, his canon of directing poses - as demonstrated throughout this study
- the problem of avoiding interpretations - i.e. avoiding (as JoAnne Akalaitis,
instead, would claim) the freedom of the play as an autonomous event, in
which 'other things' can happen: in short, the possibility for a work of art to
'acquire meaning', in some way, to 'go in-depth' towards another place. Like
Schönberg's twelve-tone system in Adorno's interpretation, Beckett's rigid
'canon' is intended to shield the work from yet another deception: rather than
a 'brutal mechanizing form' (Chabert), it is a guarantee of the authenticity of
the truth itself. Therefore, while Pierre Chabert, as an expert director, is well
aware of the possibility of balancing form and musicality in order to achieve
something more natural, something closer to life' 119 (and hence he found Billie
Whitelaw - Beckett's favourite actress and interpreters of many plays of him -
at certain moments 'a little affected, not natural'120 and claimed the Beckettian
use of music as going 'against what is "natural" in the theatrical interpretation
Endgame, until the two parts, at last moment, reached a compromise to avoid a legal
action.
116 Interview with JoAnne Akalaitis, ibid., p. 137.
117 'Introduction', ibid., p. 10.
118 See also Anna McMullan, 'Samuel Beckett as Director: The Art of Mastering Failure', in
The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, op. cit. In this essay, McMullan underlies Beckett's
'most characteristic strategies as director, in particular, his use of the most rigorous systems
of theatrical and juridical authority in order to safeguard his carefully crafted patterns of
failure' (Ibid., p. zo6).
119 Interview with Pierre Chabert, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett, op. cit.,
P-74-
n o Ibid.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
of a text'), 121 it must be said that this was Beckett's plain intent. He certainly
did not search for naturalness on stage, nor to simply free up the body for all
its possibilities - the concern of a director, for him, was neither (as Chabert
argues) a matter of being open to all the nuances of new interpreters' nor a
question of 'inspiration', but rather the search for the 'contrapuntual thing
there'.122 In other words, as seen in the previous section, the point at which
the predominant authority of text and the presence of body on stage cancel
each other out. In this sense, as Ruby Cohn states, 'Beckett's plays are just play
for precise performance. They are play as opposed to unmediated reality, but
play is its own mode of reality'.123
However, in order to understand clearly the exact relationship Beckett had
with gesture and physicality in stage performances, it is useful to shift attention
for a moment to who explored this thematic exhaustively, since, more than
any other, he posed the body in theatre at the centre of his theoretical reflec-
tion: Jerzy Grotowski. In fact, at the very end, the attention Grotowski pays
to the body turns out to be radically different from the importance Beckett
attributed to it. The two following paragraphs are intended to explain the real
sense of this difference.
4.3.2 Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre
The question of the naturalness of characters on stage raised by Pierre Chabert
(or, in this case, the 'unnaturalness' of Beckettian actors) might possibly open
up to a fertile comparison between Beckett and one of the most influential
theatre theorist/practitioners of the last half-century, the Polish director Jerzy
Grotowski (1933-1999). 124 The fact that such a comparison has never, thus far,
HI Ibid. From the same author, see also Pierre Chabert, "The Body in Beckett's Theatre',Journal
of Beckett Studies, 8 (Autumn 198z), pp. 13-18; and 'Beckett as Director', in Gambit 18
(1976), pp. 41-64.
1 1 1 See Alan Schneider's words, taken from the sound tapes for the film Rockaby, in which
he directs actress Billie Whitelaw. This piece reveals, in particular, Schneider's general
faithfulness to Beckett's vision ('Alan Schneider Directs Rockaby, in Lois Oppenheim
[ed.], Directing Beckett, op. cit., p. 15).
123 Ruby Cohn,Just Play: Beckett's Theater, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980,
p. 3.
124 Born in Rzeszow, near the Eastern border of Poland, on 11 August 1933, in 1951 Grotowski
applied for admission to the Acting Department of the State Theatre School in Cracow.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
been made depends mainly on the uniqueness of Grotowski s fame: on the
one hand, his influence in Western contemporary theatre is in many senses
deep, abiding and growing; on the other, since he belongs mostly to oral tra-
dition and his few writings are, as such, barely significant,125 whoever did not
meet him in person could not direcdy study his methods or have access to
his raj/work.126 Nonetheless, there are a few questions - especially regarding
the role of text, the directions of actors, and the body on stage - which are
worth being dealt with in terms of the Beckett-Grotowski relationship. In
their respective research (as, indubitably, they both used theatre mainly as a
field of their search for truth), they appear as much opposite as they are, in
other ways, close to each other. The loss of a narrative structure, the attention
to the spatial dimension as well as the use of gesture and body, are precisely
the elements that join and differentiate them at the same time.
Rather than as a director or playwright, Grotowski is famous for his
research into the foundations of theatre and his work of 1968, Towards a
Poor Theatre,127 in which he accomplishes the last revolution in the technique
of theatre. After Stanislavsky, Dullin, Meyerhold, Artaud, and Brecht, at the
peak of an investigation that consecrated the twentieth-century theatre as a
'rich' theatre (i.e. 'complicated', as far as the text, stage design and stagecraft
of productions are concerned), Grotowski returns to the essential poverty of
After beginning, as actor, director and playwright in Poland, he lived the rest of his life
in the U.S. and in Italy, where he died in 1999.
115 Grotowski has written no book. Most of what is published under his name are records
of meetings or interviews. Of the fourteen items in Towards a Poor Theatre, only four
were written by Grotowski. He distrusted writing and even words as such, but instead
privileged psychophysical work and direct personal contact, in this sense following the
teaching of those traditions he felt closest to him, such as gnostic and hermetic sources
linked to Hasidic and Gurdjievian closed-circle communities, but also some innovators
in psychoanalysis, such as Jacob Moreno (the inventor of psychodrama) and the Gestalt
therapist Fritz Perls.
116 As Richard Schechner points out in his preface to the wide collection of studies on
Grotowski: 'His work was "technical" in the sense that Mircea Eliade identified shamans
as "technicians of the sacred" [...] Grotowski's influence operates the way a rock dropped
into a pond causes concentric waves to expand outwards in ever-widening circles. One can
find Grotowski everywhere in today's theatre.' (Richard Schechner, 'Preface', in Richard
Schechner and Lisa Wolford (eds), The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge, zooi
[first published 1997], p. xxvii).
117 Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
acting, to the point of turning away the whole 'event' of theatre from spec-
tacle, from the frame of performance, and by extension from art, to reduce
it entirely to 'what takes place between spectator and actor'.128 In short, he
aimed to achieve a non-narrative theatre, where actors were able to be, as
it were, 'transparent' in their mind and body, and capable of a 'total gift' of
themselves. Grotowski reached his conclusion by gleaning from Stanislavsky
the axiom that continuous actor training is fundamental, and that this training
is, above all, 'work on oneself'. The expression 'work on oneself, the peculiar
'method of physical actions' that Stanislavsky developed in the 1930s, together
with Meyerholds bio-mechanical work of the 1920s (e.g. dance-like acrobatic
movements performed with the efficiency of the 'assembly line') are, without
doubt, Grotowski's starting points.
Yet, whereas Stanislavsky always put the actor and the artistic goal at the
centre ofhis work, Grotowski turned these techniques into purposes that, in
the end, were trans-theatrical. Even while he was still making productions for
public, he aimed at targets other than theatre, and his own work Towards a
Poor Theatre is full of allusions to the spiritual path. As Schechner points out,
'theatre was his means, not an end. The goal was not political, as with Brecht;
nor artistic as with Stanislavsky; nor revolutionary, as with Artaud. Grotowski's
goal was spiritual: the search for and education of each performer's soul'.129 In
particular, Grotowski stressed the inversion of the mind/body relationship
through his famous precept that nothing should be acted if not startingfirstly
in the body. The essential thing - in Grotowski's early teaching to actors - was
that 'all should come from and through the body': before reacting with the
voice, reacting with the body; before thinking, thinking with the body.
Grotowski's idea of theatre, therefore, is neither 'imitation' nor 'expres-
sion'; it does not draw on any form of primordial chaos or psychoanalytical
unconscious that retains the key of art; it is neither a hysterical action, nor
a form of katharsis, nor 'cruelty', as for Artaud; but rather an experience of
truth, in its intimate essence, i.e. the point of encounter between the Self and
Other. He explored, like nobody else in theatre, the connections between
mental and physical processes, the phenomenology of art in body and speech,
the final border of thought and corporeality. He baptized his group of work
'Laboratory Theatre' to stress the predominant role of research and experi-
mentation over any necessity of performance. The most peculiar aspects that
12.8 Ibid., p. 32..
119 Richard Schechner, 'Exoduction, in The Grotowski Sourcebook, op. cit., p. 475.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
Grotowski individuated in this experience were the primacy of the body, its
complete reactivity to external events, but also a sense of continual transgres-
sion, an overcoming of the usual limits in the relationship between actors and
audience. Acting is to transgress the rules and to 'provoke' the spectator, in
the accomplishment of what Grotowski calls a 'total act': an absolute disarma-
ment by means of which the actor 'reveals [...] and sacrifices the innermost
part of himself [...] that which is not intended for the eyes of the world'.130
Therefore, actors in the Laboratory Theatre were not concerned with ques-
tions of character or with placing themselves in the given circumstances of a
fictional role, but their task was to construct a form of testimony drawing on
deeply meaningful and secret experiences from their own lives, articulated in
such a way that this 'total act' of revelation could serve as a provocation for
the spectator. Grotowski was certainly aware that such a way of performing
was strongly linked to archaic performative forms, historically prior to the
division between sacred and aesthetic aspects of art. Ludwik Flaszen, one of
Grotowski's closest collaborators and co-founder of the Laboratory Theatre,
in this regard argues that
Grotowski's productions aim to bring back an Utopia of those elementary experiences
provoked by collective ritual, in which the community dreamed ecstatically of its own
essence, of its place in a total, undifferentiated reality, where Beauty did not differ from
Truth, emotion from intellect, spirit from body, joy from pain; where the individual seemed
to feel a connection with the Whole of Being. 131
On this path, though, at a certain point Grotowski discovered that the
conventional structure of performance could neither foster nor contain the
type of communion he hoped to create. Consequently, in 1970, when he was
thirty-seven years old, he announced that he no longer intended to develop
any new productions, having arrived at the conclusion that it was impossible
for theatre to facilitate the type of communion between actor and spectator
that he sought to realize within the frame of performance. From then on,
Grotowski started the so-called paratheatrical phase ofhis activity, abandoning
the formal structure of theatre production, eliminating the distinction between
actors and spectators, and making a shift towards unexplored areas, with the
130 Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, op. cit., p. 35.
131 Ludwik Flaszen quoted in Jenna Kumiega, The Theatre of Grotowski, New York: Methuen,
1985, p. 156.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
intersection of performance, anthropology, and ritual studies. For this reason,
the second part of his life can scarcely be judged, since his primary aim is not
to communicate with an audience and his works were not readily accessible
to spectators and critics. Moreover, this second phase of Grotowski's research,
called 'paratheatre' or 'theatre of participation' completely de-emphasized artis-
tic criteria and questions of technique: the conventional structure of dramatic
performance was replaced by improvised activities involving spontaneous
contact between a team of experienced work-leaders and a number of outside
participants. After this, other phases and shifts occurred in his evolution, from
the 'Theatre of Sources' to 'Objective Drama' and 'Art as Vehicle'.
However, what unites all these periods, despite their diverse objectives and
styles and the variations in participant numbers, is Grotowski's insistence on
direct contact and expression: the primacy of the body over mind; the 'total
act' from person-to-person, the foregrounding of Martin Buber's 'ich und du'
and the rejection of whatever is 'self-indulgent' (as he said) or soft-headed. In
Schechner s words, the final achievement of Grotowski's research, throughout
his entire life, can be summarized as follows: 'An expanded sense of theatre,
the bridge from "productions" to "sources"; an emphasis on process over prod-
uct; a systematic research into traditional performance practices; reliance on
dance and song instead of spoken dialogue; a possibility of integrating the
performance knowledge of diverse cultures'.132
4.3.3 Grotowski and Beckett
There is no historical evidence of any relationship, nor even a theoretical
point of contact, between Beckett and Grotowski as authors, or 'researchers'
of the theatrical experience. In fact, they appear as distant as their antithetic
approaches to stage directions. Certainly, Beckett was not a disciple of the
Stanislavsky/Meyerhold line: his revolution in theatre is a textual revolu-
tion, and, as seen through the witnesses of his disciples - even when explicitly
requested - he refused to adopt any method of actor training similar to those
exposed in the previous paragraph. In turn, it is likely that Grotowski appre-
ciated Beckett as a playwright, since his entire generation in Poland grew up
with and through the Beckettian plays; nonetheless, as he did with any other
131 Richard Schechner, 'Exoduction', in The Grotowski Sourcebook, op. cit., p. 489.
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
text (from Calderon de la Barca, to Marlowe, to the Bible), he would have
approached Beckett's works to interrogate and rearrange them, and finally use
them as instrumental materials rather than as finalities. It is no wonder that
when in 1973 Andre Gregory's Manhattan Project, a Grotowski-influenced
group, performed Endgame in a non-conventional manner, Beckett replied
with strong disapproval, as witnessed by letter to Barney Rosset.133
The fact is that - without and before entering questions such as the respec-
tive tastes and conceptions of theatre and artistic avant-garde - two 'worlds',
in Beckett and Grotowski (or his group), as far as the 'on-stage-direction' is
concerned, stand opposite one another. To the Beckettian actor, who is taught
that there is nothing behind or beyond the text (for neither psychological nor
emotional, nor physical, insights must be added to it), Grotowski counters
with his idea of a 'pre-expressive decided body' 134 existing behind and before
any particular genre of performance - hence, for him, the play itself vanishes
and gives way to the total, «»-mediated, ««-foreseen 'gift' of the actor. In this
sense, while the Beckettian staging is the most authoritative subjection one
might contemplate, of characters towards authorship, Grotowski's method
tends to completely free the acting, the body and the human person, from any
authority as such. To this extent, one might also argue that the Beckettian actor
is 'affected' (as Pierre Chabert implies) whereas the Grotowskian is 'natural'.
Nevertheless, on further analysis, they also share a number of points in
common. Principally, Beckett and Grotowski think of their work as 'research'
rather than 'achievement' - and this research, for both, is essentially related
to the idea of truth, in the classic understanding of truth-as-correspondence,
i.e., in this case, correspondence between art and life. Both Beckett's and
Grotowski's performances aim to bring authenticity on stage, to discover the
truest reality in art, or in Heideggerian terms, to set-truth-to-work' - to make
their own work truer than the truth itself. And this truth, for both, is linked
133 'Even in the hypothesis of a personal request from me to Gregory have we not to consider
the amount ofwork, however misguided, that has gone into this production and the situ-
ation of the actors ? This kind of massacre and abuse of directorial function is happening
the whole time all over the place...' (Samuel Beckett, Letter to Barney Rosset, 13 February
19 7 3 (Boston), quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett,
op. cit., p. 694).
134 This is the idea of a 'truth-behind-phenomena' according to Grotowski, as reformulated
by Eugenio Barba, one of his earliest followers. See Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese,
The Secret Art ofthe Performer, ed. by Richard Gough, London: Routledge, 1991.
2.11 CHAPTER 4
to the return' of Self to itself - though in a more archetypal and relational
meaning for Grotowski, whereas in a more individual direction for Beckett.
Moreover, they both find in the body a crucial point of contact, passage,
resistance, subjection, in terms of this research into truth in art. But if the
intention of their research is similar, their reciprocal targets, and consequendy
the paths and methods for achieving them, are radically different - and this
eventually explains their divergent finalities. Beckett starts from words, from
narrative structures, from psychoanalytical and foundational perspectives, and
then works to exhaust all of these by means of words, or their absence - and
only at a later stage does he discover the body/object as the other side of self.
Grotowski begins with the body, in order to achieve an ever-growing freedom
and authenticity of it, using words and theoretical structures only as a means to
this end. This process of freedom, however, leads him, at a later stage, to take
on board new spiritual, symbolic, anthropologic, in a last instance 'linguistic',
'textual' and 'narrative' dimensions.
Thus, while Beckett started from narrative to achieve non-narrative,
Grotowski walks along the opposite path. While Beckett progressively got
rid of'meaning', Grotowski increasingly acquired it in is work. The concep-
tion and use of the body, in the final analysis, was significantly different. For
Beckett, the physicality is a matter of equilibrium, of contrapuntual forces that
undo themselves: such a specific situation cannot be casual or undetermined;
even a slighdy diverse element could bring meaning back into this equilibrium,
to alter an absurd stasis; hence, the precision in his notes for directions. In
Beckett's mind, evidently, truth, the aesthetic truth, was not a casualty or a
one-sided event, like the total expression of the body. It is probable that Beckett
would have considered the 'total gift' of the Grotowskian actor, his transparent
naturalness, if not hysterical, then at least an inauthentic act, in which aesthetic
authenticity, for him, as for Adorno, is intended as the balance between dif-
ferent elements. In other words, for Beckett, if the 'total act' is meaningful
(as is indeed in Grotowski's thought), then it is no longer authentic.
Even Grotowski, in fact, in his training notes, suggests a form of control
over one's body, in order to avoid hysterical behaviour, but this control is exerted
by the body itself. In Grotowski's view, the body goes on its own, as it were,
it thinks by itself, and this is the reason why, in the end, he no longer needs
an artistic field to continue his research. Beckett deconstructs and exhausts
language but nonetheless remains within language, as he does with theatre;
Grotowski progressively abandons art, language, and all the other media he
used. What differentiates the two is their idea of truth: for Beckett truth
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
is a linguistic correspondence, 'impossible', yet, nonetheless, linguistic; for
Grotowski it is a pure experience. In this sense, Beckett is a philosopher - he
has a theoretical map, and this map is his idea of aesthetic truth - whereas
Grotowski resembles more an 'explorer', whose sailing is a directionless drift.
Thus, not by chance, he 'wrote' almost nothing and claimed he belonged to
oral tradition.
With regard to Pierre Chabert's objection to Beckett's direction, one
might conclude that naturalness, spontaneity, the freedom of the body, as far
as the 'total act' (in Grotowski's perspective), could be either salvation or the
last, vain escape from Self. Surely, from Beckett's point of view, the latter was
the real option. Whether Grotowski's research was authentic or not, Beckett
refused this sort of'body for the body's sake' as if it were the last seduction of
meaning: he did not believe that freedom could be obtained in this way. "Ihere
are no easy solutions', he used to repeat in his conversations with friends. For
Beckett, a revelation, if there is one, can occur only when things are in the right
place, when they are posed in their original and absurd equilibrium.
The Beckett/Grotowski comparison was intended, firsdy, to exclude the
hypothesis that the centrality of body and gesture in later Beckettian theatre
was a new acquisition of meaning within his work. As has been demonstrated,
this is not true. Secondly, this parallel allows us to highlight a particularly
decisive point of Beckett's philosophical proposal, advanced as the main thesis
of this work. Precisely when Grotowski claims his research is an aesthetics of
truth and correspondence between art and life, in the name of an anti-rational,
anti-linguistic or anti-textual demand, that Beckett's distinctness from all
this emerges as clearly as ever. Unlike Grotowski, the Beckettian aesthetics of
truth arises, as Adorno would say, from an accurate Logik der Zerfalls, 'logic of
disintegration', the meaning of Beckett's work against the 'meaning'. In other
words, the relationship between this 'meaning before the meaning' lies within
a paradigm of truth. Yet truth and meaning, in Beckett, stand in a contradic-
tory relationship, i.e. in a particular breach that can be merged only through
a philosophical position that cannot but be as a 'discourse on exits'. Beckett's
discours de la sortie, therefore, emerges as a paradoxical and tragic 'standing on
the edge' between words and world, subject and object, and voice and body.
In other words, this is the same edge that sustains and renders possible the
final, contradictory Beckettian axiom of the 'impossibility to express', together
with the 'obligation to express'.
Once again, unlike Grotowski, whose research aims to achieve more
meaning, even though this is directed towards the natural and total 'act' of
2.11 CHAPTER 4
the body, Beckett's aesthetics of truth - as has been repeated throughout this
work - ultimately makes the subject become real, to the extent that this avoids
such an idea of truth: The idea that rules are pre-determined, an original but
also impossible equilibrium between parts that cannot stand together, yet
nonetheless do so. This is not due to a sort of transcendent rule dictating this
state of things, but, on the contrary, is caused by the complete dominion of
non-identity. A non-identical, original truth determines an opposite truth,
the 'meaning against the meaning' (as Adorno continually remarked about
Beckett), when the subject is forced to face and give explanation to such a
non-identical truth. Nevertheless, the subject lives from time to time in this
constant uncertainty, divided between its 'meaninglessly organized' resistance
to non-identity and its futile raison d'etre. But still, at the very end, and in a
tragic way, the subject becomes subject by means of the setting-to-work of
this oscillating and unstable truth.
This is Beckett's idea of aesthetic truth. Outside this view, for him, there is
the meaningful world - there is deception. The 'Discourse on Exits', his own
proper 'philosophy', is non other than the 'correct' process that can reveal
this truth.
4.4 Self on the Brink
The investigation undertaken by Beckett through the other side of Self, i.e. the
body/object, in some sense leads him to the same conclusion achieved in the
first part of his life through the putting-on-trial of meaning in language and
words. On an inverse path - and the comparison with Grotowski emphasizes
this point very well - he questions the meaning in the body, or the body as
meaningful in the same way and does not take the physical materiality as simply
a means of escape from Self. As discussed in the previous chapter, Beckett
searched for the breach between words and world: the ultimate conclusion that
his writing of the 'text' is not about the Subject but is that Subject itself'opens
up, however, to what lies behind this writing and language in general. Thus,
in the final part of his life he particularly explored this same 'breach' from the
point of view of the world/object; the unwritten aural imagery, perceptible
principally through sound, silence and bodily gesture. Once again, though, and
even from this perspective, he reaches the limit of the absence/impossibility of
meaning in art; once again, he stands on the very edge between the absolute
If the Body is Able to Think 2.13
meaningfulness and meaninglessness of the work of art, and, one might add,
of subjectivity itself. Therefore, while this second dimension of Self - experi-
enced through the sense of hearing (see § 4.1.1), the 'pluridirectional' quality
of music and language III in general (§ 4.1.2), and the peculiar relationship
body and gestures have towards the 'voice' of subjectivity (§4.2.2 and 4.2.3) -
reveals its specific characteristics, especially in its intrinsic act of rebellion, this
rebellion is, in the end, not a liberation but rather the contrapuntal element
that confirms the absolute uncertainty of Beckett's final achievement.
The philosophical aesthetics of Samuel Beckett is essentially an 'aesthetics
of truth', in that it achieves such a truth through an inverted 'mimetic' process
(as exhaustively described by Adorno), 135 and yet it needs to maintain this
revelation of truth, to 'produce' it, to set it up at work' each time by means
of the research of a precise 'breach' or point of coincidence between life and
death. As discussed in the previous chapter, as one can never escape subjectivity
- and Beckett's aesthetics, as 'aesthetics-of-truth', aims to return to authentic
subjectivity - 'life' and 'death' are false: the coma is truth. Therefore, the point
of coincidence between art and life, the 'correspondent' point of truth of both,
is this coma. As already remarked, the authentic negation of any meaning is
meaningful (the only way in which 'meaning' is not deceptive) to the extent
that the Subject still keeps the stillness stirring. This ultimate, paradoxical result
is the essential raison d'etre of Beckett's philosophical position, in aesthetics,
between a Heideggerian idea of art as the origin of truth and a Wittgensteinian
impossibility of expressing this kind of truth.136 Beckett develops his point
through three diverse periods and stages of research: first, the deconstruction
of meaning in art, in order to pursue 'an art of a different degree'; second, the
full achievement of an 'art for nothing' - the artistic endgame as the point of
passage towards a definitive silence, which is outside literature, a 'literature of
unword' direcdy inhering the subject as such; thirdly, and finally, the return to
subjectivity 'inside' and 'outside' text - a subjectivity that is divided into Self
and Object, Voice and Body, Eye and Ear. The discovery and the full attention
that Beckett finally dedicated to such a division only partially undermines
his early assumption that 'there is no other': the 'otherness' of the body and
spatial dimension is equally a part of the Self. Yet, this is the part that most
interests the late Beckett. Perhaps this is due to a simple mot de Sympathie for
what is most defenceless and enslaved or rather to the consideration that the
135 See Chapter i, § 3.1.
136 See Chapter i, § 3.5 and the whole section 4.
 CHAPTER 4
body's and ear's size, however subject to the voices of mind, are structurally
opposed to them.
Hence, the reason why in Beckett's later plays it sometimes happens that
the final gesture, the conclusion of the play, is represented by an act of rebellion
or challenge made by the subjected bodies. The ultimate Beckettian conclu-
sion is that the truth of subject is, in logical-mathematical terms, 'indecidable'
- hence, the silence (a literature ofunword) is the most adequate condition in
which this can be expressed or reflected. Nonetheless, as this indecidability
is a real event - and not a preconceived or abstract structure, within it, the
concrete possibility that something can be decided is also contemplated. In
this continual 'staying on this edge' lies the tragic nature of the condition of
truth, as described by Beckett.
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Index

Adorno, Gretel in, I4(?n Aldington, Richard 44

Adorno, Theodor W. n, 1 7 - 1 1 , 24, 31-31, Anouilh, Jean 25
42-43, 51-52, 57, 59, 64, 72, 76-78, Apel, Karl O. 170
81, 84-91,92-99,100-105,106,108- Appleyard, Brian 29
116,127-140,142-143,144,146-148, Aquinas, Thomas Saint 43n
149,150-153,157,158n, I59n, 164,166, Artaud, Antonin 15,33,155, 243-244
168,170,17m, 171,174-177,179-181, Asmus, Walter 238, 240
184,190-191,193,202,204,206,209, Attridge, Derek 23,154,157,164
111, n8n, 224, 233, 234n, 235-236, Augustine, Saint 38
141, 249-251
Aesthetic Theory 19-20, 31, 57, 85-87, Bach, Johann S. 217
104-105, 107, io8n, 1 0 9 - 1 1 1 , 114, Badiou, Alain 18, 21, 153, 174, 190, 191-193,
116-119,122,126,131-132,133-134, 195, 206
142-143,177, 2o6n Banham, Gary 157-161,164,180
Apriorität (Apriority) 81, 95-96, 98, Barthes, Roland 120
140-141,143,166,101,111 Bataille, Georges 130,171,180
Dialectic of Enlightenment 118, i32n Baudrillard,Jean i5on
Konkretheit (Concreteness) 81, 95-96, Beck, Julian 184
98,140-141,143,166, 202, i n Beckett, John 219
Mimesis 21, ii4n, 119-124,128,134,139, Beckett, Samuel
140,153 Act without Words I 99,103,188, 224,
Minima Moralia 150 133-134
Negative Dialectics 104, 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 , 118, A Piece of Monologue 229-230
ii6n, 131-132,176 Breath 104,145
Non-Identity 88, 98,101-102, 105-106, Brief Dream 57
115,132-133,135,180, 210, 250 ...but the clouds... 188,221
Organized meaninglessness 90,92,140, Cascando 214, 24on
141,143,168,172,174,180, 209 Catastrophe 145,188, 230-232
Teilmaterialien (Material components) Censorship in the Saorstat 49
92,140,179,194 Chas, Jean du 15-16, 209n
Trying to Understand Endgame 85,88, Come and Go 145
104-105, i48n Company 196, 220-221
Akalaitis, JoAnne 240-241 Dante... Bruno... Vico... Joyce 20,14,36,
Albee, Edward 240 40-43
Albright, Daniel 217-218 Discours de la Sortie (Discourse on exits)
15-16,109, 249-150
264 Index Index 26s

Disintegration (Aesthetics of) 19, 20, Murphy 1 1 , 1 4 , 49-50, 73, 83,172-173, Behan, Brendan 25 Dante Alighieri 11, 26, 31, 35-36, 38-39, 40,
74, 78-80, 8jn, 85, 90, 98, 101, 139, 210 Benjamin, Walter 85,106,119,121-123,149n, 4in, 41, 46-47, 50, 51
140,145,177,189-190,102,206,215, Nacht und Träume 188,222 150-151 Davies, Paul 11
249 Neither 219, 220 Bergson, Henri 33 Debrock, Guy 219-220
Disjecta 30-31, 74 Not I 142,145, 230 Berkeley, George n, 14,100-201 Deleuze, Gilles n, 17-18, 21, 120,153, 161-
Dramaticules 144,145, 210 Peintres de I'empSchement 64-65, 67n Berlioz, Louis H. 221 162,180,186-190,200-201,202,207,
Dream of Fair to Middling Women 12, Ping 217 Bernold, Andre 28, 212 221-223, 215
so Play 144, 217,130 Bernstein, Jay M. 106-107, ll7> I24> 126 Capitalisme et Schizophrenie 18 9
Eh Joe 121 Poetry is Vertical 33-34 Bishop, Tom 239 Difference and Repetition 18
Eleutheria 213-214 Proust 1 0 , 1 4 , 30, 43-45, 46, 48 Blanchot, Maurice 11,17-18,11,153,158,160- Exhaustion (Aesthetics of) 21,153,186-
Endgame 20, 68, 78, 82, 84-85, 87-88, Quad 188,111 161,163-164,166,171,190, 209n 187.189-190,198, 207,111
90-93, 93n, 94, 97-103, 106-108, Recent Irish Poetry 49 Blin, Roger 26n, 28, 239, 240 Language I 187-189
in-112, 114, 124, 134-136, 138-140, Refuge of art 20, 84, 87, 117, 124, 143, Brahms, Johannes 216 Language II 187-189
142—143,146,148,152,184,224,240, 146 Brecht, Bertolt 85, i46n, 184, 204, Language III 188-189, m - 1 2 4 , 251
24m, 247 Rockaby 145, 217, 242n 243-244 The Exhausted 186,189
Film 19, 21, 80, 153, 200-203, 10 7> Roughfor Radio II 231 Breton, Andre 33,35,71 De Man, Paul 120
215, 226, 233, 234n Something There 56,160 Brook, Peter 15 Democritus 12
Footfalls 145 Still 197 Bruno, Giordano 37-38, 40, 4m Derrida, Jacques n, 17-18, 19, 11,13, 31, 77,
For to End Yet Again 197 Stirrings Still 196,198-199,210 Bryden, Mary 189 no, 119-130,131, 147,149, 150, 151-
German letter 51, 74, 205, 2ion, 212, Subjectivity 19,31, 83n, 84, 94, 97,144- Buber, Martin 146 154,155-161,164-168,170-176, I8I,
224-225 146,148,153,179-180,189-191,194, Bubner, Rüdiger 119,131—133 185.190-191,193-195,106, i09n
Ghost Trio 188,122 199, 207, 215, 221-222, 2 1 4 - 1 1 5 , 1 3 1 , Cinders 158
Godot (Waitingfor) 2 0 , 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 9 , 46, 234-235,251 Calder, John 11,28,57,84,145,105 Difftrance 11,153,165-166,168,173,177,
52, 65-66, 80-85, io4> 136-137,142, Texts for Nothing 78, 82, 167, 192-193, Calderön de la Barca, Pedro 147 190,107,110
143,146,148,184,202,210,232,134, 196, 206, 216, 240 Caspar, David E 138 Glas 157
i39n, 140 That Time 145, 229-230 Cezanne, Paul 35,40,71 Signature 19, 11,153,156, 164, 166-167,
Happy Days 8 0 , 8 4 , 1 4 1 - 1 4 1 , 1 4 4 , 1 4 6 , The Unnamable 13,21,51,78-79,148,153, Chabert, Pierre 138, 240-242, 247, 249 180,183-185,103
188,131, i39n 157-158,160-161,163-165,172-173, Chagall, Marc 33 Writing and Difference 129,166
How It Is 188 187-188,190,196,198, 204,210, 212 Chaikin, Joseph 240 Descartes, Rene 11-16, 31-32, 40
III Seen III Said 18,196 Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit 53, Chaplin, Charlie 35, 238 Devine, George 18
Imagination Dead Imagine 183 57-58, 63n, 64, 66, 83n, 146, 172, Chekhov, Anton P. 25 Devlin, Denis 48n
Intercessions by Denis Devlin 48, 51 I77n, i78n, 180,185,192,198 Chopin, Fryderyk 216 Dickens, Charles 136
Krapp's Last Tape 84, 141, 146, 183, What is the Word 57,110 Cioran, Emil M. i9n Dilthey, Wilhelm 181
113-214 Watt 14, 81-83,171-173,187-188, 210, Cocteau, Jean 33 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 47n, 79
219 Cohn, Ruby 30, 48, 242 Driver, Tom 29,58,70
La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et
What Where 130-131 Connor, Steven 143,154n, 162,173,175 Duckworth, Colin 26
lepantalon 64, 67n
Whoroscope 11 Critchley, Simon 13,15-16, 86, 99n, 156-157, Dullin, Charles 243
Malone Dies 82, 84,157,172-173,196
Words and Music 114,119 163-164,175 Duthuit, Georges 53-55, 58, 60, 62, 81
Meaning on Trial 19, 24, 107, 140, 146,
190, 250 Worstward Ho 192,196-197,199 Cunningham, David 88
Molloy 43, 51, 8 0 - 8 3 , 85, 1 5 7 , 1 7 2 - 1 7 3 , Beethoven, Ludwigvan i 7 n, 75,116,113,116, Eaglestone, Robert 168
I96n, 198 220-221 DAubarede, Gabriel 14-15,19, 43, 82,136 Einstein, Carl 33n
More Pricks than Kicks 12,50 Begam, Richard 16,165,172-174,196 Dali, Salvador 33 Eliade, Mircea i43n
i66 Index Index 267

Eliot, Thomas S. 33, 4411,89,205 Herwitz, Daniel 220-221 Keaton, Buster 35n, 80, 200-201, 238 Mihalovici, Marcel 2i4n, 220
Esslin, Martin 28, 225 Hesiod 182 Knowlson, James 16,28,41,43, 53, 56,73.136, Mondrian, Piet C. 33, 63
Hesla, David 58,81-82 211-212, 215-216, 229, 239 Moreno, Jacob L. 243n
Feldman, Morton 219-220 Hill, Leslie 173 Kramer, Lawrence 215 Mozart, Wolfgang A. 15,216
Feuillerat, Albert 47 Hoffmansthal, Hugo von 57 Kripke, Saul 9m Murphy, Peter J. 13,31-32
Flaszen, Ludwik 245 Holliger, Heinz 219 Kurtäg, György 219 Musil, Robert 79,178, 205
Flaubert, Gustave 79 Huhn, Thomas 20, 87,112-113,117,125,127-
Fletcher, John 25-28,204 128,131-132,135 Labiche, Eugene 15 Napoleon 27
Frege, Gottlob 9m Husserl, Edmund 150 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 119-120 Nicholsen, Shierry W. 119,121
Freud, Sigmund 34,100,171 Lane, Richard 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich 169,171,173,181
Ibsen, Henrik 25, 99 Leonardo da Vinci 60
Gadamer, Hans G. 77,118,170 Levinas, Emanuel 163 O'Brien, Edna 29n
Geulincx, Arnold 11-12,14, 32 Jameson, Frederic 121-122 Libera, Antoni 238 O'Casey, Sean 47
Giacometti, Alberto 33,106 Jarry, Alfred 33 Ligeti, György in, 135 O'Connor, Brian 94,116
Gibson, Andrew 174,191-193 Jaspers, Karl 97-98 Locatelli, Carla 196-198,205 Oppenheim, Lois 238-239, 241
Gide, Andre 33 Jauss, Hans R. 170 Luce, Arthur n Ovid 218
Glass, Philip 219 Jay, Martin 119-121 Lüdke, Martin W. 85, 90,139
Gluck, Barbara 39 Jesus Christ 27n, 231 Lukacs, Georg 79, 96,113 Papini, Giovanni 50
Goethe, Johann W. von 110 Jevons, Stanley 69 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 120, 169, 172, 183, Pelorson, Georges 33n
Gontarski, Stan E. 214,228,234-235 Jolas, Eugene 33, 34, 39,180 i83n Perls, Fritz 243n
Gordon, Lois 33-35 Jolas, Maria 33 Peron, Alfred 35
Gregory, Andre 247 Joyce,James 21,27n, 29n, 32-33,35,36-39,40, MacGowran, Jack 3511,137 Picasso, Pablo 33
Grotowski, Jerzy 22, 211, 236-237, 242, 243, 41, 42-45, 46,51-52, 55, 57,59n, 72, Magee, Patrick 137 Pilling, John 28, 44-45, 59
244-250 75> 79> 89, 97,100, 106, 122,137, 153, Magritte, Rene 59 Pinter, Harold 25, 28
Guattari, Filix 189 155,168,172,178,182,193-196, 2i7n Mahler, Gustav 217, 221 Pirandello, Luigi 25, 204
Guggenheim, Peggy 36 A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan 41, Malina, Judith 184 Plato 68, 9m, 119,123,134,150,181
43 n Mallarme, Stephane 106,155 Porter Abbott, H. i54n, 211,213-215,217,221,
Habermas, Jürgen 118,121, 1 4 9 ^ 169, 172, Dedalus, Stephen 41, 43n, 182 Mann, Thomas 57, 92 223, 232
175, i76n Finnegans Wake 33, 36,100,178 Marcuse, Herbert 114 Pound, Ezra 47
Hall, Peter 25 Ulysses 41,178,182,193-194 Marlowe, Christopher 247 Proust, Marcel 32, 44, 45, 46-47, 52, 79, 97,
Hamann, Johann G. 34 Work in Progress 36-39 Marx, Karl 93n 172,196, 205
Harding, James M. 142-143 Juliet, Charles 64, Ö5n, 74, 82-83, 84n, 206, Masson, Andre 53, 60-61 Putnam, Samuel 33
Harp, Hans 33n 212, 216, 225 Matisse, Henri 53-54, 72
Havel, Vaclav 23on Jung, Carl G. 33-34 Mauriac, Francois 33 Rachmaninoff, Sergei W. 221
Haydn, Franz J. 216 McGreevy, Thomas 33n, 35, 40, 44n, 47,53 Richardson, Ralph 136-137
Hebert, Hugh 29 Kafka, Franz 29n, 32, 51-52, 79, 89, 97,106, McMullan, Anna 227-232 Ricoeur, Paul 77,170,178,182
Hegel, Georg W. F. 9311,113,131 108,122,150,155, 204-205 Melville, Herman 205 Rilke, Rainer M. 47
Heidegger, Martin 11, 19, 31, 43, 59, 64, Kandinsky, Wassily W. 66,106, 2i9n Menke, Christoph 118,128-133,147-148 Ringelnatz, Joachim 74
70-72, 77, 93, 97, 119, 157, 160, 163, Kant, Immanuel 11-15, 23,122,127-129,135 Mercier, Vivian 12-13, 15, 73 _ 74> 76, Riquelme, John Paul 41
166,169-171,173,178,181,183 Katz, Daniel 198-199, 225-227 211-212 Rosset, Barney 28, loon, 224n, 247
Hemingway, Ernest 33 Kaun, Axel 74 Meyerhold, Vsevolod E. 243-244, 246 Rutra, Theo 33n
Herder, Johann G. 34 Kearney, Richard 48-50,167,181-185, '93
268 Index

Sartre, Jean-Paul 11,89 Trezise, Thomas 21,153,170-173,180

Schechner, Richard 244, 246 Trismegistus, Hermes 34
Schiller, Friedrich 92,138
Schlegel, Friedrich K. W. von in, 132 Unseld, Siegfried 135
Schlick, Moritz 69, 6<)n, 9m
Schneider,Alan 26,28,137,165,200,231,239, Van Gogh, Vincent 71
239n, 242n Valery, Paul 33
Schönberg, Arnold 102, 106, 108, i4on, Van Velde, Bram 20, 24, 53, 61-62, 64-68,
218-219,14I 72-
Schopenhauer, Arthur n, 14, 44n Van Velde, Geer 20, 24, 53, 64-68, 72
Schubert, Franz P. 35, 217, 220-222, 238 Vattimo, Gianni 169-170,183
Schumann, Robert A. 216, 220-221 Vico, Giambattista 36-38, 40, 4m
Shakespeare, William 99,115,136 Vitrac, Roger 33
Shaw, George B. 25 Voltaire 205
Shenker, Israel 29, 41, 78
Spinoza, Baruch 14 Wagner, Richard 27, 217, 221
Stael, Nicholas de 53 White, Sam 137
Stanislavsky, Konstantin S. 239, 243-244, Whitelaw, Billie 241, 242n
246 Wilde, Oscar 25
Stein, Gertrude 33, 75, 2i7n Wittgenstein, Ludwig 11, 69-70, 72, 77, 80,
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 108 9in
Stoppard, Tom 25 Wolin, Richard 106
Stravinsky, Igor F. 33,102,136 Worton, Michael 25-26, 80
Strauss, Richard 217 Wood, David 30
Strindberg, August 25, 99 Wood, Rupert 41
Symond, Ronald 33n Woolf, Virginia 2i7n
Synge, John M. 25, 35
Sweeney, JamesJ. 33n Yeats.JackB. 40,47

Tal Coat, Pierre 53-55,59, 61 ZenoofElea 80

Tiedemann, Rolf 85, i n Zuidervaart, Lambert 19, 86, 91-93, 1 0 7 -
Tolstoy, Leo N. 32 108, in, 114-119, 125-126, 131-135, Philologisch« BibKothak - FU BerKn
146, 206

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